BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

There was once talk of turning Gotham Central into a TV series, which would have been nice to see, although I don't think there are any showrunners who would have been able to master the tricky balance of supervillain theatrics with much more grounded police detective business that even Rucka occasionally had trouble pulling off in the comic (for instance, the gaudily dressed heroes from the Teen Titans stuck out like a sore thumb when they were awkwardly integrated into the not-so-gaudy Gotham Central).

But after watching how Luther handles John's bordering-on-superhuman investigative skills or the theatricality of both John's adversaries and his sociopathic adversary-turned-ally Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) without looking goofy and lame, I think Cross would be the perfect showrunner for a TV version of Gotham Central if it ever becomes a possibility again.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

If that TV adaptation never surfaces, then think of Luther as a pretty good Gotham Central spinoff in which Elba is terrific as deceased Gotham detective Crispus Allen, who's reimagined himself as a David Bowie-loving(*) British supercop in some sort of crime-ridden afterlife that's a cross between the original Life on Mars and Lost's much-maligned sideways universe.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

(*) You gotta love a procedural that has a lead who idolizes Bowie and, as it's implied in one episode, uses his music to help him think, although why Luther didn't choose a Bowie track as its theme music--it went with Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus," which actually isn't too shabby--is as puzzling as any of John's cases.

Dwayne McDuffie (1962-2011)

Dead at 49, Dwayne McDuffie was an incredibly prolific comics and TV animation writer who, as a story editor and frequent scriptwriter for Justice League Unlimited, helped make that cartoon the most satisfyingly written DC Animated Universe show since Batman: The Animated Series. But McDuffie's greatest contribution remains Milestone Media, the indie comics company he co-founded in the '90s to make the way-too-white superhero genre more diverse and to give comics writers and artists of color more opportunities behind the scenes.

"It showed that there could be actual black people in comics," wrote comics reviewer David Brothers in a Black History Month tribute to McDuffie and Milestone that he posted a couple of weeks before McDuffie's death yesterday. "The company was full of people who looked, acted, and talked like people I knew. This is a big deal, believe it or not."

It was also a big deal for Asian American readers like myself who grew up in a multiracial world that wasn't being reflected enough in superhero comics (sadly, it still isn't) and were looking for comics that featured Asian characters who were raised in America like we were and weren't foreigners in corny dragon-themed or martial arts-themed costumes that were the Asian equivalent of the "headband and yellow disco shirt" that The Boondocks once joked about in regards to Luke Cage's costume. Milestone responded to the lack of Asian American characters in superhero comics by creating the immortal hero Xombi and Third Rail, a Korean member of the Blood Syndicate, a superhero team comprised of gangbangers who were mutated by radioactive tear gas during a police crackdown on gangs. Latino and gay characters also inhabited the Milestone universe.

The most popular and enduring Milestone creation is McDuffie's Static character, a.k.a. Virgil Hawkins, a constantly bullied inner-city high-schooler who gains the ability to manipulate electricity after being exposed to the aforementioned radioactive tear gas. When the original Static comic debuted in 1993, I was glad to finally come across a comic about teens where the high school setting was hardly as clean-cut as Riverdale High or whatever campus subjected Peter Parker's Spider-Can to frequent wedgies. In other words, Ernest Hemingway High resembled the school I went to. Virgil's campus was beset by gang violence and racial conflict, elements that were watered down but still addressed in Static Shock, a more kid-friendly animated version that McDuffie was also involved in.

There had been previous attempts by other publishers to target readers of color, but the characters of color in those titles weren't as fully realized or three-dimensional as Virgil and the other Milestone characters were.

I got to meet McDuffie at a 2009 San Diego Comic-Con panel about diversity in comics where one of the projects that were discussed was Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, a graphic novel that followed in Milestone's footsteps and featured a short story I created, "Sampler." As a teen, I enjoyed Static, Blood Syndicate and Icon, so I was thrilled to meet McDuffie, who praised our GN and called it long-overdue.


I also enjoyed McDuffie's work on Justice League Unlimited. He came up with the premise for "The Great Brain Robbery," an amusing episode in which The Flash and Lex Luthor switched bodies and Michael Rosenbaum, who played Lex on Smallville when he wasn't providing the voice of The Flash on JLU, got to voice both his live-action and animated alter egos. McDuffie also crafted the show's Cadmus arc, which gave ample screen time to characters who were not so well-known to viewers who were unfamiliar with most of the DC books--like The Question, Green Arrow and The Huntress--and followed those heroes as they uncovered a government conspiracy to dismantle the Justice League due to fears that the team would become as corrupt as its parallel universe counterpart, the fascist Justice Lords. A high point of the series, the Cadmus arc dared to question (no pun intended) and critique the superhero genre's right-wing tendencies.

Although McDuffie's working relationship with DC, which distributed the Milestone books, had soured in recent years (some have viewed DC's mistreatment of McDuffie as racist), he continued to work on the company's animated projects. He scripted the feature-length adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's excellent All-Star Superman comic, which dropped on Blu-ray and DVD the same day he died.

