Judging the New 52: January 2015

In January 2015, the American comic book industry was all about Star Wars. The first issue of Marvel's new ongoing Star Wars comic shifted close to a million copies via Diamond Distribution to the USA and Australia alone. Additional sales in the UK (which aren't counted in Diamond's figures) will easily push it over to make it the first million-selling American comic in years. Certainly it's the highest-selling single issue since Diamond started exclusive distribution in 1997.

All of this activity saw Marvel claim a pretty healthy market share of more than 40 per cent, but I think all of the attention on Star Wars is masking some pretty serious downward trends among DC's titles. Put simply, some of the main DC titles are really starting to slip with readers. Justice League dropped below 70,000 readers for the first time the New 52 launched. Similarly Aquaman dropped below the 30,000 unit mark, and Green Lantern below 40,000. Detective Comics dropped by 3,000 copies. That follows a similar drop in December, suggesting that despite the sterling work Manapul and Buccelatto are doing on that book the market simply isn't buying. Sales are still above 50,000 copies, so it's doubtful DC will be taking any drastic measures, but it must be of concern.

DC have a two-month crossover coming up in April and May, and are launching 24 new comics in June and setting up new creative teams on many of the continuing titles. Hopefully that will bring some readers back.

Horror Hotline: Big Head Monster (2001)

An American TV crew arrives in Hong Kong to profile "Horror Hotline", a late-night radio chat show whose listeners call in to share their own experiences of ghosts, supernatural experiences and the occult. A call comes through describing a demonic baby with eight eyes and a giant head, and after that call comes through a whole wave of similar calls are received. The American journalist Mavis (Josie Ho) and local radio producer Ben (Francis Ng) team up to investigate.

Really you'd think that all you need to judge this film is a quick glance at the title, an understanding that it's a cheaply made Hong Kong horror movie, and quick read of the premise. It sounds like the tackiest kind of D-grade movie, less scary than it is hopelessly silly. To an extent it is rather silly. It's also remarkably effective in places, and is one of those rare pulp horror movies that's significantly better than it has any real right to be.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Through the Looking Glass"

It's 17 April 1995, and time for more Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) is kidnapped by a duplicate O'Brien (Colm Meaney), and transported to a parallel universe - the same alternate reality in which Major Kira and Dr Bashir found themselves a year earlier. The alternate Sisko is dead, and the Commander is tasked with completing his final mission: rescuing his own wife, who in this universe never died in a Borg attack.

Given the enormous creative and popular success of Season 2's "Crossover", which acted as a sequel to the classic Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror", it's unsurprising that the Deep Space Nine production team elected to return to the alternate universe once again. They clearly put their thinking caps on as well, finding one of the more dramatically interesting and character-enriching alternative situations they could have imagined: reuniting Sisko with his dead wife Jennifer.

DC Comics: The New 24

In June DC Comics is undergoing a widely expected semi-relaunch of their superhero line. Everyone will likely remember DC's line-wide reboot of September 2011, the "New 52", and while there have been fairly regular launches of new monthly titles since then June represents the biggest change since then. The New 52 moniker is being dropped, and 24 new monthly books are premiering in one month. These will join 25 books that are continuing - some with new creative teams and some with the same writers and artists.

These new titles are following from the successful broadening of the Batman comic book range in recent months. Headlined by a re-imagining of Batgirl, a raft of books have tried out new directions and styles including Harry Potter-inspired boarding school hijinks in Gotham Academy, a crime saga in Catwoman, espionage in Grayson, and horror in Gotham After Midnight. This "Batgirling" of the DC Universe looks set to produce some really interesting books, and - it must be said - a few with "immediate cancellation" written all over them.

So with 24 new books at once, this is probably going to be a fairly long post. Let's take a deep breath and dive right in.

Bullet Ballet (1998)

Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto made an enormous impact internationally with his low-budget 1989 tech-horror Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Shot in grainy black and white with a piercing industrial soundtrack, it rapidly became a cult hit around the world and attracted a fiercely loyal cult following. Tsukamoto's subsequent films never quite captured the widespread attention that his feature debut did - and that included two Tetsuo sequels - but he remains a provocative and fascinating filmmaker whose work I regularly admire.

