Artist of the Day: Prashant Sharma

From a recent ad campaign for Veet Hair Removal System:

Heroes for Hire, RIP

If Marvel ever officially announced that they were cancelling Heroes for Hire, I missed it (which is entirely possible). Since they're not soliciting for new issues though, that sort of has to be what's going on. And HfH #15 certainly feels like a last issue. If it was, it was a doozy.

I've been reading HfH because of Shang Chi. I've never been a big fan of the "heroes for hire" concept, whether it's one of Marvel's versions or The Power Company (though The Power Company did a lot to make it more palatable by making the business more like a professional security firm than just a group of mercenaries), but the Master of Kung Fu will get me to check out any comic. And I'm glad he led me to this one.

The series explored the concept of paid superheroes in an interesting way. The group's leaders Misty Knight and Colleen Wing tended to take morally questionable jobs (like tracking down Superhero Registration dodgers and kidnapping innocent Monkey Boys) and then try to rationalize them. They'd occasionally work alongside Paladin who's a totally immoral mercenary and sort of made them look better by comparison, but when you pulled back and looked hard at the team, they weren't exactly good guys. Even if they did take the required case from the little kid with no money. They had good hearts -- at least Misty, Colleen, and Shang did, and Humbug at first -- but they almost always let money get in the way of what they knew was right.

And that was pretty much the point of the series. Readers weren't asked to just mindlessly root for the team because they were the "heroes" of the book. It was very covertly done, but I think we were supposed to be asking questions about the decisions these guys were making and the cases they took.

And the really interesting thing to me is that in spite of the moral ambiguity of the characters, Heroes for Hire wasn't a dark, depressing book. It wasn't an example of the recent darkening of superhero comics, because you always knew that one day Misty and Colleen would likely realize what they were doing wrong. There was always this element of hope to the series that, ironically, is missing in a lot of traditionally lighter superhero books these days.

The bittersweet thing is that the "heroes" finally figured it out in the last issue. It's sweet because they finally realized what they needed to change. It's bitter because it's too late. It's too late for them to help some people in the story who really needed helping. And it's too late for us as readers because now the story's apparently done and we don't get to see them redeem themselves. But man is it powerful.

I'm glad I stuck with the series and I'm sorry it's done.

All the world's waiting for you.

Alright, I've sat on this long enough in constant expectation that we'd ultimately hear, "No, no. That's just a rumor. Stay tuned," but apparently that's not going to happen and Megan Gale is indeed the new Wonder Woman. Which is what they've been saying for about a month now.

Visually, she's perfect. I don't know if she can act, but I'm all for getting an unknown and I'll trust that the casting people know what they're doing. I guess it's in vogue to hate the JLA movie already, but I'm optimistic about it. Sure, the thing may suck, but I don't have a reason to be cynical about that yet. Especially with... I mean, just look at her!

You know who else would've made a good choice? Ellie from Chuck. I mentioned that one to my wife and she agreed. Sarah Lancaster would be perfect, especially considering we already know she can act.

But Megan Gale? Also perfect.

Artist of the Day: Dan Boyd

From a CD cover Dan Boyd did for an unnamed Portland band.

The Devil Bat

If you've been paying attention to the Movie Queue section of my sidebar you may have noticed that I've been watching a lot of Bela Lugosi movies lately. I started around Halloween and I'm just now getting a bit burnt out, so The Devil Bat will be the last one for a while. But it was a good one to finish the marathon with.

I'm going back and forth about whether or not I like the story. It's easy for me to divorce the story from the cheesy effects and some of the B-level acting, but even then I'm not sure. The story goes that Dr. Paul Carruthers (Bela Lugosi) is the most beloved man in the small town where he lives. He's kind and friendly and apparently a good physician. What people don't know is that he's actually conducting bizarre experiments in a hidden laboratory in his home. He's turning ordinary bats into giant monsters and sending them out to kill.

In addition to being the local physician, Carruthers is also under contract to a local, but powerful company that makes health and beauty aids. The company is owned by two families who made their fortunes off a skin cream formula that Carruthers invented, so it's no coincidence that all the bats' victims are members of those families. Carruthers has just invented a new aftershave lotion that he asks his victims to try out before it goes on the market. Once each person puts it on, the giant bat hones in on it and attacks the scent on the victim's kneck.

It's a clever way to commit murder and the elements of freakishly large bats and hidden labs are awesome. My problem is that I never really got Carruthers' motives. We learn that he wasn't cheated out of the skin cream money, but rather that the families had wanted to profit share with him and he'd demanded ten grand in cash. Now, he's angry enough to want revenge and the only explanation we have is that he's completely insane. That's all good, I guess, except that he's so convincing as the kindly doctor and we're supposed to believe that he's been that convincing for years. I had a hard time buying that someone crazy enough to raise giant bats and send them murdering innocent people for a mistake he brought on himself would be able to put up a convincing front for very long.

