New Gods #9 by Artyom Trakhanov

BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA

Film Thor's come a long way from a misfiring debut that saw him propping up a mid-range blockbuster with (maybe) two distinct locations. Thanks to Hunt for the Wilderpeople director Taika Waititi, Thor: Ragnarok is instantly recognisable as a work that has flowed from the pure delight experienced when flicking through one of Jack Kirby or Walt Simonson's cosmic comics.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Sold as all-things to all-people, Guardians of the Galaxy is a thoroughly pleasant reorganising of Star Wars that makes Leia damaged and vengeful, doubles down on Han Solo and Chewbacca and drops Luke altogether. Stuck delivering flavour for another Avengers ejaculation, James Gunn and pals punch up your basic Marvel adventure with Awesome Mix Tapes, Boogie Nights actors, and a few sideways glances at genuine pain.

As expected it's Rocket Raccoon that stands out. Bradley Cooper's voice work is complimentary but the real work is done by Sean Gunn's on-set acting and an army of digital animators. Volumes are spoken in how the raccoon holds his head. Naturally subordinated due to his diminutive size, Rocket refuses to be dominated. He doesn't scurry around, craning his neck to meet eyes. He points his nose down and peers upwards, sneering. He isn't short. You're just too tall.

Rocket is a head-on collision between Lee Van Cleef and the Jim Henson Creature Shop's Splinter from the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie - a beguiling rodent with the body language of a gunslinger. I presume Gunn loves him too. The co-writer (with Nicole Perlman) / director gives the other Guardians beats that tell you who they are and what their objective is. Rocket gets a comedy bounty motivation then a vague, upsetting past splutters out in visual asides and drunken mumbling. In a film full of heroic archetypes, Rocket is contradictory and exciting.

Guardians' only real problem is that by now Marvel movie action beats are becoming routine. As with The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians ends with a skyborne threat to a picturesque city. Thanks to this film's space opera bent, we get a tiered assault that accounts for multiple, co-habiting planes of action. The CG overload is kept personal with some Chris Foss designed fighter jets that swarm over their prey like Japanese Honey Bees, attempting to cook the evil Ronan in his mausoleum ship. Still, the basic heft of the final attack plays like a Star Wars prequel.

James Gunn's film even has an embedded solution - embrace the cosmic realm. We see one of Jack Kirby's Eternals obliterating a planet and an entire civilisation is built around mining the disembodied head of a galactic space titan. The film teeters on the edge of intergalactic histrionics, but never really commits. Ronan the Accuser is a Shonen manga villain, a space pirate swinging his dick about whilst in possession of reality bending jewellery. There's never a sense our heroes can beat him - he's on a different level entirely.

Marvel need to start looking to more melodramatic solutions. Bone up on Akira Toriyama or marathon histrionic pro-wrestling promotions. Holding hands while purple electricity vaporises the baddie isn't particularly satisfying. Why aren't the Guardians throwing themselves at this monolith man as a unit, sneaking in the odd blow, but ultimately proving themselves ineffectual? Maybe then have a death or two, followed by a rage fuelled counter attack that gets Ronan wobbly and staggering back?

Ronan instantly recovers then lands a devastating blow on Gamora, forcing an intervention from the unfathomable Thanos. Why else was the Mad Titan telling us who his favourite daughter was? It's about time Marvel put their big bad over, particularly if all he's doing is glowering until 2018. Ronan's world ending club? Thanos shrugs the blow off with a laugh then dismantles its owner with slow, measured body blows. If you're going to invoke Darkseid - even through Jim Starlin's avatar - he should figure as part of the destination. Otherwise he's just advertising. Marvel's films drip feed like television when they really need to embrace something wild and cinematic.

X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is the first film in the series to even attempt to capture the joyful exuberance of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original comics. In the 1960s Marvel was issuing beautiful pop-art masterpieces that crossed archetypal superheroics with the naturalistic hesitancy of romance comics. First Class broadly adapts the key incidents of The X-Men #1 - Professor X trains his mutant students while Magneto experiments with his ability to control missiles.

While the Bryan Singer films heave with misunderstood loners deigning to interact, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn serve up two heroes that strive to teach. I had an idea from a half-remembered cinema screening that First Class' children got in the way, clogging up airtime that rightly should have been apportioned to Magneto's one-man Mossad routine. This isn't the case. The school environment that drives the second act allows us a deeper, more personal understanding of First Class' two leads.

We get to see James McAvoy's Xavier, a character usually presented as a pat patriarch, earn his position. This Xavier is basically a super positive youth worker, keen to create a stable setting that'll allow his children to excel. He doesn't needle or manipulate his X-Men, he challenges and praises them, daring them to do better. Michael Fassbender's Magneto tempers this exuberance with a calm, pro-mutant militancy, any cool guy posturing counterbalanced by his quiet sincerity. He's basically a dapper art teacher who'll share a ciggy with the kids.

