SPIN CYCLE

Check out my review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day...

...now in the multiplexes, online at Phoenix Magazine.

BARACK-NID

Time for another edition of my infrequently recurring feature "Weird-Ass Old Comics." This time, we're looking at...

...The Amazing Spider-Man, issue #583, from March of 2009. This is a much more latter-day vintage of comic than I would normally collect; obviously it was the presence of President (then President-Elect) Barack Obama, sharing the cover with Spidey, that made me pick it up. But I had never gotten around to reading it.

Last week Obama was the guest of Stephen Colbert in a prerecorded interview from the Obama Presidential Center, slated to open on June 19th in Chicago. The comic was shown on display at the Center--Colbert teased Obama about having been featured on a Spider-Man cover before Obama was (issue #573, November of 2008)--so I dug out my copy and read it.

Obama doesn't appear in the comic's main story, a sweet feature about Peter Parker's long-suffering office pal Betty Brant. Betty is weary of Petey's tendency to stand her up or be late, little knowing that he's off battling villains while she's waiting.

According to an editorial note, the brief "Bonus Back-Up Feature" about Obama, scripted by Zach Wells and drawn by Todd Nauck, was a last-minute add after the Marvel folks learned from an interview in The Telegraph that Obama was a fan of the webslinger. In the Colbert interview, Obama mentioned his superheroes of choice as a kid were Spider-Man and Batman, which made me swell with pride; same two for me.

In the short saga "Spidey Meets the President!" Petey, in D.C. to photograph the inauguration, switches into Spider-Man to prevent The Chameleon from impersonating Obama and becoming President 44. When Obama realizes that, his Secret Service detail notwithstanding, Spidey is the right man for the job and gives him the green light to take action, Spidey delivers the tale's best line: "Ya hear that Chameleon? The President-Elect here just appointed me...SECRETARY OF SHUTTIN' YOU UP!"

It was poignant to see the Obama interview last week, even though I'm not a 44 fanboy. I've always liked him, but he was never anywhere near as boldly progressive as I wanted him to be, or as I think he could have been, especially if he had acted decisively early on. I'm not at all sure Biden, doddering but clear-eyed and out of  f*cks, wasn't more decisive. Even so I think that, graded on the curve of what he accomplished versus what he was up against, Obama was likely the best American President of my lifetime.

But when you see a man of Obama's poise and grace and reflective intelligence and plain decency in contrast to what we have now, it's both terrifying and mortifying. If The Chameleon had successfully impersonated Obama's successor, we might well be better off.

TWOFER THE SHOW

Time, or possibly past time, for another edition of my very occasional recurring feature in which I discuss weird-ass old comics from my stacks. With The Fantastic Four: First Steps now in theaters, it's appropriate we check out an adventure of The Thing, with The Human Torch in support, paired with none other than...

...The Man of Bronze himself, Doc Savage. It's an issue of Marvel Two-in-One from November of 1976.

But wait, I hear you object (if you're a nerd), how can such a pairing be? The Doc Savage pulps were set in the 1930s and '40s, while The Fantastic Four began in the early '60s.

Well, Marvel finds a way. As the issue begins, we see storylines in two periods on either side of the pages, ingeniously paralleling each other across the decades...

Apparently this clever conceit wasn't thought sustainable, as a few pages in writer Bill Mantlo trumps up a time warp which drops Doc and his cronies together with The Thing and The Torch.

Perplexed as they are at each other's presence, they team up to take on Black Sun (later known as The Nth Man) in his debut appearance, a supervillain created when a power mad rich guy and his equally power mad son are joined into a single formidable fiend through the power of the stars.

It ends rather anticlimactically. But the beginning is quite an ingenious use of the Two-in-One format; a shame they didn't try to take the parallel plot gimmick all the way through to the end.

FOUR BETTER OR WORSE

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

The Fantastic Four: First Steps--Week before last, in my review of the new Superman movie, I grumbled about the reliance of contemporary superhero movies on devices like interdimensional travel and parallel universes. Now comes this Marvel entry, which is set entirely in a parallel universe, "Earth 828" in the Marvel "Multiverse," the home of the famous super-team. It's a realm of snazzy midcentury modern decor and beehive hairdos and stentorian TV announcers and the like.

Partly because the whole movie takes place in this setting--no universe-hopping--and partly because I'm a sucker for this style of design, I didn't mind it in this case. Director Matt Shakman and the other filmmakers generate a fine atmosphere of nostalgia for a period that never happened, at least not in this universe. Cool as the movie looks, however, it took me a little while to get pulled into the story. 

