The Twilight Saga, Eclipse (2010)
“Bella, would you please stop trying to take your clothes off?” (Edward Cullen)
Zombos Says: Good (but you better be a romantic at heart)
“Well, if you must you must, but be prepared for the worst,” said Zombos, shaking his head in dismay.
“Look, I’m a reviewer, that’s what I do. This is just another movie to critique.” I folded my arms with certainty. But I didn’t feel certain.
“Another movie? Really? Die hard horror fans will have your hide piecemeal. Perhaps it would be better if you mentioned Zimba forced you to see it. Even better, put her name to this so-called review to play safe.” Zombos reached for his cordial and smugly sipped it.
“Zimba didn’t force me to see it, nor am I a mouse. Would Roger Ebert wince at reviewing this movie? Well, maybe while watching it, but I know he’d never falter at reviewing it. He isn’t a mouse either.” I reached for my cordial, forgetting I didn’t have one. I shook off the faux pas and regained my composure. But I wished I had had a cordial to smugly sip from.
Dash it all, I wish I were as certain about writing this review as Bella (Kristen Stewart) is in her love for Edward (Robert Pattinson). Wait a minute, she isn’t all that certain, now that I think of it. She’s gone and fallen in love with Jacob (Taylor Lautner), too. Oh bother, why can’t she make up her mind? She says she’s more in love with Edward. He’s certainly in love with her. Much of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is devoted to Edward and Bella’s concern over their upcoming nuptials and her turning into a vampire. With Jacob it would be simpler; no bloodletting necessary, just an occasional rinse and shampoo and combing to get the knots out: werewolf hair can get very knotty, especially when you’re as big as Jacob gets when he changes into one. I wish the CGI were better, though, to highlight his wonderful coat of bristling hair. They could certainly spend the money they save on his wardrobe–he rarely wears a shirt in this movie–and the special effects are light on gore and blood–blood for God’s sakes–in a vampire movie you’d expect more of that.
“You’re meandering,” said Zombos, reading over my shoulder. I really hate when he does that. I refocused.
Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard this time around), still carrying a grudge, begins raising an army of newborns–stronger and feistier fresh vampires–with the help of Riley (Xavier Samuel) to kill Bella. Now into three movies and it’s still all about Bella; her needs, her desires–
Zombos cleared his throat. I refocused. Again.
The Cullens (vampires) and the Quileute clan (werewolves) form a shaky alliance to battle the newborns and thwart Victoria’s plans. Members of the Volturi, led by Jane (Dakota Fanning), watch and wait, apparently up to something but I’m not sure what that might be. Jane can throttle you with her mind so she’s a formidable annoyance to avoid offending. Now, getting back to “feistier,” Bella wants to do more than just kiss Edward, but he’s all for abstinence before marriage. Sexuality, a recurring theme in all vampire movies and novels is nonrecurring here. There is passion, but it’s tepid in comparison to the boiling friskiness shown by Bela Lugosi’s or Christopher Lee’s or Frank Langella’s Dracula. I’m not sure about Jack Palance’s Dracula, but I’ll mention him also just in case.
Preparation for the impending battle with the newborns is guided by Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), who has faced a similar situation before. He knows how terribly destructive they can be. He tells Bella all about his past sins, and in doing so, Rathbone becomes one of the more interesting characters in this romance-heavy, horror-lite movie. The resulting battle between newborns, seasoned vampires, and werewolves is also bloodless, with vampires being broken apart, like statuary, onscreen, or mauled out of sight.
Most horror fans will balk (quite vociferously, too) at the bloodless and sun-walking vampires, and the large, but comely, werewolves in The Twilight Saga, but let’s face it, horror is not at the heart of this series: it’s the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob. Where many horror movies devote a multitude of endlessly spraying, bloodletting moments to butchering far friskier (and dumber) teenagers, The Twilight Saga devotes its time to Bella, mostly, and what she’s going to do about Edward and Jacob. More time is spent with Edward and Jacob discussing what they think Bella should be doing with them. And the remaining time is spent with somebody, somewhere, trying to kill her, which gets everybody involved in keeping her safe. Which is lucky for us; if no one wanted to kill her, this would be a very boring series indeed.
