Comic Review: The Chimera Brigade Book One

    Regular readers will know that I love the pulps, and a lot of pulp inspired stuff.  Movies like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Raiders of the Lost Ark; comics like The Rocketeer and Hellboy; and of course adaptations of the originals, like Doc Savage, The Shadow, and the like.  I also enjoy a good referential, alternate history story, like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  So, The Chimera Brigade is right up my alley.   Set in an alternate 1938, where Europe was profoundly changed by the arrival of what seem to be superheroes and villains after the Great War.  Across the Continent, forces are gathering, spies are spying, and trouble is brewing.

    Though the book in no way feels like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that is the most obvious reference when comparing it to something else.  But instead of characters out of Victorian adventure novels, it features a different array of references (from Zamyatin’s We to Orwell’s Big Brother to Meyrink’s Golem), and a very different plot.  I like the setting a lot and am very curious where the plot is going to take the various characters that have been introduced.  The art isn’t amazing, but it’s not bad.  Though not as good, in my opinion, it often reminds me of Mignola’s work on Hellboy.

    Doing a quick bit of research, I found that this is the first of six volumes.  I’m glad that it’s a story that has been completed.  But not I’ve got to wait for it to get translated from the French and published Stateside, which sadly, might take a while.  Because it is only the first of six volumes, this serves primarily as an introduction to the world and to the players, with only hints at the overall story.  It has my attention; hopefully it can hold on to it for however long it takes to get the whole thing out.

The Chimera Brigade: Book One
Authors: Serge Lehman & Fabrice Colin
Artist: Gess
Publisher: Titan Comics
ISBN: 978-1-782-76099-3

-Matthew J. Constantine

Something is coming...

There's big news coming for us here at In the Mouth of Dorkness.  We've been kinda quiet lately.  But we're still living the Dork Life.  And we hope you are, too.  Hopefully, by the end of the year, we'll be making a pretty cool announcement.

In the meantime; Jason Statham, Jenny Agutter, Frank Frazetta, Charlton Heston, William Shatner, Comics, Pimpmobile, Drive, Hellboy, Nic Cage, and Vincent Price. (And don't forget to check us out on Facebook at In the Mouth of Dorkness).

-Matt

Comic Review: Beasts of Burden

    Hellboy and Scooby-Doo mixed with Lassie?  OK.  A bunch of neighborhood dogs (and one stray cat) become a supernatural investigation and combative force.  This collection of short stories has a dash of the old Tales from the Crypt type anthology comics.

    Eight stories of varying lengths introduce us to the various dogs and their stray cat friend, as well as a building sense of something very, very big coming.  The stories are a mixed bag.  The art is excellent thoughout, but a couple of the stories (The Unfamiliar and Grave Happenings) aren’t all that good.  In fact, by Grave Happenings, I couldn’t help but wonder, was all this build-up ever going to built to something?  I love the things hinted at, the greater world of dogs fighting evil, weird forces building, etc.  But it’s not the kind of thing that can just build and build without coming to some kind of a head.

    The best stories are Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, A Dog and His Boy, and Lost.  But each story builds the mythology.  I know there have been some more stories published since these were collected.  Here’s hoping they too will be put into one volume.  Here’s hoping that like Hellboy, it eventually rises above aimless build-up stories and moves the concept forward.  Whatever the case, fans of horror comics and old style anthologies should check this one out.  A Dog and His Boy, man.  That one is rough.

Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites
Author: Evan Dorkin
Artist: Jill Thompson
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-513-1

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Reviews: Abe Sapien Volumes 1 & 2

The Drowning

    The first volume of Abe Sapien tells the story of his first mission without Hellboy.  Generally speaking, it feels like a Hellboy story, just with Abe put in Red’s place.  I like the premise, and there are a lot of good scenes.  What I don’t like is Abe.  It’s weird, but my recent reading of B.P.R.D. and now reading this, I find myself enjoying Abe less and less.  I don’t know if Mignola isn’t sure what to do with him, or if he is sure, and it’s just not something I respond to.  Like Liz Sherman, Abe has become a sort of listless, self-doubting, sad-sack.  And this first solo (well, he’s got several red-shirt agents along with him…for a few pages) adventure does little to lend him much gravitas.

