The New 52 Weeks Later, Pt. 3

In part 2 of the New 52 Weeks Later posts there were a lot of 0 issues worth talking about at some length.  Not so much in the third batch...

Frankenstein: Agent of Shade started out scripted by Jeff Lemire as intriguingly weird thing, with some intriguingly weird art.  But it quickly got too weird and not near as intriguing, and soon had a new writer in Matt Kindt.  There's still some nice Alberto Ponticelli and Wayne Faucher art, and a script that's just a very prosaic origin that still leaves things weird.  I think I may bow out of this one, once and for all.

Green Lantern: New Guardians #0 by Tony Bedard, Aaron Kuder and Andrei Bressan doesn't drown in continuity, it's half of a good comic book.  But eventually it harkens back to this thing that previously happened and that thing that previously happened and isn't very interesting to me.  So the 0 issues got me to give it a second try, but haven't converted me.

Nor did Catwoman, which I skipped at the start of New 52, sampled a bit as the year progressed, and am sampling with the 0 issue.  But the story jumps around, it doesn't make me care all that much about Selina Kyle or Catwoman.  The art isn't bad, but the story is just too flat.

And Superboy has had its moments, but #0 doesn't have anything in it that's interesting, or at least which isn't (a) interesting and (b) not hinted at in the 12 issues that have come before.  I don't think this book has lived up to its potential over the last 12 months.

Team 7 is the first issue of a new team-up book by Justin Jordan and Jesus Merino.  Maybe...  I like that there are characters like Grifter whom I've been lukewarm to in their current adventures who may have more interesting stuff in the past that's represented by the Team 7 team-up book.  The origin covers a lot of ground pretty efficiently, in that regard Justin Jordan is off to a better start than Geoff Johns has been.  I'll keep with this and see where it goes.

Nightwing has had its ups and downs, but on balance has been a consistently solid part of the New 52, not as many wrong turns as some of the other series, but on the other hand I keep thinking there's some interesting stuff going on in the background that ought to be in the foreground, and which isn't as the book keeps drifting to be a superhero book instead of grappling with a potentially interesting character.  #0 is all of that in a nutshell.  It goes a little further back for its original than a lot of the other #0 issues, and it finds some real emotional heart in the Nightwing character and the Robin that he once was.  But toward the end, it drifts away from the good parts of the issue in order to drag in the necessary character background for a future story arc that seems skippable.  

The best of this batch is Sword and Sorcery #0 featuring Amethyst.  There are two "A" characters that DC introduced a while back, Arion and Amethyst, and I have fond memories of both, but especially of Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld.   I can still see bits and pieces of the Ernie Colon artwork that was fresh and distinct and creative, especially for its day, little gems speckled throughout.  So I was quite happy to hear that Amethyst would be returning in September as part of the "third wave" of New 52 titles.  And happier still to report that it's a successful return.  Christy Marx is the writer, Aaron Lopresti the art.  The story they've come up with isn't new.  Definitely not.  In fact, it's a distaff version of Rick Shelley's Varayan Memoir.  Girl's been promised on her 17th birthday that she's going to get to go home, find out where her father's buried.  Home is an alternate world.  Which is a fantasy trope that I've seen plenty of in my life.  But familiar doesn't mean bad.  Marx's script does a good job of establishing the character of Amy on Earth, a bit of a loner, strong mental compass, being trained without quite knowing it for a battle she doesn't know is hers to have to fight.  We get just enough on the gemworld to find out what the stakes are for Amy, but only that, so the story can focus on the development of our lead character.  Aaron Lopresti's art isn't always good technically, look as an example at the top panel of page 5, with its somewhat stilted poses.  However, if the characters aren't always well drawn technically, the storytelling and flow of the art from panel to panel and across the page doesn't falter.  The characters have facial expressions, ones that actually help tell the story and are worth looking at.  There's something going on in the background.  The most annoying thing about Sword and Sorcery is that it's rounded out with an entirely disposable back-up story, a retelling of Beowulf.  It doesn't add anything to my enjoyment of the book, it does add to the price tag.  It's an average of 7 or 8 minutes for me to read a comic book, paying $3.99 for that instead of $2.99 doesn't delight.

