Here's the thing about the Batgirl Showcase cover...

Much as it pains me to admit it, Beau Smith has a point when he says that the "Joker's Bomb Must Wait Because My Lipstick's Smudged" cover is more or less indicative of the content; female characters in comics may not be where I'd like them to be today, but they're certainly doing marginally better now than in the '60s, when a woman had no other purpose besides trying to trap men in marriage (Lois Lane) or acting as weaker foils ("Sue! Now's no time to behave like a woman!").

HOWEVER, for the purpose of justification, historical accuracy isn't enough. Times have changed. You can't toss things out into the market just because they were totally appropriate before most of us were born: the reality is that in the here and now, that cover is offensive for the same reason African-American readers might find Ebony White offensive. It's playing to a stereotype that is not acceptable, certainly not in the 21st century when we're all supposed to know better. The notion that DC has no sensitivity to this, no ability to discern what images and tropes have passed their expiration date, is an unsettling one.

Shocking turn of events!

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=121021 (comments)

You see? Writers and reviewers can live together in harmony! :)

I'm coming up, so you'd better get this party started!

www.savagecritic.com

Tomorrow.

It's gonna be fun. :)

Um...

Find out your Harry Potter personality at LiquidGeneration!

Movie Review: Ratatouille

Not much to say about this one; it's a standard feel-good CGI movie along the lines of "Madagascar" and "The Ice Age". Amusing, with some funny scenes and feel-good moments (and the tiny sous chef was totally based on Peter Lorre!), but not necessarily worth rushing to the theatres.

Book Review: "A Density of Souls" by Christopher Rice

I should preface this review by noting that I knew two things about "A Density of Souls" which colored my reading: first, author Christopher Rice is Anne Rice's son, and while biology isn't destiny, it's kind of hard to avoid the question of influence. Second, this is Rice's first novel, and that goes a long way towards explaining certain awkward aspects of the book that would have been much more difficult to forgive, had said blunders been committed by a more experienced writer.

"A Density of Souls" can perhaps be best described as a novel of contradictions. It's an inter-familial drama which includes explosions, shoot-outs and bloodshed. It's a realistic story that, at one very uncomfortable point, attempts to inject a supernatural angle that just doesn't belong. There's a certain flatness to the individual characters, but the tapestry of lives that Rice creates is surprisingly compelling. It's a personal story, but it's also very much concerned with the community and its buried secrets. It's about a bunch of kids yet their parents have storylines too. It's a book that's clearly influenced by the works of the author's mother - occasional lapses into the violet end of the writing spectrum, overwritten and hyper-detailed descriptions of beautiful men, etc. - and yet I feel that Christopher touches upon a kind of emotional realism that Anne, with her pompous and overblown fixations on vampirism and Jesus, may never achieve.

The first half of the novel is primarily centered around four New Orleans kids - Stephen, Meredith, Greg and Brandon - whose childhood bonds are distorted by their passage into teenhood. Rice sets this up nicely, starting things off with a brief glimpse of the four at their closest, only to immediately leap ahead into high school after the damage wrought by time (and other factors) has been done. As each of them deals with somewhat-typical high school issues (bullying, sexual identity crises, peer pressure and the like), tragedy strikes, the full scale of which is not immediately apparent. We then move five years forward into the mind of Jordan, Brandon's older brother, whose return to New Orleans after a long exile starts a chain reaction that gradually unearths the community's darkest secrets.

Characterization is a bit of an issue here. The cast of "A Density of Souls" aren't fully rounded, but they're not two-dimensional either. At first I thought Rice was trying to convey something deeper but didn't quite have the words for it, but now I think it's more because this type of story - dealing with a network of interconnected histories rather than any one person's tale - wouldn't benefit from scooping out the insides of an individual's head for the purpose of deep introspection. In that sense, what we get is enough, especially considering that we're simultaneously exploring two generations of each family.

Rice's status as a novice is more apparent in some places than in others; on a purely technical level, his sentence structure leaves something to be desired, but that's more irritating than genuinely disruptive. The mercifully brief suggestion of the supernatural is indicative of the book's larger struggle for identity - it's part "Dawson's Creek" and part "Blue Velvet", and to Rice's credit he reconciles these aspects seamlessly, but then you get accusations of witchcraft in the middle of a completely realistic narrative, and that comes off as Rice invoking tropes associated with his mother's novels not because they have any functional purpose, but because they make for a useful crutch. I also can't deny there's an element of artificiality when it comes to the weepy gay guy becoming the object of everyone's affections - that's more about wish fulfillment than maintaining credibility.

At the same time, I was captivated by these characters, by their lives and their secrets, by Jordan's quest for the truth, by the shocking twists that pepper the book all the way to its very last page. And that's no small feat for a beginner. "A Density of Souls" has its flaws, no question, but it does quite a bit right as well.

Book Review: "Ithaka" by Adele Geras

After enjoying Adele Geras' earlier novel, "Troy" - a female-centric "alternative" depiction of the Trojan War - I finally had a chance to sit down with "Ithaka", her reinterpretation of "The Odyssey", following the same line of inverting the traditional focus of Homer's stories: rather than follow Odysseus on his fantastic journey, Geras' entire novel is set on Ithaka, focusing on the women left behind to fend for themselves while their king is away. However, this particular book turned out to be much more uneven than its predecessor.

