Category: Comics

You could say that it’s not often we can an Absolute #1 these days, but Absolute Green Arrow, for all its amputation antics, was mere weeks ago, and a one shot off the back of this very Absolute Catwoman has already been announced. But let’s see what’s going on in this, the closest relative the Absolute line has to the Absolute Batman flagship.

Absolute Catwoman’s first and strongest act is marking itself separately from Absolute Batman. Selina’s adventures between these pages, save a flashback to her youth, are entirely in Europe. She has a penthouse, a Cat Cave, and a luxury villa. She has that lonesome life of a solo operator, so even if she is a little bit like an incarnation of mainline Bruce, she feels fresh. This is the story of a woman trying to retire on her 25th birthday, only to find that her former colleagues are after her for a McGuffin that she unwittingly took into her custody. That classic story.

Scott Snyder (who isn’t busy enough already) cowrites with Che Grayson, providing that link between worlds, a delicate baton touch of continuity and new world thrills.

Bengal’s art makes the book appear initially like an outgrowth of Nick Dragotta’s work on Absolute Batman, but cuter. Everything appears fairly dynamic for a piece where most everyone wears helmets across action scenes, although that may be because below the neckline they’re all basically wearing skin suits — it was a genius move to feature so many costume variants. At any rate, it’s a handsome book and the felinity never feels forced. You get the impression that Selina’s been having a lot more fun than Bruce lo these many years.

Because Catwoman’s solo adventures aren’t the most mainstream of DC (admittedly, there is a scale), her supporting cast are more obscure than many of the characters we’ve seen across other Absolute titles. That’s how we end up with Holly Robinson, who’s one of the greatest examples of resurrection in comic history (Ed Brubaker forgot that she was dead, and editorial somehow didn’t pick up on it), and another character I’ll continue to tiptoe around (there are so many members of the Bat family you can be forgiven for not having heard of some of them — or knowing them without having any idea who they are).

Admittedly Absolute Catwoman does expect you to have a base familiarity with Catwoman, with the reader filling in blanks they’re supposed to instinctively know, and not just from her brief appearances in Absolute Batman. But that’s the appeal of the Absolute universe: it’s a twisting or an inversion of what we already know so well. Everything in Absolute has been worth reading so far — even Absolute Green Lantern! — but you’re doing yourself a disservice if Absolute is the only DC you read.

Go out there, immerse yourself, indulge. DC K.O. let us see Ambush Bug! It’s not a bad time to be a comic reader at all.

At long last, the final piece of The Long Halloween puzzle – until The Last Halloween debuted towards the end of last year. But that’s still ongoing, so we’ll put it aside. Initially intended to be published shortly after Dark Victory, Catwoman: When in Rome was delayed for four years; Hush, a very different flavour of Jeph Loeb,was published in the interim.  

This six issue rundetails what Selina Kyle was up to while Batman was investigating the Hangman in Dark Victory, a story which Selina only features at the start and end of. Realistically it’s an excuse for Tim Sale to illustrate Selina in a series of high fashion pieces – for the covers, at least. She spends a lot of the inner contents either naked or close enough to it. Combine this with an overtly lecherous Leprechaun-like Edward Nigma, and you’ve got a DC title custom-built for perverts. Sale’s art is excellent as always — and different to his previous titles, as always — but after a while the attention to detail is notable.

Frustrated with Bruce Wayne’s distant nature, Selina Kyle takes herself to Rome to investigate the Falcone crime family, which she suspects she has deeper links to than simply an easy target for funding her lifestyle. Plagued by vivid nightmares, thwarted by overly familiar enemies, and abetted by Edward Nigma in heat, Selina has to hope that she not only solves her mystery, but survives her European sojourn.

Loeb doesn’t have access to the full Bat rogue’s gallery that he loves so dearly, because he was using most of them extensively in Gotham at the time this is set. Still, he makes an effort: he borrows Cheetah from Wonder Woman, and various weaponry crosses Selina’s path in ways that she’d rather it didn’t. Thanks to the miracles of modern villain science, Sale’s gloriously tetanoid Joker gets to make a guest appearance.