    As I said, I really do like the premise of the story.  An island which had been a leper colony and the center of a supernatural event, was rededicated to worship of the Sea.  Then something awful happened, and something was buried.  Abe and crew don’t exactly cause the problem, but their arrival sets some stuff in motion, and as often happens in these stories, the proverbial crap hits the fan.  There are more connections drawn to the Hyperboria, Atlantis, and Lemuria, some deep history and some weird magic.  And I really like Jason Shaw Alexander’s artwork.  But, at the end of the day, like in B.P.R.D., Abe is seeming more and more like a shadowy afterthought of Hellboy, like a vessel for unused story ideas that were meant for our doomed hero, but would no longer work for him.

The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories

    The second volume feels even more like classic Hellboy, being a bunch of short stories that feature various unrelated events.  That said, it feels like Abe has a bit more personality here.  The Haunted Boy and The Abyssal Plain showcase Abe’s very different, more thoughtful approach to weird events.  The Devil Does Not Jest sets up something really cool, but doesn’t pay off, which was too bad.  Pretty much everything up until the finale was cool.  I wonder if it’ll have any kind of follow-up in future Abe books, or in B.P.R.D.

    The art is a mixed bag, as this is an anthology.  But it’s all passable, at least.  However, I still can’t figure out if I actually like Abe anymore.  He’s such a potentially interesting character, but like several plotlines on Lost, the more you find out, the less interesting he becomes.  There were so many ways to take the character, and it seems like they’ve found most of the bad ones.  As much as I love Hellboy and B.P.R.D., it frustrates me that what was one of my favorite characters feels lost to me, now.  Like I can’t connect to him or to what he’s doing.

Abe Sapien: The Drowning
Author: Mike Mignola
Artist: Jason Shawn Alexander
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-185-0

Abe Sapien: The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories
Authors: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artists: Patrick Reynolds, etc.
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-925-2

-Matthew J. Constantine

Comic Reviews: B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth 1, 2, & 3

New World

    The Plague of Frogs is over…Right?  Everything must be OK, then.  Everything should be getting back to normal, huh?  Of course not.  The Frogs were the beginning, but there’s a whole heck of a lot more trouble on its way.  It is, as the title suggests, a new world.  Humans are adaptable, and they’re gonna have to do some serious adapting.

    This volume sees the return of some old friends, and hints at new dangers on the horizon.  The B.P.R.D. team, now having to deal with being folded into the UN, is still haunted by the loss of Hellboy from their ranks.  Without his spirit at their head, they’ve never quite worked as well.  Abe has become sullen, Liz has wandered off again, Kate is stretched to her limit, Johann is more and more secretive and weird.  The cracks in the team are like the cracks in reality, letting vile darkness creep into the world.

Gods and Monsters

    Monsters are crawling out of the ground, people are loosing their minds, and out of Texas comes a profit, leading the lost and displaced away from danger.  What’s her deal?  Well, someone seems to know, and we get a history lesson in pre-human civilization, and hints of what is to come.  And then there’s Liz’s adventures in trailer park living.  Bad, bad business.

    There is an art shift half way through this volume, with Tyler Crook taking over from Guy Davis.  He does a pretty good job of not making the shift too distracting, and while not as distinct a style as Davis’s, I think it’s perhaps a bit easier on the eyes.  For all the horror contained in this book, it feels like a relatively restful intake of breath, before it all goes down.

Russia

    And so, in this volume, it all starts to go down hill fast.  When Kate takes a trip to Russia, we see that things haven’t been going too well there, either.  The world is breaking down, the rules are being forgotten, and people are learning to live with a lot of things.  A lot of pretty awful things.

    It feels like with the trip to Russia, the new conflict in a post Frog war world is revealed.  Pieces are being put on the board, and the first moves are made.  Kate is forced to finally accept that Hellboy is gone, and what’s up with Abe this time?  No wonder Abe and Hellboy were such good friends.  Both have greatness written in their destiny.  Both want to do good, to be good, to fight for good.  Yet both built for cataclysmic evil.  That’s got to weigh on a person, be they a fish man or a demon.

    The first three volumes of Hell on Earth are steeped in the cosmic dread one expects from Mike Mignola’s world.  For all the fun and excitement of Hellboy and Abe’s pulp flavored adventures, there has always been an underlying doom of growing, rolling, unstoppable horror, and in B.P.R.D., that horror is bursting out of its prison, hungry and wild.  Can the broken and battered investigators and agents of the Bureau save humanity?  Can they at least buy us a few more sunrises?  It’s looking less and less likely.

