Christopher East

After years away from the format, I feel like an inexpert judge of comic books, but lately I’ve been dipping into some of the stuff on Jenn’s shelf and I’ve been rather enjoying Joss Whedon’s comics work — to be specific, his futuristic sequel to the Buffy universe, Fray, and his Astonishing X-Men books.

Fray is an effective continuation of Whedon’s slayer lore, set in a gritty dystopian future that nonetheless contains some spiffy Gernsbackian sense of wonder elements.  It involves the new Slayer, Melaka Fray, an urban thief very much in the mold of Buffy and Faith, who learns of her fate when a fierce-looking demon Watcher comes calling.  There’s a new Apocalypse a-brewin’ and Melaka is the latest reluctant Chosen One.  Fray shows in miniature a lot of what Whedon does best in his TV work — strong characters, distinctive and funny dialogue, high stakes situations, groups standing together against dire threats, betrayal and tragedy and maintaining hope against seemingly insurmountable odds.  I’m not sure I’d call it essential reading, but Buffy and Angel completists will probably enjoy checking it out.

Whedon also displays a sure hand with The Astonishing X-Men, which I also enjoyed, to a somewhat lesser degree.  I’m a bit out of touch with the Marvel universe but from what I can tell its lore has been revised and rebooted pretty continually, so I feel a little lost there figuring who’s dead, whose alive, what timeline we’re in, and so forth.  Even so, Whedon has a deft handle on his particular X-Men lineup (Cyclops, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Wolverine, and Beast) and the art is exceptional here (I’m particularly fond of how Beast is rendered).  Anyway, some fun, if not terribly deep reading…I like comics but they sure seemed to last longer when I was a kid!

Speaking of Whedon, Dollhouse has officially been given the axe by Fox, which sadly does not come as much of a surprise.  I, for one, am  disappointed — although wildly uneven, at its best Dollhouse is an impressively dark and ambitious show, and it’s gotten increasingly more interesting since the last few episodes of season one.  (The most recent couple of episodes have been particularly strong.)  That said, Dollhouse has never really seemed like Whedon in his wheelhouse, so part of me isn’t too upset that this experiment is going to close up shop.  It just means we’ll get to see an entirely new project down the road; looking forward to it!

I like to bring page-turners with me when I’m traveling, and based on my reaction to the first Greg Rucka Queen & Country novel, I figured its sequel would be a good bet.  I was mostly right:  by and large, Private Wars (2005) is a brisk, enjoyable read in the mode of its predecessor.  But I found aspects of it troubling, and overall it didn’t connect with quite as strongly.

Following the dramatic events of the last novel (as well as several subsequent comic book issues), Rucka’s super-spy Tara Chace has retired to the English countryside to raise a child and recover from her traumatic experiences.  Chace’s resignation has left the Special Section of SIS, headed by acerbic, shrewd survivor Paul Crocker, in a sorry state:  the new head of section is a political appointee and isn’t up to snuff, and Minders Two and Three are still too inexperienced to handle department leadership.  Meanwhile, there’s a new Deputy Chief, and a new CIA Head of Station, which have transformed Crocker’s bureaucratic battlefield.  When an under-the-table operation comes his way, involving a regime change in strategically important Uzbekistan, Crocker sees a chance to do some good, and also improve his career prospects.  Carrying out the mission, though, involves luring Chace out of retirement, which takes some doing — but once Chace is on board, the adventure launches in earnest, as she inserts herself between rival siblings vying for power in central Asia.

Although it has many of the elements that made A Gentleman’s Game successful, and is certainly diverting and fast-paced, for some reason this one didn’t win me over to the same extent.  For one thing, the operation — which involves determining which successor to an ailing president will take over upon his death — is difficult to get all that excited about.  More problematic, for me, was how much of the plot turns involve revenge and violence.  Revenge was a major factor in A Gentleman’s Game as well — its mission a message-sending response to a severe terrorist attack on London — but in this case it takes a more personal turn, when Chace gets into a private war with an evil henchman of one of the Uzbek heirs, Zahidov.  Captured during an action in which she ruthlessly kills numerous members of Zahidov’s team, she is subsequently abused and tortured by him, barely escaping with her life thanks to a last-minute intervention.  While Zahidov’s behavior  is unquestionably despicable, and it’s certainly easy to root for his comeuppance in light of his treatment of Chace (and others), to me, on a certain level, Zahidov’s vicious, merciless behavior isn’t all that far removed from the machine-like killings of Chace.  It’s a problem I have with many thrillers and suspense shows or films — Taken, actually, is a perfect example — wherein the Hero, simply by virtue of being our viewpoint character on the right side of an argument, has carte blanche to brutally murder anyone who gets in his path, even if the motive for doing so places the one above the many.  Don’t get me wrong, Chace’s antagonist in Private Wars is a torturer and wanton killer, who has in the past raped his interrogation victims.  It isn’t that he doesn’t deserve whatever he gets — he does.  But does this excuse Chace’s remorseless killings, which in many cases come across like honorless, fatal sucker punches, merely in the context of a meddling political operation?  Or, even if they are in retaliation for the villains’ past abuses?  It seems like both sides of fence are equally guilty of perpetuating the violence, and escalating it without regard to collateral damage — never with a thought toward a nonviolent solution.

