Fraser Sherman's Blog

Allow me to introduce Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey

frasersherman — Sat, 25 May 2013 13:21:47 +0000

As I’m working my way through Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey books (to date from the first book, Whose Body?, through Lord Peter Views the Body), I thought I’d take a moment to give some background on him. Because they don’t make detectives like Wimsey any more.
The Golden Age of detective stories (generally considered the time between the two World Wars) was an age when British writers dominated and so did amateur detectives (Sherlock Holmes is often identified as the founder of the school, even though he was a professional PI). Cops were considered rather tacky and blue-collar and “amateur” in those days referred to doing something for love, not money—and was therefore assumed to be on a higher plane (EW Hornung’s 19th-century master thief, Raffles, is always referred to as an amateur even though he’s stealing to support himself). Murders frequently took place among the upper classes, often at country-house weekend parties (which I satirized in The Wodehouse Murder Case).
Many of these works vanished into obscurity; when Agatha Christie wrote about her Partners in Crime parody stories, she could barely remember some of the originals she’d been mocking. Wimsey survived.
As we learn over the course of the series, Lord Peter’s family are the Dukes of Denver, one of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families (at the time, a lot of aristocrats were going into commerce to make ends meet but the stereotype remained) though it’s his brother who has the title. A World War I veteran with some degree of shell-shock, he’d adopted his rather inane manner as a coping mechanism in the wake of the war. According to a biographical sketch by Sayers, his saving grace was when he wound up solving his first criminal case: Suddenly he had a focus for his first-rate mind and a way to make a difference in the world. He’s assisted in his work by Bunter, his aide (or “batman”) during the war and now his valet. Bunter has a keen mind of his own, a good deal of charm and a skill with photography which comes in handy (this is back when cameras and chemical film developing were a lot more demanding than they are now).
Surprisingly, Sayers isn’t terribly snobby about Peter’s aristocratic lineage (although as an Englishman of 55, I may just not register the snobbery), but she does present him in a very elitist way. Peter’s taste is superb: He collects rare books, wears the best tailored suits, and enjoys the best food—all of which he has the taste and discernment to appreciate. In one of the short stories, Peter’s triumph hinges on the fact his palate can identify any wine. A later novel compares his refined appreciation for music with the boors who only fake it. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Peter speaks disparagingly of someone who was turned down for the club because he smoked a strong cigar before sampling a superb port (thereby making it impossible to taste the wine properly).
The Golden Age had many flaws. As Raymond Chandler grumbled in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” the elaborately constructed plots often required people to act in batshit ways. And the aristocratic settings were light-years removed from reality or from the brutality and pain that murder brings. Nevertheless, Chandler’s hardboiled school of writing didn’t consign the Golden Age style to the trash heap. The best stories survived, and they have amateur detectives following in their wake today in countless stories.
Peter Wimsey isn’t for everyone. But then, he doesn’t try to be.

Movies, TV and Books

frasersherman — Sat, 25 May 2013 12:51:36 +0000

Courtesy of a Hitchcock film festival at the Carolina Theatre, TYG and I got to see NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) on the big screen. A classic thriller in which an unfortunate fluke leaves Cary Grant looking like the secret agent infiltrating James Mason’s spy ring, forcing Grant to go on the run until he can figure out what’s really happening. What’s striking rewatching this is how leisurely it is compared to so many modern movies—long scenes without rapid cuts, very little in physical action (Grant does not show hitherto untapped abilities to perform like James Bond) and a lack of constant danger, but without ever being boring. With Leo G. Carroll as a spymaster, Eva Marie Saint as a pretty stranger and Martin Landau as Mason’s lackey, this has multiple memorable moments including an encounter with a crop-duster, the finalé on Mt. Rushmore and Saul Bass’s striking opening credits. Deserves every bit of its rep. “The trouble with attractive women is that I have to pretend I have no interest in making love to them.”

