The Yiddish Policemen's Union

There's something daunting about reviewing a major award-winning book, especially a recent one. A question that the reader faces is one of cause—what about this book makes it worthy of an award. And that's a shame, since good books (which award-winners are supposed to be) usually have enough content for the reader to contemplate without worrying about that kind of overhead.

Michael Chabon's latest book is a multiple-award winner, and a damned fine detective novel to boot. Set in an alternate history where, among other differences, the nation of Israel has not been established and the Jews live in a diaspora, with a reserved place for them in Sitka, Alaska. And as the novel starts out, we find that that status is about to be removed, and the Jews will come under American supervision. There are a few other differences in history slipped in almost casually—"Marilyn Monroe Kennedy" for example, and the US apparently dropped an atomic bomb on Berlin to end World War II—but overall, these differences aren't what drives the book. Instead, we meet Meyer Landsman, a typical down-on-his-luck police detective who has divorced the woman he loves and is plodding out the days left before the reversion to America when a corpse is found in the fleabag hotel he lives in. And off we go on a noir detective story, as Landsman decides he must solve the case despite the corruption around him, and those forces of corruption, with a curious Jewish accent, are determined to make him fail.

It's astonishing that a Jewish noir detective has not happened before (or if it has, didn't achieve much prominence) because the stereotype of the Jew perfectly fits the expectation of the noir detective: when he is down on his luck, the world is clearly out to get him and he wants little to do with it. And nobody loathes themselves in the way that Jews in fiction seem to. And so with this detective and his half-Indian cousin/partner, we set off through the Jewish underworld. As the story moves along, we are introduced to Landsman's family, friends, and co-workers, including his sources of information. And we discover that Landsman's life really was tragic and ultimately intimately wrapped up with the solution to the murder.

And like good noir novels, the city becomes a character in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, taking life from Chabon's descriptions and sometimes acting apparently on its own. It's clear that Landsman loves his city, almost to the exclusion of everything else in his life, and if he could find a way to stay there forever, surrounded by those he loves only a little bit less, his days would be glorious. But like the noir detective stereotype, he has pushed all of his loved ones away and now mostly acts completely alone, despite the grudging aid those pushed away from him sometimes offer. And lest you begin to think that Chabon is simply following the formula of the noir story, he inserts Yiddish language and slang to remind us that this isn't a run-of-the-mill story. Nonetheless, it feels quintessential, ticking off the stereotypes and clichés as the story goes on. And coupled with Chabon's obvious joy with the English language, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a word fancier's delight. Passages show a great deal of craft and could act as a primer for how to write with a personal sense of style.

(and here is where I jeopardize my future authorial and critical career) But about those awards….

The Yiddish Policemen's Union has won the most recent Hugo and Nebula awards as the best science-fiction or fantasy novel of the past year. And no doubt it is good writing, and I would enjoy reading it under any circumstances. But I have a hard time accepting the premise of its reception of those awards, because I have some strong doubts about its nomination as a science-fiction or fantasy novel. Obviously this is a novel set in an alternative history, where somewhere along the American chronology things happened differently, causing the US to drop an atomic bomb on Berlin for example. The book doesn't care about describing the diversion point in the history of the novel: it only provides a setting where Chabon can tell his story. It doesn't concentrate on the repercussions of those changes beyond its effects on the story of the life of Meyer Landsman. I suppose a reader could view it as very sophisticated and subtle science fiction, but that line of reasoning devolves into an argument about genre classification—which I am more than willing to do, but not necessarily in a review of a book. It also requires the reader to believe that alternate history is a genre of science fiction, an assumption I'm not willing to make. It plays around the edges in such a way that a really thoughtful reader would ask the questions of the genre that I have hinted at here. Fortunately, I know from interviews that one of Chabon's goals is to play with genre definitions, trying in some ways to obliterate them so that works often ignored by critics because they fit in a genre can get some credit for just being good books.

Take for example, Chabon's remarkable, and Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Before the book hit the market, who would have thought that a loving homage to comics in general and the creators of Superman specifically—with a quasi-fantasy setting no less—would get accepted by mainstream readers, let alone win the awards it did? And by writing "mainstream" fiction with elements of snubbed genres, the wider world of those genres are opened up. This means that, for instance, Chabon isn't using the genres while looking down his nose at them; he loves them. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is apparently a stunning example of post-apocalyptic fiction, but no one outside the critics of genre have pointed out the long history such writing has had in the field of science-fiction. And McCarthy hasn't been going about championing his book as an example of the power and majesty of science-fiction. And Chabon actually has.