McDuffie may be gone, but his fight to bring more diversity to comics rages on, whether it's in the form of Secret Identities or David Brothers' writing.

"You don't even see that these days," said Brothers in a tweet referring to how the diversity in the Milestone titles ventured to include not just black characters. "They weren't black comics. They were comics."

AFOS: "The Android's Dungeon" playlist

Airing next Wednesday at 10am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "The Android's Dungeon" (WEB80) from July 17-23, 2006.

The WEB80 playlist consists of selections from scores to film adaptations of comic books or graphic novels. Several of these films actually aren't from the superhero genre, particularly Ghost World and American Splendor. Even though my print comics writing debut was in a superhero graphic novel, and I was entertained by Iron Man and its sequel (which I've jokingly referred to on Twitter as Iron 2 Man because of its weirdly arranged logo in the TV spots), I'm not really much of a fan of the superhero genre. As Matt Zoller Seitz recently noted in a Salon piece that's a great read despite Seitz's tendency to refer to superhero flicks as "comic book films" (last time I checked, comics aren't just about superheroes anymore), the superhero genre has gotten too clichéd. It's also too white right now. A few days after I posted that fans of DC's short-lived All-New Atom are worried that the company will kill off the series' surprisingly non-stereotypical Asian hero Ryan Choi, what does DC do? They bump him off, of course. Screw DC (the non-Vertigo-and-WildStorm part of the company, that is, because Vertigo and WildStorm are the only DC publishing divisions I give a shit about these days).


1. Danny Elfman, "The Batman Theme," Batman: Original Motion Picture Score, Warner Bros.
2. Shirley Walker, "Main Title," Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Reprise
3. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "Molossus," Batman Begins, Warner Sunset/Warner Home Video
4. Eytan Mirsky, "American Splendor," Everyone's Having Fun Tonight!, M-Squared
5. David Kitay, "Theme from Ghost World," Ghost World, Shanachie
6. Danny Elfman, "Spider-Man 2 Main Title," Spider-Man 2: Original Motion Picture Score, Columbia/Sony Music Soundtrax
7. John Ottman, "Main Titles," Superman Returns, Warner Sunset/Rhino
8. Thomas Newman, "Rock Island, 1931," Road to Perdition, Decca/UMG Soundtracks
9. Marco Beltrami, "Main Title," Hellboy, Varèse Sarabande
10. Robert Rodriguez, "Sin City End Titles," Sin City, Varèse Sarabande
11. Ennio Morricone featuring Christy, "Deep Down" (from Danger: Diabolik), Canto Morricone: The Ennio Morricone Songbook, Vol. 1, Bear Family
12. Dario Marianelli, "The Dominoes Fall," V for Vendetta, Astralwerks/EMI
13. John Ottman, "Suite from X2," X2, Superb/Trauma
14. James Horner, "Rocketeer to the Rescue/End Titles," The Rocketeer, Hollywood

Reruns of AFOS: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm. To listen to the station during either of those time slots or right now, press the play icon on the blue widget below the "About me" mini-bio on this blog. I wish I included Oldboy or Akira in that 2006 playlist. Oh well.

My starting six for Asian Pacific American comic books

Last year, music critic/blogger Oliver Wang invited his readers to post lists of six films that they think would best serve as an intro to Asian American cinema if someone asked, "What the hell is Asian American cinema? School me." Chan Is Missing, a Wayne Wang indie comedy that broke new ground in 1982 for its multilayered portrayal of the frequently stereotyped Chinese American community, showed up on several readers' lists.

It took a long time for the APA-dominated comics industry to catch up to Chan Is Missing and other equally groundbreaking '80s and early '90s indie films by APA directors. When I was a teen, I frequently thought, "Why aren't all these Asian creators doing comics about themselves or rather, about us? Okay, there's Xombi by a pair of non-Asians over at Milestone Media. But that's it? (NOTE: I didn't know Lynda Barry was one-quarter Filipina at the time.) Are these Asian guys whitewashed or something?"

The lack of APA protagonists was one of many reasons why I lost interest in comics and didn't become a regular reader again until the mid-2000s (mainly because of the strong writing in titles like Y: The Last Man and Gotham Central). It was a great time to come back to comics because that part of the decade saw several APA creators unleashing graphic novels with richly crafted APA characters that were on a par with Chan Is Missing.

I'm looking forward to seeing more APA comics or graphic novels. I was even involved in one of them (Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology). Whether they're semi-autobiographical works that examine APA identity issues or post-racial escapist fare that doesn't address any of those issues at all (but it doesn't matter because look, yo, it's an APA brother as the hero!), here, in alphabetical order, are six essential APA comics or graphic novels, just in time for APA Heritage Month.


