Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

An absurd, character-focused, darkly humorous, psychological take on people with the super-power/body horror combo.

The title sequence sets the tone perfectly with Dave McKean-style imagery and music that sounds like the His Dark Materials theme as played by Garbage.

They start out playing up some of the X-Men similarities (the original comics for both debuted almost simultaneously). Costumes and code names mostly don’t show up until a couple of seasons in. (Though Rita seems to have a fondness for red and white outfits.)

Mostly it’s just weird.

The first two seasons are strongest. After that it gets very uneven.

Characters

Aside from Cyborg, “Crazy Jane” – the one with 64 personalities (each with its own super-power) – is the most stable and even-keeled of the bunch. Rita, Larry and Cliff spend decades hiding from the world in Niles Caulder’s oversized mansion (the fact that they haven’t aged isn’t acknowledged until at least the second season), in various forms of depression.

Putting Cyborg in the Doom Patrol instead of the Titans is a bit of an odd fit at first. He’s from the brighter side of the DCU, and an actual super-hero in this world. But he’s always had a streak of insecurity (at best) about his transformation and what he feels he’s lost of his humanity. Even the Teen Titans cartoon had that “repairs are not yet complete” episode. So he ends up being simultaneously a foil for the rest and still being one of them. It’s especially interesting to compare him to Cliff, who’s only a brain in a robot body at this point.

Rita Farr is an interesting case, since the Doom Patrol run that most directly informs the show is Grant Morrison’s…in which she wasn’t a member, having been killed years before. My knowledge of the comic book version mostly comes from the 1980s run of The New Teen Titans, in which she’s Gar Logan’s fondly-remembered dead adoptive mother. I do remember that she mainly had stretching powers in the comics, and thought of herself as a freak after gaining them. Which kinda worked in the 1960s, but doesn’t work for the 2010s. Giving her uncontrolled powers here, such that when she gets upset she starts melting into a blob, fits the tone of the show and justifies her self-loathing more effectively.

(In theory the whole team was killed off in the comics of the 1970s, but by the time Morrison picked it up, everyone except Rita had turned out to still be alive.)

Specifics

Cliff seeking a father-daughter relationship with Jane (not realizing at first how horrible her own father was), then finally working up the nerve to get in touch with his family. (And I must say, Brendan Fraser is perfect for the role.)

Rita is such fun as sort of a glamorously-drunk den mother.

Larry coming to terms with the fact that he skipped out on the decades-long struggle for gay rights - today (well, in the late 2010s, anyway) he could be himself, if he wasn’t radioactive and bonded to an alien creature.

It’s fascinating to see a storyline in which Vic actually regains his human appearance for an extended period of time, and ultimately chooses to reactivate his tech, appearance and all.

I got so tired of the butts.

The obligatory musical episode, “Immortimas Patrol,” was…not very good. With the exception of “The Elements of Love,” a well-performed dance number full of chemistry puns. (Weirdly enough, I ended up watching it in the same week as one of the Magicians musical episodes and “Subspace Rhapsody,” which was a lot more fun. Of course Star Trek is all about people who are competent at what they do, and Doom Patrol is the opposite. Including, as it turns out, music.)

The last scene (Cliff and the vision of the future) was a perfect bittersweet coda to the whole show.

It’s been ages since I last read the original, and two days before Christmas I wanted a break from Toilers of the Sea, so I figured I’d pick it up again yesterday. And yeah, the story holds up. The emphasis on kindness and charity and human connection makes it timeless, beyond the specifics of poverty in England during the early Industrial Revolution or 19th-century Christmas traditions.

Dickens as narrator is more cheerful in “A Christmas Carol” than he is in heavier works like Great Expectations (though even that has its moments of levity), even when describing Scrooge’s cruelty, the Cratchets’ poverty, or the black market pawn shop where items stolen from his corpse are sold off. The Cratchets making the most of what little they have is of course part of the point, but there’s a sort of perverse he-had-it-coming-to-him glee in the latter scene.

The trickiest part is making Scrooge’s conversion believable, and while I think some screen versions fall into because-the-theme-demanded-it territory, the original makes it work. The spirits cover all the bases of persuasion, sometimes hinting, other times bluntly throwing Scrooge’s own words or actions back in his face. You see just enough of his youth to believe that he could still have some compassion and capacity for joy somewhere, buried deep down, slumbering where they might be rekindled. And you see hints of it beginning as early as Christmas Past. Even if it takes a bunch of ghosts traumatizing him to do it.