It's not a bad batch when there are two "first issues" for Amethyst and Team 7 that have me interested in seeing the next.  If I'm not otherwise going to add one of the established New 52 titles to my list based on the 0 issues, I'm game for the two, Superboy and Nightwing, that I've been reading.

Looper & Friends

So this Looper movie that opened on Friday, it is indeed pretty good, and I'd highly recommend the JABberwocky client list, many/most of whom have an inner sf geek, go and see it.

The barest bones of the concept:  we have time travel, since time travel is illegal only criminals travel in time, and criminals are sent back 30 years to be offed, in fact there are dedicated specialists who take care of that. Every once in a while, the specialist gets to "close the loop," kiling the 30-years-in-future version of himself that's just been sent 30 years into the future's past.  Yes, it's a time travel movie, so if this explanation is hard to follow don't blame me.  And specifically here, the future has a guy called "the rainmaker" who is taking over the mobs en masse, closing loops en masse, sending all his enemies back in time.  Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same dude, the +30 and the -30 versions.  Bruce Willis doesn't want his loop to be closed, he wants to find and kill the person who's going to become "the rainmaker," this will not endear either of them to the mob headed by Jeff Bridges that runs the whole looper thing in the -30.

Mostly, this is handled with lots of pluses.  Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, has an ace cast and an ace tech team, and the movie is well made, suspenseful, not without its bits of humor.

The time travel?  Well, it makes sense.  Or it makes as much sense as it can.  Like any time travel movie, if you get to thinking too hard about the consequences of the things that happen, you realize it's all quite nonsensical.  But Goldilocks would approve of the way the script makes just enough effort to make all of this seem logical complete with just enough hand-waving to cover up the illogic that you're willing to cut it some slack.

It's a nice contrast to some of the other attempts Hollywood will take to deal with sf themes, like the laughable In Time from a year ago.

Though just to say, for anyone who's seen, as one good example, Brian de Palma's The Fury, there's a scene that should easily reveal the identity of The Rainmaker long before the characters in the film get around to figuring it out.

Also worth seeing:  Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhal in End of Watch.

Another auteur genre piece, this one written and directed by David Ayer,whom the posters remind us wrote the script for Training Day.

More good casting.  Gyllenhal and Pena have amazing chemistry and rapport together, and the script requires them to say things that always seem right, even at their most cliche.

As with Looper, a bit of slack needs to be cut.  The good guys can spend the whole movie radioing for backup and have it come nicely and quickly, until the final act when the back-up is most desperately needed and all of a sudden it's like the additional units need to drive to South Central from Santa Barbara.

This isn't Training Day.  It's a movie, and shit happens, but it's the cop drama that really has only the nicest things to say about cops.

It's safe to say I made the right decision to head to the movies after the first act of Harper Reagan, a play from an up-and-coming British playwright that makes it to New York a few years after a London debut.  A series of two-character scenes about a women I don't care about with family trouble I don't care about meeting characters I don't care about.  I hate walking out of plays, but with all the movies on my list and this play doing nothing for me...

Of course, I'm sure the reviews will be extravagant in their praise.  As I'd suspected, they've been very good for the play Detroit that I saw last weekend.

Friday night I saw an old "new to me" Hitchcock movie, Marnie from 1964, playing at the Loews Jersey as the lead-in to a 50th anniversary Bond double feature on Saturday of Dr. No and Goldfinger.  I'd have seen Goldfinger if not for a party to go to Saturday night, but had to settle for Marnie.  Even though it has Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren, who was also in The Birds for Hitchcock, there are lots of good reasons why this is obscure Hitchcock.  Marnie, the character played by Tippi Hedren, is a bag of troubled woman cliches.  Sean Connery's reaction to her makes absolutely no sense at all.  The production values are kind of cheesy, scenes of people driving that look unconvincing by standards of a 1922 silent film, blatantly matte-painted backgrounds to the point that they distract from the actual important things happening in the frame.  (I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry after typing this last sentence and seeing that these were things that were picked on by critics at the time.)

