Micah

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I was getting ready to work up a movie review from last night, when I realized I’d finished a book a few days ago and not ever reviewed it. I mean, it was the weekend, when I rarely review anything, so the delay is understandable. The forgetting, though, quite a bit less so. I’m not sure if I’ve ever done that before, or even come close. All of this would seem to indicate bad things about the book in question, and maybe reading between the lines they do, but my expectations for Micah were set so low that I walked away pretty happy about the outcome.

Yup, as intimated recently, I read another Anita Blake book. My outline created from the several most recent books states that a book in the series will start out with a mystery, quickly shift to sexual politics among Anita’s many were- and vampiric lovers, possibly also include were- and/or vampiric politics as well, occasionally hint at the mystery, and then draw it all together in the final 50 pages, sometimes very neatly and impressively but other times wildly implausibly. But the sexual politics is definitely the unfortunate-image-inducing glue that binds the whole plot together. I’ve pretty much typed this exact paragraph in a previous review; I revisit it here because Micah is not the usual Anita Blake novel. It weighs in at a light 250 pages, and with the font and spacing choices factored in as well could not be more than a third of the length of her last several books. The big question, then: what was removed from the formula to allow for this unexpected shrinkage?

My dread was that it would be all sexual politics (or possibly just sex completely divorced from any kind of characterization or plot), with no mystery or anything else. To my surprise, it was something rather more than that. There is a plot, and of course there are sexual politics, but mostly it was a chance to provide a little bit of character growth between Anita and her most recent and eponymous boyfriend. Actual growth, relative to the reader’s previous knowledge and between each other, as opposed to the typical jockeying for sexual political position that has often masqueraded as character growth lately. And the plot, bare bones though it is, wasn’t half bad. I once more believe that Hamilton can still write good mystery fodder, if she is willing to sit down and actually do it. Rumor tells me she probably isn’t willing, though. Neverthless, I retain hope!

The Ultimates: Homeland Security

To be clear, this was not the next book in question, although I’ve now started that book, and it really will be the next book reviewed. It’s just, I still hadn’t found a replacement for my vanished Dresden Files #3, and took the excuse to make a little bit more delay by reading a little bit more Marvel modernity. (And, as I expect to like the next Dresden Files, you can see that I’ve still failed to find it or its replacement copy. Alas, for more reasons than one.)

Anyway, the continuation of the Ultimates, Homeland Security, was every bit as good as the original; what it lacked in characterization (which was not much at all), it more than made up in plot. In brief, the Ultimates (substantially expanded in scope from volume 1) must defend the world from shape-shifting Nazi aliens bent on the destruction of free will. Which I know sounds awesome enough all by itself, but it includes battles between massive military armadas, superb plot twists, semi-cannibalism, and discreet incestuous undertones. Plus, like I said, fantastic characterizations. Quicksilver, only present in a couple of scenes, is worth the price of admission all by himself on that front, and everyone else is well worthwhile. (Except Henry Pym; deeply flawed, I can handle, but he was pretty boring in this one. Still, that is a minor complaint, and about my only one. This is, as the first volume was, a flat-out excellent story.)

Ultimate X-Men: The Tomorrow People

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Yet more graphic novels! I’ve been going kind of crazy with them lately, I guess? On the bright side, they are filled with an excessively high fun quotient, and when compared to the next book I’ll be reading… well, you’ll see what I mean, I’m sure. In the meantime, the first volume of Ultimate X-Men marks the last new series I plan to pick up from Marvel for a while, probably, so there’s that, anyway.

The Tomorrow People is the least successful as an origin story of the four I’ve read lately. I mean, sure, it introduces a lot of people and concepts, but it does it in media res; which is not a bad thing, except that I felt like if I weren’t already familiar with most of the media, I’d have been immediately lost. We’re supposed to already know about the Mutants and their war against humanity, and we’re supposed to accept that these characters have both person names and superhero names without ever really being introduced to them. It’s not that it affected my enjoyment of the book, but I really think the new people they were trying to draw in would have some early struggles that none of the other series presented.