Due to the holiday nature of When in Rome, Loeb doesn’t tangle it near so much as he did the other Long Halloweens or the famously twisted Hush (for which Loeb has admitted that one key element came out of nowhere). The solution to this one, such as it is, is less surprising than it is inevitable. It’s a pleasant diversion from the dramas in Gotham, a sun drenched adventure for Selina and all that entails.

Loeb and Sale were a formidable team, rarely using the same aesthetic twice – while Long Halloween and Dark Victory were of a kind, they look quite different to Haunted Knight, which is the platonic ideal of Batman art (to this reader, at least), and the luscious Italian vistas offered by When In Rome. The Riddler is some sort of grotesque, but everything else is beautiful. Selina has a lot of skin, and a lot of butt, but it’s gratuitous in a completely different way to Jim Lee’s take on the character in Hush.

That’s why it’s so weird to end When in Rome with an epilogue taken directly from Dark Victory, with no changes to the art – Sale was in a different mode.

The more comics you read – pretending to an unearned expertise here – the more you realise that they’re not all momentous events. Catwoman: When In Rome has no sense of immediacy to it because it really does play like its title: it’s a holiday from more serious stories, despite a relatively high body count. Loeb has written Selina as a credible protagonist, and Sale has lavished her with an intense amount of attention to detail. It all adds up to complete the character arc that was alluded to throughout the Long Halloween series and, while not a towering achievement, it’s certainly a satisfying one.

We, as a society, are rapidly closing in on Avengers: Endgame. The movie designed to bridge that gap is set in 1995, crammed with nostalgia that its lead character is incapable of feeling. It even has snippets lifted directly from Top Gun.

Brie Larson, able though she may be, does not carry Captain Marvel alone. Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury gets a leading role, and Ben Mendelsohn performs a career highlight underneath a sea of makeup and prosthetics.

Read the full review of Captain Marvel at Trespass.

Ten years in the making, Avengers: Infinity War is finally here. The first Avengers film entirely free of Joss Whedon’s influence, Infinity War continues the Russo brothers’ streak while effortlessly incorporating the best of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 and Thor: Ragnarok. This is a big undertaking, and it’s amazing how few missteps Marvel has made along the way. The overt shift to explicit science-fiction and mysticism, and away from the tech-worship of early installments is both welcome and effective, and if you give a damn about any of the characters across the 18 movies that lead to this, it’s difficult not to feel consistently impacted by this two and a half hour barrage of event.

Read my full review on Trespass.

“It doesn’t have to be good to be a classic.”

The Joker says this partway through the new animated adaptation of The Killing Joke. Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, which took the comic world by storm in 1988, has long been controversial for some of its more extreme character decisions. Not everyone agrees that the choices Moore made were wrong and, one way or another, pivotal moments have stuck in the canon almost thirty years later.

Regardless of your stance on The Killing Joke ’88, The Killing Joke 2016 makes it look like a masterpiece. From its insipid original material inserted to pad the running time and provide characterisation that does more harm than help, to its actual adaptation of the source material quite late in the piece, there is very little about The Killing Joke that works.

The first half of The Killing Joke deals with Batgirl chasing down Paris Franz, the presumptive heir to a prestigious Gotham crime family. Paris is a notorious womaniser (read: sexual harasser), and Batman doesn’t approve of Batgirl working the case. This is of course an excuse for Batgirl to work up a head of sexual frustration with Batman and to force her to have talk it through as Barbara Gordon with her gay librarian sidekick – which is approximately as good as it sounds.

The back end is the actual adaptation of The Killing Joke comic, with the Joker having escaped Arkham and buying an old amusement park for nefarious purposes involving Commissioner Gordon and, of course, Batman himself. Interspersed with the Joker’s plot are unreliable flashbacks to a failed comedian’s sepia toned life …

The Killing Joke ’88 was a 47 page comic, much more about shock than substance – some good lines thrown between Batman and Joker, and some great art, but a weak scheme from the laughing man and a fateful decision that DC has been dealing with the fallout from ever since. The efforts to make the animation longer – still short at 74 minutes – were wasted, as all of the new material is less than optimal.

