The Lonely Death of The Wednesday Shuffle

Well “Death” may be overstating things.

I know, just a couple of months ago, I was on here all “OMG, BATMAN! BLACK SUN! MORRISON” but a week or so later I discovered that someone already was laying down phat annotations and explanations and ponderations regarding the self-aware Morrisonian arm of the DCU – and frankly, he got there first and did it better.

I’m talking about Daviz Uzmeri over at Funnybook Babylon. (And his Return of Bruce Wayne work over at Comics Alliance.)

Alas, it was pure geek hubris to think I was the first person to figure out where BARBATOS came from.

So, while I am still compiling notes on Final Crisis/The Morrison DCU, they are for a more low-key project. And in regards to other comics project… well…  there is something far more sinister afoot that I am unable to speak of at this time.

So for the moment, the recently re-launched Wednesday Shuffle will lie dormant.

Watching.

Waiting.

Preparing till your back is turned to strike.

Until then, the previously mentioned Funnybook Babylon and Comics Alliance are great sites, as is Bleeding Cool, and you can always find my non-comics writing (well, kind of non comics as I’ve got some comics-related interviews in the fire) over at Grinding.

THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE

Let’s start with THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE.   It seems like a counter-intuitive place to start looking at FINAL CRISIS but that is exactly the problem with trying to organize my thoughts on FC… its cyclical.    You can start at the beginning of FC itself, but that’s as much a case of starting mid story as almost any other entry point.  The DC Universe  of FC and Morrison’s over-arching story is a self-generative ouroboros of a thing, always eating its own tale and always generating the means by which the DCU is saved from existential threats.

Narrative-wise, THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE falls firmly after BATMAN AND ROBIN #12 (a series where the first storyline ends with the first page of the much earlier BATMAN R.I.P. story-arc) but time-wise,  TRoBW falls just hours after the last page of FINAL CRISIS (a series that existed outside of chronology for much of its run) and also places itself into a pretty clear timeline with SEVEN SOLDIERS.

See, this isn’t easy to dig into.

So we see Bruce, alive as various minds in the “current” DCU have deduced, except lost in time.   He’s in the same cave we saw at the end of FINAL CRISIS, with “Old Man” a.k.a. Anthro and the cave symbols we saw him and Bruce painting in FINAL CRISIS – The Bat, The Superman Crest, Wonder Woman’s symbol and Metron’s “freedom sigil”.

Morrison has chosen to make the local language our P.O.V. language for this issue and renders Batman almost unintelligible.   So we very quickly learn that the cave area is considered “haunted” but we learn very little of Bruce’s mental state, save that he seems to be almost amnesiac.

Anthro’s descendents – the Deer tribe – warily accept Bruce into their ranks even though they’re initially afraid he might herald a return of the Shining Ones whose return would herald the “ALL OVER”.  In this case the “SHINING ONES” are either referring to the Sheeda (the villains of SEVEN SOLDIERS) or the New Gods or both, given the relationship between the two groups.   I can easily see Morrison positioning ANTHRO as a descendant of AURAKLES (time-lost caveman nemesis of the Sheeda), both of them elevated to the position of “first superhero” by the intervention of the New Gods.

(And yes, this would then be yet another way that DARKSEID was responsible for his own defeat – freeing AURAKLES to return to his own timeline due to a bet with Mr. Miracle allowing a new generation of humanity to rise up after the Harrowing of the Sheeda which in turn results in ANTHRO being given Fire/the “freedom sigil”/imagination by Metron which results in many of the events of Final Crisis.

This would also explain why Anthro’s people have so many blonde blue-eyed members even though they seem to be located in what would eventually be North America.)

The rocket full of artifacts and a final accounting of the events of FINAL CRISIS is near the cave.  One is forced to wonder, given how old the artifacts inside seem to be – a mini-Bat-Signal turns to dust at Bruce’s touch – how long it has been there, and if it actually landed here or if reality regrew around it.  When Superman launched the rocket during FC, it was outside of reality and continuity, launched into nothingness from the last outpost of reality.    If reality grew back up around it, one could argue that the reason Bruce landed at this place at this point in time is because of the rocket.  Given how much of FC’s end was about reestablishing narrative – even from an “in character” perspective and not a “meta” one – it wouldn’t be too far off to say that the rocket, being the next part of Bruce’s narrative is what pulled him there out of all the times and places he could have landed in.  This is quite possibly an artifact of the world being rebuilt by Superman at the end of FC.

