X-Men: Apocalypse

            I finally got around to watching Logan a few nights ago. There was a time, not that long ago, when I wouldn't have missed something like that in the theater, but then I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And X-Men: The Last Stand. And The Wolverine. And, let's face it: Days of Future Past is kind of overrated. To my relative surprise, Logan is a dark, violent, funny, moving film, far better than it has to be—so good, in fact, that I started questioning my judgments of some of those other X-Men movies. Your attitude going into experiencing a piece of art (and for our purposes here, I'm defining "art" as anything from "Water Lilies" to The Dark Knight Returns to Their Eyes Were Watching God to Grand Theft Auto V to whatever Shia Lebeouf is farting into a freezer bag as I type this) can have a significant impact on your enjoyment. On that note, I knew I'd watched X-Men: Apocalypse at some point since it became available to stream, but I could not, for the life of me, remember a single thing about it other than a vaguely negative impression and that Oscar Isaac is four feet tall. The general consensus among friends and acquaintances I've talked to about it can be summed up as, "It's a fun movie?" with or without an accompanying shrug. Could it be, I wondered, that I watched Apocalypse at the end of a long day, or in a particularly bad mood, and was unduly harsh in my evaluation?

            Short answer: no. This movie is garbage. This movie makes X-Men: The Last Stand look like Return of the Jedi and X-Men Origins: Wolverine look like The Godfather Part II.

            Longer answer: seriously, this movie is so bad. Like, through every scene I was shaking my head and wondering how something so many talented people worked on could be so shoddily constructed. There are a thousand plot holes, both large and small. It's never clear why any of the characters are doing anything; Apocalypse has so many powers he's functionally omnipotent, but we don't know what they are and they're never really explained, so despite the fact that the FATE OF THE WORLD is in the balance, it doesn't really feel like there's anything at stake; and for a big budget summer action movie, it looks kind of shitty. There are five writers attached, fourteen characters who have starred in comics of their own, and they're adapting threads of… I don't know for sure, so I'm just going to estimate 10,000 storylines from those comics; if too many cooks spoil the broth, well, in this case they turned it into diarrhea.

            We open in "Nile Valley – 3600 B.C.E." It looks like a cartoon, but there are some live-action extras in shapeless tunics chanting something incomprehensible, which I know from being a 40-year-old virgin (don't tell my wife) is "En Sabah Nur," Apocalypse's "real" name. Inside a pyramid, some kind of ceremony is going on involving a blue troll in sci-fi armor (that's Apocalypse) and L'il Oscar Isaac, into whom the life essence (or "jism") of Apocalypse is being transferred. Some guards in mascara make sex eyes at each other, after which they execute a trap, bringing the pyramid down on the ceremony and dropping Oscar Isaac, who has been transformed into the blue troll, into a pit so deep that an entire scene happens while he's falling. How did they dig a pit so deep using Bronze Age technology? How did they manage it without anybody knowing about it? Why are they rebelling against Apocalype? And why does it all look like an episode of Power Rangers circa 1992? I don't know, and like most questions relating to character, logic, and basic continuity, I don't think it ever occurred to anyone working on X-Men: Apocalypse to ask.

            Then we jump forward to a high school in 1983, where Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), whom you may recall from the original X-Men trilogy as Cyclops and/or James Marsden, is being a dick. This will continue throughout the film, as Scott, like most everyone we'll meet, is less a character than a single, easily identifiable trait to be harped upon ad nauseam. That—and he has laser eyes. Scott might actually be one of the better-rounded characters in that he gets a trait and a superpower. As far as I can tell, Angel's (Ben Hardy) characterization is "has wings," and Moira McTaggart's (Rose Byrne) is "got psychically roofied in X-Men: First Class."

            That, by the way—you know, James McAvoy's Charles Xavier using his powers to make this woman forget months of her life—is played mainly for laughs. They'll walk into a room, and she'll be like, "This rooms seems familiar," and the other characters will share a knowing smile, like, "Ha ha, you don't even know that we erased your memories without your knowledge or consent, or even a quick discussion first." At the end, when Xavier, for literally no reason other than the fact that the movie's over, returns her memory, she just smiles at him. Like it's no big deal that our "hero" stole her memory against her will and then left it that way for decades.

            Anyway, after 45 seconds of Scott being a dick, we cut to Germany, where mutants are being forced to perform in cage fights. Angel, whom you may recall "has wings," is the reigning champion. He fights Nightcrawler (Kody Smit-McPhee) who, as one of the primary characters, "teleports" and "is Christian." The fight is broken up by Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who rescues Nightcrawler, but not Angel. I know I'm beating a dead horse, but there's no absolutely no reason for Angel to get left behind except so he can become a villain later.

