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I got the “complete black and white collection” of Scott McCloud’s Zot! a couple of years ago from my friend Chris as a birthday present, and I finally got around to reading it over the past couple days.
McCloud is primarily known for his brilliant Understanding Comics(as well as its two underrated sequels Reinventing Comics and Making Comics), but few (including myself, until recently) have read much of Zot!, his pre-UC superhero series. This book, which collects issues 11-36 (the first ten issues were originally in color, and 11 was meant as a sort of reboot), chronicles his maturation into the master formalist most are familiar with from his analytical work. There’s some clunky storytelling early on, but by the half-way point, McCloud had developed into a brilliant cartoonist.
The story itself begins as a bit of an Astro Boy knock-off (McCloud was one of the first American comic artists to take a heavy influence from manga), but quickly develops into a book of surprising depth. Zot is a superhero from a near-perfect alternate version of Earth who befriends Jenny, a mopey teenager from our own world. McCloud abandons the whole high concept conciet of the book in issue 28, when Jenny and Zot are trapped in Jenny’s reality, and the book becomes one of the better depictions of high school seen in comics.
Zot! reminded me a lot of books like Cerebus and Strangers in Paradise, series which made radical left turns at the creators’ own whims, and (for the most part) were all the better for it. McCloud’s extensive commentary on each story is self-deprecating, funny, and always insighful. Now I need to hunt down those first ten issues.
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A bunch of stray thoughts about the Alien movies, because I feel like it:
So, I’ve been showing the Alien movies to my brother. I hadn’t seen most of them in a while (probably 9th or 10th grade), and I’m happy to say the first three hold up very well.
My favorite interpretation (can’t remember where I first heard this, but it’s cool) of the Alien trilogy (we’ll get to that “fourth” film later) imagines the series as a metaphor for terminal illness. Basically, in Alien, you’re diagnosed with cancer. Aliens, you’ve fought it off for a while and you begin to feel confident. Finally, in Alien 3, the cancer suddenly takes a turn for the worse and you’re fucked.
Most people’s big problem with Alien 3 is the fact that they killed off Newt and Hicks in the first ten minutes of the movie. I’ll admit this has always bothered me (simply a waste of a couple cool characters), but it’s the main thing that makes the cancer metaphor work. Just when you think you’ve beaten one form of cancer, it might of spread somewhere else. And just when Ripley thought she had escaped from the queen and saved the lives of her new surrogate daughter and possible future love interest, their ship crashes on a prison planet, killing them both.
The Alien franchise is certainly the bleakest mainstream sci-fi series I can think of. Alien 3 strips Ripley of everything—and she had already lost a lot in the first two films. Her sacrifice at the end of that film is fucking powerful.
I’m pretty tired of defending Alien 3. If you really dismiss that movie just because Newt and Hicks died, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s a ton of great, inventive filmmaking in that film—the opening credits, Newt and Hicks’s memorial, the attempted rape, the first person crawlspace—I could keep going. It still has a lot of my favorite sequences David Fincher has ever done (Alien 3>Panic Room and Ben Button, easily; I probably like it more than Fight Club these days, too). Stop comparing it to Aliens, and I think you’ll be surprised.
Alien Resurrection, on the other hand, is probably the worst movie in any otherwise good franchise (its closest competition is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, but really, both of those movies are lightyears ahead of this one). The first three Alien films tell a complete story of Ripley’s struggles against the aliens and her eventual sacrifice. Even the idea of a Ripley clone is fucking insulting, but Alien Resurrection makes it even worse by shoehorning her into a movie which is closer to a New Horizons Aliens rip-off from 1993 than any actual Alien movie.
Most of you probably know I love Joss Whedon, but his script for this movie is fucking atrocious. In a 2005 interview, he attempted to dodge blame for this steaming pile with this weak-ass spin-
It wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.
Weak, Whedon. Most of Resurrection’s problems can be tied straight back to the ideas present in his original treatment. Though there was no Ripley (a big plus), it was still a bland retread of the first film, much moreso than Alien 3, which often gets pegged with that criticism for some reason. All the lame “futuristic” technology in Resurrection is embarrassing, like the stupid whiskey cube and the imbecilic plot device of having people use their fucking breath for entry to whatever restricted areas there are on the ship.