Anyway, in short order, the Deer People are attacked by VANDAL SAVAGE and his BLOOD MOB.  Bruce saves the son of the tribal leader but is beaten down by Savage.  He’s saved by the red-headed “Boy” who is firmly in the roll of Caveman Robin.

Dammit, I just wrote “Caveman Robin” and was completely serious about it.

Soon, Bruce is cloaked in the skin of a giant bat and It Is On:

Don’t bet on Vandal Savage – though I doubt this is the last we see of him in this series.   There’s a beatdown, an eclipse and Bruce vanishes into a mysterious waterfall never to return.

As soon as he’s gone, however, hopped forward to a future that will hopefully see him playing Solomon Bat Kane and establishing the clues we’ve seen in BATMAN AND ROBIN we get an appearance from Booster Gold, Superman and Hal Jordan in one of Rip Hunter’s time bubbles.  They’re tracking Bruce across time, trying to stop him from making it back under his own power because if he succeeds (succeeded, really, taking time travel into account)  “everyone dies.”

Buh-buh-buh.

Repeating themes:  Evil being the cause of its own destruction.  The self-protective properties of the DCU.  Batman being awesome.  Also guessing the white necklace that Anthro passes down will be important – if only for its resonance with the infamous string of pearls from Bruce’s origin.

If I had to guess, we’ll see the roots of the Wayne family, how BARBATOS got involved, if BARBATOS is the Devil is Hurt is Thomas Wayne and setup for the Hurt vs. Dick and Damien fight in the present.

Next:  Assuming I don’t go off on a tangent, I want to peel apart the idea of BARBATOS – The Bat Devil.

THE NEW

Very quickly into this run of reviewing comics I remembered what killed my interest in comics reviews back when I wrote for Silver Bullet Comics – readers are generally only interested in angry reviews.  It’s not enough to say that I, for example, hated BLACKEST NIGHT – I had to say that BLACKEST NIGHT violated my mother’s corpse and Geoff Johns is a dolphin rapist.   And, to be honest, without a bit of the vitriol I like to sprinkle into my own work, I got kind of bored talking to the open air about how much I loved comics and respected the opinions of people who liked things I found to be borderline execrable.

Being an anti-pundit is dull work.

However, I still put a lot of work into this site and its infrastructure and it seemed a shame to let it sit here and gather dust.

So, from now on, the Shuffle is going to focus on a few things in particular – primarily this is where I’m going to put my notes regarding a possible book about FINAL CRISIS – the whole damn thing from JLA to the RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE and all stops in between.  I’m hoping it’ll be interesting, even for people who don’t like Morrison’s work as I’m intending for this to be a warts and all overview.

I’m going to open up with THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE, because it seems a good enough place to start, given that the FINAL CRISIS superstructure is a massive looping beast of continuity.    Along the way, I may diverge into other related topics: KIRBY, the DCU in general, and any excuse I can come up with to wax poetic about PHONOGRAM.

A lot of folks tell me that I should write a FINAL CRISIS book, let’s see if I can convince myself that’s a workable idea as well.

All of you are welcome to join the ride.

EVERYTHING CHANGES

The Shuffle is undergoing a radical redesign and repourposing…

(What, you mean it might have content?)

…so watch this space.

Doctor Who: A Room With a Deja View

Previously, I hadn’t taken a look at any of IDW’s licensed Doctor Who spinoff comics, nor had I read any of the fiction work of famed (or reviled, take your pick) comics gossip columnist Rich Johnston.  (Though I’m a regular reader of his Bleeding Cool news site.)  If  this Wednesday’s Room With a Deja View is any indicator, however, I need to be checking out both.