B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: New World
Authors: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artist: Guy Davis
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-707-4

B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Gods and Monsters
Authors: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artists: Guy Davis & Tyler Crook
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-822-4

B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Russia
Authors: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artists: Tyler Crook & Dave Stewart
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-946-7

-Matt

Comic Review: B.P.R.D. Plague of Frogs 4

    Another volume of B.P.R.D. another part of the world irrevocably altered.  Actually two parts this time.  Germany and Indonesia…oh, and California.  Three parts.  A lot is revealed in this final volume of the mega-arc Plague of Frogs.  But of course there is more to come.  I don’t know what happens next, but considering how bad this arc has been, I have to think one called “Hell on Earth” is going to get dark before it gets light…if it ever gets light.

    So, this time around, the team is trying to figure out what’s going on with that dream/ghost Liz keeps seeing.  And like me, they’re trying to figure out why Lobster Johnson would hijack Johann’s ectoplasm and shoot it.  On the trail of this Memnan Saa, they also begin to unravel the secret of a sad and unloved occultist from the 1800s who orbited in the same social circles as the team’s new mummy member, Panya.  The quest takes them to Asia, where a member of the team is snatched.  Then to German, where they discover that the Frog threat isn’t as contained as believed and that it has become much more complicated.  And then to the frozen wastes of the Russian-Chinese border.  There is a return of an old enemy and that of an old friend…sort of.  And though I hardly think his tale is done, there is a kind of peace found for the Lobster.

    Abe and Liz go through absolute hell over the course of the volume.  Like Hellboy, Abe has never been comfortable with command, and it is weighing very heavily on him.  Both learn a great deal about themselves, and their place in the cosmic play that is unfolding.  These beings (heroes and villains) seem to be like gravity wells, attracted to each other and causing all sorts of damage as they pass, and massive destruction when the collide.  Even with the best intentions, Liz is a tremendously catastrophic force.  And if Abe found himself uncomfortable with command before, what fate seems to have in store for him will not be improving his outlook.  With Hellboy out of the picture, these two are coming into their own, and it may just spell the end of the world.  And through it all, there’s Kate.  Good, sane, steady Kate.  With all the flash and noise of these weird people it’s easy not to notice Kate, but without her, everything would be falling apart (not just lots of things but everything).

    Though this volume ends a story arc, it is not the end of the story.  And in a way, the Plague of Frogs is all just setting the stage for what comes next.  And by the end of this volume, you’ll have seen a few glimpses into what that may be.  And it’s not good.  Things have changed for our heroes.  Their lives are in constant upheaval, their losses profound and their gains sometimes fleeting.  But they press on, battling against the tidal waves of cosmic horror.  B.P.R.D. is a great series that takes its emotional cue from Lovecraft.  These brave men and women are not fighting for good or justice.  They may not even be fighting to win.  They’re doing everything they can to stop an unstoppable force, to delay it, to give the Earth just one more day of light.  The wave is coming.  And the only thing between us and the end is a team of weirdos who may themselves be the keys to our ultimate destruction.

B.P.R.D. Plague of Frogs 4
Authors: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artists: Guy Davis & Dave Stewart
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
ISBN: 978-1-59582-974-0

-Matt

Dork Art: Mike Mignola's Midnight Circus

Just popping in with some cool news revealed at C2E2.  In the current continuum Hellboy might be stumbling around Hell, but that doesn't mean we can't get another amazing Original Graphic Novel during the downtime between issues.  After illustrating the epic trilogy that sent HB into the abyss (Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, and The Storm & The Fury), Duncan Fegredo returns to the Mignolaverse with a flashback tale depicting kid Hellboy's flight from his Military Base homestead to the freedom of the circus.  A perfectly cliche American notion for young Hellboy to explore.

Comic Book Resources has a quick interview with Mignola in which he claims inspiration from both Ray Bradbury & Pinocchio.  As well as cramming in "almost everything I find hideous and disturbing about circuses."  The young Hellboy shorts hold a special kinda sway over HB fanatics.  Stories like "Pancakes," the more recent 1948, and even Eric Powell's weird tale "Midnight Cowboy" are adorably bittersweet comics and the idea of a longer book focusing on the transition from boy to man is incredibly appealing.  But I better be getting some Mac the Dog too.

