Tag: comics

#REVIEW: Fantastic Four: First Steps

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews2 Comments

What I really ought to do for this review is just copy and paste my Superman review from a couple of weeks ago and then change all the names. Because it’s really kind of ridiculous how similar my feelings on both of the movies are. Which is, if you missed my Superman review, very much a good thing.

My son is sitting behind me, working on something for his summer science class, and he just read that over my shoulder and went “Heh. A good Thing.”

Ben Grimm is magnificent in this film, by the way. There has never been a good Fantastic Four movie, and there’s never been a good Ben Grimm in the bad Fantastic Four movies. This movie somehow manages to be one of the best superhero films I’ve ever seen despite picking up a franchise with an incredibly bad track record on film. I loved it for a lot of the same reasons I loved Superman— namely, that this is a story about heroes, who want to be heroes, and who are expected to be heroes. The whole intro to the film is all about them saving lives. There’s no squirrel rescue scene, or anything like that, but there’s lots and lots of saving people, which is the whole point of this entire genre.

Another thing this movie does right that it has in common with Superman is it knows good and Goddamn well that you’ve been watching superhero movies for twenty years now, and there have been four movies about these guys before this one, and so it dispenses with the origin story in about five minutes. This means that the film doesn’t need to start with Reed and Sue not being married and they don’t need to show them being in love; nay, it can literally start with, in a first for a superhero movie, Sue sitting on the toilet, having just peed on a pregnancy test, which is coming up positive.

Marvel tried to hide the pregnancy angle at first and then stopped, but this movie has no time to waste, so Sue’s pregnant right away, and is actually massively pregnant during the first encounter with Galactus– who, in another first, is also done right. Sue actually gives birth to Franklin Richards on the ship on the way back to Earth, and watching the team deal with her going into labor while trying to not get killed by the Silver Surfer is a hell of a thing.

I’m kind of rambling, so let me cut to the quick, here: this is a great superhero movie, for very much the same reasons that Superman is a great superhero movie: it understands its characters, and it understands why they’ve been in (damn near, in this case) continuous publication since the 1960s, and it doesn’t bother screwing around with them or changing them for the tastes of Modern Audiences, which always, always involves making them more evil and stupid. This Fantastic Four is optimistic and cheery and unapologetically brilliant, and there’s no dark secrets, and no hidden betrayals, and they fucking love each other, and that is so Goddamned refreshing in a 2025 superhero movie that it was really all they needed to get right for me to love the movie.

The boy wants me to mention that Mole Man was cool. He is correct. Mole Man, for the first time in his history as a character, was cool.

The casting was superb across the board, really. I had my doubts about Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards; they were incorrect, and now I can’t really picture anyone else in the role. Sue and Ben are fantastic great. And Johnny …

…

Let’s talk about the Human Torch for a minute here.

Johnny Storm is very frequently, and for good reason, used as the comic relief in Fantastic Four stories, regardless of the medium. He currently literally has a handlebar mustache in the comics for no reason other than that he knows everyone else hates it:

He has an interesting role in this film– and, hell, it’s just now hitting me that this is sort of another parallel to what Superman did with Jimmy Olsen– in that he usually sort of gets the Xander role, as the useless funny guy, and neither movie was interested in that character. This movie remembered that he was on that first flight for a reason, and handles it in a way that I’m still not convinced about.

(Minor spoilers to follow. Not a big deal. I’ll use separators.)

So this universe’s Johnny Storm is apparently a master of linguistics, somehow? Like, on Reed’s level, practically? There have been repeated alien signals coming for months prior to Galactus’s arrival, and Reed is preoccupied with running countless tests on his genetically-altered pregnant wife to make sure that the child is going to be okay, so Johnny takes over looking at the signals. And he figures out that the signals are in the same language that Shalla Bal (Silver Surfer) says to him during a very brief conversation, and he decodes the entire alien language in a couple of months. And then he manages to figure out some other things that I won’t spoil, and it ends up being way more important to the climax of the film than one might expect.

This Johnny Storm also has a streak of nobility to him that isn’t exactly new, but is definitely more pronounced in this film than I’ve ever seen in the past. There are at least two different points where he is more than ready to die so that everyone else can live. He’s completely fearless to the point where it feels unhealthy, to be honest. I like it. He may be the most carefully developed character in the movie, and that’s usually not how these things work.

