Tom Russell: January 2007 Archives

I strongly disagree with Hutch's analysis of Lady in the Water, and I was going to post my analysis of Lady as a comment on Hutch's post. But it would be a very lengthy comment, not concise at all, and I'm basically reposting a review I wrote for my own website, http://turtleneckfilms.blogspot.com, a few months ago. So I figure I'd make it its own entry.

I do agree with Hutch that this film is more of a new mythology-- but I think that might be to its detriment. Confused? Read on!

CIVIL WAR PREDICTION

So, we all know that the noisy Marvel summer-ish crossover of 2006, Civil War is reaching its end. And when there are noisy summer crossovers, there are deaths: meaningless deaths, "important" deaths that will be retconned away in a couple years-- because we all know that the story doesn't "count" unless there's some bodies.

Which I think is ridiculous, but that's not the point of this discussion.

What is inevitable is that someone big is going to die in Civil War # 7. My guess? It's going to be Tony Stark.

C'mon-- all the cool kids are doing it.

Fellows like Neal Adams, who are tremendous artists and work from photographs so they get very realistic, are not drawing in a style that (to me) is the best for comic books.

-- Shelly Moldoff, Alter Ego v.2 # 5

It could be comics if those who know how to paint also knew how to tell a story! Who knew what pacing was, and didn't just jam a lot of pretty pictures together into a page, pages, and call it a story, continuity! It ain't!

-- Alex Toth on painted comics, Comic Book Artist # 10

I think that Steve McNiven, the penciller for Marvel's Civil War, is a very, very talented illustrator. His figures might be a little stiff, but they have a certain weight to them, a solidity: as if they've been carved out of stone. The costumes look real and worn; it's nice to see the seams of Wolverine's mask, and the little dings in Iron Man's armour. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone pay so much attention to lips before. Real honest-to-God pink lips on men and women alike, some of them carefully adorned with the small lines we all have. It makes me want to reach into the comic and give them all some chapstick.

I think Steve McNiven is a terrific illustrator. (I certainly can't draw nearly as well as he can.)

But I think he's a truly awful storyteller.

I was recently rereading my copy of Superman # 215. The main story, "Superman's Tragic Marriage", is, for my money, one of the best Superman stories ever told. It's fraught with psychological yumminess.

But that's not what this entry is about. It's about the back-up story, "Superman's First Exploit". On the first page, after the splash panel, there is a two-panel depiction of Superman throwing a baseball from Metropolis to Japan to open their baseball season.

Now, my first reaction upon seeing this, as it is with many of the things I've seen in old Superman comics, was, "Awesome! Superman just threw the opening pitch of a Japanese baseball game from Metropolis! Kick-Ass!"

My second reaction was, wouldn't the ball be travelling at such a velocity as to kill the catcher?

I pointed this out to my wife, who then pointed out to me that it is daylight in Metropolis when the ball is thrown, and it is daylight in Japan when the ball arrives. Which I found to immediately be a much more interesting discrepency.

Now, with Metropolis on the eastern seabord of the U.S., that makes for a difference of eight hours by my count. So, for the ball to land in Japan with similiar daylight conditions as to Metropolis, it would have to take eight hours to get there, right?

But the text strongly implies that the throw is nearly simultaneous. How, then, do we make up for the eight hours?

I'm not asking this in the spirit of, "Oh, look at the mistake in this old Silver Age comic", because I love old Silver Age comics. I ask this in the vein of, "boy, wouldn't it be fun to come up with an explanation for this". :-)

==Tom

I am hard at work on a good many articles for your consumption, including the second part of The Nineties: Were They Really That Bad?: Howard Mackie, which should be coming soonish.

==Tom

Between the deconstruction of the eighties and whatever's happening in comics now, there was the nineties. It may well go down in history as the most reviled decade in comics history. Even Joe Quesada, Marvel's current EIC, admits that most of what that company published in the nineties sucked. And their Distinguished Competition quickly made the nineties the decade of the Summer Crossover.

And this leads me to ask the question, were the nineties really that bad?