Legion of Super Heroes: Man of Tomorrow

I love the intro to this show

I think I'll cover the rest of the Legion episodes in order. The series opens with the Legion getting curb stomped by the Fatal Five. Lightning Lad laments "Where's Superman when you need him?" and then it cuts to Clark Kent in a bathroom in Smallville. He's practicing his heat vision on a newspaper.

He has a heart to heart with his mom about his upcoming departure to Metropolis, and then heads to the local carnival. I noticed in the credits that the same guy (David Lodge) did the voices for both Carnival Barker and Tharok. I think that's awesome.

Brainiac 5, Saturn Girl and Bouncing Boy show up in Smallville and I like the screenshot I used in an earlier review so much that I'm going to reuse it here.

If you'll excuse the digression, I'm going to steal a theory from the excellent Legion Abstract site, which posits that Brainiac 5 didn't make a mistake when they went to the point in Superman's life when he was a teenager, but that it was a deliberate choice on his part. I'm inclined to agree with that. Whether it was to train Clark to be a hero or just because Brainy wanted someone to be his friend, and he couldn't get that with the Superman who already knew the original Brainiac is up to debate, but I think there is enough evidence to support the "not a mistake" school of though. As Brainy himself says, "I have a twelfth level intelligence, Bouncing Boy. I don't make mistakes."

When at the carnival, the Legionnaires take in the local flavor and Superman considers but rejects the idea of using his powers to show off.

Food on a stick, indeed! You're too good for Triplicate Girl!

 He does have to use them when the Ferris wheel starts collapsing. The Legionnaires assist him and then Saturn Girl wipes everybody's memory.

Brainy shows off his flight ring

Superman runs off, but the Legionaiires beat him home and persuade him to come to the future with them. He yells to his mom that he's going to the future and she yells back, "Take a sweater!", which was predictable, but obligatory.

Back to the future, everybody's excited about meeting Superman except for Lightning Lad. I like his portrayal here. He's a bit of a jerk, and maybe more cynical than the rest, but he's still a hero.

"Excuse me, Lightning Lad. Just passing through!"

We get a little bit of training and we see how much Superman can lift, which is helpful if I ever get around to statting out the Legion for DC Adventures. I already did Alexis and Wodehouse from the Legacy episode. Maybe I'll post the sheet here, because you know, blogging about an obscure and defunct kid's show isn't niche enough.

They get the alert that the Fatal Five are attacking the city, so they go to stop them. I really like Jennifer Hale's voice work as the Emerald Empress, and lauding the performance of the probably the most respected voice actress isn't really going out on a limb, I think she really deserves all the kudos she gets. The animation and character are really suited to her voice. Tara Strong takes over the duties for the second season, and she also does a respectable job, but I think the writing was a little sharper for the character in season one.

Superman runs off and the Legion puts up a decent fight for a while. Jesus, the Persuader is a a jobber. The same thing happens every time he runs into Phantom Girl. She phases through him, grabs his ponytail and uses it to pull him to the ground. Unless his hair gives him super-strength, he should really look into shaving it.

The tide starts turning against the Legion and the Emerald Empress is picking them off one by one. Lightning Lad is holding off Valdius, but he's keeping aware of the tactical situation too. When he sees the Eye positioning for a shot, he disengages. Tharok gets him as he's flying away, but he was outnumbered five to one at that point, and he made them work for it. I think that's why I like him in the cartoon. Even when Validus has him in those giant mitts of his and the Emerald Eye is blasting him full in the face, he's still fighting till the end.

So the Empress takes out the rest of the Legion, and just blasts Saturn Girl, who's too strong to brainwash, and then Superman comes in to save the day. He puts up enough of a fight against the Fatal Five that the rest of the Legion can get back into the game.

Very cool visual

Resisting Tharok

I'm usually pretty harsh on Triplicate Girl, because, let's face it, she sucks. But I do really like her fight against the Persuader.  It's very nicely imaged and extremely well animated.