Minor spoilers end.

Let’s see, what else? I loved H.E.R.B.I.E., and I loved that the movie didn’t bother explaining him and that he was just there. I love the retro-future 1960s look of the movie. Love it. I love that, and this is going to be dodging a spoiler again, the movie managed to surprise me with the way it ended, which has never happened in anything featuring Galactus before. I had some ideas about how this movie was going to connect with the wider Marvel universe(*), and let’s just say I was completely wrong. I don’t think I’ve speculated about that here, so we’re probably good. I liked that they remembered that Ben was Jewish. I liked that they kept him dressed for most of the movie. The Ben Grimm in the comics wears clothes! All the time! And so does this one.

There are some great insights into Reed Richards’ character, too, and some conflicts he gets into with Sue, that really felt true to the characters. Again, the main thing this movie did right was understand the people it was about.

The standard caveats! I am super enthusiastic about stuff I like, and I really liked this movie. To be honest, were I not substantially more invested in Superman as a character than I am the Fantastic Four, I might be willing to call this a better movie, and I think I have fewer complaints about it than I do the Superman movie. It’s crazy that two superhero movies this good in such similar ways came out in the same month. It’s even crazier that we’re basically done with superhero movies and TV shows until next summer, too. I don’t know right now if I’m back on board for Avengers: Doomsday or not. We’ll see. But between now and then, you should definitely make time to see this one.

(*) The movie starts off with a title card stating it’s on Earth-828, a number I thought about for a minute and couldn’t come up with any particular significance for. It ends with a quote from Jack Kirby, who was born on August 28th, 1917. Nice touch. Also, apparently there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Jack and Stan Lee together in a montage at the beginning of the film. I missed it.

#REVIEW: Superman (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews3 Comments

I’m just gonna say it: James Gunn’s Superman is the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Please take that with whatever amount of salt you like; my opinions are subject to change and enthusiasm can take me on a ride from time to time, so it’s possible that in six months I’ll have cooled down a bit for whatever reason. The only movies, though, that are even close to this one are the original Christopher Reeve Superman, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Avengers movie. And if I’m being honest, Superman ’78 hasn’t aged as well as I might have wanted it to, and I think this version is much better as a movie although I’m not quite willing to put David Corenswet above Christopher Reeve just yet. It doesn’t have the emotional baggage those movies have; I’d been waiting for Iron Man and Avengers for decades when they finally came out, and I grew up watching Superman ’78 over and over and over again.

It’s difficult to overstate how shocked I am to be saying this. In retrospect, I should have put more stock in the tagline they chose for this movie: Look up. It’s fucking brilliant on a whole bunch of levels, but the most important thing about it is that it speaks directly to this movie’s sense of aspiration, the idea that Superman is, first and foremost, a hero, someone who wants nothing more than to do good and to leave the world better than he found it. Superman has not been an aspirational figure for some time, and I’m not even willing to admit he was in the last three movies that had a dude with an S on his chest in them. Hell, two of Reeve’s movies weren’t great, and one of those two was genuinely hot garbage. I’ve really only genuinely liked two movies with this character in them before last Saturday. I am immensely, irrationally protective of Superman, and this movie simply gets him right. Finally. Finally.

I have been waiting for a very long time to watch another Superman movie that understands the character. Going in, I figured that at best I wouldn’t be trying to get the sun to explode on the way out of the theater, and I might have just decided to lay down in traffic if it had been genuinely bad. 2025 has been a terrible enough year without Superman getting fucked over again.

But let’s get into some details. Buckle in; I’ve got a lot to say about this movie, although I don’t think this is going to reach the epic length of some of my Star Wars reviews. Then again, there have been a couple of those that I didn’t think were going to end up being very long that ended up over 10K words, so …

(This won’t be completely spoiler-free, by the way, but I’ll try not to mention anything that wasn’t made obvious by the trailers.)