Room With a Deja View is a tale of the 10th Doctor, taking place during one his companionless stints.   If you have no idea what anything in the last sentence means, then you are probably not the target audience of this book.  No time is spent in introducing the character or his capabilities.  The Doctor finds himself on the receiving end of a distress call from a location in space that has seemingly tried to seal itself off from all outside contact.   In short order he finds himself neck deep in a mystery that takes some creative problem solving — even by the Doctor’s lateral thinking-prone standards — to get to the bottom of.

There’s a twist to the story, not in the end, but in how it plays out.  It would have been easy to have the twist come off as a gimick, but aside from a warning at the begining, the fact that some parts of the story read better backwards comes off as a natural extension of the clever story.   Johnston captures the 10th Doctor’s dialogue and mannerisims perfectly, and artist Eric J does a solid job of keeping things straight.

This is a fairly quick review because the story is fairly easy to spoil.   However, what I can say is that it does what good other-media-spinoffs should do, and that’s take advantage of the medium (in the case comics) to tell stories than can’t be told in the property’s native habitat.   Often this sort of narrative expansion takes the form of “what could the show do if it had an infinite budget” like in “Angel Season 6” or “Buffy Season 8” but Deja View takes real advantage of it being a comic.

Highly recommended for any Doctor fans who need a fix.

Magic and Comics

Over at needcoffee.com my occasional co-conspirator Wolven has an excellent piece about Magic (by which I mean the real-world spiritual/philisophical tradition – Aleister Crowley and Alan Moore’s Imaginary Snake- type Magic) and Comics —  specificaly which 5 comics get magic right.    It’s a great piece showcasing the top 5 books that he feels gets Magic down.  And if my run on sentence above doesn’t clarify what I mean by “Magic” enough for you, go read the article and the included preamble.

I’ll wait.

No, it’s cool, I have this game on my phone that’s like the old Labyrinth game with the ball and the holes and the twisty table.  I’ll be over here playing it till you get back.

Okay.

Right,  it’s a thorough and sharp article featuring his top 5 list for magicaly accurate books.    So, I was reading it and I found that, I by and large,  had some serious disagreements.   This is only natural, of course, given that Magic has as much to do with the individual practioner  as it has to do with making sweet love to a copy of the Golden Bough in a darkened corner of the library.

So, despite the fact that I figured it would take much longer (and at least one Final Crisis refrence) to get me to talk about Magic on here, here’s my quick (and completely subjective) spin on the Top 5 Comics that Get Magic Right:

5. Promethea

This one is a no-brainer for the list… it’s not so much that it has an accurate portrayal of Magic in a fictional context as it is a flipping grimoire. Seriously, if you read this book and Do Stuff That Is In It,  Stuff Will Happen.     Alan Moore and J.H. Williams’ beautiful and poingant epic is also filled with enough basic and intermediate magickal theory to get any budding magician or dabbler or curious skeptic up and moving.

4. The Invisibles

The obligatory Grant Morrison book.  It’s almost cheating to put this on here since most of the magic in this book is fairly straightforward portrayals of real magical systems. (With, of course, seriously wild results.)  The number of people who got “into” Chaos Magick via the Invisibles is probably staggering.   While traditional Magic isn’t a focus of the book, really, half the characters use some form of Chaos Magick or another at some point and while not as outright a grimoire as Moore’s work, there is plenty in the book to get a curious reader into trouble or at least convince many that “there’s something to this altered consciousness stuff”.   The Invisibles was in equal parts an exploration of stuff  Morrison was into and dealing with as he wrote it, a magickal working, and “an invitation to a party”.

Plus, it was probably saved from cancelation by group ritual masturbation.  How many books not drawn by Jim Balent can say that?

(Though, funnily enough, IIRC Balent is a practicing Pagan, himself.)

3. Hellblazer

Wolven has this on his list as well for very good reasons.  And you know, it’s a book about a Magacian, so it makes sense, right?  In my mind, no one did real Magic a better turn in Hellblazer than Brian Azzarello, whose run on Hellblazer is probably the most unappriciated turn a writer has taken on the long-running series.  His Constantine rarely deals in what most would think of as Magic, mostly dealing with psychological tricks, slight of hand, misdirection, neuro-linguistic programming and sheer cunning.  In other words, he’s pretty much like real magicians.  Only infinately cooler since he’s John fucking Constantine.