Anyway, much more interesting and engaging for me in the Queen & Country universe are the corridors of MI6 — Crocker’s schemes, his interactions with the other major figures of the service, the teamwork in the Ops room, and the considerably more human personalities of the other Minders.  These are the parts of The Sandbaggers that I really liked, and it comes across more strongly in the comic books.  Rucka handles these scenes well in Private Wars, and I invariably find them more interesting than the action sequences and the operations themselves, but unfortunately they always seem to run subservient to Chace’s relentless wetwork.  I, personally, would like to see more intrigue and less combat.

So, many complaints perhaps, but setting them aside I still really like this universe, and I’ll probably keep following it, provided it continues.  At the moment there doesn’t appear to be another novel out, but I do still have another volume of the collected comics to catch up on.

A couple weekends ago I saw Watchmen (2009), but it’s taken me a while to write up the review, for a couple of reasons.  One is that I decided to read the 1986-7 Alan Moore comic book series it’s based on first, and another is that the story is pretty complicated!  But here we go, finally:

I read comics quite a bit when I was younger, but somehow I never tried Watchmen, despite universally positive reviews from my other comic-reading friends.  It may have been my Marvelcentric reading habits, or maybe my pointless contrarian tradition of resisting trusted recommendations only to “discover” them years later and feel like an idiot for having waited.  At any rate, I went into the movie version of Watchmen (2009) with no preconceived notions.  And I’m kinda glad about that, actually…I seem to like it more than some of the original series’ fans.

One thing’s for sure, Watchmen isn’t your typical comic book (at least, not at the time it appeared), and it’s definitely not your typical comic book movie (even now).  Set in the mid-1980s at the height of an alternate Cold War, the story involves a group of superheroes, now disbanded in the wake of anti-vigilante legislation, who get drawn back into their pasts when one of their own, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is murdered.  The only remaining active vigilante, Rorschach (an intense and perfectly cast Jackie Earle Haley), concerned that someone might be “knocking off masks,” investigates the killings and warns his former partners-against-crime.  But what at first appears to be a possible serial killing spree turns out to be a much more complicated conspiracy, as the disillusioned, mostly retired heroes find themselves drawn back into world events.

The plot is quite complex, and the story unfolds in an intricate, extremely non-linear fashion, as the “present” track — the heroes investigating the conspiracy, against a tense backdrop of impending nuclear apocalypse — flashes back continuously to the history of this alternate universe, enabling us to learn the origins of the characters and their teams, as well as the vastly different political backdrop their existence has greatly influenced.  As a viewer, the movie pushed all my happy Mission: Impossible analytical buttons, as narrative tracks and plot points ricochet across the screen to eventually reveal the puzzle, culminating in a mostly effective and genuinely surprising ending.  In fact, I think certain details of the film’s ending were actually better than the comic book’s, and though I’m guessing many fans of the original are decrying some of the things that got left out of the film, I think the final edit made mostly smart decisions about what to cut.  In light of the length and complexity of the original, the film does an impressive job nearly accomplishing a next-to-impossible task condensing it all into a three-hour running time.

For all the deviousness of the plot and story, a big factor setting Watchmen apart from similar comic books — at least, the old group titles with which I’m familiar — is that it examines the moral questions of vigilante heroism in a much different way.  Like many spy novels of the Cold War era, it asks the question:  in the fight against evil, is it justifiable to use evil means?  The “heroes” of this universe aren’t your standard square-jawed good guys standing up for justice and the American way.  They’re sociopaths, and mad geniuses, they’re glory-seekers and narcissists, and disaffected tools of the government…all of them with strained, sometimes twisted relationships with their “hero” status.  The psychology on display in Watchmen makes Batman seem like a simple, happy guy.  And that makes them all the more fun to watch.  (I can only imagine how much more impact these types of characters must have had in the 1980s, in the context of a much tamer comic book scene — we’re a lot more used to neurotic, gray area heroes nowadays.)