Let’s start with the casting. There’s not a single weak spot in the main cast. Not one. David Corenswet is amazing, although I’d have liked to see more of his Clark– even during one of his “Clark scenes,” the interview with Lois in her apartment, he’s actually playing Superman wearing Clark’s clothes. We never get anything approaching the epic Reeve transformation scene I linked the other day, but the characters are differentiated enough that it works. Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult are both phenomenal, and Hoult’s Lex in particular manages to make scene-chewing monologuing scary. Skyler Gisondo’s Jimmy Olsen is the most useful Jimmy Olsen I’ve ever seen on screen. I liked the Justice Gang enough that I want a movie just for the three of them– Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific are both outstanding, and I’m gonna have to be careful that I’m not overusing my superlatives, but they take a character I’ve never liked and a character I know nothing about and make me want to see movies about them. Isabela Merced doesn’t have as much to do as Hawkgirl, but I enjoyed her nonetheless. Pruitt Taylor Vance and Neva Howell as Jon and Martha Kent are flawless. And María Gabriela de Faría brings a twitchy vulnerability to her Engineer, another character that I don’t know much about and want to see more of.

My wife commented that this did sort of feel like a sequel to a movie that they hadn’t made, which I can see, and there are a handful of characters who feel like they’re there just to be there– you need Perry White, of course, and I liked Wendell Pierce’s casting even though I’m not a hundred percent certain they ever actually said Perry’s name. Mikaela Hoover and Beck Bennett as Cat Grant and Steve Lombard are just sorta there. Anthony Carrigan’s Metamorpho is scary and sad and creepy, which … again, I don’t know a ton about Metamorpho, but from what I do, that’s about right. The worst thing I can say about the casting– and, hell, one of the worst things I can say about the movie— is that I don’t quite get Eve Teschmacher as a character, but that’s not Sara Sampaio’s fault.

This is one of the best-shot action films I’ve seen in a long time, and even scenes in relative darkness are clear. You can actually tell what’s going on during the fights, and it’s amazing that a movie that features a kaiju the size of a skyscraper never manages to disappear into smearing CGI all over everything. Every punch that gets thrown has weight. I’ve seen a few people say that Mr. Terrific’s solo fight about halfway through the film is the best scene in the entire movie, and … I don’t quite agree (the best scene in the movie is between Clark and his dad, at the farm) but it’s up there with Yondu and his arrow as far as Gunn’s action scenes go.

The score uses John Williams’ iconic original music to its benefit without feeling enslaved to it, and while I can’t hum any of the other themes without seeing the movie again, it definitely puts its own spin on things. They could have copy-and-pasted half of Williams’ score and been just fine, so the idea that they added to it and changed it and it worked is an impressive achievement.

Let’s talk about the Star Wars movies for a minute, though. I’ve completely turned on two of three of the new trilogy movies, and while I loved The Last Jedi I will probably never watch it again. The Force Awakens was made retroactively worse by Rise of Skywalker in a way that I’m not going to explain right now. But part of what annoyed me about the discourse around Rise is the people who were insisting that it was a repudiation of The Last Jedi. This was mostly people who didn’t like Last Jedi saying this, and those folks are, in general, not to be trusted– but it went from simple shit like he smashed his helmet in the second movie, and has a new helmet in the third! to slightly more serious if still wrong critiques like insisting that Kylo Ren telling Rey that her parents were nobodies who left her to die in a ditch was absolutely 100% meant to be canonical truth and not Ren deliberately making shit up to fuck with her, which was obviously the case to anyone with a smidge of media literacy. I didn’t like the idea that she was a Palpatine, but it wasn’t a repudiation of anything at all.

James Gunn’s Superman, on the other hand, is a direct thumb in the eye of the Angry Murder Alien movies, and I couldn’t be any happier about it.

Over and over again during this movie, you see Superman stop fighting in order to save people. The kaiju wrecks a floor of a skyscraper and he stops to make sure everyone is OK before rejoining the fight. He protects people, throwing his body in between civilians and danger over and over again. He literally saves a squirrel at one point. And while the climactic fight in Metropolis at the end of the movie probably did as much property damage as the climax to Angry Murder Alien 1, the movie takes it time to make sure everyone understands that they are evacuating Metropolis while the fight is going on. Is it completely logical and reasonable to believe they knocked over a couple dozen huge skyscrapers and no one got killed? Eh, probably not. But you don’t care, because by this point in the movie it’s been made clear over and over again that Superman is there to save people, that people believe that Superman’s job is to protect them, and you’re willing to believe that if Superman says Metropolis has been evacuated, then it’s damn well been evacuated.

