General things and Smallville: Absolute Justice
Once more, I've been away... its been a hectic few months though, with a HELL of a lot of investigations. Several more episodes of Mysterious Midwest are out... they are viewable in all of Ohio on Warner Cable, On-Demand (NOT pay-per-view), channel 501. I understand that its also airing on Warner Cable in New York, Indiana, Parts of Pennsylvania, and ... Wisconsin. Not sure how wisconsin got into the mix... Anyway, if you DON'T have Warner cable, the episodes are also up on the Munroe Falls Paranormal Society website... go check them out if you're interested. The Ohio Cottage/MAdison Seminary was the most recent one... Moundville Penitentiary is in the works right now.
Apart from that... Lisa is jobless, sort of. She's gotten a part-time position back at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but isn't happy about it. Financially, we should be ok for a few months. Hopefully, she'll find something better paying soon.
I've been running the Doctor Who Role-Playing game, which seems to be going ok. There's a bit of a system adjustment for the players going on, as they need to grasp how storypoints can be used to change the story... AND how they can intentionally make life difficult for themselves in order to A) Make the story more interesting, and B) earn more story points for later use.
Finally, I say some fun tv..
I don't usually watch 'Smallville'. I watched a few early episodes and just found it annoying. I've never been terribly interested in Superman's life as a boy, and combining that with a teen angst\romantic soap opera was just even more annoying. I had heard that in later seasons that they started bringing in other superheroes. I heard Green Arrow was a semi-regular, and they had Aquaman, 'Bart Allen', and Cyborg. I even heard rumors that J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter had shown up (he's always been a favorite of mine.) However, it still never interested me, because from what I could see, they had *continued* the whole teen angst thing and just expanded it to include these other characters. When I saw however that they were going to do an episode involving the Justice Society of America, I got somewhat intrigued. I missed it on TV, so I tracked it down.
That was a fun movie. Not a GOOD movie, mind you, but it was a lot of fun, especially for a comic geek. The whole show (2 episodes, strung together as a single movie) was utterly different than what I'd seen of Smallville in the past, and so was engaging on a whole different level. The writer, Geoff Johns, is presently writing the massive 'Blackest Night' crossover in DC comics, and has done some solid work in the past, and his knowledge of, and love of, the genre and the source material shone through.
The initial scene starts out with Chloe Sullivan (who I don't know, but apparently calls herself Watchtower and works in the same capacity that Oracle does in the comics) encounters a very strange man with a glowing staff (one that looks really familiar to fans of the Starman comic). He introduces himself as Sylvester Pemberton and says he knows all about Chloe's friends, the not-yet-justice-league... and is about to give a warning when someone attacks and kills him. We don't see the fight. Chloe is tossed into a trash dumpster, and we only see what happens from her point of view. When she comes out, pemberton is dead, apparently impaled on icicles.
Comic fans know who Pemberton is, of course. He was known as 'The Star Spangled Kid' back in the day (the day when you could call yourself something like that without irony or sounding completely mental). As Chloe and clark investigate further, they discover a shadowy group of criminals from many years before... one that included Pemberton, and a roll call of other familiar names; Wesley Dodds, Alan Scott, Jay Garrick, Carter Hall, Ted Grant, Al Pratt, Kent Nelson... Abigail 'Ma' Hunkle. These people were all arrested long ago, but the charges against them ended up being dropped after allegations of jury tampering and evidence contamination were discovered. The group had then appeared to go their seperate ways and then vanish. Again, we know who these people are, and know they are not criminals... but the characters in the show DON'T. Clark decides to go visit someone else in the group... Wesley Dodds.
This is probably one of my favorite sequences in the whole show. We see a filthy, run down apartment. It is covered in old newspapers and dozens of half drunk cups of coffee, coffee grounds, coffee pots... and dozing in a threadbare chair is a sad looking, care-worn old man. We see then, in a set of sepia tone, rapid cut sequences, the murder of Sylvester Pemberton. We see a little more of the fight than we did previously. Then the man starts awake... clearly dreaming the whole sequence. He looks even more sad now that he's awake, and gets up, goes over to a dressmakers dummy on which is haning a trenchcoat, gas mask, fedora, and a odd looking gun. He puts these on, and for a moment we see The Sandman. One of the truly great golden age characters. He hears a voice around him, and he turns to face whoever it is, and we see the lenses of the gas mask frost over...
