Comic and uncomic destruction

From Examiner.com (also variously on the comics niche circuit) Marvelman to return: David Looney, the San Antonio Comic Books Examiner reports on the news from SDCC (San Diego Comic-Con) 2009 the news that Marvel Comics have bought the rights to Marvelman (aka Miracleman). This looks like the end to one of the most long-running wrangles over legal rights to a comic character, and it could mean we finally see reprints of classic work by Alan Moore (with later contributions by Neil Gaiman).

Moore revived this defunct character with extensive deconstruction: the unexceptional storylines of the original Marvelman (a British equivalent to Captain Marvel) were revealed to be dreams fed to a sleeping group of experimental subjects to keep control of them. One of these subjects, Mike Moran, is now a flabby middle-aged man who has migraines and dreams of flying, until he remembers the word, "Kimota", that gives him the ability given to him by the experiment: to swap to the alternate super-powered body that is Marvelman. As the Examiner.com piece says:

Marvelman was one of the first truly ‘realistic’ takes on the superhero genre, with Marvelman having a serious impact on the world once he appears in public, along with one of the earliest attempts to show what a superhero taking over the world would do to the world itself. In addition it stands as the earliest work of both Moore and Gaiman, which should be of interest to any comic book fan.

Unlike classic comics - Superman, say, operates in a world where the social order remains unchanged by his presence - Marvelman and others with the same powers eventually take over the world, acting effectively as gods. (It paved the way for works such as Watchmen, in which the world economy is radically altered by the godlike Doc Manhattan's ability to transmute and create rare elements). In one scene in the Marvelman seqquence, after the superhumans have disposed of all nuclear weapons by dumping them into the sun, Margaret Thatcher has to be comforted for her distress at realising she no longer has any power.

The series also featured probably the most apocalyptic imaginings of any comic seen, when Johnny Bates, a traumatised young boy whose own alter-ego is the psychotic Kid Miracleman, is bullied and abused to the point where he reverts to the latter and goes on a sadistic rampage in London. This, and the ensuing battle to destroy him, leaves 40,000 dead and central London in ruins (see the review of Miracleman 15, Nemesis, at Ink destroyed my brush).


Not that it takes super-beings to destroy a city. A recent post at Ptak Science Books, The Most Lethal Number: M-69 vs. U-235 (Japan, 1945), looked at the devastation to multiple Japanese cities - little-remembered compared to the nuclear attacks - caused by M-69 incendiaries. It's as good a reason as any to recommend Grave of the Fireflies, the anime adaptation of Hotaru no Haka (A Grave of Fireflies), Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical novel about an orphaned brother and sister who have to fend for themselves during the famine after the firebombing of Kobe in 1945. It's quite the antithesis of the superhero genre: the big events and battles are peripheral to its harrowing personal story - simple, yet weaving together imagery with a novel-like complexity. It's one of the most moving films I've ever seen. Roger Ebert - see his review, Grave of the Fireflies (1988) - says "it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made" and quotes the animation historian Ernest Rister, who compared it to Schindler's List and said of it, "It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen". Google finds various trailers and exerpts, such as the above from the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema.
- Ray

Watchmen: film review

So, further to previous Watchmen-related posts, I saw the film at Exeter Vue yesterday.

Overall impression: a superb film, with some qualifications.

It's a film where reaction will strongly depend on how well you know the graphic novel. As I do know it, I can't really fault it the majority of it as a visually perfect adaptation. To a large extent it was clearly story-boarded straight from the Watchmen book, with only minor alternations (parts removed include the pirate-comic countertext, and the plot threads about the newsstand vendor, the prison psychiatrist's home life and the bickering lesbian couple, as well as altering to no real detriment - and even logical improvement - the precise form of apocalypse toward the end).