So maybe it's a good thing that a mainstream book has won science-fiction's most prestigious award. But at the same time, I feel for the excellent writers who didn't win, completely lost in the shadows of a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Maybe it makes a good gateway drug to the types of writing that I love, but if anyone were to approach me about a good alternate history novel, this one would not be at the top of my list. But it is near the top of my list for its use of the detective genre, one I would like to see more of anyway.

Death Race

There seems to be an unspoken rule, or perhaps barely whispered rule, that nothing good can happen in a movie where the introduction is written words on the screen, describing the setting for the movie. I suppose there are some exceptions to this, but overall it does seem a rather clunky tool. Well, wouldn't you know it—Death Race starts with screenfuls of text describing the setting of the movie, and it is just another thump in the clunkatron that this movie is. The ironic thing is that when the movie ended, I was fairly jazzed by it, thinking that it was a whole lot of fun. And I still think that, but if I spend more thoughts on it than that, I end up punching holes in its paper-thin and already grievously torn plot.

It's the year 2012, and the nation's economy has gone completely to pot. Lay-offs and closings are taking place across the country, and in order to save money, the federal government has given over control of its penitentiaries to for-profit corporations, who apparently have carte blanche to make money any way they see fit. The opening text also explicitly ties the setting to the fall of Rome, as unhappy citizens look to more and more outrageous entertainment to appease their financial woes. Thus is born the Death Race, where prisoners are put in armored and armed cars to race around Terminal Island penitentiary (it's a pun, see—people die there, so it is Terminal!) while millions of webcast enthusiasts pay for the pleasure of a live stream of the event, featuring hundreds of different camera angles for the mayhem that follows. So in its clumsy fashion, Death Race attempts to make a political and cultural statement, but it never gets much further in that attempt than saying "People are paying money to watch other people die!"

Enter Warden Hennessey (played by Joan Allen) whose primary responsibility is to make money. The Death Race is her baby, and she does everything she can to maximize the profit. Clearly, we are supposed to be reminded of corrupt business practices going on today. We are also told that Hennessey is a hard-ass, tough-as-nails woman, but notice my choice of words. We really don't see any indication that she's anywhere as tough as we're told, because most of the time, we only get to see her stiletto heels and her smirk. Into this world walks Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a man framed for the murder of his wife and blackmailed to participate in the Death Race by the happiness of his infant daughter. Ames is matched up with Coach (Ian McShane), the crew chief for Frankenstein, the world's favorite Death Race driver. Only, it appears Frankenstein was killed in his last race, and Hennessey can't let down the adoring fans, so Ames will be racing as Frankenstein, complete with a full mask covering his face.

And so the racing starts, and everything goes way over the top. They call it Death Race, but apparently a number of people survive the race since nearly the entire field is made up of people who have raced in the past. We are given this information when the movie airs the commercials for Death Race itself. Those commercials contain some of the funniest moments in the movie, along the lines of similar commercials in Robocop and Starship Troopers. But they aren't as funny as those examples, riding their own wave of smarmy condescension for the movie viewer (again, "People are paying money to watch other people die!"). And the fact that people survive the Death Race is the first of many plot decisions and errors that drag the movie down from the fun it promises. Why would Ames's wife's killer use such an obvious tell and then repeat it around Ames? The movie goes out of its way to let us know that Hennessey has cameras and microphones all over the prison and yet there are at least two and probably more cases of where people do things in the prison that she never gets wind of. And why, if she has shut-offs for all the cars and their weapons, does she never use them when things start to get ugly? These issues are part of what is one of my biggest pet peeves in story-telling, when supposedly smart people do really stupid things, and the story turns on that mistake.

And of course there are race scenes and car crashes. On the one hand, I'm impressed by what they pulled off without using any CGI, but at the same time, that means that they really do very little we've not seen before. But to make it zingier, we get the loud rock and rap music over top and the point-of-view jumps constantly between the drivers, the audience, and shaky-cam, sometimes making it hard to tell just what is actually going on.

Statham and McShane clearly are having a lot of fun with this movie. Allen may be as well, but her character is extremely one-dimensional and ill-used, so it's hard to tell. It also seems clear the supporting cast is having a good time too. And I admit, I did too…and then I started thinking about it. So, it ends up being a really expensive B-movie, which is okay, but it sets its expectations so much higher that it finally comes off as a disappointment.

SDCC Topic 3.5: Save San Diego

This excellent article came up on Newsarama this morning. It has some very good ideas about ways to "fix" Comic-con.