If I have a regret about this scene its that we didn't see anything that happened next. I would have liked to have seen The Sandman go down fighting, but unfortunately, the next time we see him, clark is standing over his body, having discovered it in the run down apartment. But that brief glimpse of The Sandman had a lot of impact for me. It thrilled me, it saddened me, it wrenched at my gut... it had genuine emotion to it, not the forced pseudo-emotion of the typical teen soap-opera that Smallville usually is.
By this time, Green Arrow is on the case also, and trying to get pemberton's staff. Instead, he runs into Courtney Whitmore, who seems to have already managed to sneak into the police station and liberate it. She, of course, becomes Stargirl, in time. In this, she is Pemberton's protege. She seems to know all about Oliver Queen as Green Arrow, and vanishes before he can stop her. Green Arrow and Chloe track down Pemberton's car... which he apparently lived out of, and discover he has a notebook detailing each of the superheroes in the series in great detail: Clark included, along with Aquaman, Bart Allen, Black Canary, Green Arrow and others...
Clark goes to visit the next member of the criminal group on the list... Carter Hall. Hall is the curator of a museum, but everything in the museum is covered with sheets, and he claims the museum is closed. He is gruff and short with Clark, having little to say to him. I was amused by the casting choice for Carter Hall, ass-kicking archeologist... he is played by Michael Shanks, known mainly for playing Doctor Danial JAckson on Stargate SG-1... ALSO and ass-kicking archaeologist. Despite that, the casting seemed... off. He just doesn't fit my image of Hawkman.
At any rate, there is someone else there... a homeless man who is babbling to himself and clutching a bowling ball bag. Carter Hall is very protective of him, and we find out this is Kent Nelson, another member of the group Clark is investigating. And this is another of my favorite sequences... Clark uses his X-ray vision to look into the bag, and sees the outline of a helmet in profile. But as soon as he does it and works out the shape, it turns on its own and faces him, staring back. Lovely, creepy, and very true to Doctor Fate.
I'll not go into the whole show, but its a comic lover's dream. Doctor Fate could have carried the show on his own, truth be told. When he transformed from the homeless Kent Nelson into the near omnipotent Doctor Fate, it was chilling. The actor did an amazing job of transforming himself into a completely different person. He stopped being the timid, mumbling loon, and suddenly became a calm, confident, and wise superhero. The costume was dead on. As was Stargirl's, with the exception of the Cosmic Rod which looked like it had been made out of PVC pipe from Lowes. Hawkman's costume looked good too, but the actor didn't quite fill it out the way he should have... which might actually have been accurate, given that this Carter HAll had been out of the Superhero game for at least 20 years at this point, and was likely out of shape.
There are tons of references to the comics in there, as well as the welcome appearance by some well-loved characters... Martian Manhunter, for one, who was now sporting a green shirt under a blue leather jacket, and red leather crossbands on his shirt, supporting a pair of shoulder holsters (apparently, he'd been de-powered in the series somewhere. Thankfully, Dr Fate corrects this and gives him his full abilities back.) Another suprise character was Amanda Waller, working for Checkmate (I never thought I'd see THAT in anything other than a comic) and namechecking the Suicide Squad.
The one thing that bothered me a bit, up until the very end, was the villain. Icicle is a minor villain at best, and its really hard to imagine him being capable of taking on, let alone *killing* several powerful members of the Justice Society. We see him kill Star-Spangled Kid, Sandman, and Doctor Fate (!) on screen, and its implied that he may have killed Hourman and Doctor Midnight as well. He was nothing more than a whiney teenager... even in one on one combat, Stargirl was able to hold her own against him for a good amount of time... someone with more experience should have had no trouble with him. Even at the end, when he takes on pretty much everyone at once, while wearing the Helm of NAbu, he doesn't make a completely credible villain. How can this guy hold his own against Clark, Green Arrow, Hawkman, and Stargirl and be on the verge of beating them before MArtian Manhunter has to arrive to save the day? They should have defeated him easily.