Xavier's Atomic Age Hogwarts is framed by a socio-political milieu that takes in international brainwashing conspiracies and the Cuban missile crisis. Unusually, neither side is presented as particularly aggressive, both nations lumbered with warmongering generals being puppeteered by Kevin Bacon's ex-Nazi, Sebastian Shaw. The leader of a shadowy cabal called The Hellfire Club, Shaw plots to set the world ablaze in the hope that the radioactive fallout will genetically alter the survivors. First Class aligns mutants with those other mainstays of Cold War sci-fi, the American big bugs and Japanese kaiju. All children of the atom.

Goldman and Vaughn also steer the film away from specifically discussing X-Men as a metaphor for the civil rights movement. Perhaps they recognised that mapping two white fellows onto Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X was, at the very least, incredibly disingenuous? Ideas about individual agency do drive character arcs but they're more about self-reliance and personal pride than creating a way in which handsome white characters can feign minority status. Instead, Xavier and Magneto enjoy dilemmas keyed to their own backgrounds. The moneyed, educated Xavier purposes his wealth, using it to train an egalitarian special forces unit. Magneto is the State of Israel, getting strapped and refusing to be a victim ever again.

Mickey Mouse by Jack Kirby

Super Bowl Spot - Captain America The Winter Soldier

After spending my formative years obsessed with Dark Horse's Terminator comics, I'm a sucker for highly motivated cyborg assassins beating up cars. So, of course, Captain America The Winter Soldier looks brill to me. Winter Soldier trying to claw his way into Cap's ride explicitly recalls the last issue of The Terminator: Tempest in which brawny Chris Warner drawn T-800s scrambled all over a fleet of fleeing resistance trucks trying to kidnap a Cyberdyne scientist. The highlight was when an aryan terminator punched a hole through the car's roof only to get a sawn-off stabbed back at him, taking half his face off. So, anything like that please. The whizz-bang CG bullshit is still a trifle off-putting, but seeing real cars getting flipped on humid Washington highways is always welcome.

PS - this isn't actually the Super Bowl spot, it's a slightly longer version prepared for the UK and Ireland which includes a shot or two of Revenge's Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter.

Darkseid by Jack Kirby

Sigurd by Jack Kirby

Iceman by Bengus

Thor

Unfortunately, Thor is little more than perfunctory world-building in preparation for The Avengers. Despite a storyline that takes place over three distinct realms, Thor is surprisingly small in scale. Earth action is rooted to a tiny desert town and a few anonymous science rooms. Asgard is one gigantic, empty room, the Norse pantheon shrunken down to Thor's family unit and a few bumbling acquaintances.

Jotunheim, the domain of the frost giants, is one starkly lit glacier, manned by an army of unremarkable action figures. The cosmic creativity of Jack Kirby and Walter Simonson is lightly stressed in the winding, celestial architecture of Asgard, but it's no exaggeration to say that there's significantly more imagination in a film like cut-price Cannon's Masters of the Universe than this.

Thor isn't completely without merit though. When the plot will leave him alone, Chris Hemsworth gets to play Thor as an arrogant super-Viking, inclined to booze and batter his way around exile. This culture clash is quickly abandoned to knuckle down to action machinations, but it's the best use of the actor. Hemsworth, and the film around him, are much more comfortable tuned to the central character's hulking, petulant charisma. Thor is much more fun to watch striding into a pet shop and demanding a steed than stranded in unclear, canted, computer animated drudgery.

Tom Hiddleston's Loki is similarly schizophrenic, pinballing back and forth between an interesting, conflicted adversary and a panto villain. With all the major players locked in dynastic drama, it falls to Idris Elba as Heimdall to stress the otherworldly. Elba's God seems to operate on an entirely different plane of consciousness to his Norse stablemates. His speech and intonation are slow and soft, his gaze always locked elsewhere. There's a sense that the universe's information is constantly flowing into him. Heimdall is unmoving and eternal where the other Gods actually seem rather temporary. Elba's performance is the only thing in Thor that evokes a real sense of wonder Everything else borders on dull.

The Prisoner by Jack Kirby

OMAC by Dan McDaid

Comic Twart is just the best.

King Ransom

Disaster Year 20XX loves Jack Kirby. As such, I am very happy to back Stephen Bissette's call for a boycott on all Kirby derived Marvel properties until the Kirby Estate receives adequate remuneration for his hand in creating their pantheon - I don't think it unreasonable to expect something similar to the annual suborn Stan Lee receives for his silence / complicity.