--Brad

Comic Review: Hawkeye

    The pantheon of superheroes is littered with exceptionally lame characters.  Characters with no cool, with goofy costumes, lame powers, or what have you.  For every Black Panther there’s a Sleepwalker.  For every Joker there’s a Crazy Quilt.  Personally, I’ve never thought much of The Flash or Cyclops, for example.  Lobo and Wolverine have their fans, but just seem like the worst 13 year old boy fantasies to me.  But two of the lamest characters among the Big Two’s cast of heroes have to be the archers.  Green Arrow and Hawkeye.  Come on!  First off, Green Arrow looks stupid in his Robin Hood costume and his blond goatee.  And he’s such a tool.  Hawkeye looks like a purple Wolverine with that silly mask of his.  And the only thing that makes him less obviously lame than Green Arrow is that nobody ever gave two craps about him, so he was never an important character.  Then somebody cast that Jeremy Renner guy all the girls are into (what’s up with women being so into goofy looking dudes?) and suddenly Hawkeye gets his own comic series.  Before Avengers hit theaters, do you know how many people in the entire world named Hawkeye as their favorite comic characters?  Zero.  Afterward, all the Whedon/NewWho girls were instant mega-fans.  Come on!

Dr. Doom is quaking.

    So then I start hearing people say, ‘hey, this Hawkeye comic is pretty good.’  To which I would then say, ‘whatever, dude,’ confidently brushing off  such silly sentiment.  But because of the graphic novel club I belong to, I finally relented and read the first collected volume.  And yeah, it’s pretty good, I guess.  Step one in making it not suck was getting him out of that dumbass costume.  Even his post-movie look is lame, but nothing compared to the original.  Step two, get him away from the Avengers.  Like Batman in the Justice League, Hawkeye goes with the Avengers like pralines and horse testicles.  In tabletop role playing games, there was a lot of thought put into ‘play balance.’  Groups of characters might be wildly different, but as a general rule they should average out to about the same.  Hawkeye shoots arrows.  He’s standing next to the Hulk (an ever growing engine of rage that is virtually unstoppable), Captain America (a super-soldier engineered to be the ultimate extant of human ability), Iron Man (a super-genius in an ultra-advanced mech-suit), and others.  Hawkeye shoots arrows.  He shoots arrows!  He’s fighting Doctor Doom, Thanos, Skrulls, and all sorts of crazy things and he shoots motherf&%$ing ARROWS!!!  (In case you’re not keeping up on current events, people figured out good ways to protect themselves from arrows like 500 years ago!).  The only thing lamer than that would be throwing playing cards.  And that’s just too stupid for words; they’d never do something that dumb.  So, getting him away from the Avengers was a good idea.  Like the early Brubaker run on Captain America, and his run on Winter Soldier, Matt Fraction gets Hawkeye away from the nutty, over the top kind of stuff the weirder characters and super-teams get into, and deals more with espionage/crime kinds of things.  The stuff a guy shooting arrows might actually have a chance to deal with.

    Hawkeye (aka Clint Barton) is a wisecracker.  I hate wisecrackers, mostly because they’re typically written poorly.  Cracking wise involves a difficult balance between being funny and being an A-hole.  I’ll give Fraction this, he manages to strike that balance in this volume.  Barton is funny, without being too funny or two annoying.  It doesn’t feel as forced as Joss Whedon often does (hey, I love Firefly and the first couple Buffy seasons were good, but the guy has writing issues…sorry, he does).  I think, ultimately it keeps the reader at a distance as much as other characters, though.  By the end of the volume, I didn’t feel like I knew who this Barton guy was at heart.  There’s a ‘twist’ at one point (the secret video tape) that feels like it should have emotional resonance, but I don’t know that I’d have felt any different about the guy had the ‘twist’ not happened.  The dialog works better than expected and the story is fine.  But at the end of the day, I didn’t come away caring about Hawkeye.  If anything, other-Hawkeye, Kate Bishop seemed like a bit more of a ‘character,’ though she’s hardly developed either.  I guess the reader is supposed to already be well versed in the mythology, so they already know everybody’s deal.  But for this infrequent Marvel reader, that isn’t the case.  For example, I didn’t understand who Bishop was until the extra issue of Young Avengers that rounds out this volume.  Oh, she’s the ‘new’ Hawkeye…because the original Hawkeye was comicbook-dead for a while.  OK.

Showing my belly helps me shoot better!

