Category: Review Page 4 of 8

Through a happy coincidence, the final issue of this comic shipped in the USA last Wednesday. Or, as they call it over there, 5/2. Coincidence, or something more sinister? No. It is a coincidence.

Anyway, 52 was, for US-based DC Comics, something of an experiment; instead of one issue shipping once a month, 52 was a year-long weekly comic, with the same writers and breakdown artist, as well as a variety of recurring pencillers and inkers. Given that a large number of comics from DC (and, to a worse extent, their market rivals Marvel) have been shipping at a less-than-monthly rate in recent years, there was inevitably a fair amount of scepticism amongst comic retailers and readers alike as to whether the weekly frequency would be maintained. And if it was, what kind of quality would we be looking at?

Overall, though, 52 was pretty good. Set in a world where the three main heroes (Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman) are absent, the story – notionally told in real time, like the TV series ‘24’ – showed the DC universe from the perspective of a cast of less-well-known characters, though of course some of the villains remain the same – Lex Luthor, for example, tries his best to exploit the absence of Superman. The story had a broad canvas, veering from the alleys of Gotham to the far reaches of outer space, and as such did a pretty good job of keeping my interest, though some weeks were inevitably better than others.

There were quite a few mysteries that ran through the series – the identity of new character Supernova (I guessed that one), the Elongated Man’s search for his dead wife (I did not see the twists there coming, and liked the revelations), and overarching it all, though only really apparent in the last six weeks or so, the mystery of which DC villain was trying to manipulate events to their own benefit.

This latter point led to the re-establishing in DC Comics of the ‘multiverse’ – a series of 52 alternate Earths existing in parallel with each other. I don’t pretend to understand the way it’s all meant to work – I’m not that bothered as long as there’s consistency, and not slavish adherence to continuity – but I have to admit I don’t truly understand what DC see as the benefit here, both in storytelling terms and in terms of luring new readers. Unless, of course, they’re going to make it simple for newcomers to know that on (say) Earth-10, there’s no Superman, or there is but he’s made of Fuzzy Felt, or whatever.

You either have to make the stories very easy to understand (often not the case at the moment, unfortunately), or ensure new readers are so very keen to know more that they’re happy to go to the effort of figuring out the multiverse thing (not really something DC should rely on, to my mind). Maybe DC will publish some cheap, or even free, primer on their universe, I don’t know. It would certainly be a good idea, as the comic-buying market is increasingly limited already, and this restricted marketplace could just be amplified by the fact that the comic stories now take place in one of 52 alternate universes, and you need to be able to figure out which.

Still, it did pretty well for them in terms of sales and interest, which was a good thing in the short-term. Especially as sales on some new titles have been near-disastrous (the Flash relaunch, for example), and the aforementioned scheduling problems have plagued the whole DC line, with fill-in issues aplenty and even creators dropped mid-storyline to take on a new team in the hopes of getting things back on a monthly basis (I’m looking at you, Wonder Woman).

52, then. A pretty good read, but in my humble opinion, far from a good thing in terms of attracting new readers.

This musical has been playing in London for a while now, after being very well received in the USA. This is a slightly belated review, as I saw it on Valentine’s Day – as any cheapskate in a relationship will tell you, nothing says romance like Black Magic. Ahem.

Given that a large number of musicals currently playing in London are based on the work of well-known groups (Abba, Queen, Boney M), or on known plotlines (Mary Poppins, the Lion King, Spamalot), Wicked arguably swims against the current tide, as it’s a new story… albeit one linked to an established franchise; it tells the history of the Witches in L Frank Baum’s Oz series.

The green-skinned Elphaba (hope I’ve spelled that right – it’s meant to be derived from the first syllables of Baum’s name), who eventually becomes the wicked Witch, and her opposite Glinda the Good, are shown as having known each other since an early age. However, instead of Elphaba being evil from the start and Glinda as nice as pie all along, things are shown to be a fair bit more complicated – and it’s hard not to sympathise with the way Elphaba turns… well, yes, to the Dark Side.

And that phrase, and its inevitable associations, fits – there are several very good moments when events slot into place, creating circumstances and characters that are recognisable from the Wizard of Oz film, and the neat way that things come about creates an appropriate sense of sickening inevitability – notable by its absence from the recent Star Wars ‘prequels’, I feel, though both sought to tell the tale of a good person turning bad.

In fact, the ‘prequel’ description is rather inaccurate, as Wicked provides not only the history of various characters in the known Oz story, but it runs alongside it and indeed continues after Dorothy’s departure, showing new takes on known events, so in its way the story is more of an extrapolation or revelation of unseen events (in the same Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ shows us more about the two characters from Hamlet, and the events run alongside the play by that Shaxbard chap).

