Comic Reviews, September 2015

Some very personal and subjective gut feeling reviews of stuff what I've read.

The Wicked + The Divine

Image
Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson

Like many Gillen/McKelvie comics (Phonogram, Young Avengers), I read this and just ended up hating fictional 17-year olds just as much as the fictional 17-year olds depicted seem to despise anyone over the age of 30.

The comic is crammed full of the young, the smooth and the symmetrical, with copious pop music shout-outs, the Everyone's Bi trope cranked to the max, and of-the-now references to current social media fads that will quickly date this title.

If I had to encapsulate the comic in a single panel, it would be of a beautiful skinny androgyne posing in a nightclub proclaiming 'MySpace is Dead! SnapChat is Forever!'

Verdict: The Pretty + The Vacant.

SpiderVerse

Marvel
Dan Slott, Olivier Coipel

Every Spidey that ever there was, in a bonkers story that spans alternate Earths. You want the Superior Spider-Man? You got him. You want Manga Spidey? Check. You want Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham? He's right here.

Unfortunately you've also got silly old Morlun, a sort of spider-energy vampire in Hellfire Club drag, along with his lamoid family of forgettable psychos. In a comic chock full of guys in red, black and blue webbed costumes, it was the half-dozen Morlunites that I could never keep straight.

Verdict: Amazing Spider-Fanservice

Hawkeye

Marvel
Matt Fraction, David Aja

Nice little series showcasing what Clint Barton gets up to on those days when he's not running around shooting robots with the Avengers, and one that has been rightly praised for many factors. The character interplay, the dog, the sign-language, his neighbours, Barney; it's all good stuff.

I have sympathy for anyone who, like me, had to endure the erratic schedule of this 3-year series though. It's only 22 issues long, yet there was a 6-month gap between issues 20 and 21, and a further 5 months between 21 and the final issue. In a simpler series, that might not have been a problem, but Hawkeye had numerous plot lines and time-jumps, which made picking the story up again near impossible.

One final tip. While I like the Kate Bishop in LA issues, they're a different beast altogether. I'd recommend skipping 'em and sticking to the Clint in New York storyline, then going back for Kate later.

Verdict: A great 17-issue series

Saga

Image
Brian K Vaughan, Fiona Staples

Lacks focus. Stick with Y: The Last Man (what if every man on the planet dropped dead?) or Ex Machina (former superhero becomes mayor of New York). Rambles from plotline to plotline. Irritating child's narrated foreshadowing. Arsey central characters.

And the silly, silly aliens. Staples often simply draws regular 21st century humans in contemporary clothes, but with horns or wings. And those TV-head aliens! They visually strike a bum satirical note in a series which is gritty/soapy.

Verdict: Not as good as everyone says it is.

Bandette

Dark Horse
Paul Tobin, Colleen Coover

Good. Fun. Like it.

Verdict: A welcome upbeat antidote to...

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

Pantheon Books
Chris Ware

The downbeat saga of a near personality-free nobody and the reunion with his deadbeat dad. Once I'd got to the very useful Story So Far double-page spread about 50 pages in, it made a lot more sense. There are also some nice pictographics throughout.

I liked the flashbacks to Jimmy's grandfather (and confusingly, his double) as a child at the Chicago World's Fair, as well as the funny/sad cartoon on the back cover (the tale of an unloved and unbought copy of this very book). But on the whole this is an exercise in depression and bleakness.

Verdict: Only to be read if you are a stranger to the black dog.

Attack on Titan

Kodansha Comics
Hajime Isayama

Not what I expected (I thought it was a sci-fi space adventure from the title). Quite liked the freaky naked grinny-mouthed giants, but it is quite hard for a Western reader to remember to read the entire thing, including the order of the speech balloons in each panel, from right to left. Very Japanese, with way too much (clumsily translated) dialogue.

Reading tip: spend no more than 3 seconds on each page. Reading it at speed, especially action chapters like volume 2, lends pace even if there are pages and pages of angsting kids shouting oddly at each while Giant Grinny Nudists are eating people outside.

Verdict: Give the animated version a go instead.