But what I really want to note is Warren Ellis’ short turn on Hellblazer.    For much of his run, Constantine returns to his roots (at least as Moore and Delano often had him) as a witness to horror, perhaps sticking his hand in at the end to steer things, gently, but more often than not he was the vehicle for a horror story.  Except for the long arc of Ellis’ abrivated run: Haunted where Constantine comes up on lost loves and the truly fucked-up deep end of Magic… but, most cruely, the human element of the deep end.   Someone he loved is dead and it’s because she was being transformed into a Scarlet Woman by her boyfriend and scumbag Magician.  Now while the Scarlet Woman is a real concept with its own miles of baggage, I’ve never heard of one having her own aborted fetus implanted back under her skin.   But I know of people, self proclaimed magicians, who have done stuff that’s pretty close.

Haunted gets magic right, not because of the realisim of the practice, but because it shows (through a horror-story window) the kind of horror that some of the truly messed up people who are drawn to the idea of Magic in the real world inflict on themselves and others.   Sure, it’s kicked up a notch, but damaged people hurting others through mind games (or even thinking crack gives them magical insight) are not strictly the things of fiction.  It gets the feel of the desperation of the dark side of magical practice down like few other books do.

And it’s worth noting the impact Hellblazer has had, as well.  If I had a dollar for every Magician who got into it because they wanted to be John Constantine and brought tonnes of baggage and drama from the book like “the high cost of magic” with them into their spiritual practice, I’d be rich.

Also, I’d in all honesty probably owe myself a dollar.

Oh, the disagreement, part.  Unlike, Wolven, I really can’t stand Mike Carey’s run on Hellblazer at all.

2. Planetary

I don’t want to turn this into an Ellis-love fest…

…and I could, the standalone Global Frequency issue “Big Sky” by Ellis and John J. Muth is hands-down my favourite realistic representation of magic in popular media, period…

…but Planetary contains some of my favourite depictions of Magic (and Magic as information detection and manipulation) that I’ve seen.    This is one of the more subjective entries here, as to me, the few times that Planetary touches on Magic, just feels right.   While Magic is not a key component of the series, realisitc-seeming Magic even less so, Planetary does dwell quite heavily on information and the relationship between raw information and the makeup of the world around us.  And strangely, this take on the information-based makeup of existence is something that is absolutely right on the ball in my, admittedly biased POV.   Part of the feel of Magic in Planetary is probably due to Ellis’ knowledge of the works of the late Ethnobotanist and fringe-Anthropologist, Terrance Mckenna whose work I’m an avid follower of, myself.

Also, you know, as Doc Brass says: “You want to know the secret of the world? It’s this : Save it, and it’ll repay you, every second of every day.”

And if there’s one thing that actually practicing Magic myself has taught me, it’s the truth of that statement.  Magic has brought me to an interest and involvement in social justice issues, sustainability, community outreach and real engagement with the world.    Beyond the parlor tricks, the sigils, the cool parties, this is the greatest thing I’ve taken away from Magic.

1.  Phonogram

Aside from being one of the most all-around brilliant mainstream books in recent years, Phonogram captures the feel of magic with a clarity that’s shocking for creators that don’t actually have anything to do with real Magical practice.   First of all, even if you think all this Magic talk is completely rediculous, read this book.

Of course I don’t know why you’d read this far if you didn’t have at least a passing interest in the topic, unless you were waiting to see if I stopped in the middle of talking comics and went into a long drug-fuelled rant about how I was in telepathic communication with the star-intelligences of Beta Reticula IV.

Sorry, no star-intelligences here.

It’s snakes.

And they live in my head.

But they’re not related to Alan Moore’s snake.

Right.  Phonogram is brilliant.  But Wolven covers the why and the hows pretty solidly in the original article.  What he doesn’t mention is the feel.   The Magic in Phonogram feels like real Magic, at least as I’ve experienced it, to an amazing degree.   It’s largely because Phonogram is about Music, and Place, and Nostalgia, and the powerful ties between art and memory and place and personality… and that’s a lot of what Magic is about, really.  It’s Art, and using Art to Do Things, and Phonogram, being a book about Magicians who use Music to Do Things (and have things Done To Them by Music) captures that feeling perfectly.   It helps that I got into Magic while a club kid and have actually stood in the back of an Afghan Whigs show chanting spells and feeling the rush of the crowd and the power of pop.

