"Superman Showcase"

This week I've been reading the DC SUPERMAN SHOWCASE thing, 500 pages of 1959 Superman stories in B&W for $10. Great value.

This is pretty much my first exposure to this kind of stuff, and it's pretty bizarre to someone who grew up reading Marvels and EC Comics and barely ever touched a DC story.

It's a great example of comics designed for 8-year-olds, with the simple plots and hokey emotions and science. Different than the Marvels which would come a few years later, aimed at teenagers.

One of the interesting things is that they seem to understand in these stories what to do with a character who is invulnerable and invincible. In the whole 500 pages, there are three or four super-villains. There's one Braniac, one Metallo, two Bizarro stories and two Luthor stories. (He wasn't "Lex Luthor", he was just "Luthor". When did he become "Lex"?)

Most of the stories are imaginary stories, practical jokes, or elaborate hoaxes designed to fool a criminal or a mob boss into foiling their own schemes. Superman spends most of his time stopping natural disasters, helping people perform vast engineering projects, or doing showcases of his powers for charity.

They realize that there's very little point in just having two guys fight, when one of them can't be defeated and can't be hurt. There's lots of kryptonite of course to add challenge, but it's relatively rarely used by a villain directly against Superman. Most of the time it's either by accident, or a freak of nature of something.

It was a great introduction to someone who's not really interested in modern superhero comics. I've studied the history of Marvel books and I have a couple of the DC Archives from the 30's and 40's origins of Batman, but I'd never read this much 50's Superman before.

Jeff

"Domino"

"Domino" is a mess, but it's a wild, ambitious, aggressive, silly and entertaining mess. Which is a lot more than I can say for most movies, so I recommend it to viewers who don't take things too seriously.

Based roughly on the real life of Domino Harvey, model, bounty hunter and daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, it stars Keira Knightley as the most blisteringly gorgeous bounty hunter who ever lived. She's constantly smoking, sneering and basically trying her cute little darndest to convince us that she's a hardcore chick with contempt for the world who will break your nose just as soon as look at you. Most of the time she succeeds.

After growing up wealthy and pampered, Domino tries her hand at Beverly Hills high school, college and sororities and supermodeling, but she can't avoid her deep-seated need to be tattooed and yell at people. So she joins up with veteran soldier Ed Moseby and loco Latino Choco, and they become an inseparable trio of hunters. They get involved in a reality TV series presented by celebrity hosts, while simultaneously carrying out an ill-conceived and confusing armored car heist that gets them in trouble with the mob and a rich old guy played by Dabney Coleman.

The story is drenched in visual style, which won't appeal to everyone, but I dig it the most. I'd much rather a movie LOOK interesting than have the same old lighting and camerawork as every other film. Unusual color treatments, different film stocks, inset frames, titles and dialogue written on the screen, are all part of the toolbox of filmmakers and I personally would rather see them used more. Director Tony Scott here throws them all at the screen to see what sticks, and I found it pretty effective.

If you've got a sense of humor and can see the appeal of watching Keira Knightley trade lap dances for bounty locations, get naked on mescalin, sneer, blow smoke and break the nose of Brian Austin Green from Beverly Hills 90210, then check out "Domino". :)

Jeff

// EXTERMINUS //

by Kieron Gillen and Charity Larrison. This is terrific, very weird stuff. Check it out.

Jeff

The Grandaddy of the outerspace blues fable

Well, I'll be damned. Jeff Coleman and Stephen Greenwood-Hyde are serializing Spark Tower Wilson's Silent Song at webcomicsnation.

This comic is incredible. Give it a few weeks, until they've got enough pages up so that you're actually reading something, and then go show it all the love you can.

Discovered Dan Carroll mentioned us on his blog. For those who don't know, Dan Carroll was the inspiration behind "Spark-Tower Wilson's Silent Song" in the first place. He ran a webcomics site called "E-volution", and recruited us to do an original story for it. We brainstormed something unique for the web and came up with "Spark-Tower" as a result. So for that, thanks Dan!

Jeff

Influences

On The Engine, the subject of influences came up and Warren Ellis asked creators to list their five top influences.

Here's mine:


Alfred Hitchcock


Dave Sim


Rumiko Takahashi


Liu Chia-Liang


Alan Moore

Jeff