All that said, if I didn't know the book, I'd have still enjoyed it but have been sitting Googling afterward to help put the pieces together. The film starts with the murder by defenestration of a grizzled middle-aged man (despite his evident ability to defend himself) - his death is the focus of the whodunnit/conspiracy plot that is the film's main thread. It then moves into an exposition of the backstory via film clips and photo-tableaux - I suspect mimicking Annie Leibovitz, who's among the characters though I didn't spot her 1) that outlines an alternate 20th century in which Nixon, having won the Vietnam War, is still president in 1988. We see triumphant group photos of costumed heroes, one image posed as The Last Supper; a battle in a speakeasy; the same heroes with a cast of famous people such as John F Kennedy, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and no doubt many others I missed; a raving man in moth costume dragged to a hospital van; a dead costumed hero in the doorway of a bank; an evidently lesbian heroine seen kissing a nurse at the WWII victory celebrations, then the crime scene of their murder; the Kennedy assasination (where we see the window man, younger, as the gunman on the grassy knoll); the March on the Pentagon scene followed, in this reality, by the National Guard firing on the Flower Power protesters; a Wagnerian helicopter attack accompanied by a giant blue man (who turns out to be "Doc Manhattan", the only character with super-powers); and the same blue man reflected in Armstrong's visor taking his photograph on the Moon...

This was all a clever and visually spot-on creation, but there would be the problem. If I didn't know the background, the rapid dump of information would have been insufficiently explicit that I think I'd have been floundering on what exactly was the scenario when the story proper began. I think I'd have still enjoyed it a lot, but I go with Alan Moore's comments to the effect that there's a major problem with altering the medium; with a comic you can go back at your leisure "nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee" to re-read and correlate, but with the film it comes straight at you in a continuous stream. On that basis, the film probably works best watched as beautifully-developed accessory material, an additional experience for those who already know the background inside-out.

I found the overall atmosphere surprisingly dark and violent compared to the graphic novel. Visually, it confirmed my impressions on seeing the ‘Watchmen’ Trailer to Comic Comparison: film and comic colourings are stylised in different ways, and unless a film-maker chooses to go radically against realism (as in the vivid Dick Tracy) the cinematic appearances of, say, dark rainy city streets, a funeral in rain, and the surface of Mars are bound to be fairly downbeat.

As to the violence, film necessarily fills out sequences told quite sparingly; for instance, a whole fight that is the book is told via a few frames, and it also has more impact when brought out of the flat, silent print format. That said, there were signs of the urge to up the action in action sequences; for instance, a break-in by Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II to a rioting prison, achieved in the book largely unopposed by the use of sonic "screechers", was turned into a pitched martial arts battle. Instances like this, and their general failure to use minimum force, weakened the book's distinction between these (marginally) more humane characters and the violent and uncompromising Rorschach.

The acting overall was very good, with any tendency to star-spot removed by a relatively low-key cast. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Matthew Goode as the effete Ozymandias were particularly well cast; and Billy Crudup, despite the jokes (Unreal Nature's Julie Heyward pointed me to Anthony Lane's beautifully vicious New Yorker review, Dark Visions, that described his character as "buff, buck naked, and blue, like a porn star left overnight in a meat locker") produced a subtle characterisation, even under all the Čerenkov-like CGI, that brought out perfectly the other-worldliness of Doc Manhattan. The point is perhaps lost on reviewers not au fait with the graphic novel that Doc Manhattan goes naked not as exhibitionism but because, having been transformed into a godlike entity who is increasingly drifting away from understanding human concerns, human taboos no longer matter to him.

Anyhow, excellent film on balance, and I recommend it. Don't drink gallons of tea before going in, though; you'll be there for 162 minutes, not counting the usual half-hour trailer material that most cinemas have these days. See the official website watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com for sampler material.

Addendum, 17th March: Felix just sent me a clipping of Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review, whose print form appeared under the header Get cape. Wear cape. Flail. It's a very fair assessment that's unusual among the UK newspaper reviews in catching, whatever the film's faults, the richness of its historical/cultural mix. I also rather like the spoof on YouTube spoof, Saturday Morning Watchmen.

1. Yes. Having Googled her work - particularly, her Killers Kill, Dead Men Die, a series of film noir scenarios shot with Old Masters chiaroscuro and what appears to be high dynamic range - I think it was a definite homage.

