Solomon Kane (2009)

Who's In It: James Purefoy (Resident Evil, John Carter), Rachel Hurd-Wood (2003's Peter Pan, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), Pete Postlethwaite (The Usual Suspects, Inception), Alice Krige (Star Trek: First Contact, Thor: The Dark World), Max Von Sydow (Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again), and Jason Flemyng (Primeval, X-Men: First Class)

What It's About: A ruthless pirate (Purefoy) tries to walk the path of peace when he learns that the devil's after his soul, but you know how these things go.

How It Is: I don't know what took me so long to finally check this movie out. I've been interested in the character for decades and though I've never read a single story featuring him, he seems totally in my wheelhouse. Two things I've loved since childhood: Conan (and by association, Robert E Howard) and holy warriors. I couldn't have told you how much the holy warrior angle is focused on in Howard's Solomon Kane stories, but the guy dresses like a pilgrim and fights monsters. I'm guaranteed to like that.

I feel like I should talk a little about my fascination with the holy warrior trope, because it's a deep part of who I am. I'm repulsed by real life people who claim to kill on God's behalf, but enthralled with fictional explorations of that theme. Sort of how Prince always struggled with the juxtaposition of sex and spirituality in his music, I've searched for a way to reconcile brutality and belief. I haven't been successful in that search, but it hasn't stopped me from looking. I've never been a violent person - in fact, I'm quite the pacifist - but in my college freshman drawing class, we were asked to create self-portraits. My buddy drew himself completely naked with full frontal; I drew myself as the Terminator. The instructor was more shocked by mine.

I've been in exactly one fight my entire life. I was eight or nine and it was over quickly. It was probably a draw, since neither of us knew what we were doing. But though I've never thrown a punch in anger, I drew a lot of violent stuff as a kid and I loved and identified with dark, bloodthirsty characters like Conan and Blackbeard and the literary James Bond. That carried over into my faith too, and it was helpful that my Biblical namesake is the archangel who battles and defeats Satan in Revelation. I completely understood that the real Crusades were horrible and unjustifiable, but I was still intensely drawn to the paradox of being a knight for God. One of my favorite superhero characters of the '90s was Azrael, in part because of that awesome Joe Quesada costume, but also because of his struggle to remain sane and find some peace in his role as holy assassin for a secret, heretical sect of Christianity. So of course I've always been attracted to images of Solomon Kane.

One of the things I like most about the movie version is the amount of attention it gives to this contradiction between soldier and saint. Kane begins the movie as a pirate so bloodthirsty that he'd give Blackbeard a hard time. An encounter with a demon puts the fear of God into him though and he tries to reform. As he wanders, he meets a family of Puritans (led by Postlethwaite and Krige) and travels with them for a while, getting to know their two sons and daughter (Hurd-Wood). But when they enter territory controlled by an evil sorcerer (Flemyng) and his masked, psychotic general, Kane has to figure out how dedicated to peace he really is. Can he stand by and let horrible things happen when he has the skill to stop it? He knows beyond any doubt that picking up a sword will cost him his immortal soul, so what role will that play in his decision? And would such an act of self-sacrifice be enough to redeem Kane in some way?

Solomon Kane isn't a perfect movie. It treads some familiar plot territory and the special effects are satisfactory, but no more than that. But the acting is legitimately excellent and I'm impressed with the moral questions the movie raises and how it comments on them without offering pat answers. I don't know if Robert E Howard was as interested in that kind of thing, but I'm eager to read his version and find out.

Rating: Four out of five passionate pilgrims.

My first work as a writer about comics

About a month ago, Sean Kleefeld wrote a blog post called "My Short Career as a Letterhack," in which he talks about writing to comic book letters pages in order to get on the radar of editors. I can relate, because when I first got it into my head that I wanted to write comics, that was an approach I took too.

For me, it wasn't so much about being remembered by editors as it was simply a way of connecting to the comics industry on a deeper level than just reading the books. I started seeing some of the same names pop up on comics pages a lot (possibly even Sean's; I know I read at least those Marvel Knights issues he was published in) and figured that I could do that too. And since it would mean submitting a piece of writing to an editor and competing with other pieces of writing for print, I saw it as sort of a first step towards being published.

Sean posted a cover gallery of comics that his letters appeared in, so I'm doing that too. My time writing letters was much shorter than his, ended when I got reliable access to the Internet and was able to write about comics that way. But I had a good time with it and was able to figure out what kinds of letters editors were looking for.



Milestone had a Letter of the Month deal where they'd send one letter-writer a signed copy of the issue in which he or she was printed. I got picked for talking not only about Hardware, but Milestone in general and what it meant to me.





I grew up a Marvel kid, but tried a bunch of DC comics shortly after their Zero Hour event and wrote in to tell them about that.



I was a huuuuge Azrael fan, and loved getting to gush about that character to the folks making comics about him at the time. Sadly, the series didn't stay awesome it's whole run, but the issues with Barry Kitson on art were amazing.



I'm also really happy that I got to tell Peter David and Company how cool their Aquaman was.



My last published letter was the nerdiest of all as I expressed my appreciation that Malibu's Deep Space Nine series offered a more plausible explanation for the existence of Thomas Riker than Star Trek: TNG did on TV.

Robot 6 with Plums

It's been a while since I wrote a Robot Review that wasn't also a Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs column, but I did this week. GRD is a column about adventure comics and Marjane (Persepolis) Satrapi's Chicken with Plums isn't that. I call it a murder mystery in the review, but it's not a thriller. It's deeper than that. And far more touching.