LEVERAGE wrapped up its final season as Timothy Hutton and his crew continue bringing justice to those beyond the reach of the law by employing classic scams and cons against them. The finalé reveals why Hutton shifted his team to Portland and what happens to the team after everything wraps up. This was a fun series, and I’ll miss it. “Justice or order—one day you’re going to have to make a choice.”
ELEMENTARY gives us a second present-day Sherlock Holmes series; where the BBC version present Holmes at his coldest and most calculating, Johnny Lee Hooker’s Sherlock is a drug addict on a self-destructive spiral since the death of his beloved Irene Adler. Enter Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), an ex-surgeon turned “sober companion” for recovering addicts (by the end of the series, she’s graduated to apprentice detective). Further from Doyle than the BBC version, but very entertaining in its own right. “Over the course of my career, I’ve plotted at least seven murders that took place in crowded restaurants.”
BIG BANG THEORY‘s latest season doesn’t change much (despite Leonard and Penny now being a definite couple)—they’ve got a formula set and they follow it faithfully. Whether the humor makes up for the sexism is a matter of taste—I still watch, even though I’m wincing often enough at the sexism (both toward the women and toward Raj for being, in the eyes of the writer, suspiciously girly). “I’ll keep that in mind, unnamed crew member in a red shirt.”

LORD PETER VIEWS THE BODY was the first of Dorothy Sayers’ two short-story collections in the series, and I must say, she doesn’t have the knack she does with longer works. At short-length, Wimsey’s silly-ass babble and eccentricities dominate things to the point the plot is buried, and they aren’t entertaining enough in their own right to make the stories work. Disappointing.
As a fan of Patricia McKillip’s, I was equally disappointed in her third novel, STEPPING FROM THE SHADOWS (I should mention I liked her first and second). This is her only mainstream work and her poetic style feels decidedly “off” here; a bigger problem is that it’s a coming-of-age novel (following a nervous pre-teen all the way through to adulthood) and I rarely find those interesting. Nor did it help that most reviews and the back cover present it as a magical realist fantasy, when it’s a perfectly mundane books (the supernatural elements are metaphorical and imaginary) and I really hate that.

Calling it a day

frasersherman — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:57:15 +0000

This wasn’t as poor a week as last week, but it wasn’t as big an improvement as I’d hoped.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I have a bad habit when circumstances leave me really behind: my brain decides it’s hopeless trying to do anything as I’m clearly not making my goals, and balks at doing more work. After last week’s mess, that’s dogged me all this week. It didn’t help that I have a couple of other things to take care of for Mum, and that I gave up Tuesday to get recertified in CPR/First Aid. I gave serious thought to postponing so I could some extra writing done, but I’d have had to eat my reservation fee. And on the whole, I’m glad it’s done.
Output this week was pretty mediocre. I got a little bit more done on Brain From Outer Space, continued to toy with Fiddler’s Black and finished my replotting of Southern Discomfort. I gave a last redraft to Original Synergy and Learning Curve, which will be in the collection I hope to have out on Smashwords by the end of June. That was much less than I wanted to do.
I did keep my Demand Media stuff up, though today I just threw up my hands. I’m still dealing with Mum’s stuff, and I’ll be quitting early anyway (TYG and I have plans) so my brain is once again saying, what’s the point?
Still I did get these done:
•What Happens When You Borrow From Life Insurance?
•Do I Owe Taxes if I Got Money From My Mother When She Died?
•Can You Write Off Your Homeowners Insurance Deductible on a Claim?
•Can Babysitting Be Considered Charity on Federal Taxes?
•Can Credit Card Debts Be Attached to Real Estate?
•Do You Pay for Property Taxes & Homeowner’s Insurance if You Own a Timeshare?
•Can I Invest in My Husband’s Business With a Self-Directed IRA?
•Can You Dissolve an LLC if You Owe Creditors?
•Can I Claim Private Pre-K as a Tax Deduction?
•Do Losses Have to Be Reported in the Same Tax Year?
•Does Homeowners Insurance Cover Stolen Equipment?
•Should I Convert $10,000 to a Roth IRA?
•If My Husband Has a Mortgage on a House He Bought Before We Were Married, Is it Half Mine?
•Can I Contribute to an IRA With a Credit Card?
•How to Lower Taxes on the Sale of Inherited Rental Property
•Can I Deduct College Student Rent From My Income Tax?
•Can You Deduct Shipping Costs for Medical Supplies on Your Tax Return?
•Can I Deduct My Labor Expense for Investment Property Repairs?
•Do IRA Fees Go Against the Annual Contribution Limit?
•Can a Sole Proprietor Sell Capital Assets?
•How to Deduct Losses With a Roth IRA
•What Is the Monthly and Annual Net Profit Margin?
•How to Estimate a Claim on Homeowner’s Insurance for Storm Damage
•What Types of Investment Theft Losses Are Deductible?
•IRA Contributions’ Effects on Income Tax Owed
•Are Homeowner’s Insurance Loss Payouts Taxable?
•Is Landscaping Tax Deductible?
•Illinois Real Estate Law – Quitclaim Deed Vs. Warranty Deed
•Can a Live-In Partner Take Children as a Deduction on Tax Returns?
•Can You Take a Tax Deduction for Wedding Receptions?
And that’s that. Rather than make ineffective efforts at work, I’m going to quit now and enjoy myself. Hopefully I’ll be able to reset after the three-day weekend.