- Ray

Philip José Farmer obits

From the Guardian, Philip José Farmer ("An award-winning sci-fi writer who mixed sex, pulp and literature") and Philip José Farmer, rebel against reality: obituaries for an author who, judging by the number of his books on my shelf, must be one of my favourite SF writers. It's quite pertinent to current JSBlog themes that Farmer got there before Alan Moore in the enjoyable conceit of weaving Victorian and pulp characters into a single mythos. In Farmer's case, this revolved around the "Wold Newton family", the idea that occupants of a carriage in Yorkshire on 13th December 1795 were irradiated by the Wold Newton meteorite, giving rise to superhuman descendants comprising all the heroes and villains of Victorian and pulp literature (notably Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Doc Savage).

As with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, this unifying theory makes for a nice vehicle for literary analysis, criticism and subversion. Farmer's Doc Savage, His Apocalyptic Life is an authoritative account of Lester Dent's Doc Savage series of pulp novels, and the peripherally connected The Other Log of Phileas Fogg a neat reinvention of Around the World in Eighty Days, taking the inconsistencies and pecularities of Verne's novel and weaving them into a backstory about a conflict between two alien races. Tarzan, too, is a prominent figure, both in his conventional identity as Lord Greystoke in the biographical Tarzan Alive (see Tarzan Alive at Ed Stephan's Tarzan of the Internet) and as "Ras Tyger" in Lord Tyger, an unbowdlerized reimagining of Tarzan:

My Mother is an Ape
My Father is God
I come from the Land of Ghosts

So sings Ras Tyger, Philip José Farmer's superb incarnation of a modern-day Jungle Lord. He is fluent in four languages. He devours grubs, insects, and palpitating flesh. He communes with wild beasts and proffers them his love. Men he butchers. He is feared as a ghost, yet the village women welcome him at night. savage, heroic and beautiful, he is the master of his world - until the day when the incredible truth of his existence begins to unfold...
- cover blurb to the 1974 Panther Books edition

It's like a jungle Truman Show - Ras Tyger comes to the realisation that his whole environment is a construct, the scheme of a millionaire who wants to create a duplicate of the fictional Tarzan.

Lord Tyger also grades into another aspect of Farmer's work, its frank exploration of sexual themes as one of the "New Wave" SF authors. His first published story in 1952, The Lovers, set the scene with its story of a puritanically-conditioned linguist's relationship with an uninhibited humanoid woman who turns out to be an insectoid mimic: a miscegenation that "nauseated" John W Campbell but didn't stop the story winning a 1953 Hugo Award when published elsewhere. This vein continued in various guises throughout his career: Flesh, in which a starship captain takes on the role of a Golden Bough style priapic god; Strange Relations, a lower-key exploration of family-like aspects of alien-human interactions (see the Addendum); the erotic horror of A Feast Unknown (which brings Wold Newton characters into a pastiche making explicit the homoerotic subtexts of the action hero genre); and the borderline-pornographic Image of the Beast and Blown, which again involve classic fictional characters.

As with many authors, some of Farmer's work tended toward the potboiling. I found his "World of Tiers" parallel-world series unexceptional, and the superb and also Hugo-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go (in which Sir Richard Burton, Alice Liddell and other historical figures interact in a seeming afterlife among all humanity on the shores of an endlessly stretching river) also stretched seemingly endlessly to the far too many sequels of the Riverworld series. When he cut to the chase, however, Farmer was invariably readable and inventive. He was also a brilliant and adaptable prose stylist, an aspect that shone in such conceits as The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod, a short story about Tarzan as if it had been written by William Burroughs rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs.

For more background, see the official Philip José Farmer Home Page (The Brobdingnagian collection of all things Farmerian) and the Philip José Farmer International Bibliography.