However, if you've seen a lot of Hitchcock, there's so much of Hitchcock in this movie that it's fascinating to ponder on in the context of his career.  There are so many Hitchcock women like the ones here, the suave debonair matinee idol like Sean Connery is a fixture of Hitchcock's work from Farley Granger in Rope through all the Hitchcock with Cary Grant or James Stewart.  There's a very good score by Bernard Herrmann who started in film with Citizen Kane and did a number of Hitchcock films later on.

Based on a novel by Winston Graham, the screenplay is the first by Jay Presson Allen.  This gives the movie a little extra resonance for me, Jay Presson Allen wrote (with her daughter) a stage play based on The Big Love, a book by Tedd Thomey which was part of my portfolio at Scott Meredith, and it's the one time I've gotten to go to a Broadway premiere and after-party. And it turns out that Jay Presson Allen was hired to script after Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, and a one-time Scott Meredith employee himself, was fired.  Who knew!

The Loews Jersey has a 50'-wide screen.  There was music on the Wonder Organ before the performance.  It would be nice if they would get the balcony open, they've been talking about this for as long as I've taken in the occasional movie (they show one Fri/Sat per month from September to May).  I'm told the problem is less putting in the seats than being in a city-owned building with the city not rushing to repair the fire escapes and put in updated alarm systems.

Calling an Audible

Way back toward the dawn of Brillig, in fact it's hard for me to believe it's close to five years I've had the blog, I did a post called Audio Rules!, where I discussed how, in 2007, Audible essentially decreed that there should be science fiction and fantasy on audio, where previously there had been very little.  Looking back on it, this was just a few months before Amazon announced it was purchasing Audible, it's interesting to speculate on if the imminent purchase was a factor in that decision, or if it was an all-Audible thing.  Doesn't really matter, doesn't make the speculation less interesting.

Since then, we've sold a ton of audio rights, whatever it was we were selling when I did that blog post in 2008 was kind of the tip of the iceberg.  As with all things like this in the content business, it's been interesting to see it play out. As an example, the Lost Fleet books have performed on audio well beyond any reasonable expectation.  I spoke in that long ago post about the rule that an audio book would sell 10% of the hardcover, the Lost Fleet books by Jack Campbell are selling something like four times that.  The series also really outperforms on e-book, but even if we looked at audio as a percentage of combined e-book and print sales the percentage would be way higher than the rules would suggest.  Other clients of ours, their audience might be in print and might be in e-book, it just doesn't want to be in audio.

Now, and this is definitely an Amazon thing, the audio market is taking another great leap forward.

Publishers Weekly and other places reported in the spring on a major 200+ title deal between Audible and Richard Curtis Associates, another literary agency.  Not entirely a surprise.  This was a year or so after Audible introduced ACX, a service to match authors, publishers, and audio narrators to allow brokered self-publication of audio to help boost content availability, and a few weeks after we'd gotten word from Audible that their next step was going to be to buy up huge amounts of content.  The stated goal was to beef up overall sales by increasing the likelihood that readers would find things they wanted whenever they visited Audible.  Or, to put it another way, they might not make money on every new piece of content they obtained, but they would boost their sales and profits nonetheless because Audible would be to audio what Amazon was/is to pretty much everything, if you wanted to buy something it would be there for you to buy.  In that Amazon was, there was a hidden and unspoken subtext that was revealed simultaneous with the launch of the new generation of Kindles.  They'd mastered the code for enhancing their "whispersync" so that you could read six pages of a book on your Kindle while downing your breakfast, have the audio pick up right where you left off when you got into the car, have the Kindle take it from there during lunch hour, and then back to the audio again right where you left off on the ride home.  So the more audio on Audible with this feature enabled, the more books with matches for Kindle, the more likelihood that they might be able to get you to buy the book in both formats to have a seamless whenever/wherever reading/listening experience across devices, formats and media.

So suffice to say that there are a lot of those 200+ title audio deals going around, and we've been mailing off contracts to clients this week for a large helping of titles.

Some of these are recent backlist, some are books that haven't been in print for 20 years, all kinds of books in-between.  As above, another great leap forward, from not being able to sell anything just five years ago, to at least being able to sell everything with a reasonable argument.  To being able to sell the occasional surprising thing.  And now to being able to sell lots and lots and lots of things.

