Nocturne (1991)

I was on a lengthy road trip for a couple of weeks, and passed through a comic shop in Pennsylvania called Phantom of the Attic, hoping in vain they'd carry some Dawn of the Dead memorabilia now that Monroeville Zombies has closed down. Instead, I thumbed through their bundles of discount comic book runs, and found this complete three issue mini-series for 99¢. Probably not the best indicator of quality, but I've occasionally found some solid cheap reads in the rough. This was not one of those.

There's a serial killer on the loose who dismembers homeless people and leaves the parts wrapped up in odd ways. He is pursued by two cops who bear a striking resemblance to Todd McFarlane's Sam and Twitch, and this was published a year prior to the debut of Spawn. The killer hangs out in subway tunnels wearing a fedora and trenchcoat, dispatching the derelicts and creeps who cross his patch with superhuman viciousness, while himself seemingly immune from harm.

The cops catch a break when they find the long dead body of a woman in her apartment, with one wall bearing the bloody icon of "spiders from hell," the killer's calling card. Voice mails on her machine point to his identity, although she was only his first victim in the sense that his overbearing, abusive nature drove her to suicide. The killer is a neat freak, which puts him in a compromising position when he first encounters Jethell, the teenage protector of the citizens living underground. It's all very primordial Spawn, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if McFarlane borrowed from the book, consciously or otherwise.

While very amateurish and indebted to the worst impersonations of '80s Moore/Miller on the writing front, the first issue is passable. The art is mostly lousy, but random panels pack in some serious Sam Keith style detailing. Others recall left field influences like Gilbert Shelton, but more are clearly from the Barry Blair school, which makes perfect sense, because it came out of his studio and he holds the copyright. Angel de Mioche assumes all credit for story and art though, inconsistent as it is. "Culpability" might be a better term than "credit" though, because the second issue goes completely off the rails, leaving a mangled wreck of storytelling. A second serial killer is introduced to distract everybody, while the art and script, barely adequate to begin with, turns painful to the eye. Remember how disturbing the Barry Blair cottage industry of adolescent protagonists in squicky sexual situations were? Try seeing them juxtaposed with the worst grade school notebook snuff doodles, stabbing people in the dick. This middle chapter was confusing, not the least for my copy containing an unannounced reprint of #1, like that helps.

By the third issue, the only pleasure I derive from this series is the Aircel/Adventure/Eternity Comics house ads. Glenn Lumsden should have had a way better career than drawing Puppet Master comics, the way he melded Brian Bolland with Paul Gulacy. Was Steven Butler swiping Flint Henry's Grimjack for his Trancers covers, or what? Oh well, enough putting this off. The finale is so atonal and arbitrary, it's hard to believe it was planned in advance. It read more like sales reports on #1 were so bad that everything had to be wrapped up immediately to stop the hemorrhaging of costs. Key characters suffer left field grisly deaths, the art somehow manages to become even more deformed, and a "twist" ending euthanizes the narrative. Not even a guilty pleasure, even at half the price I paid. Oh, what a price I paid...

A Frank Review of "Iron Man 3" (2013)

The Short Version? Lethal Weapon Mark VI
What Is It? Super-Hero Flick.
Who Is In It? The American Sherlock Holmes, Marty Kaan, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Weyland and Holly Holliday
Should I See It? Maybe



Following up on both the previous installments and Marvel's The Avengers, Tony Stark is trying to get on with domestic life alongside Pepper Potts while suffering through panic attacks related to the alien invasion of New York. An international terrorist known only as The Mandarin runs afoul of Iron Man, and then things get a bit twisted up.

Iron Man 3 is clearly the worst film of the series to date. That doesn't make it a bad movie, as evidenced by the near-universally orgasmic reviews I've read. It's just not as good as you've heard, and I think once the afterglow wears off, folks will find that it's quite a bit less than its predecessors in the staying power department.