Barbara Gordon is a pivotal part of The Killing Joke‘s story, but Barbara was never really a character in the original instance. Her utility as a plot device (and how she is used) is one of the biggest sticking points about the property, but Moore’s reliance on the audience’s in-built recognition of Barbara’s place in the Batman universe works better than what we get in the new and “improved” version.

What you’ve got to understand is that Barbara Gordon gets her own story in The Killing Joke 2016, and it’s one about how hung up she is on Batman, not even Bruce Wayne, because Bruce Wayne only gets a single scene in either version of The Killing Joke. Her duality equates to nights as Batgirl wanting to jump on Batman, and days in the library, complaining to her coworker about her complicated feelings for her “yoga instructor” (“and they say the gay scene is complicated”).

Batman is deliberately paternalistic towards Barbara, and if the script had stayed that way, if she had some sort of Electra complex going on that was being gruffly shot down, it might have flown. Instead, we’re supposed to read this as sexual tension. It is understandable that the Bat life might predispose you towards a more unconventional relationship than, say, your camp library aide, but later in the script – the parts drawn from the comic – Barbara mentions having been a child the first time Batman and the Joker clashed. It’s not creepy, but it rings alarm bells.

The Batman of The Killing Joke is an emotionally frozen version of the character, and that is fine, but it also means that he should not take the direction that he does here. It’s one thing that Barbara is not solely to blame for the actions that she takes, but it’s quite another for her to have this reaction to them. To reduce what is supposed to be a complex and headstrong character – personality traits that are by design absent from The Killing Joke ’88 – to a woman who cares less about the crime she fights and more about her semi-requited feelings for a man who dresses up as a bat, is to do her a disservice greater than any perceived or real misdeed perpetrated by Moore in the first place.

What are we to take from Batgirl removing her costume while Batman stays fully clothed as we pan up to a gargoyle leering down at them? What can reasonably be made of a shot of Barbara jogging, close up on her butt and breasts – her legs and head carefully cropped from the frame so as to be unreadable? Fan service has been around for years, but in some properties it is far more obvious and obnoxious than others. You can’t invite us to be horrified by one form of Barbara’s exploitation while promoting your own unseen camera’s version of the same. It especially doesn’t work in the same title in which Batman gives a lecture about the evils of objectification. The Killing Joke 2016‘s two halves already have no cohesion, but to make each half internally inconsistent is several more layers too far. You can’t strengthen a character by weakening them, and you can’t show one thing and tell another unless you’re a comic book villain yourself. More than before, Barbara Gordon’s role in The Killing Joke 2016 is a tragic misfire.

Where the first and second parts of The Killing Joke clash in particular is the use of technology in the Paris storyline; Batgirl tracks Paris across the city through a series of obnoxious smartphone prompts, which is not in itself a problem, but it becomes one when it grinds against the completely un-updated adaptation of the comic. How can The Killing Joke be set in a modern day Gotham if the pseudo-recollections of the proto-Joker are still situated in a fifties-era tenement apartment and dive bar? Even if you reject the flashbacks out of hand as a concocted sob story that the Joker tells himself – and you probably should, as the whole point of him is that he’s a force of nature rather than a figure to be pinned down and analysed by way of an origin story, plus it’s near certifiable to think that the Joker came about specifically in that way  – their incongruously dated nature lend them no credibility whatsoever. To have director Sam Liu take that decision away from the audience is not just insulting, it’s counterproductive.

There is a lot wrong here, and much of it comes down to the use of the Joker. You can’t have a Joker story where the man himself shows up only halfway. Certainly you can get away with that if he’s a spectre looming over the story, or if there’s a build up to him. By having a completely unrelated storyline in order to beef up one character, very little credence is given to the real content of The Killing Joke. Easily the best thing that you can say about the entire project is that Mark Hamill is back as the Joker, and he easily outclasses everything that surrounds him. Good voice work canlift animation out of the doldrums – and The Killing Joke certainly looks like the doldrums -  and you can almost forgive The Killing Joke in the brief moments that Hamill gets to enliven proceedings. Ultimately, however, you can’t. The parade of grotesquerie that the Joker brings to the table makes The Killing Joke more unpleasant than when it was a by turns dull and unintentionally sexist frippery.