Some observations:

If you want to take a very negative approach, these deals are a bad thing for the authors involved.  Because of the volume of titles involved, I will admit the prospect that Audible has received a volume discount.  Perhaps some of the individual authors could have been more aggressive in seeking higher advances for their individual titles.  The counterargument is that the deals might not exist at all if the titles weren't being offered by agents or publishers that would allow Audible to buy a lot of content quickly.  Do you want to buy 200 books via Richard Curtis, 200 books from us, 500 books from some other agency, or do you want to have 62 separate negotiations with 62 authors to buy up those 900 titles?

Will we be able to retain audio rights as often in the future?  We've always tried to keep them, where we haven't been able to keep them we've tried to get provisions to recapture the rights if the publisher wasn't actually using them, now we come to a place when it's possible that there will be a market for audio rights to everything.  Once upon a time the publishers could say they weren't missing out on much if they let the rights stay with the authors, now maybe they are, maybe they insist, and even if we get "use of lose" provisions maybe not using is a thing of the past.  When you're in the publishing business, you can find the down side to anything.

This is the inverse to our own bottom line of a film option.  Most of those, you lose money doing the deal but hope you'll make it up down the line by having one of those options actually get purchased some day, thus making up for all the times you spent six months haggling with a Hollywood or studio attorney over a $2500 option.  Here, the immediate effect to our bottom line is nice because we've just sold rights to lots and lots of books.  However, over time, we're going to have a much bigger pile of royalty paperwork from Audible, some of the titles will sell in moderate quantity, and over time we may have a lot of processing costs that will weigh on our resources.

In spite of that fact, I decided to sell as broad a package of titles as we could muster within the JABberwocky family.  I suspect there will be days in the future when I'll look at a lot at large stacks of paper and large stacks of checks and wonder what I was thinking, but in my heart I think the decision was correct, and in general, when I've felt in my heart that something was right to do for the JABberwocky family it's been right to do.

And not only that, we're going to talk to some people about reinvesting the Audible proceeds to do e-book conversions for books that we might not rush to do otherwise for fear of a long payback period.  In many instances, this is doubling down on paperwork madness, to add potentially small bits of e-book royalties to potentially small bits of audio royalties.  But again, it seems right.  If the ability to drive accretive sales across formats is part of the goal Audible has with enhanced whispersync and enhanced availability on Audible, let's help drive that process along.

It's all going to be very interesting.

And if you'd asked me about the likelihood of any of this five years ago... well, not very!  As I've said, the whole e-book revolution took longer than people expected to arrive, and once it arrived it's changing things way faster than I'd have thought.  The growth and development of the digital download market for audio is a part of that even without the ability to cross-sync with an e-book, and with that ability all the moreso.

The New 52 Weeks Later, Pt. 2

Continuing a series where we check in on DC's New 52 one year after its launch in the midst of their anniversary "0" issues.  The second batch I read gave lots to chew on and think about...

Batwing was a pleasant surprise in DC's New 52, fresh hero and fresh setting and freshly written from Judd Winick with some very nice, clean art by Marcus To.  I don't think the totality of the first year has been up to the promise of the first issue.  We got a very attenuated origin that was interesting but which went on too long, a lot of information withheld mostly because, why do in two parts what you can do in four.  A lot of effort given to getting Batman involved because its a bat book, to fitting the Batwing square into the circular Night of the Owls.  But for all my disappointment that the series isn't as good as it maybe could have been, it's been good enough for me to keep buying it every month.  The 0 issue takes us back to that period of time between the "Batwing as a child" part of the origin and the actual becoming Batwing and becoming part of the international network of Bat thingies.  No real surprises, there aren't many blanks in this issue that we couldn't have filled in ourselves.  But the writing is solid, the art is solid, I'll keep going but always with the deep down wish for it to achieve something more.

One of the frustrations with Geoff Johns is that he doesn't seem to understand in writing Aquaman that there's a minutes-per-dollar part of the value equation that we apply toward our leisure time.  Comics are, at best, mid-tier.  TV is cheap and plentiful, movies are surprisingly cheap, Broadway is expensive.  Regular books are great value.  Aquaman is shitty value.