It’s a wonder they haven’t just turned her into a vampire already so she could protect herself for a change. Maybe we’ll see that in the next movie. It would be cool if she’d become a vamp-wolf or something like that, but that would sideline the romance a bit much. But it would be cool to see.
Graphic Book Review: The Strange Adventures
of H. P. Lovecraft
But now, a third alternative reveals itself. A harrowing possibility that I, more than anyone, should have considered! My night's wicked reveries conjure monsters. And if I sleep–Providence dies.
Zombos Says: Very Good
Madness wags the tail of Lovecraft's fiction. No reason it shouldn't since it dogged him every day of his life. But there are many forms of madness, though each one eventually distills into one consummate abyss surrounded only by the boundaries of chaos. Not benign, nor reticent, nor remorseful is the journey to this abyss, and shadows of malevolence dot its rim, poking furtively into consciousness, just enough to chill the bone and heat the blood.
Such is Lovecraft's legacy to fantastic literature: he gives us the briefest of glimpses into that awful abyss, which leaves a taste like salt sucked after the bitterest glassful of Tequila spirit is downed with a chewy biteful of the thickest worm. But the worm is only in your imagination, of course. Con gusano is a myth perpetuated for the gringos who don't know the difference between Tequila and Mezcal. But myth can be powerful, nonetheless, especially when cosmic in scale, yet kept personal in the telling.
The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft issues 1 through 4 are collected in Image Comics trade paperback. Written by Mac Carter and drawn by Tony Salmons, Howard Philips Lovecraft becomes his own haunter of the darkness, shaded over by his spiritual dissolution, doted over by his two perpetually tipsy aunts, weakened by his mentally-deranged parents, and nearing a void in his life ready to trip him into that abyss. Of course this is the imagined Howard Philips Lovecraft, the fictional one who unwittingly becomes the Gate, the reluctant welcoming committee and tour guide par excellence for those Others, the Ones patiently waiting at the rim of the abyss to return insanity and chaos to its proper place in the cosmos. Their cosmos.
Carter keeps it all very personal for Lovecraft. Howard has writer's block big time, but his volatile dreams betray his inmost desires, the ones he can't seem to man up to during his waking hours. This bottling up becomes his uncorked genii at night, speeding off on more than ethereal wings, and soon the people of Providence–the ones he can't seem to get along with all that well–are madly stroked into Picasso paintings colored in chaos.
Being an underground artist, Salmons doesn't quite capture the flux of unreality, the melting of sanity, or the horrors-beyond-time as morphologically lucid as I'd like, but between Carter's narrative for Howard's plight and the repercussions of his cosmic gate-keeping, there is a symbiosis of intent between Carter and Salmons that realizes the action more than adequately. The frantic elucidation of the Necronomicon's influence on Howard's fragile mind, the subtle murmurings from its long dead compiler goading him on (the opening pages in issue 1 are some of the best in the series), and his psychological instability converge into a fast-paced tale of terror that makes it all very personal for Lovecraft and us.
The Last Airbender (2010)
Gasping For Air
Zombos Says: Fair (watch the animated series instead)
When everyone kept mispronouncing Aang’s name in The Last Airbender I realized M. Night Shyamalan was holding true to form, which means once again he exhibits his propensity toward ponderous, preachy, hubris-driven moviemaking. It’s the kind of moviemaking that comes from writing and directing inwardly for one’s self and not outwardly to others. George Lucas is the king of hubris-driven moviemaking (the best episode in the Star Wars series, The Empire Strikes Back, was not directed or scripted by him). I now crown Shyamalan the prince and heir apparent.
