"I can see your soul in the edges of your eyes. It's corrosive. Like acid."
"In eternity where there is no time, nothing can grow, nothing can become, nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill."
EPISODE 5: "The Secret Fate of All Life"
Marty is starting to talk like Rust, and Rust is starting to talk like Reggie Ledoux. Rust gives the two present-day cops the same "time is a flat circle" bit that Reggie gave him shortly before Marty put a bullet in his brain. That the show wants you to see the connection there is pretty obvious. But Marty also references something in this episode that Rust said previously. In one of Rust and Marty's increasingly beloved car discussions, Marty is trying to rationalize the fact that he's cheating on his wife by asking Rust if he thinks a man can love two women at once. Rust's response is, "I don't think that man can love, at least not the way that he means. The inadequacies of reality always set in." In this episode, when asked what happened to the doctor who Rust was in a brief relationship with, Marty's reply is, "Same thing that always happens between a man and a woman: reality." "The Secret Fate of All Life" is an episode of transition. We're transitioning from perpetually bouncing back between 1995 and present day into a new act that takes place in 2002, and meanwhile the characters that we think we know are undergoing their own transitions.
The first part of the episode makes plain a lot of things that we'd had bits and pieces of without having the complete picture to this point. Rust and Marty did find Reggie Ledoux at his backwoods compound, he had other people held captive there, he sure as hell seemed like he's enough into the occult ("I see you in my dreams! You're in Carcosa now!") to be the killer, and they shot him dead. What's also made plain after having been heavily implied is that Rust and Marty have not been telling the complete truth to their interrogators whatsoever. Rust had already deftly sidestepped explaining anything about joining a biker gang to do steal a drug stash in the last episode, and now we know that there was not a chaotic life or death shootout with "high velocity" rifles that split trees in half, but rather Marty killed Reggie while he was cuffed having seen that he had children captive, one of which was already dead. We know that Rust and Marty have coordinated their stories together pretty well, because they're treated as hero cops by the entire force after the fact, and its only in the present day timeline that their story is really starting to come into question by the two stoic internal affairs guys and their digital camera, and their entire focus is on Rust.
That brings us to the other big reveal of the episode that you could also see coming ahead of time but that still hits hard when it happens: The whole reason for this massive inquiry 17 years after the fact, is that the internal affairs cops suspect Rust of murder. My best guess was that he'd be suspected of a new crime as a copycat killer,--a "you like with dogs, you get fleas" sort of thing--but they suspect him as being the killer from the beginning, and having orchestrated the case to move in a certain direction. Knowing this, Rust doesn't really do himself any favors under questioning. He's already established his nearly nihilist perspective on life, and in this episode, when asks about his interrogation technique, he tells the cops that, "Look, everybody knows that there's something wrong with 'em. They just don't know what it is. Everybody wants confession." In the 2002 setting we establish that this theory that Reggie Ledoux is not the killer is not a new one, and a drug addict that Rust is pressing for a double murder confession sets Rust off when he mentions that he knows about "the Yellow King."
But Rust being the real killer seems far too clear-cut for a show that's already established and then cast doubt on one seemingly perfect-fitting suspect, and lest we focus too much on him, we get a bunch of new development with Marty as well. Maggie eventually takes Marty back, and we get a quick snapshot of Marty trying to figure out why their now teenage daughter Audrey is starting to dress in a vaguely goth get-up, and then get a longer scene later where she's caught having sex in a car with two legally adult men. Maybe this could just be chalked up to teenage rebellion against her controlling, alpha-male father, but we've already seen her making sexualized drawings as a much younger girl, and surely that has a relevance that has yet to be revealed. Is Audrey's story just a mechanism to weigh on Marty's character, or does it more directly tie into the larger story in ways that we don't understand yet?
We've seen imagines of spirals or circles throughout "True Detective," and in this episode circles, both actual and symbolic are as prominent as they've ever been. Reggie tells Rust, and us, that "time is a flat circle." And while Rust plays it off as nothing at the time and tells him to shut the fuck up, it clearly stuck with him to the point where he now has a half-baked theory involving higher dimensions about how we're doomed to live the same lives over and over again but can't remember them. Marty is getting his life back together with Maggie after getting sober, but he wonders privately if he's really changed, and thus that maybe the same cycle of martial strife might perpetuate itself in a circle. Rust circles back to where he and Marty started, the crime scene underneath the tree, looks into a literal circle made of branches there, and then eventually circles back to the abandoned school that seemed like a dead end to find a new clue in the form of another one of those wooden arts-and-crafts projects. In the first four episodes, we've jumped around the perimeter of a circle formed by the 1995 and present day timelines, and now we seem to be spiraling towards some key, not yet understood, point in the center around 2002. And since Marty is now talking like Rust and Rust is now talking like Reggie, maybe everything is also spiraling downwards, towards some dark fate. The secret fate of all life.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
True Detective: Season 1, Episode 4
"You know the detective's curse? Solution was right under my nose, but I was paying attention to the wrong clues?"
EPISODE 4: "Who Goes There"
I'm pretty much a sucker for anything related to detective fiction, and as such I've been all over "True Detective" since it started in January. Put together a checklist of tropes for the genre, and you can check off most of them in any given episode: Mismatched partners trying to work a case together, a detective becoming obsessed with a case and getting into too deep, a growing sense of fatalism. All of that stuff goes back to Raymond Chandler, and earlier, and all of that is stuff that I absolutely eat up.
It seems nearly universally agreed upon that Woody Harrelson's performance in "True Detective" is great, that Matthew McConaughey's performance is a just-give-him-all-of-the-awards-now level of great, and that the show is smartly written and beautifully shot. Still, I think that three episodes in, somebody less high over heels for noir and detective fiction than somebody like me could plausibly put together an argument that, as well executed as the show may be, that it doesn't offer enough new to be considered a truly great show. Martin Hart's alpha male machismo is a lot like something that's been done in a bunch of different Scorsese movies, the occult-themed murder mystery is stuff we've seen in movies like Seven, and Rust Cohle's descent from narc officer to substance abuser has been done before, if maybe not quite like this. Again, for me, I'll gladly take a thousand more entries into this genre, but I wouldn't begrudge someone asking what's in "True Detective" that's all that groundbreaking, three episodes in. After episode four, I think any sort of skepticism about how great the show is, has to go out the window.
The first three "Detective" episodes are very conversational, and all of the tension is anticipatory. We know that Cohle and Hart wouldn't be brought in 17 years later to talk about the case open-and-shut had it been solved without incident, but we don't know exactly how and when everything is going to go wrong yet. "Who Goes There," raises the immediate stakes in a way that we haven't seen at any point yet. For the first time, Martin and Rust have a solid lead to investigate in the form of the meth-cooking Reggie Ledoux, and Rust's plan to get to him involves going through the biker gang that he cooks for exclusively. Rust knows them from his narc team days, and figures that he can talk their leader, the bug-eyed Ginger, into setting up a meeting with Reggie. By the time Rust is stealing coke from the police evidence locker and making fake needle tracks on his harm, you're pretty sure that this is a bad idea. By the time Ginger is daring Rust to man up and help them rob drug dealers in the projects, you're wondering how bad of an idea this is going to be.