I've been a fan of Robert Downey Jr. for decades, but there was a ten year span or so there where a season on Ally McBeal would be considered a period highlight. 2005's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a career game changer, in which Downey was not only at his best, but co-star Val Kilmer and writer/director Shane Black were right there with them. Downey continued rebuilding, and landing the lead in Iron Man was the result. In the five years since, we've seen a lot of the guy, but his schtick has devolved through public repetition into the sort of self-satisfied lazy smugness that recalls early '90s Eddie Murphy. Seemingly in response to this, Iron Man 3 tries to take Downey back to the scrappy down-on-his-luck hooligan Harry Lockhart with Shane Black in tow. What it does instead is recall a modern masterpiece during more pedestrian fare where the needs of keeping Robert Downey Jr. happy are now paramount, rather than his ability to serve the role of Tony Stark.

Jon Favreau faced an awful lot of undue criticism for his second directorial turn on Iron Man, and when he was denied The Avengers, he quit the franchise to do Cowboys & Aliens. Favreau seems to have been eating his feelings since, with a visible bloat as he offers a guest turn in a series he used to run. He has even less screen time in his ongoing cameos as bodyguard Happy Hogan than before, and despite seeming to be intended to serve as a motivating factor for Tony in the new film, I'd forgotten all about the character until the film's coda. Pepper Potts was similarly sidelined, turning up in a few early scenes and then dropping out for most of the flick until the big resolution. The presence I did miss throughout the film was Jon Favreau as the director, and one of my first complaints about replacement Shane Black was the obligatory early nods then dispatching of the characters Favreau found necessary in his films.



Ben Kingsley is a gas as the Mandarin for his relatively slight screen time, but his development seemed driven more by an avoidance of the complications Fu Manchu with power rings presented than true innovation. Guy Pearce has two notes as Aldrich Killian, but no power chords. I saw potential in Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen, vaguely recalling Madeleine Stowe in her glory days, but the role deflates rapidly. James Badge Dale and Stephanie Szostak chew some mean scenery, but they're just muscle. When Ty Simpkins as the adorable boy helper outshines William Sadler and Miguel Ferrer, you've wasted their talents on throwaway parts.

Gone is the cock rock of AC/DC and the punk tunes that helped define Tony Stark, replaced by forgettable tracks and score. No ostentatious displays of wealth and power. No shameless flirtation with gorgeous ladies. Forget about convincing technobabble once you apply anime logic to the Iron Man armor or have Tony Stark bypasses Radio Shack for Home Depot while in dire straits for equipment needs. There's now a kid sidekick, and the genius that invented an arc reactor out of scraps in a cave decides to become a hoodie ninja with gadgets Data from Goonies would have smirked at. The lead character offers omniscient narration that's pointless until the stinger. The one established character with a meaningful presence is Colonel James Rhodes, played by Don Cheadle, who replaced Terrence Howard in the role. Rhodey is essential to recreating the black/white buddy cop aesthetic of Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, all written by Shane Black. In fact, the whole movie feels like a greatest hits collection of Black's other movie moments. Of course there's a torture scene. Of course it's set during Christmas. Of course the finale takes place on an abandoned oil platform at night, which is totally different than the abandoned dock yard in Lethal Weapon 2. Again, I'm a fan, but that makes the constant regurgitation that much more tiresome.



Listen, I'm not a pseudonym for Armond White. There's plenty of dumb fun to be had with this roller coaster, and the over-the-top action is very much of the flavor one would hope from a comic book adaptation. The story logic is appalling, but there's kicks to be had with your brain switch in the "off" position. I'd probably be more positive if this was a spin-off War Machine movie, but as the seemingly final installment of an unplanned trilogy? Not so much. It feels set apart from the first two movies, and rushes through massive aspects of closure at the end in a jarring yet perfunctory fashion. For all it gets right, overall the film feels wrong as a sequel to the Favreau efforts. Ultimately, what it serves to prove is that perhaps the franchise not only could survive the departure of the increasingly expensive Robert Downey Jr., but perhaps should at this point, since much of his spirit and that of the enterprise has left the building.

