The Walking Dead

I finished Compendium Two of The Walking Dead the same day I finished A Feast for Crows by George. R. R. Martin, which is the main reason for me being done with big epics for a few weeks (no hypocrisy in that sentence at all.)

It was worth it, though.  I mentioned before that I don’t care for zombies but I made exception with The Walking Dead after seeing a couple episodes from the third season.  They were doing something that hadn’t been attempted in a zombie story before and I was interested to see how this played out and came to be.  However, I did not want to take the time to start the TV series from the beginning.  There are other things I’d rather be doing (like writing this stupid review.)

But I was all too happy to read the comic books, which tell a different story than what the show does but still just as delightful.

It starts off like most zombie stories: end of the world, walking corpsicles, and lots of fear.  Plus, (and this is the strength of zombie yarns) forming a community that battles more within itself than without.

What this one does different—and because they have the space to do it—is turn it from your midnight horror, cabin-in-the-woods scenario and make it a true post-apocalyptic tale, where the main drama is not surviving the zombies, but creating a civilization that handles the undead the same way you handle other forces of nature, like hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes.  The zombies are just another natural threat that they are finally learning how to take care of and are building communities that can overcome that threat.  The zombies really aren’t the worst force out there but another obstacle in the grander drama of recreating civilization.  It’s powerful and moving and I can’t wait for the next volume.

I love how Rick never gives up.  Almost every idea he’s gets blown off the table and left him in a worse position than he was before, and yet he takes those failures and does it better next time.  He will rise and the rest of the survivors will follow and for good reason, because he puts himself on the line.  He never asks more from them than he’s willing to do himself, except maybe in love.

Speaking of which, I hope he stops being a wuss and hooks up with Andrea.  Those two are perfectly compatible, more so than his deceased wife and she would be a good mom for Carl.  Certainly, nobody would defend the kid with more fervor or ability in that harsh world.

Although if I’m going to be honest, there’s an evil side of me that wants to see Carl croak.  Not because I don’t like him; I like the boy a lot.  But this story is about Rick and I want to see whether he could rise above his son dying and continue to do the right thing—meaning make a better world, even though it’s one that his posterity will never get to see.  That would make him even more heroic than he is right now, and as it is, he’s way up there in fictional heroes.

Though I won’t complain if Carl lives either.  It would be fascinating to see how the rising generation lives in this world without any memories of the old.

Michonne is only going to get bitter, even more so, as time goes on.  Nobody could argue that one.

Abraham is going to take over the new community but I don’t know if that would be a bad thing.  By that point, I think Rick will be onto something even grander by then.  The story changed and reached for something much more.  Rick’s mantle will get heavier and Abraham’s new role may be the thing that helps lighten the load.  But we’ll see.  If the series goes on as long as I think it will, there will be plenty more time to put Rick through the meat grinder and I look forward to every painful moment.

As with all zombie stories, this one is incredibly gory.  Parents be warned, although, I think with horror, this ought to have been a given.

Titus

Sorry about no posts on Tuesday but it was New Year’s and I decided I didn’t care.  I was too busy enjoying my new subscription to Netflix and having a Family Guy marathon.  Anyways…

Christopher Titus might be the funniest comedian to come from the last decade, which sucks for him because bulk of the humor is derived from his horrible life.  Titus comes from a childhood where his alcoholic father went through five marriages, his mom was a murderous psychotic who committed suicide, his sister committed suicide, and his adulterous wife took two million dollars from him in the divorce.

I’ve known some screwed up folks who had less in life stacked against them.  They give up.  Not Titus.  He makes jokes about it and he makes us enjoy being in his company.

You can check out his stand-up comedy on YouTube, Netflix, and whatever else is out there.  However, I just got done watching his too-short lived TV show, Titus, based on his first stand-up Norman Rockwell is Bleeding.  If you watch the stand-up, it’ll be fun to see every joke make an appearance.  If you watch the show first, you’ll have no need to watch the stand-up.

The show follows Titus and a cast representing his girlfriend, step-brother, best friend, and father.  Some of the stories and situations are made-up, but not as many as you would think.  Every episode is based on something that really happened.

It’s all funny, from the ups-and-downs of his romance, his father’s distaste for wussies, to the bridge-jumping episode, I laughed so hard my sides hurt.

But what makes the show rise above his stand-up was Rachel Roth guest-starring as his girlfriend’s niece, Amy.  Rachel Roth is a gorgeous actress playing a teenager who deals with personal tragedies with stronger sarcasm and violence than Titus ever put into his.  The show up until then was really about his relationship to his father and how it did and didn’t work for them.  The moment that Amy moves into his home and he takes responsibility for raising her does the show find its heart.

