Tag: Storytelling

Dark Knight Rises Initial, Non-Spoiler Impressions

  • Dark Knight keeps its spot as the best of the three. But this one hung together a lot more consistently than Begins.
  • I think Hathaway wins as the best movie Catwoman. Nice that they remembered "cat" refers to being a cat burglar, not some goofy-ass feline mysticism.
  • For that matter, Hardy of course wins as best Bane, but he could do that just by default given that the previous one was a mute thug in Batman and Robin.
  • It's gotten progressively harder to ignore the right-wing fantasy element of these movies.
  • Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm a liberal, but -- Superman's original New Deal leanings notwithstanding -- there's something inherently conservative about the superhero genre. (But that's an essay for another day.)
  • Bit too much of characters explaining their philosophies and the themes of the movie in dialogue.
  • Which you can't understand half the time. It turns out my experience watching Dark Knight a few months back with the bass up too high to hear what anyone was saying was an authentic theater experience!
  • And it's an ending. A real, honest-to-God ending. The exact thing that indefinitely-serialized comics lack. (And movies, for that matter -- superhero movie series are rife with finales that the filmmakers didn't know were finales and, thus, lack conclusive endings: Batman and Robin, Spider-Man 3, Superman 4, Superman Returns, even X-Men 3 and Blade 3.) This was a real-ass ending, and it was satisfying.

I expect I'll get into spoilers and specifics later on down the line. But that's it for now.

Tick and Jayne

Watched Jaynestown again last night, and gorrammed if'n it ain't still one of my all-time favorite hours of television.

There's something about the way it all comes together -- it takes the most two-dimensional character on the show, the comic relief, and gives him more depth and humanity than we ever see in any other episode. It asks Big Questions -- and manages to approach those same questions, of the relationship between symbol and reality, in two different subplots, without it ever feeling forced. And while the Inara/Fess subplot is pretty standard Inara Being Wise stuff, the Book/River one has some of my favorite lines from the series and does a great job pairing off two characters who don't usually interact with each other.

It's a great episode -- legitimately funny, with a downer of an ending. If that's not vintage Whedon I don't know what is.

But while it's a Whedon show, the writer credit on this episode is Ben Edlund -- perhaps best known as the creator of The Tick.

And I got to thinking -- you know, there are a lot of ways Jayne and the Tick are similar.

They're simple and childlike, we don't really know anything about them other than their basic personality traits, they provide comedy rather than depth of character, and they seek simple solutions to their problems, usually consisting of violent mayhem.

And then, of course, you get to temperament, and they're polar opposites.

The Tick is pure. He wants to do the right thing, the heroic thing, the thing that helps people. Jayne is pure id; he's not actually evil (I'd say more chaotic neutral, though people with more D&D experience can feel free to correct me on that) but he has no motivations beyond his own immediate and selfish gratification. Jayne's speech to the mudders at the end of Jaynestown is like the inverse of an inspirational Tick speech -- full of anger, despair, frustration, cynicism, nihilism, and self-loathing. It's a bitter pill: "Heroes don't exist and no one is going to help you."

Needless to say, this kind of thinking is anathema to everything the Tick stands for.

I think maybe it comes down to something like this: the Tick is an overgrown 8-year-old, and Jayne is an overgrown 14-year-old.

At any rate. Damn good television, and thought-provoking -- and it's not even my favorite episode. (That'd be the one immediately following, Out of Gas.)

Ineffable

There's a word Ford Prefect uses when he feels like he needs to say something but he doesn't know how to say it: goosnargh.

I'm going to say some things anyway. Maybe that's a bad idea. Guess we'll see. Maybe I'll stumble, fugue-like, onto some deep and profound truth; more likely I'll say something trite, insensitive and offensive -- in which case at least my newfound posting frequency means it won't be on the front page for long.

In the early hours of this morning, a man in a gas mask and a bulletproof vest walked into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, threw two cannisters of tear gas on the ground, fired once into the air and then began firing into the crowd. The death toll currently stands at 12, the wounded at 59. Those are the details as they're currently being reported, though it's still early and the information could change.

In the meantime, well, everyone is shocked and sad and horrified and, in compliance with human nature, trying to make some sense of this appalling act by making it fit some sort of narrative.