The Last Airbender (really Avatar: The Last Airbender, but possible confusion with James Cameron’s Avatar led to “Avatar” being dropped from the movie’s title) is based on an American anime series filled with engaging, colorful characters living in a mystical world divided into Four Nations according to the four elements of Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. These nations include the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Within each of them are gifted individuals who can manipulate the natural element of their nation using martial arts-like movements: they are called Airbenders, Earthbenders, Waterbenders, and Firebenders respectively.
Keeping a peaceful balance between each Nation is the Avatar, a person who’s been reincarnated many times and the only one who has the ability to bend all four elements with mind-blowing power when his (or her) Avatar Spirit state is awakened. When the Avatar goes missing, the Fire Nation conducts a military campaign to subjugate the Water and Earth Nations. Fearing the reincarnation of the Avatar within the Air Nation, Fire Lord Sozin has it destroyed and its people killed. The series ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon. Shyamalan begins with Book One: Water from Season One, when the Avatar, missing for 100 hundred years, returns to stop the Fire Nation and restore harmony to the world.
Young Aang (Noah Ringer) is the Avatar. Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern Water Tribe free him from a ball of ice, where he’s been trapped in suspended animation, protected by his Avatar Spirit state after getting caught in a tumultuous storm. Katara and Sokka, after a long-winded and unnecessary explanation of the spiritual nature of their world and the significance of the Avatar, accompany Aang on his quest to learn manipulation of Water, Earth, and Fire in preparation for fighting the Fire Nation. Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), ostracized and disfigured by his tyrannical father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis), for speaking out of turn, is obsessed with restoring his father’s approval by capturing the Avatar.
What makes the animated series endearing, charming, and just plain groovy fun to watch is the interplay between its characters, their humor mixed with serious situations, and the overriding spirituality—a mix of 1960s Psychedelic Movement, Eastern Religions, and New Age riffing—that imbues its story with
purpose and contextual sensibility. The combination of American cartoon and anime styles creates a unique visual playfulness and verve that is never overly
dark in tone or preposterous in its unfolding. None of these endearing qualities made it into this live-action movie, which is ponderous to tears and burdened with tedious voice-over explanations and lengthy exposition crumpling the sparkling creativity of the animated series.
Shyamalan’s casting choices do not fit their animated counterparts well at all. Acting ranges from wooden to pretentious: Katara is a smart, confident, go-getter in the anime; here she’s awkward, uncertain, and burdened with clumsy dialog; Sokka, lighthearted and Jim Carrey-styled improvisational in the anime is rendered here broodingly serious and a killjoy; Aang, the pivotal character who’s aangst over facing his Avatar responsibilities and his fear of causing harm through his unbridled anger when in the Avatar state providing room for emotional growth in the anime, tempered by his boyish spirit of adventure, can’t muster a strong presence here. Look at any still picture of Noah Ringer as Aang and you will see no chi energy emanating from his posturing. He has the Avatar tattoos and glider staff but that’s all. Appa is a big fuzzy plush toy of flying bison perfection (Aang rides him through the clouds), but we don’t see much interaction between Aang and his cherished Appa, although they are practically inseparable in the anime.
The showdown between the Fire Nation’s armada of ash-belching ships and the Northern Water Tribe is rendered incomprehensible for anyone who hasn’t seen the animated series, and near gibberish for those who have.
The movie is missing important bridging scenes for what eventually wound up onscreen and a key dynamic of Aang’s involvement, a more plausible reason for why he traveled to the Northern Water Tribe in the first place, is pushed to the side. Shyamalan’s insistence on drawn-out movements to bend anything
exaggerates those motions to absurdity, and his action-stopping slow-motion overuse during battle scenes undermines their intensity and suspense. When Aang finally enters his Avatar state to combat the armada, this live-action confrontation appears anti-climactic when compared to the similar animated
sequence, where his destructive power is rendered more awesomely than shown here. The movie’s texture is dark with bright colors muted. Even the flares of fire are dull and lifeless, and do not convey a sense of heat. Critics have noted the retro-fitted 3D version is even darker. I watched the 2D version and it is
pretty murky.