New Crusaders, Book One: Rise of the Heroes (2013)

I've always wanted to like the MLJ-Archie super-heroes, but never have. When I say something like "I'm not a big fan of Alan Moore," it feeling like a confession, but that's more the statement of an obvious, near universal truth. There are dozens, perhaps even hundreds of people across the globe who legitimately like these early entries in the genre, but I think the vast majority of readers who care in any way are like me, more enthused about the idea of them existing than the printed evidence of such.

MLJ got its start in 1939 with the super-hero boom, and proceeded to churn out one unoriginal example after another with the sole initial innovation of inventing the brazenly patriotic Shield. The Comet wasn't too bad, but he wasn't terribly popular, so he was the first super-hero to be murdered. His brother donned a costume to avenge his death, and the Hangman hung around for a few years as a more right-leaning Batman, which was a cool development. Beyond that though, the MLJ heroes were also-rans, and when the boom began to bust in 1943, MLJ shifted focus to a more reliable moneymaker. Archie Andrews became the greatest star of teen-skewing humor comics, taking over the entire company. During lucrative super-hero revivals in the '60s, '80s, and '90s, the old MLJ heroes were trotted out to try to siphon off the waves, failed every time, and died a swift death. I had several of the ugly, inferior Remco Mighty Crusaders action figures meant to appeal to fans of Kenner's Super Powers Collection and Mattel's Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars, which can still be had decades later on their original cards as whole sets on eBay for less than single figures from the lines they imitated. My brother and I also tried most of the early !mpact Comics, wherein DC Comics proved that they had the talent and marketing heft to limp along for three years licensing the characters whereas Archie would typically just cut their loses after a year.

There are numerous complex reasons why the Archie super-heroes have never gone over, but the most succinct rational is that they're lukewarm mercenary crap featuring cheesy bygone concepts, typically produced by hacks and nobodies with their finger resting firmly on the toenail of the market. Just a few years ago, masochists that they are, DC licensed the characters again and tried to relaunch them on the back of a J. Michael Straczynski revamp, except the guy only wrote four introductory one-shots before DC turned the project over to whoever was open in the freelancer pool. It seemed strange that Archie would turn around and offer another take in a short span of time, where usually they let the stink fade for a decade or two. Not to be cynical, but given their history, it's hard not to see New Crusaders as a means of promoting their online subscription service allowing access to the entire catalog of decades of failure to make a dent in the market. I'm sure keeping the intellectual property alive at a time when super-hero films are huge at the box office is another side benefit. They've been pretty open about their willingness to lease these things out.

Alternately, New Crusaders: Rise of the Heroes is a vanity project for Archie talent to do super-heroes as formulaically as possible, which for me is worse than it being a cash grab, because I would hate to crush their dreams of adequacy. The premise is that the events of all of the stories published by Archie subsidiaries are still in continuity, but the stars of all those books just died in a fire, leaving the mantles to their teenage offspring/wards. It's screwed right there at the premise, because these "new" Crusaders would be pushing thirty even if you only factored in the '80s stories, but they make a point of reaching back to 1940s material just to insure you can't get past the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. The Archie touch is there by starting the story in the very staid, whitebread Riverdale type setting of "Red Circle," which had known peace for all of the kids' lives. Rather than any sort of meritocracy, the kids are immediately positioned to succeed their parents by the demands of inheritance, despite their having been blissfully unaware of their heritage and having had no training whatsoever. Nothing like Caucasian entitlement to get you rooting for these chumps.

There are two non-white tokens, who are singled out as having not been sired as direct seed of Crusaders. The Comet's chief defining characteristics are being colored darker than the other kids and having to share his origin with a white boy. Jaguar's main characteristics are crippling social anxiety and having borrowed most directly from !mpact. Also, these are the two characters with the least and most distressingly catastrophic control of their abilities. I think Brad Paisley wrote "Accidental Racist" about this comic. Of course, that's still better than Steel Sterling, who lacks any discernible personality, or the gratingly obnoxious Fireball, which I'm sure won't foreshadow his story arc at all. Fly Girl and the Web are the best of the lot by virtue of not being irritating and hovering in the outer orbit of actual characterization. The team is led by the Shield, who is basically a more abrasive and reckless Captain America. Even by the dim standards of parental guidance set by the super-hero genre, the Shield manages to limbo under the bar in the field of child endangerment. There is literally a talking monkey in this book who would better serve these kids.

