Welcome to Lovecraft (2008)

This is the first of six miniseries about a house with keys that may lead to every imaginable place. That said, the first series is all about the set-up, there’s no exploration of strange worlds going on. A family father gets murdered, his family moves into the key-house where the brother of the dead man lives, and strange things begin to happen. While I like the general idea, I thought the first mini-series was a good indication of what the rest would be like. Which is something I’m really not into at all. This is all about the characters trying to cope with the death of their father or husband. Joe Hill made his entry with novels, and it definitely shows here. There’s a tendency to overwrite (however well it is done), to explore events through different characters, and it all screams novel-writing crammed into a comic. The result is a well-written but boring comic that seems to unpack its story at the pace of a glacier moving and with competent visuals that merely support all those words, instead of being an equal partner in the story-telling.

Also, there seems to be no indication that the main gimmick (key->doors->other worlds) is more than exactly that, a gimmick to explore characters instead of being the main objective. I prefer well-written characters that give depth to the fantasy, instead of mundane writing dragging down the fantastic elements to its level of boredom. The entire first mini feels like the first season of the typical TV-drama-series so common these days, where fantastic elements are used to differentiate it from the rest, but with no real understanding or care for those fantastic elements beyond mere texture.

A Flipping Good Time (2011)

The first type of computer/video games I loved and played were platformers. I still like to play them, thought these days I’m okay with not finishing them and getting a perfect score (too much to do, so little time to live). I rather enjoy the time spent with/on them, since it’s the experience of jumping around a 2d-plane that meets my craving.

A Flipping Good Time is exactly what the name implies, mainly a platformer with a gravity changing gimmick as the main hook and a collect-all-diamonds as the main objective. The first wave of levels (all 7 of them) are accessible from finishing them in sequence (which is quite easy), the second wave only after you’ve collected the right number of diamonds (I only managed to access and finish 2 of the 7, since I hate collecting 100% in levels of any kind). But yeah, the game is definitely fun to play and the overall presentation, from graphics to sounds to gameplay controls is top notch.

Thor (2011)

Thor is pretty odd. It’s by no means a good movie. Most of the characters are bland and mediocre and the story isn’t all that good either. A redemption quest crossed with the evil half-brother vying for control of the fathers throne. It’s a classic (you’ve heard it a thousand times already), easy to digest, but also entirely appropriate for a superhero movie. Better movies might have taken this to make it the best instance of this kind of plot, but Thor is content with being merely adequate.

And yet, while I think the movie is flawed from end to end, I really enjoyed watching it. The SX were great and really created a convincing Asgard (Marvel’s version of it). Thor’s actor really captured the complex mix of brash buffoon, naive hero and fierce warrior that makes the character so unique. The one thing that really didn’t work for me were the scenes on Earth, those felt like filler to bridge the time until Thor got back to Asgard to kick Loki’s butt. But still, I had fun.

Batman: Year One (2011)

Batman Year One. Man, what a great movie. I’ve nearly forgotten how good Frank Miller once was, and this movie brought it all back. It’s always odd when you talk about convincing characters in a superhero comic/movie context, but as far as this is possible the characters feel real. Batman is still a novice, all raw skill and no experience yet. But the real star of the piece is Jim Gordon, who has come to Gotham to prove his worth as a cop only to discover that Gotham police force isn’t exactly about upstanding behavior. It’s been some time since I read the comic version, but from what I remember the movie adaptation does the comic more than justice. Not only are there no major changes, the transition from comic to animation has been pretty smooth and everything just feels right.

Hack/Slash Omnibus 1 (2010)

I read only the first Hack/Slash Omnibus, but that was enough to convince me to stop. It’s a high concept comic, a girl and her monstrous looking friend hunting down slasher, a modern form of the undead based on known horror movie properties or look-alikes. It’s not a bad idea actually, but damn is the writing underwhelming. Stories that should be exiting or tense come over as boring. Every good idea gets turned into a gimmick (instead of building upon those ideas, they are thrown at the reader and then handled like plotting 101). And each time one of the characters shows glimpses of character development, it gets buried under blood and guts. Not that I don’t like that per se, but it works best if you can care about the characters.

