SpaceSpot is a new shiny Web 2.0 styled astronomy community site from the Mondo Brands group. However, I think they need to have a quiet word with their web-designer before the lawyers from DC get to them. Have a look at their logo (left) compared to DC’s new look bullet (right)
Rather similar wouldn’t you say.
“Walls” (Brad Meltzer/Gene Ha)
Well, that was unusual. JLA #11 is very high concept and is quite a departure from Meltzer’s house style at DC. As with all his work its a character piece, but unlike JLA or Identity Crisis it focuses on just two characters. Red Arrow and Vixen have become trapped in an air pocket beneath the waters of the Potomac River and the rubble of the Watergate Hotel. This issue features their struggle to keep each others spirits up and their desperation once they realise nobody is going to be able to reach them before they die.
Vixen’s panic and Roy’s calmness is nicely played. It feels like two actors alone together on a stage, one of those small arts shows where the actors roleplay and dark lighting invites you to imagine the scenery that it hidden by shadow. It works fantastically well and its success is largely due to Gene Ha’s subtler, atmospheric artwork. His process and Art Lyon colouring technique is discussed on Brad Meltzer’s blog. The repeated use of very narrow horizontal panels gives truth to the character’s claustrophobia and the use of the final splash page is an impressive change.
The use of Roy Harper continues Meltzer’s association with the Green Arrow clan that began with his succession of Kevin Smith on the Green Arrow solo title back in 2002. Arrow was also the main point-of-view character in Identity Crisis. It also can’t be a surprise that Meltzer was followed on Arrow his his old college room-mate Judd Winick or that Winick heavily used Harper as a character in his Outsiders series. Together with the ground work laid by the Teen Titans writers they’ve turned Roy Harper into a really interesting and incredibly well rounded character.
Vixen on the other hand remains something of a cypher. She carried a fair amount on anger during the old Justice League series, but after that she matured into a fairly run of the mill type-b superhero. Her vulnerability here drives part of the story and continues the subplot about her powers, but it feels less natural than Harper’s determination. She is meant to be a world famous supermodel and an experience superhero so she comes across as more timid than I’d have expected. (Is it my imagination or are artists “casting” Halle Berry as Vixen these days?)
My guess is that this issue and issue zero will be the ones that people remember most from Meltzer’s run. Also if any issue of the current run deserves to win awards it’ll be this one.
It has been with interest that we’ve watched the development of DC’s own direct to DVD animated imprint – the very best of DC’s graphic novels transformed into fully animated motion pictures. The website for first of these, Superman: Doomsday, is now live at http://www.warnervideo.com/supermandoomsdaydvd/ (which unsurprisingly is an adaptation of the Death of Superman).
To promote the release of this film WB Home Video and DC Films are offering the chance to become an “extra” in an uncoming film and to visit LA to meet one of the Animators. They don’t say which film, but the studio is known to be working on adaptations of Justice League: The New Frontier and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. If you are interested follow the link, www.supermandoomsdaydvd.com/sweepstakes, and fill out the form.
This line caught my eye in an article I was reading,
“If superhero comics are to bloom into a mature medium, they must begin to appeal to older, more intellectually liberal readers, or readers more concerned with utopias achieved rather than utopia lost.”
It’s from an academic paper by Matthew Wold-Meyer in the January 2003 issue of The Journal of Popular Culture (you’ll probably need a university library or a subscription to access it).
Now putting aside the thorny issue of appealing to older readers of any sort, its the last part “utopias achieved rather than utopia lost” that really caught my eye. Surely the entire purpose underlying the superhero genre, or even heroic fiction of any sort, is the pursuit of utopia – the struggle to achieve perfection or justice against some opponent, force, or happenstance.
Yet, the writer makes a very good point – in almost every case (Krypton, Mars, Atlantis, the Golden Age of the 1940s) utopias in superhero comic books are where people come from, they are places like Eden, from whence our hero is ejected so that he can begin his adventures or quest to regain that utopia.
Even Watchmen may seem to be about achieving utopia, but that’s only really a conspiracy theory that flows through the background of the story. The characters spend most of their time trying to deal with being superheroes in a nasty post-Utopian world, trying to come to terms with the loss of their faux-utopia prior to the Keene Act.
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