Miniatures Finished: Unmatched - Cobble & Fog

Cobble & Fog was the first Unmatched set I bought, as it was available at work and the characters looked like a fun combination of Victorian Literary figures. All of them play quite well too, which means the box is a fun stand-alone as well as good to mix with the others. As discussed before, I'd be very happy to have another in this series from Unmatched.

The Invisible Man, Doctor Jekyll, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes.

Superhero Media: Super

"From the twisted mind of James Gunn"; man, do you remember when James Gunn was a Troma alum known for shock horror and penis monsters? I mean in terms of his film work, instead of being known for an infamous Twitter dogpile attack orchestrated by internet Nazis as a dry-run before they targeted the head of Lucasfilm, just in case you forgot that's why Gunn was taken off Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for a few months. Anyway, calling Super a deconstruction of the Superhero genre would be reasonably fair, but also misses quite a lot. I imagine that there are almost as many takes on Super as there are those who have really written about it, as it is the kind of film which allows interpretation of the themes and message, if there is really one there. Is Super and indictment of violence, white male rage and/or cinema culture? Perhaps. Is it a reaction to the proliferation of overly sanitised and homogenised superhero cinema in Hollywood? Probably not, but I could see someone making that argument. Or is Super a commentary on drugs, mental health and the failings of policing? Well, that's more in my lane, isn't it?

Frank Darbo is a put-upon everyman who has caught precisely one break in his life, meeting and falling in love with is wife, Sarah. Despite being unattractive, put upon and having a rubbish job, Frank isn't actually all that angry, as far as this kind of film goes, certainly not to the absurd levels of Joker or Taxi Driver, when Sarah falls into the sway of a local drug kingpin, his initial response is despair, not rage. Frank's drift towards being the Crimson Bolt is framed as being divinely inspired, quite literally, as a godlike being speaks to him and tells him that some are chosen. As I progress further in my career as a Psychotherapist, I'm finding more and more that depictions of mental health issues in media are getting to me. Frank clearly needs help and has never gotten it, same with Libby, aka Bolty, and whilst there are plenty of people with delusions who live happy lives, both Frank and Libby are led to shockingly extreme behaviour by their untreated issues. I have to admit, I almost stopped the film after watching Elliot Page having to act mounting and sexually assaulting Frank.

Thankfully, Super comes back around in the conclusion. After the expected, and somewhat cathartic, orgy of violence in the third act, where Frank rescues Sarah and has his hero moment, the tone changes and something really interesting happens. In a voiceover and montage, we see that Sarah leaves Frank, finds someone new and raises a happy family. Rather than be angry, Frank is accepting, seeing that Sarah is the chosen one, not him, and he learns to accept the good in his life for what it is. I'm not going to lie, if not for that last segment, my review of Super would be pretty harsh, as the film it pretty easy to read in the same alt-Right vein as Joker or the like. "If your wife leaves you for another man, shag a teenager and buy a lot of guns" is equivocally NOT the message of Super, in fact, it makes a strong point against violence. It's still a little "Liberal" for my radical tastes, but the idea of not doing harm because it harms people as the central ideology for a superhero certainly has potential. I don't know, my friend who loaned me his copy of Super certainly didn't get the same reads as I did from it, so maybe there's not all that much to it and all I'm seeing is my own reflection.

Miniatures Finished: Unmatched - 2-character boxes

Been painting my Unmatched figures as a little break from other projects, they're nice for board game figures, but not quite as nice as some others on the market.

Little Red and Beowulf, both strong characters with interesting play styles, Little Red is the first time I can recall having to paint wicker.

Robin Hood and Bigfoot. I'm a big fan of playing Bigfoot, he's powerful and pretty damn mobile for a character that strong.