Addendum (topic upgraded from comments): Felix Grant just reminded me of our conversation a while back of Farmer's story Mother, from Strange Relations. In The Lovers, Farmer had introduced one example of a strange reproductive biology, in which mimicry is achieved by the mother literally "photographing" the father at the moment of conception. Strange Relations is a story collection not so much about sex as about human encounters with other unusual reproductive biologies. Mother, for instance, tells of a mother-dominated man who survives a starship crash, but finds himself literally returning to the womb when he is trapped inside the comfortable interior of the sessile female breeding stage (the "Mother") of an alien life-form that relies on non-sessile creatures ("mobiles") for food and pollination-style fertilisation.
- Ray

Watchmen: the movie - update

Further to Watchmen: the movie, time for graphic novel enthusiasts to start looking at cinema schedules: Watchmen just had its premiere screening, and initial reviews are good. 1 The MetaFilter post links to a couple of interesting Wired magazine interviews with the graphic novel's creators. Artist Dave Gibbons' Gut Feelings on the Watchmen Movie explores an artist's reaction to seeing his 2D work expanded into a realistic medium, and Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic explores various themes from his work (Moore, following past unsatisfactory dealings with Hollywood, has dissociated himself from the film).

Moore and O'Neill's forthcoming The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III) (previewed here) looks worth checking out: moving on 12 years from Vol II, which retold The War of the Worlds, its setting is the early 20th century of The Threepenny Opera

Because—as ever with the League—we tend to base the adventures upon the fictional landscape that was around at that particular time. Since this is set in 1910, we found the idea of bringing in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill irresistible. So I've rewritten the libretto for a number of the more gutsy and dark and powerful and sardonic Kurt Weill numbers. There's a new "Mack the Knife," a new "Pirate Jenny," a new "MacHeath's Plea From the Gallows," a new "What Keeps Mankind Alive."

The third part of the Moore interview is especially interesting for his exposition of what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mythos is attempting to achieve

Moore: ... I suppose we're attempting to come up with a kind of unified field theory of culture that actually links up all of these various works, whether they're high culture or low culture or no culture.

Wired: How do you position yourself on the continuum from homage to parody to commentary? If you're engaging with all of these other texts to try to do what they did, to talk about what they did?

Moore: ... It's a matter of tying these things in. Sometimes they are lesser-known works that we think should be better known, and we're including them in the hope that people might actually go out and pick up the original books. Sometimes we have characters who are greatly revered that we feel are perhaps too revered, and we would like to give a more accurate picture of them ... So, yes, it is a big literary game, but it is one that lets us touch upon a surprising amount of stuff that's in some way relevant to the contemporary world

Moore goes on to give examples from The Black Dossier' (the interim volume) of its deconstruction of various characters and literary relationships: the sadism and misogyny of James Bond (who appears in TBD as a brutal womanizer called "Jimmy"); the literary interconnections of the spy Kim Philby (nicknamed after Kipling's Kim and, as a friend of Graham Greene, quite possibly a model for The Third Man, Harry Lime); and the hostility between George Orwell and "Frank Richards" 2 over Billy Bunter books (see Orwell's essay, Boys' Weeklies, and Richards' reply - which is fairly embarrassing. Taken to task for depicting foreigners as figures of fun, Richards' reply is "I must shock Mr Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny: they lack the sense of humour which is the special gift of our own chosen nation...").

A literary game maybe, but one that takes the reader down such intriguing byways is worth playing. For more on the mythos, see Jess Nevins' Black Dossier Annotations. While it obviously needs reading in juxtaposition with the graphic novel, it is quite readable in itself (a set of footnotes that have a life of their own) for the tasters and followable references to historical miscellanea and little-known works of fiction.

1. And if you want local interest, I didn't realise that Matthew Goode, who plays Ozymandias, is from Exeter (see City actor's sci-fi blockbuster role); he's the son of Jenny Goode, director of the Exeter Gilbert & Sullivan society St David's Players.
2. "Frank Richards" was the pseudonym of the fairly enigmatic author Charles Harold St John Hamilton (1876–1961), who is probably the most prolific English language writer of all time, having written "the equivalent of nearly a thousand full-length novels" (ODNB). Certainly this beats the 904 books of Mary Faulkner: see league table. See Billy Bunter and 'The Magnet' by Bill Nagelkerke for an analysis of the Bunter mythos in relation to the rather complex peronsality of its author.

