Review: Action Comics #1000

The good:

The standout in this anniversary issue is "The Car," a story idea so simple it's amazing no one has thought about it before. We've seen hundreds of retcons, and reboots of the Superman mythology over the past 80 years, but this is the first story to ask, what exactly happened to that car Superman smashed on the cover of Action Comics #1?

Genius!

It could have been titled, "Action Comics #1: The Next Day." We find out what happened to the car, and by extension, what happened to the owner of the car who, as you remember, was kidnapping Lois Lane at the time he met up with Superman. The clever story is by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner, with exceptional art by Olivier Coipel.

The whole book is an homage to Superman, but only "The Car" is an homage to Action Comics.

They brought some creative icons back and they're always welcome: Neal Adams! Jim Steranko! Jose Garcia Lopez! Jerry Ordway! Marv Wolfman! Paul Levitz! Any comic book with only one of these creators is worth picking up ... and studying.

There's an amazing greatest hits package by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason who give us a quick 80-year history through a series of full page recreations. Beautiful.

It ends with a Brian Michael Bendis, Jim Lee cliffhanger which introduces a whole new villain and storyline to be carried out in the future. It's intriguing for now, let's see where it goes.

The head scratchers:


There are two stories where Superman and Lex Luthor stand around and chat. Really, two? Lex Luthor bores me for the same reason the Joker does. He is the default villain. Make a Superman movie, use Luthor as the villain. Make another Superman movie, use Luthor as the villain, make another Superman movie, Luthor. Reboot the franchise: Use Luthor, reboot the franchise again? Luthor, yet again.


And he's not that good a villain.

The other disappointment was the Curt Swan chapter. Yeah, I get it, he was the Superman artist for 20 years, but the unpublished art they use doesn't even have Superman (just his narration, what a cheat!), and secondly, they must have been working with some really rough pencils because after it was digitized and colorized and photoshopped, very little of it looks like Curt Swan's work, same for the full page of Superman by Swan and inked by Kurt Shaffenberger, these two had extremely distinctive styles, all washed out by the time Photoshop got finished with them. I would have been happy with a single page of Superman flying from Swan and Murphy Anderson.

Do they drag out the Superman Day celebration (where something evil is afoot) every anniversary issue. It just seemed very familiar.

Though it's Action Comics' landmark issue, it's all about Superman. Where are the homages to the heroes of its back-up features.  We have two cameos of the Justice League en masse, but no Zatara? Where's the Human Target, Tex Thompson, The Vigilante, the Atom, Green Arrow? When comics had substantial page counts, Superman didn't carry Action alone. I loved those backup features. If I wanted to read just all Superman  stories, I'd get Superman, if I wanted some variety, I'd get Action.

Julie Adams' other leading man

Word's gotten out that longtime character actress Julie Adams died. She's best known for playing the damsel in distress in "The Creature From the Black Lagoon."

Everyone's forgotten another role in which she played the object of creepy affection. Of course I'm talking about "The Jimmy Stewart Show" (1971).

This was some vanilla TV. Jimmy's adult son, his wife and grandson are forced to move in with him when a fire destroys the son's house. Its one gimmick: Jimmy's grandson was older than Jimmy's other son. The son's an uncle who is younger than his nephew!

After that the writers called it a day because there was nothing else in this show. No drama, no comedy, the family got along wonderfully. It was one of those shows where I think a very desperate NBC was more interested in having a star than giving him a vehicle.

But that's not the creepy part. The creepy part is in the first episode, Jimmy Stewart is seen riding his bike through town (an oldster on a bike! Can you imagine??!!). He comes home and kisses Julie Adams, who appears to be his adult daughter,  on the mouth. Well that's pretty creepy, then as they talk you realize... it's not his daughter, it's his WIFE! This is more horrifying than "Creature From The Black Lagoon."

I know, there are couples out there with 18 year age differences, but good lord, this just did not look right. This is a longtime Hollywood trope: Once a leading man hits 40, the age difference between him and his leading ladies gets bigger and bigger.