Ben Bates' art style is a poor man's Bruce Timm/Mike Parobeck/Ty Templeton, but gets a little problematic when the first issue ends with a massacre. Getting a pass as all-ages fare is prohibited when blood gushes out of an office drone's every orifice or cops are murdered gangland execution style during a prison riot, so Bates and (admittedly seamless) relief artist Alitha Martinez shouldn't have tried to sit at the big kids' table. The storytelling and character "acting" are overblown in a cartoony American way with Japanese manga touches. The western elements make the violence uncomfortable in a way Ian Flynn's script isn't prepared to address, and the eastern ones reinforce this as a contemporary work that disallows the quaint wrongness of stuff like Micky Mouse contemplating suicide in comic strips released at the only point in history where these characters halfway worked. The character designs are mind-numbing in their mediocrity, like a dish with every bit of flavor boiled out of it. They make DC's maligned efforts with this lot look like the height of haute couture by comparison. Origins are dispensed with as dutifully dull as possible, better recalling Strikeforce: Morituri than the magic rings and mad science of old. I tried to cut the book some slack by recognizing the number of characters that needed to be introduced in the span of a mini-series, but then I watched the Game of Thrones pilot for the first time, where the same challenge was met and overcome about a zillion times better than this. If the writer couldn't handle seven leads, he should have given us a P.O.V. character instead of wall-to-wall tropes.

New Crusaders: Rise of the Heroes is what I refer to as a "Phantom Menace." There's always that one joker who thinks they could have done a better job with a work of art, and insists on regaling you with their "improvements." In the case of a "Phantom Menace" though, the entire audience becomes a righteous incarnation of that guy, because you're being subjected to a piece so wrong-headed that you can't help but editorialize in a constructive way. This book looks like it should be kid friendly, so where is the adventure of Carl Barks' Ducks, or the warmth of Pixar, or the abandon of Axe Cop, or even the accessible low comedy of Shreck? Why is it so grim in such a common way that you might as well give a kid a flashier DC/Marvel offering with more well-rounded characters? Thanks to the decompressed storytelling, this book has the same deliberate pacing as every other comic on the stands, but doesn't take that opportunity to develop their characters or deepen the plotting. It reminds me of how aspiring artists can't look at the most dubious bottom rung talents as their competition, because those guys are already getting work for reasons that escape you, and who throws good money after bad that stays in business? There's nothing remotely new about these Crusaders; they are virtually interchangeable with anything else in the market, without any cause for recommending it above the rest of the dreck.

G-Man: Learning To Fly (2009)

The earliest comic books were collections of comic strips. When a combination of rising licensing costs and decreasing supply of proven strips got in the way of an expanding industry, publishers started generating their own material. Male fantasy melodrama took hold in the comics, but humor strips remained popular on their own and worked as ballast between genre material. Shrinking page counts and the mainstream audience moving to television killed off most of the "funny" in comic books, though the editorial departments at the comic publishers occasionally offer revivals, often super-hero themed. I like funny comics, but most comics traffic in the lowest, most derivative comedy, so I can't name any instances where I've actually enjoyed those publisher strips.

Such was the case with "Mini-Marvels," created by Chris Giarrusso in 1999, and running in many fashions throughout Marvel Comics for about a decade. It was essentially "Marvel Babies," a lighter, kid-friendly, gag-heavy version of the Marvel Universe. Nothing wrong with that, and it was vastly superior to most of Marvel's prior attempts at in-house strips, but I was never bowled over by it. Giarrusso also produced a lot of stuff under Erik Larsen's shingle at Image Comics, including his own super-hero creation, G-Man. The strips mostly ran in issues of The Savage Dragon, and when "Mini-Marvels" wrapped, G-Man became Giarrusso's primary interest. Giarrusso produced a 36 page original story for a one-shot in 2004, then collected it with some of the Savage Dragon strips for the first volume of a trade paperback series. "Learning To Fly" was solicited at a time when I had become very disenchanted with the big two publishers. I liked some of the preview material, and I'd found a gem of a series of similar heritage in Adam Warren's Empowered, but for whatever reason did not pull the trigger on pre-ordering the trade. Over three years later, just ahead of the release of a third trade, I finally hopped on board. It appears I'll be hopping right off.