Was the killer a deranged Batman fan? Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't; I don't think it matters. Maybe he just picked a movie he knew would be crowded. Maybe he picked a movie where he thought people would think he was just a guy in a costume.

But there's something that feels like Batman about it, isn't there? An over-the-top villain on an over-the-top murder spree. There's no making sense of it; it's a horrific cross of violence and theatricality. If this man wasn't doing an intentional impression of a Batman villain, then he was tapping into something in the zeitgeist that forms the basis of all the Batman villains.

There's something Alfred says in The Dark Knight:

Some men aren't looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

That's the kind of man we're talking about today -- a madman, a broken man, a man who cannot be understood rationally and whose motivations are fear and chaos on a scale that an ordinary mind cannot reconcile.

I heard an interview on NPR this morning -- it doesn't appear to be online yet -- with a reporter on the scene who also covered the Columbine massacre. The interviewer, sensibly, emphasized the fundamental differences between the two shootings, but, also sensibly, asked if the police procedure for responding to shootings had changed since Columbine.

The reporter said that yes, it has -- that in the case of Columbine, the police took time to set up a perimeter, whereas now they focus on getting in and stopping the shooter as quickly as possible.

And that makes sense, too, looking at something that's changed in how we see criminals. Setting up a perimeter and a dialogue is what you do in a hostage situation -- what you do when you're dealing with people who can, at least on some level, be negotiated with, reasoned with.

Random acts of violence are something else entirely. You cannot reason with someone who is just killing for its own sake -- there is nothing you can offer him to make him stop. He's not threatening lives in order to achieve something he wants; ending lives is what he wants.

It's a hard, hard thing to read about, to hear about.

Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing linked to Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?, Marilyn Manson's Rolling Stone article following the massacre which is sadly relevant today. He discusses how there is no single simple cause for such acts of violence, but how the media and society seek simple answers, seek explanations for the unexplainable. And how his own stage name is a criticism of the media's tendency to treat mass murderers like movie stars.

In the days and weeks to come, the news media will talk about this. They'll speculate. They'll engage in crass discussions of how this will affect the movie's box office, or what it's going to mean for Obama and Romney in the polls. Maybe they'll try and engage in some scapegoating and try to blame it on comics or video games, maybe they won't -- even speculating on such things is just too much for me right now. All I can think is how horrible this was and how my heart goes out to the victims and their families.

Perhaps the deepest and bitterest irony is that Batman itself is, on a fundamental level, a story about two people who went to see a movie and were gunned down, and the devastation that wrought on the son who would never see them again.

Revisionist History

I read something kinda odd yesterday.

It was linked at Robot 6. It's a piece from a British rapper by the name of Akira the Don, explaining on the Huffington Post why he isn't going to go see Amazing Spider-Man. And there's this little bit in there:

It's not being made because a bunch of people really wanted, more than anything else, to tell the best Spider-Man story they could on the sliver screen. It's being made to stop the rights to the character reverting from Sony back to Marvel. Who, as we have seen, make much better superhero movies than Sony.

Now, before I go any further, I'd like to establish two things.

One: I hate the fucking Huffington Post.

Two: While I am boycotting Kirby-based Marvel product (eg the Marvel Studios films), I am not at present boycotting Ditko-based Marvel product (eg the Sony Pictures Spider-Man films). I haven't seen Amazing Spider-Man, but I still might.

I'd go into a bit more detail, but my reasons for those two points could really each make for a complete post, so I think I'll leave them as something to write about later.

Anyway. It's quite clear that Mr. the Don wrote this with his tongue firmly in cheek and is not serious about it. And also, he (rightly) praised Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. So I'm not really trying to argue with him or tear his post down. But that one line is just kinda weirdly fascinating to me and I want to look at it a little further.

Marvel. Who, as we have seen, make much better superhero movies than Sony.

Really? I mean, Avengers has been a huge critical and financial success, but...are people's attention spans so short that that's going to become the conventional wisdom? The latest Marvel Studios movie was better than the latest Sony movie, ergo Marvel makes much better superhero movies than Sony?

I mean, look. I liked Thor okay. Story was pretty middling, but the art direction was fantastic.

But you wanna tell me it was better than the first two Raimi Spider-Man movies? Really?

Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man 2 -- all got pretty mixed critical receptions. And Punisher: War Zone? Let's put it this way: I was ten paragraphs farther down before I even remembered to scroll back up here and mention it.

