Evening Post

I started this last night, but didn't finish...

1. We watched Beautiful Girls, and we both liked it a lot. There's a part in the movie where Timothy Hutton says that his current girlfriend, Tracey, is a solid 7.5 in the body, face and personality department. And I think that that is a good description of the movie - it's a solid 7.5 in terms of heart, emotional escape, interesting characters and overall story. I found it very interesting in many ways - the men were in love with ideals, but they paid prices for those idealized loves. Some were physically hurt, some lost the real-life women who loved them, and some almost lost themselves. It was a great story.

2. I read two comic books today. One was a Geoff Johns Justice Society of America, which basically served to introduce the new generation of JSA. Post-Crisis, DC is revamping several titles, which is apparently more common in the DC Universe than in the Marvel Universe due to the latent difficulty of continuity problems in the DC Universe. I don't mind. I think sometimes the stories need the old CTRL-ALT-DEL. I enjoyed this collection. I think Johns is a terrific writer, although it took a lot out of me to keep up with 52, especially since I never quite understood what he was trying to accomplish. As best as I could tell, many marginal characters were fleshed out weekly over 52 weeks, but the problem was that I only gave a crap about the new lesbian Batwoman, the Question, and Renee Montoya, who is now the new Question. The big story is that the multiverse exists in DC, but try as I may, I don't care much about the multiverse anyhow. I will admit, I did like the new Black Adam stories, though. I like this tragic man in his gold and black colors.

3. The other book I read was Brian Michael Bendis' fantastic series, Powers. Barnes and Noble has both volume one ("Who Killed Retro Girl?") and volume 7 ("Anarchy"), which of course sucks since apparently a lot of crap happened between volumes 1 and 7. But oh well. As I said in a previous post, I am actually not turned off by spoilers or reading out of order, so whatever. It just makes me want to go back and read more. "Anarchy" was a good story; not as fantastic as "Who Killed Retro Girl?" but awesome nonetheless. Powers, as a concept, is the story of a metropolitan special unit within the police department whose purpose is to investigate super-hero related crimes, primarily hero homicides. So, it's actually not a superhero story, at least not in the traditional sense. The genre feels more rooted in the police procedural genre. The main character, Christian Walker is a police detective, and his partner, Deena Pilgrim. The only volume that I read, before yesterday, was Who Killed Retro Girl?, which is available online here. I encourage all interested to read it, as it's some of the best, original, superhero comics I've read in a long time. Unfortunately, I only read comics if they are free, and the local Barnes and Noble is lagging. But, they've got "Retro Girl" on display, which hopefully bodes well for me if it means they'll fill out the rest. The idea of a normal police form in the midst of a city populated by super heroes (i.e., vigilantes) and super villains, as well as the social tension that creates with civilians (several of the storylines involve superhero deaths at the hands of a group of civilians who are opposed to superheros, for instance) is a good way to defamiliarize the superheroes themselves. We end up seeing them fresh from the eyes of cops working on the mundane details of a case, the frustrations of evidence and the legal system, and the relationships between the cops themselves.