Redemption

frasersherman — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:53:18 +0000

Redemption is a powerful source for story material. The fallen hero who tries to stop her fall, the villain attempting to rise, the tyrant or fiend who sees the light. It’s also damn tricky.
Redemption actually involves several inter-related things: Can you earn forgiveness from someone you’ve wronged? Can you prove to society that you deserve to be forgiven? And can you truly become a better human being?
Case in point: It’s a tenet of Christianity (subject to multiple interpretations and sectarian disputes of course) that if you sincerely repent your sins and turn to Jesus, you’re saved. Which is unsettling: It’s nice to know I can’t do anything so horrible God won’t take me back, but if someone murdered my family, I’d probably hate the thought the killer can get into Heaven.
Salvation in this case doesn’t have anything to do with secular, society forgiveness. Being saved doesn’t and shouldn’t get you out of prison, or community service or whatever it is that you’ve done. God’s justice and our are separate things (even if we all agreed on what God’s justice was, or if it exists)
This leads us to Return of the Jedi. Orson Scott Card was quite PO’d that merely by saving Luke, Darth Veder gets to join Obiwan on the light side of the force. And Card has a point, particularly after seeing Anakin’s massive bloodshed in Ep3. On the other hand, if Vader had repented and turned to Jesus, Card would presumably have to concede that he gets a free pass (or doesn’t that hold in the LDS?).

My point is that for a redemption arc to work as drama, it can’t be too easy. Even in a Christian context, you need someone to seriously face up to the fact they’ve been a complete shit before they make the change. And then they have to prove it. Dramatically speaking, we need works as well as faith.
In a non-religious context, we have Thunderbolts #9 as an example (cover by Mark Bagley, all rights to current holder) Kurt Busiek looks back at the second Avengers team, which included former “evil mutants” Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch and ex-criminal Hawkeye. In the original stories, their transition to heroes was smooth; here Busiek shows the public much less willing to let them off the hook. Mark Waid’s Incorruptible series (covered in some of my book review posts) does a good job by taking Max Damage’s past crimes seriously: He has lots to atone for, and Waid doesn’t make it easy.
Long-running series pose their own problems. In comics, as several creators have said, redemption comes about simply because some characters have been around for years and in trying to find new angles, it’s natural to start seeing things from their sides. This can create an interesting development (Magneto’s off-and-on stints as hero, Catwoman’s moving from villain to anti-hero). But it’s to let past crimes slide (one Marvel editor suppposedly vetoed a Venom series on the grounds he was just too murderous).
In TV, charming, attractive actors can make it easy to see characters as more sympathetic than they are. Syler, the murderous power-stealer of Heroes‘ first season became implausibly sympathetic as the series went on; I can’t but suspect some of that was because pre-Spock Zachary Quinto had a female fan base.
Regina in Once Upon a Time frequently comes off as tragic. She’s lonely and desperate for love and Lana Parilla conveys her pain very well. That doesn’t change the fact she was a coldblooded killer who devastated a kingdom from her hatred for Snow White and near the end of this past season was willing to kill the entire cast provided she and her son could escape. She starts out the year trying to be good but when it turns out people still don’t trust her, she turns—and I can’t help feeling the show wants us to sympathize with her more than she deserves (after all she’s done, assuming she’s still a killer is hardly unreasonable).
Likewise, Vader’s turn to the light worked for me because it’s such a powerful dramatic moment. It might be a lot harder to buy if I’d read it on the printed page.