And yet, the show pretty brilliantly keeps you guessing as to exactly what's going to be the catalyst for everything unraveling. Is Marty going to blow their cover when he lamely tries to circumvent the bouncer at the biker bar while looking about as out of place as possible? Is Ginger going to poke holes in Rust's account of where he's been since they last saw each other? Is Rust going to out himself by explaining how they have to act more cop-like if their plan to pose as cops is going to work? Or is he going to act too cop-like as he does a sweep of every room of the house with mechanical precision while the bikers clear out the safe? You could almost be fooled into thinking that Rust is somehow going to pull this off without a hitch, but the pulsing, guttural music, and the drowned out color scheme keeps a sick feeling in your stomach.
Of course, it all goes to hell, as the bikers lose their nerve and start shooting once the guys standing outside the house figure out that they're not cops and start breaking windows. The final scene is an uninterrupted six minute long shot that follows Rust as he fights off the local gang-bangers who have no reason to believe that he's not still with the Iron Crusaders, while keeping Ginger subdued, while dodging still the cops, and eventually making into Marty's sedan. All the while, the scene still keeping the larger gunfight going in the background, and there's a brief pan into the room of a nearby house where more guys are loading guns to show that things are continuing to escalate. The only thing I've ever seen that I think comes anywhere close to this is the opening shot of Touch of Evil, which is amazing for its time, but this scene is on an entirely different level of tension and coordination. At times, it looks like gameplay footage of some weird version of Metal Gear Solid, as Rust crouches his way around walls and through bushes to stay out of sight of every next person new on the scene, except these are real people always entering the shot at exactly the right place at the right time.
If anyone's still wondering, "What does 'True Detective' have to offer me that's new if I don't really care about another murder mystery or another world-weary noir protagonist?", the climactic scene in "Who Goes There" is their answer. I've never seen a scene quite like that in either a TV show or in a movie, and I'm now more hyped for the remaining episodes of this show than I already was. See you next week.
--
Here's the opening shot of Touch of Evil:
EPISODE 4: "Who Goes There"
I'm pretty much a sucker for anything related to detective fiction, and as such I've been all over "True Detective" since it started in January. Put together a checklist of tropes for the genre, and you can check off most of them in any given episode: Mismatched partners trying to work a case together, a detective becoming obsessed with a case and getting into too deep, a growing sense of fatalism. All of that stuff goes back to Raymond Chandler, and earlier, and all of that is stuff that I absolutely eat up.
It seems nearly universally agreed upon that Woody Harrelson's performance in "True Detective" is great, that Matthew McConaughey's performance is a just-give-him-all-of-the-awards-now level of great, and that the show is smartly written and beautifully shot. Still, I think that three episodes in, somebody less high over heels for noir and detective fiction than somebody like me could plausibly put together an argument that, as well executed as the show may be, that it doesn't offer enough new to be considered a truly great show. Martin Hart's alpha male machismo is a lot like something that's been done in a bunch of different Scorsese movies, the occult-themed murder mystery is stuff we've seen in movies like Seven, and Rust Cohle's descent from narc officer to substance abuser has been done before, if maybe not quite like this. Again, for me, I'll gladly take a thousand more entries into this genre, but I wouldn't begrudge someone asking what's in "True Detective" that's all that groundbreaking, three episodes in. After episode four, I think any sort of skepticism about how great the show is, has to go out the window.
The first three "Detective" episodes are very conversational, and all of the tension is anticipatory. We know that Cohle and Hart wouldn't be brought in 17 years later to talk about the case open-and-shut had it been solved without incident, but we don't know exactly how and when everything is going to go wrong yet. "Who Goes There," raises the immediate stakes in a way that we haven't seen at any point yet. For the first time, Martin and Rust have a solid lead to investigate in the form of the meth-cooking Reggie Ledoux, and Rust's plan to get to him involves going through the biker gang that he cooks for exclusively. Rust knows them from his narc team days, and figures that he can talk their leader, the bug-eyed Ginger, into setting up a meeting with Reggie. By the time Rust is stealing coke from the police evidence locker and making fake needle tracks on his harm, you're pretty sure that this is a bad idea. By the time Ginger is daring Rust to man up and help them rob drug dealers in the projects, you're wondering how bad of an idea this is going to be.
And yet, the show pretty brilliantly keeps you guessing as to exactly what's going to be the catalyst for everything unraveling. Is Marty going to blow their cover when he lamely tries to circumvent the bouncer at the biker bar while looking about as out of place as possible? Is Ginger going to poke holes in Rust's account of where he's been since they last saw each other? Is Rust going to out himself by explaining how they have to act more cop-like if their plan to pose as cops is going to work? Or is he going to act too cop-like as he does a sweep of every room of the house with mechanical precision while the bikers clear out the safe? You could almost be fooled into thinking that Rust is somehow going to pull this off without a hitch, but the pulsing, guttural music, and the drowned out color scheme keeps a sick feeling in your stomach.
Of course, it all goes to hell, as the bikers lose their nerve and start shooting once the guys standing outside the house figure out that they're not cops and start breaking windows. The final scene is an uninterrupted six minute long shot that follows Rust as he fights off the local gang-bangers who have no reason to believe that he's not still with the Iron Crusaders, while keeping Ginger subdued, while dodging still the cops, and eventually making into Marty's sedan. All the while, the scene still keeping the larger gunfight going in the background, and there's a brief pan into the room of a nearby house where more guys are loading guns to show that things are continuing to escalate. The only thing I've ever seen that I think comes anywhere close to this is the opening shot of Touch of Evil, which is amazing for its time, but this scene is on an entirely different level of tension and coordination. At times, it looks like gameplay footage of some weird version of Metal Gear Solid, as Rust crouches his way around walls and through bushes to stay out of sight of every next person new on the scene, except these are real people always entering the shot at exactly the right place at the right time.
If anyone's still wondering, "What does 'True Detective' have to offer me that's new if I don't really care about another murder mystery or another world-weary noir protagonist?", the climactic scene in "Who Goes There" is their answer. I've never seen a scene quite like that in either a TV show or in a movie, and I'm now more hyped for the remaining episodes of this show than I already was. See you next week.
--
Here's the opening shot of Touch of Evil:
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Skyrim
I'm going to try and write this entire post without making an "arrow in the knee" jokes.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is not a perfect game, but it's a game that has positioned itself out in front of most anything else in terms of its scope, its detail, and how much it feels like a living, breathing world. It's an improvement in just about every way over its predecessor, Oblivion, building on the core idea of a seemingly-infinitely explorable open world, while taking advantage of every bit of improvement in computing power over the last five years to improve how its look, and at the same time making some better decisions with respect to gameplay mechanics. I believe I'm about 35 hours in, and yet I'm not sure if I've played enough of the game to the point where this could be considered a "full" review of it. I think I've been to six or seven of the nine major cities and there are large swaths of land even around the cities I've been too that I've not yet traversed. I haven't put much of a dent into the main story (at least that's my assumption), instead feeling content to focus on side-quests and just simply exploring. The best endorsement you can give the game is that you'd be hard pressed to find another with more stuff to do that doesn't delve into mind-numbing repetition.