The Return of Bruce Wayne (2010)

Some people would argue that Batman works best in an urban setting with most of the other high-powered superheroes seen only in the distance. Yet, Batman has been to space dozen of times, fought and won against world-destroying threats far away from the streets of his hometown and some of those stories have been very good. With the right writer, everything is possible. And Grant Morrison has shown for a few years now, that he’s one of the best when it comes to Batman, be it urban or cosmic.

So, an amnesiac Batman who jumps through time followed by some hideous, outer-dimensional beast and the present day superheroes trying to stop him from coming back (since his return is part of Darkseid’s last evil plan to destroy the universe) sounds like madness. But Morrison makes it work. The visits to past periods are fleeting enough to not bore those with no interest in historical fiction, the overall story is brilliant (or mad) enough to make the whole ride worth it and even Batman lost in time doesn’t feel ridiculous at all.

My favorite moments where those that took place at the end of time. You really could feel the last fleeting seconds of the universe ticking by and entropy slowly winning. I’m not a big fan of time-travel stories, especially when you have a fictional universe where the future is always in flux and thus future stories rarely feel important. But Morrison always includes enough leeway to makes his futures work, however the present plays out. No event of the present is big enough to influence things millions or billions of years down the line, but the archetypes survive (which is perfectly suited to a fictional setting like the DC universe).

Annihilators (2011)

After the high-stakes ending of the Cancerverse trilogy and the formation of the Annihilators, an extremely high powered task force of galactic super-heroes, one could have expected an even bigger threat. This is not what Annihilators is really about, thought there’s a new enemy, who is actually an old enemy and some other interesting plot tokens. While many readers were probably disappointed by the less than apocalyptic nature of the plot, I liked it. It showed the new team finding its footing, so to speak, team-building in a manner. This wasn’t a big story, but it was well executed and provided the bonding experience to make the team believable as a group.

Another aspect I really liked about Annihilators highlights one of the strengths of a big fictional universe like Marvel. When well done, the universe feels like one organic piece with thousands of stories going on at the same time. It gives the world a texture that mere singular pieces of fiction can’t provide. Not only does Annihilators saw the return of an old threat of the Marvel universe, also another enemy returned, which was based on the outcome of one of the more recent Marvel crossover. Thus Annihilators is self-contained yet feels like a part of the on-going meta-plot of the entire Marvel universe.

The comic also featured a Groot & Rocket Raccoon side-story that was more comedic in nature, thought it had enough action to also satisfy on that front. Plot-wise it built upon the foundations of the old Rocket Raccoon mini that is collected in the Annihilation Classics hardcover (I won’t advice to read it, the new mini gives you all the backstory you need to understand the story and the original was a pretty dire read).

BPRD Omnibus 2 (2004-2005)

Plague of Frogs 2 harkens back to the very first Hellboy story and brings the whole plot about human-to-frog-transformations to its cataclysmic conclusion. The whole frog thing was a minor plot element in the overall story, never meant to get this big, but the BPRD writers not only managed to run with it, but make it into their own thing. This doesn’t feel like the original Hellboy world anymore, he’s more like a legend who has gone on into his own side-universe.

PoF2 starts with incidents for frogs sightings all over, a megalomaniac cardboard villain trying to take control of the frogs and ending up as their figurehead for bringing back one of the real evil big guys from the other side of reality or wherever the frogs originated. For a story that is all about the big things there is pretty neat character work as well. Abe Sapien tries to deal with some elements of his past, Liz with the destruction of another member and the fissure lines she sees among the BPRD since Hellboy left. And there’s newcomer Captain Daimio, who has his own demons to fight and doesn’t seem to mind other people getting killed in the process.

