Fighting with Frank (part 5 of 13): Bad move, mister!

- Batman: Scottish COnnection
Art by Frank Quitely
Story by Alan Grant
Colors by Matt Hollingsworth and Brad Matthew
Letters by Bill Oakley

The goggles do nothing!

So the other week I went to get my eyes checked up, and the optometrist told me my vision was getting better and I felt quite chuffed about that, because that's the last thing you expect to hear from a health professional in the long, slow slide towards death, and they could have left it there, but no, they had to tell me that the vision was better because the slightly un-round shape of my eyeball was the thing that kept me from seeing things clearly, and as I was getting older, the back of the eyeball was starting to sag down with the inevitable force of entropy, and that was bringing things into clearer focus.

I didn't know metaphors were meant to be so fucking literal.

Loving the Arkin

Some actors just annoy the hell out of you. I know people who can't watch anything with Tom Cruise in it (which is a shame, they are missing out on some excellent Impossible cinema), and I remain deeply, deeply ambivalent about Amy Adams. They might be great actors, but that doesn't mean everybody has to like them

I discovered this early on in life, when I fucking hated Alan Arkin. I hated him so, so much, and wouldn't watch any film where he showed up.

I'm not sure what it was, but looking back through his filmography, it's almost certainly The Return of Captain Invincible that did it. This was not the first superhero film I'd ever seen, (I definitely saw the first Superman movie in the cinema), but it was the first really disappointing one. I haven't seen it in more than 40 years, but I just remember it being cheap, boring and Australian. With terrible songs.

After watching it on rented video some time in the early 1980s, I hated it with every atom in my adolescent body, would not watch anything with Arkin in it from then on. Which feels a bit mean in retrospect, I didn't hold anything against Christopher Lee for his role in it, just the Arkin. 

It took me years, but I eventually got over it, mainly because Arkin is actually a fantastic actor, with great charm and a undercurrent of shimmering rage - nobody lost their shit in the same way he did - and he always seemed to be on the verge of glorious hysteria, especially when he go quiet.

He made a terrific Yossarian in Catch-22, with a blend of sheer panic and cynical surrender; was unforgettably nasty in Wait Until Dark; and a force for good in a very dad way in Edward Scissorhands. He directed the excellent Little Murders, had a terrific late period of playing old affable duffers with a slight hint of menace, and I just discovered his middle name was Wolf. What a goddamn legend.

That weird childhood hatred is still there whenever I do see him in some old movie now, but it's been crushed by the weight of his wonderful, whiny brilliance over all those years. I didn't need Captain Invincible, not when I had all that.  

Longshot's weird adventures in the Marvel Universe

Even four decades after it was first quietly published by Marvel, Longshot is a very strange series, and still feels like nothing else being put out by the company at the time. 

It had a tone that was slightly off from the regular Marvel universe, something that was incredibly appealing in the wild days of the 1980s. It still had She-Hulk running around Manhattan in her wonderful bike pants, but there was also constant use of overlapping dialogue, and plotting that moved in deeply unexpected directions, and nightmare characters spinning between universes.

It all left the reader wrong-footed, just in the way it was a little bit off from the normal superheroics. Even the fact that the title character and many of his pals only had four fingers was a subtle sign of the weird, and his charming naivete only made him more different from self-assured Avengers.

It also, of course, has amazing pictures by Art Adams. There had been this kind of obsessive detailing in Marvel comics before, with artists like Michael Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith putting out some eye-catching and meticulous. But Adams had some real dynamic energy with his figurework, ands again, it all looked a bit off, a bit different from the clear, simple lines of the Romitas or Buscemas, 

While Longshot himself would soon be incorporated right into the heart of the greater universe by popping out of thin air into the Danger Room, the closest vibe to Longshot was, unsurprisingly, Ann  Nocenti, who brought a similar off-kilter perspective and odd use of the conventions of comic storytelling to her Daredevil comics.

I came to Longshot through the X-Men, where he wasn't technically a mutant, but was a core part of the team during my biggest period of X-obsession. I only picked up the Longshot series in the years afterwards, long after he'd faded from the X-books, although I was familiar with Adams from his X-Men work on covers and the art on the Annuals (every second year, for some reason). Reading the limited series in such a non-linear fashion only enhanced its strangeness, and I've been happy to have a full run of the series for years now.

It just didn't feel like a classic superhero comic, and that's exactly what makes it one of the great superhero limited series of its time. It's still very much an artifact of the 1980ss, but also timeless in a way that only the truly weird can reach.

Quicksilver in the kitchen

 

Bryan Singer's X-Men movies never really came together as complete films, and were often flabby and played so low at times that the sheer charisma of the generally excellent casts was the only thing keeping them above water. 

But they all had great individual scenes, and portrayed characters' powers in ways that were often thoughtful and interesting.  There were times they could be uninspired - they never really got hold of what Storm was capable of, and Cyclops brought nothing new to the party - but the Quicksilver scenes; or Nightcrawler in the White House; or some of the vibrant antics of the Last X-Men On Earth's fight against the sentinels in the Future Past movie, (especially Blink's teleportation holes), were memorable and rewatchable in ways most superhero films just are not.