Skyrim begins in much the way Oblivion did, in that you begin as a prisoner of no particular note, when circumstances beyond your control launch you into the story. In Skyrim, you're actually about to be executed, the hangman's axe literally about to come down on your head, when a giant dragon shows up and starts wrecking stuff. With the help of another escapee you manage to find some equipment and get out of dodge, and then you're basically launched into the world to do what you will. If you choose continue the main story, you head to the nearby Whiterun, one of the nine major cities in the game (I believe Oblivion had five or six). There, you talk to the Jarl (the local ruler) there, who wants you to use your first-hand knowledge seeing a dragon, which were thought to be extinct, to aid a contingent of troops who are out investigating the sighting of another dragon near the city. Given that this guy just met you, and the only skill you've really demonstrated is "ability to run the fuck away really fast" I'm not sure this is in any way logical, but it advances the story in that you and your cohorts end up slaying the dragon and the rest of the troops look on in awe as you absorb its soul into your body. Whaaaa? To find out more, you visit the Greybeards, a group of old bearded dudes akin to monks who live in isolation at the top of Skyrim's tallest mountain (the trek up provides some of the coolest visuals in the game). They tell you that you're one of a rare breed, the "Dragonborn", who can absorb the power of dragons and unleash it via Shouting: literally, shouting words in the ancient language of dragons that hold special power. I wouldn't spoil the rest of the story even if I knew it, which I don't because, as I said, it's really, really easy to get distracted doing other quests.
The Shouts are the biggest new addition to Skryim's gameplay from what existed in Oblivion. If you dabble in any sort of meme-laden online community, you're probably aware of "fus-roh-dah," which you can use to knock back enemies, or pretty much anything else. There's also Shouts to disarm enemies, turn into a spectral form, detect nearby living things, and a bunch more where that came from. The gist of the system is that you find dragon words inscribed in stone throughout the game word, usually where dragon's are roosting or in the depths of some of the larger dungeons. The word either grants you a new power or is used to strengthen an existing power. To unlock use of the power, you have to spend a dragon soul which you get from straight-up slaying the hell out of some dragons. It's not uncommon to just lay eyes on a dragon flying off in the distance as you're off traveling in the game world, but you can also find them by world of mouth in towns (overhear someone saying "Hey, I hear there's a dragon atop the mountain to the northwest" and that point will be automatically marked on your map). The battles with dragons are the closest thing the game has to boss battles, although there's pretty good variance in the relative strength between certain types of dragon, and like other enemies, they progress in power as you level up.
Speaking of leveling, Skyrim's system for progressing your character is not totally dissimilar to Oblivion's, although it has a little more depth and it's a lot more fun. In Oblivion, instead of just accruing experience points the way you do in the bulk of both Western and Japanese RPGs, you leveled up after you improved any of your skills a certain number of times. Amongst these skills were some pretty bizarre inclusions, like "Athletics," which seems like a reasonable metric for an RPG character, until you realize that it can be leveled up simply by arbitrarily running around and jumping. Once you gained a level, you got a certain number of points to distribute amongst your base attributes, with the game cap on how much you can raise each attribute in a single level based on how much you used each associated skill. For example, if you shot a lot of people with bows last level and upped your Marksmanship skill, you could then increase your Agility score. The rationale behind the system had a certain logic to it, but there wasn't much fun in it. After grinding your way to whatever level you'd just hit, adding 3 ticks to your willpower score didn't necessarily do much more you as far as instant gratitude goes. And what if it so happened to you weren't playing your character precisely the way the class--chosen at the start of the game--was meant to work? Imagine that your character was a heavy-armored bruiser that wasn't at all based around magic, but you spent last level using the giant pile of ingredients you had taking up space in your backpack to brew some potions, and then you decided to do some sneaking around in a city for one clandestine purpose or another. Bettering these skills wouldn't lead to being able to put in the maximum points into the abilities that would help your character most.
Skyrim doesn't completely uproot this. You still level up your character by leveling up their individual skills, but the wacky inclusions of Athletics and Acrobatics have been removed, and the game doesn't include the weird persuasion mini-game that Oblivion had that let you mindlessly grind away at your Speech skill. However, you're no longer locked into a class from the start of the game. When you create a character at the start, you still customize your appearance and your race--which gives you race-specific characteristics, like cold resistance for Nords and a berserk mode for Orcs--but you're no longer locked into a specific class. Your character develops entirely by how you play the game. Want to be a swift-footed ranged attacker? Get some light armor, get a bow, and start shootin' people in the face. Want to be magic based? Find some spellbooks and start casting away.
Once you level, instead of just upping your ability scores, you can actually pick and choose new talents for your character. The leveling up screen shows each of your main abilities along with an associated constellation of stars, that basically acts like a skill tree. At each level, if you meet a certain minimum threshold for the level in the associated skill, you can light up a new star, and then open up the connecting pathway, or pathways, to more. For example, the first star in the Constellation for the Archery skill simply ups your bow damage by 20%. You can choose to put up to 5 levels in this to stack more damage, but once you have at least one point in the first star, you open up paths to other abilities, like your arrows being able knocking back enemies, being able to move faster with a bow drawn, being able to recover more of your used arrows, and a few others. At each new level, you can keep working your way through one of the trees you've already started, or you can begin a new one. Compared to Oblivion, Skyrim allows for much more control over how your character develops, and the new abilities you gain give you much more instant gratification than just perpetual slight increases your stats.
The battle system has remained pretty constant. It's still entirely in first person, and the basics of it are essentially that you left-click (I'm playing on PC) to hit with your primary weapon and right-click to block if you have a shield, or perry if you have a two-handed weapon. A difference is that you now "equip" your spells, as you would a weapon, and so you can end up with combinations of a one-handed weapon and a spell, a spell and a shield, etc. The game's offering of spells is fairly similar to Oblivion's: various elemental based attacks, healing spells of varying effectiveness, temporary buffs to your health or attack power, turning yourself spectral or invisible, reanimating a dead body as an undead meat shield, etc. If you make a conscious effort to level up the various schools it's possible that these more indirect spells might be quite useful, I can't really say, but insofar as I've used magic, I've found that just sticking to trying to burn, freeze, or electrocute whatever is in your path is usually all you need. Really, combat as a whole is still pretty simple. It's still all in the first-person perspective and all using FPS-style conventions (WASD to dodge around and click to attack). There's a certain finesse to blocking a melee attack at the right time, or sidestepping a fireball, but there isn't really a lot of depth to it. Frankly, if the game didn't put so much care into drawing you into the experience in otherwise, things would get quite boring because of how ho-hum the combat is.
The main appeal of the game, then, is that there's just so damn much to do. Talking to passers-by upon entering any of the major cities will net you at least half a dozen new quests to do in a matter of minutes. Most of these quests have their own storylines with multiple steps, but even if you manage to exhaust these, asking innkeepers and the Jarls of various towns if there's any work will produce an infinite number of randomly generated one-off quests where you're sent to a random location to collect a bounty on some sort of ne'er-do-well. You can also join any number of guilds with their own independent quests. If you join the Thief's Guild, there is a main line of quests that allow you to work your way up in the ranks of the guild, but there are also randomly generated quests asking you to pickpocket a certain person, or steal an item from a certain house, or forge a certain business ledger. If you run out of things to do, you're doing something very, very wrong. All of this questing ends up requiring a good deal of travel, but at no point does this lead to tedium. You can instantly jump to any place you've already been to at any point in which you're not in combat, although really, even if you just decide to hoof it you'll find yourself admiring the landscape along the way and you might stumble on some good loot in one of the various caves, ruins, or fortresses along the way.