It does have Azrael in it though and he doesn't whine once about not having Batman's respect.

DC in May

I'm still catching up on the solicitations for upcoming comics. I was just going to stick this in the Awesome List below, but dang if there aren't a lot of interesting comics coming from DC in May.

In no particular order:

House of Mystery #1



There aren't many people I'd trust to make an ongoing horror anthology series interesting, but Bill Willingham is one of them. Especially since he and co-writer Matt Sturges aren't doing a real anthology so much as they are a series of tales with a connected, mystery metastory running through them. Or something like that.

It's still really risky business, but like I said, I trust Willingham enough to give it a serious look.

Justice League Unlimited #45



I don't usually read this comic, but it's got Mary Marvel on the cover with a gorilla who's holding some kind of superscience device. Time to see if this compares well to Marvel's Marvel Adventures comics that I love so very truly.

Detective Comics #844



All I need to know is that Zatanna's on the cover.

Gotham Underground #8



I'm gonna have to flip through this one in the store, but Azrael's sort of appearance on the cover is getting me to at least pick it up. I fully expect him to appear in flashback or something, which means I'll be leaving it on the shelf.

Batman: Gotham After Midnight #1



Steve Niles and Kelley Jones on an ongoing about Batman's "bizarre and frightening case files" featuring grave-robbers and man-made monsters. DC just made me a regular reader of a Batman comic again.

Tor #1



This is another one I'm going to have to flip through. I absolutely love Joe Kubert's art, but the blurb bothers me a little by focusing a lot on Tor's struggle with existential questions. Not that I'm at all against having some deeper subject matter, but I want to see him struggle more with giant crocodiles than the meaning of life.

The War That Time Forgot #1



This sounds like a no-brainer. "A lone USAF pilot, about to warn his superiors of the attack on Pearl Harbor, finds his craft suddenly crash-landing on a mysterious island populated with prehistoric creatures and soldiers of wars of the past, present and future - including Tomahawk, Firehair, and Hans Von Hammer, the Enemy Ace! What bizarre force has compelled these military masters of every era to inhabit the same strange territory? Can they survive without killing each other or being devoured by dinosaurs?"

The only problem is that it's written by Bruce Jones, a guy who's sometimes taken awesome concepts and turned them into solemn, weighty stories. Again, I'm all for adding strong characterization and profound themes to all the historical soldiers vs. dinosaurs action. Let's just make sure that it's only Time and not the writer who forgets the War.

Links du Jour: Gay Dumbledore, Azrael, and Neil Gaiman's Superdog

The Return of Azrael

I don't talk much about Azrael, but there was a time when he was one of my favorite comics characters. He eventually turned into a directionless mess, but when he started out he had a cool name, an interesting origin with tons of potential, a great supporting cast, and the coolest costume in the history of superheroes.

I hate that his ongoing series was allowed to continue far past the point where Denny O'Neil knew what to do with the character. He should've been retired when Denny ran out of ideas, but even though DC rode the Azrael horse until it died, I've always believed that the right creators could revive the character and do something really great with him. There's just too much potential there.

Marc Andreyko started hinting at a possible return in Manhunter and I'm eager to see where that goes when Manhunter finally returns from hiatus. In the meantime though, Comic by Comic notices an Azrael appearance on the cover of an upcoming issue (#8, if my figuring is correct) of Frank Tieri and J. Calafiore's Gotham Underground. Of course, Spoiler -- another dead Batman ally -- is on the same cover, so maybe that issue focuses on fallen friends or something. It's nice to see Az's face on a comic again anyway.

Realism and Superhero Comics

I'm not a Garth Ennis fan, so I've never been tempted by Hitman, but this review (you have to scroll down a ways) made me want to read JLA/Hitman. Mainly the part where Ennis explains why realism and superhero comics don't mix: "because there are real situations where men have to kill to succeed, and Superman and Batman don't really have the 'moral courage' to get their hands dirty." It's an interesting opinion that I don't disagree with. The Never Kill manifesto is something that needs serious exploration and possible change if superhero comics are to embrace "realism" as part of what they are.

I Love My Dead, Gay Dumbledore

I wish I'd thought of that line from Heathers myself, but I totally stole it from my fellow Newsarama blogger Tom Bondurant who said it when the Newsarama group was discussing this story amongst themselves. Anyway, I'm sure you've heard the story by now about J.K. Rowling's recently outing Dumbledore at Carnegie Hall during her Open Book Tour.

I agree with some of Ian Randal Strock's thoughts on it in that if fans want to ignore that bit of information, they certainly can since Rowling never made it part of the stories. But I disagree with Strock's assertion that it just doesn't matter since it's not part of "canon." Fans who want to ignore Dumbledore's sexuality -- as revealed by his creator -- will have to make a conscious effort to do so. Whether it's in the books themselves or not, the fact is now in the public consciousness and Dumbledore is irrefutably gay. Ignoring that fact isn't so much a valid choice as it is simple denial.

And so, to Strock's question, "So what?" I say that this is kind of important because there are Harry Potter fans who didn't think they knew any gay people before this announcement. And now, for the first time in their lives, they realize that someone they really cared about (fictional though he may be) was gay. And it's going to force them to take a hard, inward look and decide how they're going to respond to that news.

Neil Gaiman's Dog Looks Like Krypto

During hunting season anyway.