    The art is disgusting.  But I guess this kind of thick-line, block coloring, no shading, no detail, no subtlety kind of crap is popular among comic aficionados.  I think it looks like a turd sandwich, but my taste in comic art has never matched up with general readership or especially the more ‘literary’ types.  I guess it’s like people who enjoy the flavor of liver.  Intellectually I know they exist, but emotionally I have a hard time accepting it.  I’m a little less choosy about art than I used to be.  Once upon a time I would simply not read a book if I didn’t really like the art.  Now I may be less inclined, but it’s not a deal breaker.  Still, is more consistent and consistently good art too much to ask?  Or must Ben Templesmith and his lot (it looks like crap intentionally…for ART!) be attached to every project I might otherwise want to read?  It seems to be a choice between ‘looks like crap’ art and ‘looks like manga’ art.  I’m way past sick of both.

    At the end of the day, this is a comic I’ve read.  It’s not great.  It’s not amazing.  I don’t understand the level of excitement around it, or why so many comic readers are claiming it as one of the best comics around.  It’s OK; and among the recent releases from Marvel that makes it stand out.  I still prefer FF (also featuring hideous art!) and Fantastic Four though.  But I’ll take Invincible or the Rocketeer over this any day.  Against comics like Hellboy or Y: the Last Man, it’s not even a blip on the radar.  Heck, I’ll even take the unpleasant art of B.P.R.D. over this, because the content of the story matches the look (and is far superior in every other way).

Read B.P.R.D. instead!

Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon
Author: Matt Fraction
Artists: David Aja, etc.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
ISBN: 978-0-7851-6562-0

-Matt

Brad's Week in Dork! (3/3/13-3/9/13)

The March to Summer has begun.  Can't you taste the buttered blockbuster blitzkrieg?  With the Friday release of Sam Raimi's CG Candyland, the 2013 spectacle movie is upon us and I'm rather appalled by these early offerings.  Don't get me wrong.  I can't wait for Summer.  Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Pacific Rim.  These are popcorn films I'm seriously craving.  But first we have to wade through the wannabes like Oz and Jack The Giant Slayer?  No.  It's bad enough I had to suffer through the Icon disappointments of The Last Stand, Bullet To The Head, & A Good Day To Die Hard.  Not to mention the castoff dreck like Texas Chainsaw 3D & Gangster Squad.  I get it.  We need time to digest the year end Best Of films.  Sure.  January.  Suck it up Hollywood.  But once February rolls around and March hits, I want to be seeing good quality filmmaking.  Or at least one or two solid entries.  Now, I know what you're saying (and what Matt is happy to echo), "Brad, you don't have to suffer through all this subpar cinema."  Well, yer right.  I don't have to.  But I love to anyway.  The movie house is my church.  I want to be nowhere else.  And now that I'm the happy owner of a Movie Pass, I've got my ankles in it and I'm chowing down on the New Year muck.

So....saw four flicks theatrically this week.  That's the most I've done since the New Year began.  Dead Man Down, Jack The Giant Slayer, and Oz all disappointed.  None quite terrible, but sometimes the middle-of-the-road pictures are the most painful.  The happy news is that the first film I saw on the big screen this week also turned out to be my favorite film of 2013 so far.  It didn't quite hit me like The Grey did early in 2012, but it was thrilling enough and when facing Lovecraftian blackness, a sliver of light can feel like the sun.  Steven Soderbergh might be claiming retirement from the movie making business, but I sure hope he realizes the error of his ways sooner rather than later.  His last three films (Magic Mike, Contagion, & Haywire) were heaps of funky HD joy and his latest, Side Effects, is even better.  It's slick, twisty, and well acted.  Plus, another cool score from Thomas Newman.

So if 2013 isn't going to bother giving us the proper fresh entertainment we all deserve on the big screen than I guess we gotta look to the small.  Took the plunge into the Neflix timesuck known as House of Cards, whipped through the second season of HBO's Game of Thrones, and rediscovered some serious enthusiasm for a John Carpenter classic.  Managed a few comics, but outside forces kept getting in the way of a proper sit down with the funny books.  I have a feeling that the four color form is going to rule next week - so many good books to get through and I haven't even started this month book group selection yet.