But, you’re probably asking by now, is it any good? The answer, to my mind, is a definite yes. The music’s strong – particularly when it comes to Elphaba’s songs of upset and annoyance (‘Defying Gravity’ and ‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished’ are ones which stick in my mind even a fortnight later), and the staging is very good indeed – as you can see from the photo above, there’s a mechanical dragon which looms over the stage (and occasionally does more than merely loom), Oz the Great and Terrible looks both of those things, and the final part of the first half was so effectively done it sent a tingle down my spine . The cast – of whom I’ll freely admit I only recognised Miriam ‘Caramel Bunny’ Margolyes – all put in sturdy performances, and all showed that they could belt out a tune and hold a note where it was required (what is technically known as ‘singing’. I think), and deliver a sad line or joke as well.

Given that it has plot elements of a phoney war, manufactured scapegoats, and victimised minorities, it’d be all too easy to suggest that Wicked is influenced by the events of 11 September 2001, but as the novel (by Gregory Maguire) upon which the musical was based was written in 1995, I don’t know how much stock I’d put in that sort of claim. Then again, page and stage are very different places, so maybe there’s something to it. Regardless, the way that things in Oz are shown to have a darker side is cleverly done.

You have to bear in mind that I don’t like musicals (simple reason for that: I’m all about the story, and most musicals either ignore story as much as possible [Show Boat*], or seem all too willing to let the tale grind to a halt to shoehorn in another song’n’dance number [Chicago*]), but I found this a lot of fun – it’s good to look at, and the music is solid, and the story’s interesting. Definitely recommended, and in what may be a first for me, a musical that I would happily see again.

*Yes, I’ve seen both of these. A previous employer took me (and various clients) to see them as part of a corporate evening out. So I speak from experience – those are two evenings of my life I won’t be getting back.

It’s been a few weeks since I caught this at the cinema, but it’s worth me giving a quick review, I think – if nothing else, it gives me a chance to post the picture to the left there; Daniel Craig’s first press conference after it was announced he was playing James Bond led a lot of the papers to be rather scathing, but the majority of them did a volte-face when they saw the actual film. Apparently they’re not able to distinguish between the actor and the role, though perhaps such a tenuous grasp of the difference between reality and fiction is a job requirement for journalists.

Anyway, Casino Royale is a very decent Bond film, and a good solid thriller in its own right. It features the standard elements of the Bond films (pre-title sequence, him saying his name in – y’know – that way, specific drink orders, etc), but unlike, say, its immediate predecessor (the woefully patchy Die Another Day), it also features a strong plot with a discernible through-line (as they say), and good performances by all the cast.

One or two of the lines are a bit wonky, but the general pacing’s very good, and they do well in coming up with some stunt sequences that are actively inventive (the free running bit, for example), and the pre-title bit sets out the stall well; it’s a flashback, and then they go into a flashback within that. Fairly unusual for a Bond film, let’s face it, and streets ahead of the thinking that leads to such nonsense as invisible cars.

Anyway, heartily recommended if you want a good entertaining film with some actual character development for Bond, and some respectable twists. And worth seeing on the big screen for the ‘wow’ factor – one or two scenes had the (admittedly fairly lively Saturday night) audience I was a member of actually gasping, which must mean the film-makers were doing something right.

O’Neil is a long-time comic writer and editor, and this novel is set in the DC Comic Universe, re-telling the origin of The Question, a character O’Neil wrote to considerable acclaim in the 1980s.

Vic Sage, alias the Question, isn’t a standard superhero character – he’s essentially a man in a trenchcoat and fedora whose face is rendered blank by a mask. Quite a creepy image, and in making the character an orphan, the character truly is a blank slate, and his driving motivation in the comics (under O’Neil, at least) is that of curiosity, as well as a wish to see justice done, though that’s often almost incidental.

I was a huge fan of the Question comics (even writing letters of comment , some of which, to my adolescent fanboy glee, were published in issues’ letter columns), so I was keen to see what O’Neil did in the prose medium.The results are … let’s say mixed.

In the novel, starting from scratch and set in in the present day, a lot of the ideas underpinning the comic series are lost, and the need to reintroduce the characters – and even other DC Comics characters like Batman – takes a fair amount of time, leaving certain elements overplayed and others rather truncated. It starts rather uncertainly, too, and it’s not entirely clear who or what of the various elements described is going to prove relevant, and what’s just scenery.