Really, when you take a look at it, Sony and Marvel are pretty well even -- each has two big successes and a handful of mediocrity. Marvel's got Iron Man and Avengers, and Sony has the first two Spider-Man movies.

And then there's Fox, which I think probably also fits that bill: the first two X-Men movies were pretty successful, but the rest of their output hasn't been. (Maybe X-Men: First Class? I liked that one, anyway.) Fox may lose just based on the sheer volume of crap it's put out: X-Men 3, Wolverine, Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four vs. Annoying Sarcastic Businessman, Fantastic Four vs. Giant Cloud of Gas...

Anyway. What Mr. the Don clearly means is that he wishes there wasn't this pesky matter of the outstanding movie rights at Sony and Fox, and that Marvel could get all its characters in one basket and we could see, say, Spider-Man and Wolverine in Avengers 2. As a fan, I can certainly relate to that desire; I really think the shared-universe aspect is what's made both Marvel Comics and the Marvel Movie Universe special.

But it's foolish to suggest that Marvel makes much better superhero movies than Sony.

Because -- just as in the comics -- it's not about the corporate rightsholder, damn it. It's about the creative team.

Avengers didn't succeed because it's Marvel, no matter how badly Marvel wants to say it did. Avengers succeeded because of Whedon and Downey and Ruffalo and Johansson and Hiddleston and Jackson and Evans and Hemsworth and Evans -- and, yes, the people who wrote and drew the stories it was based on, like Kirby and Lee and Heck and Millar and Hitch.

And the first two Raimi Spider-Man movies didn't succeed because they were Sony. They succeeded because of Raimi and Maguire and Simmons and Robertson and Campbell and Molina and Dafoe (and in spite of Dafoe's costume). And Ditko and Lee and Romita and Conway and Kane.

And don't get me wrong, there is something to be said about huge media conglomerates owning huge stables of characters who can all meet and interact. There is an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold that features both an adaptation of an old Mad spoof and a team-up with Scooby-Doo. It is awesomesauce.

Or, hell, the recent Avengers cartoon where Ben and Johnny come over to the mansion for poker night. That was great! And it's too bad that we can't see something like that happen in a movie because of rights entanglements!

But that stuff's not great just because it's DC/Time Warner or just because it's Marvel/Disney. It's great because great people -- writers, artists, actors, directors -- put it together.

The Cheap Theater

I don't go to as many movies as I used to.

Mostly it's because I used to go to a lot of movies with my dad, and he's in Maui now.

But price plays into it too. Ticket prices have fucking skyrocketed, outpaced pretty much only by comic books.

This week, I went to Tempe Cinemas a couple times. It used to be what we called the dollar theater, but now it's $3, or $2 on Tuesdays.

But on the plus side, the place has improved. They've fixed up the bathrooms, the theaters are in better shape, and they appear to have switched to digital projectors, because the picture is fucking clean. Digital projection gets rid of one of the major drawbacks to seeing a movie at the cheap theater: you no longer find yourself looking at a print that's been viewed a few hundred times and is covered in scratches.

Anyhow, I caught two very different movies this week: The Pirates: Band of Misfits and Cabin in the Woods.

Pirates is Aardman. And I love me some Aardman, and have since I first saw The Wrong Trousers close on 20 years ago.

It's got a great cast (and #2 even looks like Martin Freeman), a ton of sight gags and one-liners that fly by fast, and a swordfight with Queen Victoria. It is recommended viewing for all ages!

Cabin in the Woods is not recommended viewing for all ages, but it is recommended viewing! I went into it cold, knowing nothing about it beyond "cabin-in-the-woods horror movie co-written and produced by Joss Whedon", and I think that is the optimal way to see it, so I will say nothing about it except that I love that there is actually a plot explanation for all the clichés, all the archetypes, and why the teenagers keep doing stupid shit.

Now, there was something a little odd about it: I'm pretty confident it was another digital copy, because the print was crystal clear for the most part, but there were a couple of spots, lines, and pops over the course of the movie. I'm curious: were these artificial and intentional? Like, did anybody else see it and notice a big black spot on the print right after the girl takes off her top? Because I'm tempted to believe this was some kind of Grindhouse-style deliberate fuckery, but I can't say for sure.