It's impossible not to notice how cobbled together "Learning To Fly" feels. The lead origin story works well, introducing a comic book random world where a pair of brothers arbitrarily gain super-powers and engage in schoolyard tiffs. It is immediately followed by the first in an entirely unnecessary cycle of strips called "Mean Brother/Idiot Brother." The amateur strip-within-a-strip shows the conflicting perspectives on incidents from the points of view of G-Man, our sympathetic hero, and his older sibling Great Man, who is essentially Reese from Malcolm in the Middle. There are only four of these things total, but they grate mightily. A large portion of the book pulls together short 1-to-3 page strips called "Comic Bits" that sometimes carry a narrative from one to another, but are still set up like a Sunday section building to a last panel punchline. A consequence is their being very episodic and arrhythmic when taken as a whole. An extended parallel universe serial ends the book, but not well, as it just sort of stops with a metatextual bow.

Empowered benefited from starting as a collection of daringly risqué shorts poking fun at the woes of making a living off fetish commissions, which built into an overarching commentary on women in the genre, until the lead character graduated into an entirely new longform story. It was a natural progression for its creator, and felt organic as a result. Warren is also a natural born world builder brimming with gratuitously imaginative contributions to the medium. By contrast, Chris Giarrusso's trade doesn't work as an album, as it cherry picks material from a wide variety of sources produced at different times that mostly travel from bit to bit with no greater objective. It is almost cynical in the way Giarrusso moves his "Mini-Marvels" shtick into the creator-owned arena without having a grasp for how to present his new characters. Despite there being dozens of supporting players, most speak in the same voice as G-Man and serve as his proxy or springboards, rather than having a life of their own. Similarly, most of their designs are basic and derivative, less archetypal than iconic in the manner of stick figures on signs meant to convey a very simple message. Wet floor, deer crossing, handicap only, super-speedster. Without the development time, characterizations and general expectations that come with preexisting characters, Giarrusso lacks a direction to go with his own creations. Hopefully, Giarrusso corrects these problems with later editions, but for now I find myself more interested in seeking out Jacob Chabot's Mighty Skullboy Army collections, as his frequent team-ups with G-Man were the highlight of the strips.

Ferals Collected Volume One (2012)

I've sampled David Lapham's writing on and off since buying the first issue of Stray Bullets when it came out, but I didn't pay serious attention to him until the first collection of Young Liars blew me away. That volume was amazing, but I somehow got sidetracked after starting the second, and haven't even cracked open the third. The comic industry seems to have the same problem with Lapham, because they kept putting him on books with potential and the best of intentions only to see them canceled left and right. I'm not interested in a Deadpool book no matter who writes it, and then there's that nonexistent trade paperback collecting the short-lived Sparta: USA I'm still waiting on. Moving to Avatar seems to have suited Lapham, as he's been one of their most consistent performers, and he even managed to out atrocity Garth Ennis on Crossed from what I hear. Still, no projects quite spoke to me, and Avatar's pricing structure was prohibitive when it came to sampling. Finally, Ferals was announced, and I have a lifelong love of good werewolf stories (despite "good" and "werewolf stories" rarely finding their way into the same sentence.) Twenty bucks seemed reasonable for six issues, plus my new comic distributor offered vastly more favorable discounts on Avatar product than my old one. I was sold.