Right-o.  That’s it.  I’ll try and keep the magic talk to a minimum from here on out.  Well, unless there’s interest in “crossing the streams” of geekery and Magic-talk in the future.    The original article just made me want to really talk about books that reflected my feelings on, as my good friend Dr. Strange says, “the mystic arts”.

Blackest Night #1 (with bonus Green Lantern #43)

Not to be outdone by Marvel’s release of Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth, a book teaming up Deadpool with his own severed head from Marvel Zombies, DC has launched Blackest Night — a zany team up book with former loser Green Lantern villian Black Hand and Bruce Wayne’s skull on an epic adventure through the DC Universe.

Sigh.  Okay.  That’s not quite right.

Let me preface this by saying that the GL and Batbooks are pretty much the only DC books I followed in the wake of Final Crisis.  Not because some deep-seated loathing of Final Crisis, in fact the problem was just the oppisite.  Final Crisis was so awesome that it made the day-to-day adventures of a lot of the other DCU books seem “bleh” in comparison.  However, I’d been following GL for a while, despite my dislike for Hal Jordan because of the fascinating and rich tapestry Geoff Johns and Pete Tomasi were creating.  (It’s worth noting that Green Lantern‘s sister book Green Lantern Corps is actually my favourite of the two since I generally find Hal to be a santimonious prick and love Kyle and Guy.)

So, needless to say, I was psyched about the oncoming Blackest Night, an event crossover with its roots in a throway Alan More GL story from ages ago.

Then I read Green Lantern #43.

And I hemmed and hawed, unsure if I wanted to go into why I really hated it.  I figured I’d wait for Blackest Night before going into it so that I could see if the launch of BN changed my mind.     And then I read Blackest Night #1 and what little interest I had in the event leaked out my ears.

It’s a question of tone, and I realize in this case, my extreme dislike for Blackest Night is probably a very subjective matter of personal taste.   Blackest Night is trying to be a super-hero horror comic.  That’s an incredable hard trick to pull off.  Often you’re left with something where the heroes and the horror don’t mesh together well and you get the later Batman and Superman vs. Predator and Aliens and Obama and whomever else they faced off against before the Dark Horse licensed superhero crossover died off.  On the other hand sometimes it really works, like with WildCATS vs. Aliens, a book that despite it’s clean and crisp art, balanced horror and the capes and punching genre fairly solidly.    For my money, Final Crisis was a pretty solid horror/supers book, too.

Anyway, enough preamble.  Green Lantern #43 tells the new origin of old GL villian Black Hand, making explicit some things that were hinted at in Johns’ solid Secret Origin arc.   But here, in transforming Black Hand into a credible threat, he takes a step too far and Doctor Lights him.     Doctor Light was a D-List villian until Brad Meltzer revealed that not only was he actually incompitent due to mind manipulation, but he was mega hardcore.  And a rapist.  A hardcore rapist.  With that grim and gritty transformation, Meltzer not only wrote some of the most tasteless shit regarding rape outside of a South Park cartoon, but he also took Doctor Light a step too far.

He wanted to beef him up?  Make him more hardcore?  Sure.  But in doing so, he made him too grim, taking him to almost comedic depths of depravity.  It read like the bad fan-fic I was writing when I was 16.  The transofrmation of Black Hand into a grave-humping necrophile with a costume made of body bags strikes me the same way.  It’s so “grrrr serious” that I can’t take it at all seriously.    It’s cape rape as characterization all over again.    It’s an attempt to make Black Hand serious that takes him to the level of something you’d see in Garth Ennis’ The Boys.

On the bright side, Doug Mahnke’s art is as crisp and awesome as ever.   Mahnke is one of DC’s finest artists and I’m glad he’s getting the exposure from Green Lantern that he deserves.   There’s a few really chilling splash pages that are awesome and effective.  And yeah, I did say that I found parts of it chilling.  There are parts that work… until I remember that we just discovered that Black Hand is really a necrophile with a costume made of body bags.