One thing that you can and should demand of a Batman property is that, at the very least, the art is good (don’t tell Frank Miller). For all of The Killing Joke ’88‘s flaws, it is hard to deny that Brian Bolland’s art and colour work (for the 2008 reissue) is exquisite. The aesthetic used for this animation doesn’t read as pale imitation or even shallow parody, but comes across as a lumpen mess. For all of the focus on making Barbara more of a character in her own story, there are frequent instances where shehas either a wonky eye or an almost featureless face. Her most important scene is rendered in a  distressingly cartoonish fashion, and its more horrific underpinnings – the ones that arouse the most complaints about the title – are rendered entirely more graphic under the circumstances. Panels are not frames, and a tableau does not translate so well to the screen, but there are definitely times when less is more. The Killing Joke 2016 doubles down on the horror that it has tried to downplay, made it more uncomfortable and unforgivable than it ever was before, and begs that we take it for the apology that it was intended to be.

In taking Bolland’s striking black-and-white with carefully selected highlights away from the flashbacks and render them in sepia with no elements outstanding, you take the grotesquerie of a couple of panels at the fair and stretch them out forever, make them uglier, and set them to music, DC has committed something of a crime against one of their tent poles. The Killing Joke was written in a feverish rush in the first place, but Alan Moore was never so lazy as to depict Batman throwing a dwarf into a pit of spikes. That’s kind of what Batman does not do, and exactly why people had so many problems with Batman v Superman earlier this year. There are things you don’t do in a Batman story and murdering dwarves is one of them. There is not a Batman style guide at hand at the time of writing this piece, but it is a safe bet that it does not endorse Batman inflicted fatalities.

With none of Barbara Gordon’s positive characteristics on display and Batman and the Joker being either absent, watered down or uglied up for the duration, there’s nothing to recommend here. Animation, if it can’t surpass the comics from which it is drawn, should at least supplement them. Producer and Batman animation visionary Bruce Timm – under the influence of a sackful of cash from DC – had hoped to add flesh to something that has been notorious for the entirety of its lifetime. The Killing Joke adds pablum rather than substance and does not even brag Timm’s distinctive aesthetic into the bargain; hideous, pointless and offensive is a triple threat in entirely the wrong direction, and it’s hard to say who has erred the most in the production of The Killing Joke. Are we to blame Timm, Liu or screenwriter Brian Azzarello, who has had respected runs across several DC titles? It’s entirely possible that The Killing Joke was a terrible idea from inception to premiere, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who will take responsibility for the fact.

The Killing Joke ’88 is a heavily flawed work, but one that boasted excellent art and enduring influence for better and worse. 2016 takes what was viewed as exploitative in the original work and underlines it, runs it through an ugly filter and removes what little beauty, both artistically and thematically, it once had.

2016 is a more progressive place than 1988, and both what comics have to offer and what their readers demand have changed with the times. In taking what was already a throwback, throwing it further back, and pretending that it has somehow evolved, The Killing Joke is more offensive today than it ever was 28 years ago. If you were on the fence about The Killing Joke ’88 before, or if you thought that it was a travesty, don’t watch The Killing Joke 2016. Congratulations, DC: The Killing Joke ’88 is now a goddamn work of art.

I don’t know how to review stand up comedy. I can’t exactly do a joke by joke dissection, because then everyone dies – the joke most of all.

I will start by saying that Louis CK’s Australian accent is atrocious: “tonight’s perfarmence”. It was really hard to place what he  was trying to do with his voice, and that was apparently what he was going for when he introduced his first support act, a nervous but funny ringer from Melbourne whose name I didn’t catch.

