Last year, I reviewed The Unwritten #1 by Mike Carey and Peter Gross and voiced a hope that it would be a worthy successor to Y:The Last Man, another Vertigo series that was drawing to a close. Nine issues in, I’m happy to report The Unwritten is filling those large shoes admirably.

The series chronicles the adventures of one Tom Taylor, the son of vanished author Wilson Taylor, whose series of fantasy novels about a boy wizard named Tommy Taylor is designed for real-life comparisons to J.K. Rowling’s brat. I haven’t read Rowling’s novels (I’m in a minority here — they put me to sleep), but I am knowledgeable enough about them that I get most of the parallels being drawn here.

The public in The Unwritten can’t stop confusing the real-life Tom and the fictional Tommy, so much so that Tom has been typecast in a role he never made. When a violent crime leads police to arrest Tom, public outcry is so great that it creates almost a psychosis among children readers. (Imagine if J.K. Rowling were arrested for murder.)
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I’d no sooner written a column bemoaning the loss of one of my favorite foods, grape Pop Tarts, then they’re back on shelves. It’s been years since I’ve seen them, yet last night as my wife and I rounded the corner of the cereal aisle, I did what I always do — scan the shelves of boxed pastries on the off chance Kellogg’s has started production again. And this time, it had.

Of course I bought a box (my wife wanted me to buy multiples, but I restrained myself), and of course I toasted one up as soon as we got home. This is the part where I should say that it didn’t taste as good as I remembered because I’ve lost too many taste buds in the intervening years. Happily, it isn’t the case. Grape Pop Tarts — now dubbed “Wild Grape” — taste just as good as ever.

Hey, it’s the little things, right?

 Last weekend, I watched John Carpenter’s The Thing, an adaptation of the sci-fi novella, “Who Goes There?,” written by John W. Campbell Jr. under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart. I had finished reading the story in the anthology, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume Two A, a wonderful anthology of early sci-fi novellas. “Who Goes There?”  was also the basis for The Thing (From Another World) in 1951, one of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies.

Carpenter’s Thing is more faithful to the source story. In the 1952 version, the alien creature is really just a giant Frankenstein’s monster that happens to come from space, famously played by a pre-Gunsmoke James Arness.) The 1982 Thing restores the creature’s power to imitate other lifeforms and is a product of special effects, models and suggestion.

John Carpenter’s film is almost bi-polar: scenes of suspense alternate with set pieces of full-on gore. A well-known example of the latter is a scene where the creature, having imitated a sled dog, attacks the rest of the pack. Copious amounts of blood and a grisly dog puppet make it revolting, even in an era where such in-your-face effects have become standard.
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Here is my Feb. 4, 2010, column from The Review:

Can you name this story?

A man in a wheelchair transfers his mind into the body of a large, blue, synthetic creature on the surface of an alien planet, where he battles hostile, indigenous life forms. The freedom he enjoys becomes so intoxicating that he “goes native” and eventually refuses to leave the host body and return to his own.

Sounds like “Avatar,” yes, the James Cameron written-and-directed film that has captured our imagination at the box office and is poised to become the biggest box office moneymaker of all time?

But the synopsis above also describes “Call Me Joe,” a short story by sci-fi writer Poul Anderson, first published in 1957. Before “Avatar” was even released, some fans who had read Anderson’s work were crying foul, wondering if Cameron would credit “Call Me Joe” as a source. They remain a small but persistent voice, nearly lost in the tsunami of “Avatar” admiration that has netted the director multiple Oscar nominations.
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Some dumb moves by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year. Why expand the Best Picture category to include ten movies and keep the Best Director category at five nominees? (For that matter, why expand the Best Picture category at all, other than to help boost interest in an awards show that regularly gets its lunch eaten by a variety of Johnny-come-lately telecasts?)

And while the Oscars have been ghettoizing animated cartoons for years, that still doesn’t make it right. Surely animated movies are worthy of being considered for inclusion along with their live-action brethren. That hasn’t happened since Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which should have won Best Picture and obviously came close enough that it worried the members of the august academy who couldn’t imagine the statuette adorning a “mere” cartoon.

I don’t believe that even a fraction of the mangled lyrics on kissthisguy.com were ever actually misheard this way, but they are still funny to read and listen to. My Advanced Placement class was talking mondegreens today, and we ended up on the site. Good for a quick laugh on a cold Monday, and at least as funny as the news that Taylor Swift won the Album of the Year award on the Grammys. Is it only a popularity contest now?

Archie #605 is the final chapter in the “Archie Marries…” saga, tracing the freckled teen’s decision to marry wholesome Betty Cooper to its conclusion in the form of twin babies. It’s a happy wrap to the series, much better than the rather distasteful conclusion of issue #602, where Archie’s marriage to Veronica Lodge put him in the high-pressure world of finance and ulcers, working for her billionaire father.

This Archie, by contrast, teaches music at Riverdale High while his wife teaches English. It’s all a little reminiscent of Mister Holland’s Opus,  with Arch in the Richard Dreyfus role. Writer Michael Uslan also provides some unique outcomes for the other members of the cast, which I won’t spoil here.

Overall, the mini-series provided a much-needed shot in the arm, sales wise, to the Archie line, so much so that next issue, #606, serves as a coda to this storyline, likely to milk the momentum of the story. Still, I have to wonder what Archie’s younger fans thought of an issue that gives us an adult Archie riding Betty on his bicycle to the maternity ward. That may be fun for older fans awash in nostalgia, but puzzling to any 10-year-olds out there looking for typical Riverdale hijinks.

You’d think one gunshot to the groin gag would be enough for any given book. Kick-Ass #8 gives us two. This tendency to take things to the extreme and then go one step beyond has characterized most of the series, so it’s no surprise the writer Mark Millar and artist John Romita Jr. (along with inker/embellisher Tom Palmer) continue the tradition in this last installment.

The plot is almost an afterthought. High-schooler Dave Lizewski puts on a costume and becomes a real-life superhero. Sometimes, this means kicking ass. More often than not, it means getting his ass kicked. There’s a little of both in issue #8, as he is joined by Hit-Girl, a prepubescent version of himself out to avenge the death of her father.

Who’d have known when issue #1 was released that by the end of this eighth issue, there would be a film version of Kick-Ass ready for release later this month, or that what started as a fairly realistic look at how a young man could become a real-life Spider-Man or Batman would end up being an over-the-top bloodbath. While I preferred the earlier issues, the later ones contained just enough sheer moxy to keep me buying.

Bring on the movie and, judging from the last pages of this issue, the Kick-Ass comic sequel.

Here is my Review column from Jan. 28.

We see the trends we expect to see.

If we’re looking for signs that the economy stinks, we’ll find them. If we’re looking for indicators that the economy is recovering, we’ll find those too.

We can find ample reasons to support claims that today’s kids are smarter or dumber than earlier generations, or that society is more religious or depraved, depending on the lens through which we view these situations. The same is true for any number of topics that have less to do with objective truth and more to do with subjective perception.

So when I say that Saturday is a full moon and that people will be wonky, you’ll understand that I will expect to see people acting oddly and that I will look for evidence to bolster my claims. The rest of the month I haven’t look as hard, and therefore have missed telltale signs that people are eccentric all the time.
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Three of my students made a parody of “Kill Bill” for a final project in Film Studies. They called it “Kill Phil.” Watch it by clicking above.