On a technical level, "Ithaka" shows Geras applying some interesting devices. For example, one recurring sequence features Penelope weaving images drawn from her dreams. What she doesn't know is that her threadwork is actually telling the story of the Odyssey, snapshots of her husband's encounters with the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso and so on. It's actually very effective if you're familiar with the source material, because you realize that Odysseus is getting closer and closer to Ithaka. Geras also makes the occasional aside into the mind of Argos, Odysseus' ancient hunting dog, whose thoughts are presented in a stream-of-consciousness narrative that stresses the neverending cycle of day and night as Argos waits for his master to return.

But Geras' techniques can't quite cover up the true failure of "Ithaka": an astonishing lack of depth. I say astonishing because, for all that the main protagonists of "Troy" (Xanthe and Marpessa) were naive girls, their hopelessly limited perspectives were balanced out by characters such as the kitchen gossips and Helen, whose interpretations of the events around them were decidedly different (and, arguably, more informed). In this book, there's no font of wisdom to counter protagonist Klymene's overwhelming naivete; her twin brother is an invisible cipher whose ultimate fate is kind of moot, given that he's never around anyway, and her only real foil is Melantho, an over-the-top hoochie who goes out of her way to pony-ride every guy she can grab. She's a Chuck Austen character. If she were living in the 21st century she'd be a pop princess and "unwitting" participant in a sex tape scandal. In fact, Melantho is a perfect microcosm of what's wrong with the entire cast of "Ithaka" - they're so exaggerated, so blown out of proportion that we just can't take them seriously. And it's a dismaying step down from "Troy", where even the most cartoonish characters had some degree of depth to them (ie: the obnoxious Boros and his shockingly heroic attempt to save Xanthe when the Greeks invade).

And because the characters are so flat, there's very little emotional resonance here. Geras only allows us access to the inner thoughts of Klymene and Penelope, with everyone else seen through their eyes, but at the same time the events of "The Odyssey" (which are, after all, still unfolding in this narrative despite the alternative point of view) are affecting everyone. Why should we care about Telemachus if we can't get into his head? How can we be invested in Klymene's relationship with Mydon when we only ever see her side of it?

In fact, this restriction deeply undermines Geras' one major change to the story of "The Odyssey" - she rewrites the character of Leodes as a love interest for Penelope. They become involved even as Odysseus makes his way home, to the point where Penelope is almost convinced to just run away with him and leave Ithaka behind. Now, from a modernist/feminist angle, what Geras does makes sense. Penelope is, after all, probably the biggest doormat in Greek mythology, defined by her unbreakable fidelity to a husband who's humping every woman, demigoddess and inflatable dryad who crosses his path. I can certainly see why women writers, especially today's women writers, would be reluctant to follow Homer's lead quite that closely. And indeed, Geras completely breaks down the supposedly-happy ending of "The Odyssey", because even as Odysseus gets everything he wanted, including a wife who (he thinks) has remained exactly as he left her, Penelope will never really be as happy as she once was; robbed of her ability to make her own choice, she'll forever remain locked in an internal conflict that can't be resolved.

That's a poignant conclusion. Or it would be, if we had any real sense of the love Leodes and Penelope share. For us as readers, there's never any real doubt that Odysseus won't come home to reclaim his family and kingdom; Geras knows we're "in on the joke", and tries to take it further by creating this relationship that we know is doomed, but the characters don't. It might have worked if Leodes had been better-defined; as it stands, the only thing you really know about him in 350 pages is that he loves Penelope and that he's probably the only suitor on Ithaka who isn't a complete bastard. That doesn't make for powerful drama.

I also think Geras missed an opportunity to tie this book in with her earlier novel, as one of the supporting characters introduced at a later stage is a survivor of the Trojan War. This would've been a great oppportunity to revisit, even in passing, those characters from "Troy" whose fates were left uncertain. In fact, Homer used that exact type of intertextuality in the original epic; one of Telemachus' voyages takes him to Sparta, where he learns what became of Helen after the Greeks reclaimed her (referring to "The Iliad").

As with "Troy", the gods of Olympus appear throughout "Ithaka". However, this time they're active participants; characters see and remember them, and they even physically involve themselves at key moments in the story. On the one hand, this is preferable to how they were written in "Troy" - a god would appear and offer important information to a privileged character, only to be forgotten moments later. It made them completely useless because nothing they said affected the course of events or gave any insight into characters' motives and desires. On the other hand, when directly intervening, the gods end up deflating tense moments prematurely. For example, when Odysseus finally leads an attack against the suitors, Pallas Athene informs Penelope (and the readers) that a certain character is going to die, moments before it actually happens in what would normally be considered a surprise twist. Except it's obviously not much of a twist since we knew it was coming. Similarly, Poseidon makes some threatening comments early on, only to disappear completely in the second half of the novel, but it's enough to give away the fates of several characters.

Overall, it's a very clumsy effort on Adele Geras' part, and I honestly don't know how to reconcile this with "Troy" at all. It's a below-average novel on its own, but looks all the poorer in comparison to its predecessor.