There's a scene towards the end of the movie though where Lugosi kind of sells it. He finally cracks in front of someone and you can just sort of see that it's been a struggle for him to remain so friendly all these years. It doesn't make the whole thing suddenly plausible, but it makes an effort. And really, I'm glad that they didn't make the families out to be evil barons who intentionally screwed poor, old, kindly Dr. Carruthers. You really feel bad for them and want to see Carruthers get what's coming to him.

Okay, I've just convinced myself that I like the story.

This isn't Lugosi's best work. (I'd call that The Invisible Ray and maybe The Black Cat. I like him better as a good guy because it's so against type for him.) But it's definitely an above average role for Lugosi. He switches personalities flawlessly and you completely buy that he's a well-masked madman, even if you don't get how he's doing it.

Besides, you know what a cautious fellow I am.

Courtesy of the Sci Fi Channel, here are a couple of more spoiler-free stills from the new Indy movie.

Dang if they don't look even better than that first one.

Art of the Day: Not the Cloverfield Monster

This has been floating around for a while, but I just found out about it. It's a fan's conception of what the Cloverfield monster might look like, including the smaller "helper" monsters that fans have been speculating about.

I only hope J.J. Abrams' actual monster looks this good.

Putting the adventure back in Adventureblog

The latest installment of my Blogarama column, "Fringe Benefits," is up. It's a review of B. Clay Moore and Steven Griffin's Hawaiian Dick: Byrd of Paradise.

I'm going to move away from the theme days format I've been using here for the last few months or however long it's been. It was a useful system for organizing posts, but I've gotten bored with it. So now, instead of saving up links and topics until the appropriate theme day, I'll be talking about things as they occur to me or I run across them.

I'm also gonna try to do less link-blogging in general and replace it with more actual content. Naturally, if I run across something cool I'll still want to talk about it, but you probably won't see links to every new giant monster video game or statue that comes out anymore. Basically, I want to make this place more spontaneous, exciting, and well, adventuresome.

"Stuff Nobody Cares About But Me" Saturday

Just have some odds and ends that don't fit in the regular week's blogging, but I think are cool anyway.



Not the Engine.

Warren Ellis' new message board is open for business.

Now that's heroism.

This story's almost a month old, but it's amazing enough that I still want to share. A fourteen year old kid jumps onto railroad tracks to save a stranger.

Kevin should make a whole blog about this.

Samuel L. Jackson's Book Club.

Cool Blog of the Week

Covering the Mouse: a blog full of covers of Disney songs. Hours of fun.

Change the World, Start at Home

Three projects on Saint Paul's East Side (where I live) are competing with projects in nine other cities for help from HGTV's new program Change the World, Start at Home – and the public decides who gets the help. I'm not going to pretend that Saint Paul is more deserving than any of the other cities, but it's certainly a neighborhood that can use some help.

From November 8 to December 21 your votes will help win support for three local projects that feature a mixture of historic preservation, community, education, and environmental improvement, including:

• Helping a Dayton's Bluff (my neighborhood) family with an unfinished home renovation. As far as I know, that's not mine. We're doing our kitchen, but that's pretty much up to us.
• Transforming the grounds of the Wilder Recreation Center/City Academy building.
• Restoring and interpreting the ecological and cultural resources in the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

Click here to vote for Saint Paul.

Click here to read about the Saint Paul projects.

This isn't me, but...

Michael May and the Messarounds are playing the Lager House in Detroit tonight. Somebody go and tell me how they did.

No, Matthew! NOOOOOOO!

From Studio 60 to this? The adult in a child's body deal is lame enough, but it also means he's playing second fiddle in a frickin' Zac Efron movie. I had great hopes for Matthew Perry's post-Friends career and his makes me very sad.

Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.

"Hey, lady! You call him Dr. Jones!"

Indy may be getting older, but I still wouldn't screw around with him. Thanks to Comic by Comic for the image.

And speaking of Dr. Jones: "The story is told in the Kebra Negast (Glory of the Kings), Ethiopia's chronicle of its royal line: the Queen of Sheba, one of its first rulers, traveled to Jerusalem to partake of King Solomon's wisdom; on her way home, she bore Solomon's son, Menelik. Later Menelik went to visit his father, and on his return journey was accompanied by the firstborn sons of some Israelite nobles—who, unbeknown to Menelik, stole the ark and carried it with them to Ethiopia. When Menelik learned of the theft, he reasoned that since the ark's frightful powers hadn't destroyed his retinue, it must be God's will that it remain with him."

True story? Smithsonian Magazine's Paul Raffaele tries to find out. It's true, as one commenter to the article put it, that Raffaele is "no Indiana Jones," but it's still a cool story full of mystic locales and secretive guardians. And this one definitely is true.

