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Well, it’s my girlfriend’s birthday today (and, by some odd coincidence, her twin sister’s birthday as well), so that means no post for you!

In the meantime, however, why not try pal Tom’s new comics/movies/tv/assorted media weblog You Know What I Like – recommended by four out of five doctors.

And also please visit the weblogs of other close, personal friends of mine: pal Ian’s Brill Building, now with extra flouride protection; Captain Corey, only half the calories of regular beer; and pal Dorian’s Postmodernbarney, now with 50% more Red Dye #3.

Oh, and don’t forget:

Okay, so that Spider-Man 2 movie…I’m warnin’ you now, I will be making mention of elements of the movie that you may not want to know beforehand. So, if you don’t want to know that Venom (John Goodman) and Will O’ The Wisp (Eddie Murphy) team up to defeat Spidey (Kirk Cameron, replacing Tobey Maguire), then for God’s sake, skip this entry.

Look, I’ll even put SPOILER WARNING in bold letters right here:

SPOILER WARNING!!!



There, now you have only yourselves to blame.

Now, this isn’t a real Roger Ebert-style review or anything…that would require “effort” and would be too much like “work,” and I’m too “lazy” to put together anything like that right now. So, here are a bunch of observations about the film slapped together in no particular order:

• First off, this film is quite a bit better than the first one…the CGI effects are much less dodgy, the film flows a lot better, and there are no real draggy parts. It’s also a funnier film, which is nice…sometimes superhero movies are so determined to be taken seriously that they forget it’s okay to be funny once in a while.
  

• What I particularly liked was the emphasis on just how screwed up Peter Parker’s life is, with his double-life as Spider-Man being primarily to blame. One of the main components of the comics is that being Spider-Man is simultaneously a burden and a release for Peter, which the movie does a good job of expressing.
  

• Another nice feature of this movie is that there is some forward motion in the relationships of the characters…while “status quo — SUCCESSFULLY MAINTAINED!” (as pal Dorian likes to say) is the name of the game in the Marvel comics themselves, it’s nice to see the films not do the same — even if all they’re doing is following (kinda sorta) the plotlines in the comics.
  

• Tobey Maguire is up to two emotions for this film, rather than the one that he had in the first. He can now do “weepy sadness” and “angry determination.” Well, maybe he can do three emotions, but I’m not committing until I figure out just what the heck he’s supposed to be feeling here:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Okay, so Harry is pushing Octavius’s work in the fusion field as a way to make a huge fortune (and Noble Prizes) for the company. Um…Doc Ock has four mechanical arms with sophisticated artificial intelligence that network directly with a human nervous system. Screw the fusion nonsense…market that!
  

• If you have a problem with the idea that the arms’ artificial intelligence was controlling Doc Ock, I think you can make an argument that it was just a delusion of D.O.’s, transferring blame for his actions onto this…um…extremities, and not literally what was happening.
  

• It came as a bit of a surprise that, in movie time as in real world time, two years have passed. Not much to say about that…just thought I’d note it.
  

• Remember that part near the end of the first film, right as Green Goblin is about to be stuck right through the breadbasket by his own rocket sled? There’s that split-second close-up of Willem Dafoe saying “oh!” just before his perforation. At that point I thought to myself, “okay, I’m watching a Sam Raimi film.” Something similar happens in this movie, in a short and peculiar sequence near the middle, where I again suddenly think to myself, “okay, Sam Raimi is in charge of this film.” You’ll know which sequence it is…it’s the one with the last song you ever expected to hear in a superhero film.
  

• By all rights, every single person in New York City should know that Spider-Man is Peter Parker by now. Why does he even have a mask? On the other hand, I did like the sequence with a maskless Peter facing a crowd of New Yorkers…yes, yes, in the real world every single one of those people would hightail it to the nearest tabloid with a story, but their reaction to Spidey did give the character (and the film) a slight mythic quality.
  

• I did mention that I might have some spoilers in this little list of notes, didn’t I?
  

• What did I want more of in the first film, and what did I get in the second? That’s right…J. Jonah Jameson. He’s a real scene stealer, and lots of fun. Alfred Molina is darn good as Doc Ock as well.
  

• For just a brief moment, it almost looked as if Robbie Robertson (when he was holding the Spider-Man mask) was going to be a plot point instead of just window dressing for Jameson’s office antics. Alas, ’twas not to be.
  

• I’m not sure I buy the whole reasoning behind Spidey’s intermittent powers. Because he’s insecure, he can no longer spurt stuff out of his body? And I’m not supposed to read anything into that?
  