As a fan of the anime series I’m disappointed in this confused, overly complicated, and pedantic adaptation. As a movie critic I can say that for a movie version of the anime’s spiritual journey, one filled with wonder and energy, this first movie in a potential series does little to emotionally involve us and gives even less to wonder at.
Unless you’re wondering what I’m wondering—and it’s not to find a duck and a hose at a 7 Eleven—I’m wondering how a heavy-handed director, with a lately spotty track record, is given a movie that requires a touch as light as air.
That’s what I’m wondering.
Professor Kinema’s
Horror Hosts In Magazines
By Professor Kinema (Jim Knusch)
In the ‘golden age’- the late 1950s and early 1960s- of monster fandom a lot was happening. A generation weaned on television and made fearful of the evils of communism and the reality of nuclear war was coming of age. That is, they were into their teens. Both the USA and Great Britain began to resurrect (in more ways than one) and breathe a new life into many of these classic monsters in updated productions for the big screen. These new offerings were embellished with color and gore. Life magazine of Nov 11, 1957 featured a two page spread promoting new and upcoming horror and sci-fi releases from American-International Pictures. Big screen horror and monsters were in. Vintage horror movies, especially of the 1930s, were finding a welcome audience on the tube. This acceptance was so strong that it led to a repackaging of select titles being syndicated and offered weekly under the title of SHOCK! The SHOCK! TV package was seen in some areas as SHOCK THEATRE, NIGHTMARE and HOUSE OF HORROR. As was suggested by the SHOCK! promo book, some of these were hosted locally by bizarre personalities. These personalities in themselves became phenomenally popular. This was evidenced by major pictorial articles in national magazines, hundreds of fan clubs, the marketing of premiums and-most importantly-high TV ratings. To the teenage fan caught up in all of this a trip to the local newsstand would result in the purchase of a comic book, a humor magazine or an occasional ‘Tales of the Crypt’- type of periodical that was somewhere in between a comic book and pulp magazine. By 1958 something new was added to the racks; the Monster Magazine.
…
Graphic Book Review: Sweet Tooth, Out of the Deep Woods
Zombos Says: Very Good
Desolation. Uncivilized behavior. Freaky mutations. Must be the post-apocalypse in Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth comic series, with the first five issues, Out of the Deep Woods, collected into Vertigo's trade paperback.
There's more: Gus, who sticks out like a sore thumb with his deer-like antlers and ears; a mysterious stranger, called Jepperd, who rescues Gus from hunters looking for reverse-anthropomorphic mutated kids like Gus; and the "affliction," or plague, or major nasty event that's reduced the human population to a few nasty adult survivors with basic ulterior motives like staying alive at all costs and against all odds.
Raised by his Bible-reading father, Gus must leave the safety found in the
woods he's known all his life. As he travels to a sanctuary with Jepperd, a two-fisted,
tough as oak and emotionally as thick-skinned man with a bagful of candy and a
secret, Gus learns more about the world outside and eventually meets other mutated kids showing different animal characteristics.
There's still more: Gus is nine years old. The affliction started seven years ago. So how can he be affected by mutation before the world was sent to places deep south by the contagion? It's a puzzle that Lemire assembles his minimalist but expressive panels around, showing closeups of Gus and the desperate people he meets reacting to each other and the near overwhelming loss surrounding them–and within them. Gus' innocence and naivete, the adults' complicity and duplicity, and the inevitable conflict between the two are dramatically visualized by Lemire with carefully paced and sequenced scenes and sparse narrative and dialog.
I almost passed this one up. I thought the antler-kid story too cute and indie-artsy based on the first issue's cover. I was wrong. It's about self-discovery, overcoming one's fear, and struggling through desperation. It will keep you reading to discover, along with Gus, what the Hell happened, why, and where more candy bars might be found.