Is Our Writers Learning: Cold Days (here there be spoilers)

frasersherman — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:09:22 +0000

The newest Harry Dresden novel COLD DAYS does what the predecessor Ghost Story failed to do: work as a series book and a standalone.
The story: Newly drafted as the Winter Knight of Mab, Faerie’s Winter Queen, Harry gets his first mission: Take out Mab’s daughter Maeve. Killing an immortal is, of course, a challenge even for Harry, but he learns that the next night is Halloween, when immortals enter the mortal world and become killable.
So Harry re-enters the mortal world himself, reuniting with his friends and trying to figure out how, exactly to whack Maeve. Plus as usual, problems multiply. Maeve insists her mother’s gone mad. And someone’s plotting a break out from a supernatural prison that will as a side-effect level most of Chicago.
What I Learned: If you’re going to have a story arc for a series, books have to work as both arc installment and standalone (I get into that at the link to Ghost Story). This one works fine in its own right: Harry has a challenge and he accomplishes it (Maeve turns out to be behind the planned breakout. She loses). It has the added touch that things have changed enough during Harry’s supposed death that it has a modestly different feel (nothing radical, but enough to entertain me).
But it also advances the series: We learn that creatures from Outside are plotting to destroy everything and that “Nemesis”—someone working with or for them—is behind most of Harry’s long-running problems (such as the Black Council operating inside the council of wizards). That’s not a wildly original goal (or name) but it is more than we’ve had before (the Black Council was always presented as the big bad, not the puppets).
What else I learned: Romantic tension is much overrated. Harry and Murphy have been friends since the start of the book and flirting for the past three or four (and Harry’s apprentice, Molly, has an interest in him too). And that’s as far as it goes (Dresden writes good romances in his Codex Alera series, but not so well in The Dresden Files).
One of the truisms that gets tossed around about sexual tension (interpreting that very loosely) is that writers should prolong it as long as possible. Superman and Lois and Clark should forever be a triangle rather than a relationship (some writers were pushing against the Superman/Lois marriage long before it got rebooted). If male and female characters of TV show X get together, it will kill viewers’ interest. While it’s true a fixed relationship cuts off certain story options (Peter Parker obviously has more flexibility in his romance plots now that he’s single again), after a certain point I just think it’s ridiculous. Sure, it works in romance novels, but romance novels end, usually happily. All Butcher does is acknowledge the sexual tension and let it sit there, kind of like cold suet pudding.
Yet another thing I learned: Even though I’m a comics fan, Harry’s geek references feel overdone (I honestly don’t remember him being such a comics fan, but of course it’s years since I read the first book). Strangely enough even though I’m not a sports fan, I wonder why more fictional characters don’t make sports references—after all, probably more people in the real world do.
On the plus side, Butcher does an excellent job of keeping the tension up, and building the obstacles up to a nail-biting finish. And he’s done it consistently. We start off with the initial Kill Maeve mission. Then throw in complications (Maeve’s lies, attacks by faerie assassins). Then Harry learns of the potential destruction of Chicago. He has a hazardous encounter with a powerful entity that really doesn’t want to talk to him, and learns just what’s at stake. And finally we come to the big finish as an overwhelming faerie/outside force attacks the prison against Harry’s much smaller troops. At some point I think I’ll reread this and note how Harry manages to survive all this—after all, threatening the hero is simple, having him win can be much tougher.