Secret Wars: Marvel's Ultimate Crossover Bloatfest reviewed

Reworked splash from Mike Zeck's Secret Wars art, 1984

So, I've dipped into Marvel's current Ultimate Crossover Bloatfest, which for those of you who dwell outwith the worlds of comics is a several months long publishing event, affecting upwards of 40 regular comic books, with one mega-storyline directly or indirectly affecting characters big, small, forgotten or best-forgotten. This sort of thing's been going on since the mid-80s with the original Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars and - over the vibrational garden fence - DC comics' Crisis On Infinite Earths. The latest offering from the house of ideas is, confusing to greyhairs such as myself, also called Secret Wars. Or possibly Battleworlds. Or Warzones. It is... a mixed bag.

Essentially the 'in-game' background is this: all the different dimensions/worlds/alternate Earths were disappearing (probably an anti-matter wave or something), until only a couple remained, the classic mainstream Marvel Earth (also known as Earth-616, and a no-prize for the first person to correctly tell me where that designation first appeared) and the more recent Ultimate Earth (or Earth-reboot).

What's he sitting on? A tree?
Dried porridge? The Thing?

Some cosmic jiggery-pokery ensues (I don't know exactly what coz I didn't get whichever comic it happened in, but I'm hoping for a giant Kirby tuning fork), and a single planet Earth emerges. Except that it isn't really Earth at all - it's a patchwork collection of realms known collectively as Battleworld (again, confusingly like the original Secret Wars), all ruled over by Doctor Doom, who now wears white and is God, or at least a god, to quote Phil Connors. Why he didn't rename it Doomworld escapes me, as that is exactly what he would do. I suspect the Secret Wars/Batttleworld concept was set in stone before the DoomGod thing was.

Each realm/kingdom is ruled over by a different baron; often another villain (e.g. Baron Sinister and his Bar Sinister; I assume it's a really evil mutant pub) but not always (Sgt Fury rules the craply-named Europix in some sort of never-ending World War Two).  Nothing particular new in that - we've seen the 'villains carve up the planet for themselves' before, in Old Man Logan, the Ultimate line of comics, and Age of Apocalypse. Many of the realms hark back to particular comic events in Marvel history; Days of Future Past, Planet Hulk, Infinity Gauntlet etc. Consequently there are multiple Hulks wandering around, endless Wolverines (wasn't it ever thus) and - oddly - a planet-wise police force made up only of Thors (including frog Thor in a lab-coat - yay!).

The real-world commercial reason for the event is probably a) giant big crossovers sell and b) it's high time that the printed Marvel Universe more closely resembled the hugely popular meganaut that is the cinematic version (or MCU as we bores call it). And they're probably right. Much as I love the established mainstream Marvel continuity, which has - more or less - survived unscathed through the decades since Stan and Jack dreamt up Fantastic Four #1 back in 1961, it seems odd that the comics do not reflect the burgeoning MCU, which itself owes much of its look and feel to Mark Millar's reimagined version of the Avengers, The Ultimates.

Back when comics were fun, mutter mumble

With the exception of the odd movie tie-in comic, to my knowledge only the ongoing Iron Man series in any way resembles the on-screen version (though, shorn of Robert Downey Jnr's snarky charisma, Matt Fraction's paper depiction of Tony Stark is naught but an irritating tool, and isn't helped by endless tedious storylines involving corporate shenanigans and 'reinventing the scientific paradigm'. Yawn. Gimme the classic David Michelenie/Bob Layton era any day: Iron Man vs two dozen villains on Justin Hammer's floating island! Shellhead and Doom go back to Camelot! The Titanium Man crashes a Rodney Dangerfield gig!).

So, to Battleworld. Or possibly Secret Wars. Or Warzones. I picked up a bunch of issues this weekend at the ever-pleasant Orbital Comics in London, where I had a delightful chat with the chap at the till about Fables. The comics I selected were all either issues #2 or #3, so I was coming in slightly late to the story. Still and all, comics are published in serial form, and should be expected to make some kind of sense to readers who haven't been there from the beginning.