• By the way, this is yet another Big Hollywood Blockbuster Film in which the Good Guy wins by blowing something up that the Bad Guy owns (which I’ve discussed before). Okay, maybe Spidey doesn’t literally blow it up, but it is big, and it does get destroyed, and thus the Good Guy wins. I’m willing to let it go this time, though, since there’s a little more emotional depth to it than is usual for blockbuster action movies. And by “a little,” I mean, “very very little.” But some, at least.
  

• Okay, show of hands…who thought “hey, Aunt May knows darn good and well that Peter is Spidey” during her little pep talk to him outside her house?
  

• I know it looks like they blatantly set up the villain for the sequel here, but really, if it’s not Venom in the next movie, they’re really going to be pushing the patience of the kids in the audience. (And my girlfriend’s patience, for that matter.) Of course, if they do both Venom and the aforementioned set-up villain, then they’ll be getting into Batman movie sequel too-many-villains territory, and I don’t think they’re gonna want to kill the golden goose like that.
  

SPOILER WARNING KAPUT!!!



Well, if you read any of that and you haven’t seen the movie, and do plan on seeing the movie…hey, I warned you. At least don’t tell any of your friends about the surprise cameo by Madame Web (Bea Arthur).

Just a very quick post…yes, I did see Spider-Man 2 last night; no, no cell phone users had to face my wrath; yes, the movie was pretty good; yes, the trailer for the I, Robot movie confirms that it’s based on Asimov’s robot stories in that they’re both in English*; and yes, I’ll post more about Spider-Man 2 later tonight or perhaps tomorrow, if I get the time, since the next day or two are going to be pretty full. I’ll avoid major spoilers, but there still might be some minor spoilers, so if you want to go into the film not knowing a darn thing about it (beyond the 75% of the movie they’ve already shown in the trailers), you may want to skip my next post.

* Reference totally stolen from Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Plastic Man #49 (Nov 1954) – art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera

Public Enemies #2 (May-June 1948)

So let’s dip back into the innocent comic book adventures of yesteryear, and take a look at what the children were reading. Today’s reading selection:







Remember, it’s all true, since names have been changed to protect the guilty. The story starts with Jeff telling his girlfriend Gail that, if they’re going to elope after their high school graduation, they’ll “have to pull that job tonight…game?” The job in question? Robbing a hotel clerk:







Well, the clerk puts up a fight…well, not much of a fight, actually all he does is say “you’re just a little girl!” Gail doesn’t care much for that, and shoots him anyway. She rifles through his desk, and finds only a couple hundred dollars. Suddenly, the bellboy rushes in:







Even though Gail is the only person in sight, and thus a suspect, the bellboy doesn’t stop her from leaving on the basis of her somewhat flimsy story. She dashes out to the car, where boyfriend Jeff was bravely waiting, and she tells him that she just had to kill a man. “I hope that bell boy forgets my face,” she says foreshadowingly. Jeff tells her not to worry, as they’ll be splitting this town after the sure-thing con job he’s got planned for tomorrow.

The next morning, Jeff sensitively inquires as to Gail’s well-being:

Gail then presents to Jeff copies of her graduation picture…”my mother had several taken of me,” again said foreshadowingly.

That night, Jeff and Gail, though presumably still underage, go to the Club 51 bar. A drunk fellow sitting at a table says a few lecherous words to Gail, and is punched out by Jeff for his troubles. Gail is aghast! She thinks Jeff is ruining the plan, but he says that punching that guy is actually necessary to the angle he’s working, which leads us to wonder just how much of the plan Jeff has let Gail in on. Or, more likely, it just implies that Jeff is making it up as it goes along.

Anyway, Jeff tells Gail to fake that she’s mad at him for starting a fight…and their fake argument results in Jeff making a big show out of abandoning her at the bar. “Here are the keys to your old man’s car…I’m leaving right now…alone!” “But I can’t drive!” wails Gail.

One of the bar patrons overhears this Oscar-winning exchange, and offers to take Gail home, to which she obviously agrees. Once in the car, and having driven some distance, Jeff pops up out the back seat and slugs the man over the head. Dragging the body out of the car, Gail and Jeff share this loving exchange:

The victim had eight hundred dollars on his person, and thus the apparent plan of killing a random barfly and finding a ton of money in his wallet is successful! “California here we come!” shouts Jeff, since California has no legal system or extradition laws or anything.

After this huge windfall, they decide to skip graduation altogether and head to Gail’s house to pick up her clothes…only to be met there by a gaggle of policemen! “You’re under arrest for murder,” exclaims the lead cop, a charge Gail decries as “ridiculous.” However, all that foreshadowing earlier in the story was not for naught:

As you can see, Gail immediately rats out Jeff, and Jeff returns the favor:







After a brief trial, Gail is sentenced to doing twenty years in the pokey. We don’t know what happened to Jeff, and neither does Gail, until a year later when a helpful and knowledgable prison guard gives her the “shocking” (har har) news:







And there you go…another all true case from the Public Enemies crime files, where the important moral lesson of criminals always paying for their transgressions comes after several pages of showing us just how glamourous and fun crime is.