Not Batgirl #0,  Gail Simone delivers a script that's sufficiently wordy to make me feel I'm getting my money's worth without being the overly prolix prose of bad Roy Thomas, or the early issues of the New 52 Superman.  There's enough room left on the page for me to really admire the artwork of Ed Benes, both pencils and inks.  It manages to feel clean and give a sense of charcoals or loosely finished pencils at the same time.  It made me want to longer, which hasn't happened too much since I stopped having a chance to admire Pier Gallo's art on the pre-52 Superboy written by Jeff Lemire.  Even though Batgirl is a familiar character, there's some fresh ground, fresh insight, into the character.  Of the 0 issues I've commented on so far, this might just be my favorite.

Writer Scott Snyder collaborates with penciller Greg Capullo and inker Jonathan Glapion on Batman 0.  This would be a good issue by the standards of almost every other book in the New 52.  But Scott Snyder's done such excellent work over the first year of his New 52 run on Batman, which might be the most consistently excellent of the books, that his 0 issue falls just a little bit short.  In part, I think it's a little too intent on introducing the Red Hoods as villains for a forthcoming arc in the series or event in the DC Universe that it can't quite be all it should be in this issue.  But still, good enough.  There's a backup story Tomorrow by James Tynion IV and Andy Clarke that does well enough in its purpose-driven life of touching on all the various Robins and other Batman sidekicks that need a shout-out in the 0 issues.  

Grifter is the entry point to a discussion of the Daemonite books in the New 52.  It, Voodoo and Resurrection Man all started out with first issues that were awfully good and had me looking forward to discovering some new and interesting heroes with new and interesting things going on.  But then all of them ended up being part of some mega-story about this group of aliens called the Daemonites that must be part of some pre-52 DCU something or other that I didn't even get the bare outlines of from some kind of osmosis process.  The contrast for this is Swamp Thing and Animal Man, which dealt with a lot of stuff about red, green and rot that I hadn't read much of during my many years completely away from comics and then ten years reading some but not too many of the standard Superhero books.  As the story lines in all three books converged on the whole Daemonite thing, they became progressively less interesting to me, and I'd look at each new book but became increasinly reluctant to by them.  It didn't help that the books were often not offering good value, more 4 or 5 minute reads than 7 or 8 minutes.  

Which is kind of the story of Grifter.  The creative team has changed, with Rob Liefeld as a new plotter as of the 8th or 9th issue with dialogue by Frank Tieri and art by Scott Clark and Dave Beaty.  And there are some interesting concepts in the script about Grifter's background.  But there are also those damned Daemonites that I just don't find to be very interesting.  And there are too many pages like the double-page spread on page 2+3 or pages 12 and 16 and 17 that don't have many words and don't have art that makes me want to stop and stare and linger, so I'm not feeling a lot of value for my $2.99.

Green Lantern #0 by Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke and a trio of inkers got a lot of press (Johns was doing an appearance in Dearborn MI while I was in Ann Arbor, so the local papers were all over this, but the national media was certainly on this) for introducing a new Arab-American Green Lantern.

Other than trying Green Lantern: New Guardians for a few issues before it too drowned in continuity, I skipped the Green Lanterns books because they were too reliant on prior continuity even after the New 52 reboot.  To give some credit where due, the attention to this issue, a fresh origin story that was continuity free, inspired me to give it a go.  If there are a few other people like me... there's some real thought and real smarts behind what DC's been up to the past year.