The preceding review of the pretty wonderful Captain America: The First Avenger will be the last piece of Marvel derived content for the time being, and no further coverage of the various iterations of Marvel vs Capcom 3 will be posted. Although, I hardly expect Marvel Comics to break out in a cold sweat at the prospect of their product no longer being covered by a niche pulp culture blog, it is my feeling that if every Jack Kirby fan does their part we can perhaps blacken their greedy, greedy little eyes.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America: The First Avenger takes a character that could be perceived as a jingoistic brute and presents him as the earnest, physical manifestation of America's Greatest Generation. Chris Evans' Steve Rogers may be (at least initially) small and sickly, but he's also possessed of backbone and keen lateral thinking. Taken under the wing of German super scientist, Stanley Tucci's Abraham Erskine, Rogers is involved in an army run mensch program designed to stress the kind of post-identity idealism required to become a bright, blaring symbol. This is were the film excels. Rogers, as Captain America, isn't written to be a downtrodden jerk enjoying the newfound power or status gifted to him by phenomenally powerful sun lamps. Instead, he's the exact same grafter he's always been. 

Rogers still fumbles his way around women; he oozes discomfort when he finds himself around actual soldiers too. He carries no bitterness though. No sense of navel-gazing self-pity, even when the super soldier program he exemplifies is suddenly blackballed and Rogers finds himself lost in the vaudeville and propaganda of USO shows. Instead, he grits his teeth and gets to work, bopping The Fuhrer on the nose ever night. Rogers doesn't abuse his new-found abilities, preferring to locate the task at hand then knuckle down on it. He never cats about with his dancers, or re-visits a bully for a settler either. This Captain America seems to understand himself in the abstract - the human embodiment of the kind of virtues essential to the population of any country locked into an extinction war. Rogers excels as Captain America, first as a song and dance man shilling for war bonds; eventually as a one-man answer to Hitler's Satanic science division.

"You win wars with GUTS!"

After Hal Jordan's limp-dicked reluctance to be awesome in last week's Green Lantern, this enthusiastic biff-bosh trail for Captain America: The First Avenger is a tonic. Instead of a dull hunk dodging responsibility, we have a pint-sized member of the Greatest Generation actively seeking burden.

Super Bowl Spot: Captain America: The First Avenger

In contrast to Transformers hyperactive image avalanche, Captain America: The First Avenger sells on a more romantic, human action, teasing flirty relationships amongst sci-fi slanted Second World War secret servicing. Phew! Ahead of Matthew Vaughn's 60s set X-Men: First Class, the period setting is a novel twist for a genre close to saturation point. Plus! Who doesn't get a kick out of seeing the primary coloured Cap existing alongside bleach bypass GIs?

Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing

I'm not sure Marvel vs Capcom 3's character roster can get much more awesome. Joining the likes of Super-Skrull and Viewtiful Joe, the game's latest additions include the redrafted Bionic Commando, Sir Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins, and, best of all, Tales of Suspense superstar MODOK. Getting to solo a team of video game mainstays with a jet-powered, grossly mutated, Jack Kirby created, science-head is a bit of a dream come true frankly.

Kamandi!

With the demise of Bruce Timm's DC animated serials, I gave up any hope of seeing a motion take on Jack Kirby's Fifth World survivor Kamandi. What were the chances of any subsequent team being as infatuated with the lesser known DC ensemble? I needn't have worried. Guest star extravaganza Batman: The Brave and the Bold to the rescue!

Sketch Tuesday: Orion

Bah. Curse my lateness. No alliteration for me. Orion was the notional lead in Jack Kirby's New Gods series, first appearing in the title's inaugural issue, dated February 1971. Born on Apokolips, raised on New Genesis, and destined to battle his father to the death at the end of all things. Well, until various writers transposed that termination arc onto Kal-El of Krypton. Poor Orion eh? That's before you even get into Batman stealing his missus. Yikes!

Although everyone ignores it, Kirby closed the saga in 1985 with a prestige format graphic novel called The Hunger Dogs. Hunger Dogs saw an increasing isolated Darkseid finally achieving something of his force dominion ambitions through the use the atom allegory Micro-Mark. Orion battles across the hell-planet, instigating a revolution among the despised Apokoliptian working class in the process. Rather than duff his dad at the conclusion, Orion abandons the self-destructive prophecy and zips off to start a new life with his beloved Bekka. He's outgrown Darkseid, and all he entails. A rather fitting conclusion I think, but what do I know?

Being the son of Darkseid, Orion naturally has a brutish exterior. His craggy monster face is usually kept in check by his soothing Mother box, but every now and then he reveals his true form - usually to make a bombastic point. Here's my take on The Dog of War.



Believe it or not, when I started this I didn't intend it to be a weekly love letter to Jack Kirby!

Sketch Saturday: Darkseid

First seen mouthing off to an incompetent subordinate in Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #134, Jack Kirby's master antagonist Darkseid has since risen to the enviable position of go-to omega threat for team-up tales up and down the DC multiverses. Feet unt feet of towering granite think-thug, topped with creation blessed eraser lasers, Darkseid ain't to be trifled with.



Crikey!