            Then we cut to Poland, where Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is working in a foundry under an assumed name. He has a human wife and a daughter who talks to animals. Anyone who's ever seen an X-Men movie will know that his family can't be long for this world, because Magneto's long-standing characterization other than "magnet stuff" is "haz a sad." And, true to that, the wife and daughter die in the next scene they're both in, impaled by a single arrow while they're hugging (the… irony?).

            The movie goes on like that for another two-plus hours, introducing way too many characters, bouncing them off each other, and occasionally checking in with the plot, which can be succinctly summarized as "Apocalypse wants to kill everyone," which takes a while to get going because he recruits a bunch of underlings he doesn't need. Why does he bother with hench-people when he spends most of the movie warping reality by pointing at things? Because that's the plot. Why does he want to kill everyone? Because that's the plot. Why does Quicksilver (Evan Peters) get involved? Because his scene was the best part of Days of Future Past, and also because that's the plot.

            Credit where it's due: Quicksilver's big action scene, in which he saves everyone in the Xavier School from an explosion at super-speed, is once again a standout. Even that, though, is predicated on a plot hole so big you could fly a Blackbird through it. He sees Magneto (his biological father, depending upon whether you ask someone from Marvel or Fox) on TV and goes to find Charles Xavier so he can ask him Magneto-related questions. (The TV he's watching, by the way, is a flatscreen, which nobody on set appears to have noticed despite the fact the film's only visual motif is IT'S THE EIGHTIES.) When he arrives on the outskirts of the school grounds, a good ¾ of a mile away, he cocks his head like a beagle hearing a peanut butter jar being opened somewhere in its home, somehow sensing that the school is about to explode so he can start getting everybody out.

            There are countless contrivances like that, and the 10,000^th time (again, just an estimate) something doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny, you start wishing you could ask, "Do any of you even want to be here? Was anybody really champing at the bit for an Apocalypse movie? Are you already starting to miss Hugh Jackman? I know I am."

            While I'm acknowledging the positive, or at least less negative, aspects of the movie, Fassbender and McAvoy do rise above the material to some extent, and I'm pretty sure Rose Byrne would do so as well if Moira McTaggart had any reason to be in the movie beyond the "hilarious" "comedy" of having had her agency stripped away by a man she trusted. Among the younger generation, Kodi Smit-McPhee is working his ass off to make Nightcrawler work and largely succeeds, and Alexandra Shipp is likable as Storm, despite the great big nothing-burger they both have to work with. Hugh Jackman shows up for 90 seconds as Weapon X Era Wolverine, and even with no dialogue and the world's worst mullet wig, he almost manages to steal the show. Special credit to Evan Peters, who, except for his signature scene, seems to know he's in a piece of shit and relaying his lines sarcastically.

            I could go on, but I'll leave you with this, because I think it perfectly encapsulates how little of a shit X-Men: Apocalypse gives. There's a post-credits scene in which a bunch of janitors are cleaning up the blood, bodies, and shell casings left after our heroes toured the Weapon X facility (all the characters go to Weapon X for a while, just so they could include that 90 seconds of Hugh Jackman, I think). But then, what's this? A nerdy science-type walks through carrying a steel briefcase! He walks down a few hallways, then goes into what I suppose must be the employee break room, where he opens a mini-fridge and pulls out a comically large vial labeled "WEAPON X DNA" in what appears to be Comic Sans.

            Fuck you, too, X-Men: Apocalypse. Fuck you, too.

The Far Cry 5 Chronicles: Part One: Jacob Seed

            Given the wide range of review scores, not to mention my lukewarm response to Far Cry: Primal, I wasn't expecting to like Far Cry 5 as much as I did in the first few hours. Of course, what seemed to bother a lot of people was the story; or the juxtaposition of the dark, serious tone of the story and the almost wacky, "anything can happen" tone of the side missions and gameplay; or the story's refusal to take a hard stance on the sociopolitical causes and ramifications of a right wing Christian cult staging an armed takeover of a county government in our current political climate. And there isn't much story in the beginning.

