Multimedia Mayhem - Injection, Life, and others

This is a broad collection of what I've been soaking my brain in over the last few weeks, a mixture of movies and comics. First up, my latest reads in the comics media.

Descender

Written by Jeff Lemire and illustrated by Dustin Nguyen, this is the story of an artificial boy, TIM, trying to find his human "brother" many years after a cataclysmic attack on the human/alien civilisation by the robotic Harvesters.

Drawn using what looks like watercolours, Nguyen and Lemire have conjured up a fascinating and engaging story of TIM's journey to find Andy (who's since grown up and become a robot bounty-hunter). The style is unusual and, although it doesn't always work for me, I've stuck with it as I like the story and the characters, even Andy.

The Sheriff of Babylon

In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, Christopher Henry, a military contractor hired by the administration to train the new police force, tries to find out who has killed one of his recruits.

Tom King (writer) and Mitch Gerdas (artist) have woven a labyrinthine plot of cops, insurgents and other opportunists in a murder mystery set in Baghdad just after the fall of Saddam. King (probably a pseudonym as he's a former CIA officer) has managed to convey the confusion of post-Saddam Iraq where no-one is quite who they seem. Gerdas' art is subtle enough to shock you at the horror of the carnage without distracting from the story. Overall, it's slow going, but it's more than worth the effort and I'm looking forward to the next volume.

Life

A movie, just to break things up a little. This is a biopic of the encounter between photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and James Dean (Dane DeHaan) just before the premier of East of Eden and Dean's subsequent fame.

Directed by Anton Corbijn (I've seen quite a few of his movies: The American, A Most Wanted Man and now this), it takes a while to get into. This is partly because DeHaan's voice sounds so dull and flat (the sound quality is generally bad throughout), but also because the pace is slow, building up the frustration that mirrors Stock's as he tries to get the essence of Dean onto film. Stock made the iconic photos of Dean that everyone now knows and that featured in the Life magazine article, making Dean famous, and this lends the film a quiet poetry that makes it worth watching to the end. Recommended, but not for the impatient.

Injection

Authored by Warren Ellis, who lives futher down the Thames Delta, this is illustrated by Declan Shalvey. A team of experts try to create a new kind of artificial intelligence by fusing magic and technology, with disastrous results.

A sort of fusion itself, Injection mingles elements of Hellblazer with Neuromancer and James Bond, but Ellis is good enough to bring off what could have been a real mess, making it a delight to read. The characters are engaging, although the agent character, Simeon Winters, has yet to be significant, as is the logician Vivek Headland. The art is also excellent, combing the mythical with the technological. Ellis is also writing Trees with artist Jason Howard, which I'm also reading, an alien invasion story. His work is always worth reading and he's got an interesting newsletter, Orbital Operations, that I subscribe to.

Top Ten

As some may know, I've been a comic book fan for getting on decades. I've been going through the collection weeding out those that can be donated to the charity shop, having read them and not thought them worthy of keeping, and it occurred to me to set out a list of the best ones (so far).

Concrete, by Paul Chadwick.
I read these stories when I was in my mid-twenties and,  having now collected them in trade paperback (TP) format, they are still excellent. They move comics from the super-hero vs villains format to telling truly human stories.

The Treasury of Murder Series by Rick Geary
This true murder series, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, seem a little bit like CSI, but Rick has turned them into works of art far superior to anything on TV. The books have a truly Gothic feel to them.

100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
The ultimate comic crime series. No super-heroes, no cops, just bad, bad, people trying to stay alive. The first stories were excellent, really hard boiled, making Sin City look like a Doris Day movie. After that, it seemed to get embroiled in a dark conspiracy plot that I just found to be confusing. I've got all the TP's so I'll probably give it another go at some point.

Scalped by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra
My current favourite crime comic at the moment. Think Raymond Chandler on a Native American Reservation.

The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
Okay, if you want a super-hero comic book, I'll give you this one. This will blow your mind. It's what League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should really have been, but funny, rather than just pompous.

BPRD and Hellboy
I've included these together as they represent the work of Mike Mignola, even though he's not having much to do with them these days. Plus the movies weren't bad.

The Losers by Andy Diggle and Jock
The movie was okay, but it came out at the same time as The Expendables and The A-Team and got lumped in with them. Not only was the movie better than the others (oh, yes it was) but the comic books were better than the movie.

Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz [pronounced sin-KEV-itch]
A work of true genius, and I don't say that lightly. You know the saying that there is a thin line between genius and madness. Well I think that he must have wandered over the line a few times doing this. The fourth, and last, issue didn't seem to have a proper cover, it was just black, until you tilted it and it caught the light. It was gloss black printed on matte.

DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli
This is an unusual war comic book, about as far removed from Sargent Rock and Major Eazy as you could ever get.

Queen and Country by Greg Rucka
Back in the seventies, there used to be a spy series called The Sandbaggers. Not Bond or even Le Carre. It inspired this series about MI6 operatives.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Although it tails off a bit at the end, this is Ellis's magnum opus and what a work it is. The first episode is free to download if you can find it.

Okay, eleven, but I had to include the last one. In addition, the following are ones that I think are worth an mention:

Northlander by Brian Wood
A comic book about Vikings, but see his other work above.

Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
What would happen to someone if the stories written about them became real.

The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson
Despite the ultra-violence (which is what happened to spoil Ennis' Preacher) a worthwhile attempt at the anti-super-hero genre.

Cerebus by Dave Sim
This holds the record for being the longest English-language comic book by a single team (Usagi Yojimbo has the overall record). It's also self published, no one having the patience to handle Sim for any length of time. I only managed to keep up as far as Reads, Volume 9, but I got single issues up to Going Home, Volume 13. I liked it mainly because of the art work, which always draws me into a comic and Cerebus is fantastic to look at, the high water mark being Rick's Story, which looks like a modern Book of Kells.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Why this one and not Watchmen or V For Vendetta? It's the notes in the back of the book which make this so good. You don't realise how much research goes into a comic book like this, and this alone made it worth a mention.