Jonah Hex (2010)
The Spell is Broken
Zombos Says: Fair (read the comic series instead)
I miss Doctor Miguelito Quixote Loveless (Michael Dunn), the diminutive villain with grand schemes on the 1960s television series The Wild Wild West. He was a villain to reckon with, one far above John Malkovich’s burlap sack portrayal of renegade madman Quentin Turnbull in Jonah Hex. Loveless devoted his creatively criminal and misguided scientific genius to endless schemes embellished with his weapons of mass destruction, gleefully challenging government agent James West to stop him each time they crossed paths.
Paths are crossed in Jonah Hex, but they don’t seem to head in any sensible direction. They meander around with the artlessness of that silly Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith, then saunter a well-trod vengeance trail much like The Outlaw Josey Whales, and finally stop plumb cold at the usual quest-between-mundane-here and mystical-there with less force than The Crow.
A weapon of mass destruction, created by Eli Whitney no less, figures prominently. They always do. Mysterious glowing balls of fire provide the triggering mechanism for larger balls of fiery, explosive material. Turnbull does a dry run of the weapon’s capabilities by blowing up a small town just after church services. He threatens to blow up the nation’s capital on the centennial celebration for July 4th. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) conscripts Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) into hunting down Turnbull and ending the madman’s grand scheme. The bad blood between Hex and Turnbull goes back aways: Turnbull killed Hex’s family in retribution for Hex causing the death of his son.
Something truly weird happens in this movie and I’m not referring to Megan Fox.
Yet.
A flashback done in comic book format explains, sort of, how the Indians helped Hex survive to become the I-talk-to-the-dead-bounty-hunter-badass wanted by the law. Watching the colorful but limited animation (it brought to mind those Marvel Super Heroes cartoons in the 1960s) I wondered Did they run out of budget? Was this movie originally planned as animation? Why suddenly eschew perfectly good live action for a graphic novel on screen? Why not pepper this lengthy backstory as flashbacks throughout this leisurely-paced movie to make it less onerous?
I thought about this until “I don’t play house” Lilah (Megan Fox) and Hex hook up for a bedtime social visit. Then I started thinking Why is she in this movie? Beauty to his ugliness? She doesn’t have much to do, or much to say, or much to act on. Brolin has even less to work with, but he does have a nifty ability to talk to the dead. He just grabs hold of a moldy corpse and it springs to life. But he needs to talk fast because the fresher the corpse, the faster it starts to immolate into ashes. Aside from Hex’s orneriness, this appears to be his best and only mystical ability.
Red-tinted fever-dream flashes of him fighting Turnbull around a coffin with a crow sitting on its lid are the only other mystical touches. They don’t make sense, but touches they remain. Eventually Hex talks to enough dead people to find Turnbull. Before he meets his nemesis, he stocks up on the usual badass tricky gunnage that can deliver high explosive impact and flailing bodies flying asunder with minimal effort. He gets it from this movie’s equivalent of James West’s gadget-buddy Artemus Gordon.
Hex and Turnbull and Lilah square-off on an ironclad ship in Independence Harbor as it speeds toward the capital with its deadly weapon preparing to fire. Union soldiers pull up alongside in their version of the ironclad Monitor and ask Turnbull to kindly surrender his weapon of mass destruction and stop being such a damn nuisance. While they wait for his reply, he locks and loads and blows them out of the water in a shower of little ironclad pieces. I was hoping for a better reenactment of the Battle of Hampdon Roads.
The one thing they got right in this movie is when Hex whistles for his horse to come to him.
At least his horse knows what to do..