            For the first time in a Far Cry game, the player character has no voice, no backstory, not even a name, so when I was dropped into a tense situation: the arrest of Joseph Seed, leader of the Project at Eden's Gate, it didn't inspire a lot of thoughts or feelings beyond, "Joseph Seed looks like Matthew McConaughey with a man-bun—they have to have done that on purpose, right?" Obviously, the arrest doesn't go as planned, and then it's a mad dash through a forest at night/tutorial, including an impromptu defense of a cabin in the woods and a car chase. None of that is fun, exactly, but it got me acquainted (or reacquainted) with the ins and outs, and it was over pretty quickly.

            After that had played out, I was fished out of a river by a mysterious stranger and woke up in the underground shelter of—I shit you not—"Dutch Roosevelt," a man who sounds exactly like T-Bone from Watch Dogs and looks exactly like my grandfather if he'd gotten spooked by the 2008 financial crisis and decided to go off the grid. Dutch was so impressed by how I handled myself in those scripted tutorial sequences that he decided to make me the tip of the spear in his ongoing effort to reclaim Hope County from the "Peggies" (that would be P.roject at E.den's G.ate-ies).

            This is where the game gets fun. Dutch might have given me a little backstory, I can't remember, but essentially he handed me some guns and a map, said, "Why don't you kill some Peggies and blow some shit up," and ejected me back into the wilds of Montana, where armed zealots lie in wait every fifty feet or so, gossiping about Joseph Seed and waiting to unload their flamethrowers and belt-fed machine guns into anything that moves; where packs of normally docile grizzly bears get into the cult's hidden stash of ecstasy and start murdering everyone they see; where simple, salt of the earth folk wait for a hero to rise, the type of man (or woman, but I'm playing as a man because I'm a man and also because of unconscious sexism, probably) they can count on to drive a stunt car through a series of checkpoints while it's on fire, or steal back their late father's big rig—the one with the battering ram and mounted machine guns—or fetch the decorations for the annual Testicle Festival.

            You know, listing that stuff, I'm beginning to realize just how much faith Dutch is placing in me, especially when you consider that I've never spoken a word to him. He doesn't even know my name. I guess I just have a trustworthy face.

            Running (and driving, swimming, and occasionally flying) around Hope County, helping people with their chores and getting into pipe bomb fights with passing maniacs, I was reminded of how much fun I had playing Far Cry 3, my first in the series. I had less fun with each subsequent installment, despite the fact that in terms of gameplay, the Far Cries are just very slight variations on a strong theme. I can't identify what's making the difference, but whatever fairy dust they sprinkled onto Far Cry 3 is back, and I was happy, at any given moment, just to be running across a wheat field, picking off distant goons with arrows to the face and blowing up the manure silos they were guarding. The side missions are mostly fun, too, and the named NPCs are well-written and performed. After somewhere between three and five hours, I was honestly befuddled by the lower review scores.

            Then I made enough progress in the story to get to the first major boss fight.

            Actually, first I did a mission to recruit a companion character named Nick Rye. Nick is a pilot, the third generation to run his family business, with a very pregnant wife. The Peggies stole his plane, and he wanted me to get it back for him. The plane was in John Seed's actual compound, which was crawling with goons, so I held off until I was nearly done with the region. When I stole the plane, Nick name on the radio and talked me through a bunch of aerial maneuvers to make sure the Peggies hadn't cut the brake-lines or whatever, and while I was doing that, he talked about his family—his father and grandfather, his love for his pregnant wife and unborn child, his struggle with the decision of whether to stay and fight for what's his or leave to protect his family—and by the end, I was thinking, "What a great mission!"
            Then I landed.

            What had started as a balls-and-dick-out, pedal to the metal action movie and resolved (or so I thought) into a relatively quiet moment of introspective character-building turned back into Rambo III. The Peggies were swarming Nick's property! They were going to kill his wife and burn down his house! HALP! So I got back to killing waves of cultists, made it through a checkpoint or two, and got killed just as Nick called me to defend the hangar. I respawned, hustled over to the hangar, and… nothing. There were no bad guys there, no Nick, no nothing. So I restarted at the checkpoint… nothing. I thought about restarting the game, but the flying part of the mission, lovely as it was, took a long time, and I didn't want to do it over. After about a half hour of fiddling, I gave up and went to bed frustrated (Michael Scott told me to tell you that that's what she said).