I never understood why any of the Murderverse characters wanted to be heroes. Calling their little group the Justice League made no damn sense– can you name any time in any of the main DC movies that anyone other than Wonder Woman cared about justice? That’s a real question! And you can’t do it! Lex Luthor would still be an evil, murderous bastard if Superman had never shown up. Nothing in Angry Murder Alien 1 or Angry Murder Alien Vs. Bat-Themed Ninja Killer would have happened if Superman had never come to earth!

Corenswet’s Superman wants, before anything else, to do good and to save people. His desire to keep people from getting hurt sets the entire story of the film in motion. When he’s fighting the two physical villains of the film, Ultraman and the Engineer, he tries to talk them out of fighting.

Superman’s greatest power as a character isn’t his heat vision, or his strength, or his ability to fly. It’s that he refuses to accept that there’s ever nothing he can do. That if put in an impossible situation where the only way out is to kill or to let someone die, he does the impossible thing anyway. They effectively put him in that exact situation in this film, where there’s a dimensional anomaly eating Metropolis at the exact same time as a nation on the other side of the world is being invaded by a technologically superior force and the citizens are literally crying out his name to come and save them. The movie wants you to think that he’s going to have to choose, that he’ll either have to let people die in Metropolis or let people die in Jarhanpur.

No. He’s fucking Superman. That’s not how it works. He’s going to save everybody. That’s what makes him Superman. And he does.

(There is also a brilliant, if maybe a little overly snarky, scene where Lex Luthor reveals that he has a literal army of genetically enhanced monkeys manipulating the internet into hating Superman. It’s … maybe a little too on the nose. But I loved it anyway.)

Little spoiler coming. It’s not going to be anything that surprises you if you’ve thought much about the movie and it’s absolutely not going to ruin anything, but still.

This actually ties into the only thing I can think of that I really didn’t like about this movie. The film has three bad guys: Luthor, Ultraman, who is a black-suited Strong Silent Guy for 90% of the movie, and the Engineer, whose bloodstream Lex has filled with nanites so that she can create weapons out of her body and interface with computers. You’re meant to believe (although this is a comic book movie) that Ultraman doesn’t survive the movie, and while the Engineer’s fate isn’t quite as clear, she gets knocked unconscious in a really dangerous place late in the movie and you never see her again after that. She could very well still be alive; her status is more ambiguous than Ultraman’s.

I’m not going to get into why, but I would really have liked to see Superman work harder to save both of these characters. He’s kind of got his hands full with other shit when Ultraman goes down, but he tries to talk both of them off of the ledge and away from Luthor during their final battle, and you get the feeling that the Engineer, at least, is listening. Again, she’s kind of fascinating– she’s twitchy and broken and walks with a limp when she isn’t doing metahuman shit and, while I might change my mind after a second viewing, you get the feeling that her enhancement wasn’t entirely her decision. I can do without more Ultraman, and Superman doesn’t directly kill him, but I feel like he should have shown more concern for him, for reasons I’m not going to talk about– this is a guy who lectures Guy Gardner when the kaiju dies, for crying out loud– but I want to see María Gabriela de Faría again. I’ll be paying the closest attention to the last parts of this fight when I inevitably see this movie again.

Okay, that’s it for the spoilers.

You should see this movie. You should see this movie if you love superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you’re tired of superhero movies, and you should see this movie if you don’t usually see movies at all. This movie deserves to be extraordinarily successful. 2025 has been a miserable fucking year for anyone with a trace of a human soul, and it’s probably going to get much, much worse before it gets better. This movie foregrounds hope, and truth, and justice, and a better tomorrow, better than anything I’ve seen in years. It’s a movie that I really feel like America needs right now. And it’s really hard to imagine how I could have loved it any more than I did.

Look up.

…okay, Marvel? Let’s not.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, PoliticsLeave a comment

I am fully fucking aware that, lead times being what they are on comic books, this was definitely written, if perhaps not completely drawn, before the Current Unpleasantness actually began. But once we realized we were going to publish it during the Current Unpleasantness, and that it scans as really fucking unsubtle given the Current Unpleasantness, maybe we reconsider the entire fucking thing? Because I don’t need this shit in my life at all, much less in a medium that’s supposed to be fucking escapism:

And fuck me dead if this very same Fantastic Four comic book doesn’t use vampires as a persecuted minority that Doom is scapegoating later on in the damn issue. Using Doom as a stand-in for the shitgibbon is one thing. Using vampires as a stand-in for trans people is deeply fucked up.