Poor Julie, her leading men were from the black lagoon or the nursing home.

Film review: Ralph Breaks the Internet

This movie is curiously unengaging. The first film satirized video games, and the sequel seems just as happy to satirize the Internet. And the viewer is thinking, "is that it, a bunch of comical internet references?" Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, it's visually stunning, but the story driving the narrative isn't much to go on. And I'm not saying this because I'm an old geezer, my 11-year-old felt the same way.

The only bright spot is the Disney Princesses interlude where the princesses poke fun at their own tropes (none of them have moms! most were saved by guys!) Not only is it funny, it's beautifully animated. All the characters' facial features and expressions are enhanced and you're seeing the princesses again for the first time.

The sequence got me thinking, maybe they should have made this scene its own cartoon short that would be shown before a better full-length film.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Into the Spider-Verse is well-deserving of its good reviews and as animated superhero movies of 2018 go, it's  better thought-out than The Incredibles 2.

It's a little slow getting started, but once it starts it moves pretty quickly to a very exciting climax.

A new Spider-Man (barely a teenager) teams up with a bunch of alternate universe Spider-Men and women to defeat the Kingpin's plan to possibly destroy all the universes.

The film closes with a subtle tribute to Stan Lee that might get you a little teary.

But I'm not here to review the film, I want to discuss the whole alternate universe thing.

This whole concept was introduced to the world of comic books by Gardner Fox in DC Comics way back in the early '60s. This became an incredibly popular idea that inspired the annual JLA-JSA team-up, sometimes the best selling comics of each year.

Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz laid the groundwork for decades of logical and fun story developments

And everything was great.

Until the mid-80s, when the editors at DC thought "y'know, the whole multiverse concept is really popular with our readers ... let's piss on it!"

So they had the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the muddled, not-terribly-thought-out miniseries to discontinue the whole multiverse conceit.

Later they introduced Elseworld stories. These books had alternate versions of our favorite characters but the stories weren't canon, otherwise a reader might get emotionally invested in a character or storyline. The last thing you'd want is for a reader to get emotionally involved in a story.

It's as if the editors had long meetings debating how to further disenfranchise readers.

They since then had reboots to fix all the mistakes, then more reboots to fix mistakes they made while fixing those mistakes, brought the multiverse back again and again with countless reboots, each time pissing on it just a little more.

Meanwhile, at Marvel, they simply picked up the ball and ran with it.

How exciting: A legion of alternate universe Spider-Men. And it's canon! It counts. It's not a hoax or an imaginary story. At the end they gave credit to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, but y'know, they probably should have given a little credit to Gardner Fox.

This is why DC has such a hard time trying to duplicate the success of the Marvel Universe films. Deep down they really don't respect their characters or readers.

Behind the scenes: The voice audition for "Fairly Oddparents."

Director: Give us the most annoying voice you have ... no no... your *most* annoying voice. Mmm, I see, well thank you, we'll keep looking."

Overdue Star Trek review: Whom Gods Destroy

Kirk and Spock are held captive on a penal colony planet when the inmates take over the asylum. Adding to the drama is the main inmate is a shape-shifter.

This episode has two problems, one minor, one major. The minor problem is the show did this plot already. Serious? They have the entire galaxy to explore, not to mention countless allegory plots about the human condition, and they were running out of ideas by the third season?

The major problem is everything the writers knew about mental illness was learned from watching "Arsenic and Old Lace." The difference is Star Trek had the decency to play mental illness as a drama instead of "Arsenic" which played mental illness as a laugh-riot!

I'm talking about the whole delusions of grandeur trope. Shorthand for mental illness in pre-70s was to put a Napolean hat on someone. Instant crazy! "Arsenic" did this by making a character think he was Theodore Roosevelt, "Whom Gods Destroy" did it by making Garth think he was Lord commander of the universe.

The other disturbing thing was the other inmates passing time by doing wheelbarrow races. It's as if the writers were thinking that the insane extras had to do something, hmm, what do the mentally ill do, yeah! they do wheelbarrow races! This of course comes off as awful, insensitive and really amateurish.