Skyrim does away with the ponderous weapon repair system, that required you to constantly carry around a giant bag of blacksmith's hammers and constantly repair your equipment or have to deal with penalties in their effectiveness. Your weapons never dulling sacrifices a certain degree of realism, but this is certainly one case where its welcome. Replacing the simple repair system is a robust weapon and armor creation system, wherein you can use the various metal ores and animal hides you collect along your way at blacksmith's forges to create equipment and add bonuses to the equipment you already have. There's also an alchemy system that's very similar to the last game, and a new enchantment system in which you first disenchant already magical items which then allows you how to apply that enchantment to other equipment. So there's a lot do to besides just running into new areas, bashing stuff, and getting out.
The game does have flaws. The fact that the world levels up with you and that is what facilitates the open-ended gameplay, but it can also be a bit of a double-edged sword. There are times when you'll slay a dragon on a mountaintop in a iconic clash, epic choir music blaring all the while, only to be murdered by a random bear during the descent back down. Some dungeons seem to be populated with grunts providing no challenge whatsoever, but with a boss enemy at the end who can fell you with a single critical hit. For all the realism but into the finely detailed and ever shifting landscapes, less care seems to have been put into the people of Skyrim. They don't have the creepy, uncanny valley look of Oblivion, but some of the animations still seem somewhat off and they behave oddly at times. NPCs will stand around and stare at you blankly at times when you're talking to them to turn in a task that they gave you that should provoke an instant reaction. People seem to clip through objects a lot. Most quests are pretty straight-forward, and the game always provides you with map markers showing where to do, but a few don't give you enough direction as to what you're supposed to do once you get there. Overall, there doesn't seem to be as much polish put into the actual mechanics of the game as there clearly was put into creating the game world.
These are minor quibbles, and are quibbles that barely touch my overall experience with the game. Even on the pretty modest settings which I'm running Skyrim on my not-quite-high-end PC, the game world leaves me consistently awe-struck, and I've yet to find myself tiring of uncovering more of it. If Bethesda works under the same time frame as with Skyrim, it'll be another five years before we see another Elder Scrolls game. In five years time I doubt I'll have actually exhausted everything there is to do in Skyrim. This is before the modding development tools have even been released. There simply isn't another game working quote on this scope, and it's a must-play for anyone with even a passing interest in any form of RPG.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is not a perfect game, but it's a game that has positioned itself out in front of most anything else in terms of its scope, its detail, and how much it feels like a living, breathing world. It's an improvement in just about every way over its predecessor, Oblivion, building on the core idea of a seemingly-infinitely explorable open world, while taking advantage of every bit of improvement in computing power over the last five years to improve how its look, and at the same time making some better decisions with respect to gameplay mechanics. I believe I'm about 35 hours in, and yet I'm not sure if I've played enough of the game to the point where this could be considered a "full" review of it. I think I've been to six or seven of the nine major cities and there are large swaths of land even around the cities I've been too that I've not yet traversed. I haven't put much of a dent into the main story (at least that's my assumption), instead feeling content to focus on side-quests and just simply exploring. The best endorsement you can give the game is that you'd be hard pressed to find another with more stuff to do that doesn't delve into mind-numbing repetition.
Skyrim begins in much the way Oblivion did, in that you begin as a prisoner of no particular note, when circumstances beyond your control launch you into the story. In Skyrim, you're actually about to be executed, the hangman's axe literally about to come down on your head, when a giant dragon shows up and starts wrecking stuff. With the help of another escapee you manage to find some equipment and get out of dodge, and then you're basically launched into the world to do what you will. If you choose continue the main story, you head to the nearby Whiterun, one of the nine major cities in the game (I believe Oblivion had five or six). There, you talk to the Jarl (the local ruler) there, who wants you to use your first-hand knowledge seeing a dragon, which were thought to be extinct, to aid a contingent of troops who are out investigating the sighting of another dragon near the city. Given that this guy just met you, and the only skill you've really demonstrated is "ability to run the fuck away really fast" I'm not sure this is in any way logical, but it advances the story in that you and your cohorts end up slaying the dragon and the rest of the troops look on in awe as you absorb its soul into your body. Whaaaa? To find out more, you visit the Greybeards, a group of old bearded dudes akin to monks who live in isolation at the top of Skyrim's tallest mountain (the trek up provides some of the coolest visuals in the game). They tell you that you're one of a rare breed, the "Dragonborn", who can absorb the power of dragons and unleash it via Shouting: literally, shouting words in the ancient language of dragons that hold special power. I wouldn't spoil the rest of the story even if I knew it, which I don't because, as I said, it's really, really easy to get distracted doing other quests.
The Shouts are the biggest new addition to Skryim's gameplay from what existed in Oblivion. If you dabble in any sort of meme-laden online community, you're probably aware of "fus-roh-dah," which you can use to knock back enemies, or pretty much anything else. There's also Shouts to disarm enemies, turn into a spectral form, detect nearby living things, and a bunch more where that came from. The gist of the system is that you find dragon words inscribed in stone throughout the game word, usually where dragon's are roosting or in the depths of some of the larger dungeons. The word either grants you a new power or is used to strengthen an existing power. To unlock use of the power, you have to spend a dragon soul which you get from straight-up slaying the hell out of some dragons. It's not uncommon to just lay eyes on a dragon flying off in the distance as you're off traveling in the game world, but you can also find them by world of mouth in towns (overhear someone saying "Hey, I hear there's a dragon atop the mountain to the northwest" and that point will be automatically marked on your map). The battles with dragons are the closest thing the game has to boss battles, although there's pretty good variance in the relative strength between certain types of dragon, and like other enemies, they progress in power as you level up.
Speaking of leveling, Skyrim's system for progressing your character is not totally dissimilar to Oblivion's, although it has a little more depth and it's a lot more fun. In Oblivion, instead of just accruing experience points the way you do in the bulk of both Western and Japanese RPGs, you leveled up after you improved any of your skills a certain number of times. Amongst these skills were some pretty bizarre inclusions, like "Athletics," which seems like a reasonable metric for an RPG character, until you realize that it can be leveled up simply by arbitrarily running around and jumping. Once you gained a level, you got a certain number of points to distribute amongst your base attributes, with the game cap on how much you can raise each attribute in a single level based on how much you used each associated skill. For example, if you shot a lot of people with bows last level and upped your Marksmanship skill, you could then increase your Agility score. The rationale behind the system had a certain logic to it, but there wasn't much fun in it. After grinding your way to whatever level you'd just hit, adding 3 ticks to your willpower score didn't necessarily do much more you as far as instant gratitude goes. And what if it so happened to you weren't playing your character precisely the way the class--chosen at the start of the game--was meant to work? Imagine that your character was a heavy-armored bruiser that wasn't at all based around magic, but you spent last level using the giant pile of ingredients you had taking up space in your backpack to brew some potions, and then you decided to do some sneaking around in a city for one clandestine purpose or another. Bettering these skills wouldn't lead to being able to put in the maximum points into the abilities that would help your character most.