Splice (2009)
Missing Some Genes
Zombos Says: Good (but should have been better)
The Frankenstein brothers had it easier back in the day: just rob a few graves, swap a brain or two, dodge the villagers, and they were good to go. For Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody), two scientists splicing genetic material for the pharmaceutical company funding them it’s harder: they need to quickly come up with a profitable benefit from their work for the company’s board of directors while avoiding using human DNA in the process to help. There’s all that messy ethical, moral, legal, and congressional-folk just itching to light those political-torches falderol if they give into temptation and cut that corner by doing so. But temptation is the bread and butter of horror, of course, and giving in to it is where Splice begins.
The movie cuts some corners also. It’s not quite a horror movie, though we do have a metamorphic monster; it’s not quite a character study, though there are glimpses into Elsa’s troubled family life; and it’s not quite a panoply for all those ethical, philosophical, and legal issues waiting to pounce when manipulations, creations, and terminations of human substance are involved; though fragments of this triplet codon are to be found here. This leaves Splice‘s horror and dramatic genes only partially joined, spread apart by inadequate dialog (thankfully devoid of too much scientific jargon) and a story that neither emphasizes its philosophical dilemmas or craftily avoids them, nor terrorizes us with their details.
…
Universal Monsters Iron-On Transfers
These are copyright 1992 from Joy Insignia, Inc. and Troll Company (although the graphics show 1991). I picked them up from eBay a while back, when eBay was still an enjoyable place to find interesting monster collectibles.
Not quite as stylish and colorful as the Mani-Yak iron-on transfers, but still worth adorning your t-shirt to strut around a horror convention or two. Click each one for a larger image.
[REC] 2 (2009) Divinely Horrific
If Prince of Darkness married The Exorcist and they conceived a bouncing bundle of terror while watching Bava’s Demons, its name would be [REC] 2.
Zombos Says: Very Good
[Rec] 2 picks up immediately where [REC] left us, only this time we are with a 4-man SWAT team waiting to escort another Ministry of Health official, Dr. Owen (Jonathan Mellor), into the locked-down building. Only he knows more than they do.
With one skittish hand-held camera and three helmet minicams worn by the heavily armed police, directors Balaguero and Plaza criss-cross the action across apartments and up and down the stairwell with reckless abandon, informing us and terrifying us with what we fully see, partially see, and don’t see.
Under Dr. Owen’s insistence they head to the attic, stepping over pools of blood as they climb the staircase, guns poised. When they reach the attic, he tells them to record everything, including the newspaper clippings taped to the walls. A frightened voice played from a reel to reel tape recorder hints at an experiment gone out of control. Distant screams prompt an argument when the police want to investigate and Dr. Owen tells them not to. Over the doctor’s protests and warnings, Martos heads down the staircase and enters one of the apartments. We see what he sees as his helmet minicam switches on. What he sees in the dim light rushes towards him with ill-intent, leaving his helmet on the floor and him fighting for his life. They rush to his aid but it’s too late–“He was fine a couple of minutes ago. What kind of a virus does that?”–He’s now infected and attacks them. Dr. Owen stops the attack in an unexpected way and they lock Martos in another room.
How the doctor did it leads to an explanation for what is going on, who lived in the attic apartment, and why they must return there to find a potential cure. The police officers are incredulous and fraying at the seems by the minute. The infected tenants want to pry those seems apart even more. Patient Zero, hinted at in the last minutes of [REC], is also in the attic. Only they need to figure out how to find her…And she’s not alone…And the old reliable gimmick of using an air duct big enough for an elephant to fit through is used for a scare. At least it’s grimy like it should be and the scare is worth it.
[REC] 2 is an old school horror show dressed up with enough exuberantly creative point of view camerawork to keep you dizzy and jumpy at the same time. Unlike its Americanized version, Quarantine, which resorts to a more “plausible” terrorist-weapon plot line to explain the source of contagion, [REC] 2 unabashedly returns to the roots of cinematic horror to overwhelm the apartment building’s tenants with a supernatural malevolence that will not be stopped. By kicking old school for their modus operandi, while playing with our perspective to the point of disorientation, [REC] 2 maintains a freshness and exhilaration that many American horror movie sequels fail to do.