Ferals is a good bad comic. This is a book that's all plot and circumstance, while characterization is nearly absent, and every single character is detestable. The good news is that the story has a very cinematic quality in the best sense, with a density of information that is demonstrated visually rather than stated literally. By comparison, most "cinematic" comics are more like music videos; brisk shallow reads with (hopefully) a few money moments. Each chapter is meaty in the action department, and I don't just mean the sex and gory violence, but also the distance traveled by the narrative with each step. There's a lot going on to keep up your interest, and when the volume ends abruptly with a plethora of unanswered questions, you're left yearning for more. On the other hand, there's a massive weight on Lapham to explain all this shit, because the scenery and cast changes so frequently, the unfolding developments are all that exists to hook readers. Not to be a spoiler, but most of the characters introduced in the story are dead by the end of this volume, and you're unlikely to care about any of them, because everyone exists purely to service the plot.

Avatar has something of a gonzo house style between Mike Wolfer, Jacen Burrows, and Juan Jose Ryp. Artist Gabriel Andrade is more reminiscent of high end Vertigo artists like Darick Robertson, with classic clear storytelling enhanced by stylish flourishes. It very much suits the tale, which requires a grounding in reality so that the grisly details and inhumanity of the wolf is affective in contrast. It's a great looking book, well served by glossy stock and sound coloring. The subject matter goes far enough over the top to be too much for more skittish readers, but not as graphically lurid as much of the more infamous Avatar fare. Lapham is building a werewolf mythology not quite like any seen before, and I'm willing to give this title the benefit of any doubt based on the quality introduction found in this initial collection.

Ze Greatest Songs Of Mein Time #7: "Mutilated Lips" by Ween

Written By: Ween
Released: June 24, 1997
Album: The Mollusk
Single?: No

I was introduced to "Mutilated Lips" through limited airplay on some local college rock station. I'm probably underselling it as part of the nurghophonic jukebox, since it's one of my all-time favorite "incomprehensible weirdness because fuck you world" songs. I'll get in a certain mood and just recite the chorus to myself over and over throughout a day. As a matter of fact, screw it, I just turned it into the seventh (non-sequential, merely chronological by posting) song on my list of absolute favorites that I haven't updated on this blog in over two years. That's how much you need to set aside three minutes and forty-nine seconds to listen to this at least once. Strangely for a person that avoids natural bodies of water and haven't even been in a swimming pool since it proved useful in getting an ex into a bikini early in our relationship a decade ago, I really seem to gravitate toward fucked-up nautical ditties. I bet she'd have dug this tune as well, but it never came up.

P.S. Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia from 1916 until his death in 1974, and was revered as a messiah among Rastafarians. I suspect this isn't especially relevant to anything, though.


Lyrics:

I lick my brain in silence
Rather squeeze my head instead
Midget man provoking violence
Listen not to what I said

I said please calm it down
Everything is turning brown

Mutilated lips give a kiss on the wrist
Of the worm like tips of tentacles expanding
In my mind, I'm fine, accepting only fresh brine
You can get another drop of this, yeah you wish

Mutilated lips give a kiss on the wrist
Of the worm like tips of tentacles expanding
In my mind, I'm fine, accepting only fresh brine
You can get another drop of this, yeah you wish

Laughing lady living lover
Ooo you sassy frassy lassie
Find me the skull of Haile Sellase, I
Give me shoes so I can tapsy
Tap all over this big world
Take my hand you ugly girl

Mutilated lips give a kiss on the wrist
Of the worm like tips of tentacles expanding
In my mind, I'm fine, accepting only fresh brine
You can get another drop of this, yeah you wish

A Frank Review of "Superman: Doomsday" (2007)

The Short Version? The Death and Return of Superman: Abridged Edition
What Is It? Direct to DVD animated feature.
Who Is In It? Jayne Cobb, Ellen's ex, Spike,
Should I See It? Maybe.



I didn't really like the '90s Batman and Superman animated series at first. I could see the growing pains play out on the screen, and it took a little while for each show to find its way. You would think that with the involvement of Bruce Timm as co-writer and co-director, Superman: Doomsday would benefit from his decades of experience in DC animation to come out of the gate strong for the first in the company's series of direct-to-DVD movies. Unfortunately, it seems like Timm and company went so far out of their way to make this something different, they failed to trust their proven instincts. Superman: Doomsday feels like a lengthy accumulation of meditated missteps.