Tuesday’s child is fair of links

frasersherman — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:54:57 +0000

From a year ago, Crooked Timber reviews how little protection employees have in the workplace and the conviction of some libertarians that as long as you can change jobs, there’s no reason to think “sleep with me or get fired” is coercive. It’s long but very good.
•Robert Nielsen looks at monopolies on a small local scale.
•Slacktivist ponders on the appeal for believing we’re surrounded by evil monsters. Here he thinks about it some more.
•A slacktivist post from 2007 (Slacktivist Fred Clark periodically links to some of his older work before he moved to his new website) on the problem of seeing everything from the shareholder’s point of view.
•More from Paul Krugman about austerity. Kevin Drumm suggests that the moral aspects (Cut waste! Reign in reckless spending!) make it palatable to the public, but aren’t necessarily what people in power think.
•Conservative voices shriek with outrage about Obama’s conduct on pretty much everything. Including “umbrellagate.” Which is not meant to excuse Obama’s spying on journalists or indicting them for reporting on leaks. Or the White House view the war on terror is the new status quo. Though I know plenty of conservatives who are fine with endless war on terror providing it targets Muslims. After all, this is the greatest battle of all human history!
•Sure enough, right-wingers still manage to bring the crazy: One guy suggests people pushing for impeachment are really running a Democrat scam, while another suggests if Americans are paranoid about UN black helicopters and internment camps that don’t exist, this is a good thing.
•In the same spirit as the right-bloggers, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan explains that even if Obama had nothing to do with any of the current crop of scandals, he’s at fault because rot spreads from the top, sort of.
•Here’s a more nuanced look at the IRS’ alleged persecution of conservative political groups.
•A great post on why society needs feminism.
•American industry has its own solution to the tragedy that killed 161 garment workers in Bangladesh this month: Move to other countries where death gets less attention.
•Americas North and South on the truth behind a recently circulating image of a weeping Brazilian Indian.
•A homeowner in a mortgage modification program paid his bills early to avoid missing a payment. Wells Fargo forecloses on the ground he paid too soon. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren asks federal regulators why bank frauds don’t lead to more prosecutions.
•A Republican-backed agriculture bill means probably big money for big agriculture but $20.5 billion in food-stamp cuts. And in North Carolina, legislators push a bill responding to footage of turkey farmers beating birds with metal bars. The bill “would ban photography at a place of employment, make it a crime for anyone to make false statements on a job application (such as when an animal welfare activist applies for a job at an agribusiness operation for the purposes of an investigation), and make it mandatory to turn any recording over to authorities within 24 hours.”
Nothing new here. Multiple states have “produce disparagement” laws that make it a crime to say (for example) that eating Texas beef or Florida oranges is unhealthy. But not being new doesn’t make it good.
•Defeating the Dragons remembers her painful adolescence—one problem with it being her parents didn’t believe adolescence existed. She was supposed to act as an adult, but without any of the power that comes with that (I didn’t realize until I read her “about” but DtD is another refugee from the Florida Panhandle, though my parents were never that conservative, thank goodness).

Slight change of plan

frasersherman — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:03:31 +0000

I was going to start writing some fiction but I’m too dang tired. So blogging, then some research, and fiction later in the week.
•A week ago I mentioned Paul Krugman’s analysis of the “austerians” insisting we cut spending to the bone to save America. Krugman’s conclusion was that in addition to getting the facts wrong, what steers austerians is the moral aspect: Austerity is usually phrased as forcing America to shape up, sober up and tighten its belt! Spending is always the problem, never revenue (which is bullshit)!
In attempting to refute Krugman, Michael Kinsley confirms him, asserting that “the problem is the great, deluded middle class—subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition.”
What exactly is Mr. Kinsley thinking about? We’re coddled because we get a modest Social Security pension (does he believe like Pete Peterson that Social Security turns our retirement years into “a publicly subsidized vacation.”? Is it the fact we have a public education or public roads that coddles us? Would Kinsley advocate privatizing the water systems so for-profit companies can charge us higher rates? He doesn’t say. Nor does he explain what sort of suffering he’s willing to face, only that there must be sacrifices (Steven Pearlstein, at the link, is quite open about the fact he shouldn’t be treated to the kind of wage cuts he advocates for factory workers).
As LGM points out, Kinsley’s position is that inflation is still the ultimate threat, no matter how low it is (like Michael Myers, it’s out there somewhere, waiting …) and that we’re in the same fiscal position as we were in the 1970s (we’re not). Krugman says Kinsley gets the 1970s wrong. He also suggests one reason people object to government spending to get the economy flowing is that if the economy’s okay, we won’t embark on structural reforms (he links to Pearlstein making that argument)—which I tend to assume are a euphemism for “kill any government spending that doesn’t benefit me or the lobbyists I know)
Of course, Kinsley doesn’t seem to feel that Wall Street firms and banks who benefited from the bailout are being coddled, or that morality is needed among those who crashed the economy or that hedge fund managers (who get great tax breaks on their income) need to be told “the party’s over.” Somehow it’s the middle clss. Did he think this sounded less mean than blaming the poor as David Brooks likes to do?
I think Krugman had it right, as do those who compare the push to slash the deficit to the run-up to the Iraq war: saying we shouldn’t invade or we shouldn’t slash spending is seen as frivolous, as doing nothing (in Kinsley’s words, choosing dessert over spinach). People like Kinsley and Brooks, they’re tackling the problem, they’re making the hard choices, they’re telling people the ugly truth, that everyone who’s not rich needs to suffer.
When it’s a choice between nothing and a bad policy, I’m reminded of the wisdom in that old doctor’s rule: first do no harm.