You may remember the title quartet, created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in 1961, scientists and explorers endowed with superpowers by a trip to space. Reed Richards can literally stretch himself to ridiculous lengths; Sue Storm can make herself invisible and also commands force fields from her hands; her brother Johnny Storm, aka The Human Torch, can make himself a flying fireball at will; and Ben Grimm aka The Thing, is a super-strong and super-durable rock-man.

Despite the title, this isn't an origin story. Our heroes are well-established here, and Sue is pregnant with Reed's baby, when a threat from space turns up. The planet-gobbling giant Galactus (Ralph Ineson) is headed hungrily for Earth, scouted as a suitable snack for him by Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). Even with Sue eight months along, The Four journey to space to intercept Galactus and negotiate with him. Turns out The Big G is more than willing to make a deal, straight out of a fairy tale: He'll spare Earth, in return for Sue and Reed's baby, who he says will absorb his hunger and let him retire from planet-eating.

Or some nonsense like that. Despite the high-powered stars--Pedro Pascal as Reed, Vanessa Kirby as Sue, Joseph Quinn as Johnny and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben--the characters didn't initially pop as vividly as they do in some Marvel and other superhero flicks. Pascal is subdued as the reflective, problem-solving Reed. He and Bachrach and Quinn are all good enough company, and Garner is quite an elegant Surfer, but only Kirby zaps the earlier parts of the movie with energy when she speaks.

Eventually, though, things get lively. I think it was during a scene in which the Four are multitasking on the edge of a black hole that the actors seemed to wake up, and First Steps started to feel kind of deranged, in a good way. By the time Galactus arrives in New York, the movie takes on an agreeable kaiju flavor; the titan looks a bit like the title character of the '60s-era Japanese film Majin, Monster of Terror, and the climactic clash between him and The Four is satisfying. There's real, off-the-wall imagination here, and after an unsteady start First Steps ends up surefooted.

SURF WAR

 Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of The Surfer...

...and Thunderbolts*.

The asterisk, I'm assured, is an essential part of the title.

PANEL DISCUSSION

From time to time Your Humble Narrator likes to sort through the stacks of old comic books of which he has far too many. A recent such rummage led me to reflect, on the last day of Black History Month, that I learned a fair amount of what little I know about black history not at school but from comics.

Although Adalifu Nama's Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011) is a lively and accessible study, its focus is deliberately narrow. As far as I can find, a comprehensive history of the black presence in comic books, both as characters and as artists, writers and publishers, is yet to be written. Reading up to review Marvel's Black Panther a few years ago, I came across a reprint of All-Negro Comics from 1947...

...which contained probably the earliest black superhero, Lion Man; even though the title was run out of business after only one issue, it left me wondering if it could have influenced the creation of T'Challa years later over at Marvel.

But in my collection, amongst the superhero, scary and funny titles, I found a number of civic-minded, non-fiction comics devoted to black history, most notably...

...the 169th issue of Classics Illustrated, Negro Americans: The Early Years, from 1969.

Classics Illustrated were highly abridged and expurgated adaptations of literary classics intended to interest kids in reading, and I was their success story: the dorky kid who actually became a bookworm at least partly because of the hours I spent poring over these mostly lame versions of Wells and Verne and Hugo and Melville and even Homer and Shakespeare.

Negro Americans was different than the other Classics Illustrated titles, however, in that it wasn't based on a classic book; no author is credited. On the table of contents page it says "...we try to give accurate accounts of some of those black men and women who gave their talents and lives to their country during its formative years. Space allows us to show only a few of these black heroes...The efforts and triumphs of these black men and women live as their legacy to American heritage."

I bought this comic off the stands sometime in the early '70s, and learned from it--not from school--that Crispus Attucks was arguably the first man to die in the American revolution when he fell in the Boston Massacre...

...or about the advances in heart surgery by Daniel Hale Williams...

...among many other extraordinary accounts.

I also have the Classics Illustrated version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, from 1944...

..with better-than-average art for the series.

A while back I acquired (for a dollar an issue!) a full run of the Golden Legacy comics, a series of 16 books on black history published from 1966 to 1976. Most of them concern African-American history--Crispus Attucks, Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker, Martin Luther King, Jr., arctic explorer Matthew Henson, Amistad mutineer Joseph Cinqué, and two volumes on Frederick Douglass, among others. But there are also issues on ancient African civilizations, on Toussaint L'Ouverture and the founding of Haiti, and on the ancestry of Dumas and Pushkin. Again, they didn't teach most of this stuff at my school.

The art was pretty cool, too.

My stacks yielded a couple of '70s-era comics featuring Quincy, the everykid from Ted Shearer's newspaper strip...

