100 Bullets

100 Bullets is a crime fiction comic series created by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso and published by DC Comics under its Vertigo imprint. The series consists of numerous story arcs arising when a mysterious organization called the Minutemen gives certain people a gun with 100 untraceable bullets. These individuals are assured that the 100 bullets will enable to them to exact vengeance without any legal consequences. There is a much wider story, however, which involves numerous conspiracies related to the activities of the Minutemen going back hundreds of years. The series sets a very dark and realistic tone and most of the characters are deeply flawed criminals of some sort who very authentically display the dress and speech of an underground life on the street. Despite their humble backgrounds and true to the noir genre, many of these downtrodden losers are able to make honorable choices.

Sleeper

Tom Cruise and Hollywood have discovered Ed Brubaker, but comic book fans have known about Brubaker and his crime comics for quite some time. According to wire reports, Cruise is seeking the film rights to Brubaker's Sleeper, and the property does seem perfect for the big screen. Sleeper features a secret agent (Holden Carver) whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain, gives him a powerful healing factor, and allows him to store pain and pass it on to others through skin contact. Carver goes undercover in a super villain’s powerful organization and is eventually caught between two warring sides with unclear allegiances. Mayhem ensues. I'm sure this was one of the most successful Hollywood pitch meetings of all time. It's a 'high concept', easily translated to the screen, and it's a great role for somebody like Tom Cruise. Warner Brothers thinks this might be the next big movie franchise, on the level of the Bourne movies.

So who is Ed Brubaker, and what else is he working on? By his own admission, as a teenager he was 'kind of a thief and a drug-addict...and lived in a really ugly world of speed-freaks and scumbags.' Fortunately, he turned himself around. But he retained a somewhat bent perspective as well as an interest in dark subject matter such as pulp crime fiction. (In his autobiography, My Dark Places, crime author James Ellroy describes a similar scenario, with similar results.)

Brubaker is probably best known for 'killing Captain America'. Except it was actually Steve Rogers that was killed, and the Captain America persona was taken over by his sidekick, Bucky. All grown up now, Bucky was previously known as the Winter Soldier, a programmed Soviet assassin. Let's just say that he has some issues. He is a much darker character than Steve Rogers, and is much more suited to Brubaker's noir style. In the hands of Brubaker, Captain America has become a pulpy blend of sci-fi and espionage.

Brubaker is also one of the creators of Criminal. A straight-ahead crime series, Criminal features career criminals and ordinary people who get in over their heads, with violent and unpredictable results. One volume centered on a prizefighter who runs into some problems with the local crime bosses. Another story is about a Vietnam veteran who gets involved in a heist. Criminal is sharply written, beautifully illustrated by Sean Phillips, and is a worthy homage to the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. Each issue also has a prose section in the back, highlighting subjects such as the Black Lizard reprints of classic crime novels, or Harry-O, the classic TV crime show from 1974-75.

Brubaker and Phillips are also working on a new series called Incognito, which Brubaker says is "about a completely amoral guy with super-powers forced to pretend he's a normal law-abiding citizen, because he's in Witness Protection."

See links below for more information. No word on exactly when Sleeper will come to the big screen, but it looks like things are coming along nicely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/books/08capt.html
http://criminalcomic.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeper_%28comic_book%29

Lush Life

Lush Life is the highly acclaimed 2008 novel by Richard Price, best known as one of the writers of HBO's The Wire. Set in New York City's Lower East Side, the book works on several different levels. It is, of course a crime novel, and it works especially well as a mystery and a 'police procedural'. But it is also a very insightful study of a community in transition due to the 'land rush' of the last decade. Price very successfully portrays every socio-economic strata of the borough, from the Chinese and Hispanic underclass all the way to the mostly white yuppies, wannabe artists, actors and other strivers who are helping to gentrify the area.

The story has several characters at its center: Eric Cash, a 35 year old would-be actor who is just about to give up his dream; Matty, the detective who tries to solve the crime; and Tristan, the inner city kid who was unwittingly involved. Price displays each perspective with gripping psychological realism and succeeds in generating considerable sympathy for the motivations and difficulties of the criminals, their victims, and the police. Price's characters and dialogue really draw you in, and the plot keeps you hanging to the very end.

