White Zombie vs Starbucks…

Have you ever noticed the similairities of the logos of White Zombie and Starbucks?

JSA: Darkness Falls

I must admit that I had not read any Justice Society before reading this book.  I had read some JLA stuff, and I always assumed that the JSA was like JLA, just without Batman or Superman.  It does features a few characters that are more from the golden age, but it is not exclusive.  The stories here are not golden age either.

This collection features JSA 6-15 by David Goyer and Geoff Johns.  We start with a public ceremony which leads to an assualt by Alan Scott’s son gone bad Obsidian.  It goes from a battle with Obsidian to a struggle for the survival of the universe.  The stories were quite good, a mix of humor, action, fun and pathos that you get in the better JLA trades out there.  The team itself is a pretty interesting combination of elements – especially Starman and Wildcat.  This being my first real exposure to the JSA team (outside some reprints of the Golden Age title) I was very intrigued and enjoyed the title.  The art varies highly since it was such a long run, but I did not really experience any art which I found repellent here.  Sadowski, though, stands out as the highlighted penciler of the collection.

What is interesting about this storyline is the full embrace it has with the human nature of the members of the team.  With the JLA there is often a tension with the non-human outsiders as they try to adhere to human society and culture.  This is a big part of characters like Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman or Hawkgirl.  The members of JSA, though there are some members who do not represent earthly beingness, are still a team of characters that fit the human world.  They are far more human, far less godly, and this makes for some entertaining character interaction.

Ultimately, this book takes on some of the higher qualities of the legendary Morrison run on JLA and holds up some good things in view of that gold standard.

Tokyo Gore Police…

Occasionally you see a movie that is so bizarre, so far beyond anything that you have ever experienced that you just go damn, and know it will be years before you ever see something to top it.  I think it was about 2002 that I saw The Story of Riki-O and had that feeling.  But then I saw Tokyo Gore Police.

I heard it mentioned on the Crankcast when Chris Taber was on.  He said it was bizarre.  He was right.  The basic plot:  in the future the Japanese police have been privatized and are now this crazy looking army of samurai warriors with all kinds of bent and S and M aspects to them.  They are battling something called “engineers”, which are genetically modified super beings that kill people for no real reason.  The main character is a female whose father was a policeman and was killed in the line of duty.  She grows to become a cop.  A mean one, and a slayer of the engineers.

There is a background story of the political movement that moved the police into being privatized, how that fits in with our female protagonist (who was raised by the police) and the generally messed up world that these characters live in.  There are also some intercutting of some crazy commercials that are reminiscent of Starship Troopers.  My favorite was for these blades for “cutters” that were being sold to Japanese school girls.  Suicide is a big part of this movie, and there is also a very funny PSA telling people to “stop the hara-kiri”.  What else do you get?  An S and M club where there is something that has been modified into a chair that urinates on people.  A subway pervert who gets his hands severed.

This movie looks shot on video, but it was shot well – with a good camera and good lighting.  There is a strong Cronenberg element also with all the biotechnology and body horror.  It is not as fancy as Cronenberg’s stuff, but it is pretty awesome.  At times the effects can be campy, but the attempts towards gore are pretty intense and maybe it is a good thing it is campy.  It is what seperates this movie from something like Hostel.

The Walking Dead Compendium…

This series is not a secret.  It has been a hit for a long time now.  Robert Kirkman has shown with this series the almost Shakespearian level that you can take the zombie story too if you just sit down and think out what the world would really be like if the dead could walk.

The Walking Dead shows a level of imagination that is really hard to come by anywhere else.  The title is so unbelievably good on a consistent level and basis that it makes many other accomplished series look stupid.  This is Kirkman’s Cerberus, his magnum opus (at least for now).  Really this is some revolutionary work in the medium of comics.

I read the first two trades, but when I heard they would be coming out with this collection I stopped buying them.  This collects issues 1-48, which is equivalent to the first 8 trades I think.  I picked this trade up from Amazon for a little under 40 dollars.  Great deal, especially considering that each trade is around 15 dollars a piece now…and worse, when you finish one trade you just want another one.

That is an interesting part about the Walking Dead series in trades.  You do not get the breaks between issues that you usually have with other comics.  Sure, there are story beats that are part of issue cliffhangers, but the flow is not really impeded by movement from one issue to the next.  An interesting thing I have never really noticed is that in a huge collection like this one thousand page monster the story can read almost like a manga – but the subject matter is pure comics.  The story is in black and white, which gives it an unusal feel in the current climate of computer aided colored and manipulated comics.  Being in black and white brings out the simplicity, which is disarming, and allows the complexity of this character drama to work out.  In some ways it is like that first season of Lost.  The characters become so interesting that the show is instantly addictive.  It is only the latter stalling out of the series that makes you pull away.  This book is nothing like that.  I was engrossed until the very last page and read the bulk of the 1000 pages over a two day period.  I was exhausted by the end of it, emotionally more than physically, but I would read another 1000 pages easily and readily.  It was that good.

Kirkman will not give you anything easy with Walking Dead.  There is some horrific violence, and it is only occasionally from the zombies.  The zombies are only a part of the story, and only a part of the threat that surrounds the characters.  Kirkman also has an interesting grasp on the post-apocalyptic survivors guilt and suicide that would come with such a zombie attack, as well as the new form of morals that must emerge to be safe in a situation of scarce resources.  As an anthropology student I have come across some interesting arguements about the small scale society and warfare as it occurs due to the competition over limited local resources.  That is definitly the case for our protagonists.  There are also some genuinely disturbing moments of how badly humands can treat other humans when the conditional agreements of society give way to matters of power and control.  Really, all of this is grain for the plot but it is also very interesting sociological stuff as well.

Lastly, Kirkman will end the life of any character.  Do not be fooled, he will kill a major character and leave you gasping and going “what the #@%#”.  He will do this more than once, and you will love him for being so unpredictable.  Robert Kirkman is considered by some to be the best comic writer out there today.  I do not know if that is true.  I do know that this series lets him be one of the best comic writers because he is freed from the constraints of making nice with the corporate intellectual property, of having a line he cannot cross or a way the story cannot go.  I am still a more than a little amazed that Marvel let him do the Marvel Zombies stuff.  That was some very powerful, if somewhat disturbing material.  Seeing Captain America in the state he was in was pretty harsh.  I have heard it said that the Walking Dead is really about the survivors, and that is true.  It is about the humans who must try to survive the zombie world and the punch in the gut that comes as you realize that the people are more of a dangerous problem than the zombies.  That is a very interesting approach to take, since most zombie stories (be they film, book or comic) tends to deal with the immediate aftermath up to some point after about six months when the major characters reach some kind of promise land where they will survive.  I have the feeling that Kirkman might just end The Walking Dead with the death of the last main character, which would be a turn that would seem to feel inevitable.  But maybe I shouldn’t be second guessing the guy, this is his sandbox and I have a feeling he might have something that none of us would expect planned for the end of the series.  I have the feeling that when that end comes, despite how much we don’t expect it, we will recognize that it couldn’t have ended any other way – like the end to the movie Seven.