The good news is, the actual storyline following the origin was pretty darn excellent, if perhaps rushed. Pre-9/11 America is nevertheless obsessed with terrorism, in the form of mutants who have been beaten down too long and now wish to use their powers for dominance over humanity. Before you’ve had barely time to take a blink, three forces are on a collision course: the Brotherhood of Mutants, led by the evil Magneto, seeks to place homo superior at the top of Earth’s food chain, Professor Charles Xavier’s X-Men wish to prevent Magneto’s plans and make peace with their human brethren, and the robotic Sentinels have been programmed to murder any person with the mutant gene. Mix all that in with assassins, unexpected betrayals, secret unrevealed pasts, familial angst and a reasonable portion of sex, and, y’know, good times. I measure this one as just below the Ultimates on the adult content scale, but at the bottom of the entertainment scale of the four series with Ultimate Fantastic Four, at least so far. (But still entertaining!)

Point of historical interest: I’ve never really read modern superhero comics, and only recently the semi-old stuff from the 60s and 70s. Ultimate X-Men marks the first comic I’ve read which contains the otherwise ubiquitous appearance of the female hero with outsized breasts and bared midriff. The only real surprise here is that it took this long, I guess, but there it is. On the bright side, none of them was placed in a refrigerator.

Ex Machina: Fact v. Fiction

The third volume of Ex Machina is essentially more of the same. Which is to say, it contains odds and ends of political discussion[1], bits and pieces of Mayor Mitchell Hundred’s past, both before and after he gained his power over machinery of all kinds[2], and, most interestingly to me, continued gradual reveals about the source of his powers and other related incidents around the world[3]. Also, there’s a rival vigilante superhero in New York City! Plus more drama within Hundred’s past and present support systems!

I’m just saying: still a solid story, about which I have little of substance to say at this point. But I have a feeling that it’s all going to come together someday, and I’ll be, like, wow. It’s a theory, anyway.

Oh, and also, the occasional skyline shots with the remaining World Trade Center tower portrayed prominently? Still just as chilling as they were in the first volume.

[1] Well, really a lot less than usual, but replaced by civic responsibility in the guise of jury duty. Which falls in the same bucket, I guess.
[2] Including a bit of a family bombshell, something I’m starting to realize that Vaughan is pretty good at; I should pay attention to his episodes of Lost and issues of Buffy Season 8 and see if the trend holds there, as it has in this and Y: The Last Man.
[3] See, without going into spoilers, there’s an event that seems related to Hundred’s powers, but which is later revealed to have been a mislead. Except, I’m pretty sure that reveal was the real mislead, and that this information will be very important later.

Wyrd Sisters

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510tZcYWM+LI’ve just spent some time[1] looking over my past several Discworld reviews. And my memory matched the apparent reality, which is that Wyrd Sisters is definitely the first one that I’ve liked almost without reservation. It is notably the first one since Mort (my previous favorite) that lends itself to thoughtful examination and analysis. Also, it marks the first book to be populated with characters that seemed real and interesting to me right from the start.

The titular witches, who have recently formed a coven at the dreadfully modern urgings of their youngest member, are accidentally embroiled in politics when the infant heir to the throne of Lancre is deposited at their feet by loyalists fleeing from the scene of the king’s recent murder. They immediately deliver the child to a troupe of actors passing by, by way of removing the political odor as quickly as possible, only to discover that the duke who has taken the throne is bent on ruining their lives anyway. At which point, it’s time to get the heir-turned-actor back onto his rightful seat by any means imaginable.

Plus there’s a lot more and a fair bit funnier that I can’t easily shoehorn into a paragraph of plot description. I was definitely moved to laughter aloud now and then. But as I said, the depth was the best draw for me. On the surface, there are glaring parallels with Macbeth, Hamlet, and the actual life of William Shakespeare, all used to the comedic effect for which Pratchett is justifiably famous. But, and speaking as quite a fan of the Bard, the most interesting piece by far was the witches themselves.