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/080812-save-san-diego.html

SDCC Topic 3: The Future of Comic-con

By all accounts it was the biggest year ever for Comic-con, but there were troubling signs mixed in with all the good news. The convention had record attendance, but fewer and fewer of those convention-goers were actually interested in comics. The biggest rooms were generally reserved for media panels, and the lines for those panels began hours before the panel and in one case, I am told actually overnight. The convention floor was bigger than ever, but even more space was taken up by things only tangentially related, or not related at all, to comics. And from the reports I hear, two of the mainstays for such a large comic convention are being priced out—given the cost of the high-demand floor space, comic retailers and artists are unable to afford the space. All of this leads to the general feel that it's not a comic convention any more, and the signs around San Diego would seem to indicate the same: they described it as a "convention for the popular arts."

There are some benefits to this: a lot of people who would otherwise not be exposed to comics had the opportunity to talk to creators or see what they are all about, but there are no real numbers to know how many folks took advantage of the opportunity. It's very easy to stay on one end of the convention floor and never get beyond games and media companies, and I suspect that a lot of people who were there for the Lost panel never made it to the convention floor, let alone to see what the latest offerings from Boom or IDW might be.

I find myself taking an awfully conservative stance on the issues that affect Comic-con; while I was happy to go to some of the media panels when I started going to the convention, they were rare and they were easy to get into—there was always space in those rooms. But they were a momentary alternative for the reason that I was actually there. It appears that in the minds of the organizers and PR folks, the audience for comic books is the same audience for science fiction movies, and even less corresponding TV shows like Prison Break and Bones. But those same organizers would have a difficult time weeding out the least related media events, since the media has been encroaching very slowly into the schedule of the con. If they had started out with a firm stance against such things, they might be able to support such a position now, but the door has been flung open, and while those media things may not meet the original goal of the convention, they bring in tons of money, both in payment for booths and by the convention-goers they bring as well.

An unfortunate effect of this unprecedented growth is the inability to find rooms in San Diego for the week. Fortunately Mrs. Speculator works with hotels and travel agents as part of her regular job, and so knows how to find her way through the labyrinth of obtaining rooms at convention rates at our favorite nearby hotel. But if she did not know how to do this, the timeline for us getting a room would generally work like this:

1. As we are checking out, ask about the availability of a room for the following year. The answer is always either that they can't reserve rooms that far in advance, when the better answer should be that we have to get the rooms through the convention planning service when they are made available for the entire convention.
   
2. Come February, the reservation system is opened up and we find that very few rooms are available because companies coming in from out of town are wealthy enough to not have to pay convention rates and thus have booked rafts of rooms.
   

The problem, as it is with most processes, is in consistent enforcement of the rules. Some hotels do allow early reservations at con rates. Some hotels apparently don't make as many rooms available as they promise to—and who can blame them? Given the choice between renting a room for full rates and convention rates, I would do what I could to maximize my income as well. But a good friend of mine has reservations for next year at the con rate, while if we're not careful, the Speculator household will have to struggle to find a place to stay within easy transportation range, because we're using a hotel that, explicitly at least, is following the rules.

And, lest my devoted reader thinks that I am a lone voice in the wilderness, it's clear I'm not. There are open conversations about the growth of the con and the pressure it is putting on the resources of not only the convention center, but of San Diego itself. And searching through blogs, it's clear there are more than a few people displeased with the influx of media stuff and movement away from the tradition of the con. What to do? I humbly submit some suggestions, in no particular order.

1. Move the convention. There are actually a lot of folks who believe this is going to happen anyway. The convention's contract with the city of San Diego runs out in 2012, and the names you keep hearing are Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Personally, I don't like this solution. San Diego is a gorgeous city, even when 100000 nerds and geeks descend on the city's Gaslamp Quarter and trash it. Part of the beauty of San Diego is the weather—on the last day of the con this year, the high was 69 degrees (F) and the humidity around 20%. Los Angeles would be much warmer, much more humid, and smoggy, and I can't imagine the mass of people who move at the convention now walking their way through downtown LA and its traffic issues. And I want nothing to do with Las Vegas in the last week of July. I just love San Diego and would live there if I could, but neither of the other two cities make me excited about just travelling to them.
   
2. Expand into San Diego proper. I've heard rumors this may be happening, where the convention decides to move panels into local hotels. This will take some thought on the part of the organizers, such as grouping related panels in local hotels, recognizing that the ones that are generally less-well attended will just die if they are not in the convention. While there are a number of hotels within easy walking range of the San Diego Convention Center, it's already a long walk from one end of the building to the other, and not many people would be willing to make the trek to the convention center and then have to wander off into the city. And frankly, the convention center usually runs perilously close to chaos, and they would have to get a much firmer grip on security and organization if they were to have outlying panels.
   