            I had already built up enough Resistance Points (I'd explain, but who cares) to take on the final battle with John Seed, so the next time I played, I bit the bullet, headed to Fall's End, and went to the church, where I was hit in the face with a rifle butt and treated to a five-minute cut scene. I awoke to find John Seed tattooing my sin, "WRATH," onto my chest. After he inks it onto a sinner, he cuts off the flesh with the tattoo, thus unburdening the sinner of their sin—easy peasey! He'd already completed the process with the local pastor, and I watched him do it to Nick Rye, whose sin was greed—because he didn't want the cult to steal his sole source of income, I guess?—but when he was about to do it to me, I grabbed the pistol the pastor had hidden in his Bible and shot off his ear. This led to another gun battle, after which I jumped into a truck's turret so that we could chase Seed down and kill him. I died in a rain of gunfire almost immediately, the game reloaded at the point just after I'd climbed into the turret, and…

            Nobody was around. No enemies, no NPCs, and nobody to drive the truck. I tried to get out of the truck, but I couldn't. I did a manual reload and ended up in the same place with the same problem. So I quit the game and started the mission over, which was when I discovered that the five minute cut scene of John Seed monologuing and cutting off people's skin is un-skippable. I used the extra time to fight the almost overwhelming urge to throw my Xbox in a fire, and I managed to get through that dog shit turret sequence without getting killed, which was when the game told me that John Seed was escaping in a plane and I had to shoot him down. My total experience flying planes to that point was the Nick Rye mission I couldn't finish (which'll become even more frustrating in a minute), but I got in a plane and took off, figuring, "How hard can it be?" After all, until this point in the middle of this mission, Far Cry 5 has never presented flying as anything but an optional activity, so it would be crazy to make this more difficult than, like, a 3 out of 10.

            It turns out that it's very hard.

            I got shot down again and again and again. I looked up strategies for the fight online and found that tons of other people were having the same issue, and that most people had gotten past it by calling in flying ace Nick Rye for assistance, which I couldn't do because the mission had bugged out. After literally an hour of this shit, I went to a gun store, put a grenade launcher in my inventory, let John Seed shoot me down, and then shot him from my parachute with a grenade. I hadn't tried this earlier because the game kept emphasizing that I had to shoot him down from another plane. But now, at least, one of the worst missions I've ever played in a triple-A game was over.

            WAIT, WHAT?

            John Seed also had a parachute, and he happened to parachute down right on top of his underground compound. "You have to kill him again!" the game told me. I landed in a crouch, snuck up behind him, and shot him with the grenade launcher, just to be sure. Success! Another cut scene! And now, it's finally—

            Oh, hey, there's more.

            John's "underground compound" was a repurposed missile silo, and now that I had his keycard, I had to go in and rescue another deputy. Working from the naïve assumption that the game's designers would recognize when it was time to leave well enough alone, I sprinted in like an asshole and got gunned down by the hundred faceless goons still hanging around. I respawned outside of the compound with the keycard in my hand, and all of John's guards up top respawned, too.

            Mother. Fuck.

            Over the next 346 hours (subjective time), I fought my way to the bowels of the missile silo to rescue the other deputy, fought my way back to the top of the missile silo to blow it up, fought my way through fire and explosions and waves of bad guys to get to a helicopter on the roof, and by the end my only satisfaction was that it was over.

            That there are persistent mission-breaking bugs in main missions on a console version of a triple-A game at all is incredible, let alone this many. Kirk Hamilton wrote an entire article about the turret bug, an article that was published on Kotaku, one of the highest profile gaming sites in the world, two weeks ago. How does nobody notice and fix that?

            But even without the bugs, that John Seed "boss fight"—and all the accompanying nonsense—was the worst. One of Far Cry 5's greatest strengths is the sandbox aspect, and even the parts that offer the illusion of freedom are basically on rails. I don't mind the story aspect. John seed is well-acted (by Detective The Irish One from Castle, as I discovered after the fact), and I find the Far Cry universe's style of pseudo-philosophical nonsense consistently entertaining, if not necessarily thought-provoking. The fact that I couldn't skip the cut scene after the first time fits what I'd expect from the people who create Far Cry's pseudo-philosophical nonsense, but when it's paired with the mission bugs it's almost unforgivable. Either this game was shipped before it was ready or there's a fundamental disconnect between the people making the game and the people playing it (or, going by what little I know about video game production in the 21^st century, probably some of both).

            As much as I like, even love, a lot of the component parts of the game, I understand the mixed reviews now. If the parachute/RPG gambit hadn't worked—had I not been lucky enough to have it work on the first try—I would have quit, and I don't think I would have gone back.

            Will this pattern of high highs and abysmal lows continue as I travel north into Jacob Seed's region? God, I hope not.