So the film, in terms of structure, visuals, sound (yes, even the period music, which I think actually worked — in spite of myself!), story, and action, succeeded for me on just about every level.  The acting was more of a mixed bag.  Haley and Morgan are both great, I think, perfectly capturing their characters from the books, while Patrick Wilson (who plays Nite Owl) is probably the only actor to improve his character from what was on the page.  Many of the other characters, unfortunately, deliver flat, unexciting, or overly affected performances.  Beyond that, some occasionally unimpressive makeup work (that was Nixon? really?) and a tendency to over-show violence that the comic book more effectively implied are maybe my only real complaints.

Which isn’t to say it’s an otherwise perfect film, or that it perfectly captures the series.  But, as a newcomer to the universe here, I found  it pretty satisfying.  I would venture to say that if you’re at all a fan of the genre, the film and the graphic novel should both qualify as “required consuming.”

Greg Rucka’s A Gentleman’s Game (2004) is an espionage thriller based on — and crossing over with — his comic book series Queen & Country (2001-2007), which is a direct and loving homage to an old British television series called The Sandbaggers (1978-1980). The entire project has the feel of being a pop culture, cross-media mash-up — and for me, in the best possible way. Spies! Comics! Suspense! Addictive TV! Additionally, the Queen & Country universe manages to feel comfortably old fashioned and edgily contemporary at the same time — layering traditional Cold War mystique over a gritty, post-9/11 world. In short, this series pretty much couldn’t be more in my wheelhouse.

If you haven’t seen The Sandbaggers — and it’s kind of obscure — it’s a TV spy series set largely in the offices of the British SIS, and revolves around the Director of Operations and his Special Section, the “Sandbaggers” of the title, who are called upon to perform the foreign servive’s most sensitive and dangerous missions. Though the episode’s crises take place all over the globe, the show itself is largely centered on the halls of SIS headquarters and the British political world, where the Director of Operations, Neil Burnside, fights the Cold War on the home front — in sharp verbal duels with the espiocrats and politicians who control his agents’ fates. It’s incredibly low budget and extremely dialogue driven, but the plots are twisty and engaging, and the performers — particularly Roy Marsden as the blunt, unforgiving, and whip-smart Burnside and Ray Lonnen as his affable, fearless head of section, Willie Caine — are in fine form throughtout. For fans of dark, realistic, unglamorized espionage, I’d venture to say it should be required viewing.

Queen & Country borrows liberally from the entire Sandbaggers set-up, right down the organizational structure of its foreign intelligence service, and Rucka’s characters invariably have obvious Sandbaggers counterparts — so much so that when reading the comics, I find myself hearing the actors’ voices in my head. The one exception is Tara Chace, the head of Rucka’s Special Section. Chace is Sydney Bristow by way of Alec Leamas: an ass-kicking, fearless super-spy on the one hand, and a bitter, ingenious alcoholic on the other. If there’s one thing that differentiates Q&C from Sandbaggers, it’s Chace — and if there’s a second, it’s Rucka’s tendency to venture out into the field more often than The Sandbaggers, with its miniscule budgets, could ever afford to.

Which brings us, finally, to A Gentleman’s Game, a novel that bridges episodes of the comic book series with the story of a terrorist plot that takes place on British soil. This leads to a special operation of retaliation, which sends Chace on a series of risky, action-packed adventures across the Middle East. Meanwhile, Rucka’s Burnside-figure, Paul Crocker, works the halls and bureaucrats on the home front — the author staying true to his source material, even as he expands on it. Meanwhile the villainous terrorist perspective is seen through the eyes of a converted western Muslim, Sinan, whose fate is ultimately entwined with Chace and her allies.

I found it well written, deftly plotted, and thoroughly engaging stuff, sure to please fans of the comics and TV show it grew out of, and probably not a bad fit for newcomers who enjoy contemporary spy shows like 24 or Spooks. (An aside for viewers of Spooks, known as MI-5 in the U.S.: Peter Firth’s vicious Harry Pearce could easily be a direct descendent of Roy Marsen’s Neil Burnside on The Sandbaggers.) From time to time Rucka is perhaps a little too enamored of his protagonist, and the novel does display the occasional hoary old spy genre tropes — superhuman feats of violence, superhuman feats of lovemaking, etc. — but these are minor quibbles in what is ultimately a ripping espionage yarn. It left me wanting more, and fortunately there’s a second novel out, which I definitely intend to add to my reading pile.