(Failing that, is there any other possible explanation for a few analog artifacts on an otherwise pristine, seemingly digital print? Like, is there a digital-file-to-analog-projector thing going on and the projector occasionally hiccups, or what? Or did I just see a film print that was in really, really good shape despite being at the cheap theater?)

Now, despite my gushing about the picture quality, which is better than I've ever seen it at Tempe Cinemas previously, the projection left something to be desired. Pirates had a couple of edges cut off, and about the right 1/8 of the picture in Cabin was out of focus.

Still and all, the seats were nice, the picture and sound were great, the audiences were well-behaved -- I had a better experience at the cheap theater than I usually do at the regular theater, and I suspect I will be making this a more frequent habit. There are plenty of movies coming out that I'd like to see in the theater but not pay full price for.

And they had a promo going: a new restaurant called Pizza 'n Greens opened a few doors down from the theater, and they're offering a $1 pizza slice if you bring a ticket stub in (or 10% off your whole bill). We went in after Pirates, and each ordered a slice. Instead of a slice, they made us fresh little miniature pizzas, and the service was great. We decided to come back and spend more -- which we did, after seeing Cabin. This time I tried a calzone and my lady tried a fatoush (Mediterranean salad) -- because as it turns out the menu is a sort of interesting mix of pizza and middle-eastern food. (I was tempted to have a chicken shawerma but decided I was in the mood for a good calzone at the last minute.) Anyway, once again, good food, great service, look forward to going again, recommend them, and oh by the way they deliver until 5 AM so if you need delivery at all hours of the night they're a good option for that.

And then we went to Changing Hands and I found a used copy of The Art of Ditko for $15, so I had to pick that up. And I also found that Stross's Rule 34 is out in paperback, so I grabbed me one of those too.

All in all, good times. And man, there are a lot of links in this post! My post probably looks like I ran Intellitext over it, except the links actually useful and pertinent and (hopefully) not just fucking obnoxious.

Great Opening Titles: Dexter

Once again: recent, obvious, and Emmy-winning. Specifically, the '07 Emmy. Dexter.

A positively wonderful juxtaposition, turning the normal and everyday into something violent and stomach-turning. The camera work, the music, and Hall all sell it.

And yeah, Simpsons did this one too, last Halloween. And once again, Art of the Title has something to say.

I've got more to say about Dexter and his role in the pantheon of guilty-pleasure vigilante justice antiheroes -- because he takes the premise and drives it right the hell off a cliff, pushing the trope to reductio ad absurdum levels.

But that's an essay for another day. And it's got Batman in it.

Doctor Who: The Inappropriately-Named Resurrection of the Daleks

Another old Who review. This one just got a Special Edition rerelease; the review is of the Not-Special Edition. And as before, it contains spoilers of some 28-year-old Doctor Who serials.

Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2008-11-25.


Just watched the inappropriately-named Resurrection of the Daleks. Not bad, but a whole lot like Earthshock: a Davison serial with one of the Big Two enemy races, a lot of running around on a spaceship (and Rula Lenska's character is pretty much identical to the Captain in Earthshock), and ending with someone sacrificing himself to destroy the ship and a companion leaving. Of course, that last similarity actually works pretty well -- while Adric isn't mentioned, it's easy to assume Stien's death reminds Teagan too much of his and that's part of why she's so shaken up at the end.

The premise -- that the Daleks are totally helpless by themselves and forced to reluctantly rescue Davros in order to get out of a jam -- is almost as thin here as it was in Destiny of the Daleks, but at least the "we need a genetic engineer" explanation fits better than the rather nonsensical "we are slaves to logic and don't know how to improvise in a war" explanation used in the latter. Plus, Davros as much as says these Daleks aren't very advanced models and he's going to work on making them better; of course that's the bastard about time travel stories. In the Dalek timeline, this has to take place well before their first few appearances.

The climax is the Doctor's confrontation with Davros, which echoes the Fourth Doctor's "Have I the right?" scene in Genesis of the Daleks, and which still makes for decent drama here even though you just want him to pull the effing trigger already. It's not the ethical dilemma it was in Genesis (is it okay to kill the first batch of Daleks before they do any harm?) or, years later, The Parting of the Ways (is it worth taking out the entire Earth to kill the Daleks?); it's just the Doctor and Davros, with no innocent lives in the balance. And the Doctor's already killed several Daleks by this point.