I'm not sure where I'll go from here.  I'd like to be reading a Green Lantern book.  This one isn't bad.  But is it good enough?  The script and art were unclear enough that I didn't realize until a few pages later on when everyone else was talking about it that the new Green Lantern had found a car bomb in the van he hijacked.  I don't instinctively find car thieves to be the kinds of identifiable lead characters that are going to get me super interested in what they are up to.  It's hard to sympathize with the guy when he's being interrogated because the bomb might not have been his, but he sure did steal the van that was holding the bomb.  There isn't enough in here to explain or justify how this guy is the "man without fear" type that I recall earned a Green Lantern ring, or is that one of the things that changed in the many years I wasn't reading Green Lantern books?  But is is new, it is different, there's some nice classic comic book art (the interrogation scenes, especially.  We'll see.  Not as good as it should be, not bad, the odds are I can give it a few issues, and then it will drown in some big GL title crossover saga that won't interest me, and I'll have a convenient excuse to repurpose that $2.99 in my budget.  But I've gotta say, I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, to see this series gain its sea-legs and for the GL titles to enter an extended period when they can be read without requiring a degree in GL history.

Literary Lunch at Citi Field Shake Shack

Once upon a time I was a very big Mets fan.  Over the years things have changed to where I am more a tennis fan than a baseball fan.  But I have enough residual Mets-loving in me that I was feeling the tug of Citi Field, where I'm not sure I've been since Opening Day.  The siren song got very loud indeed today.  A day game.  The last home game of the season.  Nice September weather, not as sunny as I'd have liked but sunny enough.  And R. A. Dickey going for his 20th win.  20 wins is a major milestone in baseball, enough of one for Dickey to have a chance at at being the first Met to reach it since 1990.  Enough of one that Dickey is a strong contender to win the NL Cy Young Award for the league's best pitcher.  In a Mets season that got off to an unexpectedly pleasant start which made the team's ultimate collapse that much more disappointing, Dickey's great season has been the one solace for a Met fan.

So I took a long lunch.  It was lunch.  Just about the only thing I really like about Citi Field is its Shake Shack.

And it was such a nice way to spend an afternoon.

One of the things with baseball more than just about any sport is the very real chance that you can see something in any given game that you truly haven't seen before.  There were examples of that today.  

I might have seen someone rob a home run before, but I don't know if I've ever seen it the way I saw today, Travis Snider of the Pirates gripping the top of the right field fence with one hand, stretching the other hand with his glove about as high over the head as you could possibly go and stretching it back a bit too, and somehow getting a ball that was over and past the fence into his glove for an out.  Mike Baxter seemed a little surprised to be ending his home run trot just past second base.

And then the play where the Pirates centerfielder dove for a ball, did a wonderful job of acting like he caught it, I thought he had.  But the umpire called it safe, that the ball had hit the ground or been trapped.  There was a runner at first base who had held up on going to second to see if the ball had been caught.  The centerfielder managed to throw the ball to second to get him for a force out -- maybe he should have just let the ball fall in front and thrown him out.  So I've seen players dive for the ball, I've seen acting jobs, I don't think I've ever seen that combine with a force out at second on a missed fly ball to center field.  And then to add a cherry to this unique baseball sundae, the center fielder was injured on the play and left the game.

R.A. Dickey is a rare baseball breed, the knuckle-baller, the successor to Tim Wakefield for the title of last knuckle-baller standing.  Alas, he didn't have his knuckle ball working in the early innings, and the Pirates took an early lead.  A liner to left that went over the head of the left fielder.  A fly ball to shallow center that was up in the air for an awfully long time but not quite enough time to be caught.   A slow roller to third where the Mets didn't get the out at first because the third baseman thought a little too long and hard about trying for a play at home.  It looked like that kind of Mets game, where the Mets weren't doing the job on defense, the Pirates were leaping the outfield fences to take away home runs, that Dickey might muddle through without his knuckler and still lose the game not so much because of his pitching as because he was playing for the Mets.

But it didn't play out that way.  Ike Davis hit a solo home run.  The Mets got another run here, another run there, and then David Wright hit a three run homer to give the Mets a 6-3 lead.  And R.A. Dickey found enough of his knuckler, mixed in enough change-ups to keep the Pirates off balance, that he managed when all was said and done to pitch 8 2/3 innings.  To get 13 strikeouts tying a career high, to get within a fraction of an inch of getting a 14th strikeout as the final batter he faced fouled off several pitches before earning a walk.