In many modern comics, and Secret Wars is no exception to this, an effort has been made to bring newcomers up to date with the story by means of a single page recap, often with teeny-tiny headshots of the the main characters. This technique recently reached its nadir with Jonathan Hickman writing the Avengers (I forget which flavour), with literally dozens of character headshots peppering the recap page, like a Legion Of Superheroes yearbook. But more of Mr Hickman's influence later.

* * *

Here's what I issues I read, why I picked them off the shelf, and what I thought of them:


Secret Wars #3 (of 8)

Never tire of Alex Ross' Spidey

Why I picked it up: It has a groovy Alex Ross cover - a split screen with half of Reed Richards and a bunch o' heroes (both Spideys, Ladythor etc) on one side, and some dude in silly hat with a bunch of villains on the other. For all Ross' genius at painting likenesses of comic characters, the headshot of Maximus (who some call mad) is unintentionally hilarious - he looks like Jim Carrey about to do a Jimmy Hill impression.

The other villains include forgettable Hickman dweebs with daft two-part names like Corvus Glaive, Midnight Swan and my least/best favourite, Proxima Midnight, or Five To Twelve as I like to call her.

What I thought of it: Eh. This series is the main spine of the entire Secret Wars event, so it necessarily must hop about from realm to realm. And it does so with the usual lack of characterisation that is a Hickman trademark - only grieving, shell-shocked Reed and a babbling Miles Morales (Ultimate Spidey) display anything like a personality; everyone else just delivers stentorian globs of dialogue with all the charm of a broomstick.

It also seemed to be a bit of a breather between issues as there was an awful lot of chat and very little action, apart from a spaceship opening up to reveal a bunch of 'pre-Crisis' survivors, which was nicely done. I also liked the hidden Isle of Agamotto.

Nice artwork from Esad Ribic, though the shot of Doom's face, whilst disturbing, doesn't seem horrific enough - it looks like he could have dispensed with the metal face mask and got away with a cyclist's scarf over his nose all these years.


The Korvac Saga  #2

Sadly no Starhawk/Aleta body-swapping

Why I picked it up: As a youngster, I loved the original Korvac Saga in the Avengers, in which the team must first discover why their team-mates keep disappearing to (spoiler: it's the Collector, 'saving' them from Korvac), and then must team-up with the original Guardians of the Galaxy (from the 30th century, you know) to battle a near omnipotent godlike being called Michael Korvac, who seems content to quietly rule the world from his nice house in Forest Hills. This issue's cover depicts a bunch of second-string Avengers (Wonder Man, Moondragon, the original Captain Mar-Vell, Jocasta) and the original Guardians mixing it up.

What I thought of it: Competently written by Dan Abnett, with decentish - almost John Romita Jnr like - artwork from Otto Schmidt. It turns out that Korvac is running a realm in Battleworld called Forest Hills (a nice callback) and is playing host to a diplomatic visit from Wonder Man and his Avenger bodyguards from the realm of Holy Wood (ahahaha).

Not really very much of interest here. Some people spontaneously monster out and there is some fighting and some talking. Korvac isn't wearing his t-shirt and shorts, nor does he ever glow yellow and purple with Cosmic Power. Also Wonder Man's personality doesn't seem to match any of his previous incarnations; not the indecisive hesitant hero wannabe of the early years or the solid hero of the 90s solo series. Nice to see the original future Guardians of the Galaxy though.


Ultimate End #3

Ultimate Cap has more stars and pouches
than Mainstream Cap, but less head-wings.

Why I picked it up:
It has a nice cover of mainstream Spidey and Ultimate Cap.

What I thought of it:
Good stuff from writer Brian Michael Bendis doing what he does best, cracking dialogue from characters he loves. Rather splendidly, it was only on the second read-through that I noticed all the Ultimate characters speak in sentence case, while ALL THE MAINSTREAM CHARACTERS SPEAK IN CAPS. Marvellous. They do they same thing in the main Secret Wars series. Once I figured that out, it made the Bruce/Doc Green and Punisher/Punisher interaction a lot more comprehensible, though I couldn't figure out why Doc Green loses his silly beard and goes pink when he Hulks out (even more). And the Punisher on Punisher scene was a bit daft.