The script isn’t the only fatal flaw, though. How about the typically shallow and visually hideous direction from French douche Jean-Pierre Jeunet? Or all the stupid “funny” faces the actors are making constantly? Or Winona Ryder’s delivery of the line “—Since you were born without balls!”? Or the cheap-as-fuck opening credits? Or the stupid dude in the wheelchair? Or the embarrassing basketball scene? The list goes on. What a piece of shit.
I’ll get around to rewatching Alien Vs. Predator eventually, probably before Ridley Scott’s Prometheus comes out (trailer looks dope!), but I am not looking forward to it (or its sequel, which I never saw).
The Alien movies are the only series aside from Indiana Jones which I rank in perfect descending order, though the first three are pretty close and the fourth one is pretty far down in the bowels of Hades.
Check out some more organized thoughts from my boy Dabeedo here.
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Wanderlust (David Wain; 2012)
With a premise cribbed from Albert Brooks’s Lost in America and a cast ranging from the expected (The State/Stella alumni) to the happily unexpected (Alan fucking Alda), Wanderlust is pretty handily David Wain’s best movie since Wet Hot American Summer.
It follows a young couple (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) who are financially forced to leave New York City and decide to stay at a hippie commune called Elysium for a few weeks. Though it has a more coherent narrative throughline than WHAS, Wanderlust retains a lot more of the, for lack of a better term, “zaniness” of that film which was mostly absent from Wain’s previous effort, the entertaining, but kind of Apatow-lite Role Models. Paul Rudd gives his funniest, least smug performance in a while, culminating in a hilarious scene in which he psychs himself up for a tryst by describing all the places he’s going to put his cock in a ridiculous southern accent.
I expected the film’s premise to be a bit of a downside, but it turns out neo-hippies and aging hippies are still hilarious. Though Wanderlust makes a lot of jokes at their expense, it never really comes down for or against the idea of a commune, so it never feels particularly mean spirited. A jovial, occasionally poignant comedy.
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Saga #1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Brian Vaughan is clearly the most influential mainstream comic book writer of the past decade, even if he was conspicuously absent for much of the second half of it. After getting a job writing for Lost during its third season, Vaughan wrapped up his brilliant Marvel book Runaways, and allowed schedules to slow on both of his well known landmarks, Y: the Last Man and Ex Machina. He’s been absent in comics (and television; he left Lost after season five) since the end of Ex Machina, so I don’t think I’ve ever had higher expectations for a comic book than I have for his much vaunted space opera Saga.
It was clear within pages that Vaughan had not disappointed. Saga #1 is a 44-page comic, but it still has a lot of character introductions and world building to accomplish even for that double-sized length. Here, Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples have taken the Star Wars concept of a “used universe” and stretched it even further, putting spaceships and interplanetary war side by side with school buses and iPhone (or whatever its equivalent) applications.
Marco and Alana are members of two warring races who went the classic Romeo and Juliet route—minus the suicide—and have now had a child named Hazel. Saga is narrated by that child, still an infant in this first issue, after she’s grown up. Vaughan and Staples use this device pretty cleverly, with Staples hand lettering Hazel’s narration without any enclosing boxes surrounding the text. This is one of the more unique uses of lettering in a mainstream comic this side of Sandman.
Staples’s art is at least as impressive as Vaughan’s predictably impeccable pacing. Her art has the looseness of Eddie Campbell and the coolness of Becky Cloonan. Its a style which complements Vaughan’s writing more than perhaps any of his previous collaborators. Her storytelling is fluid and her characters’ “acting” expresses a full range of emotion without wasting a line. This mirrors Vaughan’s florid and quick dialogue and the depth of his plotting and characterization.
There are many obvious reference points when trying to describe Saga—Star Wars, Romeo and Juliet, Game of Thrones—and I’ve thankfully only made offhand references to two of those (shit—now all three). Regardless of whatever its influences may be, Saga’s universe is wholly original. Sex robots with televisions for heads seem only to be the tip of this galaxy’s iceberg of the bizarre, and I’ll certainly be there to unveil more and more of it every month.
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R.I.P. Moebius, 1938-2012
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