That said, despite the excellent character work, what really stands out are the apocalyptic scenes. You often get gigantic monsters threaten to destroy the world in fiction, but creating the illusion that this could actually happen, that saving the world is not a foregone conclusion, is hard to do convincingly. What probably helps is that none of the characters whose running around in the BPRD-world is capable of taking out the master of the frog monsters with brute force. This is not a world of super-heroes, just garden-variety freaks that can deal damage, but not on that scale. The only way to deal with those monsters is to find another way.

The only thing that doesn’t work in the Plague of Frogs 2 hardcover are the four issues of the War on Frog mini, which was done years later and feels like filler. It was meant to highlight four of the main characters of the BPRD while they fought the war with the frog monsters. Instead they stop the flow of the overall story dead cold, while not managing to present interesting nor enjoyable stories on their own.

Tiny Barbarian (2011)

Gameplay-wise you won’t find anything new or original in Tiny Barbarian, there’s just the usual platforming combined with a sword-swinging attack. What makes the game feel unique is the overall art direction, which successfully captures the moot of Robert Howard’s The Frost Giant’s Daughter. The rough, frozen, desolate landscape, the ephemeral beauty Conan is following, it’s all there.

The game is pretty short and once you’ve finished it you’ll probably never play it again, but playing it is definitely not wasted time. That said, I would like to see a much longer game done in that style and with more variety in level design and weaponry, thought one that is still trying for the same kind of atmosphere.

As the boss brothers are a bit different difficulty-wise than the rest (meaning at first try you probably die, and the second and so on, until you have his rhythm down pat), here’s a few hints to beat them. The first form are the two ice brothers. Once you know how, they are pretty easy. Alternately they fall down to cage you in and shoot at you, or they fall down where you stand. The second one is easy to avoid and get a few hits in, the first is easiest when standing next to the left one.

He shoots first high, so do nothing, then low, over which you have to jump without getting hit from the high shot from the ice giant on the right.

Next the left ice giant brother shoots high again, while the right brother shoots low. First avoid the shot from the right by doing nothing and then jump over the shot from the left brother. If you want to see it in action, here’s a playthrough (not from me) of the game where you can see that method in practice.

Once you killed one brother, the other gets ragey and has a persistent pattern. He falls down, but follows you all over the screen while dropping toward where you are. The best way to avoid getting hit by his fall is moving in one direction and then to switch at the last moment. Then get one hit in and jump away. Normally he shoots low two times after a fall, then high-low-high and then two times low again and so on. The high-low-high pattern is easy to avoid, when you know it’s coming, the rest also when you manage to jump away fast enough.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Captain America is probably the most unusual of the recent slew of superhero comic book adaptations, not because the subject matter is really all that different, but because the movie takes a concept that could have easily failed in thousand different ways, and makes it work. It takes a superhero who is seen by most as a jingoistic symbol of the American dream, a superhero even more ridiculous than a man with the powers of a spider or a man who goes around with a bat-costume.

In a clever move the movies takes the Captain back to his roots, to a time when the Americans in the eyes of the world and their own still could act with righteous might and people believed them. I’m talking about the second World War, obviously. We have the usual occult Nazi as the enemies, lead by the Red Skull, with the Captain, his friend Bucky and Cap’s Howling Commandos on the side of good.

Plotwise the movie is about the Red Skull, who is trying to take over the world, after having cut all ties to his former mentor Hitler. Using a Cosmic Cube as an energy source, his second-hand man has devised weaponry which is more advanced than even stuff we have today. Yet, instead of getting any further with his take-over-world stratagem, the Captain is stopping him at every corner. At the end, they fight their final battle in the last remaining plane the Red Skull has left.

This isn’t a deep movie, but as an action movie it takes all the right steps. Chris Evans does Captain America with just the right amount of youthful idealism to be believable, and for whom you can root even if you aren’t American. You might not buy into the American dream, but you’ll buy into the character Evan’s is portraying and indirectly into his idealism. Second, the support cast is just as competent, from love interest to best friend (in a clever twist Bucky isn’t a sidekick but former best friend and guardian, who is then outclassed after Steve Roger’s transformation from thin and sickly to muscle-packed, healthy superman). Pacing is excellent, effects are great and so on. Overall one of the best of the recent superhero movies.