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe

            Deadpool (or I should say "a Deadpool," because this is definitely a What If…) is institutionalized, but the doctor providing his care turns out to be the Psycho Man, who breaks something in Deadpool's brain. Deadpool realizes, for reasons not revealed until the end of the story (but which are character-appropriate, and which I'm going to spoil later on), that it's his calling to kill all of the superheroes, supervillains, and cosmic entities in the Marvel Universe, so he does. There's more to it than that, but that's just the particulars, and if you're the type of person who's going to enjoy this story, the particulars are going to be your bread and butter. And if you're going to read it, you should go and do it, because I'm going to start spoiling things now.

            I'm not entirely sure why I don't like this more. Everything about it would seem to be up my alley: I like Deadpool, I like Cullen Bunn and Dalibor Talajic, and I like it when stories get meta, something Deadpool is a character uniquely suited for. Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe should be a home run for me, and it's more like a ground rule double. It reminds me—you're not going to believe this—of The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, is, in fact, the superior version of these very similar stories, but I think it ends up suffering from most of the same shortcomings.

            This is, for the most part, a dour, mean-spirited book. Deadpool skates around offing your favorite characters and being a dick as he does it. This works for the Punisher—or it fits the character, at least—but a big part of what makes Deadpool tick is his sense of humor. While he slings the occasional quip, the switch Psycho Man flips in Deadpool's head turns him grim n' gritty and immediately drains 90% of the fun out of the story. I feel like the title promised me a darkly funny cartoon—Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, if Elmer could die—but what I got was Ryan Reynolds as the Punisher.

            This ties in to another problem: it's way, way too easy. Just for instance: ¾ of the Fantastic Four die off-panel. How? I couldn't tell you, but if other scenes are any indication, Deadpool stabbed them to death with his swords. How'd he kill men made of rock and rubber and fire with swords? Couldn't tell you. The Invisible Woman explodes his head from the inside-out with a force field, which is the kind of thing you'd expect to see more of, but then she immediately turns her back on him to congratulate herself on a job well done, which is how he manages to stab to death a woman who can turn invisible and make force fields and fly.

            When we check in with Wolverine and his near-identical progeny, Deadpool has already defeated X-23 and Daken and strung them up in a room full of flamethrowers. "They can't be killed because of their healing factors," he reasons, "but they can't heal when they're on fire." But when Wolverine shows up 5 seconds later—Wolverine, who has the exact same power-set as X-23 and Daken, but is the original—Deadpool just kills him with a sword. There's slightly more to it than that: he identifies the sword as one of Marvel's made-up, magical alloys, Carbonadium, which "wreaks havoc on your healing factor." But if that's the case, why not just use that sword to kill the baby Wolverines? And Deadpool's only superpower is literally an off-brand knockoff of Wolverine's healing factor, so if it's that easy for him to kill 3 Wolverines, why is it so difficult for every other character in the universe, many of whom are super-strong or bulletproof or super-fast or able to control people's minds with the pheromones generated by their weird purple skin (just for instance), to kill Deadpool? There isn't much consistency to any of it, which makes most of the proceedings feel pretty meaningless.

            Deadpool does push the overarching metafictional plot forward a few inches when he kills Wolverine. He says, "Your mutant power isn't regeneration. It's popularity," implying that the real reason Wolverine can't die is because he's one of Marvel's most popular characters. That's kind of interesting, right? But again, Bunn doesn't do much of anything with it. Literally the next panel is Deadpool cutting off Wolverine's head off and saying, "I've got big plans, and all the popularity in the world can't save you this time!" Okay, sure, but why not?

            Yup! Couldn't tell you.

            There's a scene toward the end of The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe where all the surviving heroes and villains show up in a field somewhere, and basically say, "I thought you called me," and then the Punisher is like, "Ha-HA!" and a nuclear bomb goes off. I don't know the writer, Garth Ennis, I've never read an interview with him about this story, but I'm absolutely certain this scene came about when he sat down at his laptop one morning and said, "Shit! I'm running out of pages!"

            Similarly, toward the end of this story, Deadpool tricks the Punisher into killing the Puppet Master, then holds up a little clay man who's vaguely Galactus-shaped and says, "Puppet Master made me some special puppets." Next panel: Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Thanos, et al, all floating in space dead. I wasn't thinking about Thanos or Galactus until you brought them up, Cullen Bunn, and I don't think they really need to be in this book, but if you're going to include them, at least come up with something a little more compelling than, "… and then Deadpool murdered them all off panel." I don't mind a Deus Ex Machina, especially not in a story like this, but the Puppet Master? The greatest heroes in the world have been struggling and dying and sometimes even losing to Thanos and Galactus all these years, and all they needed to do was get the Puppet Master's help? The Puppet Master? The tiny, elfin man whose power is basically voodoo dolls? Really? Really?