Then she goes on to accomplish precisely dick for the rest of the series, except for one of her bodies dying in the season two opener. It's a shame it didn't get killed by Brainiac's creation Computo as had happened in the comics, because that would be another reason to love Brainiac 5.

The Fatal Five are routed, but they teleport away. The episode closes with Superman putting on his flight ring and joining the Legion in the sky. All things considered, a great intro to a great series.

Locus Awards

The Locus awards are this weekend, and the finalists in the collection category are:

• Mirror Kingdoms, Peter S. Beagle (Subterranean)
• What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer)
• Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, Fritz Leiber (Night Shade)
• The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson (Night Shade)
• The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Five: Nine Black Doves, Roger Zelazny (NESFA)

Though I dearly love Peter Beagle (and Fritz Leiber for that matter), I'm of course pulling for Chris Kovacs and the rest of the team who put the Collected Stories together. Fingers crossed for them this weekend!

Site Update: Follow by Email

I added a little widget to the site so that people can get blog posts by email. I tried it with my alternate email address and I'm not entirely thrilled; the post arrived almost a full day after it went up. Still, if you're interested, the option is there.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Sleeper

It's funny that I never got around to commenting on Roger Zelazny's Wild Card stories. I like Roger Zelazny (obviously).  I like super heroes (also obviously). I'm even kindly disposed towards shared world books.

I think part of the problem is that the series occasionally reads like an account of somebody's RPG campaign, perhaps because that's how it got its genesis. Years working in a comic book store have given me an almost visceral revulsion to the words, "Let me tell you about my campaign..."

If you're not familiar with the Wild Cards series, it's a shared world created by George R.R. "Song of Ice and Fire" Martin, originally based on his Superworld RPG campaign, though it grew beyond that. A number of writers contributed characters and stories and subsequent volumes built on the earlier ones. The gist is that in 1946, an alien virus was unleashed that killed 90% of those exposed, transformed 90% of those who survived the initial exposure into hideously mutated Jokers, and made the rest into super-powered Aces.

Zelazny's contribution was Croyd Crenson, the Sleeper. All the best Superheroes have alliterative secret identities. Just ask Clark Kent, Bruce Banner or Peter Parker.

I used to watch Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in each show, the main character would occasionally whine about his or her lot in life and I would think, "Oh, poor healthy attractive teen with super powers." Croyd has a legitimate grievance. His case is unique and described as something like malaria, in that it periodically re-infects him every time he goes to sleep, (a sleep that can sometimes last for months), and upon awakening, he has new powers and a new appearance.

To digress for a moment, I feel that authors are public figures, but they're entitled to privacy just like anyone else. So I try to keep a respectful distance with these reviews. I don't like to speculate about personal details in an author's life that might have influenced the writing, unless they're a matter of public record (like Zelazny writing Divine Madness and Comes Now the Power during his self-described darkest day, a fact which I think is essential to understanding the stories.)

So I try to refrain from long distance psychoanalysis. However, as soon as I started rereading Sleeper for this review, I immediately thought back to Carl Yoke's fond reminisces of his childhood with Roger Zelazny in the Collected Stories. Croyd begins the story as a fourteen-year-old ninth-grader in 1946, and Zelazny would have been eleven nine years old that year. I can't help but imagine that descriptions of Croyd's class is informed by Zelazny's own. I think that because Zelazny did grow up in that postwar period, he brings an unusual verisimilitude to his depictions of classroom life in that era. When the air raid sirens go off, one character says to the other:

"Do you think the war started again?" Charlotte asked.

"I don't know," Leo said.

I don't think that's an exchange that would have occurred to an author who grew up at another time. I like the kids he wrote in A Dark Traveling and I like the kids he writes here.

Entries about Croyd usually begin with the opening line from the story, which I like for a number of reasons. One, it sets up the premise very quickly. Two, it seems so characteristically Zelaznian that I think that I would have been able to identify the author from that brief excerpt alone.