However, it made much more sense at the end, when he is being 'debriefed' by Amanda Waller. She'd never intended him to succeed in the first place. She thought he'd be good enough to take out some of the minor members, but never thought he stood a chance against the others... her purpose was to bring the Justice Society back together and get them working with the new generation of heroes. *click* It suddenly makes sense. And then, just when you think she's simply ruthless, but her heart might be in the right place, She turns around and gives him an ironic smile and raises a gun. "Welcome to the Suicide Squad." she says as she pulls the trigger.
If they brought in the Suicide Squad, I would start watching the show regularly.
It wasn't perfect. The dialog was clunky. Some of the costumes looked a little silly. The special effects weren't exactly top notch. I'm still not convinced that Icicle could have taken out Dr. Fate so easily.... But no comic fan could have gone unaffected by seeing the newsreel footage of the arrest of the various members of the Justice Society. Seeing the golden age memorobilia set reverently in cases at the JSA's brownstone was like a love letter to comic book fans. Everything was so iconic... the Golden Age Green Lantern Ring, the Flash's helmet, Hourman's hourglass, Hawkgirl's helmet...
There were so many small mentions of things in there, easter eggs for the fans; Green Arrow nervously commenting that his emails with Black Canary were 'purely platonic', references to the Superfriends and the Trouble Alert, a coy reference to Lois and Clark, Martian Manhunter commenting that he likes cookies... Mentions of Inza Nelson and Shiera Hall... the antagonistic relationship between Hawkman and Green Arrow.
This, ladies and gentleman, is what a superhero TV show should be. Heroes fighting villains. Continuity with the past. References to the comics and a wider universe beyond the narrow confines of a single comic character. This felt right. And whats more, they left it open for these characters and more to return. Hawkman and Stargirl tell the others that they have located the former members of the JSA, and their children, and proteges, and will be bringing them together. The painting and the criminal records clearly showed some characters that could prove very interesting... Ted 'Wildcat' Grant, Jim 'The Spectre' Corrigan... even the Golden Age Black Canary. From the comics, we know that Alan Scott has children who take up the superhero mantle (Jade and Obsidian)... who knows, maybe they will even meet Ma Hunkle's successor as Red Tornado. :)
Apart from that... Lisa is jobless, sort of. She's gotten a part-time position back at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but isn't happy about it. Financially, we should be ok for a few months. Hopefully, she'll find something better paying soon.
I've been running the Doctor Who Role-Playing game, which seems to be going ok. There's a bit of a system adjustment for the players going on, as they need to grasp how storypoints can be used to change the story... AND how they can intentionally make life difficult for themselves in order to A) Make the story more interesting, and B) earn more story points for later use.
Finally, I say some fun tv..
I don't usually watch 'Smallville'. I watched a few early episodes and just found it annoying. I've never been terribly interested in Superman's life as a boy, and combining that with a teen angst\romantic soap opera was just even more annoying. I had heard that in later seasons that they started bringing in other superheroes. I heard Green Arrow was a semi-regular, and they had Aquaman, 'Bart Allen', and Cyborg. I even heard rumors that J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter had shown up (he's always been a favorite of mine.) However, it still never interested me, because from what I could see, they had *continued* the whole teen angst thing and just expanded it to include these other characters. When I saw however that they were going to do an episode involving the Justice Society of America, I got somewhat intrigued. I missed it on TV, so I tracked it down.
That was a fun movie. Not a GOOD movie, mind you, but it was a lot of fun, especially for a comic geek. The whole show (2 episodes, strung together as a single movie) was utterly different than what I'd seen of Smallville in the past, and so was engaging on a whole different level. The writer, Geoff Johns, is presently writing the massive 'Blackest Night' crossover in DC comics, and has done some solid work in the past, and his knowledge of, and love of, the genre and the source material shone through.