Ray

HG Wells adaptations

I just watched the 2005 Spielberg War of the Worlds: a competent enough adaptation run through the usual Hollywood filter of contemporary American setting. I didn't realise until Googling it that there were two straight-to-DVD adaptations also released in mid-2005. One, HG Wells' War of the Worlds by The Asylum is also a modern US retelling; the other, The War of the Worlds from the independent film company Pendragon Pictures, looks intriguing as the only version so far to retain the original setting. In fact the director, Timothy Hines, has stuck as faithfully as possible to the book. I'm not a purism-freak, so this isn't automatically a plus point (for instance, in my view, Wells is tediously didactic in places and the deus ex machina he uses to kill the Martians is pretty lame). Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting take on the adaptation, and judging by the sample material, well done considering the low budget; Pendragon have online a stills gallery and YouTube trailers. Reviews appear to be mixed and have commented on the rather stylised flavour (Hines' deliberate simulation of the style of early film).

Reading The War of the Worlds I've often thought it was ripe for a sequel

Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter.

It's hard to believe governments would give up so quickly with the prospect of having such a powerful weapon, and one could easily envisage an early 20th century made very different by adaptation of Martian technology. Two of many follow-up works, the comics Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, follow exactly this thread to create a steampunk scenario (they've also done a very nice graphic novel version of WotW: see the webcomic).

On the subject of HG Wells sequels, one worth reading is Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships (HarperCollins/Voyager, 1995, ISBN 0006480128). There have been many sequels to The Time Machine, such as KW Jeter's Morlock Night (also steampunk, Jeter being one of the coiners of that genre) and Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance (see After London). However, Baxter's book, which rightly won numerous awards, was authorised by the Wells estate as the official sequel.

The general thrust of The Time Ships is the increasingly complex, ultimately cosmic, changes to the timeline arising from the Time Machine's invention. At the end of The Time Machine, the Traveller leaves for the future, we assume to go back to Weena. However, in The Time Ships he finds that the future is different, somehow changed by the writing of The Time Machine so that it is dominated by civilised technologically-advanced Morlocks. Accompanied by one of them, Nebogipfel, he returns to the past to warn his younger self, only to be caught up in a battle involving a time-travelling tank from the First World War, which is still going on in 1938 due to a Time War caused by the Traveller's work being developed by both the English and the Germans (who have their own "Zeitmaschine"). And so on.

But more than a straight sequel, which would be good in itself, The Time Ships is additionally a skit on HG Wells works in general, with references to other works such as The Plattner Story, The Land Ironclads, The Chronic Argonauts, The World Set Free, and so on. Do check it out.

These titles, as well as WotW itself, are all available online for readers in the USA, where most of Wells' works are out of copright. Hyperlinks that UK readers can follow - here, he's in copright until the end of 2016 - would probably count as contributory infringement. The World Set Free is, by the way, remarkable for its prediction of nuclear weapons, although Wells was wrong about the mechanism; his "Carolinum" bombs use not a chain reaction, but a large chunk of unstable isotope whose radioactive decay can be held in stasis.
- Ray

Addendum: a couple of out-takes on the deus ex machina of Earth's bacteria killing the Martians in WotW. Firstly, this plot weakness was subverted very neatly in book II of the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (see the earlier Rider Haggard post), altogether an extremely good retelling of The War of the Worlds. In this, the "Earth bacteria" explanation is revealed to be the cover story for the British Government's use of a biological warfare agent against the Martians with deliberate disregard for collateral civilian casualties.

Secondly, the intro and outro to the Spielberg movie featured an animation of these Earth bacteria in a water drop, with a Morgan Freeman voice-over - very hard to take seriously after having heard the poem Morgan Freeman Narration

What is that sound? A familiar voice.
You might want someone else, but you don't have a choice.
Martians, and penguins, and Andy Dufresne;
If you pay me enough, I'll be there to explain.
...