Jon Rauch comes in.  It's the Mets.  At the end of a miserable season that started off with such promise.  He comes in to relieve Dickey, the first batter he faces comes within a yard or two of hitting a 2-run homer.  In the 9th inning, he does give up a 2-run homer.  Close isn't good enough.  1 out, none on, Mets up by 1.  Bobby Parnell comes in and gets the final  outs to save R. A. Dickey's 20th win.

And then in another first, at least for a game I've attended, the Mets showed the postgame interview from the Mets TV channel on the scoreboard.

Some decades ago when the Mets were in another period of protracted badness, their ad slogan one season was, if memory serves, "At any moment, a great moment."  Which sums up today pretty nicely.  

And just to say:  when R.A. Dickey was warming up before the top of the first inning, his music was from Star Wars, a chunk of the finale from Episode 5 or 6 that started with the Imperial March theme, and then just a little bit of the next reprisal before the game began.  And when he came to bat, which pitchers get to do in the NL and which R. A. Dickey got to do three times today, his "walk to plate" music was the theme from Game of Thrones.

So that little spark of Mets fan in me got fanned a bit, and the sf nerd in me as well.  If there's going to be a first pitcher in 22 years to have 20 wins for the Mets -- well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I really would love for him to get the Cy Young Award.

The New 52 Weeks Later, Pt. 1

The first in a series of posts looking at the first year of the DC Comics New 52, which series have been making the grade, which of the September "0" issues I am liking, that sort of thing...

Aquaman:  This is supposed to be one of the big successes of the New 52.  Not for me.  I buy an issue or two, it's a fight scene I don't care about with little text to read and not enough texture to the art for me to spend more than five minutes reading.  So I stop, then decide flipping through to give it another go.  Issue 12 was a "give another go.". And just good enough I want to buy another, just bad enough to do it without much enthusiasm.  

Animal  Man:  I had been reading few DC superhero books before the New 52, the one I enjoyed most and which I was saddened to see disappear two summers ago was Jeff Lemire and Pier Gallo's Superboy.   Consolation, that Lemire's Animal Man has been one of my favorites in the New 52.  So far the New 52 has mostly done crossovers that are, if not good, at least logical and within a group of related titles.  This series is crossing over with Swamp Thing as the two are immersed in a battle between the green and the rot, part of a battle best given context if you have read Pre-52 Swamp Thing and related but given enough info within the current series at one can get by comfortably. And the crossover is what crossovers should be and in the past twenty years rarely have been, a good extended story somewhat bigger than either book might be on its own with an underlying story-driven reason to exist.  Yes, these crossovers are still driven by an underlying corporate dicta, but there is some sign of lessons learned comparing these or the Knight of the Owls in the Batman books to the Pre-52 crossovers.  

Swamp Thing, written by Scott Snyder, has been the equal of Animal Man.  As with some of the other New 52 titles, it's wandered a bit in the middle months of the first year, a little like Aquaman in having some issues that have been too much fighting too quickly read to give good value for money. The recent Animal Man crossover helped bring it back to less swampy crowd.  So not entirely as good as Animal Man, but good.  And its 0 issue this month has given some good background on the rot, red and green that may help moving forward as well.

Grant Morrison's Action Comics got a lot of attention, some negative, for it's first issue depiction of a young hot-headed and immature Superman/Clark Kent.  That bothered me less than when the series left that behind in order to do some very Grant Morrison alternate history with a black Superman that came out of nowhere and left just as quickly.  His 0 issue is a surprisingly tender not at all what I would expect of Grant Morrison story of a oing Superman and someone even younger trying to fill Superman's "shoes." Solid, not an "all it can be" series, but still one of the better.  The art has been enjoyable, and Ben Oliver's in issue 0 quite quite good.

There is some churn in the New 52.  Phantom Stranger 0 is the first and origin issue for a series starting in September to replace one of the dear departed.  The character has been around in he magical part of the DC Universe for a long time. Writer and DC exec Dan Didio joins with artists Brent Anderson and Scott Hanna to craft a fist issue that ets me interested to come back for more.  

Master Rush

I seem to be treading water at work right now, I didn't feel like I was getting that badly backed up during the weeks I was away from the office but now that I'm back it's like the needle on the in-box doesn't want to move.