The mainstream Wrecking Crew wondering where all the 'kiddie superheroes' had come from (the Ultimate comics line having somewhat younger characters) was a nice touch.

Continuity-wise, I think the Ultimate End storyline is supposed to take place before all the other Secret Wars comics. I think. Can't figure out where it fits in - with both the Spideys and Doc Green also appearing in other SW comics in vastly different circumstances, and beards.


Planet Hulk #3

Ohhhh - I've just noticed the big jaws! Doh.

Why I picked it up:
The cover is a great birds-eye shot of a barbaric Captain America accompanied by his 'warbound' partner Devil Dinosaur. Devil Dinosaur! Yay! Sadly he does not display the Gary Busey-like choppers of his original Kirby incarnation, but still: Cap and a red tyrannosaur together, trekking across some sort of Hulk-themed Cursed Earth. I'm so there.

What I thought of it:
S'alright. Turns out they're also accompanied by Doc Green, the slightly silly Bruce-with-goggles version of the Hulk. They're on a quest/mission across 'Greenland' to either rescue Bucky or kill the 'red king', who I assume is Red Hulk. There's plenty of action, a lot of walking/talking and oodles of greenies from a sort of down and out Maestro-Hulk to a bunch of Mad Max tribal Hulks.

Not much to it, but like another SW series Weirdworld (Conan expy Arkon treks across a... well, weird world), it does what it says on the tin. There's also a slightly homoerotic flashback between Cap and Bucky, though that could be just me unconsciously indulging in a bit of 'shipping.


Squadron Sinister 2

If only the Four could save the world

Why I picked it up:
I have always loved the Squadron in both its Sinister and Supreme models (even though the Supreme Power series went on for too long). So a series focussing on the evil Marvel version of the Justice League is most attractive, especially as they appear here in their classic 60s/70s guises. But the real selling point for me was the Frightful Four front and centre on the cover!

Though they are traditionally seen as something of a joke threat for the Fantastic Four, I have come to love the Wizard, Sandman, Trapster and Medusa ever since they played a crucial role in a long running Marvel Superheroes campaign I ran called Seconds.

What I thought of it:
Pretty good, though as with any series where the villains are the protagonists, the writer needs to work hard to make them interesting, if not sympathetic. A challenge that I think Marc Guggenheim falls short of here: Hyperion and Warrior Woman (not Power Princess?) are casual brutes, Whizzer a bit of a nobody, Dr Spectrum has no character at all, and Nighthawk is a downright sadist. John Ostrander's Suicide Squad managed the trick by making at least a couple of the central villains enjoyable, whether it was snarky Captain Boomerang, self-destructive Deadshot or the troubled Enchantress. Here, they are all just nasty tools.

But! It does contain the Frightful Four, though sadly not for long. I would have preferred to see them get a few more licks in, especially with the ultra-smart Wizard leading them. Secondly, of all the SW comics I picked up, this does the best to convey the idea that this truly is a battle world, with neighbouring realms going to war and invading all over the place.

And what a hoot some of those realms are! We have Sgt Fury's World War Two zone (massively outclassed by the invading Frightful Four and Squadron Sinister), featuring long-forgotten characters like Captain Savage and his Leatherneck Raiders, and the even more obscure Combat Kelly and his Deadly Dozen! Then there's a page featuring heroes from the original New Universe, before it got a cynical Warren Ellis makeover; Starbrand, Spitfire, Merc, even Kickers Inc - they're all here. Splendid.

* * *

All in all, a mixed bag. There's a whole bunch of other Secret Wars titles out that I haven't yet glanced at - Where Monsters Dwell, Future Imperfect, 1872, X-Men '92, Captain Britain and the Mighty Defenders...

The optimist in me would like to think there's enough of a spread, both in characters and genres something there for most comic readers, and maybe even draw in new readers.

What do you think of Secret Wars so far? Lemme know.

Superhero Movies and Me

I contributed a few articles to online magazine Journey Planet, for their superhero issue - #21 - in April 2015. Prepare for childhood nostalgia and extreme geekery.