Thief

Thief is a classic 1981 noir crime film written and directed by Michael Mann. James Caan plays Frank, an expert jewel thief who runs into some problems after taking down a major score. In an effort to recover money from his murdered fence, Frank is lured into working with Leo, a mobster, on a very large diamond heist. The heist is successful, but Frank's mob partners renege on the agreement. Frank angrily informs Leo that he will be paid, or there will be consequences. Leo's henchmen kidnap and eventually murder Frank's partner Barry (played by James Belushi). Frank takes his family to safety and is ultimately able to turn the tables on Leo, murdering him and several of his henchmen.

The movie is based on the true story of burglar John Seybold, who also served as a technical advisor to the film. The plot serves as an interesting counter-point to the work of Donald Westlake in his famous Parker series. Most notably, it would be unthinkable for Parker to work with the mob, and we can see why given the results for Frank in Thief. We can also see why Parker would consider it to be very unwise to have so many ties to the community. Frank is vulnerable because of the businesses that he owns, and also because of his family and home. Parker's burglar ethos requires that he be able to basically disappear on a moment's notice. My guess is that a real burglar would be much more like Parker, and that many liberties have been taken with Seybold's story in order to develop certain themes. By introducing certain elements such as a family and personal ties, Michael Mann explores Frank's desire for self-realization. Frank keeps a collage of pictures which represents his vision of the life that he is driven to have. So there is a definite pathos and tension to the film that would be lacking if it followed Westlake's Parker model. But at the same time, the film probably lacks verisimilitude. I.e., there is no way a real master thief would make the choices that Frank makes.

Also notable is the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream.

The film displays meticulous attention to detail, which is a direct result of Mann's decision to employ Seybold as an advisor. The tools and techniques of the trade are authentic, right down to the oxy lance used to penetrate a safe.

If you watch closely, you will see CSI's William Petersen in a small role as a bartender. Later he will work with Mann in Manhunter, another overlooked classic of the 80's.

Donald Westlake's Parker

Donald Westlake's Parker is a hardened professional thief who appeared in a string of crime novels published in the 1960's and 70's and written under the pen name of Richard Stark. Parker has been the inspiration for several movies, most recently Mel Gibson's Payback (1999), based on the first Parker novel The Hunter. Darwyn Cooke is working on a graphic novel which is also based The Hunter, soon to be published by IDW. If you like Ed Brubaker's Criminal series, you will definitely want to pick this up. Brubaker has acknowledged that his work is in many ways inspired by Westlake's Parker.

Perfectly capable of murder, Parker has almost no redeeming qualities, aside from his professionalism and the fact that he is an honest crook. In The Hunter, Parker chases his ex-partners and his ex-wife, who have betrayed him in a heist and left him for dead. He survives, but is arrested by the police. Slowly, methodically, one by one, Parker kills his betrayers, ultimately taking on the mob in the process.

Parker is a loner, in many ways indistinguishable from the unnamed protagonist of Clint Eastwood's Dollars trilogy. He operates in an amoral world where everybody is a criminal of some sort. In this world crime pays, there is no good or evil, but simply different styles of crime. Crime is a business, and all business is a form of criminal activity. In fact, Parker is an entrepreneur of sorts, competing with the syndicate and fending off assorted psychotics, amateurs and losers. Of course, there is no law, so Parker cannot be caught and punished. He can only be injured or delayed. He has no connection to society, and seeks only to acquire money in order to remove himself to comfortable isolation.

But what makes Parker so archetypal and enduring is that he speaks to something very deep in our collective psyches. We envy Parker's lack of shame, or guilt, or any type of sentimental feeling whatsoever. Although he is hunted constantly, he is totally unselfconscious, totally focused on his purpose. Parker is a very remarkable, enduring anti-hero.

Watchmen

Watchmen is literature, at least it is according to Time magazine. Watchmen was the only graphic novel to appear on Time's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present".

Watchmen (1985) is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by the brilliant but temperamental writer Alan Moore. A near-mint, first printing of the entire series now sells for about $200. Moore also wrote From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both of which have also been adapted for the screen. (League was a great comic book, but a terrible movie. Definitely explains why Moore has so much distrust of filmmakers attempting to adapt his works.)