This is the first I've seen of Turlough, and I can immediately understand why people like him: the companions are a pretty fucking bland and indistinguishable bunch, and he stands out by being more complex than most of them. He's intelligent but also arrogant and self-serving; that's a lot more compelling than just the girlfriend du jour.

Of all the DVD's I've watched, this one had the most noticeable issues with the transfer. There are a couple of places where the picture ripples noticeably. It's not a big deal but distracting enough to make note of; seems like they could have put more effort into fixing that.

Anyway. Not a bad Dalek serial; better than the previous one but not as good as Genesis. (Of course, Genesis is probably the best one, so that's sort of a meaningless comparison.) Decent; I'd put this one in the "rent, don't buy" pile.

Not a Luddite, But...

Until recently, I used to tell people that, for a computer scientist, I'm something of a Luddite. I don't use Facebook or Twitter, I don't have a smartphone -- I don't even text.

More recently, it's occurred to me that it's not that I'm a Luddite, I'm just a guy with a different set of priorities. And actually my tech savvy is probably responsible for some of that.

I don't have a Facebook account because I want control of my privacy settings. It's not like I'm anonymous or anything; if you're reading this, then profoundly embarrassing things with my real name attached to them are just a couple of clicks away. A couple of clicks max.

But that's my call. That's not "third-party site suddenly changes its privacy policy without warning" territory. And whatever I may put on this site, it certainly doesn't constitute permission for advertisers to sell it to each other.

I understand the appeal of Facebook. I did the MySpace thing, back when that was a thing people were doing. It was cool to get back in touch with people I hadn't seen since high school. But ultmately it was a new place for them to send me all those damn chain E-Mails and personality tests I had asked them all to stop sending me; it was a time sink of the sort I'm not much interested in anymore, and if they really want to get in touch with me they can Google my name. I'm not hard to find.

As for Twitter -- well shit, if you read this blog you already know that even my off-the-cuff single-sentence posts won't fit in 140 characters. I am not at my best in short bursts; I am at my best telling long, rambling stories that set up an atmosphere. (Kazz once compared me to Garrison Keillor. I'm pretty sure that was after he kicked that beer can into the back of my head.)

On texting, well, my initial opinion of it is pretty much what Samuel L Jackson had to say about it on Boondocks (NSFW):

But that's because I have a simple, 12-button flip phone. I understand that texting's a lot quicker if you've got a touchscreen or a keyboard, and I understand its value for quick, asynchronous, precise communication. It's not a replacement for a phone call, it's a replacement for voicemail. And voicemail sucks.

As for why I don't have a smartphone: Well, to start with, I've always been a horsepower guy. I sit at a computer all day at work and then I go sit at another one at home. As such I've never really felt much need for a laptop (I got my first one for free maybe a year and a half ago and barely use it), let alone a smartphone.

On the other hand, I do like toys. And I can really see the appeal of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that fits in my pocket. Not to mention, you know, I am a computer scientist, and this is the future of computing.

So yeah, I've kinda hit a point where I want a smartphone.

But then you hit the predatory pricing.

I'm with Sprint. They've been good to me. But I will be goddamned if I'm going to enter into a two-year, $60-a-month-minimum contract with them.

I'm a temp. I don't know if I'll be employed come December. If I get hired, I'll probably buy a smartphone (just in time for all the Christmas sales!). But I'll also probably jump ship to Virgin or Cricket or one of the pay-as-you-go carriers.

Meantime, I've got this little Samsung flip phone I've had for some 5 years, that is serviceable as a phone and alarm clock and little else. For example, I discovered the other day that it doesn't even have a way to transfer the photos you take with it to a computer. Which I guess is okay, because I never use that camera anyway and it's scratched to fuck as it is.

(I discovered this after getting my picture with Phil LaMarr at Phoenix Comicon last month. That's not a very long story but it is a story for another day, I think.)

Eureka

So, um. I just started watching Eureka last season, but...am I correct in understanding that they built up Carter and Allison for three years, made the audience really want them to be a couple, finally hooked them up in season four, made the audience really like them as a couple, and then...made her an absolutely terrible person in the final season?

Jack Cole

Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2010-03-24 and 28; presented here with some edits.