1. The All-New Atom (writer: Gail Simone/illustrators: various, 2006-08)
DC's most recent revival of their microscopic superhero only lasted 25 issues, but its wisecracking lead, Ray Palmer's Hong Kong-born protege and successor Ryan Choi, still suits up as the Atom in other DC titles and even the Batman: The Brave and the Bold animated series (some fans of the Choi incarnation fear that after these post-cancellation appearances, the character, whose series tanked sales-wise, might get killed off someday). For this offbeat series, which was partially created by Grant Morrison and collected in four trade paperback volumes, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman writer Simone set up a nifty and inventive premise that raises the question "Do superheroes ever think about the destruction they leave in their wake?" The shrinking technology that Professor Palmer made use of as the Atom has left some nasty side effects on the physics of his hometown Ivy Town and turned it into a Sunnydale-like hotbed of paranormal activity. After his professor mentor mysteriously goes AWOL, Choi defies the wishes of his Hardass Asian Father and assumes the Atom mantle to protect Ivy Town from monsters, size-changing serial killers and a microscopic extraterrestrial warrior race that lives inside Choi's dog Copernicus. Oh yeah, and there's a 30-foot-tall naked red-haired chick (if the My Life in Miniature arc ever becomes a movie, naked Giganta ought to be played by Christina Hendricks--and somewhere, a nerd's pants explode).


2. American Born Chinese (writer/illustrator: Gene Luen Yang, 2006)
Colored superbly by artist Lark Pien, Yang's absorbing third novel centers on a whitewashed Chinese junior high-schooler who's filled with enough self-hatred to fuel an Esther Ku routine, and it ties the kid's struggles beautifully to the Chinese legend of the impish and heroic Monkey King. As a kid who drew his own comics, Yang was prone to some of the same kinds of whitewashed behavior that his novel depicts. He would doodle bucktoothed caricatures of his own people, without realizing they're as offensive as the Asian-bashing cartoons he would later find objectionable as a grown-up (he named the school that's a source of torment for the title character after one of these racist cartoonists, Pat Oliphant). American Born Chinese's bucktoothed Cousin Chin-Kee character was a way for the Bay Area native to exorcise that personal demon (much like Lynda Barry, whom I'll get to later). The confessional feel of American Born Chinese is quite Catholic--Yang himself is a devout Catholic--and the candor with which he tackles self-hatred and identity recalls the earlier and more personal works of another guilt-ridden Catholic, Martin Scorsese.


3. Chew (writer: John Layman/illustrator: Rob Guillory, 2009-present)
Layman and Guillory's clever, funny and sometimes gross Image series imagines a world rocked by a Y: The Last Man-like bird flu catastrophe (was Layman inspired by the footage of struggling Vietnamese chicken farmers in Laura Ling's 2006 bird flu piece for Current TV?). In the Chew-niverse, Poultry Prohibition is in effect, the poultry black market is as dangerous and murderous as the drug trade, and the FDA, suddenly the most powerful government agency in America, starts a Special Crimes division and turns to "cibopath" Tony Chu to bust all the crazies who have emerged since the bird flu. Chu's cibopathy allows him to see the history of any item he eats, from where it originated to who prepared it. So if Chu were the primary on the case of the Barbara Bel Geddes Alfred Hitchcock Presents character who killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and got rid of her weapon by serving it to the cops for dinner, Miss Ellie wouldn't have stood a chance. Guillory modeled Chew's often repulsed but brave detective hero after Lost cast member Ken Leung, whose ease with shifting back and forth between humor and seriousness would make him an ideal screen portrayer of Chu (although I have a feeling Leung, who had a bit part in X-Men: The Last Stand as a porcupine man who must be a nightmare in the sack for the ladies, might want a break from playing guys with weird powers). Here's a reason to admire Chew's white scriptwriter: he reportedly refuses to sign off on a screen adaptation if an APA actor isn't cast as his creation. In whitewash-crazy Hollywood (The Last Airbender, Mickey Rourke's possible Genghis Khan biopic), I wouldn't be surprised if Layman ends up in one hell of a fight. Heads up, Hollywood: Chu-style biting might be involved.


4. Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President (writer/illustrator: Kaiji Kawaguchi, 1997-2001)
24 foretold a black president. The West Wing's final season envisioned a Latino one. Kawaguchi's soapy but riveting political manga imagined a Japanese American prez--several years before either of those shows introduced their fictional chief executives of color. Kenneth Yamaoka, the New York senator whose campaign to become the Democratic presidential candidate is the focus of Eagle, bears a few similarities to President Obama. Both are charismatic, self-deprecating former lawyers of biracial heritage who hail from Hawaii and have to put up with racist outrage over their ascension in the political arena. The major difference between Yamaoka and our current president is that Obama doesn't have an adopted daughter and an illegitimate son who fall in love with each other. The somewhat disgusting incest subplot is the weak link in an otherwise thoughtful and intriguing exploration of political strategizing and racism on the campaign trail. (The five-volume Eagle is currently out-of-print, but I unearthed the first two volumes at a local library and absorbed both chunky books in one sitting. Yamaoka's campaign manager Arthur McCoy resembles Human Target star Chi McBride so much that I couldn't help reading aloud some of McCoy's dialogue to myself in a McBride-style rasp.)