We really don't portray mental illness like this anymore.

This is a pity, if the writers had done actual research, a real story about real mental illness could have been made. The viewers could have actually learned something. Star Trek classic took on the Vietnam war, it could have taken on mental illness.

Some good points. I never tire of two William Shatners wrestling each other. Star Trek 6 would steal this 25 years later for a hilarious moment.  Yvonne Craig was beautiful and sexy and back in the 60s always got saddled with the girlfriend-of-the-week roles, though she deserved better. On the other hand what's not to like about her as an Orion slave girl? And speaking of Orion slave girls, the episode used a bunch of formerly introduced alien races; this might have been a cost-saving maneuver, but it perhaps unintentionally brought some uniformity to the ST universe.

One technical point: The Star Trek classic reruns shown now are the special-effects enhanced episodes where, for the most part, all the model starships have been replaced by CGI ships. That being said, the scene where the Enterprise is firing photon torpedoes at the Klingon ship should be awesome. It's not. It's only slightly better than the original effect. Further, they missed an opportunity to CGI the scenes where Garth is shapeshifting instead of leaving in the cheesy '60s effect. Speaking of Star Trek VI, the shapeshifter in that film changed form while talking, how cool is that?

Oklahoma!, perhaps not OK

I saw a production of "Oklahoma!" yesterday, which made me think: Is Oklahoma! a problem play? A problem play is pretty much any play that has aged badly, or contains really outdated concepts.

We have the A plot and the B plot. The B plot is a lot of fun. It's a love triangle between a dim-witted cowboy, his girlfriend who unapologetically enjoys sleeping around and the traveling salesman who wants to get out of the triangle, but keeps getting pulled back in.

The A plot starts out light-hearted, with a Beatrice and Benedict set-up of a boy and girl (Curly and Laurie) who love one another but are too proud to admit it, so they have to pretend they don't. This takes an ugly turn when the girl hooks up with Jud, a psycho killer.

Curly's solution to this is to go to the psycho killer's house and convince him to commit suicide.

What!?

Meanwhile, Laurie  has a dream  where the psycho killer kills Curly, but in real life, they finally get rid of the psycho killer when Curly stabs him to death (but accidental-like, because Curly is a good  guy.).

Then the ensemble sings a song about how wonderful things will be when Oklahoma becomes a state.

What!?

This is crazy!

Let's explore the B plot first. This should arguably have been the A plot if only because the great characters. Had Broadway ever had a heroine who enjoyed sleeping around who's not punished for it? TV wouldn't have characters like this until Sue Ann Nivens in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," all Broadway heroines were virtuous. Ado Annie came along, and she had no problem sleeping with different men. She thought it was kind of funny.

Now, the problematic A plot. Why would Laurie agree to take Jud to the big social if she's deathly afraid of him? Are there only two men in the whole county? So the only way to get rid of him is to murder him? And everyone's OK with it? We have stalking laws now, but in 1943 stalking was just a nuisance that could only be solved by a knife fight where the hero accidentally kills the villain?

A competitor for Laurie's affection who was sane would have ratcheted the drama down a little but would have been more compatible with the light-hearted B plot.

Think of "Cheers" where Sam and Diane loved one another, but didn't want to admit it, then the erudite Frasier comes along and everyone has to step up their game. It was hilarious and it worked. Now picture Frasier being a psycho killer who just wants to rape Diane, but fortunately Sam accidentally kills him with his car. Wow, that doesn't work at all.

Another problem with this play is more logistical. The script requires that at the end, the lovers ride off in a surrey with the fringe on top. This is nothing you can pick up at a costume-and-prop store. When my high school did Oklahoma! we had borrowed a surry from a nearby high school who had just done Oklahoma, and we in turn gave it to another high school who was about to do Oklahoma! I think there's one surrey in the whole country that just keeps getting passed around.

One more note, "Friends" would later steal the gag of the beautiful woman with the terrible laugh with Chandler's on and off girlfriend Janice.