Of course, just about every adaptation I’ve seen popped up in my head while reading it, starring everyone from George C. Scott to Mickey Mouse. Patrick Stewart used to perform an amazing one-man stage show that I was lucky enough to see back in the 1990s.

And yet after all this time, it’s still not clear what’s so particularly dead about a doornail.

An intricate novella about the middle generations of a multi-generational spaceship, those with no memory of Earth and no chance of setting foot on the target planet. A few generations back, a religion started with the belief that nothing outside the ship matters, but you have to keep the ship functional and traveling. By now it’s become the belief that nothing outside the ship exists at all, that the home they left was a myth, and that their destination is a myth too, and only the journey is real.

What happens when that ideology takes hold of the ship’s leadership? And navigation? And education? After all, why teach children about animals, or forests, or how to farm on a planet? They’ll never see one.

And what happens when that ideology faces proof that the destination is real?

On one hand, it’s a classic case of dogma vs. science, or humanity’s insistence on ignoring slow, long-term crises like climate change. On the other hand, it’s not as if there’s a way for most people on the ship to prove the existence of planets anymore. They just have to take the word of their ancestors that their world existed. The destination world is as unknowable as an afterlife.

So it becomes a matter of trust: do you believe the religious teachings that match your experience, or do you believe the historical and scientific teachings that don’t? And if you do have the knowledge and resources to check scientifically, do you accept or reject what you find out?

“Paradises Lost” was originally published in The Birthday of the World (And Other Stories), and is also collected in The Found and the Lost.

Echoes

There are a zillion stories about generation ships. But I see echoes of the story in Czerneda’s The Gate to Futures Past, with the people trapped on a space ship and facing the question of what’s real about their existence…in Burke’s Semiosis, where the later generations of colonists have a completely different outlook from the first generation who came from Earth…and in Heaven’s Vault, a game in which an archaeologist seeks out the history of the nebula she lives in, even though the learned believe time is a loop, and the idea of coming from somewhere is unfathomable to them.

And of course we see that question of competing worldviews in the real world, as science and technology become too complex for casual understanding and pundits peddle “alternative facts” while discouraging people from checking up on them.

I don’t know how I missed a time-travel comic book published by DC (through its short-lived Helix imprint) when it was new, but apparently I did. And I didn’t stumble on it over the next ~30 years until I read about the crowd-funded hardcover re-release last year.

Time Breakers flips the familiar time-cop trope on its head: Instead of protecting time from paradoxes, the protagonists are trying to create more paradoxes, convinced that the very existence of life depends on it.

The main characters are intriguing, as are the ever-more-convoluted tangles of timeline dependency loops, but the villains don’t have much in the way of depth, and I can barely remember them even after a second read.

Weston’s art is detailed, bringing to life the settings and costumes of different eras ranging from prehistory to the near future.

The story feels a bit choppy and unbalanced, spending more time on setup than I’d expect from something this length, and diving into the resolution faster than expected. It makes me wonder if it was originally intended to be a longer story, or an ongoing series that would allow more room for characters, and then shortened to 5 issues.

The 2024 hardcover collection includes a new cover and commentary by Weston, along with two earlier commentaries by Pollack (who died the year before, and to whose memory this edition is dedicated) from 1997 and 2017.

Regarding Helix Comics

Helix was a science fiction imprint that DC used for a couple of years in the mid-to-late 1990s. Its best-known title, Transmetropolitan (a futuristic take on Hunter S. Thompson by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson), moved over to Vertigo after the label was retired.

I only remember picking up a couple of them at the time: Sheva’s War because of its painted artwork, and The Dome: Ground Zero for its early computer-generated art. A few years later when I finished reading the main Elric books I picked up the collection of Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, and I eventually got around to reading most of Transmet. One of these days I’ll read the rest of it. There were more, of course, but Cyberella is the only other title that rang a bell when I read that list.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I skipped most of the Helix line. I was reading a lot of comics (mostly super-heroes, but some media tie-ins), and I was reading a lot of science-fiction books, and I was obviously aware of Helix…so why didn’t I check out more of the science-fiction comics? I can only assume that most of them just didn’t grab my attention enough to look more closely. Even the one about time paradoxes.

Incredibly good ice cream with flavors and combinations not usually found here in the US. The Ube malted crunch and Vietnamese coffee rocky road (which doesn’t have nuts, so I can actually eat it!) are my favorites of their standard flavors, and I always make sure to try some of the seasonal flavors when I’m in. The Japanese neapolitan (matcha/cherry blossom/Hokkaido milk) is a reliable standby as well.

I’ve only been to the Venice (California) location, but they apparently have several other locations around the Los Angeles area, and are opening one in Torrance soon.