Moore is also known for his 1986 masterpiece Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?. This was intended to close the book on the original Silver Age Superman's history subsequent to the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Hard to explain, but anybody who enjoyed Superman comics as a kid in the 60's and the 70's should check it out. You can pick up the back issues for about $8.00.

In a nutshell, Watchmen takes place in an alternate history United States where the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. After government-sponsored superhero The Comedian is found murdered, the vigilante Rorschach warns his former colleagues of what he believes is a conspiracy to kill costumed heroes. As the story progresses, the protagonists discover that one of the heroes has devised a plan to stave off war between the United States and the USSR by carrying out a plan that will kill millions of innocent people.

Watchmen also features a comic within a comic in the form of Tales of the Black Freighter, a fictional comic book. Moore and Gibbons used a pirate comic because they reasoned that since the characters of Watchmen experience superheroes in real life, "they probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics."

The most important character of Watchmen is probably Dr. Manhattan. In fact, he is the only 'superhero' in Watchmen that actually has superpowers. Through a nuclear accident, he acquires almost total omnipotence, which results in an interesting exploration of quantum mechanics. Due to his almost total mastery of his environment, time has no meaning to Dr. Manhattan. Time folds into itself, and he experiences all time frames as happening simultaneously. A similar theme is explored in Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel Destination Void, wherein the creation of a powerful artificial intelligence results in the folding of space/time.

Along with Frank Miller's 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen was a breakthrough deconstruction of the superhero genre, and ushered in an entirely new approach to comics and the movies inspired by them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_happened_to_the_man_of_tomorrow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Dark_Knight_Returns

Soon I Will Be Invincible

Austin Grossman's 2007 novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, is set in the real world with superheroes, and is just about the funniest thing I have ever read. It is written from the viewpoint of the supervillain Dr. Impossible and the female cyborg Fatale. The novel takes a perfectly realistic look at the lives and motivations of super-powered individuals.

Probably the best part of the novel is Dr. Impossible's deadpan, unintentionally hilarious internal monologue. All Dr. Impossible wants is what every evil super-genius wants. He wants to conquer the world, and he wants to explain his diabolical plan to you before he does it.

Dr. Impossible's nemesis is Corefire. He is a good looking, overly self-assured, invulnerable dolt. Dr. Impossible hates him and so do I. He is one of the founding members of the supergroup the Champions.

Next in the pantheon, and also a founding member, is Blackwolf. He has no superpowers, but has trained his mind and body to near perfection. He has the single-minded focus of a borderline autistic, which he is rumored to be.

Damsel, the third founding member of the Champions, is the daughter of a golden age superhero and a princess of an alien planet. She has some issues due to her mixed heritage.

Fatale, who has no memory of her life before the accident that led to her transformation into a cyborg, eventually discovers that the corporation that saved her life was a front for Dr. Impossible. Needless to say, this little development comes into play later in the novel.

Some of the other more interesting characters include:

Lily, born in the far future and stranded in the present. Her powers include super-strength and she also has access to far future technology. Also notable for her translucent appearance.

Elphin, supposedly the last fairy on Earth. She is inhumanly fast and strong and has some nature-controlling powers. The novel never makes it clear if she really is a fairy, or if she's an alien of some sort.

Mr. Mystic, a magician much like Dr. Strange. His powers include illusion and teleportation.

Two of the most inexperienced Champions are Bluetooth and Phenom. Bluetooth is a geeky young hero infused with alien technology. He has the power to read minds and control electronic equipment. Phenom's powers come from his cybernetic implants. In one of the best scenes of the novel, the hapless duo attempt to interrogate Dr. Impossible, which leads to his escape. Oops!

The most important supervillains, other than Dr. Impossible, include Baron Ether, a Golden Age scientist and robotics expert. He is sort of a mentor to Dr. Impossible. The Pharoah, whose powers come from a magic hammer, is Dr. Impossible's friend, sort of. (Actually, he thinks he's an idiot.) The Pharoah's hammer is one of the most powerful objects on the planet and figures prominently in Dr. Impossible's plan to rule the Earth.