3. Expand the convention center. I've also heard rumors of this being considered as well. There isn't a lot of space to expand however. On one side of the convention center is the bay, and opposite it is Harbor Drive. On one end of the convention center are hotels, while there is a courtyard on the opposite, between the center and the parking for Petco Park, the home of the San Diego Padres. I guess the convention can expand into that courtyard, but it was used as an overflow area for the massive lines for the media panels. So if it is taken away, the organizers are going to have to think carefully about safe places for those overflow lines. But the real problem with this proposal and the one before it is that while it addresses crowding at the convention, it doesn't address crowding in the hotels. In fact, those proposals would potentially increase the attendance at the hotel, making the housing crunch that much worse.
   
4. Start enforcing standards of what is allowed at the convention.
   This is supposed to be a comic convention. Of course, there are things that are tangentially related to comics and its fandom, such as science fiction and fantasy, but there are things at the convention that have nothing to do with any of that. While we are big fans of Bones and The Office, they have no place at a comic convention, and those rooms could likely find other panels more closely related to what the convention is supposed to be about. Outside of role-playing games, think seriously about removing the gaming booths. Why I had to bull my way past a display of a karaoke game at a comic convention escapes me, but it had a huge crowd and really large speakers.
   
5. Along those lines, split the convention up. Take all the media and gaming panels and booths and move them to a sister convention that is being held at the same time, say in Los Angeles. Or just put the non-comics and non-SF things in LA, trying to maintain the tradition of what Comic-con is supposed to be about.
   

Ultimately, the solution to the issues is not going to be an easy one, and I don't envy the decisions facing the organizers. All I want, selfishly, is my comic convention, in San Diego, and the panels I want to see. Without being a sardine on the floor of the convention. Come on Comic-con; make this happen.

The Name of the Wind

It's an interesting experience to set down a book, be pretty thoroughly enamored of it—so much so that I am looking forward to finding its sequel—but have no real clue what makes it such a good book. So it is with The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss's debut novel, a novel I picked up due to its many nominations (and some wins) as the book of the year for 2007. As I read it, there were days I wanted to take off from work so I could devote myself to finishing it, so strongly did it move me. But as I set it down, nothing about it really stands out so that I could say a single aspect was among the best I have ever seen.

I think what drives it the most is the always-reliable tale-within-a-tale aspect, where the story involves the telling of another story. In this case, we are introduced to innkeeper Kote, who is apparently a diligent and good innkeeper, but just in an area where he can't possibly have a clientele that could take advantage of his skills and resources. Enter Chronicler, whose name is his job—he's a collector of the important stories of the world we find ourselves in—and he recognizes the innkeeper as the fabulous hero Kvothe, the story of whom he wants to add to his repertoire. Kvothe is uneasy but agrees to tell his story, in part because it appears he expects he may die soon and wants the truth behind all the legends about him to be known.

And so the majority of the book is the first day of Kvothe telling his tale to Chronicler, with only Kvothe's faithful student Bast as a witness. Between the visitors to the inn and the fragments of legend that Chronicler mentions, we know that we are about to be witness to an epic story, for Kvothe has legends and myths surrounding him all over the world—the youngest student ever in the University, the Kingkiller, the fighter of demons, the lover of women. But as Kvothe tells his story, starting from the very beginning—his birth—all these mentions are only harder-than-usual foreshadowing, waypoints for where the story we are reading is going to go. Kvothe himself is the archetype of the epic hero: a young man who shows extraordinary innate talent but who must be trained so that his true power can be revealed. And so, of course, the story involves both triumphs and failures, alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking. And there are "intervals," moments when everyone has to break from storytelling in order to use the privy or make food, or when Kvothe steps back from his narrative to illuminate a point. The narrative device is deftly handled, pulling the reader into its thrall.

Kvothe himself is the most fully fleshed out of the characters, while the people around his story are generally one-dimensional, reflecting the scant understanding that a young man would have for the personalities in his world. That is, he is the most fleshed out until the surprising last few chapters that take place after the day's story is done.