He was fourteen years old when sleep became his enemy, a dark and terrible thing he learned to fear as others feared death. It was not, however, a matter of neurosis in any of its more mysterious forms. A neurosis generally possesses irrational elements, while his fear proceeded from a specific cause and followed a course as logical as a geometrical theorem.

This is why I love his work. He couldn't resist putting his twist on the Wild Card concept, and it resulted in one of the most enduring characters in that series.

I like how he conveys the weirdness of the initial outbreak:

Croyd saw a man perform a series of dancelike movements, tearing at his clothing. Then he began to change shape. Someone back up the road started howling. There came sounds of breaking glass...Far up the street, a man raced from a doorway screaming. He seemed to grow larger and his movements more erratic as he moved to the center of the street. Then he exploded....He halted again beneath a tree. There came a moaning from overhead.When he looked up he realized that it was not a tree. It was tall and brown, rooted and spindly, but there was an enormously elongated human face near its top and it was from there that the moaning came...He had long yawning spells now, and the remade world had lost its ability to surprise him. So what if a man flew through the skies unaided? Or if a human-faced puddle lay in the gutter to his right?

Croyd gets home, passes out, wakes up and eats a lot. This bit reminds me of Corwin. Perhaps "hungry hero" should be an entry in my Roger Zelazny drinking game:

There was a half-loaf of bread in the breadbox and he tore it apart, stuffing great chunks into his mouth, barely chewing before he swallowed. He bit his finger at one point, which slowed him only slightly. He found a piece of meat and a wedge of cheese in the refrigerator and he ate them. He also drank a quart of milk. There were two apples on the countertop and he ate them as he searched the cupboards. A box of crackers. He munched them as he continued his search. Six cookies. He gulped them. A half-jar of peanut butter. He ate it with a spoon.

Back when I was still in high school, I took a job working the graveyard shift. I was having trouble staying awake, so for my second night, I bought some extra strength No Doz, took double the recommended dosage at half the recommended intervals and washed it down with black coffee and Jolt Cola. I stayed awake for my shift...and the next thirty hours after it. To this day, I can't ever remember feeling that sick. Reading the account of Croyd employing increasingly desperate efforts to prolong his waking moments brought that all back.

It was quite sudden that he found himself weak and shaking. He realized what it was and he took another pill and set a pot of coffee to percolating. The minutes passed. It was hard to remain seated, to be comfortable in any position. He did not like the tingling in his hands. He washed them several times, but it would not go away. Finally, he took another pill. He watched the clock and listened to the sounds of the coffeepot. Just as the coffee became ready the tingling and the shaking began to subside. He felt much better. While he was drinking his coffee he thought again of the two men in the doorway. Had they been laughing at him? He felt a quick rush of anger, though he had not really seen their faces, known their expressions. Watching him! If they'd had more time they might have thrown a rock....

It's a pretty lightweight story, but it has everything I like about Zelazny's work. He quickly establishes the premise, then works on variations. I love how he thinks things through and thinks about probable consequences and then writes about them:

At about four in the morning he stopped in an all-night diner off Times Square, where he ate slowly and steadily and read a copy of Time magazine which someone had left in a booth. Its medical section contained an article on suicide among jokers, which depressed him considerably.

Little details like that really enrich it.

Croyd wakes up and goes to sleep several times over the course of the story, changing powers and appearance each time. His final awakening in this story comes shortly before his sister's wedding. Unfortunately, it's also somewhat premature, and his body is not yet finished with its transformation. The last third of the story deals with Croyd's attempt to stay awake long enough to see the wedding.

The inhuman and still-mutating Croyd enters the church, drawing strange looks from those assembled.

Through perspiration-beaded lashes he saw the priest enter. He wondered why the man was staring at him so. It was as if he did not approve of non-Episcopalians sweating in his church.

Heh.


The ending is bittersweet. There are a few more Croyd stories after this one, and I can't tell if Zelazny intended this one as the first in a series, or a standalone piece. I think it works either way.