Blackest Night itself?  As you can guess, I felt it was plagued by the same kind of forced overwrought seriousness.  Johns is in a tight spot, trying to balance between tense dialogue and exposition and as usual, he favours the new-reader friendly exposition.     Geoff Johns’ gift is that he can take decades of contradictory continuity and make you think that it was all one giant plan.  He weaves together disperate elements well and that skill is on full display here.   Sadly, I don’t quite think that Ivan Reis is quite up to the task of doing a horror book.  There’s just something off about a lot of the work here and I can’t tell if it’s his style or the script that’s throwing me off.  For example, the long-awaited scene where Scar of the Guardians snaps?   Instead of paying off the sense of dread that Johns and Tomasi have seeded in the GL books for the last several years, it instead looks like the worst case of Muppet on Muppet violence since Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Muppets.

Blackest Night?  Not a fan so far. In fact as it stands, I hope it’s not the sign of a resurgence of the “cape rape” style storytelling to the DCU.   I’ll let you know if that changes.  Because I’ve been enough of a fan of the buildup — Including the excellent Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps, released the same day as BN #1 — that I’ll hang around and see if there’s a payoff.

Also, I am really curious about Bruce Wayne’s skull.

No Wednesday Comics?

Since I’ve gotten a few emails about it, I just thought I’d sit down and write a quick note explaining why I won’t be reviewing Wednesday Comics on here. 

The quick and easy answer is:  Because it’s review proof.

Wednesday Comics features fifteen oversized, one-page, serialized stores about classic DC characters, from some of the best writers and artists in the business.  Which, on the face of it sounds awesome.  However, after taking a read through the first issue, I realized that almost every story barely gets off the ground in the space allotted, most just fading into a quick “To Be Continued”. 

It’s a really neat format and the newsprint isn’t nearly as distracting as I’d feared, but there’s no way to review the thing with just one installment out as it’s nothing resembling a complete package.

With no stories to review – unless I wanted to touch on the book’s failure to deliver done-in-one serialized fiction with satisfactory bridge points – the only thing left to talk about is the format.  Which has been to done to death on every other comics site and USA Today. (Which incidentally is running the Superman strip from Wednesday Comics.)

It’s an awesome experiment; publishers need to play around with the format of individual comics in order for them to survive, but as a stand alone artifact, it’s awfully difficult to really bring any sort of solid critique to bear.  

Torchwood: Children of Earth

When I realized I wanted to do a quick review of the recently aired BBC1 mini-series Torchwood: Children of Earth, I expected to be writing about the inevitable rubber monsters, near-constant weeping, irritating score, ham-fisted attempts at being “adult” and how pretty John Barrowman’s eyes are. Well, there is some weeping, the score is still irritating and John Barrowman is still so very, very, pretty. But other than those bits, I’m shocked to say that this five-part mini-series comprising the third season of Torchwood is really, really good.

While Barrowman has publicly criticized the cut from thirteen to five episodes, the format of Season 3 does nothing but help. Whereas in a normal season, you’d get one or two good episodes, one or two mind-numbingly bad episodes and a smattering of in-between ones, Torchwood Season 3 is a tightly plotted, tense five episodes.

For those of you who aren’t Doctor Who fans, Torchwood is the “adult” spinoff of Doctor Who, starring the Doctor’s occasional companion Captain Jack Harkness. It’s shown “post-watershed” in the UK which means there can be naughty bits and foul language. In previous seasons this leeway in content has been used to mostly have lots of gratuitous sex and violence – in almost every instance it came off as juvenile, like a kid dropping the F Bomb in front of its parents for the first time just because they can. Oh sure, some of the gratuitous sex was actually plot related, the gore was sometimes effectively used, and Season 2’s fight-and-fuck scenes between Barrowman’s Harkness and James Marsters’ Captain John Heart were really, really hot. But on the whole, it was still a bunch of dysfunctional characters fragging and shagging in front of a bunch of rubber monsters.

Children of Earth is a very different beast.