Skyrim doesn't completely uproot this. You still level up your character by leveling up their individual skills, but the wacky inclusions of Athletics and Acrobatics have been removed, and the game doesn't include the weird persuasion mini-game that Oblivion had that let you mindlessly grind away at your Speech skill. However, you're no longer locked into a class from the start of the game. When you create a character at the start, you still customize your appearance and your race--which gives you race-specific characteristics, like cold resistance for Nords and a berserk mode for Orcs--but you're no longer locked into a specific class. Your character develops entirely by how you play the game. Want to be a swift-footed ranged attacker? Get some light armor, get a bow, and start shootin' people in the face. Want to be magic based? Find some spellbooks and start casting away.
Once you level, instead of just upping your ability scores, you can actually pick and choose new talents for your character. The leveling up screen shows each of your main abilities along with an associated constellation of stars, that basically acts like a skill tree. At each level, if you meet a certain minimum threshold for the level in the associated skill, you can light up a new star, and then open up the connecting pathway, or pathways, to more. For example, the first star in the Constellation for the Archery skill simply ups your bow damage by 20%. You can choose to put up to 5 levels in this to stack more damage, but once you have at least one point in the first star, you open up paths to other abilities, like your arrows being able knocking back enemies, being able to move faster with a bow drawn, being able to recover more of your used arrows, and a few others. At each new level, you can keep working your way through one of the trees you've already started, or you can begin a new one. Compared to Oblivion, Skyrim allows for much more control over how your character develops, and the new abilities you gain give you much more instant gratification than just perpetual slight increases your stats.
The battle system has remained pretty constant. It's still entirely in first person, and the basics of it are essentially that you left-click (I'm playing on PC) to hit with your primary weapon and right-click to block if you have a shield, or perry if you have a two-handed weapon. A difference is that you now "equip" your spells, as you would a weapon, and so you can end up with combinations of a one-handed weapon and a spell, a spell and a shield, etc. The game's offering of spells is fairly similar to Oblivion's: various elemental based attacks, healing spells of varying effectiveness, temporary buffs to your health or attack power, turning yourself spectral or invisible, reanimating a dead body as an undead meat shield, etc. If you make a conscious effort to level up the various schools it's possible that these more indirect spells might be quite useful, I can't really say, but insofar as I've used magic, I've found that just sticking to trying to burn, freeze, or electrocute whatever is in your path is usually all you need. Really, combat as a whole is still pretty simple. It's still all in the first-person perspective and all using FPS-style conventions (WASD to dodge around and click to attack). There's a certain finesse to blocking a melee attack at the right time, or sidestepping a fireball, but there isn't really a lot of depth to it. Frankly, if the game didn't put so much care into drawing you into the experience in otherwise, things would get quite boring because of how ho-hum the combat is.
The main appeal of the game, then, is that there's just so damn much to do. Talking to passers-by upon entering any of the major cities will net you at least half a dozen new quests to do in a matter of minutes. Most of these quests have their own storylines with multiple steps, but even if you manage to exhaust these, asking innkeepers and the Jarls of various towns if there's any work will produce an infinite number of randomly generated one-off quests where you're sent to a random location to collect a bounty on some sort of ne'er-do-well. You can also join any number of guilds with their own independent quests. If you join the Thief's Guild, there is a main line of quests that allow you to work your way up in the ranks of the guild, but there are also randomly generated quests asking you to pickpocket a certain person, or steal an item from a certain house, or forge a certain business ledger. If you run out of things to do, you're doing something very, very wrong. All of this questing ends up requiring a good deal of travel, but at no point does this lead to tedium. You can instantly jump to any place you've already been to at any point in which you're not in combat, although really, even if you just decide to hoof it you'll find yourself admiring the landscape along the way and you might stumble on some good loot in one of the various caves, ruins, or fortresses along the way.
Skyrim does away with the ponderous weapon repair system, that required you to constantly carry around a giant bag of blacksmith's hammers and constantly repair your equipment or have to deal with penalties in their effectiveness. Your weapons never dulling sacrifices a certain degree of realism, but this is certainly one case where its welcome. Replacing the simple repair system is a robust weapon and armor creation system, wherein you can use the various metal ores and animal hides you collect along your way at blacksmith's forges to create equipment and add bonuses to the equipment you already have. There's also an alchemy system that's very similar to the last game, and a new enchantment system in which you first disenchant already magical items which then allows you how to apply that enchantment to other equipment. So there's a lot do to besides just running into new areas, bashing stuff, and getting out.
The game does have flaws. The fact that the world levels up with you and that is what facilitates the open-ended gameplay, but it can also be a bit of a double-edged sword. There are times when you'll slay a dragon on a mountaintop in a iconic clash, epic choir music blaring all the while, only to be murdered by a random bear during the descent back down. Some dungeons seem to be populated with grunts providing no challenge whatsoever, but with a boss enemy at the end who can fell you with a single critical hit. For all the realism but into the finely detailed and ever shifting landscapes, less care seems to have been put into the people of Skyrim. They don't have the creepy, uncanny valley look of Oblivion, but some of the animations still seem somewhat off and they behave oddly at times. NPCs will stand around and stare at you blankly at times when you're talking to them to turn in a task that they gave you that should provoke an instant reaction. People seem to clip through objects a lot. Most quests are pretty straight-forward, and the game always provides you with map markers showing where to do, but a few don't give you enough direction as to what you're supposed to do once you get there. Overall, there doesn't seem to be as much polish put into the actual mechanics of the game as there clearly was put into creating the game world.
These are minor quibbles, and are quibbles that barely touch my overall experience with the game. Even on the pretty modest settings which I'm running Skyrim on my not-quite-high-end PC, the game world leaves me consistently awe-struck, and I've yet to find myself tiring of uncovering more of it. If Bethesda works under the same time frame as with Skyrim, it'll be another five years before we see another Elder Scrolls game. In five years time I doubt I'll have actually exhausted everything there is to do in Skyrim. This is before the modding development tools have even been released. There simply isn't another game working quote on this scope, and it's a must-play for anyone with even a passing interest in any form of RPG.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Batman: Noel
(Spoilers -- although the strength of the book isn't really that its full of countless unforeseen plot twists)
Think about what you know about Charles Dickens' timeless classic, A Christmas Carol. Three ghosts, Christmas goose, "God bless us, everyone!", and all that. Now imagine it with more Batman. An insane concept? I sort of thought so. Dickens' story is a pretty simple morality tale: an old, crotchety hardass learns through some wacky hallucinations that he should be more charitable and look out for his fellow man. Batman has never strictly operated within the law, but the general goodness of his character is never really questioned, and if he has any faults, lack of charity isn't one of them. It's not often that a Batman arc goes by without Bruce Wayne showing up some place or another in Gotham to attend the ribbon cutting of some public works project that he's financing. That said, given that this book, Batman: Noel, was being drawn by Lee Bermejo, whose art made the Brian Azarello penned Joker a delightfully haunting experience, I knew I had to pick it up. This is Bermejo's first stab at writing as well as penciling and my only hope was that his Dickensian Batman idea would hold up. It's maybe not perfect, but I can happily say that it mostly does, and when paired with his strikingly gorgeous art, his book is a very fun read.