The Quicksilver thing was so effective they did it all over again in the next movie, even as the scripts twisted themselves into knots to explain why they didn't just use Pietro to save everybody all of the time. And while that run of X-Men films has run its course, and the mutants have some kind of a MCU future ahead of them, the freaky nature of their powers in these original films still lingers.

Love and Rockets: And love is everything

I'm always been on Team Jaime, man. It's the easier option - his art has a flowing beauty that remains intoxicating after years of high-grade comics. And his Locas tales are some of the greatest stories I've ever read in any medium, and have an emotional resonance built over decades of human growth. His comics span the length of a lifetime, and can be funny and goofy and scary in a way nobody else can touch.

Whenever I get a new issue of Love and Rockets - and it remains one of life's great little pleasures to do so - it's almost always Jaime's comics that I go for first. I always get to Beto, but it's the misadventures of Maggie and the gang that I always need to mainline.

Gibert's comics are still absolutely marvelous, and the older Hernandez can do something like a Poison River or a Human Diastrophism and make it all look so easy. And sometimes, his comics are the strongest thing in an issue.

Beto's story in the most recent issue is just staggering - the sheer simplicity of it, just two people in love, wandering around a bunch of sand dunes, and so happy in the moment. It's blatantly sentimental, and all the better for it, because we could all use a little more sentiment in these bleak fuckin' times.

There is also something about the way it compliments the story behind the cover of this issue - a tribute to somebody who gave up on some dreams of art for family, and ending up raising two of the finest artists in modern comics - that comes with a real emotional kick.

Jaime's Princess Anima thing has been going on forever, and has had nowhere near the soulful resonance of the Hoppers crew, but was never intended to be. It's been a blast to read, even if I could never quite untangle the convoluted continuity of this sci-fi wonderland, and has come to a surprisingly bloody climax. It's great comics, but Beto's stuff is more haunting, and somehow more essential for these times.

Love and Rockets is still the best comic in the world. 

Do I really need all that?

After moving away for a year, putting a bunch of stuff into storage, and then coming back and moving it out again into a new space under the new house, I've been given a real perspective on how many things I actually need to hold on to.

My comic, magazine and book collection has always been an unwieldy thing, but it really does feel a bit out of control right now, and it needs some harsh pruning. I do this every few years, and it's been a while since the last time, and I'm feeling particularly ruthless with this purge.

Culling the collection, figuring out what really matters. I should not be having so much fun doing this.

But it took me years to complete a full collection of the generally excellent Shade The Changing Man comics by Peter Milligan and his pals, but do I need all 70+ issues? I'll read them again for another concentrated dose, and then they're gone. I'll shift them on in bulk, giving somebody else the chance to inhale all the Meta madness in one go.

I certainly don't need all the Kick Ass comics I have - it's some of John Romita Jr's finest mayhem, but nothing much more than that. But I'm also starting to realise that I don't need all the Groo and Sgt Rock comics I've got, even though they are all of consistently high quality. 

Because as good as they are, and they are really good, there is a certain amount of repetition. Groo really only has one joke, and it's a great joke that can play out in an infinite variety of situations, but I don't need all of it to hand, and just a few choice examples would do. I've got about half of the Groo comics they've put out, which must be well over 200 issues by now, and that's a  lot of jokes about cheese dip. 

And the mild pacifism and propelling thrills of the Sgt Rock comics have the same kind of delicious repitition, and I've got another 100 of them, and really only need a dozen. So I've gone through and picked those 12 out out, partly because they have particularly good stories, but mainly because they have nostalgic value, or just really good Joe Kubert covers.

I'm not getting rid of any of my Unknown Soldier or Enemy Ace comics, of course. I'm not crazy.

The biggest chunk of the collection that is already destined for a new home is the past 20 years of  Empire mags, as previously mentioned. I've picked some of them out too - I'm not getting rid of the one issue I got on my first ever trip to London - and my mate Kyle is getting every one with an X-Men cover, because that's his thing.

There's piles and piles of other comics that can go - I've come to the realisation that I don't need any of the Hellboy comics after his properly mythic adventures in the underworld, and I definitely don't need all those Warren Ellis comics that I thought I had already ditched.

It took me many, many years to realise I couldn't collect everything, and only needed to keep the stuff that actually met something to me, one way or the other. Sharpening your collection is surprisingly fun and good for the soul, when there is always more to cull.

Maybe I don't need quite so much Unknown Soldier.

Fighting with Frank (part 4 of 13): Must try harder next time.

- Multiversity: Pax Americana #1
Art by Frank Quitely
Story by Grant Morrison
Colors by Nathan Fairbairn
Letters by Rob Leigh

My life is my own

I don't know much about poetry, just a few lines from random epics have cling to the inside of my brain, but most of it has been pushed out by the desperate need to know who was in the New Warriors.

But the words of Number 6, and even the order he lists his demands, is seared into my soul forever, man. I don't know much about poetry, but I know it when I see it.