They were published by King Comics, the periodical arm of King Features Syndicate. Along with Quincy's adventures with his white pal Nickels and others, the books featured educational content, teaching readers proper grammar, etc...

Moving away from educational comics, I found several issues of Midnight Tales, a creepy Charlton Comic that ran from 1972 to 1976. It's noteworthy not because of any specifically black content, but because the artist, the marvelous Wayne Howard (1949-2007), was probably the first African-American comic book artist to get a "Created by" credit on his title. Indeed, he was one of the first artists of any race to do so; comic books were usually uncredited in earlier decades.

In Midnight Tales Howard, in collaboration with writer Nicola Cuti, dreamed up Dr. Cyrus Coffin, aka "The Midnight Philosopher," who collected strange yarns with his beautiful raven-haired neice Arachne. I still think it would make a wonderful TV series on, say, the CW Network.

I love the macabre wit in Howard's artwork...

Or my favorite of his covers, from the first issue...

How much had Dr. Frankenstein been drinking when he made that mistake?

Finally, I came across a striking 1984 issue of All-Star Squadron,  DC's superhero team-up title set in the 1940s. This particular story...

...is set against the real-life backdrop of the white mob violence against residents of the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit in 1942. More strikingly, it features black superhero Will Everett, aka Amazing Man, facing off against a hooded supervillain wonderfully called "Real American," who has the hypnotic power not only to turn the white citizens into mindless, violent racist rioters, but to have the same effect on some of Amazing Man's superhero allies.

Hard to imagine that some Republicans in congress wouldn't love to get their hands on that technology...

ANTY CLIMAX

Opening this weekend:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania--Paul Rudd, aka Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, is taking a little hiatus from front line superhero duty. On inactive status with The Avengers, he's written a book, so he's giving readings, and hanging out with family, and smugly basking in celebrity. That's the set-up, in a few quick scenes in San Francisco, for this third eponymous Ant-Man feature.

Then, thanks to science experiments by his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) gone wrong, Scott and Hope Van Dyne, aka The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) get swept into the "Quantum Realm," along with Cassie, Hope's Mom Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) and dad Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). The Quantum Realm is a subatomic micro-verse teeming with life in which Janet was stranded for decades.

Thus Janet knows the turf, and she knows that the people there are ruled over by the tyrannical Kang (Jonathan Majors), a dimensional conqueror who she marooned in QR before she escaped. Kang would like very much to be reunited with Janet. Far-out fantasy adventures ensue.

Director Peyton Reed seems to pays heavy homage to the original 1977 Star Wars; the Quantum Realm is full of cousins of Tusken Raiders and Jawas. There are also strong echoes of the Avatar flicks, of Zardoz, and of Dr. Who, and maybe a thematic hint of Horton Hears a Who.

This is yet another Marvel entry featuring alternate universes; it has a somewhat similar look to Sam Raimi's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness from last year. As with that film, I went in with the feeling that the This-That-Or-The-Other-verse conceit that the Marvels have leaned on so hard in recent years is of limited sustainability, as it has a tendency to dilute the dramatic stakes.

On the other hand, also as with Multiverse of Madness, taken on its own terms Quantumania is perfectly enjoyable. The visuals, however derivative, are elegant, witty and well-executed, and the glamorous cast is in pleasant form. Rudd's sly, subtle clowning is always good company, and he carries the movie effortlessly.

The best performance, however, is by Jonathan Majors, from The Last Black Man in San Francisco. His Kang is quiet, subdued, even sad, as if haunted by the joyless drive to conquer and rule. As with Christian Bale's Gorr in last year's Thor: Love and Thunder, Majors brings a needed edge of serious, almost tragic menace that helps to ground this silly sci-fi spoof.

SNAILED IT

Opening this weekend:

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On--The title character is a teeny-tiny, rather generic-looking seashell with a single googly eye in his aperture and a tiny pair of shoes attached to his underside. He lives in a sunny AirBnB with his "Nan," a slightly larger shell named Connie, and the two of them devise ingenious ways to eke out a subsistence.

Once they were part of a larger community of other anthropomorphic random tidbits--other shells, cheese curls, Chex mix, pencil stubs. But lately they've been on their own, and supportive as Connie is, Marcel feels the loss of society keenly. Even Marcel's pet--a miniscule bit of lint named Alan that he leads around on a leash--doesn't make up for it.

The conceit is that we're seeing a documentary in which the director, Dean Fleischer-Camp, interviews and bonds with Marcel, and eventually helps him try to find the old gang, a process which involves Marcel and Connie's favorite TV star, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. Marcel's piping, guileless yet keenly perceptive voice is provided by Jenny Slate, and Isabella Rossellini voices the firmly loving Connie.