House of Cards:  Not sure this show is right for me.  Politicians behaving like assholes and committing diabolical acts of scumbaggery?  What's so new about that?  Granted, Kevin Spacey is devilishly fantastic as Congressman Underwood, especially when he's plotting to camera and Michael Kelly as his right hand goon is properly menacing.  However, I really hate the female characters.  Kate Mara's descent into journalistic prostitution was wasn't just disappointing it was downright predictable and boring.  Robin Wright Penn's narrative collapse is little more than hateful window dressing and Constance Zimmer's bitchy coworker turned bitchy partner in crime is just icing on this gender garbage dump.  I enjoy watching villainous protagonists as much as the next person, but I'm not seeing anything new or original in House of Cards.  Still, look at Spacey's glare to camera.  There is a little joy in his monologuing.

Thunderbolts #5:  Ok.  First off.  I really hate that cover above.  What the hell is The Leader doing?  Is he about to 8 Mile his way outta the Thunderbolts posse?  It just looks ridiculous.  That being said, I'm still loving the silly heck outta this book.  Daniel Way is having a lot of fun with these morally corrupt loners.  Sure, I don't really buy how Red Hulk got them all together in the first place but now that they're here and we've got The Punisher & Elektra making out in the blood splattered woods of Kata Jaya - I am happy.  And I'm seriously loving the Preacher stares Steve Dillon is putting on Frank Castle's face.  Some of you out there in Internetland don't seem to appreciate him on this book, but I'll be sad to see him go after this first arc.  The man can put hate on a brow like nobody else in this business.  I hope he finds more weird work over at Marvel.

Uncanny Avengers #4:  A bit better than last issue.  Rick Remender's caption writing still needs some readjusting, but I dig the plotting.  Opening the issue on the infamous Summers plane crash gives an extra bit of oomph to Havoc as Avengers leader, and the Days of Future Past-like flash forwards are perfectly comic booky.  The Red Skull logos on the Sentinels' faces brought a great grin to this long time comic book fanboy.  And the final 90s throwback splash page?  Damn.  That's goofy.  Cool.  And I want it on a poster.  This issue also marks the end of John Cassaday's run.  It's a real shame.  I was hoping for a massive hardcover volume of his work here, but now I'm going to have to settle for a puny four issues.  The loss of him on art takes a good chunk of the books epicness, and I'm curious to see if replacement killer Daniel Acuna can deliver the goods.  Uncanny Avengers started out as the flagship book of Marvel Now and has slowly become little more than a blip on the landscape.

The Walking Dead - Season 3 "Clear":  From the beginning, this show has suffered from serious acts of narrative decompression.  Padding.  We're nearly at the end of the third season.  Rick's crew should be gearing up, if not already embroiled, in a full on WAR with The Governor and the rest of Woodbury's henchman.  Instead the audience is given yet another distraction from the overall story.  Granted, this was a pretty good distraction.  Rick, Carl, & Michone return home in search of weapons.  There they encounter Morgan, whom we haven't seen since the first episode of the first season.  His son is dead.  He's lost his mind.  He's a mirror for Rick's possible future.  The man is batshit crazy.  You know, like Rick is on occasion.  He craves death.  Of course, Rick & his moral high ground can't grant him his death wish.  Meanwhile, Michone & Carl go hunting for memories of a world before walkers.  It's solid stuff.  Something I might have enjoyed 3 or 4 episodes into the season and not 12.  Let's get on with The Governor dammit!  Time to kill Andrea already!  But I'm tired of bitching & moaning about The Walking Dead.  I'm going to keep on watching (at least until the third season is finished), but I'm no longer going to unleash my complaints on this blog.  I'm sick of it.  I sound like an asshole when writing about this show.  It just frustrates me too damn much.  So no more episode reviews.  The next time I write about this show it will be a Season 3 recap, and hopefully I loved it.

They Live:  You know the drill - Rowdy Roddy Piper has come here to kick ass and chew bubble gum.  By this point in my life, I must have seen this flick thirty times.  The first time I watched it, I liked it okay - nowhere near as good as The Thing or Big Trouble in Little China, but infinitely superior to later Carpenter flicks like Ghosts of Mars and Vampires. Over the years it's become a background kinda movie. As I do dishes, laundry, or clean the apartment. And that's how I started my week. They Live in the background. But once Piper got the glasses and the bubble gum chewing started, and the epic Keith David bum fight erupted, They Live just couldn't continue in the background - it had my full attention. It's a lark. A goof. But it has painful truth too. And it will probably hold truth forever - these problems are not going away. Get your own pair of sunglasses and choose kicking ass over chewing bubblegum.