I recognize that there is literally no way that Marvel is gonna reconsider or reschedule any of this, but I wanted to register my protest anyway.

In which I am unbelievably petty (WARNING: Superman opinions)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, movies6 Comments

Let me begin with some Statements which are Generally Known to be True:

  • That I am insanely, irrationally protective of Superman, and do not believe the character has been done right in live action since the Reeve era, with the possible exception of Tyler Hoechlin in Superman & Lois, which I really enjoyed for about five episodes and then mysteriously stopped watching;
  • That I am fully aware that a set picture is not the best way to evaluate a superhero costume;
  • That I have been loud and wrong about iconic superhero costumes before;
  • That I absolutely hate it when nerds do exactly what I am about to do, although I will attempt to mix in some positives;
  • That I am probably not going to see this movie, not because I am boycotting it but because I don’t see movies any longer, and I feel like maybe that’s could give me an out about having an opinion, an out that I am currently not taking; and
  • That David Corenswet’s performance is going to be infinitely more important than his costume, as will other minor details like the fucking script, and I know literally nothing about how he’s going to move and act as the character. I do know I’m not terribly interested in Ultraman or Mr. Terrific, one of whom was also in the leaks but one of whom is still technically a rumor.

That said!

Wait. No. Let’s do this first:

Two things are Correct about this costume.

  • The colors, for the first time in years, are correct, and this says good things about the direction the film is going to take;
  • Putting the S-shield on the back of the cape in yellow is also Correct.

I hate every single other fucking thing about the fucking costume.

  1. The collar. They’ve clearly drawn inspiration from the New 52 costume, which I hated, and part of the reason I hated it was the fucking collar. Every other and I mean every other live action iteration of Superman’s suit has done the cape/shoulders/neck area better, including Tyler Hoechlin’s, which dropped the cape into prominent gold grommets and still looked better. I hate the collared look. It is, in fact, the thing about the costume that I hate the most.
  2. The S-Shield. This is a version of the Kingdom Come shield, which was fine in Kingdom Come, which was set in the future and involved a Superman who had gone through intense personal loss, and is not fine here. Just use the fucking regular S-shield, Goddammit. This is not a place where we fucking need to innovate. Also it could stand to be a little bigger– if it was right, at least– but that’s not that big of a deal.
  3. The texture. This may not survive the transition into the actual film, but I hate all the little lines and shapes everywhere. The cape looks like it’s made from microfiber, which also sucks.
  4. The belt. Yes, the costume needs the belt, and I’m happy it has a belt, but that belt looks like Batman’s belt. It looks chunky and rubbery for no clear reason.
  5. It’s fucking baggy. Superman wears his costume under his clothes and it needs to be tighter. This also may not survive the transition onto the actual silver screen. In fact, I really doubt it’ll be noticeable on the screen. I hate it anyway.
  6. The wrists. Also borrowing from New 52, and perhaps more obvious in other pictures than in these, they’re pointy, and they look fucking stupid. You also can’t conceal pointy wrist cuffs under a dress shirt.
  7. The briefs. Shut up, Goddammit, the word “petty” is right in the title. Yes, I’m happy they’re there, and I’d rather have them than not have them, but those are fucking boyshorts, not Superman briefs. It’s wrong and it’s wrong for no reason.
  8. The boots. Actually, the boots are fine. I have no beef with the boots.

Do not get me started on Clark’s hair:

(Actually, the hair is whatever; I think Clark would have a more conservative haircut than that ramen-looking GenZ mop bullshit but it definitely makes him look less like Superman, so I’ll deal.)

Okay. I’ve got that out of my system now, I hope. I have seen a couple of images today that I can’t find now where someone took the Corenswet suit and basically Photoshopped in the edits that I suggested above, and it looks perfect, and I’ll update if I find one again. And I will get over it, especially now that I’ve written this. It’s not the most important thing about the fucking movie. All the same: blech.