5. One Hundred Demons (writer/illustrator: Lynda Barry, 2002)
For her first autobiographical work, which she called an "autobifictionalography," the creator of the alt-weekly fixture Ernie Pook's Comeek took a cue from a Zen monk who would exorcise his personal demons by painting them, and she revisited her own demons from her past. They range from frustration over the travesty that was the 2000 Florida presidential vote recount to regret over choosing lousy boyfriends (the nameless pony-tailed boyfriend in the "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend" chapter is based on her ex Ira Glass). Many of the novel's most enjoyable or poignant sections involve Barry's days as a gawky, fatherless misfit who bonded with her fun-loving Filipino grandma and was subjected to nonstop verbal abuse from her far less compassionate half-Filipino mother. One Hundred Demons is an interesting precursor to American Born Chinese, and like Yang's novel, it's upfront about the painful side of growing up Asian in America and nostalgic for the delightful aspects of it, such as Barry's Pinoy relatives' impromptu dance parties (the American Born Chinese equivalent is Transformers toy battles with other Asian kids). Barry's rubber-limbed drawing style is especially charming during the chapter about dancing, which finds Barry paying tribute to the "keepers of the groove" and "the babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all."


6. Shortcomings (writer/illustrator: Adrian Tomine, 2007)
I knew Shortcomings was terrific right when it began with a swipe at overly earnest APA indie films ("Why does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?"). On the subject of Shortcomings, which collects a three-issue arc from his series Optic Nerve, Tomine told The Economist's Intelligent Life, "It became a challenge to create something honest. I didn't want to make a book that said 'it's cool to be Asian,' or 'racism is bad.'" That honesty--best exemplified by Tomine's refusal to make his New York-hating theater manager protagonist Ben Tanaka a completely likable romantic hero who's always in the right and who triumphs in the end--is why Shortcomings isn't just one of the best APA-made graphic novels but also one of the aughts decade's best novels, period. Tomine's downbeat (but not overly dour) and elegantly illustrated novel has often been compared to Annie Hall (which is also about a heartbroken misanthrope who has to brave a city he can't stand in order to attempt to patch things up with the one that got away), but the way Ben sabotages his relationship with his activist girlfriend Miko to indulge a fetish for white chicks and then amusingly suffers the consequences is more Larry David than Woody Allen. While many readers might detest Ben, it'd be hard to find anything to dislike about his mischievous and much less sullen Korean lesbian best friend Alice, whose acerbic exchanges with Ben are among the novel's highlights ("All Asians might look the same to you, but my family would spot your Japanese ass a mile away").

October is Filipino American History Month...

... but to me, Fil-Am History Month is every month.

However way you observe FAHM, it's the perfect time for me to put the spotlight on comics that were drawn by Filipino talents, whether they're American or non-American. Several Pinoy illustrators have lent their pencils to Marvel and DC titles, such as former Flash artist and Secret Identities contributor Greg LaRocque (who, like many Filipino artists this month, did a wonderful gesture by auctioning off comic art to raise money for typhoon relief) and Secret Invasion artist Leinil Francis Yu.

I don't have any of Yu's Marvel work in my collection, but I dug up from my shelves the 2005 Batman/Danger Girl crossover special he collaborated on with inker (and komiks art historian) Gerry Alanguilan:

The superhero artwork by these Filipino artists frequently looks spectacular, but as Budjette Tan noted in a 2003 Comic Book Resources column about the abundance of Filipinos in the American comics industry since the days of Alfredo Alcala and Whilce Portacio, "so few are writing and drawing about who they are and where they are from." The autobiographical comic strips by Bay Area cartoonist Rina Ayuyang are an example of a Filipino creator writing and drawing about the Fil-Am experience for a change.

I first caught some of Rina's underground comics at a Cartoon Art Museum exhibit earlier this year and liked what I saw. Her Whirlwind Wonderland compilation, which she debuted at APE last week, is one of several books I grabbed at the expo.

Good thing I brought my copy of Whirlwind Wonderland with me while I was at my parents' house. I had my mom translate for me the Ilocano-speaking auntie's dialogue that went untranslated during a strip in which Rina can't understand what her relatives are saying. For instance, "Pagtartarabahuam? Taga ditoy ka kadi? Ilugan nak to man nga agawid no malpas ti pangaldaw?!" means "Where do you work? Are you from here? Can I get a ride so I can go home after we eat?!"

I'm bored with the superhero genre these days (my current favorite superhero comic is an anti-superhero title, Dynamite's The Boys, in which Garth Ennis takes the piss out of supers), but if I ever feel like creating a Fil-Am superhero, instead of an inability to see through lead, I'd make his weakness be an inability to understand his Ilocano-speaking aunties.