Better keep the popcorn and soda safely cradled while you watch this movie and your seatbelt fastened at all times. It’s a bumpy-in-the-night ride, the ending of which leaves [REC] 3 a strong possibility. And if that happens I’m definitely taking Dramamine before I see it.
Comic Book Review: The Littlest Zombie 1
This is part of what makes it hard to get food now. All of the slow, unarmed survivors have already been eaten.
Zombos Says: Good
Fred Perry's plucky undead kid in The Littlest Zombie (from Antarctic Press) is beset by life's–rather, I should say–undead's challenges of finding food in a world with no Stop and Shops but lots of bigger-sized, and often unsatisfied, consumers competing for scraps of fresh brains and sinewy limbs still flailing.
Issue 1 brings frantically struggling paramilitary survivors and patiently struggling zombies together, and the little fellow smack dab in the middle looking for a leg up, or just about any other body part he can sink his rotting teeth in to. His main challenge this time around is one very large zombie that illustrates the when-he-sits-around-the-house joke quite well. The squabbling living folk use him for a door stopper to keep the horde of onlookers away while they fight among themselves. The living's social disorder is hinted at when mention is made of slavers and marauders, and the final decision to sell out others in order to stay off the menu. Perry only gives us hints of how the living are making do with scant resources, but this may indicate he has a grander scheme in mind for future stories. Perry's art is light-hearted but detailed enough to play off the usual tropes of zombiedom's nastier habits. It's a shame he only has black and white to work with, although he makes more than adequate use of it. Color and zombies make a better match graphically. Nothing says putrescence like green and ochre.
Perry's morality play approach makes his little fellow appealing, and deceptively less threatening then his adult brethren, but also keeps him feisty and hungry enough to stay zombie cute enough for a plush toy.
Comic Book Review: Turf 1, The Fangs of New York
Zombos Says: Good (in spite of poor page layout)
If you've ever read a Classics Illustrated comic you're familiar with how the artwork is accompanied by large blocks of narrative and copious balloons of dialog in each panel. By today's standards those comics appear too wordy, but these are literary classics that were transferred to a medium their authors didn't normally worry about. To compensate, the panel layouts were carefully designed to accommodate art and text so neither overpowered the other.
Image Comics' Turf issue 1 is like reading a Classics Illustrated story, but without that careful planning of art and text layout. This gives the impression the artwork was done first, then narrative and dialog text were slapped on top, creating an awkward, crowded, and often contentious marriage of both within panels too small to cleanly hold them. Some pages stretch to ten panels, which are then crammed with text, some of which is either unnecessary or could have been better accommodated by choosing a different page layout or approach. How Alan Moore's penchant for verbosity is craftily handled in comics comes to mind. So my question is why didn't Ross and Edwards do a better job of planning their graphic story layout? Jonathan Ross' story is ambitious and well written–for a novel–and Tommy Lee Edwards artwork captures the grit and flap of the roaring 1929 social scene with detailed precision–when you can see it.
Suzie, the society columnist for the Gotham Herald realizes her dream of becoming a bona fide news reporter when European vampires (their progenitor, shown in one panel, looks like Bela Lugosi's Dracula), led by Stefani Dragonmir, move to eliminate the city's gangs and take control of organized crime. Along with her reluctant photographer Dale (why do sidekicks always seem reluctant?) she's heading knee deep into the belly of the beast. If that's not enough for you, there's also alien cargo runners locked in a space battle above the city, soon to crash the party in issue 2. Vampires, gangsters, and aliens: sounds like a B-movie extravaganza, not to mention a mysterious Old One the vampires are looking to revive to start their war on humanity.
Given panels sized and arranged to fit everything snugly but adequately, issue 1 would be almost exhilarating in its pace and setups. However, as written, the only size to properly make it all harmonize would be a coffee table book format. Without a doubt, for the cover price, this is one issue where you get more than your money's worth.