A few months back, I was in my local independent bookseller, and I ran across Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. I didn't even notice Spiegelman's name on the cover, I just flipped through the book and thought hey, this is pretty neat. And then my girlfriend got it for me for Christmas.

I started it today, and...wow.

Here's the thing: I've never actually read a Plastic Man comic before. I'm aware of him, I'm aware of Cole's work, but...I had no idea what I was missing out on.

It's just absolutely phenomenal stuff. The double-meaning in the book's title is apt: Plastic Man is like nothing I've ever seen before. It doesn't so much defy rules as live in a world where they haven't been invented yet. It freewheels between absurd whimsy and slapstick and completely shocking violence -- in one story, the villain, trying to escape, trips and lands with his head in a bear trap and dies. (It's page 12 in the link above.) There is absolutely nothing to foreshadow this; there is just a fucking bear trap all of a sudden. It's a real straight-up anything-can-happen book -- the closest analog I can think of is Tex Avery. (Spiegelman says it's like "Tex Avery on cocaine".)

Of course, Spiegelman's name is on the cover because a good big chunk of the book is a biography he's written -- and Cole is a fascinating character, right from the start. Early on, there's a story of how, at the age of 17, he biked from Pennsylvania to LA -- and there's a photocopy of his first published work, a piece he wrote about the journey that was published in Boys' Life.

I've read some very good comics histories over the past couple years, but none that used the artist's actual work so extensively. The Ten-Cent Plague, in particular, is a great book whose greatest weakness is its need to describe covers because it can't just print them (not sure whether that was due to rights issues or cost of printing, but at any rate there are many cases where it tells when it should show). Not only does Spiegelman use extensive excerpts of Cole's work, he discusses them with an artist's eye -- Cole's talent for layouts, the way Plastic Man draws your eye to create a sense of motion -- there are even diagrams.

And speaking of layouts, there's a reason Chip Kidd's name is on the cover too. He's the graphic designer who put it all together, Spiegelman's words and Cole's pictures. The whole thing is composed like a giant magazine article -- which it actually is, as it began life in The New Yorker. (Those of you familiar with Spiegelman will know that he is a major contributor to the magazine, and is married to Francoise Mouly, the art editor and a supreme talent herself.) The book is absolutely flooded with incidental Cole work, sometimes just a few panels on a page and sometimes a complete, uncut story. (Interestingly -- well, if you're interested in things like paper stock, which you actually most likely are not --, the pages that reprint stories in longform are newsprint, while the rest of the book is glossy. Those of you familiar with reprints of old comics have most likely observed that the old 4-color printing process looks much better on the newsprint it's intended for than on glossy paper. Scott McCloud discusses this a good bit in Understanding Comics.)

I've never seen a book quite like this, and I've never read a comic quite like Plastic Man. It's a deft combination -- Spiegelman makes for a great biographer and a great art teacher, and is equally masterful at knowing when to step the hell back and let the man's work speak for itself. And Kidd puts the whole thing together, creating an eye-catching presentation that's easy to read, or, if you prefer, just glance at. (I prefer to read everything, even the incidental stuff -- and even on the thumbnails, the text is big enough to read.)

The book also reprints Cole's infamous Murder, Morphine and Me in its entirety. I'd never read the story before (though I'd seen the infamous "woman about to get a syringe in the eye" panel that made it Exhibit A in the 1950's Senate hearings on comics), and it's an important piece of history, as well as a very neat contrast to the whimsy of the Plastic Man stories. It's got an afterschool-special quality to its message, and a predictable twist ending, but it's also got sympathetic characters, a breakneck pace, expressive art, and content that's graphic not just for violence's sake but to truly move the audience. It represents everything that thrilled young audiences of the time, and scared the old guard. It's just as powerful a representation of the no-rules nature of groundbreaking Golden Age comics as Plastic Man, with the same artist but an entirely different tone and genre.

This book makes me want to go out and buy a bunch of Jack Cole stuff. In the span of an hour he has become one of my favorite artists, and I don't know how I managed to miss out all these years.

And this book is the best casual introduction I can see, as sadly there is no set of cheap Chronicles paperbacks for Plas -- just $50 hardback Archives. I'm seriously considering saving up, though -- I want to see more.

Fortunately, there are also a lot of old Plastic Man comics available at Digital Comic Museum, which collects public domain comics. You can find Plastic Man in both his self-titled book and in Police Comics.