Superhero Media: The New Mutants (2020)

So where the hell was this languishing for years? Seriously, The New Mutants is probably one of the best films in the "Fox" X-Men series and it was almost forgotten the instant it came out, despite several years of hype and re-edits. The New Mutants is pretty much exactly what I picture when I promote the idea of smaller, more nuanced, often cheaper, superhero cinema on this blog. There are maybe, ten actors in this film? Yet it manages to be more engaging, exciting and character-driven than many of the bigger ensemble films, especially in the X-Men series. Barely escaping some kind of supernatural attack, Dani Moonstar awakens in a mental hospital with four other teenage mutants, Rahne Sinclair, Ilyana Rasputin, Sam Guthrie and Roberto de Costa. Or, you know, Moonstar has been thrown in with mentally unstable versions of Wolfsbane, Magik, Cannonball and Sunspot. Now, I've never been a big X-Men fan, so I'm only passingly familiar with any of these characters, but I have to say I empathised with each of them pretty quickly and any changes that were made played to the strengths of the story, as far as I could tell.

Being a tight ninety minutes, The New Mutants doesn't waste much time trying to make the Essex Hospital (because references) seem at all innocent, with super-technology drops and strong supernatural horror beats pretty quickly. The links to the main X-Men films are pretty thin on the ground, which I like, because the last thing The New Mutants really needs is a Wolverine cameo that goes nowhere. Although there is almost no telling how much of the "original" film survived the various edits and re-shoots, the version of The New Mutants that's on my DVD copy really seems to trust the young actors with the material, and whilst the emotions are writ large, as suits both teen drama and comic books, the feelings read as genuine, and I can see plenty of adolescents connecting with this film just as I did with X-2 back in my day. Also I love that the queer characters are just kind of there, and their sexuality has nothing to do with why they are being hunted by nightmares, its just who they are.

Where the edits and reworking hurts The New Mutants the most is in the third act, where Dani is pushed to the background by Magik, because, by then, Anya Taylor-Joy had become famous through Peaky Blinders and The Queen's Gambit. I have mixed feelings about Taylor-Joy, as I suspect she's a pretty decent actor, but is constantly sexualised by the camera, so I simply cannot tell; a lot like a young Scarlet Johanssen, actually. Now the shift in focus in the film is not overly jarring, and there is an attempt to tie a "friends as surrogate family" narrative in at the end, but I wonder what a version of The New Mutants where Dani stayed in the fore would have looked like. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Fox X-Men has wrapped up and won't be continuing, but The New Mutants is a high note to go out on and I really hope it gets some cult love at some point, as there is a lot to like, and not just for angsty teens. I know that I'll be going back to this long before others in the series myself, now that I know what's there.

The Slizer Project - Part IV

When I stared on this, I thought it would probably take three articles of reasonable size, not what's now looking to be five somewhat longer ones. Now we're getting to the part of the story I really remember better, not only because I was a teen when I was thinking it up, but also because it started to occur to me how far the story had come since it started. A group of friends traveling through time, having adventures, had now become an interstellar war over the control of alien super weapons. Yes, it's juvenile, but I was juvenile, literally and figuratively, at the time. To this day, I still like when stories progress to a point far beyond where they started, when such progression makes sense each step, but leads to a journey of wide scope. Think Dragon Ball going from an adventure to find some mystic orbs to a multiversal battle for survival. Anyway, on to the next step.

The story continues, our heroes having been victorious against the Razors, but only barely, the decision to introduce four more Slizer units is made; Millennium, Blaster, Spark and Flare. The shadowy alien forces backing the project put more of their own in the larger and more "powerful" units, shuffling Calvin's friends around to lower places in the hierarchy. This causes friction in the team and with 12 Slizer units in the field, the humans find themselves most often under alien command and split up across multiple deployments. Meanwhile, a rival concern in The Century offers a new weapon to the Slizer team, a new and more powerful biomech; the Toa. Yeah, look, at this stage, Bionicle was a thing and I was trying to fold that story into my own and it never really worked. Basically, it was a set up for a tournament arc (can you tell I was watching Dragon Ball Z at the time too?) where the Slizers faced their opposite number in the Toa. It wasn't the best idea, but it led into the next arc, where things really kick off.