The Sweeney:  "We're The Sweeney shit, and you've been knicked." The film has a little bit of the original show's cockney charm, but as much as I love Ray Winstone (especially, savage, fat, beastly Ray Winstone), this theatrical remake lacks any kind of originality and bears closer resemblance to Training Day than its source material.  I want to see The Sweeney cracking the heads of hoods and not fending their freedom from Internal Affairs. I want doors bashed down. Bare knuckle brawls.  And sweet 70s suits. This is just another cop program in a field of cop programs.  Basically, a waste.

Justified - Season 4 "The Hatchet Tour":  Possibly the best episode of the season so far.  Raylan finagles his way into the car transporting Hunter to the pen.  After a little detour to Wynn Duffy's trailer and a team-up with Sheriff Shelby, the three find themselves speeding to the residence of Lee Paxton where Patton Oswalt's Deputy Bob commences to siege the house with the contents of his go-bag and a hefty machine gun.  Plenty of comedy peppers an episode that is otherwise steeped in painful family history.  With his father now dead, a couple of old timers offer the son a new light on Papa Arlo's past acts of violence.  Wars aren't necessarily ignited over dogshit.  But will Raylan ever be able to see Arlo as anything other than a criminal?  Doubtful.  And oh yeah, the mystery of Drew Thompson is revealed!  So happy to see it not held back until the final episode.  Now this season is going to barrel towards its climax, and it might not be as bloody as last season's "Slaughterhouse" but I bet you it's going to be ten times more soul crushing.

Side Effects:  Best not talk too much about this one. It's one of those flicks where the less you know the better. The film opens on streaks of blood smeared across an apartment floor, red foot tracks passing near beautifully wrapped presents - up front you know it's not going to end well. Now what leads these characters to this bloody mess is a Hitchcockian thriller filtered through a Law & Order procedural. Rooney Mara will get all the press from this flick, and she is excellent as the mentally cracked bride, but I was ecstatic to see Jude Law blasting his way through his character's downfall. Law might have drifted out of favor post-Sky Captain, but he's an actor worthy of an epic return to the big screen. And Stephen Soderbergh need not retire.  As stated earlier, his last round of entertainments have been exceptionally small bits of character work, and I dig his digital eye.  The man just shoots classy.

Hellboy in Hell #4:  Mike Mignola's first mini-arc in this epic ongoing series comes to a close and like the previous three issues, it is exceptional.  So glad to type those words.  After the insane revelations of The Storm & The Fury, I had some serious doubts as to whether Mignola had anything left in his trick bag.  Plus, sending Hellboy to Hell felt a little gimicky.  Curse my eyes for ever having any doubts.  Hellboy is still reeling after his encounter with his brothers and his possible attack on Lucifer, but most of this issue revolves around ex-Witchfinder, Sir Edward Grey explaining big red's current role in the royal hierarchy.  Yes, Mike Mignola found a way to complete the Beast of the Apocalypse narrative.  The Right Hand of Doom melancholy has been with this comic since the beginning; the idea that it could all be over seems somewhat preposterous.  And I'm pretty darn sure someone is going to come looking for Hellboy's hand sooner or later.  Sir Grey pretty much alludes to such, so yeah, this really isn't a conclusion to The Beast as much as it is a pause in programming.  And if all that wonderful bizarro denouement wasn't enough, Hellboy in Hell #4 also offers some pretty badass revelations involving the Witchfinder.  Here we see Edward Grey's final moments on Earth and his passage into the underworld.  Damn cool.  I say this all the time, but if you are not reading Hellboy than what the hell is wrong with you?

Game of Thrones Season 2:  So I didn't love this season as much as the first.  Why?  Well, no Sean Bean.  Obviously, the House of Stark is just not going to be as interesting with these kids spread out all over the five kingdoms.  I'm not saying their stories suck - they're just not as complicated as Papa Stark's struggling foothold on the North.  His son Rob is barely around in this season.  He's got some boring dopey Florence Nightingale love story for his arc.  The legless kid is mostly scrambling in the dark.  Sansa Stark definitely has the most tortured plot with her horrifying engagement to the epically evil King Joffery (and seriously, Jack Gleeson is an amazing monster - he just has to say three words and I want to cave his skull in).  I'm guessing Arya Stark is eventually going to transform into the show's badass, but she's mostly wandering this season.  And don't even get me started on bastard John Snow, he's a drab bore.  Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen, is off in the desert getting chapped for the majority of the drama.  She deserves better.  So, Season 2 really lives & dies with Peter Dinklage.  As the hand of the king, Tyrion Lannister excels in this backstabbing political thunderdome, but there is no way it can last.  Rise, Fall, sword to the face.  I also appreciated the little bit of magic we got this season.  This is a Fantasy after all.  Dragons.  Witchcraft.  White Walkers.  Smoke monsters.  More of that in Season 3 please.