I read more manga: GYO

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I talked about my experiment with, and affection for, Junji Ito’s Uzumaki a few days ago, and that led to me ordering two more collected editions of his work, including the above, called Gyo. And … uh … well, I have one more left and I guess we’ll see how it goes, because Gyo is … kinda bad? Like, “about fart monsters” bad. The big scary beasts in the book are literally fart monsters. There are lots of lovingly detailed drawings of fish, people, and various other living things with tubes implanted into their asses to harvest their internal gases. That’s not a joke. It’s not even a humorous exaggeration. They’re fart monsters. Their farts might be sentient. It’s unclear.

Fart monsters are not scary, no matter how you try.

Now, there’s definitely some creepy shit in here, and Ito’s art is awesome, particularly the way he ramps up the detail whenever he’s drawing anything particularly horrific, but the problem is that the creepy pictures are connected by story and words and talking, and the words ruin the cool pictures. Not the least because I hate the font this book is lettered in, which makes everyone look like they’re shouting, all the time. And a lot of time they are! There is quite a bit of shouting in this manga. Not always for a good reason.

It also features one of the worst female characters and one of the worst romantic relationships I’ve ever encountered in literature, period. Kaori is terrible in every imaginable way, and is a collection of every misogynist stereotype about women one could write down, and her boyfriend Tadashi is also terrible although not in an especially gendered way. You never for a second understand why these two even like each other because they are both insufferable and their relationship is toxic as hell, and I’m not sure if the book was deliberately written that way, but I don’t actually think it was. Like, she’s worse than him because her shittiness is so explicitly gendered, but they’re both terrible characters.

So, yeah, I didn’t like this one, although I’m still three-starring it, mostly on the strength of the artwork and the two amazing stories at the end of the book. They are both maybe the length of a standard Western comic book, so we’re talking two ten-minute reads, maybe, but the second one in particular, called The Enigma of Amigara Fault, is spectacular. The other suffers from a little bit of The Dumb; there will be some who won’t like it because it’ll fail the smell test right away and it isn’t long enough to win your trust back, but if you get past that it’s a great little short horror story. It also suffers a little bit from being translated into English; I assume the phrase “principal post,” meaning the main support column of a house, doesn’t sound quite as ridiculous when repeated in Japanese as it does in English. Amigara Fault, though, is great, from start to finish. It’s just that I’m not sure those two stories are enough to justify purchasing the entire volume, since Gyo itself is so Goddamned goofy.

One more, though, and then I’ll have to decide if I’m looking for more to read or retreating back into my superhero comics where I belong.

On Wandavision, again (spoiler-free)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews, Television1 Comment

I think the most depressing thing about the finale of WandaVision, available today on Disney+, is that I really don’t have a lot to say about it, and that’s not a cute way to lead into a 1500-word post. I thought the show started off slow, and not necessarily in a good way, and it ramped up quite a bit after that, steadily getting better until the penultimate episode …

… and then the finale kind of fell flat for me. I have been religiously avoiding spoilers all day today (and, again, this will be a spoiler-free review) and the real interesting thing is that having watched the episode I’m genuinely not sure it was worth the effort. Not that things don’t happen that could have been spoiled– there are some major character developments in the finale and throughout the series– they’re just, and I hope this makes some sense, not the kind of events that spoiling them could have harmed my enjoyment of the show. Ultimately, WandaVision ends up being a very character-driven series about the nature of loss and grief, and if that doesn’t sound like typical Marvel fare, well, it’s because it’s not— there’s a couple of big fights toward the end (if you see that as a spoiler, I can’t help you) and there are some important developments for the future of the MCU in general, but they’re not any of the developments that I thought I might see going into this series in general or this episode in particular.

Was it worth watching? Yes, definitely, and it’s great to see Marvel finally putting some energy into their female characters– Wanda herself, Agatha Harkness, Monica Rambeau and Doctor Darcy Lewis all have substantial roles, and as a lifelong fan of Rambeau in particular it’s great to see her finally on screen. Do I want more? Absolutely, but I’m going to get more, that much is clear, and it’s exciting. And the show deserves some credit for reinvigorating an interest in the MCU that had been seriously flagging after the dual disappointments of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home. You could make an argument that that reinvigoration was inevitable, and you’d have a point, but the show still did it. I don’t know that it’s a reason for a Disney+ subscription all on its own, but I suspect that’s not a particularly relevant criticism, as anyone invested in Wanda Maximoff enough to consider getting a Disney+ subscription just to watch her show almost certainly already had one anyway. If all the stuff that they already have plus The Mandalorian wasn’t enough to convince you … hell, you’re probably not reading this in the first place.