The second support was the established comic Tom Gleeson, who I didn’t think was as funny. He had a more consistent feel and was less awkward than his predecessor, but his style of comedy was in line with the “happily married with no children” school and that’s not something I can strictly identify with.

Did you know that married couples have sex, but not in the same way the freewheeling young folk do? Did you know that the Australian middle class talks about nothing but goddamn real estate? Tom Gleeson will tell you all about it!

On to Louis C.K., who is the important part: man is dynamite. He came on stage to say that it was first time in Australia, and we might know him from Youtube, or from stealing his TV show. But we couldn't steal the ticket to tonight: "You paid for that! That's right in my pocket!”

C.K. is one of those special comedians who can appear off the cuff even if he’s not necessarily doing so; if he’s done the bit about an effeminate God creating flowers while his disapproving room mate looks on before, I don’t want to know about it.

If C.K. had a set in mind, one that he wanted to slavishly stick to, it didn’t really come across that way. I still haven’t forgiven Dylan Moran for performing substantively the same material for me a year apart, and Bill Bailey reused a few bits with a couple of years separation while openly courting hecklers, it seemed.

Louis C.K. didn’t have to worry about any of that. The closest he came was when he returned for his encore and someone shouted “We love you Louis!” and he told them “No you don’t, you’re just having a good time. You don’t love me.”

C.K. owned the stage, at one point literally walking to the end of it and standing in the curtains to see how much slack his microphone cord would allow him. “I’m wasting your money right now,” he told us, as audience members in the balcony craned over the edge to see him leaning against the wall. That and the ticket bit might make it seem as if he was lording over the audience for having paid to see him, but it didn't come across like that at all. The night being at the Opera House he seemed suitably humbled that someone could have played violin since four just to get the chance to play at the venue, while all he has to do is talk about fucking the fat he plans to develop "after I've driven away all of my loved ones” – and he doesn't have to share the money with the rest of an orchestra. The level of self-deprecation and shame was just right without being too on the nose.

He briefly had me in tears, talking about the only people who he is bigoted towards (people who go camping with only a tent and a bike) and the special word that he has for them (which is an unfortunate coincidence). Otherwise I was laughing pretty much the whole time, with nothing falling flat – although he did notice that no one thought that "I fucked the wrong woman and had two beautiful kids” was a particularly great line; I think that I just assumed that not every sentence had to provide a laugh, as long as most of them facilitated either future laughs or overall cohesion.

Other bits that particularly got me were his discussion of evolution and the acknowledgement that the only voices he knows how to do are "stereotypical gay man” and "stereotypical seventies black man” and the fact that he talks to himself in these voices at home. His black bee was a delight.

Unlike Gleeson, with whom I couldn't really identify, I felt that C.K. was speaking to me even when he was talking about marriage, fatherhood and frequent heterosexual intercourse. I even knew what he was talking about when he described deep sleep as a "whore goddess”, speaking in ancient tongues (of which she had forty to fellate him with) and secreting heroin into his penis with her tongue. It's in the delivery, it's in the tone, and it's in the set of the man. I'm not being a cultural cringer in playing favourites here, but C.K. really seems to know how to sell his stuff; he's an unassuming man and he's willing to believe that his own material is funny, and to accept that the audience finds it so.

After a brief walk-off, C.K. came back for his encore and wondered what he would say to us, as we'd had enough "dick and cum jokes” for one night. He decided on a story about barely avoiding death, closing the night out on a great note that effectively established four characters and showed that the man is a genuine storyteller rather than a simple joke thrower. There was substance to everything that C.K. said on the Opera House stage; I learned a little something about packing comedy, and damn if I didn't have a great time.

Captain America: The First Avenger is a pretty good film. Technically the fifth in the Marvel universe that has been forged since 2008's Iron Man, it is the chronological first. I would go so far as to say it's the best one that they've offered yet, completely failing to pander to easy nationalistic pride while presenting a valid hero's journey and allowing Chris Evans to create a character with some nuance and likability. Intensely stylish and pure of heart, Captain America: The First Avenger is surprising in many ways … except for its wholly and depressingly unnecessary subtitle.