More on immortals

frasersherman — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:02:06 +0000

A couple of weeks back, I posted a link to and discussed John Rogers’ blog post on immortality. His basic point being that a world of immortality would be one in which nothing is forgotten and old issues never die. Case in point, “wasn’t it a little goddam tiring in the 2000 election to still be refighting the 32-year old Vietnam War records of the two candidates for the US presidency? Now imagine it was the Civil War.”
This example does not prove his case. All it really proves is that Vietnam was an anomaly.
As David Blight shows in Race and Reunion, by the end of the 19th century, the “meaning” of the Civil War was solidifying, and that meaning was that everyone involved had been noble soldiers, fighting for their rights and their homeland, and that as they were all American brothers, they could come together, reunite and salve the wounds. Thinking about slavery and its role in the conflict was too uncomfortable and posed too many challenges; easier by far to go with the myth and let Jim Crow lie.
So I doubt someone (specifically a white someone) from the Civil War would be carrying around huge grudges into the 20th century. He’d undoubtedly freak out at the civil-rights movement, but whites who were born long after the Civil War freaked out enough—I doubt it would have been worse.
A black guy, however? He might carry a lot of grudges when he saw how the end of slavery often meant just slavery by another name. So it’s not like Rogers’ thesis is completely wrong, but it’s not completely right (and as far as fiction goes, I’d have no problem accepting his view as a premise).
As to Vietnam, like I said it was an exception. Not more traumatic than the Civil War, but certainly the most controversial war of the last century. And the dispute over Kerry’s war record wasn’t the result of old farts clinging to issues (though we certainly do get that in politics), it was the work of an aggressive right-wing campaign. Jerome Corsi, who wrote the book questioning Kerry’s war record, was a Republican operative dating back to the Nixon era (when he’d gone up against Kerry and the other anti-war veterans for the first time). It’s not about the scars Vietnam placed on people, any more than the Birthers are about the scars from the 1960s.
I sometimes wonder if we don’t make a big fuss about generational/age differences simply because it’s something we’re familiar with: Everyone’s dealt with older and younger people so it’s easy to see that as a defining characteristic (like arguments that an age gap between couples poses an ineradicable cultural difference rather than just one more way two people have different life experiences). But I don’t think it’s any bigger a cultural gap than moving to another country, or even within the country (the cultural range of experiences just in the US is pretty wide), it’s just the gap we deal with most.
(Cover by Jack Sparling, rights belong to current holder)