I’ve only ever heard ‘wyrd’ in the context of witches and fortune tellers and the like, and I thought I knew that it meant something generally pertaining to that kind of job. To my surprise yesterday, wiktionary defined it as ‘fate’. Which fit very well in that the witches, despite their best efforts, are being forced to take a hand in the destiny of the entire kingdom, if only to maintain their own reasonably comfortable lives. But it fit far better as and pulled sharply together for me what a profound (if unconventional) fit they are for the Fates. Magrat the newly confirmed Wiccan, painfully naive in the ways of the world, eager to be accepted by her sisters, and entangled in a hilarious romantic subplot, is clearly the Maiden. Nanny Ogg can hardly go two sentences without reference to one of her seemingly infinite brood, and she’s as bawdy as they come. And Granny Weatherwax, despite not seeming to be old enough for the role, definitely contains the no-nonsense attitude, certainty of her own superiority in all things, and barely held-back ire that… okay, these qualities are not automatically what I would have expected from the Crone before today, but they work so very well that the urge to say I did is almost overwhelming.

All of which to say this: in addition to being as funny as he’s been yet and providing his best characters yet, this is the book where Pratchett became not just funny, but also very clever in subtly high-brow ways. I don’t think he’s quite where I expect him to be on coherent plotting, but the odds and ends that seemed off to me are partially explicable by the oddness of his world, certainly less glaring than in some previous volumes, and for the most part have already faded from my mind, replaced by everything I was happy about. So they can’t have been as bad as all that.

[1] Okay, not just; more like several hours ago. It’s not like you’d ever find out, or even know the difference. But I could never lie to you, baby, you know that.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

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I mean, it’s Indiana Jones, right? Star Wars was basically imprinted upon my brain from my earliest memories, and the consecutive releases of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark cemented Harrison Ford as the coolest guy on the planet. What I’m saying is, objectivity is basically impossible. Despite this, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out last week, and now I’m forced to try for objectivity anyway. Thanks a lot, Harrison Ford! (And George Lucas and Steven Spielberg!) Which may explain my review delay of almost a full week past having seen it in a midnight premiere showing, although my inclination is to blame my recent vacation instead.

So, it’s been twenty years since Indy was last thwarting supernatural Nazi plots and freeing slave kids and otherwise trotting the globe in pursuit of archaeological treasures. Well, no, since we’ve last seen him doing such things. It’s clear almost immediately that he hasn’t stopped doing them. The only real difference is that 1957 leaves him with slightly tireder muscles at the end of a long day’s adventure and that the jackbooted enemies have a different ideology. The graverobbery and the cool whip use and Indy’s instinctive understanding of and respect for history (both the commonplace and the paranormal), in stark contrast to everyone around him? All of that is the same. And when push comes to shove, that’s what I’m looking for in an Indy (not indie) flick. It can have goofy dialogue and it can have some of the worst effects I’ve ever seen come out of ILM and it can have slightly more pointless moments designed to make the children in the audience giggle than in previous Indiana Jones films. And I’m not saying I’ll like those things; but since it still feels like swashbuckling archaeology, since the core appeal of the film is still there, I’ll accept them.

The real problem I have is knowing that I went into the theater with extremely low expectations, and came out pleasantly surprised. It was about on par with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is a low bar for Indy, but still pretty great overall. And now I have to think to myself, what if someone reads this and goes into the movie with higher, dashable expectations? That’s a tough responsibility to shoulder. So, if you want to avoid it because it’ll be crap, you shouldn’t, because it isn’t. But you should also bear in mind some terrible effects[1], cheesy dialogue[2], and a hilariously bad refrigerator sequence are there to temper you back down to thinking it will be bad anyway, so you can still like it. It’s a tightrope, I know.