Production design porn from the Topps Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine

Long before movie studios promoted their tentpole releases through elaborate sites or postings of HD trailers on Apple's trailer site ("Watch the Avatar trailer a day before its premiere in theaters or James Cameron will shoot a puppy!"), there were these things called official movie souvenir magazines that were exactly like the studio sites promotional material-hungry film geeks can click to nowadays. When I was a kid, either Starlog Press or Topps would devote an entire one-shot mag to an upcoming blockbuster and fill the mag with a spoilerrific photo summary of the movie, fluffy cast interviews, slightly less fluffy crew interviews and the only part of the mag I liked, behind-the-scenes pictures and concept art. Starlog Press did tie-in mags for the Star Trek, Rocky and James Bond franchises, while Topps focused on blockbusters that it produced trading cards for, like Tim Burton's Batman and Touchstone Pictures' wannabe Batman, the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy reboot.

Do mag publishers still put out official movie souvenir mags? I wouldn't be surprised if High School Musical: The Musical or whatever it's called recently had one.

In 1989, Batman was my favorite movie. Twenty summers later, uh... not so much. But both score music-wise and production design-wise, the film remains one of the most impressive from that decade. Production designer Anton Furst's bleak vision of Gotham City won him an Oscar and was so pitch-perfect for this incarnation of Batman that DC incorporated the late Furst's architectural designs into the early '90s comics.

Here are several interesting photos and drawings from my well-preserved copy of the 1989 Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, which I still like to occasionally leaf through even though the Pop Art-colored backgrounds and frothy late '80s fonts are a poor match with the photos from this darker-toned Batman movie--the mag looks like it was designed by the Saved by the Bell opening titles designer.


A visual effects crew member inspects the miniature Gotham set that was built for the Batwing attack sequence.


Was this where the Gotham Central police headquarters name and comic book series title came from?


The Batman shoot in England encompassed most of Pinewood Studios' 18 soundstages, including the stage where this opulent office for Jack Palance's Carl Grissom character was constructed, and Pinewood's 95-acre backlot.


Batman co-creator Bob Kane poses with either Michael Keaton or one of Keaton's 80 stunt doubles from the movie.


"Top speed... unknown"? Judging from the sequence in which Batman and Vicki Vale escape from the Flugelheim Museum in the Batmobile, it looked like its top speed was 40 mph. Batman's ride moved so slow it looked like Aunt Harriet was behind the wheel.


Burton and Furst sit atop the Furst-designed Batmobile. That's the first and last time we'll ever see a giant dildo in something published by Topps--unless the company does a series of cards for the Sex and the City sequel.


The Batmobile apparently has a detachable penis.


The nerdiest of nerds still can't look at pictures of the Furst-designed Batcave like the ones on these two pages without getting riled up over Alfred letting Vicki step into the Batcave to see Bruce Wayne. That moment actually doesn't bother me as much as the revelation that a pre-Joker Jack Napier murdered Bruce's parents (a last-minute script change that Batman co-screenwriter Sam Hamm hated and was unable to fight against) or the sight of Batman, who has a strict code against killing in the comics, continually slaughtering the Joker's thugs like he's Rambo in a funny-looking gimp suit.


Why wasn't it called the Batplane like in the comics? The Batwing sounds like something you find inside a box at Popeyes Bat and Biscuits.


How the hell did Batman get his thick cape to fit in that cockpit?

He looks like a cosplayer who wanted to mash up the Tom Baker Doctor with the Joker.


Kim Jong Il is... Batman.

Rattle and hurm: My Watchmen movie soundtrack (if I got to pick out the songs)

Even though the Watchmen feature film doesn't hit DVD and Blu-ray until July, I want to look at one of my quibbles with the much-discussed box-office dud: its not-very-imaginative soundtrack.

It's rare to see a comic book that comes with its own soundtrack. Lalo Schifrin composed some themes for his son Ryan's Devil's Due comic Spooks, Rob Schrab picked out several songs or themes from movies like The Empire Strikes Back to accompany pages of Scud: The Disposable Assassin, and of course, eight years before Schrab introduced the indie rock-and-John Williams-scored Scud, Alan Moore's groundbreaking Watchmen quoted from "All Along the Watchtower," "Neighborhood Threat" by Iggy Pop, "You're My Thrill" by Billie Holliday, "Sanities" by John Cale and "The Comedians" by Declan McManus, international art thief. Moore made diegetic use of "Neighborhood Threat" (Dan Dreiberg's lonely walk back to his apartment) and "You're My Thrill" (the Owl Ship tenement rescue sequence).


(A complete list of the tunes that Moore's Watchmen referenced was posted by Shawn from thus spake drake, who notes that "The chapter and title uses [in which lyrics by the likes of Cale and Bob Dylan were quoted], while they work lyrically with the story, don't necessarily correspond musically with the tone of the comic, so they're best as a reference and not a literal backing track.")

The British comics author's song references captured quite well the anxiety and sadness of the paranoid times Moore's screwed-up superheroes lived in. So what does Zack Snyder--who said he wanted to be as faithful to the DC miniseries as possible, save for a few exceptions like the omission of the big-ass squid, which pissed off the most hardcore Watchmen fanboys while I had no problems at all with the squidless climax--do with the song soundtrack for his adaptation? He keeps key songs like "All Along the Watchtower" and "You're My Thrill" but omits other tunes from the comic and sprinkles the soundtrack with tired and overused existing songs like Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence."