This is one of the works of film and TV composers Jon and Al Kaplan, who excel in satirical musical adaptations. Their major opus is Silence! Silence of the Lambs: the Musical, which won the Overall Excellence Award: Outstanding Musical at the 2005 New York Fringe Festival: for a sample, try It's Me - lyrics here - based on the part of the film where Hannibal Lecter escapes using the policeman's skin as disguise). Quid Pro Quo (the "lambs" dialogue between Lecter and Starling) is also a particularly good song. The Kaplans' work combines lyrical tunes, clever impressions, and highly witty lyrics. The lyrics are, however, extremely frank, so be warned: www.jonandal.com
- Ray

Addendum 2: see Woking walker at MetaFilter, where they're discussing Woking’s awesome Martian fighting machine at the architecture blog Deputydog: nice pictures of Michael Condron's WotW-themed art installation, The Martian, in HG Wells' hometown. Also the local Wetherspoons is named The Herbert Wells in homage, and is one of a number of pubs serving Waylands Brewery's Martian Mild.
- Ray

Addendum 3: I just ran into Dr Zeus' nice The War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection. Among interesting images there, the site includes Peter Balch's animations and discussion of the problem of tripod gait, which isn't as straightforward as you might think. Although very stable while standing still, movement requires taking at least one foot off the ground, so it needs as much dynamic balancing as biped walking. Of related interest, Ansible 254 has a quotation from Elizabeth Bear's 2008 Ink and Steel that's food for thought:

Tripodal Stability Dept. 'She crouched on a three-legged stool as if warming herself before the fire, but Will knew her chill would take more melting than that. He knelt down before her. The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the other that his father hadn't mended in fifteen years gone past.'

- Ray

Watchmen: the movie

Now that the official trailer is out (see above) I'm full of cautious hope about the quality of Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen. As 'Watchmen' Trailer to Comic Comparison at Ropeofsilicon.com shows, the colouring has a darker, metallic, Gotham City flavour compared to the book, but many of the scenes in the trailer have been storyboarded closely on the original, and it looks overall highly atmospheric. (The trailer leads with the nuclear accident that changes Jonathan Osterman into Doc Manhattan, the blue CGI character shown later).

The Hugo-winning Watchmen is, deservedly, a classic of graphic novels, that both celebrates and subverts the superhero genre. At one level, it's a whodunnit: a government operative is murdered by defenestration, and suspicion falls on his past associates, a disbanded alliance of generally dysfunctional costumed crimefighters. The scenario, however, is complex; it's set in an alternate 1985, in a world whose 1950s saw the beginning of two generations of costumed crimefighters using the usual mix of athleticism, martial arts and technology. This status quo has been shaken up by the 1960s creation of a genuinely superhuman hero, Doc Manhattan, whose godlike powers over matter and energy have enabled Nixon to win the Vietnam War and caused many subtle differences from our world such as a decline of petroleum economy (as he can synthesise unlimited lithium for batteries).

The storytelling is also complex. The main narrative is intercut in some places with that of a pirate comicbook, a form that dominates in this alternate world. It's interspersed with pastiche memoirs, case notes, monographs and features (for instance, on Max Shea, a leading comicbook artist who has gone missing). And in part it's told in a non-sequential stream-of-consciousness form from the viewpoint of Doc Manhattan, who sees all time segments simultaneously and whose increasing psychological estrangement from humanity becomes a major factor in the story. Furthermore, Watchmen is rich in verbal and visual cultural allusions (right from its titular reference to Juvenal's Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes) and is an extended exploration of the conflict between characters who apply radically different moral stances - such as uncompromising Biblical-style retribution, utilitarianism, and cynical nihilism - to the same aim of "doing good". Many of the characters are thinly-disguised heroes from Charlton Comics (a low-budget publisher that folded in 1986 after selling its characters to DC), and Watchmen can be read as an allegory of how superhero comics reflect the era of their creation, from naive two-fisted Golden Age heroes through more complex and flawed Silver Age reimaginings to postmodern angst.