Final thought, to the lady who was sitting next to me in the airport on Tuesday morning: look, I understand that some people have a hard time with science fiction being inserted into anything in the universe world. I can accept that you walked into the theater not expecting [spoilers]. But I also know this is not your first experience in the life of Doctor Jones. The first time you watched one of his movies, the climactic scene showed a lot of Nazis having their faces melted off of their skulls because they had the temerity to open God’s toybox. The second time, some dude pulled some other dude’s heart out of his chest, without breaking the skin. It might be worth your time to admit to yourself that your complaint isn’t really so much about the [spoilers] as it is about your decision to get rid of your imagination sometime in the last 25 years, and now you resent anyone around you who still has one, because they look like they’re having more fun. Just think about it, is all I’m saying.

[1] It’s not just the prairie dogs.[3] There was a punching battle on a couple of side-by-side jeeps that was as obviously green-screened as anything I’ve seen in the past several years in a Sci-Fi Channel original motion picture.
[2] For my part, I really didn’t mind, and was even amused. But it seems a little incestuous to have Indiana Jones “have a bad feeling about this”. I’m pretty sure I should have minded, y’know?
[3] Although it’s possible I’m wrong, I just kind of assume everyone already knows about the prairie dogs, even if they know nothing else. It’s like they were inserted just to remind everyone that George Lucas still had some creative control?

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Doom

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I haven’t found any Ultimate X-Men yet, the upshot of which is that I’ve already looped around on these quick reads to volume 2 of something. I don’t mind so much: there’s a goodly pile of things available, and so far they’ve been uniformly entertaining. That is not, as they say, nothing. The second Ultimate Fantastic Four picks up essentially right where the first one left off. Fresh from their first victory, Reed Richards and company[1] are still working to find a way to become normal people again. And the key to that is discovering what happened to the fifth person affected, Victor Van Damme. He, after all, was the one who changed the experiment’s parameters that caused the accident in the first place. The downside to the plan is that he already knows where they are. Being under effective house-arrest courtesy of the United States in the same Baxter Building where all of their schooling and late night studies took place makes this kind of easy, you see.

I’m definitely still liking the series. The comedic timing is improved over an already funny previous run, and the elements of government control over what is not yet a famed superhero group, but just a quartet of college kids? That’s a story with a lot of depth behind it, if they choose that direction to go in. Plus, y’know, Doctor Doom is there now, and we all know he’s a great adversary.

[1] My historical knowledge of the group, predating any actual reading, leaves me with only his name at the tip of my tongue. So my instinct is to assume that the other names wouldn’t mean a lot to most people. However, I feel compelled to come out in praise of how Sue Storm has been handled thusfar. She’s a modern love interest, in that he seems as much like her prize as she seems like his. And on top of that, she’s a gifted biologist in her own right, every bit as skilled in her field as Reed is in his. It’s a very pleasant contrast with the 1960s version; and make no mistake, even then she was a pretty strong female character for her genre and time!

Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility

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A thing that is rapidly striking me as odd about the Ultimate Marvel universe is how unrelated the stories are, compared to 1960s Marvel. I mean, I’ve read three origin stories now, and all of them refer to events that are mutually exclusive of each other. As though they’re all actually set in mildly disparate realities from one another. This is not something that troubles me particularly, just an oddity. I mention it in part because it struck me last time and I never said, but also because it’s one of the many aspects informing my reading of the first Ultimate Spider-Man.

Other aspects include the initial Spider-Man movie, which appears to have been heavily influenced by this volume, my readings of the first 31 issues of the Amazing Spider-Man comic[1], and my expectations relative to the other Ultimate series in which I’ve dabbled that this one would be the most kid-oriented. And indeed, our Peter Parker is a mere 15 years old, with a fair bit of modern angst to him. So, on the whole, it really feels like I should be feeling a little meh about the whole thing. Instead, I enjoyed myself a lot. My guesses about this are that I’m even more of a sucker for high school angst than I thought (and, come on, get over it already, man), or that lowered expectations were just right for the book, or that the original story Stan Lee put together in 1963 has such a heaping helping of mythic resonance that any given retelling will affect me just as much as the first time I saw it. I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s that last one.