            If it seems like I'm being too hard on Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, well, I am. I just see so much potential here, and quite a bit of it goes unrealized. When Deadpool reveals why he's killing everybody: he's always known that they're all characters in comic books, and he's come to understand that the fuel of fiction is its characters' suffering, so he is, in essence, mercy-killing every fictional character who ever existed, it breathes a bit of life back into the story. Because that's a great idea: not only specific to this kind of story, but in perfect keeping with Deadpool as a character, because other than being a blatant rip-off of Wolverine's powers and Deathstroke's everything else, Deadpool's big thing is breaking the fourth wall. And if you realize you and everyone you know are characters in a superhero comic, how can existential angst be far behind? Deadpool's hundreds of murders in this book can almost be framed heroically when you look at them from that perspective. The story just doesn't do enough with that, and I think that very serious and thoughtful underpinning is what drove the tone of the book from whimsical to relatively dour.

            The last few pages give us a glimpse of what might have been. Deadpool realizes that Marvel's comic book universe is actually a multiverse, and that it'd take him forever to kill every possible iteration of every character, so he travels to the "real world" and the offices of Marvel Comics. He finds cartoon versions of Bunn and Dalibor Talajic, both of whom take every opportunity to make fun of themselves (Talajic mostly draws himself as a pair of ill-fitting jeans and a buttcrack sticking in from the edges of the panels), along with the book's editor, Tom Brevoort, and Marvel EIC Axel Alonso, all of whom are hard at work on the very pages we're looking at. It's a little Metafiction 101, but it's fun and it doesn't take itself too seriously.

            There are multiple sequels to Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe (the next volume is Deadpool Killustrated, in which Deadpool takes it upon himself to murder the characters of classic literature), and I'm going to read them, because of all the potential I've mentioned, and because I bought them as part of a bundle on Comixology. I hope now that Bunn is warmed up he lets himself have a little more fun with the concept.

Morbius, the Living Vampire #1

            Originally a Spider-Man villain, Morbius was created in the early ‘70s, a decade famous for giving us forward-thinking and culturally sensitive characters like Luke Cage: Hero for Hire, Shang Chi: Master of Kung-Fu, Brother Voodoo: Exactly What He Sounds Like, and, of course, the Hypno Hustler. Morbius’s hook is that he looks like a vampire, he has a lot of the traditional powers and weaknesses of a vampire, and he drinks human blood for sustenance—but oh-ho-ho, he’s isn’t a vampire, not really. See, he was a doctor with a rare blood disease, and one day, when he was particularly desperate, he tried mixing electroshock therapy and vampire bats, and, well, there you go.

            So now you know:

VAMPIRE BATS

+

ELECTROCONVULSIVE THERAPY

+

DISCO

=

I'm probably being too hard on disco.

            He’s gross-looking, his traditional costume is a skintight jumpsuit with a plunging neckline and a giant, red collar, and that origin is a little too dumb, even for me. Over the years he’s bounced back and forth between tragic villain and dark, misunderstood hero, and I guess the pendulum is swinging back toward HERO! Although he doesn’t do anything particularly heroic in this issue. Or much of anything at all, really, but sit around eating stuff he picks out of the trash. But I’ll get to that.

            Last I remember seeing Morbius, he was revealed to be the secret seventh scientist at Horizon Labs, Peter Parker’s place of employment. As a result of the Lizard getting up to some nonsense and Morbius being really into drinking blood, Spider-Man ended up punching him in the face and sending him to the Raft. You know, the Raft—the prison for supervillains they constructed just off the New York coastline, despite the fact that they keep having these massive breakouts where all the supervillains escape and just kind of wash up on the beach in Manhattan? That Raft? This is going to come as a shock, but it seems there was some sort of a breakout!

That happened in another comic book, though—one I didn’t read. I assume some low-rent villain used a superpower in an unexpected way, then the lights went out and the warden said something like, “This is impossible! Our system was designed by an alternate Tony Stark from the year 2099! It has eight levels of redundancy!” and then the Purple Man made him eat his own face. Also: Morbius escaped.

He's in a hurry, he's super-agile, and he can fly, so he bends the turnstile. With his hands.

            This book actually opens with Morbius running around in a subway, fighting ‘80s street toughs straight out of Crocodile Dundee, before being shot in the chest with a shotgun, narrating “I WAS A LIVING VAMPIRE… NOW, I’M A DEAD MAN.”