Another strength of the novel is the world-building that Rothfuss performs. There is enough in it that the world seems familiar until the moments when it falls into the pattern of the epic settings. There is magic, and it appears to be based on some of the more mundane rules of magic, requiring thought and planning beyond just the uttering of a simple spell. There are dragons, but Rothfuss works really hard to make them fit a naturalistic niche in their environments, so they are both more and less than a reader of fantasy has come to expect when confronted with their name. So part of what pulls the reader into the novel is interest in how this world is like the one(s) we know and how it differs.

And there is no doubt through the book that this is part of a series—there are surprises at the end of The Name of the Wind, but generally speaking no one's life appears to be explicitly in peril. Part of the reason you'll await the next book is to find out more about this boy and how he became the man he clearly is, rather than trying to figure out how he survives some catastrophic peril—all in all a far more natural way to lead in to a sequel than most others.

There are also moments of surprising artistry. But those moments are forced, not fitting the language of the rest of the book, and standing out like an experiment or formal separation from the narrative voices that guide the story. Perhaps those moments are the words that Chronicler will eventually add to his legend, but they are distinct from the rest of the text, no matter their power.

The Name of the Wind is not so much ground-breaking as it reconstitutes the tropes and clichés of epic fantasy. Not in any sort of method like Guy Gavriel Kay uses, but in a way that is just as interesting and compelling. One could make an easy argument that this is a young adult novel, for all the reasons that Kay's own Ysabel was considered young adult. Nonetheless, like Ysabel, it is compelling, and I look forward to more from this author and from this world. We may be seeing the first indication of a major long-term voice in fantasy.

SDCC Topic 2: Loyal Opposition?

I've not been around comics enough to know the tradition of the competition between DC and Marvel. From the things I've been able to pick up, the relation between the two major superhero companies was one of genial competition, and perhaps some ribbing. For instance, I recall Clark Kent showing up behind the scenes in an issue of Marvel Team-up. And then there was the annual Halloween festival in some town in New England where folks in costume would show up on the other company's comics. Of course, the Squadron Supreme is a Marvel-ized Justice League and DC eventually followed up with the Extremists, an Avengers knock-off. There was also a period of company crossovers, led by Superman vs Spiderman, and followed up by others, including the unlikely Batman/Hulk. We're lucky that these are available as back issues with a little searching and have been collected in trades.

In the lifetime of my buying comics as they are released (opposed to seeking out back issues), there have been two major moments of cooperation between the two companies: the Amalgam cross-over, resulting in some of what I thought was that time's best story-telling, as creators were allowed to let their imaginations run wild and combine characters from the two companies. I was particularly fond of Dr. Strangefate and Bruce Wayne, Agent of SHIELD, the names of which just evoke all sorts of possibilities in story-telling. After a long period of time, Kurt Busiek and George Perez were allowed to do a JLA/Avengers cross-over that had pretty good sales for its period, but there are indications that we've entered a cold war period and the companies will not cross over again any time soon.

Of course, my readers and those who know me also know my interest in questions of genre. And so I have spent some time pondering the differences between the two companies, especially in light of Steven Grant's excellent recent post on the difference (http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=17254).

I had reason to think of these issues recently when the Speculative Nephew came to stay with us for six weeks (sadly, Grant's excellent piece had not yet come out while the Nephew was living here). I've been pretty unabashed for my love of DC, and the Nephew is the stereotypical Marvel zombie. And while we don't really clash on it, especially since I read the Ultimate universe from Marvel and pass those comics on to him, and since I spent a good deal of time working in a comic store and so had to learn the Marvel Universe fairly well in order to be an effective service representative. But when he had spare time, he was only able to find mostly DC stuff sitting around the house, and I was pleased to find him poking through The DC Encyclopedia for example. He also found some of Batman: The Animated Series on cable, which piqued his interest enough that he started watching the collections of it and Justice League from our DVD stacks. He's a curious kid, and a smart one, so one day he asked me why the DC animated shows were of such a higher quality than the Marvel ones (actually, it was something like "Why are the Marvel cartoons drawn so bad compared to this?" as he was watching Batman). This led to some interesting conversation about what I could only guess were some of the philosophies behind their editorial and licensing practices. And of course, having talked about it and trying to be even-handed, I had to spend some time thinking about it both during and after the conversation.