Batman: Noel is told a bit like a Christmas book. That was Bermejo's original idea, although he strayed from it being strictly that as he continued to develop the concept. Still, the book has sparse dialogue except for a couple of specific scenes, instead making use of running narration, and only a little of it on each panel, so that the art has room to breathe and so the pictures tell as much of the story as the text. The first few pages in fact are mostly wordless, and show us snow-covered old brick buildings with chimney stacks billowing smoke to at least give us a little bit of the feel of Dickensian England, even as the story is set in modern day Gotham. The first character we're introduced to is Bob Cratchit, who exists just as he is in the Dickens story. He's broke and he has a son named Tim with a bum name. The narration tells us that Scrooge is making him work on Christmas, but this doesn't seem to match up with what's going on in pictures because we see him delivering a package with a hand-scrawled note on it from the Joker. But then, suddenly, Batman shows up, rolls a 20 on his intimidate check as he calls Bob low-life scum and places a tracer on him. So what's going on is that Batman is Batman in the actual dialogue, but he's standing in for Scrooge in the narration. Bob's "working for Scrooge on Christmas" by being Batman's lead to finding the Joker.
Bruce returns back to the Batcave, where Alfred expresses his displeasure with using the father of a young boy as bait for the Joker, gently reminding Bruce that Jason Todd once got a face full of Joker-wielded crowbar. Alfred departs to find Bruce some medicine for the cough he seems to be developing, and Bruce, now alone, looks at Jason's old Robin uniform and sees a vision of Jason telling him that he needs to pay or there will be consequences. That's right everybody: Jason Todd is Jacob Marley. So now Batman we know that Batman is also going to be visited by three "ghosts" and so he does, although unlike Robin/Marley, these are actual flesh-and-blood encounters. Batman briefly stops over on the Gotham PD rooftop to meet with Jim Gordon, who here has his usual bristly mustache and square-rimmed glasses, but smokes a pipe that evokes Sherlock Holmes and dons a red scarf to get in the Dickens spirit. Gordon says that Catwoman has information on the Joker.
Batman meets Catwoman on a rooftop at exactly 1 AM, and thus she stands in for the Ghost of Christmas past. She tries to goad Batman by showing him a bag full of cat-burgled jewels, and when he says between hacking coughs that he doesn't have time for this crap, she reminisces about how he used to be different and less serious. The Ghost of Christmas Present is Superman who basically tells Batman to have more faith in people and to get off his high horse a bit as far as calling everybody who slips up a hopeless scumbag. The Ghost of Christmas Future is filled in for by the Joker, who just skips the moralizing and straight-up buries Batman alive. The book ends with Batman emerging from the grave ala Batman: RIP and arriving just in the nick of time before Joker pipe-wrenches Bob and his family to death. The gist of the scene has been done countless times, countless different ways, but it's gorgeous to look at here, like the rest of the book, and Bermejo has some fun writing for the Joker, having him make quips about Clue, the board game, and being disappointed in Bob for trying to defend himself with a baseball bat, which isn't a Clue weapon.
Bermejo's art, in collaboration with an Italian colorist named Barbara Ciardo, is easily the best part of the story. It looked more painted than penciled, the way Alex Ross's work is, which works with the idea of modern Gotham as a pseudo-Victorian setting. It has much less of a rough and gruesome feel than his work on Azarello's ultra-dark Joker story, and it uses a lot of bright reds and casts a lot of warm light on people's faces as if from a fireplace to fit in with the Chirstmas theme. At the same time though, there is a darker gothic motif to it that any self-respecting Batman story has, especially in the Batcave and on the rooftops. Bermejo's faces are gorgeous, with tons of expression in them. He draws Batman as perpetually furious and border-lined crazed, while the scenes with Bob and Tim are intimate and genuinely heartwarming. Overall, the book's Chistmasy yet not always rosy look ends up reminding me of a Norman Rockwell painting, if he had one step less myopic a view on life.
I don't know if the book is a masterpiece. The Batman is Scrooge analogy is never really sold perfectly. Batman never comes across as a man who desperately needs to save his soul, mostly just a guy who's acting like a bit of a dick. Batman here is kind of like a less vulgar version of Miller's "goddamn Batman" persona: angry, abrasive, and obsessive to a fault, but still a man clearly on the side of good and not evil. Seeing people from the Bat-verse as stand-ins in a Christmas Carol retelling is still a lot of fun, and when they're being drawn by Lee Bermejo it's hard to look away. This is a very different book from Joker, but it'll fit nicely on my bookshelf alongside it, nevertheless. Noel is very much worth picking up.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
The New 52: Action Comics (Part 1)
Batman has always been my go-to superhero. I've dabbled in Superman stories here and there, but generally Action Comics and Superman aren't on my regular pull list regardless of who's writing them the way Batman and Detective are (although I think that's gonna change for the first time in like 5 years). Superman stories often seem stuck in the mud, with his altruism and near-invulnerability making it hard for him to be put into new and interesting situations. I didn't read it, but it seems as if that was the case with J. Michael Stracynski's "Grounded" storyline, where Superman decided to spend year walking across the entire United States to... I dunno, more closely identify with regular people or something, because that's apparently something that would make sense to Superman instead of using his amazing powers to fly around saving a bunch of said regular people from getting killed or maimed.
The last Superman book I really read and enjoyed the hell out of was Grant Morrision's 12 issue out-of-continuity toy box, All-Star Superman, that's regarded by many as one of the best Superman books ever. Morrison showed his love for some of Superman's old, wacky, silver age exploits, throwing in everything from Superman having to escape the Bizarro planet with a scrap-metal rocket to Jimmy Olsen briefly getting transformed into Doomsday. Along with all of that, though, the book also had a lot of heart, was clearly one of the best takes on the character put onto paper, and it was a good reminder of why the character still exists after 80 years or so. So, suffice to say, the announcement of Grant Morrison writing a rebooted Action Comics alongside artist Rags Morales--whose art in Identity Crisis was better than Brad Meltzer's story-- was enough to pique my interest, especially after preview images started coming out showing a jeans-clad Supes getting pelting with police bullets. Huh?! Clearly this is was going to be a reboot involving more than just sticking a #1 on the cover.
Indeed, the events of this Action Comics arc take place five years previous to "present day" in the current DCU, and Superman's first appearance is pretty jarring as he shows up at a business meeting on the top floor of a highrise, deplores the "rats with money" in attendance, and dangles a dude off of a ledge. It feels more like Batman than Superman. I'm told that this is actually accurate to early characterizations of Supes. I honestly don't know enough about his history to confirm as much. Some cops show up, but have no idea what to do, as Superman takes Mr. Glenmorgan, the businessman who's the subject of his ire, and jumps down to the ground, leaving him alive and unhurt but scaring the crap of him enough for him to confess to skirting labor labs and giving bribes. Superman tells Glenmorgan, "treat people right or expect a visit from me." He's the goddamn Superman.
Supes flies off and we learn that Lex Luthor is with a bunch of military big shots monitoring Superman's actions. Lex has devised a trap where a building scheduled for demolition but not yet abandoned will be straight-up wrecking balled down with people still inside. Supes helps those inside escape and so here we get a much more traditional image of Superman: He still saves people first and foremost. An armored tank shows up and tries to capture Supes by firing an electrified net at him to no avail, Supes takes the wrecking ball to the tank, the residents that Superman just saved get pissed and do the whole "if you're gonna get to hit you gotta get through us" bit, and Superman flies off and grabs his Clark Kent clothes off a clothesline before entering his apartment. This is roughly halfway through #1, by the way. It moves fast.