Somewhere, I suppose, there's a critic working up a venomous pan of this animated feature, based on the viral 2010 online short and its sequels. But I'm not that critic. The movie has a paradisal atmosphere and is very, very funny, with sprightly timing of its visual gags and surprising verbal interplay, much of it probably improvised, between Slate and Fleischer-Camp (formerly Slate's significant other in real life). Yet from the start there's a hint of bittersweet melancholy to it as well, underscored by passages from Philip Larkin to "Peaceful, Easy Feeling."

Thor: Love and Thunder--Embodied once again by the jovial Chris Hemsworth, Marvel's version of the Norse deity must make a big personal adjustment in this latest adventure. The thunder god's beloved hammer Mjolnir, which formerly only he could wield, is now responding to his ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Thor is now in a relationship with a perfectly nice battle axe, Stormbreaker, but he can't forget his old hammer, and the sight of his ex effortlessly swinging it takes some getting used to.

Thor and Jane, along with their pals Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and rock man Korg (director/co-writer Taika Waititi), must here work together to rescue a group of children abducted from New Asgard, a rather bougie beach town and tourist destination, into dark dimensions. The kidnapper is Gorr the God-Butcher (Christian Bale), a rasping, chalky-skinned, spectral figure whose religious disillusionment early on has led to his desire to, you know, butcher all the gods. Thor's appeal to Zeus (Russell Crowe) for help reveals a distinct lack of cross-cultural amity in the Olympian, who comes across like a tacky billionaire showman of the new school.

As in 2017's delightful Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi plays this material for goofy laughs; there are cosmic gags here worthy of Melies. It's very silly, but unlike Ragnarok, it isn't only silliness. Bale's Gorr is genuinely creepy, and the scenes in which the characters are faced with loss and love are emotionally substantive. Love and Thunder has an airbrushed-van rock-n-roll sensibility that Waititi doesn't mock; borderline-campy as the movie is, its use of "Sweet Child of Mine" can bring a tear to the eye.

TAKE THIS JAW AND SHOVE IT

With Jurassic World Dominion opening this weekend, Your Humble Narrator has been more than usually preoccupied with dinosaurs, which is surely saying something. Thus, going through stacks of my old comics, I've noticed a recurrent motif:

Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle; Dell 1965:

Fantastic Four; Marvel 1975:

Jungle Action Featuring The Black Panther; Marvel 1975:

Marvel Two-in-One, Marvel, 1983:

Judge Dredd; Eagle Comics 1984:

Aquaman; DC 1992:

Shanna the She-Devil; Marvel 2005:

And finally, Superman in Action Comics; DC 1991:

So, just as Anaïs Nin chronicled her erotic adventures in Paris, and as George Orwell recorded his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, I will here thrill you with a tale from the world of obsessive comic hoarding: I had long sought a copy of that Action Comics issue with the beautiful Kerry Gammill cover, and spent hours in various comic stores and junkshops digging through dusty boxes of old funnybooks hoping to turn one up, without success. I resisted the temptation to simply order one from Amazon or eBay on the grounds that it would be far more satisfying to find one through honest rummaging, and that if I cheated and ordered a copy online I would soon face the bitter comeuppance of then finding it, probably for less money.

But one day, with the kind birthday present of an Amazon gift certificate further weakening me, I broke down and ordered. No joke, TWO DAYS LATER, as I strolled the aisles of a junkshop, I spotted a box of comics, idly flipped through the first two or three in it, and...there it was. For about four dollars less.

So now I have two...

WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE

Opening this weekend:

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness--On the one hand, I'm a little over the Marvel "Multiverse." On the other hand, this newest adventure of Marvel's mystical mage is a lot of fun.

For those who may be unacquainted with this conceit in the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," I'll summarize as best I understand it: The Multiverse is the premise that our reality exists alongside countless concurrent realities in other dimensions, complete with other versions of ourselves and the people we know, including our favorite superheroes, and that many of these alternate realities are similar, but none are quite identical. When we dream, according to this movie, we're really experiencing a taste of the lives of other versions of ourselves.

The Multiverse has already played a major role in two previous entries, 2018's dazzling animated flick Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where it was wittily used to explore racial, gender and other variations on comic book themes, and last year's Spider-Man: No Way Home, where it was used as an amusing excuse to mingle the actors and situations from various "reboots" of the franchise. In both cases, it was also a spoof (and a servicing) of the familiar, OCD nerd need to make every "canonical" version of a pop culture franchise at least technically consistent with every other version (Star Wars and Star Trek fans sometimes demand this too).