Not to spoil anything, but does it come as any surprise when the New Champions are able to foil Dr. Impossible's plan? No matter how close he comes, even Dr. Impossible knows that he will ultimately fail, and the cycle will begin anew. And in that process, we have a lot to learn from Dr. Impossible. As he stands on the verge of taking over the world, ' at the fulcrum point of creation', he blurts out, 'God I'm so unhappy.' Success means the end of the journey, and Dr. Impossible knows that the journey is more important than the goal. Defeat means renewal, and a rediscovery of your purpose. Dr. Impossible certainly knows his own purpose: 'When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixer, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world'.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Itzkoff2-t.html

http://bottlecity.blogspot.com

The Real James Bond

In his 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard in effect deconstructs the character of Hamlet by shifting our perspective to that of two minor characters in the original play. In a similar way, Alan Moore's The Black Dossier deconstructs James Bond by showing him from the perspective of Wilhelmina Murray and Alan Quartermaine. He becomes Jimmy, a misogynistic, 'nasty little thug', quite different from the debonair, sophisticated spy that we are most familiar with. This version of Bond is in some respects reminiscent of the original Ian Fleming novels.

The 2006 reboot Casino Royale also shows James Bond in a different way: somewhat of a thug, quite a bit less confident, and certainly far removed from the Sean Connery and Roger Moore versions. While not completely inverting the character, the movie succeeds in returning to the original source material for a new perspective.

The picture on the left is an image of James Bond commissioned by Ian Fleming. He looks a lot more like Daniel Craig than Pierce Brosnan, doesn't he?


No discussion of The Black Dossier would be complete without referencing Jess Nevin's unbelievable annotations. See link below.

http://www.shsu.edu/~lib_jjn/dossier.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_%26_Guildenstern_Are_Dead

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the Golden Age of Comics. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish boys, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay. The pattern of their lives in some ways mirrors that of Superman creators Siegel and Shuster. They experience many of the same difficulties when they naively bargain away the rights to their creation, The Escapist. The novel also explores discrimination against Jewish immigrants, as well as the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Chabon shows that there were two reasons why Jewish writers and artists were so prominent in comic books and pop culture of the time. First, due to discrimination, this was sometimes the only work available. Secondly, comics and other pulp works were an important escape and creative outlet that allowed downtrodden immigrants the chance to dream and create their own heroic mythology.

Kavalier and Clay was a tremendous breakthrough that greatly contributed to the acceptance of comics as a uniquely American art form worthy of study and critical appreciation.

Kingdom Come

Kingdom Come (1996) was a landmark DC mini-series written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross. The story was based on Alex Ross's idea, and Mark Waid was added to the project due to his knowledge of DC history. Set in the not too distant future, the plot centers on an archetypal Superman who has retreated to his Fortress of Solitude, disillusioned due to a cataclysmic clash of values between the older generation of superheroes and a newer, amoral group of meta-humans.

The precipitating event of the graphic novel is the Joker's murder of Jimmy Olson, Perry White, Lois Lane, and the entire staff of the Daily Planet. Before he can be put on trial, the Joker is in turn murdered by a new superhero called Magog. Magog is later acquitted of murder, and this acquittal causes Superman to become so disillusioned that he isolates himself from human society.

Later events in the novel center upon Superman's return to Metropolis and his attempts to put things back into order. He creates a type of prison camp for metahumans he deems to be criminals. He eventually comes into conflict with a group of superheroes (and some supervillains) who have united around Batman, who feels that Superman has become too rigid in his ideals.

As the conflict reaches its climax, total disaster is averted by the sacrifice of Billy Batson/Captain Marvel. The remainder of the novel is devoted to a sort of coda wherein Wonder Woman become an ambassador for super-humans, Batman becomes a healer, and Superman essentially becomes a farmer as he begins to restore the Midwestern farmlands destroyed in the war.

Critics have always speculated as to who deserves most of the credit for the success of Kingdom Come. Possibly the best way to judge this is to look at what each creator produced in later years . Alex Ross was one of the creators of 2005 DC mini-series Justice. Mark Waid is probably best known in for his 'three-boot' of The Legion of Superheroes.