* * *

I was always a Marvel kid, growing up. DC comics in the 70s, with their Superman robot doubles and Bizarro Loisses and multi-coloured Kryptonites, were just a bit too old-fashioned for me. Marvel was modern and somehow more real, as far as any superhero comics could be, with their argumentative rock men, wisecracking wall-crawlers and angry adamantium-clawed mutants. They were just cooler. I remember practising folding my middle and ring fingers into my palms and making thwippy web-shooter sounds, then flipping my hands round the other way up and pretending to cast the Roving Rings of Raggador at the other kids in the school playground.

So you can imagine how excited I was when they made the first Spider-Man film in 1977. Spidey wasn’t my favourite hero - that was probably Hulk (oddly, I never felt right calling him The Hulk; I felt, like his teen sidekicks Rick Jones and Jim Wilson, that the jade giant was my friend, so just ‘Hulk’) - but I’d read enough of his adventures, reprinted in Britain in the weekly black and white comic Super Spider-Man and the Titans, to be thrilled at seeing the wall-crawler in a film.

For years, like many British comic publishers, Marvel UK had been in the habit of launching new weekly comics for the initial boom of extra sales, then later merging less successful titles into their more popular sister publications. Thus The Titans, a landscape format anthology of old Avengers, Fantastic Four and Sub-Mariner tales, was merged with the mellifluously-named Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes (I never quite understood why he was ‘Super’ Spider-Man) to form Super Spider-Man and the Titans. So now you know.

The Spidey stories I’d read were weird and wild 70s tales from the likes of Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, featuring ghostly gangsters, murderous spider-mobiles and my favourite tale - a locked room mystery where the killer turned out to be (spoiler alert) W.H.O, a wall-sized homicidal computer. So eight-year old me was fairly vibrating with keen when my mum took us to our local cinema - the hoary old Embassy in Waltham Cross  whose resplendent blue and purple neon frontage could be seen as far away as the Little Chef on the A10 - to see Webhead for his big screen debut.

My review? It was… OK I guess.

To be fair to the movie itself, it had been hard to get into the mood when Spider-Man was part of a mismatched double-bill, as was common in those olden days. So we first had to sit through 90 minutes of You Light Up My Life, a teary romance about a struggling singer played by Frenchie from Grease. Ironically, all these years later, I can still sing the first few bars of the title song, which is more than I can say for the bland 70s wah-wah of the Spidey movie, which sounded like the background music to every single Starsky & Hutch episode. Some bright spark at the cinema must have decided that Didi Conn singing her little heart out was the perfect aperitif to Spider-Man, them both being American films and all.

Spider-Man was… alright. It starred a grown-up Von Trapp kid from The Sound of Music, who did a decent Peter Parker. And he looked OK in the red and blue costume, apart from the peculiar mirrored eyes. But, eh, I dunno. He didn’t say much as Spidey, and certainly didn’t make jokes as he swung around mocking the baddies, like in the comics. And the baddies themselves were just ordinary crooks in bad 70s suits. Oh, and three guys in black martial arts gear who chased him around with sticks. There were no proper supervillains with metal arms and goblin gliders and funky costumes. There was a bit of wall-crawling, which was pretty good for time (i.e. better than Adam West bent double in the Batman TV show), but the webbing looked rubbish, ranging from ‘flimsy gauze’ to ‘obvious thick nylon cord from my dad’s camping gear’.

But hey, it was Spider-Man, in an actual film. I couldn’t really complain. Surely this was just the start of all my favourite comics appearing on the big screen. Except, not so much. Of course there was blockbusting Superman the Movie the following year, and on TV we had The Incredible Hulk, now remembered more for its haunting end theme ‘The Lonely Man’, than for its less than super action (reputedly, the show’s low budget decreed that Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk could only make two appearances per show, presumably due to the now-forgotten ‘green body paint’ shortage of 1978).