The most important episodes of this show was seeing him take charge of this troubled and back-talking and backstabbing (sometimes with real stabbing) child come to trust her new guardians.  This parent-child show didn’t feel complete until Titus became a parent himself.  It’s a shame Amy never became more than a guest star.  I kind of wonder what would have happened had the show been allowed to run longer.

Les Miserables

Christmas was wonderful.  Family, presents, caroling, (more) family, sugar, sugar, cats, and sugar are all the key ingredients of any successful holiday and boy did we have all but one of those things.  But we made up for that one lacking ingredient by going to see Les Miserables.

Now, before I go any further, I want to give a heartfelt thank-you to everybody in the movie theater business.  Over the months that I’ve worked in retail, I understand how much working on holidays suck, and Christmas is the most important holiday in America.  This is the time when you want to recreate and be with your own families.  Instead, you have to be at the same smelly, messy, and boring job you deal with on every other day of the year, watching other families come in to recreate and rub it in your over-worked faces.  That sucks.  And yet, it’s such an invaluable service to the rest of us, because going to the movies on a holiday is a wonderful way to spend time together.  It certainly keeps us from fighting over the dinner table and throwing food at each other.  In a public place, we have to keep some semblance of culture and mannerisms and we have you to thank for it.

It means a huge amount as well when you consider that this was not only the best Christmas movie we could see that day, but it’s the most Christian movie to come out in years.

Horrible things happen in this story; really, the entire movie goes from one devastating tragedy to the next.  The start of the movie goes from the pains of Jean Valjean’s slavery and the pains of his parole, to Fantine having to sell her body in three different, brutal ways, the wantonness of the Thenardiers, the boy Gavroche’s death, and that horrible scene in the sewers.  These are hard things to watch, especially because in every case, the good guys never seem to come out on top.

Valjean loses the only family he has, the poor stay poor, those who fight for freedom or for their own child die, and the harsh culture never changes.  And yet, the whole time, I admire them for doing the right thing.  The sacrifices made are tragic and yet I root for every noble choice they make.  And the end of the film shouts out the message that it’s an eternal reward that they fought for and not something for the here and now.  Valjean’s core story is that he was bought by God and at the end of his life, he was not forgotten.

It’s the best movie I expect to come out in this decade.

Also, the music is fantastic and may have just burst the dam for musicals.  There are only ten lines spoken in the whole film.  Everything else is in song and the voices were strong enough to match the instruments.

But maybe the greatest success with this film is the cinematography.  From the opening shot, I was amazed at the depth of each background; not only does it look gorgeous but each set-piece conveys the emotion and sets the mood for each song.  The “Lovely Ladies” setting was marvelously hellish, and I really loved the white elephant and each shot at the barricades.  They were just how I imagined it when I read the book last year.

Merry Christmas!

No regular post today.  I just want to wish you all a very merry Christmas and hope that your time with family and loved ones is joyful and blessed.

Three Comics

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson was my favorite book as a kid and I was excited to recommend it to my book club last month.  The entire meeting was spent trashing it.

Which is fair.  It’s not the best crafted novel and I can see that now that I’m older and have considerable more experience in life and the post-apocalyptic tale.  Still, I was hoping that someone would at least like it.  I was hoping that at least they’d like Lisa, the heroine.  No such like, and I’m now hesitant to pick any books in the future.

Allow me to recommend here, however, the graphic novel adaptation titled (wait for it) The Girl Who Owned a City.  The art is cool; I’m kind of a fan of this new style comic artists have and drawing these square-faced kids.  It’s cute and has a striking presence.  But best of all, it eliminates all the problems in the novel (Lisa’s boring stories and weird things like what happened to the adults’ bodies.)

                    ***

Bill Willingham has branched out yet again in his Fables series with Fairest, a new series devoted to the female cast of Fables.  This honestly was needed.  There are a lot of women in the Fables series but except for Snow White, Rose Red, and Cinderella, very few of them take a front-row seat to the action.  So now we get a look at their lives.

With Volume 1, the majority of it is devoted to Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty.  This was fun because in it, Willingham finally wakes her up along with the Snow Queen, all thanks to Ali Baba.  It’s funny how true love is interpreted.  After all, in this series, Aurora has been kissed awake fifty times by true love’s first kiss.  Well, the kisses were true love, otherwise she wouldn’t have woken, but it’s never been lasting love otherwise she wouldn’t still be single by the end of the story.  (And by the way, I’m fine with that.  I love that thing’s worked out between Ali Baba and the Snow Queen.)

And the Imp is awesome.  I hope to see more of him in the future.