So we’ve got a week off now, I think, and then straight into Falcon and the Winter Soldier, another show that I’m not hugely hyped about but I’m still watching anyway. There’s pretty much something Marvel happening damn near every week for the rest of the year; I just hope I don’t actually have to go into a movie theater to see Black Widow in May. I’ll have both my shots by then, but still. Stream it and overcharge me, guys, I’m good for it.

I read books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

My comic shop has been having a hell of a time lately. For those of you who aren’t comic geeks, Wednesday is New Comic Books Day. Every comic book shop I’ve ever frequented was closed on Tuesdays, because Wednesday is the day every week when new books come out and that meant that they needed to remerch everything in their damn store once a week. DC Comics recently decided they were going to take responsibility for shipping and fulfillment themselves, and they started shipping everything to be available for Tuesday. My comic shop shrugged and didn’t change anything, knowing that nobody was going to get pissed about having to wait that extra day, and if they’ve caught any grief from it I’m unaware of it.

The problem is that for the last several weeks all of their indie and Marvel books have been getting caught in weather nightmares and have been late. You can probably imagine that with this business model a comic shop makes a huge percentage of their weekly revenue– 75% or more– on Wednesday, and so if something prevents the books from being there on time it can cause serious cash flow problems. Last week’s Marvel books just got put on the shelf today, and last I heard they were hoping this week’s Marvel books would be available tomorrow. I popped in yesterday anyway because I had dinner plans with my dad and the comic shop is near his house, and since I’m not buying much DC stuff nowadays there really wasn’t much of anything available. So I picked up Nubia: Real One, a 208-page original graphic novel written by L.L. McKinney and drawn by Robyn Smith. You might recognize McKinney’s name from her books A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark, both of which I have read and really enjoyed. This isn’t quite her first comics work, but it’s certainly her first major work– she’s done a story here and there, but debuting with a 200+ page OGN is … not a thing that’s really done, to be honest. I had a conversation with the owners about various prose authors who have made the transition into comics work recently– Daniel Jose Older, Saladin Ahmed, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jodi Picoult, of all people, all came up. Some authors have trouble with the transition, because in comics so much is handled visually.

LL McKinney is not one of those authors, and I’ll stop burying the lede: Nubia: Real One is one of the best comics I’ve read in quite some time, and to pull something like that off with a character I wasn’t terribly aware of or invested in is a hell of an accomplishment. I’m also completely unfamiliar with Robyn Smith’s work, and honestly a quick scan of the book didn’t initially impress me, as this is far from traditional superhero work. That’s not automatically bad, mind you, but Nubia is an Amazon. This is a DC book.

Well, all those concerns got blown to hell once I started reading the book. Smith’s art and in particular her character designs are just beautiful– it can be difficult to draw regular folks in a way that makes them instantly recognizable in a comic book (there’s a reason superheroes wear brightly colored costumes) and the characters are all distinct and clear without looking, other than Nubia’s towering height, disproportionate or exaggerated. And then there’s Nubia’s tooth gap. This may seem like a weird thing to fixate on, but she smiles a lot in this book, and she’s got this gap between her front teeth that just did an amazing amount of work in making her seem like a normal kid and a regular person. I have been reading comics for 35 years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character with a gap in their front teeth that wasn’t supposed to be a small child. She feels like a real person, with real problems, and so do her friends, and so do her parents for that matter, and while anyone who knows anything about the character already knows what the big twist is (this is an origin story) the story itself is great as well. I loved this book unconditionally, and if you’re even a little bit of a comic book person you owe yourself to check it out.