But that was kind of it, barring the increasingly poor Superman sequels (I never recovered from the ill-conceived casting of Richard Pryor clowning around in Superman III, though strangely the sequence of that woman getting roboticized by the maniac computer at the end still haunts me). There was the disappointing Howard the Duck (1986) of which I can only remember the embarrassing song at the end, the rubbish Captain America (1990) featuring an Italian Red Skull, and of course Batman (1989), a film series that like Superman before it seemed to peak with its sequel and then go markedly downhill from there. Apart from three so-so Hulk TV movies featuring the ageing Ferrigno and Bill Bixby, that was pretty much it for Marvel at the movies.

Meanwhile, the world of actual comics was going through a renaissance with titles like Watchmen, the Dark Knight Returns, Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Elektra Lives Again, The Phoenix Saga in X-Men, Walt Simonson’s Thor, and the classic Masters of Evil storyline in the Avengers. Did we get any of that magic replicated on the big-screen? Did we - to misquote Pete Postlethwaite - bollocks. The closest thing to a Marvel movie at the time was a stop-motion Micronauts film I made with my dad’s super-8 cine camera using my Baron Karza action figure.

Fast forward to right now. As I type this, we are but five days away from the premiere of Avengers: Age of Ultron. And as with all Marvel movies since Spider-Man back in 1977, I just can’t wait. So no change there, but the difference this time is that I can reasonably sure that a) it won’t be mildly (or desperately) disappointing and that b) the rest of the cinema-going world might just agree with me. For this is the age of the Great Marvel Movie, or more specifically to lift a term from a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, the era where Marvel Can’t Fail.

Who’da thunk there’d be a time when Guardians of the Galaxy - an obscure spacegoing team comic from 1969, would be one of the most successful movies of 2014, both commercially, and amazingly, critically? Who’da thunk that Groot (a creature of wood that feeds on wood, to quote his villainous debut in Tales To Astonish, 1960) and Rocket freakin’ Raccoon would have become household names? I am Groot t-shirts? Kids dressing up as Rocket for Hallowe’en? What strange parallel world have I stumbled into, where ordinary folks know and care about characters that were once the secret specialist subject of only the uberest of geeks? Last Christmas I was even able to buy a crocheted Baby Groot pot plant. Strange Days.

You can draw a line tracing the slow but steady rise of the Great Marvel Movie, from Blade - coyly shy of its comic origins, through X-Men and X2 (we won’t speak of The Last Stand) with its Shakespearean heavyweights playing Xavier and Magneto, to Iron Man with its game changing post-credits sequence (‘I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative’) that paved the way for the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And how cool is that idea of the MCU? There’s never really been anything like it before. Linked movies, all inhabiting the same world. Not as a series of increasingly poor sequels, but a genuine shared (with the introduction of the Guardians of the Galaxy) universe with shared heroes and villains, and storylines that criss-cross from one movie to another, and even into Agents of SHIELD on TV. Imagine if United Artists back in the 60s had made a series of individual westerns starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson respectively, before bringing them all together in one movie called The Magnificent Seven Assemble. How cool would that have been?

What if you could travel back in time, say 20 years or more, and tell a comic fan - maybe your younger geek self - that there would come a time when there would be a movie of the Avengers and it wouldn’t suck? And they wouldn’t be fighting crooks in bad suits or ninjas with sticks, but proper supervillains and aliens and Loki and everything. And the Hulk wouldn't be throwing stuntmen into sugar glass one at a time but Punching Spaceships In The Face. And that there were plans afoot to do the Inhumans and Captain Marvel and even Iron Fist, for the love of Stan. Your younger self would think you mad.

It's funny. I sometimes feel a bit weird about comic movies being so successful, like now that everyone’s in on it, it’s not our secret guilty pleasure any more. If I can have a conversation at work with a 30-year old woman about the Kree tinkering with human DNA, then comics have most definitely gone mainstream. Which is cool, even though I do sometimes feel like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, shouting at everyone that I was here first, I was here when he found the conch (or in this case, Namor’s fabled Horn of Proteus).