The initial scene starts out with Chloe Sullivan (who I don't know, but apparently calls herself Watchtower and works in the same capacity that Oracle does in the comics) encounters a very strange man with a glowing staff (one that looks really familiar to fans of the Starman comic). He introduces himself as Sylvester Pemberton and says he knows all about Chloe's friends, the not-yet-justice-league... and is about to give a warning when someone attacks and kills him. We don't see the fight. Chloe is tossed into a trash dumpster, and we only see what happens from her point of view. When she comes out, pemberton is dead, apparently impaled on icicles.
Comic fans know who Pemberton is, of course. He was known as 'The Star Spangled Kid' back in the day (the day when you could call yourself something like that without irony or sounding completely mental). As Chloe and clark investigate further, they discover a shadowy group of criminals from many years before... one that included Pemberton, and a roll call of other familiar names; Wesley Dodds, Alan Scott, Jay Garrick, Carter Hall, Ted Grant, Al Pratt, Kent Nelson... Abigail 'Ma' Hunkle. These people were all arrested long ago, but the charges against them ended up being dropped after allegations of jury tampering and evidence contamination were discovered. The group had then appeared to go their seperate ways and then vanish. Again, we know who these people are, and know they are not criminals... but the characters in the show DON'T. Clark decides to go visit someone else in the group... Wesley Dodds.
This is probably one of my favorite sequences in the whole show. We see a filthy, run down apartment. It is covered in old newspapers and dozens of half drunk cups of coffee, coffee grounds, coffee pots... and dozing in a threadbare chair is a sad looking, care-worn old man. We see then, in a set of sepia tone, rapid cut sequences, the murder of Sylvester Pemberton. We see a little more of the fight than we did previously. Then the man starts awake... clearly dreaming the whole sequence. He looks even more sad now that he's awake, and gets up, goes over to a dressmakers dummy on which is haning a trenchcoat, gas mask, fedora, and a odd looking gun. He puts these on, and for a moment we see The Sandman. One of the truly great golden age characters. He hears a voice around him, and he turns to face whoever it is, and we see the lenses of the gas mask frost over...
If I have a regret about this scene its that we didn't see anything that happened next. I would have liked to have seen The Sandman go down fighting, but unfortunately, the next time we see him, clark is standing over his body, having discovered it in the run down apartment. But that brief glimpse of The Sandman had a lot of impact for me. It thrilled me, it saddened me, it wrenched at my gut... it had genuine emotion to it, not the forced pseudo-emotion of the typical teen soap-opera that Smallville usually is.
By this time, Green Arrow is on the case also, and trying to get pemberton's staff. Instead, he runs into Courtney Whitmore, who seems to have already managed to sneak into the police station and liberate it. She, of course, becomes Stargirl, in time. In this, she is Pemberton's protege. She seems to know all about Oliver Queen as Green Arrow, and vanishes before he can stop her. Green Arrow and Chloe track down Pemberton's car... which he apparently lived out of, and discover he has a notebook detailing each of the superheroes in the series in great detail: Clark included, along with Aquaman, Bart Allen, Black Canary, Green Arrow and others...
Clark goes to visit the next member of the criminal group on the list... Carter Hall. Hall is the curator of a museum, but everything in the museum is covered with sheets, and he claims the museum is closed. He is gruff and short with Clark, having little to say to him. I was amused by the casting choice for Carter Hall, ass-kicking archeologist... he is played by Michael Shanks, known mainly for playing Doctor Danial JAckson on Stargate SG-1... ALSO and ass-kicking archaeologist. Despite that, the casting seemed... off. He just doesn't fit my image of Hawkman.
At any rate, there is someone else there... a homeless man who is babbling to himself and clutching a bowling ball bag. Carter Hall is very protective of him, and we find out this is Kent Nelson, another member of the group Clark is investigating. And this is another of my favorite sequences... Clark uses his X-ray vision to look into the bag, and sees the outline of a helmet in profile. But as soon as he does it and works out the shape, it turns on its own and faces him, staring back. Lovely, creepy, and very true to Doctor Fate.