And so it was with this background that Mrs. Speculator and I found ourselves sitting in a "Mondo Marvel" panel in San Diego as we waited for a DC Universe panel to begin. While I know that things are kind of cold between the companies at the moment, and Marvel holds a decided upper hand in sales—and until The Dark Knight came out, they were pleasantly surprising reviewers with Iron Man (some calling it the best superhero movie ever made). Mrs. Speculator and I were surprised by the partisan animosity both in the crowd and in the panel. Granted we didn't see the entire panel, but soon after we got in the room, the panel was mocking Green Lantern in a complete non sequitur from the conversation topic. Now I've seen DC make a snide remark about the competition, but there is generally a little laugh and the conversation goes on. But the panel went on riffing on the relatively asinine weakness of the Green Lantern Corps for some time. Now anyone with knowledge of comic book history has to have a little respect for Green Lantern as it brought in some of the great names of science-fiction into the comic writing field. A little joshing would have been fun, but it went on and on, to the point of uncomfortableness. And when they went on to other questions from the floor, a young fellow asked them to name their favorite comic book movie. As they went down the panel, it was fascinating to see the verbal and visual contortions they went through in order not to give credit to the Dark Knight, going so far as to talk about Howard the Duck rather than say the name of a character from the other company.

What happened? I thought that the writers and artists of comics were fans of the medium and would appreciate the efforts of anyone else in the field. And the belittling that was going on had the opposite of the intended effect among some of the audience; instead of joining in the laughter, the audience got quieter and quieter as Marvel spent time calling attention to the successes of DC by refusing to talk about it. It was sad and peculiar all at once, especially as there are more and more eulogies for the comic industry, especially superheroes. It seems to me that for either company to succeed, the industry has to remain relatively vibrant—which requires at the very least minimal cooperation between its two leaders.

It's like the ridiculous siege mentality that has overwhelmed recent American politics has carried over into comics. No longer is politics about the weighing of the benefits and costs of various proposals of the different parties to chart a course to make America excel. Now it's "us" versus "them" and nothing good can be said about the other side, no matter the cost to the process at large as a result. Perhaps DC and Marvel have reached this in part because of their use of exclusive contracts, but there really is no reason to not wish the other side luck in their work to maintain a marketplace where both companies can do well. There's no reason not to appreciate the good work that the other company has performed.

Let's be honest, if this is a battle, Marvel currently holds the position of the Republicans in 2004. The presidency is theirs and they have cleaned up in the midterm elections. Instead of spending their effort belittling and mocking their opposition, they should be doing what they can to expand their market and reach. And folks, it sounds like Brand New Day went over about as well as firing federal prosecutors did for the Republicans. The adamant supporters of Marvel swear it's okay, that Marvel will make it right eventually. But those who are more moderate are asking publicly "What the hell?"

So what I came away from that panel with was an idea that Marvel needs to tends its own needs and let DC take care of itself. DC has managed to shoot itself in the foot a number of times in the last couple of years, and doesn't need Marvel's help in making a mockery of what used to be their strengths. And you know, it's just petty, taking away from the joy that events like Comic-con are supposed to engender in their attendees.

Besides, everyone knows Superman would clean Spiderman's clock if he really wanted to.

SDCC Topic 1: Flash Villains

Mrs. Speculator and I went to a panel in San Diego spotlighting Geoff Johns, who appears to be poised to write every book in the DC stable. Asked if he was planning on announcing his empire at DC soon, he laughed it off, but there really can't be anyone more busy there at the moment. I'm mostly enjoying his work, especially since he seems to have hit on a formula that works well, even if it is predictable (big reveal on the last page!). While the format is repetitive, the content changes, and it is that (and his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the DC universe) that really makes his books fun.

At the panel, Johns described a current mini-series called Rogues's Revenge, where the repercussions of the death of Bart Allen in the lives of the villains who performed the deed are explored. And while he was describing the basis of the mini-series, he said something along the lines that the villains should have been smarter than to kill Bart in his short stint as Flash. And you know, that all seems well and good...until I got to thinking about it.

While the original motivation of the Rogues Gallery was to rob and make money, over time that motivation has had to evolve, unless it is being artificially restrained by the continuity and rules of comics writing. Sure, they each had "superpowered" gimmicks--heat ray, cold ray, mirrors, control of the weather--and so they would appear to be a match for their nemesis. And perhaps there might have been a thrill over time to go up against someone as powerful, or more powerful, than they were. But after a while, it should have been apparent that the result of each clash was going to fall into a limited number of categories:

1. The rogues get captured and sent to prison. Perhaps they could go on a crime spree over some period of time, but if they stayed around Central City, the general result is capture by the Flash--it's the pretty much unbreakable rule for superhero comics: the villain gets caught at some point.

2. They get enough money to give up the life of crime. I can't think of a single instance of a villain just walking away from it all into retirement. I'm sure it must have happened somewhere along the way, but it's rare enough that a decently written story about it would probably be ground-breaking.