Graphic novels

frasersherman — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:40:14 +0000

NEMO: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill is a so-so entry in the League of Extraodinary Gentleman series. Following a battle with Ayesha of Kor, Nemo’s daughter Janni leads the Nautilus to Antarctica where they encounter HP Lovecraft’s lost alien city from At the Mountains of Madness, pursued by grown-up boy inventors Tom Swyft, Frank Reade and Jack Wright (I presume Tom isn’t spelled “swift” because he’s still under copyright). The usual in-jokes, but I felt like it didn’t amount too much—Janni isn’t as interesting as her dad and the inventors aren’t big enough names now to provoke much interest (and at times it felt like Moore was venting his distaste for them, like for Harry Potter in Century: 2009)
BATMAN: City of Owls by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo follows up Court of Owls as the sinister Court of Owls launches an all-out attack on Batman and his allies, only to find, of course, it’s harder to defeat the Darknight Detective than it looks. Good, though the Court lost most of its interest for me when it went from being a decadent cult of Gothamites (as it is here) to a worldwide conspiracy in later stories (because I’ve seen way too many of those).
I’d never heard of the British super-villain the Spider before reading Albion, but he has enough of a rep, it seems, that simultaneous with that series, Titan Books released KING OF CROOKS, a collection of his first three adventures by Ted Cowan, Reg Bunn and Jerry Siegel (some ads credited Siegel as the Spider’s creator, presumably to boost interest from American readers). I can see why he became a cult item (he’s much closer to a DC or Marvel villain than what I remember reading Britcomics growing up), and the stories are quite entertaining as the Spider mixes ruthless ambition to become King of Crime with taking time out to defeat rival villains such as the villainous illusionist Mirror Man. The Siegel material is weaker than the Cowan stuff, but overall an entertaining read, nicely drawn.
Eric Powell’s The Goon debuts in THE GOON: Rough Stuff as he struggles against both the zombie priest plotting to take over his cities but federal agents seeking to take down the Goon’s boss. Amusing enough, but the Goon’s never clicked with me the way he does a lot of people.

UNWRITTEN: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words by Mike Carey and Peter Gross has Tommy finally take the fight to the Cabal by tapping his fictional counterpart’s magical abilities; in alternating chapter, we learn what the Cabal’s enforcer Pullman has been doing through the centuries. Last time I read this series, I complained the Cabal’s goals were kind of mundane; it turns out that’s because even they don’t know what’s really going on. This clears up a lot of mysteries, except where it can possibly go from here. Great installment though (cover art by Yuko Shimizu, all rights reserved to current holders)

The Iron Man and the Yellow Face (spoilers for Iron Man III. You’ve been warned)

frasersherman — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:42:38 +0000

When I heard Ben Kingsley would be playing the Mandarin in Iron Man III, I was peeved.

Here we have a movie featuring Iron Man’s archenemy, one of Marvel’s most prominent Asian characters (though a very stereotypical one), and he’s being played by a white guy. Sure, Kingsley is awesome, but there are awesome Chinese actors out there. Why not use one for a Chinese villain and maybe work on making him a little less of a “sinister oriental” stereotype?
As it turns out, because the Mandarin is a scam. Guy Pearce is the real villain, the leader of AIM (a criminal cartel in the comics, here a high-tech corporation) who’s developed a method for turning humans into living bombs. When they carry out a terrorist attack, there’s no recognizable bomb parts left to track it back (Law and the Multiverse discusses the legality of the “Extremis” treatment here and other Iron Man-related topics).
The Mandarin is just a front Pearce uses for a series of terrorist attacks culminating in the murder of the president, after which Pearce’s ally, the VP, will take the White House. When Tony Stark confronts the Mandarin, he turns out to be a drug-addled British actor who doesn’t quite grasp that real people are getting shot in tandem with his televised statements (which freaks out some conservatives for not presenting a truly scary terrorist and showing the real villain as an American). And Kingsley’s performance as the actor is glorious.
So given that plot, I can see why they weren’t worried about casting a Chinese actor … but then again, why not cast a Chinese actor?
The standard response is that “race shouldn’t matter. It should be the best actor” but that rarely works the other way: Minority actors are much less likely to get cast in a role that isn’t specifically written as Asian. And there’s a long history of Asian roles being played by white guys: Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan have never been played by an Asian, and actors as Caucasian as Katherine Hepburn, Alec Guinness and Mickey Rooney (Dragon Seed, Passage to India and Breakfast at Tiffany‘s respectively) have been cast in Eastern roles (more recently Prince of Persia and Avatar the Last Airbender have Asian leads played by white guys). So yeah, turning a prominent Asian villain into a white guy still bugs me (but not, obviously, enough to stop me seeing it)
(Cover art by Jack Kirby, all rights with current holder)