All in all, it's a tour de force of the comicbook form that lives up to Alan Moore's intention to create "a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density". I'm certain that some of this complexity will necessarily be removed from the film. Nevertheless, the basic storyline appears to be faithfully followed. There's more on the whole movie project at Watchmencomicmovie.com, which has further photos. If you've read Watchmen, or don't mind spoilers, The Annotated Watchmen provides a concordance to its many allusions.
- Ray

M and other non-comical comics

Via the MetaFilter community weblog: New York magazine features Exclusive Comics Excerpt: 'M', a section from the forthcoming Abrams reprint of Jon J Muth's adaptation of Fritz Lang's 1931 film, M. The film (available at the Internet Archive) was ahead of its time in many respects, in theme, technique and in its moral ambivalence (Lang makes strong parallels between the police and the criminal vigilante gang who are hunting the serial murderer 'M' for different reasons); Muth's photorealistic rendering in silverpoint, charcoal and oils is remarkable.

We don't often see graphic novels in the shop, but reading the article about M reminded that two of interest came in recently. One is a classic of the modern reinvention of the superhero genre, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Older readers may remember the jokey Adam West / Burt Ward TV series, as recalled at Adamwest.com. Miller's graphic novel broke with this depiction and featured a middle-aged and retired Bruce Wayne returning to his role as Batman. Despite the title of the upcoming sequel to Batman Begins, it has never been made into a film, but it was iconic in forming the film depictions of Batman / Wayne as an anguished character whose methods go beyond legality and whose mindset, torn between philanthropist and revenge-driven psychopath, is as peculiar as that of the villains he fights. Also, as the introduction by Alan Moore says, it takes the Batman story into the final scenes of the hero myth - maturity, decline and death - that are fundamental to legend.

The other graphic novel that turned up recently is Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (see the taster at Random House, and the CNN review A not-so-comic comic book and interview). Semi-autobiographical, it's a poignant exploration of the origins of a man's crippling inability to interact with the world. The main story concerns events when Corrigan, a timid postal worker, meets his father for the first time in his mid-30s; but this is interwoven with Corrigan's dreams and fantasies and with flashbacks, particularly to the childhood of Corrigan's grandfather at the time of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Past and present also interact: the 1980s Corrigan's neuroses and dreams (such as his fear of women and his recurring dream of a tiny horse) appear to come from the traumas of his grandfather's childhood rather than his own. Through these interwoven narratives, the story gradually reveals and dissects the history of a family with a repeating motif of fractured relationships.

The Dark Knight Returns and Jimmy Corrigan make an interesting juxtaposition. Despite very different subject matter, they're both gripping for the same reason: the clever use of the comic format to explore how their damaged protagonists' emotions are rooted in their origins. This makes them an excellent riposte to those who think comics are incapable of tackling the same themes as those of "real literature".
-Ray

Addendum. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition - see this hypertext thesis and this Illinois Institute of Technology project - must have been an astonishing sight. Its 600-acre electrically-lit "White City" largely consisted of temporary buildings coated with stucco, and most of it was destroyed by fire during the Pullman Strike of 1894. However two of its more solidly constructed buildings remain on site - the Palace of Fine Arts (now the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry) and the World's Congress Auxiliary Building (now the Art Institute of Chicago) - and two were removed and preserved elsewhere, the Maine State Building and Norway Building.

Addendum 2. The post focused on male-protagonist comics, but let's not forget the equally excellent Gemma Bovery, Posy Simmonds' modern reworking of Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a satire on Yuppiedom; and the works of Claire Bretécher, who specialises in sympathetic but sharply observed female characters. Bretécher normally does short-format work, but her Le Destine de Monique (called Where's my baby now? for the English edition) is a full-length graphic novel following the excruciating tribulations of an actress who desires to have a baby at all costs. It was subversive and even taboo at the time it was written, tackling the topic of in-vitro fertilization when it was not a commonplace, and it was even the subject of a dissertation, The Rhetoric of Parody in Claire Bretécher’s Le destin de Monique. Editions of Bretécher works in English translation are reasonably easy to find second-hand.