I'll not go into the whole show, but its a comic lover's dream. Doctor Fate could have carried the show on his own, truth be told. When he transformed from the homeless Kent Nelson into the near omnipotent Doctor Fate, it was chilling. The actor did an amazing job of transforming himself into a completely different person. He stopped being the timid, mumbling loon, and suddenly became a calm, confident, and wise superhero. The costume was dead on. As was Stargirl's, with the exception of the Cosmic Rod which looked like it had been made out of PVC pipe from Lowes. Hawkman's costume looked good too, but the actor didn't quite fill it out the way he should have... which might actually have been accurate, given that this Carter HAll had been out of the Superhero game for at least 20 years at this point, and was likely out of shape.
There are tons of references to the comics in there, as well as the welcome appearance by some well-loved characters... Martian Manhunter, for one, who was now sporting a green shirt under a blue leather jacket, and red leather crossbands on his shirt, supporting a pair of shoulder holsters (apparently, he'd been de-powered in the series somewhere. Thankfully, Dr Fate corrects this and gives him his full abilities back.) Another suprise character was Amanda Waller, working for Checkmate (I never thought I'd see THAT in anything other than a comic) and namechecking the Suicide Squad.
The one thing that bothered me a bit, up until the very end, was the villain. Icicle is a minor villain at best, and its really hard to imagine him being capable of taking on, let alone *killing* several powerful members of the Justice Society. We see him kill Star-Spangled Kid, Sandman, and Doctor Fate (!) on screen, and its implied that he may have killed Hourman and Doctor Midnight as well. He was nothing more than a whiney teenager... even in one on one combat, Stargirl was able to hold her own against him for a good amount of time... someone with more experience should have had no trouble with him. Even at the end, when he takes on pretty much everyone at once, while wearing the Helm of NAbu, he doesn't make a completely credible villain. How can this guy hold his own against Clark, Green Arrow, Hawkman, and Stargirl and be on the verge of beating them before MArtian Manhunter has to arrive to save the day? They should have defeated him easily.
However, it made much more sense at the end, when he is being 'debriefed' by Amanda Waller. She'd never intended him to succeed in the first place. She thought he'd be good enough to take out some of the minor members, but never thought he stood a chance against the others... her purpose was to bring the Justice Society back together and get them working with the new generation of heroes. *click* It suddenly makes sense. And then, just when you think she's simply ruthless, but her heart might be in the right place, She turns around and gives him an ironic smile and raises a gun. "Welcome to the Suicide Squad." she says as she pulls the trigger.
If they brought in the Suicide Squad, I would start watching the show regularly.
It wasn't perfect. The dialog was clunky. Some of the costumes looked a little silly. The special effects weren't exactly top notch. I'm still not convinced that Icicle could have taken out Dr. Fate so easily.... But no comic fan could have gone unaffected by seeing the newsreel footage of the arrest of the various members of the Justice Society. Seeing the golden age memorobilia set reverently in cases at the JSA's brownstone was like a love letter to comic book fans. Everything was so iconic... the Golden Age Green Lantern Ring, the Flash's helmet, Hourman's hourglass, Hawkgirl's helmet...
There were so many small mentions of things in there, easter eggs for the fans; Green Arrow nervously commenting that his emails with Black Canary were 'purely platonic', references to the Superfriends and the Trouble Alert, a coy reference to Lois and Clark, Martian Manhunter commenting that he likes cookies... Mentions of Inza Nelson and Shiera Hall... the antagonistic relationship between Hawkman and Green Arrow.
This, ladies and gentleman, is what a superhero TV show should be. Heroes fighting villains. Continuity with the past. References to the comics and a wider universe beyond the narrow confines of a single comic character. This felt right. And whats more, they left it open for these characters and more to return. Hawkman and Stargirl tell the others that they have located the former members of the JSA, and their children, and proteges, and will be bringing them together. The painting and the criminal records clearly showed some characters that could prove very interesting... Ted 'Wildcat' Grant, Jim 'The Spectre' Corrigan... even the Golden Age Black Canary. From the comics, we know that Alan Scott has children who take up the superhero mantle (Jade and Obsidian)... who knows, maybe they will even meet Ma Hunkle's successor as Red Tornado. :)