As much as I’m looking forward to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s new Vertigo mini-series WE3, I can’t help but think…is there really any new ground to cover in the cyborg-animal warrior genre that hasn’t already been expertly covered by the 1990 Marvel Comics mini-series Brute Force?

from Brute Force #1 (1990)

from WE3 #1 (2004)

(Blame pal Chris…he’s the one who first noticed the slight resemblance between the two series. Anyway, all you Brute Force fans can Read More About It over at Scott Shaw!’s Oddball Comics column.)

The Bionic Woman #1 (October 1977)

So Jamie Sommers, AKA The Bionic Woman (with some of her bionic parts exposed, above) is, when she’s not kicking butt for the O.S.I., a school teacher in Southern California.







Jamie decides to call Rico’s mother about his schoolwork, and tells Rico as such…Rico then relates to his teacher, just out of the blue, that his grandfather wants to take him away from his widowed mother. However, this plot becomes important as a fella tries to snatch Rico after school lets out:







(That bit about Rico’s dad being a professional car racer has no bearing on the plot whatsoever, by the way.) Jamie stops the car, and puts the bionic squeeze on the kidnapper’s hand, telling Rico to get out of the car. Once he’s safe, Jamie apparently decides the smart thing to do is to let the kidnapper go, telling the boy that the man just wanted to take him to his grandfather, even though there’s absolutely no evidence presented in the story thus far to draw this conclusion.

Taking Rico to his beach house, Jamie is greeted by Rico’s mother Anita, who tells Jamie that the grandfather had disowned his son, her husband, and didn’t help him when he needed it. Now that he’s dead, Grandpa is trying to worm his way into Rico and Anita’s life, and she won’t have it. Anyway, apparently unconcerned about the attempted kidnapping, Anita and Rico dress for the beach as Jamie excuses herself.

However, Jamie doesn’t make it far before discovering that the house was being monitored by (we’re meant to assume) the grandfather’s minions:

Why it was important to note that Rico is in swim trunks is a mystery for the ages. Perhaps we’ve just learned something important about Harvey. So, Harvey, in green, and his pal, in blue, approach Anita and Rico on the beach. Jamie rushes into action and lays the bionic whammy on Harvey:







Jamie is shot with a “medicated wax pellet” gun, which knocks her out, and Anita, Rico, and Jamie are taken to the grandfather’s home in “the hills above the Ventura Air Force Base.” Now, I work in Ventura…I lived in Ventura for a few years…I’m pretty sure that there’s no Ventura Air Force Base. Anyway, once at Grandpa’s house, Rico makes a break for it, and ends up dangerously close to a cliff. Jamie, awake by now, sees another threat:







Jamie picks up a rock, and pegs the snake…which then shocks Rico into falling off the cliff:







Luckily he fell onto the one lone branch that just happened to be right below:







Having failed in her previous attempt to kill the kid, Jamie decides to jump down to the branch:







Jamie grabs Rico just in time, and his grandfather, having rushed out with a rope, rescues his grandson. Rico rightfully reveals that he feared for his life at Jamie’s hands:







After being pulled to safety, Jamie wonders at the incredible feat of strength she managed with her non-bionic arm, having pulled up Rico who weighs, what, 35, 40 pounds?







Anyway, everything ends well, with Anita, Grandpa, and Rico back together as a happy family, despite all the criminal charges Grandpa is going to face for sending armed men to kidnap his grandson.

1. Crossgen files for bankruptcy…somewhere, Bill Jemas is laughing.

1a. Crud…Crossgen books sold very well at our store, and we had several people who hadn’t been reading Crossgen books beginning to sample their wares (beginning with Abadazad).

2. Overheard at the store today: “Hey, it’s Luthor…that guy from Smallville!”

3. Grotesque Anatomy is holding a Street Angel Squid Contest which I’ll let him explain.

4. Swamp Thing animated series to be released on DVD…I’m the only person you know who’s excited about this. (via pal Ian)

5. Here’s a treasure trove of scanned comics, including several 1930s White Boy Sunday strips, a collection of Abner Dean comic strips that may or may not be safe for work, depending on how uptight your workplace is, a 1951 Strange Adventures story by Edmond Hamilton and Alex Toth, and many more goodies. (via pal JP)

6. Happy Father’s Day! My dad turned me on to The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and he’s read every issue of Groo the Wanderer and Preacher, plus a good chunk of Ennis’ Punisher. I also let him borrow my copy of Last of the Independents, but I don’t know if he’s read it yet. And, he reads this website every night. Hi, Dad!

True 3D #1 (Dec 1953)

Wonder Woman #170 (May 1967) – cover by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito