Brief hiatus

Please excuse our brief hiatus over the next few weeks, while the proprietor goes snorkelling along the Great Barrier Reef. We will return after the hiatus with the next great films of the 00s.

50 Great Films of the 00s: 40-31

50-41 here. No links this time, on account of bandwidth constraints. Anyhow:

40. Infernal Affairs

Maybe it’s because I don’t much like Leonardo DiCaprio, or maybe it’s because I’m a film snob, but I much preferred the original Chinese Infernal Affairs to the American remake The Departed. Most likely, though it’s due to the “first met is best” effect that I’ve noticed elsewhere. Given two works of art, one a remake or adaptation of the other, I tend to prefer the first one I meet, regardless of whether it’s the original or the remake/adaptation. So I prefer the adaptation of Oldboy to the original manga, or the manga adaptation of Welcome to the NHK to the original novel, or in the case at hand, Infernal Affairs to the Departed, because those were the first ones I met. In any event, Infernal Affairs was an improbably stylish thriller that rose above its somewhat dopey plot through force of sheer pulpish conviction.

39. The Wind That Shakes the Barley

I’ve talked here before about spinach art: works that are good for you but no fun. For years I avoided the films of director Ken Loach, figuring that they must be spinach of the highest order. Socially committed films on “issues” (mixed-race romance: Ae Fond Kiss; workplace conditions in the construction industry: Riff-Raff; etc.)? Films where characters engage in passionate debate about the merits of various forms of socialism (Land and Freedom)? Yeccch — this despite our sharing much the same political outlook, I might add. So it was with great surprise that I learned, once I finally bothered to test my knee-jerk reaction, that Loach’s films were funny, good-natured and compassionate and were indeed films first, civics lessons second. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was no exception despite its heavy subject matter (the start of the troubles in Ireland) and, I’ll admit it, I totally have a man-crush on lead Cillian Murphy.

38. Volver

Pedro Almodovar is another writer/director I came to late. He’s the sort of film-maker who often gets called “flamboyant” and “colourful”. With good reason; he is flamboyant and colourful. He’s also one of the few major figures in world cinema who is deeply concerned with women — what they’re like, what they like, how they live life. Volver is typical of his oeuvre in this respect and reminded me more than a little of Gilbert Hernandez, for its mixture of the mundane with the supernatural, telenovela flourish with novelistic emotion and above all the women: strong, wise, foolish, human.

37. Lost in Translation

It became fashionable for a while to bash Sofia Coppola and this film in particular. Okay, its deployment of Japanese culture veers into “Aren’t these wacky Easterners funny?” territory. But if you can put that aside — a big if for some — this is still a fine film about alienation and dislocation. Indeed, I’d say it captured better than any other film I’ve ever seen the sense of dislocation and placelessness of being an innocent (or not-so innocent) abroad, and the aching need for an emotional connection with the familiar. No doubt it helped that I saw it at a pretty receptive time in my own life: as a twenty-six year-old graduate student in the States, alone and friendless and far, far from loved ones. But there’s more than enough about the film to put it on this list regardless: two strong lead performances — honestly, has Scarlett Johansson been remotely as good in anything else? — dreamy cinematography; and brilliant sound design by Richard Beggs.

36. Fear and Trembling

Speaking of East-West encounters and those wacky Japanese, there’s always this French curio, also from 2003 and also chronicling the meeting between a Western ingenue and Japanese culture. This time the ingenue is French and the culture she meets is specifically corporate culture. The title is from Kierkegaard, but it might as well have been from Sade; due to a series of cross-cultural misunderstandings, the protagonist finds her position in the Japanese office growing more and more degraded until, in a delirious scene, she wallows around and sleeps in the upturned garbage of her capitalist oppressors. That sounds like heavy, depressing stuff but the accomplishment of this remarkable little film — and it is decidedly minor in its focus, almost all of it occuring within the one office floor, concerned with the power relations between two people at its heart — is that it isn’t depressing. But nor is it played for laughs either. Instead the film walks a nimble line between outright satire and heavy-handed moralizing that makes it one of the most tonally interesting films of the decade. It’s also, despite its (cross-)cultural specificity, the best office film since The Apartment, which makes it a pretty damn good movie full stop.

35. Lilya 4-Ever

A grim bit of miserabilism from Lukas Moodysson, Lilya 4-Ever largely takes place in a generic bleak Eastern European hellhole, part of the detritus left behind by the former Soviet Union. Things only get worse once Lilya escapes to the West, as if to rebuke the one glimmer of hope offered in the first half of the film. There’s one thing audiences want from miserabilist cinema: the complete and crushing absence of hope. This movie delivers that in spades, and then some.

34. Little Otik

Jan Svenkmajer has for decades been one of the world’s greatest living animators, which is all the more remarkable given the budget constraints he must have been working under. In Svenkmajer’s world, everyday objects come miraculously alive, but the resulting vision couldn’t be further from the dancing candle and teapots of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. No, the living objects in Svenkmajer’s world don’t dance so much as writhe, and rather than being shining new friends, there’s apt to be a touch of death about them even as they writhe. Little Otik isn’t even his best film — for mine, that would be his marvellous Alice, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that manages to remember and recreate the creepiness of the original. But it’s a Svenkmajer film all right, and we’re lucky to have his creepy, insidious surrealism and stop-motion animation in any form we can get. If Dave McKean, Marcel Duchamp and Tom Waits were combined into one person, and that person were an animator, the result would be something like Svenkmajer.

33. Gomorrah

There’s a scene towards the start of this brutal organised crime exposé where two dimwitted wanna-be gangsters act out scenes from Scarface. That one scene sums up the intent of the film: to contrast the grim reality of organised crime with the Hollywood glamourised version. And at that it succeeds admirably; the crime we see in Naples is vicious and surprisingly petty. Who knew, for instance, that the mob had their fingers in sweatshops or that a sweatshop foreman selling his skills to rival sweatshops would be such a risky proposition? Gomorrah is a powerful film with a simple message, which it sells with great skill.

32. L’Enfant

The Dardenne brothers specialise in a nouveau cinéma vérité, detailing the lives of the lower classes in Belgium. Not unlike a Belgian Ken Loach, come to think of it. L’Enfant was their second film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and it stays true to their themes and style. A young couple fall pregnant and have a baby and things just get worse from there, with one bad decision after another. Cheery!

31. The Bourne trilogy

All right, I’m cheating by counting these three films as one. But the three films in the Bourne series were all written by the same screenwriter, Tony Gilroy (who would go on to direct Michael  Clayton, itself a fine film about keeping your principles in the workplace). And they all share a naturalistic visual aesthetic, plus a  sober sense of seriousness. It was that sense of seriousness that made the first film stand out, and showed you could make an action movie as adult and stripped-down as the best thriller. Would that more film-makers were paying attention.

Not so wonderful, you ask me

Showcase Presents Wonder Woman. DC, 2007. Robert Kanigher, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. $16.99, 528 pages.

Along with Will Eisner’s The Spirit and Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, the Charles Moulton/Harry Peters Wonder Woman is one of a handful of “golden age” superhero comics actually worth reprinting. They’re weird, fun, kinky and nothing if not the product of a singular vision.

Not so the adventures reprinted here, from the start of superhero comics’ “silver age”. Other Showcase volumes from the same era (late fifties/early sixties) have ample charms. Flash, Hawkman, The Atom, Adam Strange, Green Lantern: these all feature art by the likes of Murphy Anderson, Joe Kubert, Gil Kane and Carmine Infantino. The Superman volumes (Superman itself, Supergirl and Superman Family), meanwhile, have the deadpan surrealism that was the hallmark of Mort Weisinger’s tenure as editor.

There are no such charms to be found here. There’s no sign of any passion here, just a couple of cartoonists churning out material to pay the bills. Kanigher’s scripts are simply hackwork, Andru’s and Esposito’s art competent but dull.

Things are even worse if we compare this with the Moulton and Peters run on Wonder Woman. Gone is the giddy delight they brought to the material; gone, too, are their themes. So, no spanking, cosplay, horseplay, bondage, subtextual sapphism, or explorations of male-female relationships. Even Wonder Woman’s golden lasso is now just a lasso, not the lasso of truth of old, which could compel submission.

Still, at least one thing is constant between this and the earlier, better Moulton/Peters Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor is still a total douchebag.

Recommended? Not at all.

Silverfish. DC, 2008. David Lapham, Dom Ramos and Jared K. Fletcher. $17.99, 160 pages.

A low-key crime thriller, Silverfish achieves its presumably modest goals. It’s entertaining, gripping enough in the way that a thriller is supposed to be gripping. Lapham’s art is mostly unobtrusive, except in brief flashes of expressionism here and there, which culminate in a bravura sequence towards the end of the book where the antagonist’s delusions break forth into the waking world.

Recommended? If you’re in the mood for an unpretentious, solid crime comic.

50 Great Films of the 00s: 50-41

Other comics blogs have started running through their top albums or tracks of the new millennium. So I thought I’d get out ahead of the curve and do the same for film. I’d do the same for comics, except that there’s no equivalent of metacritic for comics, so it’s hard to remember which comics came out in which year — especially for the earlier years of the millennium.

This list isn’t a list of the great films of the 00s. And with a few exceptions I haven’t included films because I think they’re “important” or because they “deserve it”. Instead, it’s a largely subjective list of the films that I liked the most over the last decade. So if your favourite film isn’t on the list, that isn’t a slight against it; I probably just didn’t like it enough to count it among my favourite fifty films of the decade.

Unless your favourite film is Mulholland Drive, in which case your taste sucks and you are stupid.

There’s only one ground-rule: no two films by the same director. This makes the list more diverse than it would be otherwise, which will become quite a big deal once we get into the top 30. It’s also just fun to have to decide which Michael Bay movie, for instance, is the best — Pearl Harbour, Bad Boys II, Transformers 1 or 2?

So let’s get this started. Click on the links for trailers.

50. Far From Heaven

Todd Haynes’ film was at once a homage to, and commentary on the florid 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk. As such, it could have ended up like Gus van Sant’s frame-by-frame remake of Psycho a few years earlier, an exercise in film theory to obscure ends. After all, both Haynes and van Sant had made their names with explicitly “queer” films, and both Psycho and Far From Heaven might have seemed like grabs at reaching mass audiences. But where Psycho flopped, both critically and commercially, Far From Heaven soared. What Haynes had seen was that the respectable veneers in society and in Sirk’s films served the same purpose: to suppress emotion, the strange, the different. What he ended up making was a film at once postmodern and modern, that at the same time used the conventions of the 1950s and commented on them, a film that was about film but also race, homosexuality and the bourgeoisie.

49. Farenheit 911

One of only two documentaries on the list. This was, to put it mildly, a divisive film, about a divisive subject: the Bush presidency and its decision to go to war in Iraq. Even many people who generally agree with Moore’s politics found this film unfair and heavy-handed. Still, there’s no denying its power as a piece of agitprop, on a par with the work of Eisenstein. If, at the end of this movie, you didn’t want to organise an angry mob and impeach the president, you weren’t paying attention.

48. American Splendor

Arguably the best comic book movie of the decade — or, for that matter, ever. With a compelling lead performance by Paul Giamatti, and a whole bevy of directorial tricks, it managed to do what I would have thought impossible: give me a reason to give a damn about professional sad-sack Harvey Pekar.

47.  Sexy Beast

The first film on my list that also appears as part of Scott Tobias’ “New Cult Canon” over at the Onion AV Club, but by no means the last. It’s a tough little gangster-comedy that subverts the cliches of the genre to amusing and entertaining effect. Ray Winstone is surprisingly good as a flabby ex-con but the real star is Ben Kingsley as a foul-mouthed and single-minded psychopathic brute (which in turn was surely the basis for Ralph Fiennes in the equally refreshing gangster-comedy In Bruges).

46. In My Skin

The new millennium saw a renaissance in French film, but not just any French film. No, it was a particular type of French film — film that divided critics and made audiences squirm — a cinema of discomfort, you might call it. Marina da Van’s In My Skin was one such film; she stars, writes and directs in a remarkable film about one woman’s all-too-quick descent into obsession and madness. The cinema of discomfort specialised in scenes that are hard to watch; In My Skin has such scenes to match the best. One unflinching shot in particular, in which da Van slowly, deliberately cuts herself, is still etched in my memory, all these years later. In My Skin is as powerful a piece of body-horror as anything Cronenberg ever made.

45. The Fog of War

From leading documentarian Errol Morris came this documentary about Robert McNamara, one-time US Secretary of Defence. In that role, McNamara was the chief architect of the Vietnam war; just as he had, early in his career, masterminded the firebombing of Japanese cities in WWII. McNamara speaks with the gravity of mistakes made and lessons learned. Fog of War appeared not long after the US invasion of Iraq; much like Farenheit 911, it was hard not to see it as aimed directly at the then-current Powers That Be, even if its subject himself might disavow any such intent.

44. Let the Right One In

A clever horror film, masquerading as a sort of sweet romance about puppy love, in a novel period setting: Sweden circa 1980 or so. Apparently the screenplay toned down some of the more shocking elements from the source novel; even so, it’s nasty enough. The vampire of the film doesn’t just suck blood; she tears it from her hapless victims. There are elements of the film that suggest a sort of vampire procedural, with much care given to the basic mechanics of bloodsucking. But at the core of the film is the relationship between meek Oskar and vampire Eli, both of them damaged and alienated in their own ways.

43. Brick

Another film from the New Cult Canon, this could easily have gone wrong. It’s a tribute to the performances — with a strong lead in Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, but good efforts all round — and the direction of Rian Johnson (who also wrote) that it didn’t go wrong. In fact, it went quite right. The marriage between hard-boiled noir and high school drama is inspired: noir calls for a veneer of toughness, often covering a deeper idealism or even sentimentality, and a kind of oblique dialogue. So too does high school. That’s the film’s key insight, and it works it through admirably.

42. American Psycho

Not exactly an unfilmable novel, but certainly not an easily filmable one, what with its interludes on mainstream 80s music and the fact that the protagonist is, you know, a psychopath. But Mary Herron’s script (with Guinevere Turner) navigates this difficult territory with great skill and a surprisingly light touch, making this an effective satire of 80s corporate culture and masculinity more generally. And Christian Bale was a great choice to play the eponymous American psycho; his brooding intensity and bland good looks have never been used to greater effect.

41. Gosford Park

Robert Altman was one of the all-time great American writer-directors — and, really, one of the all-time greats full stop. This was one of his last films before his death and, at the age of 75, he showed that he could still deliver an ensemble film like nobody else. In a ridculously strong cast, Clive Owen stands out, but really the star here is Altman, with his uncanny way of manoeuvring the space between people and the way that space gets filled with words.

How’d it get burned?! How’d it get burned?!

So I watched the Neil LaBute/Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man last night. The final reel is indeed as crazy as its reputation suggests, what with the bicycle-stealing, bear suit and what have you. Shame the rest of the film doesn’t quite live up to this camp delirium.

An even greater shame is that it’s the most misogynistic film I’ve ever seen, particularly with its nasty little coda. Seriously, it’s like Dave Sim wrote and directed it. If you ever wanted to see the Cirinists on film, this is the one for you.

What’s missing from the film is what was so effective in the original: that rationalist Anglican fear of paganism. That’s what makes the original so creepy. In its place we get Nicholas Cage punching various women in the face, which is not the same thing at all.

Still, it might be unfair to label LaBute a misogynist as such. In his first film, In the Company of Men, he showed that he hated men too. I guess he’s an equal opportunity hater: he just hates everyone.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu

Good-Bye. Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Drawn and Quarterly, 2008. $19.95, 208 pages.

Impotence, death, full-bodied rashes, symbolic exhibitionism. Prostitution, incest, foot fetishism and the exploitation of Hiroshima. Yoshihiro Tatsumi definitely has a singular vision of post-war Japan. It’s a bleak vision, so bleak it makes Chris Ware look like Andy Runton. In Tatsumi’s seedy world, men are perverts, Johns, and/or frustrated in love, sex and work. Women are prostitutes, strippers, and/or frustrated themselves — generally with a good helping of tears.

There’s nothing in Good-Bye that will surprise anyone who’s read either of the two previous volumes of Tatsumi’s work published by Drawn and Quarterly (The Push Man and Abandon the Old in Tokyo). Tatsumi is definitely mining, here, the same vein of deadpan despair as in those earlier volumes.

Still, it’s a rich vein, worth being mined. You couldn’t exactly call it nihilism – that would suggest a sort of editorialising that Tatsumi generally doesn’t bother with. Instead, he simply and plainly lays out the bare facts of these hopeless lives, and has his characters plod on through. Sometimes they yearn, sometimes they cry, but mostly they just endure.

I can’t think of anyone else in comics who makes comics quite like this. Ware is the obvious comparison: Ware too has a pervasive sense of despair. But he also has a sense of humour, which Tatsumi has never betrayed — unless these stories are meant to be funny, in which case Tatsumi has a sense of humour blacker than a black hole. Ware also sometimes indulges in the kitschy sentimentality of miserabilism; his depressing tableaux sometimes verge on tears-of-a-clown material. (Don’t get me wrong; I still think that Ware is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time).

Tatsumi, by contrast, generally doesn’t engage in this kind of thing. You rarely get the sense, which you sometimes get with Ware, that Tatsumi is whispering in your ear, “Look at how sad all this is.” One exception is the story in this volume, “Life is so sad”, which is every bit as (uncharacteristically) unsubtle as it sounds. But for the most part, Tatsumi’s tone is flat, unemotional — “without affect”, a psychiatrist might say.

There a few stumbles in this volume. “Life is so sad” is one of them. Another is the cod-psychoanalysis at the end of “Woman in the Mirror”, which shows Tatsumi’s understanding of queer sexuality as not much more advanced than Osamu Tezuka’s in MW. But on the whole, Good-Bye nicely rounds out a trio of works by a great cartoonist, a chronicler of life at the fringes of society and normality.

Recommended? For those with a strong emotional constitution.

A few thoughts on The Essential Hulk Vol. 1

The Essential Hulk, Volume 1. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko et al. Marvel, 1999. $14.95, 528 pages.

One of the minor pleasures in this golden age of reprints is seeing how uncertain things were at the start. The Essential Hulk Vol 1. offers that pleasure in two ways. First, the book itself — the copy I’m (re)reading is an old one, from 1999 and it’s interesting to see how Marvel’s reprinting strategy has changed since then. For one thing, the covers of those early Essentials featured new cover art; the cover to my copy of The Essential Hulk is by Bruce Timm. For another, the big drawcard of the volume, to judge from the cover, is its inclusion of OVER 30 ISSUES OF CONTINUITY!

In other words, these early Essential volumes weren’t sold on the strength of their art by Jack Kirby, or Steve Ditko — likewise, the early editions of Essential Avengers, Fantastic Four et al. featured new cover art by various artists. What was being sold was valuable continuity, essential reading for the True Believers.

Since then Marvel — and DC, for that matter — have figured out that Kirby has just as much as allure as their decades-old continuity (if not more). The covers of newer editions of the Essentials generally feature original art from the interior; while DC includes the great man’s name itself in the title of its reprints: Jack Kirby’s The Losers, Jack Kirby’s OMAC, Jack Kirby’s The Demon.

So this old reprint volume as a reprint volume shows a degree of uncertainty in those distant early days of Marvel’s reprinting program. And then there’s what’s inside the volume. There, you can practically see the gears turning as Kirby and Lee try a dozen — all right, three or four — different frameworks for the Hulk.

Which is surprising, really. You’d have thought the basic concept solid enough to require little revision: it’s Jekyll and Hyde meets Frankenstein. What more do you need?

Well, to judge by the first couple of issues, you need more — and it’s one thing or another. In issue 1, Bruce Banner turns into a savage Hulk whenever it’s night. By issue 3, he’s no longer bound to the diurnal cycle but now he’s under the hypnotic control of Rick Jones. By issue 4, Jones has lost his control and the Hulk, while still brutish, retains Banner’s intellect. Three issues later, we finally get the set-up familiar from later comics, not to mention the film and TV adaptations: Banner turns into the Hulk whenever he gets too stressed. Except that even then, it’s still not quite the familiar set-up — Banner turns into the Hulk when he’s stressed, sure, but it goes the other way too. That’s right, whenever the Hulk gets too stressed, he turns back into “the weak, powerless Bruce Banner”. Kind of puts a dampener on big fight scenes; in practice, all it means is that the Hulk turns back into Banner at the convenience of the plot.

This state of flux is echoed by the art. We start out with Jack Kirby, in a typical early 60s Kirby mode. That means doughy figures, and little to none of the baroque machinery, architecture or costumery that would flourish in his work a few years later. Then we get one issue of Ditko over Kirby’s pencils — although, let’s face it, with those inks they might as well be Ditko’s pencils. Then another couple of issues of Kirby, then Ditko for a couple of issues, then a few more of Kirby, then Kirby on layouts only and a cast of thousands on pencils.

It’s the switch to Ditko that has the greatest impact. He’s the one who sets up the (more or less) familiar status quo of the stress-induced-transformation. More importantly, he amps up the soap opera and turns the strip into a cliffhanger-based serial. He also introduces two parallel nemeses with high foreheads, widow’s peaks and pencil moustaches: Major Glenn Talbot and the Leader. Yet, although parallel in appearance, they cut contrasting figures. For Talbot is nemesis to the intellectual Banner, beset by anxiety; thus he is an upright instance of masculine militarism. Whereas the Leader is nemesis to the brutish Hulk, and so he represents Brains to the Hulk’s Brawn. At any rate, it’s a nice bit of doubling, subtly done.

That said, no one would mistake the material in here for the best of the Kirby-Lee or Ditko-Lee collaborations. Kirby stopped pencilling well before he could build up any real momentum, and Ditko left after a mere hundred pages or so. Still, afficionados of either artist will find this volume interesting for its first half, where Kirby’s and Ditko’s pencils appear. It’s a rare opportunity to see Ditko and Kirby working on the same character for any sustained period  — Machine Man in the 70s is the only other example I can think of.

Recommended? For Kirby/Ditko die-hards only.

A few thoughts on The Essential Thor vol. 4

The Essential Thor, Volume 4. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, John Buscema et al. Marvel, 2008.  $19.99, 600 pages.

Of all their collaborations, it’s the Kirby-Lee Thor that is my favourite. Yes, that means I like it more than their Fantastic Four. Not that I don’t like their Fantastic Four, but when Kirby cuts loose in Thor, he really cuts loose. There’s a savage, primal energy to the best of Kirby’s work on Thor that seems only fitting for a series about a Norse god with a really big hammer and a penchant for talking smack — ye olde schoole style.

Kirby’s pencils on Thor are so strong that they can even, for the most part, overcome inks by Vincent Colletta, surely Kirby’s least popular inker. Colletta’s inks actually work fine over Kirby’s romance comics — he softens the sharper edges and smooths out faces into something more conventionally attractive — but they are catastrophically ill-suited for the gotterdammerung of Thor. Colletta’s line is too feathery, too scratchy for the bombast-turned-up-to-eleven that fills the pages of Thor. (And that’s without even getting into Colletta’s overzealousness with the eraser)

So it should come as some relief to find that many of the Kirby-pencilled tales in Volume 4 of The Essential Thor are inked by Bill Everett. It should, but it doesn’t. While there are some nice panels here and there, Everett’s inks are, overall, too crude to do Kirby justice. Everett may have had considerable cartoonist chops himself, but he doesn’t acquit himself too well here.

Or maybe some of the blame for crude rendering should go to the great man himself. Kirby certainly seems to have run out of enthusiasm for the character in his last year and a half (collected here). He recycles characters and plots from earlier issues and, when he does create new characters, the results are, uncharacteristically, visually dull. It’s dispiriting stuff, really, much in the way that his last year and a half on Fantastic Four (reprinted in Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 5) is dispiriting. It all smacks of someone who was just going through the motions. Granted, Kirby going through the motions is still better than anything else Marvel was probably printing at the time, but it’s a long way from the feverish pitch of earlier issues. Unlike those earlier issues, these ones don’t shimmer with invention, or that mad headlong rush into new territory that we associate with Kirby’s best work.

But that’s only the first half of the stories in this volume. As for the rest of them, they’re fairly typical of the sort of thing that filled Marvel’s books once Kirby and Ditko left. Neal Adams turns in a very restrained two issues, with nothing much to recommend them; he’s followed by John Buscema who does yeoman but unremarkable work.

In all, it’s a disappointing end to an otherwise excellent body of work.

Recommended? Kirby completists will still want it, caveats and all. Others should stick to the earlier, better volumes — particularly volumes 2 and 3.

My hottest 10

Triple J is the government-run, youth radio network in Australia, specialising in various kinds of “alternative” music. It’s sort of like a national version of US college radio, I guess. Anyway, every year for the past 20 years they’ve been running the world’s largest music poll, the Hottest 100, in which listeners vote for their favourite ten tracks of the last year. This year being the twentieth anniversary of the competition, they’re doing something different: a Hottest 100 of all time.

These are the tracks I voted for, in no particular order, my favourite ten songs of all time:

• Aesop Rock “Daylight”

• Bjork “Storm” (I couldn’t find a video of the studio version, so here’s a live one instead)

• Aphex Twin “Avril 14th”

• Dalek “Paragraphs Relentless”

• The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows”

• Massive Attack “Rising Son” (Can’t embed the video, so have a link instead
• Justice “D.A.N.C.E.”

• Sly and the Family Stone “Everyday People”

• Elvis Costello “Couldn’t Call it Unexpected no. 4″ (I couldn’t find a video of Elvis singing this, so here’s some other guy playing it on his banjo)

And, finally, probably my favourite track of  all:

• Madvillain “Shadows of Tomorrow”

I will become small

Showcase Presents the Atom. Gardner Fox and Gil Kane. DC, 2007. $16.99, 528 pages.

Everybody knows that superheroes are wish-fulfilment figures. First, there’s the secret identity. Everyone wants to be special, and the secret identity cleverly embodies both the fantasy and the reality: in reality, I may be just schlubbish Clark Kent but in fantasy I am Superman. Whoosh—that’s the sound of me flying away to fight crime.

In my mind.

Second, the adventures. Saving a world that hates and fears you, scaring the superstitious and cowardly lot, making a deal with the devil to ruin your marriage and save your aunt from her three-hundredth brush with the grim reaper, and so on—all more interesting than humdrum everyday life. In principle, anyway.

And third, the most distinctive feature of superheroes, the superpowers of course. Who hasn’t ever dreamed of flying like Superman? Running like the Flash? Eating matter like Matter-Eater Lad?

Er, okay, maybe you haven’t dreamed of eating matter. Still, at the core of every superpower is a fantasy of power and being special. I am not like everyone else. I can bend steel bars/control the elements/shoot laser beams out of my eyes. Whoosh.

Even lame powers—even proverbially lame powers—are still powers. Talking to fish or bouncing around or turning into different “forms of water” might not keep you from getting your arse kicked by Doctor Doom. Or Turner D. Century, for that matter. But they’re still powers.

Which is what makes a book like DC Showcase Presents The Atom such an odd read. For what is the Atom’s superpower? He can shrink.

Now, shrinking certainly opens up plenty of opportunities for adventure, as seen in comics like the fondly-remembered Micronauts. And shrinking has a long history in comics, stretching back to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (and, to a lesser extent, his Dream of the Rarebit Fiend).

It’s worth talking about McCay a bit more, since little Nemo seemed to dream about shrinking every other week. The early Slumberland strips are structured with the pacing of a nightmare, the perils growing ever worse until the sleeping Nemo can handle no more and wakes himself up in the inevitable final panel. Shrinking was the perfect tool for McCay’s purposes: as Nemo grows smaller and smaller, even everyday objects or animals loom more and more dangerously. (Plus, McCay just loved messing with perspective; Nemo grew to giant-size as often as he shrank).

And that’s exactly the problem with shrinking as a superpower: it isn’t one. Sure, the Atom can control his mass when he shrinks so that his punches carry more force. But he’s still a teensy tiny little guy; he can be trapped in a test-tube (and sometimes is). Shrinking is a super-weakness, not a super-power. It makes you vulnerable. It’s like being made out of glass. Certainly, life would be dangerous if you were made of glass. It might well be interesting to read about how a person made of glass would navigate the dangers of everyday life created by her condition. But such a person could never be a superhero. There’s a reason it was Bruce Willis’ character, not Samuel L. Jackson’s, who was the hero of the (dreadful) film Unbreakable. Being made of glass, literally or metaphorically, kind of puts a damper on the whole fighting crime thing.

(While being allergic to water—as Jackson unforgettably tells Willis, “water is your kryptonite!”—apparently doesn’t. But I digress.)

In the stories reprinted in the Showcase volume, the poor little Atom is constantly being menaced by everyday objects, newly dangerous to him in his reduced state. The Atom is threatened by tweezers, light bulbs, domestic animals and, for all we know, specks of dust, feathers and powder puffs. What a revoltin development.

Not only is The Atom not a symbol of power-fantasy for a child reader, it symbolises the grim reality instead: you are a small thing in a world of giants, and their ordinary artefacts are dangerous to you. Obviously kids can relate to that, but why would they want to?

No wonder, then, that the Atom never managed to sustain his own title for too long. Nor did his Marvel counterpart, Ant-Man. It wasn’t long before they changed him into Giant Man. Come to think of it, when DC revived the Atom in the 80s they transformed him into a fantasy adventure hero and called the series Sword of the Atom.

Hmmm, Ant-Man becomes Giant Man, the Atom gets a sword. Psychoanalysts would call that overcompensating.

Thanks very much, I’ll be here all night. Tune in next time, when I suggest there may be something going on between Batman and Robin and that the Marston/Peters Wonder Woman sure did like getting tied up.

But, really, my point isn’t that there’s a sexual subtext to shrinking. I don’t actually buy that (notwithstanding Craig Yoe’s old gallery of suggestive Doll Man covers). The point is rather just that shrinking and superheroes don’t mix.

On the other hand, The Amazing Glass-Man would probably sell like gangbusters.