Halo Jones

I seldom see graphic novels passing through Joel Segal Books in Topsham, but a pleasant exception arrived in stock today: the three-volume Titan Books set of The Ballad of Halo Jones. Drawn by Ian Gibson, this is another Alan Moore title (see the previous entry) and Moore's earliest major work, when he wrote for the British science fiction comic 2000 AD in the mid-1980s.
      Moore writes in the preface that he wanted something out of the "guns, guys and gore" style of the comic, a female character who was neither wilting and forever losing her clothes nor a "tough bitch with a disintegrator and extra Y-chromosome". Halo, a 50th century everywoman, proved to be one of 2000 AD's classic characters, appealing to both with male and female readers, and her story went on to three 10-story segments before foundering over Moore's dissatisfaction over creator's rights issues.
      Book 1 introduces Halo's mundane life, where she dreams of escaping from the Hoop, a dystopian floating urban complex where even a shopping trip is a perilous affair. Book 2 follows her when she leaves in the hope of finding adventure off-world via a job as a hostess aboard a luxury star liner. Book 3 takes a darker tone as she finds enlistment in the military the only available career choice. The story is tragi-comic, full of strong female characters, and Moore and Gibson's imagined world is packed with intricate social detail (the creators are not afraid to leave slang and other trivia unexplained).
      In this early work, Moore shows the talent for clever allusion that manifested in his later works such as From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: for instance, Book 3 shows unmistakable references to several other classic anti-war SF works: David Masson's short story Traveller's Rest, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero. All are worth finding. - Ray

Rider Haggard

These days, Sir Henry Rider Haggard is best known for his most famous novels, She and King Solomon's Mines. He was, however, a far more prolific and influential author who brought his own experience and perspective to his novels: a late-Colonial administrator who had worked in South Africa at the time of the Zulu Wars and Boer War, and developed some sympathy for local cultures. (See, for instance, his non-fictional commentary Cetywayo and his White Neighbours).
      His African-based work grades into a larger body of historical fantasy: epic and readable in general, though some is a little silly in premise. His co-written The World's Desire, for example, brings together Helen of Troy and Odysseus in Biblical Ancient Egypt. You can find many of these lesser-known novels online (see, for instance, Project Gutenberg and Gutenberg Australia - the latter also has his 1926-published autobiography ). There's also an annotated bibliography at Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Violet Books website, which specialises in scholarly material on "Antiquarian Supernatural, Fantasy & Mysterious Literatures, Vintage Westerns, Swashbucklers, & Juveniles". Salmonson makes a strong case for Rider Haggard's influence on the 'Lost Race' genre and other fantasy literature of the later 19th and early 20th century.
      This influence continues to the present. For instance, DM Thomas's 1984 Swallow, a novel about a storytelling Olympiad, features one segment that's a bawdy retelling of King Solomon's Mines. (I'm sure it's no coincidence that it also shares a title with Rider Haggard's Swallow: a tale of the great trek). The quintessential Rider Haggard hero, Allan Quatermain, embodies Haggard's colonial sentiments: a hunter and adventurer who is nevertheless aware of his prejudices and, for the genre, sympathetic to the cultures he meets. As Rider Haggard's work developed, Quatermain increasingly encountered the supernatural and mystical. In the final stories, the elderly Quatermain uses a drug, taduki, to explore his past lives in Babylon and the Ice Age.
      If you like the genre of Victorian fantastic fiction, I recommend the two-volume graphic novel, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Its basic premise is of Wilhemina Murray (from Dracula), Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Mr Hyde and the Invisible Man being brought together as a national crime-fighting team in a technically advanced alternative 19th century.
      Moore has melded an encyclopedic knowledge of Victorian literature with iconoclastic creativity to produce a gripping and tightly-allusive 'steampunk' adventure (nearly every frame contains some in-reference). Volume I brings the main characters together, and contains a standalone short story, Allan and the Sundered Veil, that brings the events of the later Quatermain stories round to the starting point of the graphic novel, where he is found in a Cairo opium den by Mina Murray. Volume II is a retelling of HG Wells' War of the Worlds.
      If you don't mind spoilers, Jesse Nevins' Notes on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gives some of the flavour with a frame-by-frame analysis of the many literary allusions. The movie is enjoyable enough, but shares very little with the book except the basic characters. - Ray