"Ride of the Valkyries" was a clever choice for Apocalypse Now's copter attack sequence. But thanks to countless movies and shows with Wagner-scored Vietnam War sequences like Watchmen, I now wish I could hop into a time machine to 1978 and kill Francis Ford Coppola so that he never puts "Valkyries" on his Apocalypse Now soundtrack.

Who did they hire to be the music supervisor on Watchmen? The narrator of The Wonder Years? Steve West from Radio Nigel or the music supervisor from BBC's Ashes to Ashes would have been a better music supervisor. Snyder's existing song choices in the Dawn of the Dead remake, my favorite Snyder movie, were far less hackneyed (Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around," Richard Cheese's cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness"). I'm an Elvis Costello fan, so I'm bummed that Snyder's Watchmen omitted "The Comedians," even though it comes from what Costello considers the worst album of his career, Goodbye Cruel World. However, "The Times They Are A-Changin'," which was referenced in the comic's fake Adrian Veidt cologne magazine ad, was perfect for Watchmen's main title sequence, my favorite title sequence in a 2009 movie so far.

I was listening to Prince's "Sign O' the Times" on my iPod earlier today, and I thought, "Man, I would have put that tune on the Watchmen movie soundtrack and swapped selections like 'The Sounds of Silence,' '99 Luftballons' and 'I'm Your Boogie Man' for some lesser-known '80s tunes," so here's the track listing for my alternate Watchmen soundtrack:

1. Nat King Cole, "Unforgettable"
2. Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"
3. Prince, "Sign O' the Times"

Sure, "Sign O' the Times" is from 1987, not 1985, the year when most of Watchmen is set, but in the story's alternate universe, I'd like to think Prince came out with Sign O' the Times right after Purple Rain instead of Around the World in a Day.

4. Iggy Pop, "Neighborhood Threat"
5. Philip Glass, "Pruit Igoe & Prophecies"
6. Killing Joke, "Eighties"
7. Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "The Comedians"
8. The Clash, "White Riot"

A reviewer at Wired's Underwire blog says he would have preferred a tune by the L.A. punk band the Minutemen--also the original name of the Watchmen characters' team--instead of "I'm Your Boogie Man" for the '70s protest sequence. I'm not familiar with the Minutemen, so I'd go with "White Riot," which is often mistaken for being a skinhead anthem. ego trip's Big Book of Racism wryly describes it as the song in which "Class of '77 punk's finest are sick of colored folks hogging all the revolution."

9. The Police, "Walking on the Moon"

I would have used "Walking on the Moon," which is sung in the comic by a nervous soldier who sees Dr. Manhattan teleport himself away, or "You're My Thrill" instead of "99 Luftballons" for the Dan/Laurie diner scene.

10. Billie Holliday, "You're My Thrill"
11. Devo, "Jocko Homo"
12. The Rolling Stones, "Worried About You"(*) (instead of Leonard Cohen's ubiquitous "Hallelujah" during the movie's much-maligned--but not by me--sex scene)
13. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Happy House" (for the prison sequence)
14. XTC, "All Along the Watchtower"

Jimi Hendrix's cover of "Watchtower" will always be my favorite version of the Dylan song, but let's face it, the Hendrix version is overused these days. Because of Watchmen's '80s setting, I would have picked XTC's 1978 version.

15. Time Zone featuring John Lydon & Afrika Bambaataa, "World Destruction"
16. John Cale, "Sanities"
17. Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"
18. Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan" (the IMAX version, which was the version I saw, cut this song from the end credits and ran a sped-up version of the credits because the movie was already too long for IMAX exhibition)

And I would have shown way less schlonggage from Nuclear Smurf and I would have adapted Watchmen into a miniseries for HBO or FX instead of a feature film that's both too long as a film in the theater and too short as an adaptation of such a dense and literate piece of comics writing, but those are discussions for another post.

(*) Self-pimpin' time: "Worried About You" and "World Destruction" can be heard during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "F Zone" block of existing songs that have been used in films and shows. "The F Zone" airs Mondays at 4am, 9am and 3pm, Wednesdays at noon and Fridays at 5am, 9am and 3pm on AFOS.

About a Pinoy (Part 2)

Previously: Part 1.

Note: This is the second half of a bio I wrote about myself for my user profile at a Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology creators' wiki on Wetpaint.com. I wrote this list a few weeks before I saw The Dark Knight, which would have wound up on the list had I seen the movie beforehand. Watchmen wouldn't have made the list though. I have mixed feelings about that film.(*)

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5 FAVORITE SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF SUPERHERO COMICS


1. Batman: The Animated Series

Highlights: The revamped origins for Mr. Freeze and Two-Face, the early conflict between Batman and the police, the spectacular animation and Shirley Walker score during "Feat of Clay, Part 2," the Gray Ghost, "Harley and Ivy," Batman's hatred of It's a Wonderful Life, Kevin Conroy's performances in "Robin's Reckoning, Part 1," "Perchance to Dream" and "I Am the Night," the "death" of Batgirl, the Dark Knight Returns segment (and Joel Schumacher-bashing) in "Legends of the Dark Knight."