Bullet Ballet, released in 1998, is something of a jump back for Tsukamoto in terms of visual aesthetic and storytelling style. After expanding his style with Hiruko the Goblin (1991) and Tokyo Fist (1995), here he reverts back to the grainy black and white visuals, the aggressive musical score and the shaky, frantic camera work that made Tetsuo such an arresting film. The results are spectacular: Tsukamoto keeps the very best elements of his first film but combines them with a more complex and nuanced sense of story and character. I think this is the best Tsukamoto film that I've seen so far.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Distant Voices"

It's 10 April 1995, and time for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Dr Bashir is assaulted and knocked unconscious by an alien thief. When he awakes, Deep Space Nine is in disarray as some unseen monster stalks down the crew on-by-one. It soon becomes apparent that Bashir is not being hunted across the station at all: he is lying in a coma, and an alien virus is attempting to kill him inside his own dream world.

And it was all a dream. This is the kind of maddening, self-indulgent, ridiculous dream world episode that sets my teeth on edge. I imagine they're very popular with the people who made it, since it gives everyone a chance to do something different. The design people can re-light and re-arrange the sets to make them look strange and interesting, and the cast all get to play their regular roles in different ways. The writers and the director can engage in surreal dream imagery. The audience? The audience be damned; this isn't an episode for us, it's an episode for them.

Drive (2002)

A depressed businessman suffering from hypertension finds his car hijacked by three armed bank robbers. What ensues is a bizarre and purposefully absurd odyssey through the streets of Tokyo over a 24-hour period. The film is Drive, released in Japan in 2002 and directed by Hiroyuki Tanaka under his pseudonymous alter-ego Sabu.

I have only seen one other Sabu film, which was his rather marvellous manga adaptation Bunny Drop (2011). This is a remarkably different film: whereas Bunny Drop was a heart-warming conventional comedy-drama, this is a slightly darker and considerably more sparse affair. It doesn't even really have a story, just a road movie-style chain of interconnected events. Parts of it work, parts of it do not, and it's overall a little too long for comfort, but in the end there's more good in the film than bad and enough interesting scenes and moments to make it worth recommending.

The Pull List: 4 February 2015

Saga has returned! This 25th issue kicks off the fifth volume of the book, and picks up where issue #24 left off: half of the cast kidnapped, the other half forced to team up with the villain to chase after them.

I was rather underwhelmed by the last volume of this comic, which seemed to unexpectedly jump forward in time by two years and then do a lot of odd work in making me actively dislike characters I had previously liked an awful lot. To an extent that damage is still done; despite Alana's stressful situation, I'm struggling to care that much about what happens to her. That said there's an urgency and a narrative drive in this issue that's been missing for a while, and that makes up for my lack of empathy quite a bit.

I'm hugely invested, on the other hand, with Marko. Forced to team up with Prince Robot, and terrified that his daughter is dead or lost to him forever, he's now the emotional core of the book. His situation is awful, and both Vaughn's writing and Staple's artwork really bring home just what a nightmare scenario he is in. It's momentarily quite powerful stuff.

One of the things that impresses me about how Vaughn writes this book is the way in which he casually drops in major plot information through Hazel's narration that in any other book would feel like a massive spoiler (here she reveals her father won't see her again for several years). In Saga, however, it's something that adds weight and gravity. We're already sad see Marko mourn losing his daughter; once we learn that he's not going to find her any time soon, it feels overwhelmingly tragic.

Staples' art remains as close to flawless as one can get. She highlights character over background detail, and gives the various protagonists real personality and depth. This is, all up, a brilliant issue. I hope the quality I loved in the first 18 issues has finally returned. (5/5)

Under the cut: reviews of Action Comics, Annihilator, Batman Eternal, Detective Comics, Ms Marvel, Nameless and The Woods.