The original Question, created by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, was a single-minded and pretty harsh character, and in order to start afresh, the 1980s comic series as good as killed him off, but this novel doesn’t quite have the same approach, and to my mind that was a bit of a pity. The reduced role of Myra, the love interest, is a shame as well, and indeed she’s reduced to little more than a love interest, and a rather token one at that – there’s no real reason why Vic should be so keen on her after so few interactions.

That said, the book hangs together pretty well, and some of the action sequences are quite tautly written, even if characters do have some frankly unlikely names (Emiline Grandyfan, Thaddeus Crate, and Eustis McFeely, for example), which rather disrupts the flow when reading. A pity, especially as some of the dialogue is quite snappy.

A cautious recommendation to fans of the original comic series, I guess, but in all honesty you’d be better off hunting down back issues (especially the first 12-15 issues), or even checking out the character’s appearances in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series over the past few years.

Touted as ‘the new Da Vinci Code’, this novel is, thankfully, much better than that, though I guess it shares some themes – secret societies, and the notion of a true history of the world which remains hidden from the general population.

The Travellers of the title are people born with the ability to travel out of the material realm as we know it into other dimensions. They’re seen as a threat and tend to be eliminated by the ‘Brethren’, who are keen to make the world as regulated and ordered as possible. Travellers are protected by a warrior group known as the Harlequins, and this book – the first of a trilogy, it seems – tells the story of a Harlequin called Maya trying to protect two could-be Travellers from the Brethren.

From that description, it might all sound a bit science-fictiony, but the book’s set pretty much in the present day (perhaps a few years in the future), with most of the trappings of today, and quite a bit of the paranoid-sounding stuff about surveillance and tracing people has its roots in current events.

It’s pretty well-written, even if plot requirements sometimes force characters to speak in exposition-ese, and there are some interesting twists. I mentioned above that it’s the first of a series, and rather irritatingly this isn’t really very clear from the cover, and I half-wonder if the themes (which will be familiar to anyone who’s seen The Matrix or read The Invisibles comic series) won’t feel a bit stretched over more than a couple of books. But I was sufficiently interested to make a mental note to keep a look out for the next book (in paperback, mind).

There’s a certain amount of internet hoo-hah about the author, as he apparently ‘lives off the grid’ like characters in the book, but I’ll take that with a bag of salt, frankly. Anyway, the book’s not bad, and if you want a dose of easily-absorbed conspiracy-laden reading, I’d recommend it.

This is the first novel by Wolstencroft, who’s one of the creators of the BBC drama ‘Spooks’ (known as ‘MI-5’ in the USA, I believe). I’d read positive reviews of the book, and as I’d enjoyed the first couple of series of Spooks (until they’d seemingly been forced to let plots be driven by the need to write various cast members out), I was pleased to get this for 75p in a charity shop.

As you’d expect, it’s a thriller, about two men, Charlie and George, who, at the start of the book, work in a photo developing booth in London. This happy little situation is shaken up quite quickly within fifty pages or so, with some really rather clever twists and gradual revelations about the two men which undermine the expectations which have been built up.

However, once the whole spy and espionage aspect of the book gets going, the constant twists and turns of the plot start to border on laughable, reminding me of Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ in that characters seem incapable of staying dead when seemingly demised. There are also some sequences which I simply couldn’t follow – there’s one in the ladies’ toilet of Oxford Circus tube (does such a place exist? I have my doubts), and another chase in a tube tunnel, where I honestly had no idea what was meant to be going on.

The number of pages devoted to events seem disproportionate too – dozens of pages detailing a trip on the Eurostar (albeit a covert one), but at another point in the book, bam, a new chapter begins and they’re in a totally different country with scant explanation of how they got there. And the plot hinge upon which the whole book moves seems pretty feeble too, and certainly not worth the Security Services creating the mayhem involved in the book.

Finally, there’s one ‘big revelation’ which I found utterly risible, and which, if you don’t want to spoil the book, you can avoid by jumping to the next paragraph. Right, still here ? Okay, brace yourself then, this is it: the two baddies chasing Charlie and George are actually the same person – Rose Willets is Latham. Yes, she apparently is also Latham, a male character, referred to as ‘he’ in the narrative, in spite of the fact that the male pronoun should not apply to a genuinely dispassionate omniscient narrative such as the book purports to take. Quite how she is also meant to be he is never fully (or at least plausibly) explained.

To be fair, Wolstencroft’s writing style is generally quite readable, but the incessant twists of the story undermine the whole thing to the extent that, like Dan Brown’s inexplicably popular bad book, I just kept reading to the end in vaguely awed and appalled fascination – to see what he would come up with next; and not in the sense of being hooked by the tale and concerned about the characters, as they’re pretty much a uniformly unsympathetic bunch.