3. They capture the hero in some terrible deadly snare. The comics are full of the villains working out extraordinary traps in order to capture the hero, but what happens happen if the traps are successful? Either the hero escapes, which leads us back to #1, or the hero DIES. There's no point in keeping the hero alive after they have been captured, because they will eventually escape and put the villain in jail. Scott Evil's diatribes in the Austin Powers movies makes this point clear--don't talk to the hero, or describe your nefarious scheme; don't give them a chance to escape, just kill them. Because it is the hero's job to capture the villain, and the only thing that is ever going to stop them from doing that is their own death.

So, I'm not sure who is more naive: Johns for hinting that there had to be another way or the rogues for staying in the fight, even if it was against a new version of the Flash. Granted, solely from the standpoint of writing a serial format, the only option that doesn't end the series is #1, which is why it is what we see most often. The joy in comics comes from the deviousness of the villain and the whatever-the-attribute-is of the hero to overcome that trap. The best stories are ones that involve intricate machinations revealed over time, the ones that put the heroes at the worst disadvantage and then show them at their heroic best as they overcome the long odds. This is why Watchmen can only be a mini-series (SPOILER ALERT!): the villain wins! Of course there could be interesting follow-ups regarding the world that Ozymandias has created, but those really aren't stories of superheroes any longer.

Ultimately what Johns describes in his statement--that his villains should know better--is his trying to eat his cake and have it too. Real people in the situation the rogues found themselves in would have known better--they probably would have given up the fight a long time ago. But these guys continue to fight, which by itself masks an implicit escalation of tactics: villain tries a trap, villain fails, villain goes to jail. What happens next? If they stay in the fight, the villain comes back and tries a more dangerous trap, and the cycle goes on and on until it gets broken with the removal of one combatant or the other from the field.

This is why it is supposed to be shocking when a hero dies--not only is it tragic when a figure for good who fights for the general well-being of people he doesn't know is killed by the effects of his selfless decisions, but from a metafictional point-of-view, it imperils the series. Of course the hero almost always comes back, or the serial is generally dead. Barry Allen died, and Wally West took over. Steve Rogers died, and Bucky took over. The serial has to go on, or in comic book hero terms, "his death has to mean something." And the villain is captured and sent to prison, until they are released and escape and then it goes around again with a different pair of combatants.

The things we like best are the things that break this pattern--X-Men follows this pattern but in a soap opera format that is just as much about their personal lives as it is about fighting crime. And of course, the X-Men have the advantage that they themselves are not so much heroes as they are non-humans fighting for their own rights in a world hostile to them. They have villains to fight, but it's not about the redistribution of wealth, but upholding the rights of all sentient creatures.

But, for the vast majority of stories, someone has to win. And when it is the villains, they really have no choice but to kill, due to the implicit rules of their combat.

Home from San Diego

Mrs. Speculator and I just recently returned from our regular sojourn to San Diego and Comic-con, about which I will be writing more in the next few days. But in the meantime, I went through a number of books and movies, about which I'd like to say a few words apiece. So, allow me this space to do a little catching up, and then I'll get to subjects with a little more depth. (Mrs. Speculator and I have begun watching reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I can't help but hear his voice in my head for these introductory remarks. I'll work on getting my wit as sharp as his in his own introductions.)

Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson: This is the seventh book in The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it works much like the other books in the series: a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, are given separate threads which are slowly and sometimes not gently pulled together into a huge tapestry. Unlike the earlier novels, however, the gods begin taking a much more active role in the affairs of this world, and the various races can no longer ignore the activity surrounding them and their affairs. This novel returns to the country of Letheras, where we last saw an immortal Tiste Edur take the emperor's crown and watched as a single motley fool worked to overthrow the whole system for its economic corruption. As we return, the emperor remains immortal, but suffering from his immortality: Erikson twists the fairly standard trope so that the emperor actually does die, but returns to life after each death, a process that has driven him to the border of sanity and perhaps beyond.
The titular heroes of the series, the Malazan, find themselves far from home and their commander ordering them to invade Letheras, despite their relatively small forces.