[1] I’ll be reading #32 pretty immediately after this review posts, in point of fact. Mary Jane Watson has been the elephant in the corner for at least 25 issues now, which is kind of hilarious to me, given my knowledge of what the future holds. I have to believe that Stan Lee had her in mind as the real deal all along; the set-up is too perfect to be coincidence.

Y: The Last Man – Kimono Dragons

For the first time in a really long span, I’ve broken the rotation of my graphic novels reading. It’s very much not my fault, though. See, the current Walking Dead book was supposed to have been out in January, and then April, and now in a few days. But “in a few days” pushes well beyond the time I was supposed to read another one, you see. So I had to skip ahead to the nearly concluded Y series. Well, okay, not very near, since I’ve got two books to go after this one, and one of those doesn’t release until June. But it feels pretty near, right now.

Kimono Dragons, by title, is about a bunch of Yakuza chicks in Japan. (I mean, they would be chicks, right, since every warm-blooded male on the planet died years ago. Aside from Yorick and his monkey, obviously. I mean, are you even reading these things? Come on!) But by plot or theme, I’m not really seeing much in the title to interpret. In short, Yorick and company continue their hot pursuit of Ampersand the capuchin monkey who holds the key to humanity’s survival, Israeli super-soldier Alter continues her hot and frequently deadly pursuit of Yorick, cold though the trail has grown, and Doctor Allison Mann continues her hot pursuit of the truth behind mankind’s extinction. (Well, and of some choice Australian tail. A woman has needs.)

Along the way, all of the usual cultural and gender explorations take place, the plot is shifted one step closer to what still feels like a solid resolution, and a few remaining characters have their backgrounds explored. The series has reached a point where (as most long-running series do) the individual pieces no longer feel quite as profound as they did early on; like I said, if there’s a central theme to book 8 here, I missed it. But the quality remains consistently high, the story engrossing, and the artwork by turns exotic, sexy, and visceral. I can’t ask for more that that out of anything that isn’t Sandman.

Invincible

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So, I finished my Star Wars series! Yay! I mean, I look forward to future books, but mostly I’d been a little concerned for the previous several books of this series that it was running off the rails, and now that can no longer be an issue. Plus, it mostly didn’t, which is even better. Invincible documents the finale of yet another galactic civil war in which some people from the Skywalker family face off against each other on opposite sides, Jedi vs. Sith, and… well, probably the good guys prevail? History does have a way of repeating itself, I guess.

But I really did like a lot of it. It had more of a swashbuckling, John-Williams-scored Star Wars feel than most books in the series have had, for one thing. For another, there was finally a pay-off to all the Boba Fett devotion from earlier in the series, that made it look in this book like he wasn’t only included as a sop to the fans. (It didn’t retroactively fix previous books with the same problem, but those mostly skated by because he and his people are interesting, at least.)

The one flaw I did find was just how short and quick of a book it was. After praising the stately, thoughtful pacing of the first half of the series, and then being a little annoyed by how things seemed to go nowhere in the last few books, this one was like a bucket of ice water in the face. Fun, exciting things happened, but in especially the last third of the book, they happened way too quickly, without any time to pause and incorporate the new circumstances. I feel like either the last few books could have been plotted more tightly, this one could have been longer, or both. It was really only the overwhelming speed that kept this from being an entirely satisfying novel that resolved the series neatly and left me ready for what’s next. Instead, I’m left with a combination of gradually draining adrenaline, a sense of ‘Well, that happened’, and a sense of “Huh? That happened?’ Which, okay, sounds pretty unsatisfactory on the page. What you have to account for is that the Star Wars adrenaline rush, when performed correctly, is a thing of great influence over one’s mood.