So, far from recommended, and disappointing after a good start. I got it from a charity shop, as I mentioned, and it’ll be going back to the same place. Here’s hoping they benefit more from selling it again than I did from reading it.

Gladwell’s first book, ‘The Tipping Point’ was a perhaps surprisingly well-received book analysing social trends, and what makes them emerge, fade or become part of ongoing culture. In Blink, he looks into the power of snap judgments, and the benefits of being able to make speedy (but accurate) decisions.

There are some very good examples – a fake sculpture which fooled most experts, but nonetheless made some say hmm at first glance, and a marriage guidance counsellor who can analyse discrete moments of behaviour and make startlingly accurate predictions about the likelihood of the couple staying together. There are more examples like this, and Gladwell writes well, and yet I must admit I was vaguely disappointed with the book.

Whereas Gladwell’s previous book analysed the people and factors involved in social trends, Blink doesn’t repeat the analysis in Blink; after two hundred pages or so of discussing why it’s a good idea to try to ‘think without thinking’, he spends about a dozen pages talking about how one might go about doing this. Maybe my expectations were inappropriate, but it seemed to me that it would be a good idea to actually suggest ways that the reader might develop the skill of making snap judgments.

So it’s an interesting read, but it rather fails to reach a conclusion – or, at least, the one I was hoping for; as opposed to ‘hey, that could be something to try’, it remains slightly removed, restricted to the lives of others, and thus in the realms of ‘oh, that’s interesting’.

Which the book is: interesting. But not, I felt, fascinating or gripping. Cautiously recommended as long as you don’t expect suggestions as to how to apply the lessons of the book to your life, but if you’re looking for a pseudo-self-help title, you’ll probably feel slightly let down. I certainly did.

Yes, this is a review whilst it’s previewing, but rather than being a bit previous, I like to think I’m ahead of the game, okay ?

As you may know, this is a stage musical based on the film ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’, which has the blessing of the remaining Pythons, though it’s mainly (and when you see it, pretty clearly) an Eric Idle-steered item. It’s done well on Broadway, and now it’s transferring to the West End of London, as is Tim Curry, who plays King Arthur.

So, what’s it like? Well, it’s a mix of bits from the film and new bits – a few new songs, expanded versions of favourites like the title song, and new plot-type bits. Overall, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t truly hang together as a story as well as the original film does.

Notably good are some of the new songs, especially ‘This is the song that goes like this’, a great parody of the big romance numbers that all big musicals seem to feature, and the song about needing more Jews involved to get ahead in musicals (though this feels considerably less relevant in the UK than I’ll wager it did in the USA). And the sets are very good, and there’s quite clever use of Gilliamesque animated bits (the picture above is the animated ‘Trojan Rabbit’ which appears on the interval curtain, for example).

Less good is … well, the thing is, because there are whole scenes which are lifted directly from the film, Python fans will be used to hearing them performed in a particular way, and whilst it’s perfectly understandable that the cast want to make the parts feel their own, or to vary them when they’re doing so many performances, bits like the Knights of Ni, Constitutional Peasant, the Black Knight and French Taunter are so well- known and well-loved (and rightly – for my money, Holy Grail’s one of the funniest films there is), that hearing them performed by other people, with different emphases and inflections just feels wrong – like overhearing someone reciting Python in the pub or on the train, if you know what I mean. It has the unfortunate side-effect of making it feel almost like a student review version of the material, and that’s not really what you want from a West End show.

That said, there are some nice jokes, the staging’s really very good, Curry holds it all together well, there are enough in-jokes to keep Python fans happy, and there are new audio bits from Idle (introducing) and Cleese (as the voice of God). I have to accept that (my ongoing quest to spot the Pythons notwithstanding), this is probably about as close as I’ll ever get to seeing Monty Python live, and as it’s a fun night out, I’d cautiously recommend it; cautiously, as you have to accept it’s NOT the Pythons, but once you do that, it’s really pretty good.

Of course, as it’s currently in Preview, it may well be that the critics will slate it when it opens ‘officially’ (after all, the member of Python are revered throughout the western world, but particularly in the UK, so there might be cries of ‘what have they done to our Python?’ or the like), so it might close quickly and you might not get a chance to see it, should you so choose. Or, it might be hyper-well-received (as I gather it was in the USA), and so tickets will sell out well in advance, so you might not be able to get tickets before 2008… now do you see why I decided to go to the Preview?