Worst moments: "I've Got Batman in My Basement," most of the episodes that were animated by AKOM (the worst of the many overseas studios that collaboed with Warner Bros. on B:TAS), Nightwing's mullet.

2. Batman Begins

Highlights: Wally Pfister's awesome cinematography, the realization during the Iceland-posing-as-Tibet sequences that this Batman wasn't going to be stagebound like the other films, Christian Bale's acting during the "party's over" speech, the excellent supporting cast, Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow's minimal dialogue, the lack of puns, "Do I look like a cop?!"

Worst moments: Why another love interest? Batman/Bruce has fuckbuddies, not soulmates. His one true love is his work.

3. Iron Man

Highlights: Robert Downey Jr.'s ad-libs, the Altman-esque dialogue, the performances by everyone in the cast, the character interplay, the evolution of the armor, Pepper saving Tony rather than the other way around, the final line before the closing credits.

Worst moments: Yinsen is essentially a rehash of the Magic Negro, despite a good performance by Shaun Toub.


4. Justice League Unlimited

Highlights: The Cadmus arc, the sight of Batman trying to buy a cup of joe inside a coffeehouse to stay awake, the Justice Lords, the jabs at Bill O'Reilly, Green Arrow's evolution from skeptical outsider to team booster/conscience, the guest shots by Joss Whedon alumni, the Question's secret love for teenybopper music, the Ultimen, the sight of Wonder Woman tucking the Atom into her cleavage, the Superman/Captain Marvel battle, the writers' clever way of getting Michael Rosenbaum to temporarily play his own character from Smallville.

Worst moments: The Batman Beyond retcon, the mostly forgettable pre-Unlimited first season, the wonky CGI in the opening titles during the pre-Unlimited seasons, the absence of a B:TAS-style full orchestra.

5. Spider-Man 2

Highlights: Ock's hospital massacre, the fact that Peter has a crappy apartment, the J. Jonah Jameson scenes, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" montage, the el train sequence, Tobey Maguire doesn't cry too much in this one.

Worst moments: The Ock character was better fleshed out in Michael Chabon's early draft before it was script-doctored.

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(*) During the sequence in which Dan Dreiberg gets a visit from the beans-craving Rorschach in his kitchen, the IMAX theater where I saw Watchmen experienced technical problems, and the projectionist had to stop running the film for about 15 minutes. The audience went apeshit, but they calmed down when the theater staff apologized and announced that they would offer re-admit passes to everyone at the end of the Watchmen screening. Luckily, the 15-minute interruption didn't ruin my enjoyment of the film.

Here are the things I love about Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' anti-superhero comic: the brilliant opening title sequence--the lesbian twist on the "V-J Day in Times Square" photo was the coolest and funniest part--and Jackie Earle Haley's fierce performance as the crazed Rorschach. I also think the film's modified climax works better than the rather screwy psychic squid master plan in the comic.


But the film has pacing problems--it feels rushed, resulting in a film that plays like a two-hour-and-40-minute theatrical cut of a 12-hour network TV miniseries. For instance, you don't get enough of a sense of the impact of Veidt's actions, which Gibbons hauntingly captured in the final chapter of the comic. (Will the extended cut that Snyder has planned for DVD and Blu-ray rectify the pacing problems?) I also don't like the wonky CGI for Veidt's genetically engineered lynx Bubastis and some of the hackneyed music choices, like "Ride of the Valkyries" during Dr. Manhattan's attack on the Vietcong. The lack of Elvis Costello on the film's soundtrack--the comic quoted Costello's "The Comedians"--kind of bums me out.

I like what AICN's Alexandra DuPont says about the Laurie Juspeczyk character. DuPont always thought of Laurie as "Karen Allen feisty--you could see how she was the sort of fiery woman who would attract powerful men despite her '80s-coke-queen exterior." Had Allen been a couple of decades younger, she would have been a better Laurie/Silk Spectre than Malin Akerman, who's too young to be playing a world-weary ex-"costumed adventurer." Also, I would have preferred Heroes' Jack Coleman as Dan/Nite Owl--he's the right age for Dan, plus Hollywood ought to hire Coleman, the best actor on Heroes, more often. But Patrick Wilson did a fine job and was more subtle than I expected as the washed-up, nerdy Dan.

God, I let this footnote go on too long. The end is nigh.

WonderCon 2009 wrap-up

Out of all the comic book cons I've been to, I prefer San Francisco's WonderCon because it's more laid-back than the other cons and Moscone Center South isn't so packed. And yes, there are TV show and movie panels like the Chuck panel with cast members Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski (above), Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez and series co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, but there aren't so many TV and movie panels that they cause the programming schedule to be overcrowded, so that gives me more time to talk shop with people and check out their comics. Plus, WonderCon is right across the street from Jollibee and Red Ribbon. Automatic win.