The plot is simple: Something from space starts wearing the entirety of Earth’s children like finger puppets to deliver cryptic messages. This ties into a secret remembered by only a few members of the British government – a secret that they can’t afford to have get out. Meanwhile, Torchwood, of course, begins its own investigation. Obviously things collide, more things go horribly wrong, secrets from the past come to light, the immortal Jack Harkness has some skeletons crawl out of the closet and a lot of people do very horrible things. The first three episodes are a tense 24-esque action-adventure story with political undertones but episode four is where Children of Earth transcends its roots as the “Doctor Who spinoff with the rubber masks and fucking” and becomes some of the best political sci-fi I’ve ever seen. The story takes a turn towards issues of politics and class in a spellbinding display that beats the best bits of Battlestar Galactica for political sci-fi. Almost all political problems on the Galactica could be solved by an awesome speech by Edward James Olmos, or failing that, Mary McDonnell tossing someone out an airlock. No such luck here, as the problems faced by various characters lead to more morally compromised solutions with little room for speeches and not a convenient airlock in sight.

It’s not a story without hope, the Doctor is quoted repeatedly as a source of hope, in fact; but it’s hope marred by human frailty, greed, fear, ego and expedience. There are few characters that don’t do the unexpected, and few scenarios which end in the sort of pat “everything will work out” that you’d expect from current Doctor Who scribe Russell T. Davies. Like the best kind of horror, despite the presence of an alien menace (with truly twisted Ellis-ian motivations), the real horror comes from what the people do when placed in unimaginable circumstances. Some rise to the occasion and some fall and fail in startling, all too human ways.

Euros Lyn handles directing with a skilled hand and I’m excited to see his work on the rumored upcoming Doctor Who feature film. He juggles the action-y Torchwood bits and the political maneuvering in dim conference rooms with equal skill. The score is loud and obtrusive as I’ve come to expect from Who and Torchwood, but even that is used to the show’s advantage in a great post-destruction sequence.

I gather that Children of Earth did well, ratings-wise, in the UK, and that most parties would be interested in pursuing more seasons. I honestly don’t know how that would happen at this point, but it would be interesting to see if future seasons stuck to the same mini-series formula and continued to be the same kind of quality sci-fi as seen this week.

For those of you in the US, Children of Earth will be showing on BBC America starting on July 20th.

Also, John Barrowman is really, really cute.

Marvel Divas #1

“Review this.”

With those words my Editor flung a tear-stained copy of Marvel Divas #1 at me.  As it flapped through the air and landed heavily on my desk like a dying bird, I was struck by two things:

First, the cover.  The sheer anatomical improbablity of the cover of this book had already made it infamous on the internet from day it showed up in Marvel’s solicits.   And yes, it’s a rediculous piece of art – screaming “Yes, there are boobies — strange malformed boobies — in this book.  Please buy it.”

The second thing that struck me is that I don’t have an Editor, leaving me to wonder who the sweaty heavyset man pacing franticly in my living room was.

But to the book at hand — The thing about Marvel Divas, the thing that is difficult to wrap my mind around, is that it’s actually really good.  Not world-changing good, but it’s a solid, funny, entertaining book about four female super-heroines maintaining their friendships in the New York supers scene.

Yeah, it’s Sex in the City with capes.

But it’s not a pastiche of Sex and the City, it takes the concept at face value and runs with it and that’s how what first sounded like a joke project, turns out to be my favourite read of the week — a week where Grant Morrison writes Batman and Captain America comes back from the grave, no less.   The book features Firestar, the Black Cat, Monica Rambeau, with Patsy Walker as Carrie …err… the narrator.  All of the characters are in character and sharply written.  Firestar seems a bit off, but she doesn’t get much face time and her history in Kurt Busiek’s Avengers is a very important plot point.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa turns in a solid script, packed with character, interesting insights into the life of a C-List superhero, and real wit.  There’s a Roy Lichtenstein joke that cracked me up.   Tonci Zonjic’s pencils are sharp and clear and he’s got a clear eye for fashion that makes both his male and female characters look well-dressed and sexy without going over the top.  (I personally prefer his Brother Doctor Voodoo re-design to the one Voodoo sports in New Avengers and solicits for his own new series.)

Seriously, my favourite book of the week.  It’s a “Sex in the City” superhero knock-off that I wouldn’t be ashamed to show to my friends who actually watch Sex in the City.