The Pull List: 1 January 2014

After a Christmas and New Year break, I'm back to the grindstone on the Pull List, reviewing all of the comic books that I buy each week. As this is the beginning of a new year, it's worth briefly looking back at 2013 to see what the highlights were.

For my money the best comic series of 2013 was Dark Horse's 47 Ronin. Mike Richardson wrote a highly effective adaptation of the Japanese legend, while Stan Sakai took a rare break from his creator-owned anthropomorphic animals to give the story exactly the sort of pastel-coloured, gently styled artwork that it needed. It may have only been a five-issue miniseries, but I gave every issue five out of five - it was simply that good.

Speaking of five out of five, across the whole year I awarded five stars to 115 comics - an average of 2.2 comics per week. Marvel had the lion's share of those with 48 five-star comics, although that came from a fairy narrow band of titles: Thor: God of Thunder, Young Avengers, Hawkeye and Daredevil accounted for 26 of those between them. Thor had the most five-star issues with eight, mainly due to the sensational "Godkiller" arc that kicked off that series.

If there's an award for Publisher of the Year, however, I really think it deserves to go to Image. The publisher has released a massive quantity of creator-owned titles over the year, across a range of genres. It's left the American comic book industry in a much healthier place that it was in at the end of 2012, proving that a broad range of genres can thrive outside of the "big two" paradigm of superhero comics. Image has successfully expanded science fiction through books like Black Science and Storm Dogs, horror through Revival, fantasy with Umbral, edgy drama through Sheltered and Lazarus and crime via Fatale, Dead Body Road and a number of others.

All up, I really enjoyed being a comic book reader in 2013, and have high hopes for the year ahead. Let's start reviewing: this week, the reviews cover All-Star Western, Aquaman, Batwoman, The Flash, Forever Evil, The Green Team: Teen Trillionaires, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Manhattan Projects and The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.

Disney's Second Renaissance

Walt Disney's Frozen hit Australian cinemas on Boxing Day and has been raking in the cash ever since. So far it's grossed more than $16 million dollars and remains at #2 in the box office charts behind only The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. It's been a long time since Walt Disney's animated features were looking this healthy. Quite frankly it's been a long time since Disney's animated features were this good.

Film historians refer to "the Disney Renaissance", a creative resurgence within the Walt Disney Animation Studios that saw the company scale commercial and creative heights with a string of hits starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and running through to Tarzan in 1999. This golden period of studio animation stumbled to its knees over the 2000s due a variety of factors: internal schisms within the Walt Disney company, an aggressive release schedule that saw the studio release too many films too quickly (seven animated features between 1999 and 2002, for example) and an industry-wide shift away from traditional animation to computer-generated images (CGI). On a financial level Disney was fine, since they distributed and later purchased Pixar Animation Studios, the outfit that drove the CGI animation industry and whose own films enjoyed a creative drive that equalled - and arguably surpassed - Disney's own. Creatively, however, Disney was in a fallow period. A few more traditionally animated features crept out - Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Home on the Range, Treasure Planet - while Disney's own attempts at computer animation didn't exactly inspire audiences.

Star Trek Enterprise: "North Star"

The crew of the Enterprise infiltrate a mysterious colony of humans living in a 19th century civilization within the Delphic Expanse. When they observe the human bigotry towards the alien Skagarans, Archer feels compelled to interfere.

This is the sort of Star Trek episode that generally sets my teeth on edge. The Enterprise is out in an isolated region of space, yet magically discover a human civilization based on the wild west? It's ludicrous. For some strange reason, however, this time it works for me. "North Star" takes its ridiculous premise and gives it a broadly sensible treatment. Aesthetically it works as a solid western. Plot-wise it is by-the-numbers, broadly entertaining Enterprise. As part of Star Trek as a whole, it's a knowing throwback to the original series, where episodes like "A Piece of the Action" and "Patterns of Force" were commonplace.