But at least I'm getting caught up on movies very efficiently.  There's nothing much better for that than having an 8:10 showing of one movie you want to see (Premium Rush) which runs for 1:31 with the same theatre providing a 9:45 of another move you want to see (Master) which meant there was around one coming attraction of down time between the two!

Premium Rush was a lot of fun.  It opened quietly in August and hasn't done much box office, but it won't surprise me if it has a good moment on video.  It deserves to.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a bike messenger delivering an envelope that a lot of people want, so his life is going to get complicated.  Ours gets put on hold for 90 minutes, half of which is probably spent riding along with with the bikes on the streets of  New York, weaving in and out of traffic.  There are little scenes like in Sherlock Holmes where the messenger maps out his routes, seeing which path through an intersection has him thrown thru a taxi cab window and which he can skate by an opening door unscathed.  I was surprised at how many fx and visual effects credits there were at the end of the movie, because it's so smoothly done you'd think it was all filmed right there on Broadway.  The movie is utterly preposterous, but because it doesn't take itself seriously it didn't bother me so much.  So you pick up a package on 116th St. and take it downtown by first going up to 130th St.  So there's supposed to be suspense in whether you can get a package downtown in 90 minutes that shouldn't require anything close to that on a bike.  So even though your bike can probably go through traffic, a guy in a car will catch up to you.  Tony Scott's remake of Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 a few years ago, all the implausibility and the remaking of the NY map to fit the movie's convenience drove me crazy in part because the movie depends on the hijacking situation seeming real, here none of it was supposed to be real so I gave lots of license to it.  It was an enjoyable 90 minutes.

The Master?  Oh my.  Paul Thomas Anderson has directed some classic movies, I'd see Magnolia again in the blink of an eye and thought There Will Be Blood was a masterpiece, which I happily enjoyed seeing twice.  This latest film is a dull dreary bore, ignore all the highfalutin praise you'll be hearing about it because the fact is, let me repeat, that it's a dull dreary bore. The alleged topic of the movie could/should be interesting, supposedly the lead is a surrogate for L. Ron Hubbard and the movie a gloss on the introduction of Scientology to the world.  But you know, I'd think L. Ron Hubbard would be an interesting person to make a movie about, and there's nothing interesting about Philip Seymour Hoffman's stand-in.  He seems to lead the most boring existence spending his time giving classes to stuck up rich people, and if he steals some of their money in the process we don't find out much about that.  Joaquin Phoenix's character isn't any better.  I recently saw a play in New York where one of the characters had to act with one side of his face not quite working, and it was distracting but ultimately you learned to live with it and take the character for what he was instead of for the tic, but Joaquin Phoenix is nothing other than his occasional ability to really scrunch his face in the strangest way.  It's a 2:16 minute movie that not only does little to develop its lead characters but leaves all the side characters behind as well.  I have no idea what purpose was served by the character played by Jessie Plemons, or who the Amy Adams character is, or...  I mean, pick a character in the movie, I don't think you'd know what they're about if you didn't have the press kit in hand to explain.  Maybe that's why so many critics like it, because they had the press kit.  I toyed with walking out, I decided Paul Thomas Anderson had given enough great film to my life that he surely deserved another hour of my time to finish telling his story, and in retrospect I wish I'd followed my instincts and bailed on this.  The score is interesting.  There's the occasional nice composition, I didn't see a 70mm print and one or two of the shots I thought "gee that might be nice to see on a 70mm print," then I'd ask why you shoot in 70mm but don't actually shoot in wide screen to take fullest advantage of the wider film format.  The two lead actors are so different in their approach that there's the occasional brief scene which uses that contrast to good effect, a jail sequence when Philip Seymour Hoffman watches quietly while Joaquin Phoenix rages in the next cell breaking his toilet with sheer force of will.  I'll be awfully curious to see if the box office holds up as actual viewers are exposed to the film, instead of the cineastes at Telluride or in the buzz factory of the Toronto Film Festival.  I was a bit surprised to see how well Tree of Life did a year ago, but that had more star power in Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, and if you read the reviews you at least saw a movie that was kind of like what the reviews told you it would be.  This, it's oh so highly praised, and there's nothing there.