A pre-title sequence featuring limited animation inserts a heavily revised Lex Luthor dead center in the Doomsday story. Personally, I'm a big Luthor fan, but I find it fatiguing that filmmakers always seem to feel the need to include him in every major Superman story. Luthor has taken to wearing an all white suit and has a more angular design, but it still adds up to a silly looking throwback to '60s spy movie villains, and I'm talking the off-brand stuff like Matt Helm and Derek Flint. You halfway expect Luthor to demand "one million dollars" for the life of the Man of Steel. James Marsters is the voice actor, and while his tone is haughty enough, it feels rather thin with Clancy Brown still fresh in mind. There were a few times when Lex was speaking from off screen that I didn't confidently recognize him. The title sequence is a snooze, trying to evoke Superman: The Motion Picture, but with generic hero music and bland visuals.

The movie opens at the Daily Planet, and while the new Perry White design is mediocre, Ray Wise provides solid vocals. The Lois Lane design isn't too bad, although she has a weird pointed cleft chin. Anne Heche's vocals are unacceptable, though. She seems to be trying to push an East Coast accent, but it comes out as a sort of nasal quacking that makes you want to tune her out like the tuba that was Charlie Brown's teacher. Heche and Marsters both break a cardinal rule of voice acting in their occasional failure to enunciate. Whole sentences will sometimes run together. Voice acting is like radio, in that clarity is king, so you should never require subtitles.

Clark Kent appears for all of one scene with strategically tussled hair, but any bid for cool is undermined by the framed picture of Ma on his desk and a general air of lameness. Not that the eyeglasses disguise has ever been easy to sell, but the redesigned Superman is so dissimilar from every other character present, the conceit is glaringly obvious. I figure I dropped that Charles Schultz reference earlier because Superman looks like one of his dashed out scribbles, appearing deep into middle age. Both identities have Adam Baldwin dialing up the nerd, so prepare for a first act full of the Clark of Steel. He deepens later, thankfully. Jimmy Olsen is in this thing too, with former child star Adam Wylie, which works as well as Jimmy Olsen can work.

Rather than crash landing from space, Doomsday turned out to be buried deep in the earth, excavated by a Lexcorp project. There's an extremely painful scene where two workers rattle off thinly disguised exposition and awful "jokes." Lex himself had just cured muscular distrophy, and already had worked out AIDS and bird flu, but intentionally stalled usage to maximize profits. You have to figure Timm's team had been sitting on that premise for twenty years, back when it might have been less moldy, and finally released the stinker to take advantage of the PG-13 rating. Superman was working on a cure for cancer, but couldn't quite pull it off, just so's y'know he's smart, too. Once again, there was lengthy speechifying on the matter, and it makes my teeth hurt. Superman's altruism is kind of kneecapped by the dick move of sexing Lois at the Fortress of Solitude while still refusing to cop to being Clark, which of course she already knows.

Doomsday is one of the things the movie gets right. Although I missed the slow progression from his being mummified and chained to the full boney badass, Doomsday is swift and lethal to a frightening degree. Killing squads of army men doesn't quite sell the menace though, so I wish the film had either brought in an existing team of D-list DC heroes as cannon fodder, or allowed Doomsday to kill the hell out of some analogues. It seems like this is a universe without any other super-heroes, which underscores another problem with the adaptation. Without super-heroes, you have no "Reign of the Supermen," which vastly limits the scope of the original mega arc. There's also a lack of variety in the Doomsday fight, so it's just a long sequence of Superman and Doomsday punching blood out of each other until they both die. Superman's actual death sequence is labored without being effective. Anne Heche and Swoosie "Ma Kent" Kurtz's crying over Superman's body is hilariously atrocious. Later, the two women meet up to mourn, and neither come out looking too great there, either.