By dint of sheer will he was able to hold himself steady through Mendelssohn's "March." He was unable to focus on what the priest was saying after that, but he was now certain that he was not going to be able to remain seated through the entire ceremony. He wondered what would happen if he left right then. Would Claudia be embarrassed? On the other hand, if he stayed, he was certain that she would be. He must look ill enough to justify it. Still, would it become one of those incidents that people would talk about for years afterward? ("Her brother walked out...") Perhaps he could stay a little longer.

There was movement on his back. He felt his coat stirring. He heard female gasps from behind him. Now he was afraid to move, but the itching became overpowering. He unclasped his hands to scratch, but in a final act of resistance he seized hold of the back of the pew before him. To his horror, there came a loud cracking noise as the wood splintered within his grip. There followed a long moment of silence.

The priest was staring at him. Claudia and Sam had both turned to stare at him, where he sat clutching a six-foot length of broken pew-back and knowing that he couldn't even smile or his fangs would show.

He dropped the wood and clasped himself with both arms. There were exclamations from behind as his coat slipped away. With his full strength he dug his fingers into his sides and scratched cross-body.

He heard his clothes tear and felt his skin rip all the way up to the top of his head. He saw the hairpiece fall away to his right. He threw down the clothing and the skin and scratched again, hard. He heard a scream from the rear and he knew that he would never forget the look on Claudia's face as she began to cry. But he could no longer stop. Not until his great batlike wings were unfurled, the high, pointed vanes of his ears freed, and the last remnants of clothing and flesh removed from his dark, scaled frame.

The priest began speaking again, something that sounded like an exorcism. There came shrieks and the sounds of rapid footfalls. He knew that he couldn't exit through the door where everyone else was headed, so he leapt into the air, circled several times to get a feeling of his new limbs, then covered his eyes with his left forearm and crashed out through the stained glass window to his right.

As he beat his way back toward Manhattan he felt that it would be a long time before he saw the in-laws again. He hoped that Carl wouldn't be getting married for a while. He wondered then whether he'd ever meet the right girl himself. . .

Catching an updraft he soared, the breezes sobbing about him. The church looked like a disturbed anthill when he glanced back. He flew on.

I think this is the best of the Croyd stories, before the Wild Card books became bogged down in an increasingly snarled continuity, but I might review the others, as I'm kind of on a superhero kick lately.

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

We got to the theater a little bit early, so we saw a lot of TNT previews and what felt like 45 minutes of Tom Hanks plugging Larry Crowne. About halfway through, I started wondering if my insurance covered trepanning.

We had stopped at Wal-Mart and smuggled some candy into the theater. Jen brought Junior Mints, in homage to Jimmy Buffet and I brought Bottle Caps. When the advertisement told us "Refreshments are in the lobby," Jen yelled out "Or in my purse!"

Coming Attractions:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Boy, that trailer makes it look like a top notch music video.

The Change-Up - In the tradition of 80s Body Swap movies!

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - This looks, surprisingly, not terrible. Also, I've liked Professor James Franco ever since his Freaks & Geeks days.

Okay, the movie. It opens with a young Magneto in a concentration camp, just like in the first movie. Then we cut to a scene of Charles and Mystique meeting as kids, and the actors they got for the roles were just adorable. 

Then it's back to the concentration camp. The evil Dr. Schmidt had seen what the boy did with the metal gates when he was taken away from his parents, so he tries to get him to reproduce it with a metal coin. The boy is unsuccessful and so, in a later trial, Schmidt has the boy's mother brought in, and tells him that he is going to count to three, and if the coin hasn't moved, then he'll shoot the mother. Schmidt slowly counts to three in German, and then fires, killing her and causing young Magneto's powers to tear up the office and kill the soldiers present by crushing their metal helmets. (He screams "NEEEIIIIINNNN!!" showing, I suppose, that it's okay to make your characters yell "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" as long as they do it in German.)  Far from being upset at the death of his men, Schmidt is delighted, declaring "Wunderbar!"