Of course, like any neurotic True Believer, I worry about sequelitis and shark-jumping, with clunkers like the Fantastic Four films (Doom playing Marco Polo - ugh), Spider-Man 3 (emo-Pete’s dancing - wince), Wolverine: Origins (what they did to Deadpool - yecchh) and the duller episodes of Agents of SHIELD still fresh in comic-fans’ minds. But this is a great time to be a Marvel comics fan, when the term ‘superhero movie’ has become a genre in its own right, and shows like Daredevil and AKA Jessica Jones coming our way on TV.

I can only hope that the shark is still a way off, that there are more great movies to come (Alan Moore's Captain Britain, anyone?), and I wonder where the genre is going next. My eight-year old self and I can’t wait to see.

First Among Equels

Easy there, my fellow spellcheckers. Or indeed spell-checkers; I'm never sure. I stand by the oddly-formed third word of the title and here's why. I have before me a shiny new issue of Total Film magazine, the 'no telly allowed' sister publication to geek periodical SFX. You may have seen SFX in the newsagent perhaps, nestled on the shelf somewhere between White Dwarf and Kerrang!, below FHM and above Total Carp.

Did you know that there are over eight different carp magazines in my local newsagent? Not eight copies of Total Carp, not eight fishing magazines. Eight different carp magazines. If I was a lazy writer I'd have written that last sentence thus: Eight. Different Carp. Magazines. But I'm not so I didn't, and neither should you.

Total Carp, Carp Fishing, Carp Angler, You And Your Carp, What Carp? Carpistry, Carpy Diem and The World According To Carp. I may have made some of these up, but I assure you that there are indeed many, many magazines devoted purely to pictures of what looks like the same man in a flat cap (there's another one: Carp & Caps) holding the same ugly green fish out to the camera like the mighty hunter he is.

But I diverse. Total Film. It's about film. Totally. There's an article on pages 84 to 90 about the forthcoming 300: Rise Of An Empire starring Eva Green, which I want to say a couple of things about. OK, three things, but one is really just to say: Eva Green's eyebrows - what's up with them? I mean, really? I honestly believe she's down in casting directors' special little notebooks as #1 on the 'really low, really straight eyebrowed actress' list. But hey, everybody's got ta have a USP, and I'm guessing that's hers. Fair play to her. Too long have we been pigeon-holed, labouring under the yoke of the plucked and arched brow. Cast down your tweezers and burn your wax strips. Say it long and loud, we're proud to be browed.

Ahem. Sorry. Sorry Eva. What I actually want to say is this. Movie titles that go Something: Rise Of Something Else are rubbish. The film might be great, but the formula X:RiseOfY is lazy, lazy lazy. See also G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans ("Ooo look! It's Michael Sheen as Tony Blerewolf!"), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Rubbish I say.

And just where is the Silver Surfer rising from, exactly? He's from outer space. Rise of the Mole Man, yes, I'll give you that. Even Rise of the Sub-Mariner. But I would have thought that Scorching Hot High Orbital Entry of the Silver Surfer would have been more spatially accurate. Shame on you, Fantastic Four sequel. For your rubbish title yes, but more importantly for the embarrassing and somewhat creepy scene of Mr Fantastic dancing with his long stretchy arms snaking around the ladies, second only to Spider-Man 3's similarly cringey shots of naughty, greasy haired enVenomed Peter Parker skanking around a night club floor in his evil black symbiotic togs. Superheroes should not dance, not even the Batusi.

Secondly, lastly, whateverly, and this is the point I intended to make briefly and succinctly some paragraphs ago, the article on 300: Rise Of An Empire: contains the following quote from director Noam Murro, "Its not really a prequel, it's not really a sequel, it's a side-quel". By which he means that this film depicts events that take place at the same time as the original Zack Snyder (insert Mark Kermode impression here) movie 300, and indeed the Frank Miller comic of the same name. Not to mention the actual bloody historic events themselves.

So surely that makes it an equel?

That's what I'm calling it. Films that take place contemporaneously as other films in the series. Equels. Obviously.

That's mine now. I thought of it first and thus own it. I don't even need to Google the word 'equel' to be sure I was first.

Oh OK, I will, but I'm sure I'm OK.
.
.
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It appears I'm in the clear.