With Superman dead, the entire city tries to make up for the loss of Superdickery. Perry White starts drinking, Jimmy Olsen sells out to a gossip rag, crime spikes, and super-creeps like the least imaginative Toyman ever start killing children. Worst of all, Kevin Smith hits town to supply an in-joke. Everything is terrible, which goes to show that Superman's entire supporting cast sucks because they so readily go to seed just to make the Man of Steel look as important as possible. Particularly sad is when Lois, who just had not been carrying her weight as much as needed in this production, guides Lex into traffic to try to make up for it. When Luthor gets jobbed by anyone less than a Phantom Zone criminal, you know your script needs another revision.

The best part of the movie is a vestigial element from "Reign," a variation on the Eradicator that is much more entertaining than the one in the comics. That, and the return of the Mullet of Steel, especially when it rests like a crown on Superman's head as he lifts weights in a speedo. Where there's a good Superman and a bad Superman, there's a by-the-numbers resolution, complete with a forced cycling of themes from the start of the movie. I thought we might at least get a team-up to battle a resurrected Doomsday, given the dang movie title, but whoops-- outtatime. It's nice that such attempts at structure were made, but the movie fails both technically and spiritually. Things happen too quickly, are addressed too broadly, and resolved through contrivance. This movie is as cynical and shoddy as people feared the source material might have been in the '90s, before the care and craft of those creative teams proved the naysayers wrong.



Extras?
Disc One:

• Requiem and Rebirth: Superman Lives! A fantastic 40-odd minute documentary about the Doomsday/World Without A Superman/Reign of the Supermen epic comic story from the early '90s. Creators, editors, publishers, fans-- everybody gets their say. Wizard Magazine chimes in, and in their glorious tradition, their representative manages to offer easily corrected misinformation (Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway did Adventures of Superman.) There's even archival footage from the original story meeting. Not only is this the best reason to buy the DVD, but I have to confess, I actually teared up at one part. Affective storytelling like that was glaringly absent from the cartoon.
  
• Justice League: The New Frontier: Original Animated Movie: First Look I think this was on the movie's own disc. Everybody loved the source material and one another and everything's great and yay.
  
• Behind The Voice A brief look at the recording of the voice actors. Most of these actors are ageless, so the visuals aren't necessary, and they have nothing interesting to say.
• Commentary by Bruce Timm, Lauren Montgomery, Brandon Vietti, Duane Capizzi, Andrea Romano, and Gregory Noveck All that stuff I complained about, they applaud themselves for. At least with that many interested parties, there are no lulls.
• Superman's Last Stand A button mashing cartoon game recalling the old Don Bluth numbers from the '80s. The animation really slows things down and gets repetitive, so I blew it off at level three.
• Trailors Batman: Gotham Knight and Appleseed: Ex Machina.

Disc Two:

• When Heroes Die: The Making of Superman: Doomsday This one is too long and talky, trying to build up the story through testimonials from followers Jung and Campbell and junk. Very repetitive, like the staff were coached beforehand.
• The Clash of the Juggernauts This one was tighter and more comic-centric.
• Bruce Timm's Top Picks Four popular episodes of Superman: The Animated Series "Mxyzpilated" was probably the best story to feature Mister Mxyzptlk in my experience, while simultaneously insuring you never want more, thanks to the highly specific voice casting and the basic nature of the villain's narrative. "Brave New Metropolis" is yet another instance of the Timmverse embracing the Mirror Universe, and possibly the worst. In a parallel universe where all things appear equal until its Lois Lane is murdered, Superman really comes across as an asshole when that's enough for him to turn into a fascist while partnering with Lex Luthor and turning a blind eye to their impact on society. It's an excellent example of why Superman is such a hard sell in modern times compared to Batman-- because the people responsible for his adaptations either don't understand him or readily sell him out. "Apokolips... Now!" makes for a solid two parter, but the Fourth World Saga still seems to get short shrift. Terrible Turpin's story is fantastic, though.
• Wonder Woman Sneak Peek Does a good job of pushing the heroine, and reminds me of what idiots the naysayers are who don't think the Amazing Amazon needs/deserves her own live action motion picture.