During the fight with the Toa, Calvin and the Jungle Slizer disappear. The green Toa is found defeated and mutilated, but there is no trace of what happened. For a while, the team is looking to recover their missing teammate, or rather, Calvin's friends are looking for him, while the aliens want to recover the Jungle Slizer before it falls into the wrong hands. The leader of one faction of the aliens, called "Mantis" by the humans because they can't pronounce his clicking name, pilot of the Millennium Slizer, was badly injured in the battle with the Toa and whilst he recovers, he becomes more antagonistic as time goes on and there is a major fracture in the Slizer team, with the human members even being kept from their Slizers unless a mission is happening. This starts to cause problems when a revolt of workers living in The Century begins to get violent and the various factions that fund the Slizer operation start to disagree over how to handle it, with one faction even leaving and taking the Ice Slizer with them. The stage is set for a possible civil conflict with our human protagonists caught in the middle. Meanwhile, rumors of something like the Jungle Slizer being spotted in conflict zones begin to circulate.

Superhero Media: Mister Miracle by Tom King

I feel it's worth mentioning that this Mister Miracle series is technically an "Elseworlds" book, because I didn't figure that out until the last issue myself. Is that a spoiler? I hardly do these reviews in a timely manner, so for all I know there will have been four Mister Miracle films released that follow this plot by the time this gets through the backlog. Covering a brutal war between New Genesis and Apokolips, Mister Miracale features such epic highlights as drunk Skeets, Darksied eating carrots and Batman killing babies. In a more metaphorical sense, the series is about PTSD and the healing nature of positive relationships that ground us to reality. The very human moments of the series are among the strongest, especially contrasted with the brutal and high-concept warfare on display in other sections. Moments where Scott Free and Barda are lounging on the couch, watching nothing in particular on television and reflecting on their brutal upbringing under Granny Goodness are perhaps the most grounded I've ever seen superheroes and the trauma which drives them.

In Ultimate Fantastic Four, there is a storyline in which the civilisation of Halcyon is at war with the forces of the Resurgence led by Thanos. It's basically an update on the Jack Kirby "4th World" stories from which Mister Miracle and Darksied emerged, and is one of my favourite versions of that "Chariots of the Gods" take on a war in heaven myth; until I read Mister Miracle that is. One of the factors that makes the Grecco-Roman Olympian myths so enduring is that the gods are all about the human emotions writ large, being as wrathful, lustful and jealous as humanity, but with the power to act on all these impulses with impunity. Mister Miracle takes this concept of divinity and runs with it to the extreme when it comes to the New Gods, with Scott and Barda in particular driven to extreme acts of violence by their, very 'human', desire to be done with their abusive families and just live their own lives. Towards the end of the book, there is an extended sequence where one of the couple is at home, looking after their son and the other is engaging in bloody hand-to-hand combat on Apokolips.

There is an interesting art style happening in Mister Miracle, with digital blends and blurs over seemingly random panels, representing Scott's trauma disconnecting him from reality. As an experienced Trauma Psychotherapist, I found a lot of value in this technique, as it reflected both my study and the experiences discussed by my clients to do with their own trauma. Some of the reviews of Mister Miracle that I've read are put off by the visualisation of the protagonist's internailsed trauma, which I can understand, but it is, essentially, the main point of the story, and if the reader is unable to engage with the motif, then much of the story is lost. Can I also just say that this is probably the best appearance of Darksied that I've read? Not just because Darksied eating carrots and cream cheese is an amazing image, but because he his used minimally, doesn't engage in much of the fighting and is just a malevolent force, rather than a big bad to punch. Evidently, a lot of fans hate Tom King's run on Batman, but if he does more work in the vein of Mister Miracle, I'll be sure to track it down.

Miniatuers Finished: The KLF

A friend of mine printed these models, and, as I was already working on some Doctor Who stuff, I couldn't resist grabbing a couple. Naturally, I had to call them the Kaled Liberation Front, or, The KLF. 

If you get the joke, you get the joke, if not, think of them as low-tech Daleks from a regressive splinter faction.