Excluding that and the final page, it’s told in flashback, with the just-having-been-shot-in-the-chest Morbius continuing to narrate. Basically, he crawls out of the water in front of an unhoused old coot named Justin, who gives him some spare clothes and advises him to get out of New York. “What are you, a moron? You just broke out of super-prison, and all the superheroes live here,” Justin heavily implies.

All throughout, people see this, and they're like, "So, Michael! Are you a crackhead, or...?"

But Morbius says he can’t leave, not until he takes care of a few things, so Justin suggests that he hide out in Brownsville, which Wikipedia tells me is a historically poor and crime-ridden neighborhood in Brooklyn. Morbius bugs out to Brownsville—because I guess the Avengers don’t have anything better to do than round up Morbius, the Living Vampire—and, based on the next several pages, the things he needs to take care of in New York are: lurking in alleys, hanging out in a cemetery, and eating trash. But then, on day four of his self-imposed exile, he meets Noah St. Germain, the leader of Brownsville’s gang of 1980s-themed punks, and St. Germain punches and kicks him for a while.

And that’s pretty much it.

Okay, that's kind of funny.

On its basic merits—words and pictures, telling a story—it’s okay, I guess. The art’s kind of blah, and Richard Elson’s really bad at drawing clothes, but he draws backgrounds and conveys the action clearly, which is more than I can say for a lot of professional comics artists. There isn’t a lot to the story, but I always know what’s happening, and there are a few chuckles to be found. This is the kind of thing that gets shifted from an ongoing to an eight-issue to a five-issue series in its first two months, because you can do comics that are just okay, and you can do fringe characters, but you can’t do both at the same time. A couple thousand people will buy it because they’ve been obsessed with Morbius ever since Rise of the Midnight Sons—which just happened to come out when they were thirteen—and another couple thousand will buy it because they’re into what Keatinge’s doing on Glory, or they love Hell Yeah, and maybe Keatinge and Elson’s mothers will buy ten copies each to give to their neighbors, and then, having been outsold by Phantom Stranger for three consecutive months, Morbius, the Living Vampire will go gentle into that good night, having affected nothing and offended no one.

So here’s why it offends me.

UGH.

That “this isn’t just another vampire book” bullshit that permeates the entire endeavor, as if Joe Keatinge’s “street level” take is incredibly original and avant-garde*—it gives the impression that the creators are ashamed of their involvement. It’s awkward, it’s trite, and it’s unprofessional, really. As a reader, I shouldn’t be thinking about how much you are or aren’t into this gig at all, but since you're forcing me, I should be under the impression that you two are having your dreams come true right now, that getting to work on Morbius, the Living Vampire was your number one professional goal, and that having done so, you can now die happy. I am not under that impression. I’m under the impression that you’d both much rather be working on Daredevil.

Because street level, man, I don’t know. I can think of less appropriate directions for Morbius, but they’re, like, “Transport him to the world of Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham,” or, “Have him travel back in time and participate in a comedy of manners,” or, “Have him go to Japan and join up with teenagers who pilot mechs against giant monsters.”

If you think about it for a second, two of my three suggestions are actually better fits, and I was actively trying to fail.

Since I’m ranting, anyway, why is Michael Morbius, the middle-aged, originally from Greece, Nobel Prize winning, super-genius super-scientist running around in a hoodie and talking like a surly teenager? Why does no one he interacts with seem to notice that he’s chalk-white and has fangs and glowing red eyes? Why is Morbius staying in New York? What are the “things he has to take care of” that he’s putting off for eating garbage sandwiches and sleeping under dumpsters in Brownsville? Why is he eating sandwiches at all, for that matter? He’s a vampire. And come on, seriously, why do St. Germain and all of his thugs look like extras from Police Academy 2?

Watch out, Morbius! It's one of those New York criminal types!

But I’m getting carried away. Something about this book just irks me. For me, subjectively, it’s a D-. Objectively, though, I’d probably give it a C. It is competent, but unspectacular work on a character not many people know and even fewer care about.

In summation: Morbius, the Living Vampire is instant tapioca pudding.

* “Some of the worst monsters are human,” he said in an interview, presumably expecting to blow your mind.

I hate Katana #1

            Yeah, I don’t know what this is supposed to be, and I don’t know who it’s supposed to appeal to. The character’s been around for thirty years. Does she have a lot of fans? Birds of Prey fans? Is this another Twilight/Bieber moment? Will women and Japanese-Americans find that Katana really speaks to them, with its weaponized jewelry and the street in modern-day San Francisco where everything is like feudal Japan?