Enjoyable as both of those earlier movies were, I'm afraid that the Multiverse has the effect, for me, of diluting the dramatic stakes. Death has always been negotiable in superhero stories, of course, but in Multiverse-heavy yarns, major characters--iconic characters--are killed off, or lose their heroic status, and it doesn't feel like it matters that much, because there's an apparently endless and easily accessible supply of replacements from other Universes.

Thus I don't know how sustainable the Multiverse gimmick is for me; even though I greatly enjoyed the original 2016 version of Dr. Strange, I went to this sequel a little grumpily. It turned out to be a non-stop, vigorously imaginative blast.

This time the surgeon-turned-sorcerer Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is called away from the wistful experience of attending the wedding of his ex (Rachel McAdams) to come to the defense of America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenage girl who has innate magical powers she can't control. She's pursued by Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who for some reason needs the kid to obtain a book that will allow her to steal the life, including two little boys, of a suburban-mom version of herself in another Universe. (All of this is related, I understand, to a Marvel TV show called WandaVision that I haven't seen.) Strange and his allies attempt to prevent this; tentacled Lovecraftian abominations interfere with his efforts.

Or something like that. Big-name Marvel characters from other franchises turn up, sometimes in new versions, sometimes in versions we've seen. Epic surreal action scenes leap giddily from Universe to Universe. And if you sense more than a nod or two to the Evil Dead flicks, it probably won't surprise you that the director is Sam Raimi, back after a hiatus from directing features. His wild headlong style is as exhilarating as ever, as is his flair for macabre slapstick, and both are splendidly abetted by a driving score from Danny Elfman.

Cumberbatch plays Strange with his usual old-school movie star suavity and aplomb, and Gomez is charming as America. The standout in the cast, however, is Olsen, who keeps her voice down and makes Scarlet Witch intimidating, but also poised and glamorous, with a strong undercurrent of the sorrowful.

VEIN MAN

Opening this weekend...

Morbius--Jared Leto certainly has the physique and facial bones to play the title character in this Marvel flick. His performance as the hapless vampiric hematologist is good, too; quiet and haunted yet not oppressive, tinged with grim humor. The movie, however, could use a transfusion of originality platelets.

Michael Morbius, the cadaverous "Living Vampire," was introduced in comics in the early '70s as a nemesis to Spider-Man...

...and eventually headlined Marvel titles of his own. Like Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, he was a reluctant and tormented blood-drinker. Michael had brought on his condition, which includes superhuman strength and batlike gliding and echolocation ability, through a serum intended to cure the rare blood disease that was killing him. He craved blood but didn't want to hurt anyone, and, as with The Lizard (with whom Morbius notably clashed), Spidey empathized with him and tried not to harm him.

There are other strong performances in the film, directed by Daniel Espinosa from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (the team behind 2014's Dracula Untold). Matt Smith slyly plays Milo, Michael's mega-rich pal and research patron, who suffers from the same disease and soon notices the same side effects from Michael's serum, but feels less guilt over his bloodlust. Adria Arjona has a lovely sober quality as Martine, Michael's partner and romantic interest; her gravity seems to bring out a hint of playfulness in Leto.

I really wanted to like this one; I'm fond of the comic character. And for the first half or so it cruises along enjoyably enough, though there's nothing really new to it, just standard spooky gothic flourishes. The corn is as high as a vampire's eye, too; repeatedly, when they're in bloodsucker mode, both Michael and Milo strike a scary pose and go "RAAAAAH!" like the bully kid in A Christmas Story, and after a while they seem like the performers in a Halloween haunted house.

Then, as the movie progresses, the questionable logic increases. Why, for instance, would a boat on which secret medical experiments were being conducted require a large team of heavily armed mercenaries? Why would Michael want to commandeer a counterfeiting workshop's equipment to adapt into scientific equipment?

In the later scenes, as Michael and Milo battle in the shadowy streets of New York--The Batman has nothing on this movie for gloominess--Morbius descends into an unexciting muddle. It has a truncated, cut-down feel to it, a suspicion supported by the presence of scenes in the trailer that didn't show up in the finished film.

The most disappointing of these is the paucity of Michael Keaton, as Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture; he's shown in the trailer and I figured that if nothing else worked in the movie, Keaton would at least goose a little life into it. But [spoiler alert!] he only appears very briefly at the very end, and adds almost nothing to the picture (unless I nodded off when he said it, even the line he speaks in the trailer was cut). In the sequel, if there is a sequel, I certainly hope Keaton gets a much bigger role.