Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi!!!

I was just reading random blogs off Comic Weblog Updates, which lists pretty much every good weblog about comics, in the order by which they were last updated, when I came across this post on the appropriately-named The Comic Blog. It's a review of Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi- a webcomic about, you guessed it, the Powerpuff Girls!

And not just the Powerpuff Girls, either. Lots of characters from other Cartoon Network and even Nickelodeon shows pop up too- like Dexter, Samurai Jack, Courage the Cowardly Dog and even Jenny XJ9 from My Life As A Teenage Robot. The idea of having all these characters live in the same universe is just outrageously geeky. And yet so cool! I love all these cartoons and it looks like Bleedman, the writer/artist of this Doujinshi (oh by the way a Doujinshi is the Japanese word for fan comic. Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!) really loves these cartoons too.

The review on the Comic Blog sums up the series so far really well so I won't reiterate, repeat and restate the plot (lil Mojo Jojo injoke for all you PPG fans out there).

Suffice to say this is pure gold. The drawings are brilliant, the characterizations are all spot-on, the plot is totally off the wall in a BIG-FIGHT-MANGA kinda way... basically it's just completely awesome.

Go read it. Now!

PS: The homepage displays the latest comic- new readers should head to the archives (on the sidebar on the left) and start right from the beginning.

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Batman Begins

Batman Begins is the best live-action Batman movie ever made. Even better than the Tim Burton original, which I loved when it first came out.

For the first time, Gotham City feels like a real, living, breathing place inhabited by actual people. It's neither Burton's gothic wonderland nor is it Schumacher's neon paradise, this Gotham City has soaring skylines but it also has rotting slums. It has character.

Everyone who saw Christian Bale in Equilibrium and thought "Wow, this guy would make the perfect Batman" and then gasped in amazement when he actually got cast in the role can now smile smugly. Yes, you were all right. Christian Bale makes an awesome Batman. Even better, he makes an awesome Bruce Wayne. This is a movie about Bruce Wayne creating his Batman persona and I can think of no other actor who could pull it off as well as Bale did here.

I won't go into the details of what makes the movie so good- you've all probably read it elsewhere or watched the movie yourselves. So we all know, or at least, have a rough idea, of how good this movie is. What I'm going to talk about is what I didn't really like about the movie.

*Here Be Spoilers.*Don't read on, those who haven't seen the film.

See, when I walked out of the movie theatre after watching the movie, there were two thoughts in my head. One was, "Oh my god, I can't believe how cool they made Batman!" The second was, "And yet, why am I slightly... disappointed...?"

Well I've had almost a month to think it over and I've come to realise exactly what it was that disappointed me so much.

It wasn't Katie Holms as Bruce Wayne's would-be love interest. Sure that whole plot thread is kind of tacky, but I can live with it.

It wasn't really the lack of good action sequences, either.

I thought the training sequences were serviceable, though they COULD have hired a stunt director from Hong Kong to jazz them up. Batman's first attack on Falcone's gang, shot like a horror-movie, with Batman flitting in and out of shadows to take out men indiviually, was really cool and original. The chase scenes with the Batmobile were kind of boring though. Well, not so much boring as unnecessary. One gets the feeling there are chase scenes because a Hollywood summer blockbuster MUST have chase scenes.

Batman's fight scenes... are just plain lousy. Choppily edited to the point where you have no idea what's going on until finally Batman's standing in front of a pile of groaning hench-men. That's a bit unimpressive in this day and age. Don't tell me it's because Batman's suit doesn't give Christian Bale freedom of movement, either. Hello, this is the age of CGI! CGI let Keanu Reeves fight off a hundred men while dressed up in a full-length gown in the Matrix Reloaded. Why couldn't Warner Brothers hire their Matrix CGI team to create a CGI Batman and make some really impressive fight scenes?

I mean, he doesn't need to be inhumanly strong or fly or anything like that, but he shouldn't be completely inflexible and ungainly either. The movie drives the point home that Batman strikes from the shadows and uses stealth and illusion to defeat his opponents. OK, but that doesn't mean he can't be fluid and graceful. In the comic books, he's supposed to be the world's greatest martial artist. Can't we have a movie that shows off that side of him just for once?

But that's really a minor niggle compared to my real beef with the movie. See, the real problem with this movie is Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.