Age of Ultron #1:  2013's first big Marvel event is here.  Brian Michael Bendis has bee teasing Ultron's great triumph for years, and now it's finally a chromium foiled reality.  And I don't know what the hell is going on.  The first issue drops you into another crazy ass post-apocalyptic world - this one involving Ultron's sweeping takeover of planet Earth.  The heroes have fallen.  Of course, not all of them.  The first issue sees Hawkeye popping arrows into the throats and sockets of Hammerhead goons, crashing into a Super Villain safe house and rescuing a tortured Spider-Man.  But is this the Peter Parker Spidey, or the Superior Doc Ock Spidey?  Since Bryan Hitch had to start drawing this book eons ago, who the hell knows, but that question just reminds me how much I detest Dan Slott's current run on Spider-Man.  It's too early to tell if this book is going to kick ass or disappoint (like nearly every Big Event of the last five years), but I can certainly tell you that Hitch's art is amazing and I could look at his devastation splash pages all day long.  And I love Ultron.  He's a mad doctor robot bent on world domination.  What's not to love?  So I'm in for this badboy.  Till the artist switch halfway through anyway.

Jack The Giant Slayer:  Can't say I hated it. Can't say I liked it. This is just one of those films that exists. Maybe some five year old will see this one day and loose their tiny excitable mind, but I doubt any kid past the age of reason will give two shits about Bryan Singer's remake. And it got me thinking. Other than The Usual Suspects, has Singer ever directed a film that truly engages my emotions? There are moments in Superman Returns that bring a lump in my throat. His two X-Men films have a glimmer of pure comic book joy. And I kinda dig Tom Cruise's historic snooze, Valkyrie but it's rather dull in its a-b-c narrative. I think Singer is nothing more than a journeyman - not the type of artist to illicit passions. But whatever his intentions were for Jack The Giant Slayer the resulting movie is a lumbering mass of misguided adventure. Nicholas Holt is struggles as its hero. Ewan McGregor is cashing a paycheck. Ian McShane pops up as a reminder of the Deadwood myth. If there ever was an audience for this movie it was decades ago, and if there was a way to harken back to those Ray Harryhausen glory days, this bloated but feeble fairy tale most certainly is not it.

Dead Man Down:  I kinda love the Hitchcock set-up. Noomi Rapace witnesses neighbor Colin Farrell choking the life outta an angry bald man. She records the murder. Blackmails him into committing another murder. Strangers on a Train from the hateful morality behind the original Girl With A Dragon Tattoo.  Unfortunately, Dead Man Down is all bark no bite. Nearly every moment in which the threat of violence occurs is quickly stalled by lamebrain character interference.  Noomi's scarred beautician is more mope than femme fatale, and Colin Farrell's vengeance seeker never quite reaches the proper rage levels, and his final assault on Terrance Howard is missing the sick killing glee the plot deserves. Dead Man Down should be a rough watch, but in actuality it's a tame puppy. 

Oz - The Great & Powerful:  Sam Raimi. Twenty years ago, the man could do no wrong in my eyes. Evil Dead. Evil Dead 2. Army of Darkness. Darkman. Those four films have earned him permanent residence in my heart. But since then, it's all peaks and valleys; his Hollywood grab films have never quite connected with me. The Quick & The Dead. A Simple Plan. The Gift. Drag Me To Hell. Those films have their moments. But the Spider-Man trilogy. That's a cartoon world I have little enthusiasm for anymore. His ram-o-cam theatrics seem hamfisted in the blockbuster, and even if its cute to see POV fenceposts and deadite witches barreling through this Disney behemoth, the man just doesn't seem like the right fit for these cinematic gobstoppers. And James Franco...your wrinkly smiles are emotionless and distracting. Where is your wonder. You're in OZ dammit. I want awe from you. Instead, Franco delivers vacant pothead gawks. Michelle Williams at least seems to be at home in the flashback performance, and Rachel Weisz knows how to ham. But at the end of the day, Oz The Great and Powerful is a pre-summer dud.

--Brad