I can’t find a properly high-resolution version of this cover, unfortunately, but I also finished Tochi Onyebuchi’s Rebel Sisters this week. This is the second book in a series, the sequel to his War Girls, which ended up in fifth place on my Best New Books of 2019 list. The sequel has a very different feel to it from the first book. War Girls was, in the author’s words, “Gundam in Nigeria,” only it ended up being quite a bit more weighty than that description implies. That said, there were giant mechs and blowing shit up, but for all that it was a cool action book it also had a lot to say about revolution and civil war, and it was all-around a hell of a thing to read.

(I have said it before, and I’ll repeat it again: if you are not reading African and African diasporic science fiction and fantasy right now, and particularly Nigerian science fiction, you are missing out. This is a real movement and you need to get in on it.)

Rebel Sisters is set after the future civil war that takes up the bulk of War Girls, and stars Ify, who was one of the main characters of War Girls. Ify has left Nigeria and moved to a space station and is working as a doctor, when a mysterious illness takes over among the children of many of the refugee families who live at the station. She ends up returning to Earth in an attempt to find a cure for the disease, and finds out that the Nigerian government has … well, they’ve dealt with moving on from the war in a unique way, I’ll just say that. Rebel Sisters is a quieter and more contemplative book than War Girls was, and bounces back and forth between Ify’s perspective and that of one of the synths from the first book, a character I won’t spoil much about. You kind of get the feeling that Onyebuchi got the “big robots smash punch BOOM!” out of his system in the first book, and this one is more About What It Is About, if that makes any sense, although it’s no less an accomplishment for all that. One interesting detail from the author’s afterword that I’m going to make sure you know about going in, because I wish I had: the disease the kids come down with may strike you as … rather narratively convenient, for lack of a better word. It is– and this kind of blew my mind and made me read more into it– actually based on a real phenomenon that has happened among refugee children.

Check it out.

Finally, from the This Book Doesn’t Really Need My Help department, I’ve also read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. I bought both of the other books in this post because of preexisting fandoms, but while I had heard of Coelho before ordering The Alchemist, I couldn’t have told you anything about him other than that he was an author. Well, I decided I wanted to find a book from Brazil for #Readaroundtheworld, and a search for Brazilian authors brought his name and this book up, and … well, if they’ve done a 25th Anniversary Edition of it it’s probably pretty good, right?

It is. It absolutely is.

If I had to compare The Alchemist to anything else I’ve read, two books come to mind immediately: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. There are a number of commonalities, but what stands out is the length of the books (Haroun is easily the shortest of Rushdie’s works, Jonathan is basically a novella, and Alchemist is around 230 pages) and the fairy-tale feel of the stories themselves. Jonathan and Alchemist come off as more didactic than Haroun does, but all three books have Feelings About How We Should Live, and, well, Jonathan and Haroun are both books that have been intensely rewarding rereads, and I suspect Alchemist is going to be as well.

I don’t speak a word of Portuguese other than where it overlaps with Spanish, but for what it’s worth this is also a pretty superb translation, good enough that I actually made sure it was originally written in Portuguese and not English. There can be a certain awkwardness to translated works from time to time, where you have to sort of wrap your head around the style of the language of the book before you can get into it, but either Portuguese translates very smoothly into English or Alan R. Clarke is very, very good at his job. He’s translated several of Coelho’s books, and I enjoyed this enough that I’ll definitely want to read more of Coelho’s books in the future, so I’m glad they seem to be in the right hands.

It is decided

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

For our 12th anniversary, my wife and son and I will be attending C2E2, which is a huge show that I attended once as a vendor several years ago. This will be the first nerd convention that I have been to in years where I will actually get to be a fan and an attendee and not trying to hawk books, so it ought to be a lot of fun, although I’ll probably need all of Sunday to recover afterwards. I have important decisions to make during next week now, mostly along the lines of how much money am I going to allow myself to blow at this thing and when I find a giant sword that I want, should I consider buying it, or am I past the point where I should be buying giant swords?

I mean, realistically I know the answer to that, but still.

There will be tons of pictures of cosplayers, of course, and there may be pictures of me taken with a handful of my favorite authors, as John Scalzi, Sam Sykes, and Gail Simone are all going to be in attendance. I will absolutely go meet Gail; Scalzi and Sykes will depend on the length of lines, as we’ll have the boy with us and I feel like C2E2 is not an optimal place to “meet” people who I might want to talk to for more than ten seconds. We’ll see, though.

Finally! A plan!