Huh? What?

Stick with me here. You see, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 both featured great villains. Sure, the Green Goblin's costume kind of sucked, but as a villain he was superb. His development as a villain was a great counterpoint to Spider-Man's development as a hero. His story is inextricable from Spider-Man's. It was all linked thematically and fit in beautifully.

Then came Spider-Man 2, which raised the bar so high that it doesn't look like anyone else'll overleap it for quite some time. Doctor Octopus is probably the greatest comic-book villain put to film. And once again, he's completely relevant to Peter Parker's story in the movie. He's not just some villain tossed into the script so that Spider-Man has someone to fight. Not at all. Before he becomes a villain, he's Doctor Otto Octavius, brilliant scientist and loving husband. The kind of man that Peter Parker wants to be, but can't, because he has to be Spider-Man. Then a tragedy occurs, his wife dies, he goes insane and becomes the villainous Doctor Octopus. In Doctor Octopus, we have a villain who's fully-fleshed out, with a backstory and motivations and even a character arc that goes full circle and ends with his redemption.

Well I think you can see where I'm going with this. Yes, the villains in Batman Begins suck. They really suck. Well, the mob boss Falcone is suitably sinister and impressive in an early flashback sequence but the filmmakers let Batman take him out in his very first outing as Batman. I think that was a really bad decision on their part- not only does it make Batman seem a little too powerful at this early stage in his career, but it also completely destroys any possibility of using Falcone as a credible villain. A mob boss doesn't need a backstory, unlike Spider-Man's villains. He's a mob boss. Everyone gets mob bosses. All he needed to do was physically embody the crime and corruption of Gotham, a symbol of all that's gone wrong with the city since the death of Bruce Wayne's parents. A truly amazing movie could've been made focusing on Batman's efforts to slowly and methodically take down this man.

Instead somebody made the bone-headed decision of turning the last third of the movie into a standard Hollywood action movie- complete with supposedly cunning and powerful villains who do incredibly stupid things.

I'm talking specifically about Ra's Al Ghul here. He initially cuts an impressive figure when he returns to Gotham. The revelation of his true identity is well-played out. But his masterplan to destroy Gotham is beyond ridiculous. I mean, its the kind of thing that the Scarecrow, who's in this movie but is oddly enough reduced to a bit part, might come up with. And he has nothing but the rather vague and fuzzy motivation of "Gotham City's full of crime and corruption. It sucks. So we need to destroy it." Riiiiight. So why not just nuke the whole place? Sheesh.

Given Ra's Al Ghul's history in the comic books as the only villain who can actually match wits with Batman, the Professor Moriarty to Batman's Sherlock Holmes, treating him this way in the movie is just disrespectful, really.

Well that's all I have to say about that. The movie's good, but falls short of greatness. And with the talented team that Warner Brothers assembled to make this movie, that's a bit unacceptable.

Well, despite my reservations about the movie, I have to say I really enjoyed watching the movie and I have high hopes for the next one. The bit at the end setting up the Joker as the villain for the next movie is positively spinge-tingling. Hopefully in the next one they sort out what was wrong with this movie , improve what was right and deliver the kind of masterpiece Batman deserves.

My final verdict: 8 out of 10.

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Writer's Block

Lightning and thunder. Rain wails down on the ground unmercifully. Torches burn in the night. An angry mob, complete with pitchforks and torches. Ah, tradition.
A man points his finger at a point above his head and yells, "There he is!" The crowd, like a hydra, moves its many heads in unison and looks up. A tower, tall and thin like a finger growing out of the ground, with a single window at the top. Inside, the silhouette of a man is visible, lighted by a table-lamp that swings wildly in the wind. He is seated at a table.

Free of such encumbrances as gravity or even legs, we omniscient, invisible observers are free to swoop up through the window and into the room, to better observe what he does.

As we look down on him from a vantage point at the top of the room's conical ceiling, we see a layer of crumpled-up pieces of paper covering the floor. They rustle like leaves with the wind. The man at the table has another piece of paper in front of him, held down with one hand while the other grasps a pen. It hovers inches above the paper, unable to make contact. After a few minutes of this our would-be writer screams, frustration and anger in his voice, and rips the paper apart. He gets up, grabs piles of paper with both his hands and begins to hurl them out the window.