Once again, the strength of the novel is the tremendous characterizations and the interaction between those characters. The plot feels like it meanders until all is resolved, and the reader is witness to world-changing events yet again. The scope is magnificent and daring, and the book moves really quickly, and like an avalanche, captures the ubsuspecting reader (but only if you devote more than five minutes a day to the book--my own personal weakness this time around). My biggest difficulty in finishing Erikson's Malazan books is having to wait to pick up the next one. I still cannot recommend this series, and this book, enough, and I do actually proselytize it in person.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute: This book had been required reading for me, either in junior high school and high school, and most of what I remember about it was how impressed I was supposed to feel upon its completion. It is supposed to be a classic of the atomic age, a bitter parable of man's folly to build weapons that are capable of destroying the world. And perhaps it is a classic, but it has outlived its possibility: the people in the novel are stereotypically the demure and courteous characters of the early 1960s, and worse of the British Empire, who face the impending doom of fall-out from an atomic war with the all-too-familiar stiff upper lip. All the characters remain calm and accepting of their doom, much as I would expect in the very final stages of such a disaster. Perhaps it is a different time, or perhaps I have been biased by disaster movies of the last 30 years, but I have a really hard time thinking communities could remain so calm for half a year as they knew their inescapable death was approaching. Civilization, as the book's epithet claims, goes out with a whimper.

I suppose part of the purpose of such an anticlimactic ending is to point out the ridiculous position that having so many earth-shattering weapons puts humanity in. And I remember the days of the 70s and early 80s, before the Berlin Wall fell, when nuclear destruction was a very real fear in our daily lives. Those times have past, leaving this book a somewhat interesting artifact of a different way of thinking. The characters are generally likable, though not particularly deeply written, and so mostly unknowable. But two of the main characters perform actions that I cannot explain, thus weakening the novel for me overall. I wonder if anyone has considered rewriting On the Beach updating it for modern attitudes and culture.

Wanted, as most of the reviews take time to point out, bears only a passing resemblance to the comic series on which it is based. It was difficult to set this aside as I watched the movie, so much did I enjoy that series, but then the sheer goofiness of the movie just swept me away so that I didn't care. James McAvoy plays Wesley, a middle-class dweeb caught in his unhappy job and unhappy life with no way to escape. That is, until the most improbable of events pulsl him out of that life, much like the stable-boy in the fantasy trope who finds he is hear to the kingdom. Wesley is the son of the world's greatest assassin, a member of a guild who has appointed themselves the world's protectors, "killing one that thousands might live." Instead of a ring or a sword, Wesley's destiny is revealed in the body of Angelina Jolie, who comes to rescue him from the sights of a competing assassin who has set himself up against the fighters for justice. What follows is the first of several ridiculous chases through the movie that forget the laws of physics and materials, including the human body. And yet they are so breath-takingly shot as to be ridiculsously fun, such that you find yourself laughing at the scenes on the screen as well as the audacity to even pretend the stunts could actually happen.

But once the screenwriters set up their characters and world differently from the way the comic series did, the movie really has no other direction to go in than the one it takes. The movie becomes predictable in its sweeping movements, if not in the audacaity with which it tries to carry off its scenes and stunts. The characters which had carried so much potential become awful stereotypes, and sadly predictable as a result, suckign a great deal of the joy out of the movie. Adn yet it is lavishly shot, a gorgeous production, making me think of Crank with a huge special effects budget or Smokin' Aces with a global conspiracy plot. It really is a lot of fun and perhaps advanced the effects craft for forthcoming and better movies, but I can only recommend the movie in that light, or as a matinee to pass time you find yourself unexpectedly trying to fill. It's the fluffiest of cotton candy, which seems to be the movie's goal in the first place, and it's clear everyone in the really strong cast are just having a good time.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is also a cotton candy movie, but it really doesn't have anything to offer. It isn't particularly fun as it mocks itself and winks at its viewers metafictionally in a sad effort to replace the powerful chemistry between Brendan Fraser and the original lead actress, Rachel Weisz. Her departure drags on this sequel as the usually wonderful Maria Bello just cannot pull off the combination of grace, style, and joie de vivre with which Weisz earlier played the same role. Fraser seems to just go through the motions, searching for a backboard off of which to play. The now-adult son, played by Luke Ford, is annoying in the stilted father-son conflict that doesn't seem to have any basis beyond the imagination of the screenwriters, or at least doesn't really show in the film itself. Even the effects, the strong point of the first Mummy remake, feel pretty dated and bland.

Unfortunately, Michelle Yeoh is scintillatingly beautiful when she shows up, serving as a stark indication of what the movie could have been had they really tried. Jet Li is dramatically underused and ridiculous in his appearance, never really getting a chance to show any ability to act. When I think of these movies in the future, I'll be trying very hard to remember how much fun the first movie was and the potential it showed for the action genre, potential that has seriously been misplaced. I am going to work very hard to forget that the second and third movies, especially the third, was ever made.