            Like I said, Katana is a character who’s been around since the early ‘80s, so named—you guessed it—because she carries a magic katana called the “Soultaker”, so named—you guessed it—because it was forged by a swordsmith named Murray Soultaker. Wait, no, I'm being told it’s because it "takes" people’s "souls" when it kills them. I’m not terribly familiar with her, to be honest, because she’s not a particularly prolific character. Until recently, her highest profile appearances have been as a member of the Outsiders, Batman’s “team of loners,” and otherwise, as far as I’ve noticed, DC mostly tends to bring her around when they’re being accused of publishing an entire line of comics made by and featuring nothing but white guys. *cough* LIKE RECENTLY *cough* *cough* Of course, she also took Robin’s place on the animated show, Beware the Batman, so maybe that was a motivating factor, although if that’s the case, a) the character in the comic looks nothing like her (much better designed) animated counterpart, and b) if kids crossing over from the cartoon are your target demo, maybe a bit less slavery and rapey sex dreams in a pool of blood?

Hey, kids!

            That’s just a suggestion.

            The book opens in media res, with Katana losing a fight to Coil, who—you guessed it—briefly replaced Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazard while John Schneider was renegotiating his contract. But also his sword is long and flexible—like a cross between a sword and a whip, I guess? Anyway, he binds her up in his “spiral sword” so he can give her a lecture about his men's rights activism. “Women,” he says, “belong in the kitchen.”

            I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the implication.

            Then we cut back to “A few days ago…” and Tatsu Toro, Katana’s civilian identity, going through San Francisco Customs. “Traveling for business or pleasure?” asks the Customs guy.

            “What’s the difference?” she says, in a manner totally at odds with her behavior and tone throughout most of the rest of the book.

Just sit back for a moment and revel in the incredible kineticism.

            Tatsu makes a beeline for Japantown and the aforementioned street where everyone dresses and acts and builds buildings like they’re in old-timey Japan. A drunk old man throws something at her, but she catches it and spikes it in his face. A woman rents her a room, and for an extra fee, agrees to let her use the secret space in the basement. Everyone speaks in pseudo-philosophical quips that are, I suppose, meant to make everything seem more weighty and mystical?

            Tatsu sets up in the basement, where she tries, and fails, to fight thirty-three table-legs, after which we get another of those silly, out of character remarks: “As the kids say: Epic fail,” as she is literally on her knees, cradling Soultaker and begging her dead husband for forgiveness.

Oh, Katana. You don't know the half of it.

            Then it’s time for the blood-drenched sex dream and then another page of creepy, oddly sexualized sword-cradling and forgiveness-begging. She spends two full pages getting dressed, making note of how each, individual piece of jewelry is lethal, and goes out to visit a tattooed, untouchable teenager who seems to be a slave. I mean, she isn’t specifically referred to as a slave, but she begs Tatsu to help her get away and her aunt (or, you know, owner) says she “isn’t for sale.” But Tatsu isn’t getting caught up in any of this slave business, she just wants to see the girl’s tattoo of Soultaker. Then, exactly one panel after the slave girl begs for her freedom, Tatsu goes for a stroll in the park.

Look at how sharp those hair-sticks are! Be careful, Katana!

            Where she is attacked! By the Sword Clan! She narrates how each individual piece of jewelry is taking down an opponent—which is helpful because not a single thing that’s happening is clear in the art—and is then restrained by Coil, which takes us back to the beginning. It turns out that she doesn’t even have to do anything to get free. His sword just breaks to pieces around her, because hers is better. Despite the fact that on our first viewing of this exchange Coil’s primary motivation seemed to be misogyny, this time he’s like, “Soultaker is dangerous! You have to join the Sword Clan so we can train you to control it!”

            Oh, and that’s a legitimate concern, because the sword is totally controlling her in the last few panels of their fight. But Katana says, “Never! I am a clan of one!”

            Blah blah, more pseudo-philosophical nonsense, and then:

What a cliffhanger!

            Katana was probably never going to be a best-seller, or even necessarily last more than twelve issues, but it was one of very few books published by DC with a non-white, non-male lead, and that made it significant, whether they wanted it to be or not. And this? The writing is all stilted dialogue and tired stereotypes. The art is super-stiff, way over-reliant on photo-reference, and much more importantly, always incredibly unclear.

            This is terrible. And it’s a shame.