Fast forward a couple years to 1962 and Magneto is now a grown man with full control of his powers. I've always liked Magneto. If you'll forgive the digression, when asked about themes in his work, Roger Zelazny mentioned a number of things, including,  "a hate so big it would burn the innocent to reach the guilty", and that's what comes to mind when I think of Magneto.

I was looking for my favorite Magneto moments and I found them in the first issue of the 1991 X-Men series. At this point, he's absented himself from Earth entirely, returning only when a group of mutant refugees find their way to his doorstep.

I would love this as a wraparound design on a t-shirt.

Later on, he heads on down to the Earth to raise a Russian sub. Previously, the sub had launched a missile at him. Magneto deflected it, then sank the submarine as object lesson. He's raising it now to salvage the nukes for his own use. I really love how these panels are put together here.

Click for larger image

They fight and the battle continues below deck, where Magneto stumbles on the remains of the crew. This is another sequence that I really love.

Click for larger image

My favorite part of X-Men 2 is when Wolverine and the kids who managed to escape from the school are at Bobby Drake's house and Bobby's little brother calls the police on them and they surround the house. Pyro is there, and he's this cocky little kid, but he only has that attitude because he's so scared. And then there is a point where he lashes out at these people, ("You know all those dangerous mutants you hear about on the news? I'm the worst one.") and I think there is something about that with Magneto. He does the wrong thing for the right reason.

And it's hard to pigeonhole him, because the character has been in circulation for almost fifty years (he was introduced in 1963) and written by dozens of different authors in the time. So anyone with any opinion at all about Magneto can find textual support for it somewhere. His creator, Stan Lee, said of him in a 2008 interview,  that he didn't think of Magneto as "a bad guy". "He just wanted to strike back at the people who were so bigoted and racist... he was trying to defend the mutants, and because society was not treating them fairly he was going to teach society a lesson. He was a danger of course... but I never thought of him as a villain."

Anyway, back to the movie. I would watch an entire movie of Magneto - Nazi Hunter. The scene at the villa in Argentina was extraordinarily well done.

The villain of the piece is Sebastian Shaw.

After the Emperor blasts him with his Force Lightning, the life support on his suit fails and he says goodbye to his son, Luke Skywalker. (Oops, not that Sebastian Shaw!) 

I like Sebastian Shaw. I like Kevin Bacon. It's hard to reconcile the two, but I like the character Bacon plays in the movie, even if I have a hard time seeing that character as Sebastian Shaw.

Eventually Xavier and Magneto team up, and join with the CIA. We get a bit of sublime continuity porn with a reference to Agent Stryker's son, William, who was the villain in X-2.

Nicholas Hoult as Hank is McCoy endearingly awkward. There's a scene where he's having a little picnic with Mystique, complete with those 60s era glass Coke bottles (which was really an inspired stroke and kudos to whichever person in the prop department took care of it). I'm not sure where it's supposed to be. There are these big fan blades, so maybe it's some kind of jet propulsion lab where they tested the Blackbird. I dunno. It's some out of the way place. They're having this conversation, and then Magneto comes strolling past in his black turtleneck to drop a cryptic observation. It was like a Calvin Klein commercial.

I really liked the recruiting montage. (I also liked the quick exchange where McCoy says something about getting better reception from Cerebro if Xavier would let him shave his head and Xavier tells him not to touch his hair.) But the recruiting bits were all pretty great, and the Wolverine cameo was brilliant. I liked Ron Weasely, even if he was calling himself Banshee.

Once all these young mutants are recruited, there's a scene where they're giving each other code names and showing off their powers, and I liked it for two reasons. 1.) It seemed like something that young people would do in these circumstances and 2.) It was just fun to watch. When they get busted by the adult mutants, Jen quipped it was like "Risky Business for mutants."

Magento and Xavier leave to go with a strike force to Russia to take out Shaw, but when they get there, they find that Emma Frost is there instead. There's a nice bit where she "seduces" this Soviet general, except she's just using her telepathy to make him think that he's getting it on with her, and she's really sitting on a chair next to the bed, eating a cracker.