There’s a last little short story devoted to Beauty and her husband Beast.  She’s been given a much creepier backstory and there are some exciting possibilities for the future of Fables.

And the art, as always, is gorgeous.  Even with their worst stories (like the reprehensible Jack of Fables), their art has always been above and beyond.  I’m excited to see more of future volumes of Fairest.

                    ***

I usually don’t feel compelled to tout Marvel’s work, since anything they have will generally sell just by having their name attached to it.  But I need to say a word for Neil Gaiman’s 1602, which creates an origin story for Marvel’s superheroes if they were born in the sixteenth century.

You have the Fantastic Four, Peter Parker, the Avengers, and the original X-Men in medieval garb, living in Europe, traveling to the New World, and complete with an end-of-the-world situation.  It is a lot of fun and it even has heart.  I love how Peter remains a hero without any superpowers through the whole story.  And I am a huge fan of how the Fantastic Four were part of a mythology before making an appearance.  A lot of fun.

One Piece

I stopped watching the anime of Naruto because the manga remains so much farther ahead in story, but also because Naruto: Shippuden has gotten so bogged down in meaningless side storys, reinvented flashback, and recap episodes that it’s really frustrating to watch.

One Piece is the opposite.  I am very happy with watching the anime because, at least in the U.S. releases, it is farther along in story and doesn’t get bogged down by the random crap that’s in Naruto.

For those unaware, One Piece is about pirates in a fantasy world more unreal than anything they have in the Pirates of the Caribbean series.  The captain of the main crew, Luffy, has the same powers as Mr. Fantastic from Fantastic Four, only cooler.  His swordsman fights with a sword in both hands and one in his mouth.  There’s always somebody bursting into flame or turning into smoke or sand, or morphing into a bear or dog.  And then there are the dogs and animals that act like people.  And most of the villains are so ridiculously drawn that it’s hard to imagine them being at all a challenge to the heroes.

It all works.  There is plenty of comedy, but better, it also becomes highly emotional throughout.  There is deep, personal drama that grabs the heartstrings and stretches them so thin you think they could break.

Couple reasons I think this work: comedy helps us enjoy where we’re at but it also can make us care.  So when these people we care about are at risk, you feel the danger that much more acutely.  And the transition from comedy to serious and back again is much smoother to audiences from serious drama to comedy and back again.  This latter thing does not sit well with most adult audiences.  We can enjoy humor in a drama, but it has to be kept at bay to lighten the mood.  But stories that begin with comedy can have equal amounts of both without feeling like you’re screwing with the audience.

The other reason I find this works is the separation between Luffy’s crew and the rest of the world.  It’s hard to distinguish this line until near the end of the “East Blue” arc when Luffy battles the pirate Arlong.  Arlong has had this village captured for years.  He tortures, he kills, he robs, lies, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  He has grandiose plans to start taking more land.  He hopes to create a comprehensive map of the world in which to take over all the known seas.  All noble reasons for Luffy to fight him.  That’s not why Luffy gets involved.  He doesn’t understand most of what’s going on and couldn’t care about the stuff that he does.  He gets into the fight because Arlong made his crewmember Nami cry.

That is what makes this series so good.  Luffy and his crew constantly get involved in national crises and nasty wars with world governments.  Inevitably, they’re on the right side but their story is separate.  The “Baroque Works” arc, an entire nation is at risk but Luffy doesn’t get involved to uphold a principle or to gain a reward.  He fights because his friend Vivi is going to die if he doesn’t.  “Water Seven” arc, he declares a war on the whole world because they captured one of his crewmembers, and one that his people didn’t even know they could trust.

“Impel Down” arc ended an entire era and Luffy is the cause of it, but that the war needed to be fought isn’t on his mind.  He just wants to save his brother.

In the end, it’s these two stories rubbing against each other that give it its power: the personal crises and hilarities of Luffy’s crew and the turmoil and intrigues of the world at large rubbing against each other helps maintain both the depth of the drama and the continued comedy going strong years after the manga was first published.  There is a reason this is the number one manga in the world today.

I think it speaks some truth about life.  How much of the world is affected because of the actions of a few?  Do the leaders and movers and shakers always intend to shape history, or do they just fight for their own personal desires and relationships with such fervor that the world bends itself around those simple things?  It’s something to ponder on.

To Connecticut

I highly doubt that any of the families or others involved with today’s massacre in Connecticut will ever read this, but I still want to say how sorry I am that this happened to your children.  I truly thought that we were moving past these horrendous school shootings but now it only seems to be getting worse.  My thoughts and prayers are with you, and may God and your loved ones comfort you now and through the many days to come while you grieve.