Chernobyl Diaries (2012)

Is it ever acceptable for a motion picture to co-opt a real-life tragedy as fodder for horror? I'm troubled by the notion; on the one hand I think it's perfectly acceptable to modify the real world to generate art, but on the other it's very easy for a film to come across as crass, tasteless and sometimes even actively offensive. Chernobyl Diaries, written and produced by Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity) and directed by Brad Parker, treads the line in a fairly haphazard fashion. For the most part it's a diverting low budget horror flick, but then from time to time it feels... inappropriate somehow. The Chernobyl disaster was a real event, with 5,000,000 people in its contamination zone. Turning that into the basis for a (look away now if you don't want to know) mutant cannibal film is a fairly tacky manoeuvre.

The film follows a group of relatively clueless young American tourists as they accompany Russian tour guide Yuri in a journey to Pripyat, the residential city that once housed Chernobyl's workers. They quickly realise they are not alone. They rapidly find their van sabotaged. Yuri goes missing. People start panicking. And so on and so forth.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

John McTiernan's 1988 action film Die Hard was a game-changer in Hollywood action cinema, pitting a single ordinary protagonist against a group of armed villains. Police lieutenant John McClane (Bruce Willis) was a working-class everyman who panicked, got injured and generally survived the movie and saved the day by the skin of his teeth. The film was such a hit that 20th Century Fox repeated the formula in 1990's Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and then repurposed an unrelated screenplay to make 1995's Die Hard with a Vengeance. After a lengthy break the series got a fourth instalment in 2007 with the amiable but ridiculously over-the-top Live Free or Die Hard, and that film's success led to a fifth film six years later.

In A Good Day to Die Hard, the increasingly old and cranky Lieutenant McClane travels to Russia when his wayward son Jack is arrested for murder. Once there he discovers his son is a top-level CIA agent neck-deep in rescuing a disgraced dissident from an aspiring defence minister in the making. Or something. To be honest I'm fuzzy on the details because this is the worst film from 2013 that I have seen.

AKB0048: "Their Day Off"

After a month of training, the recruits are granted a day off to relax and explore Akibastar. For some it's a chance to get to know one another better. For another it's an opportunity to meet the Successors of AKB0048. For the production team it's a chance to indulge in a little fan service with naked teenage girls having a bath together.

That's annoying. I get that fan service is a thing, and generally speaking female characters are going to accidentally flash their underwear at the viewer or somesuch, but in this specific episode it irritated me more than it usually would. Part of the problem is that the episode is overall a very lightweight one. It meanders along via a series of character vignettes but overall doesn't add a great deal to the series.

Popular Posts: December 2013

Here are the five most popular posts on The Angriest this past month:

• "An Adventure in Space and Time" (link)
• Doctor Who: "The Day of the Doctor" (link)
• Babylon 5: "Voices of Authority" (link)
• The world's longest-running movie franchises (link)
• The best comic book covers of 2013 (link)

Here are the five most popular posts originally published in December 2013:

• The world's longest-running movie franchises (link)
• The best comic book covers of 2013 (link) 
• The Wolverine (2013) (link)
• Babylon 5: "Messages from Earth" (link)
• The Pull List: 27 November 2013 (link)

Doctor Who: "The Time of the Doctor"

I have just returned from a week-long holiday in Sydney, during which time the BBC aired the Doctor Who Christmas special. "The Time of the Doctor" is a significant episode for the series. It marks the final appearance of Matt Smith's 11th Doctor, heralds the introduction of Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor, ties up three seasons' worth of loose continuity strands and by coincidence also happens to be the 800th episode of Doctor Who ever broadcast.

A mysterious signal is being transmitted from an isolated planet. Every power-mongering civilization in the universe arrives out of fear, while the Doctor arrives out of curiosity. He finds a crack in the universe he thought he had left behind, a town named Christmas and a future he has been desperately hoping to avoid. On the planet Trenzalore, the Doctor's faces a 300 year-old siege that can only end in his death.