And up until this point, I thought all the comments about January Jones's acting being the weak point in the movie were needlessly harsh, and they were misinterpreting Emma Frost's aloofness. But no, she really is pretty awful (though she's awful pretty, so I can see why they cast her) and I'm convinced that she's actually just a mannequin with a good agent. With a name like January Jones, though, she's a shoe-in to be the next Bond Girl. (Jen suggested that she could be a centerfold, because, you know, she's already "Miss January".)

Meanwhile, Shaw and his mutants attack the CIA lab where the mutants are staying. They give the chance to join up. Darwin is killed trying to resist them, proving that even mutant powers are no protection against the Black Guy Dies First rule.

They regroup, then move up to the X-Mansion up in Westchester. Again, the montage is really excellent. This time it's a training montage, with everyone fine-tuning the use of their powers. After a time, they see JFK's address on TV, and they realize that Shaw is finally acting, and tomorrow they will have to intervene to stop him.

They turn in and Magneto finds the teenaged Mystique in his bed, ready to seduce him. He says, "Maybe when you're twenty years older," and she transforms into Rebecca Romijn, who played Mystique as an adult, which was another great cameo. Afterwards, she talks to Xavier in the kitchen. She's having the slow realization that Xavier and Magneto have different goals and that her goals are more in line with Magneto's. I love her line, "Pets are cuter when they're little."

So the X-Men all take off in the Blackbird and they avert the Cuban Missile Crisis. Something I think I saw, but of which I'm not entirely certain is that when the jet is hit and spinning out of control, Magneto throws himself on top of Xavier, and then uses his powers to clamp himself to the metal floor in order to protect him. It was pretty chaotic, and I'm not absolutely certain that's what happened, but if it is, it was an excellent detail.

How many times is a mutant called Angel going to show up in the X-movies? When Shaw's mutants are emerging from the ruined sub to face off against the X-Men, well, let's have a roll call. Riptide summons these devastating tempests, Azazel is this horrifying teleporting ninja demon assassin dude, and then Angel unfurls her little cutesy dragonfly wings. flutter-flutter-flutter I mean, Jesus. Which of these kids is doing her own thing?

Magneto confronts Shaw and when he is helpless, he levitates the Nazi coin we saw in the beginning of the movie and says, "I'm going to count to three. And I'm going to move the coin," in an excellent but tremendously gruesome callback to the earlier scene. He kills Shaw by slowly pushing the coin all the way through his head.

Once the crisis has been averted, the Americans and the Soviets decide that mutants are the bigger threat than the other side, so they each authorize their assembled ships to launch a strike against the survivors. Magneto freezes the barrage in midair, where they hang for a moment, and then he turns them around and sends them back against the ships that launched them. I couldn't help but think of Gob in Arrested Development when they showed the Navy Captain looking through a pair of binoculars at his own missiles coming back at him.

Xavier begs Magneto to stop, saying, "They're just following orders! Like Eichmann!" (I'm paraphrasing here) an argument Magneto fails to find persuasive.

Catastrophe is averted, though Xavier is paralyzed by a stray bullet deflected by Magneto. Magneto and his evil mutants depart, and we cut to Westchester, where Moira is pushing Charles in his familiar X-logo wheelchair. She tells him that his secrets are safe with her, and he says he knows they are, and then gives her a kiss of forgetfulness, which I thought was kind of a dick move, because it costs her her career at the CIA.

Jen said that aside from a couple scenes like the Missile Crisis and elements like mini-skirts, it didn't really seem like a period piece. Xavier's talk of "Groovy mutations" aside, I have to agree. Havoc in particular looked like he stepped out of One Tree Hill. (Also, the less said about his hula hooping power, the better). The few small complaints I have here should in no way detract from what may be the best X-Men movie yet. (I'd have to watch X-2 again before I can say for sure.) Excellent film. One of the all-time great comic book movies. There are plans to make this the first film in a trilogy of prequels, and I'm not sure if that's something I want or not. This one was so great that it's set the bar extremely high for followups, and I think I might be happy with just this one by itself.