In this "five years earlier" period, Morrison and Morales depict Kent as young and shaggy-haired, looking more like Peter Parker than the usual design of the character. Superman calls Jimmy Olsen, who is apparently at this point already Superman's super pal even though Jimmy and Lois are working for the Daily Planet while Superman is working for the rival Daily Star. Jimmy and Lois are tailing "Guns" Grunding, an "enforcer" who worked for Glenmorgan. The train's brakes are sabotaged and it careens down the tracks at full speed, while Grunding pulls a pair of pistols on Jimmy and Lois. Amidst a bunch of commotion, Jimmy manages to subdue Grunding, while Superman gets between the train and the wall it's about to ram into. Everyone on the train is safe as Superman blunts the impact, but he ends up being knocked out, impaled up against the wall. Luthor, monitoring things once again tells General Lane, Lois's father, "I give you Superman." What Morrison does with Luthor is pretty great. He really gets his time in the spotlight in the second issue, but here he has a nice beat when he mentions to Lane that it was his daughter who christened the name Superman, but "the creature" didn't go out of his way to refuse it. Later at the end of #1 he has a great rant to Lane about how is a non-native species that's going to threaten humans the way cave toads upended the ecosystem in Australia. It's always fun when Luthor is filled with this sort of jealously-tinged disdain for Superman. Luthor, while just a wee bit of a bastard, is an undeniable genius and his achievements reflect the absolute pinnacle of human potential. Suddenly, an alien creature shows up and turns Luthor's word on its head. A lot of Luthor's beef with Superman is just that he sees him and the impossible feats he's capable and sees a cheater, like a 'roided up baseball player. I've always loved that idea.
More on Action Comics to come.
The last Superman book I really read and enjoyed the hell out of was Grant Morrision's 12 issue out-of-continuity toy box, All-Star Superman, that's regarded by many as one of the best Superman books ever. Morrison showed his love for some of Superman's old, wacky, silver age exploits, throwing in everything from Superman having to escape the Bizarro planet with a scrap-metal rocket to Jimmy Olsen briefly getting transformed into Doomsday. Along with all of that, though, the book also had a lot of heart, was clearly one of the best takes on the character put onto paper, and it was a good reminder of why the character still exists after 80 years or so. So, suffice to say, the announcement of Grant Morrison writing a rebooted Action Comics alongside artist Rags Morales--whose art in Identity Crisis was better than Brad Meltzer's story-- was enough to pique my interest, especially after preview images started coming out showing a jeans-clad Supes getting pelting with police bullets. Huh?! Clearly this is was going to be a reboot involving more than just sticking a #1 on the cover.
Indeed, the events of this Action Comics arc take place five years previous to "present day" in the current DCU, and Superman's first appearance is pretty jarring as he shows up at a business meeting on the top floor of a highrise, deplores the "rats with money" in attendance, and dangles a dude off of a ledge. It feels more like Batman than Superman. I'm told that this is actually accurate to early characterizations of Supes. I honestly don't know enough about his history to confirm as much. Some cops show up, but have no idea what to do, as Superman takes Mr. Glenmorgan, the businessman who's the subject of his ire, and jumps down to the ground, leaving him alive and unhurt but scaring the crap of him enough for him to confess to skirting labor labs and giving bribes. Superman tells Glenmorgan, "treat people right or expect a visit from me." He's the goddamn Superman.
Supes flies off and we learn that Lex Luthor is with a bunch of military big shots monitoring Superman's actions. Lex has devised a trap where a building scheduled for demolition but not yet abandoned will be straight-up wrecking balled down with people still inside. Supes helps those inside escape and so here we get a much more traditional image of Superman: He still saves people first and foremost. An armored tank shows up and tries to capture Supes by firing an electrified net at him to no avail, Supes takes the wrecking ball to the tank, the residents that Superman just saved get pissed and do the whole "if you're gonna get to hit you gotta get through us" bit, and Superman flies off and grabs his Clark Kent clothes off a clothesline before entering his apartment. This is roughly halfway through #1, by the way. It moves fast.
In this "five years earlier" period, Morrison and Morales depict Kent as young and shaggy-haired, looking more like Peter Parker than the usual design of the character. Superman calls Jimmy Olsen, who is apparently at this point already Superman's super pal even though Jimmy and Lois are working for the Daily Planet while Superman is working for the rival Daily Star. Jimmy and Lois are tailing "Guns" Grunding, an "enforcer" who worked for Glenmorgan. The train's brakes are sabotaged and it careens down the tracks at full speed, while Grunding pulls a pair of pistols on Jimmy and Lois. Amidst a bunch of commotion, Jimmy manages to subdue Grunding, while Superman gets between the train and the wall it's about to ram into. Everyone on the train is safe as Superman blunts the impact, but he ends up being knocked out, impaled up against the wall. Luthor, monitoring things once again tells General Lane, Lois's father, "I give you Superman." What Morrison does with Luthor is pretty great. He really gets his time in the spotlight in the second issue, but here he has a nice beat when he mentions to Lane that it was his daughter who christened the name Superman, but "the creature" didn't go out of his way to refuse it. Later at the end of #1 he has a great rant to Lane about how is a non-native species that's going to threaten humans the way cave toads upended the ecosystem in Australia. It's always fun when Luthor is filled with this sort of jealously-tinged disdain for Superman. Luthor, while just a wee bit of a bastard, is an undeniable genius and his achievements reflect the absolute pinnacle of human potential. Suddenly, an alien creature shows up and turns Luthor's word on its head. A lot of Luthor's beef with Superman is just that he sees him and the impossible feats he's capable and sees a cheater, like a 'roided up baseball player. I've always loved that idea.
More on Action Comics to come.
Monday, October 17, 2011
The New 52: Detective Comics
After coming off the high of Animal Man, let's get this one out of the way. Before the relaunch, Tony Daniel had kind of an erratic run as writer/artist on Batman where he covered a lot of different ground He returned The Riddler to being a villain--which is fine because his reformed period didn't seem to lead to much--and gave him a girl who's allegedly his daughter to run around with called Enigma. As to what her point is, she doesn't seem to have much of on yet. He did an arc with I-Ching, an old Wonder Woman character, centered around a Maguffin called the Beholder Mask that was okay. Essentially, the stories were mostly forgettable, but not acutely terrible. Now, Daniel is serving as again both writer and artist here on Detective Comics, and this is, in fact, terrible.