At WonderCon, I ran into an ex-co-worker, an on-and-off Fistful of Soundtracks listener (more on him in the graf after the next one) and Film Score Monthly soundtrack label founder/honcho Lukas Kendall, whom I never met face-to-face before. Lukas used to record a few phoners with me in the earlier years of the college radio version of A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Also, I got to meet some bloggers whose blogs I regularly read, I talked shop with IDW letterer Chris Mowry, I took some career advice from Keith Knight and Stephen Notley (he raised a good point about why Topher Grace would have been a better Spider-Man than Tobey Maguire, whom Stephen finds to be too humorless to play a wisecracking New Yorker like Spidey), and Chris, Keith, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Darick Robertson, Erik Larsen, Keith R.A. DeCandido and Michael Aushenker signed comics or promo materials for me.


The AFOS listener I met was graphic designer Joe Sikoryak, who's responsible for the look of Film Score Monthly and its spiffy CD packaging and booklets. FSM's Superman: The Music box set (above) is one of Joe's coolest achievements. I went to see Joe at a panel he was moderating (it was for Super Capers, an indie superhero flick in which Adam West pokes fun at his Batman persona) because before the panel started, I needed him to answer a question that had been nagging me ever since I ran into him on the previous day: Was Joe the cartoonist behind The Daily Show's brilliant "Decider" segments, which reimagined Bush as a caped superhero? (Joe told me his brother R. Sikoryak was the one who produced "The Decider.") It was surreal to be talking to Joe for several minutes while both Adam West--a.k.a. '60s Batman, a.k.a. Lookwell(*), a.k.a. the Gray Ghost--and Sam Lloyd, one of my favorite supporting players on Scrubs, are sitting a few inches from you.

(*) Lookwell, a great unsold 1991 sitcom pilot written by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel, features my all-time favorite West performance. West's title character is a pretentious, washed-up star of a '70s detective show who attempts to become an actual P.I.


Here I am at WonderCon's G4 booth with Attack of the Show's Blair Butler, who reviews comics and graphic novels during AOTS' Fresh Ink segment. She's guested in the past on Joe Gonzalez and Jimmy Aquino's Comic News Insider podcast (where I recently plugged Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology), so I told her both my first and last names to see what her reaction would be. Blair was initially confused because I look nothing like the CNI co-host. I explained to her that I'm Jimmy Aquino the scriptwriter and there are now two Jimmy Aquinos in the comics world.

Blair lit up when I asked her to autograph her own rave review of All-Star Superman in an issue of Geek Monthly magazine. I'm not really a fan of the Superman character or the superhero genre, but like Blair, I've enjoyed Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's clever Supes revamp, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and was the recent focus of an A.V. Club "Gateways to Geekery" post. As Blair wrote in her review, All-Star Supes is "a master class on how to mesh great plotting and great pencils."

Then I said to Blair, "The Eskimo kiss you did with Olivia [Munn] made my week."



Blair said that when Olivia goes off-script or takes shtick like the Eskimo kiss or an impromptu shaving of part of Kevin Pereira's hair into unexpected directions, you can't stop her from whatever she's doing and you have no choice but to roll with it. The Eskimo kiss went way longer than Blair expected, which of course, resulted in great live TV.

Also, Blair and I wondered what is the deal with Olivia's irrational fear of balloon popping noises ("Maybe they sound like gunshots to some people").


Nice. Miramax had a booth for Adventureland, an upcoming comedy about amusement park workers from Superbad director Greg Mottola.

I wasn't at the Adventureland booth when Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr, who has a role in the film, showed up to sign Adventureland posters and tees. I would have liked to have seen how Starr interacts with fans of his old show. The former Bill Haverchuck needs to do more TV or movies. He was terrific on Freaks and Geeks.


Next time, instead of the Star Wars droids, I'd like to see the Daleks roam around the Moscone hallways, so that I'd have some fun watching the giant salt-shakers with toilet plungers harass any of the British WonderCon visitors who used to hide behind the couch during a Daleks episode of Doctor Who. (I mean, c'mon, England. Giant salt-shakers made you shit your trousers when you were kids? Really?)


Here's an Asian American Catwoman. I always get a kick out of seeing Asian American cosplayers suit up as non-Asian DC or Marvel characters.

Unfortunately, the rest of the photos I took--like a snapshot of a female Robin (the Boy Wonder, not the Witch Hunter) cosplayer--are even blurrier than the ones I've posted. There are a bunch of pretty dope Flickr photo galleries that feature WonderCon snapshots that are better than the ones I snapped.

Here's a word of advice to anyone who attends WonderCon and is actually reading this: Skip the expensive, underwhelming convention food (you're going to have to in this recession) and eat outside. Take your money to Jollibee or any one of the local cheap eateries (or better yet, non-fast food joints). Chickenjoy trumps overpriced Costco-quality pizza any day of the week.