Never mind.

Yesterday, when I teased about the book questioning Jesse James' DNA test, the reason I didn't write about it then was that I was in a rush and didn't have time to read the whole press release I'd saved. Now that I have, I recognize the book's author as being one of a couple of folks claiming to be descendants of Jesse James. Everything you need to know about her and her case is in the link, but I've heard her story on one of those Jesse specials I mentioned yesterday and I'm skeptical. In spite of the fantasy we pose in Jesse James vs. Machine Gun Kelly, there's no real evidence that leads me to believe that Jesse survived his encounter with Bob Ford's gun.

Solomon Kane Poster

As much as I love Robert E. Howard's Conan stories (and I so do), I've never tracked down his Solomon Kane stories because deep in my heart I don't believe that anyone, not even Howard, could write stories cool enough to do justice to the idea of a wandering, Puritan monster-hunter.

I have to say though that the poster for the movie adaptation looks pretty damn cool. Sort of makes me want to read some Howard stories. (Thanks to Christopher Mills for the link).

Chuck picked up.

I'm pretty sure I watched the pilot episodes of every new show this season. Some shows never got a second viewing; others I dropped after checking out a few additional episodes. Without question, the best new show of the Fall has been NBC's Chuck. It's like they took Jim from The Office, turned him into a reluctant spy, and had the hottest, most butt-kickingest secret agent ever and Jayne from Firefly protect him. It's funny, it's action-packed, and it's got a ton of heart. It's also been picked up for a full season, which -- assuming the WGA strike is resolved and they can actually create new episodes -- is the best news I've heard all week.

Assassination of Jesse James review, etc.

I finally saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford a couple of weeks ago, but I keep forgetting to write a review. My brother-in-law Dave and I agreed that it was basically a very pretty, well acted History Channel special. And I should know because I've been watching a lot of Jesse James specials lately on PBS and the History Channel and whatnot.

The Assassination of Jesse James doesn't really add anything to them except that it's got a much larger budget and some fancy movie stars. It's more or less a straightforward, accurate depiction of the last part of Jesse's life, complete with a History Channel-esque narrator. There's nothing particularly revelatory about him unless your previous exposure to him has been limited to American Outlaws.

That's not to say that it's a worthless movie though. It actually plays pretty well if you see it as a movie about Bob Ford. It does a fairly nice job of getting inside poor Bob's head and letting you experience with him the fear and paranoia that being in Jesse's gang must have entailed. At least in the middle half it does.

The first half hour or so has one of the coolest, moodiest train robberies I've even seen in a movie, but other than that it's just a bunch of look-how-crazy-Jesse-is and isn't-Bob-a-socially-retarded-dweeb. Where the movie really picks up is once Jesse starts suspecting that his men are plotting against him. At that point, everyone's on edge, including the audience. Unless you really know your Jesse history, you never can tell when he's going to snap and kill off a pal next. It's makes for some gripping movie-watching.

Unfortunately, the film never really explains why Bob decided to betray Jesse. It implies it, certainly. Living in fear will grind on a fella, and Jesse never really gave Bob the respect Bob felt he deserved. But I missed seeing that one moment where Bob goes, "That's it. I've had enough." Maybe it was there and it was too subtle for me, but I kept thinking and wondering about it for the last half-hour of the movie and it kept me from being able to just enjoy the end as the paranoia got thicker and thicker until something had to crack. The lack of that one, defining moment is the movie's big flaw and the reason I probably won't buy it when it comes out on DVD in January.

Moving on to other Jesse news, Spout.com notices that Warner Brothers has finally decided to pay some attention to Assassination and has started taking out "For Your Consideration" ads for it. They're promoting it for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, but I agree with Spout that they're missing an opportunity by not pushing Casey Affleck for Best Supporting Actor. I'd argue that his role in the film should actually put him up for consideration for Best Actor, but Supporting Actor would probably be an easier win for him.

If other Jesse movies are interesting to you, VCI has a boxed collection of them on sale for ten bucks. The Great Jesse James Raid & Outlaws Collection features The Great Jesse James Raid, Renegade Girl, Return of Jesse James, Gunfire, Dalton Gang and I Shot Billy the Kid.

What else?

Bob Ford's gun went up for auction last week. Not the one he shot Jesse with, but still pretty cool.

Jesse may have been Welsh.

And I'll wrap up with a cool story about Jesse versus a moustache-twirling rent-collector. I don't know if it's true, but I like it because Jesse gets to sort of play the hero in it while still remaining in character.

Next week I'll tell you about a book that questions the DNA evidence around Jesse's death. Maybe, as Jesse James vs. Machine Gun Kelley postulates, Bob didn't really kill him as dead as everyone thought.