Below, the mob has reached the foot of the tower. The thrown paper, mulchy with rain, falls on them like so much snow. They aren't bothered. Their hive-mind operates at another level. Focused on the task at hand: breaking down the tower gates. A previously unseen log emerges from the thick of the crowd, held up on each side by a couple of swarthy men.

They charge at the door.

BAM.

Again.

BAM.

And again.

BANG.

The gates crash inward, shattered wood flying everywhere. The men drop their improvised battering ram. They stand at the bottom of a hollow shaft. A narrow staircase hugs the walls, winding up to the very top. It stops in front of a trap-door built into the wooden ceiling of the shaft. The mob shifts into caterpillar mode and begins its trek up to the top.

The writer at the top still rages, wordlessly screaming out his window at the uncaring rain. The first to reach the top begin banging on the trap-door. He scarcely notices. It's only when they finally slam it open, sending a clump of wet papers flying, that he turns around to face the first of the crowd as they climb up into his room.

They are all quiet now. Then one of them steps forward. He looks like a hobo, dressed in rags, a years-worth of beard hanging down to his chest, dripping water onto the floor. He coughs, as if to clear his throat. He opens his mouth, and speaks. His voice booms, louder even than the rain and thunder.

"Your head's like mine, like all our heads, big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there!"*

He steps forward with every sentence and is now right in front of the writer, who trembles. He pokes his finger in the writer's chest and continues.

"But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over."*

The writer has sunk to his knees. He weeps openly, tears run down the sides of his face.

"The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are."*

The writer howls, part-agony, part-grief.

"There, there, we'll soon fix you up."

For a second, the world seems to bend at the edges. The hobo is transformed. He is light-clad, resplendent. He reaches out and touches the writer's head. His essence pours into the writer and he disappears into him.

One by one, the remaining men in the room are transformed. In their stead stand a werewolf, a unicorn, a Viking warrior with a magic hammer. They jump into the writer's head after the hobo.

The crowd below surges forward into the room and the line of people, transforming into wondrous and fantastic creatures and places, leap into the writer.

Mermaids, dragons, elves and fairies.
Brave samurais and knights of yore, riding steeds.
A procession of Lovecraftian creatures of nightmare and horror.
Gaudy and colourful costumed heroes and their similarly costumed foes.
Gaseous djinns and watery sprites.
Talking rabbits, talking mice.

All these creatures flood into the writer's head as he sits on the floor, open-mouthed. Finally the last one enters. The writer blinks. And the world is transformed.

No more tower. No more lightning and thunder. No more rain. Nothing but empty whiteness and the writer at the centre of it all. He raises a pen as large as the universe. He begins to write on the canvas of his imagination.

And so the story begins.

*These lines of the hobo’s speech are quoted from Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. An observant Invisibles fan will notice that the hobo character is actually Tom O'Bedlam himself. ;-)

Notes: This is the first of hopefully many short stories I'm going to post to this blog. I hope everyone who reads it finds it at least mildly enjoyable. Or at least not completely revolting.

Shoutouts to the blog No Fancy Name for the extremely useful post on making expandable blog posts in Blogger without which I would have to resort to using the fairly useless code given in Blogger's Help to implement this nifty function.

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Back to the World of Blogging

Wow it's been almost a month since I last posted on this blog.
That's pretty bad. If I had any readers they'd be out for my blood now, but with only 3 posts, I can't have many, or any! Whoa, this is totally working counterwise to what I intended when I started this thing.

I mean, this blog is meant to be read. So I can't just let it rot here. I've been thinking and thinking for the past month- just what the heck am I gonna put up on this thing? I've been plagued by that niggling, at-the-back-of-your-head question that I suspect every writer, professional or amateur, has: Do I have anything worth saying?

Well I've decided the best way to stave off that question and it's attendants, writers-block and the procastination demon, is just to write.

Just Write.

That's my new slogan. Print it out on t-shirts, boys and girls. Spray it on walls. Tattoo it on your arms and legs!

I need to build up a readership so I'm gonna mass-mail a link to this blog to all my friends. Hopefully some of you find my writing interesting. At least enough that I'll have a readership base and be compelled to write more articles, instead of letting this blog rot again.

Because there's nothing sadder than a blog with a latest entry that's a full year old. Not in cyberspace, anyway.

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