Even with the ever expanding supporting cast, Batman is by his nature an insular character, and Batman books are often heavy with internal narration. It can certainly be done well. Frank Miller, obviously, pretty much made a name for himself and created much of the modern idea of Batman using the device, ("Two ribs broken... must not pass out... use the pain!") and even though some find it overrated, I've always loved Jeph Loeb's heavily narration-boxed Long Halloween as well. That brings me to the narration at the beginning of Detective #1 Here's a sample: "His modus operandi changes with the wind... and it's been windy in Gotham City." Really? That's what Batman's thinking? Since when does Batman think like David Carruso sounds at the start of a CSI: Miami episode? The comic gets more bizarre from there. Batman tells us through narration that he's been pursuing the Joker for five years, (according to DC, five years is the amount of time Batman's been active in the new reboot, which doesn't seem like enough time for everything that's still in continuity to have happ--you know what, it's comics I'm just going to go with it) and yet later it's as if Batman is entirely unfamiliar with him. For some reason, Daniel feels the need to have the Joker be naked as he's killing a dude, which leads us later to Batman thinking to himself "What was the Joker doing naked? Does he always remove his clothes first?" Wait, what? In the five years he's been pursuing the Joker, has he never been up close to him? How would he not have determined this at some point in the past five years already? And would a serial killer having a sexualized component to what they do really be that confusing to Batman? Can Batman get a torrent of Red Dragon on his Bat-computer?
The story seems set up to be a reintroduction of the iconic and unending conflict between the Batman and the Joker. Good vs. evil, rationality vs. insanity, order vs. chaos and all that. And yet, this is quickly upstaged by all the gratuitous gore in the book, and the Joker himself, the guy who's supposed to be the villain-of villains in Batman lore, is upstaged by a new character based on cheap grotesquery. On page 4, we see a guy wearing human skin over his own face, and before we have any idea who it is, we see the Joker biting out his own throat. It happens in five panels. There's no tension or genuine horror in it, it's just gross for grossness sake. By the end of #1, Batman has caught the Joker and thrown him back into Arkham, as he always does, although Daniel is not done yet. Our as yet unnamed new villain breaks into the Joker's cell. The Joker tells him "get on with it", the mystery man says "This will hurt--a lot." and in a last page reveal, we see the skin of the Joker's face nailed up on the wall, with the rest of the Joker off-panel saying, "That was fangasmic!" Ugh.
Issue #2 is more of the same. Bruce Wayne bones a just-introduced reporter named Charlotte after the unbelievable sexual tension set up by these lines:
"My eyes are up here."
"I can see that, and they're shooting daggers!"
"Then kiss me before you bleed to death."
Shakespeare is reborn in Tony Daniel! If anything of substance is to come as this relationship it'll be in a latter issue. Bruce swaps back into the cape and cowl and sets out to find our new villain, who's revealed to be The Dollmaker, and he ends up looking a lot like Ragdoll from Secret Six, wish makes me opine even more for a better comic than this. Turns out that he has a whole slew of henchman that all have creepy skin masks on their faces, and there's a creepy girl in a nurse outfit speaking as if she's his daughter talking about cutting out Batman's eyes. The last page reveal here is Batman clutching what looks like Jim Gordon, only all patched up with a bunch of different grafts of skin on his face and not looking in any way alive. This reveal at least has something of an "I honestly have no idea how this ends well" element to it, although knowing how dumb this comic has been to this point, I think it's entirely likely that this isn't actually Gordan, and The Dollmaker just made up an already dead guy to look like him.
Between this, and Batman: The Dark Knight #1, which is also written and penciled by one person (David Finch), and which is similarly uninspiring, I'm thinking DC should stay away from letting one person have free reign on Batman books for awhile (although, theoretically, somebody is supposed to be editing these, right?) Daniel's work here through two issues is truly pretty distasteful. I'm a grown man with no kids, and so I don't really care about how violent a comic book is, so long as there's a point to it. Scott Snyder's recent Detective Comics run before the reboot featuring centering around The Joker and James Gordon is notable in comparison to this both because it manages to tell a story with the Joker and another antagonist concurrently without the Joker seeming to be completely upstaged, and for its use of violence that actually has a purpose. There's a last panel reveal in one of Snyder's issues that's really about as graphic as the face nailed to the wall, but it's violence that's used quickly and effectively in a genuinely terrifying way. The violence here is splattered everywhere up close and personal to the point where it becomes meaningless. Batman comics should have a healthy amount of darkness to them, but they should never, ever be torture porn. This was an all-around awful reading experience and it's getting dropped from my pulls. Luckily, Scott Snyder is writing Batman, and if his first issue is any indication, he hasn't lost anything since his Detective run.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
The New 52: Animal Man
**SOME SPOILERS**I haven't been reading comics as long as some, but I've been reading them for a while now, and to this point I've managed to not really encounter much of anything Animal Man related. I'm aware of some of his history, notably the Grant Morrison Vertigo run in which he gains awareness of the fact that he's a fictional character, and has a conversation with Morrison himself. I'm also aware that Jim Lemere writes a current Vertigo series, Sweet Tooth, which has garnered some acclaim, but haven't actually read any of it save preview pages in the back of other Vertigo books. And I hadn't heard of artist Travel Foreman at all. But I'd heard nothing but good things about the book both from comic site and from friends, and so I felt I had to check it out, and I'm glad I did. I'm completely sold on the concept. It's going on my pull list.
Page 1 of issue #1 gives you the starting point for the series in the form of a fictitious magazine article, ala those in Watchmen. Buddy Baker used to be a superhero and now he's a family man who's trying to break into acting. Buddy still has a itch for crime-fighting through, and so when an insane man is holding hostages at the hospital, Buddy flies--'cause he can do that--to the scene to punch the dude out. Afterward though, Buddy starts bleeding profusely from his eyes, a symptom which the doctors on hard are unable to discern a medical explanation for, and so here's our hook for the book.
The early pages with Buddy and his family are decent, but it's the back half of #1 that really will really convince you that this is the start of something great. Foreman's art, while not uninteresting at the outset, really gets turned up to a new level of detail when Buddy gets pulled into a cryptic dream sequence. The use of color and the creative paneling (on one page, different images are separated by the sprawling roots of a tree) remind me a lot of what makes Batwoman so enjoyable and so different compared to most superhero books. The entirely dream sequence is genuinely creepy and leaves you genuinely confused as to where the book is going, but in the best possible way. The last page of #1, back in the real world, ends with the reveal, that Maxine, Buddy's daughter has apparently managed to raise several skeletal animals from the dead. Again, super-creepy and super-effective in making you want to figure out what's going on.
Issue #2 manages to keep all of #1's momentum going, as Buddy's mysterious hemorrhaging gives way to artery-like tattoos suddenly appearing on his skin which Maxine weirdly is able to identify as a map to "the red place." This leads into another surrealist sequence where Buddy and Maxine travel (in the real world? in a dream? we don't know) to something between a giant tree and a giant network of arteries, like those that manifesting themselves on Buddy that seems to represent something like the heart of all animal life. Foreman's art is again wonderfully imaginative here, culminating in a two page spread where Maxine tells Buddy to "let it take us into the red," and Buddy's face begins to morph into some shape that I can't even begin to describe. The Hunters Three, the villains of this arc, though their origins and motives are not yet clear, are three different and equally grotesque creations.
The best thing about Animal Man is that I don't have much of an idea where this opening arc is going to take me next, but that it makes me want to find out. Lemire and Foreman have taken a C-list superhero character and decided to reintroduce him by having him discover the nature of all living things in the DCU. It's a sort of broadening a character's mythos like what Geoff Johns did starting with Green Lantern: Rebirth, but this is much more interesting, original, and seemingly must more profound. I've bought into this hook, line, and sinker, and highly recommend it.
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