GRAEME: Okay, I really liked both Firefly and Serenity, but am I the only person who thought that Serenity: Float Out was really rather dull and randomly reliant on knowing the mythology for the show/movie?
LEV: NO. You are not the only person.
GRAEME: Good! I get that it’s a tie-in and everything, but if I’d never seen any of the series or movie, I would have had no idea what was going on here. It was horrifically insular.
DOUGLAS: I won’t go into it too deeply, since I interviewed Patton Oswalt about it a few months ago, but I did think it was odd that this didn’t particularly have much of a plot–it’s a bunch of anecdotes that various characters are telling about Wash, and then a little revelation at the end.
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EVAN: Yeah, I felt the same way. Thought it was the fact that there’s a huge hole in my nerd CV where Firefly‘s supposed to be, but that wasn’t the case. (I did see Serenity in the theaters, though, and loved it.) Aside from what Douglas says about the structure, my biggest problem was all the sci-fi jargonistics in Float On. There’s a careful balance you need to strike between that stuff being fun and being a barrier. They used to make fun of such language-mangling on MST3K all the time, and whenever I read too much sci-fi blather I don’t understand, I always go back to that. I will say that I did like how the idea of Wash carried through all the anecdotes, but it felt like there wasn’t enough of HIM in the issue.
GRAEME: It’s also – All of the anecdotes came from new characters that we don’t know or care about, and the anecdotes are all really, really boring. “I remember that time Wash went shopping and came back with candy for me, EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T ASK. He was that kinda guy.” “Yeah.”
It was like that famous Batman story where everyone is talking about the Batman they saw that night, except Batman was boring and everyone who was telling the stories saw the same guy crossing the road.
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DOUGLAS: I will say that I thought the look of Float Out was nicely done. It’s always hard pulling off a comic book based on a TV show, just because their artists are obligated to make the characters look like the actors. Patric Reynolds gets around that here by using a rough, “sketch”-ish technique a lot of the time–there are a few pages where there’s texture made by straight-up scribbling with some kind of chalk or burned-out marker. He’s obviously still working from photos of the actors, but the looser his line gets, the less the fake-photo effect takes me out of the story.
Since we’ve been talking about Star Wars a lot in the Techland virtual offices today (because of a TOP SECRET THING), let me ask two leading-to-rhetorical questions: 1) How much do the space-flight sequences in this comic owe to the similar sequences in the first few Lucas movies, maybe even more than they did in Firefly/Serenity? 2) Was there any precedent in SF comics (or movies, or TV) for future high-tech to look kind of dirty and weathered before Star Wars?
GRAEME: I’m sure Lucas is credited with the creation of “old-looking” SF, isn’t he? I can’t really think of anything that came before, unless it’s the workaday aesthetic of 2001, but even that was bright and shiny. I think Star Wars has completely impacted and shaped a generation’s take on space scenes in general, and you can see the influence in many things, but I see your point about Float Out – There are scenes (the dropping-the-cargo one in particular) that feel very Lucas.
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DOUGLAS: Onward to BULLETPROOF COFFIN. That is one serious head-scratcher of a comic right there. I’m kind of surprised that this is (co-)written by the same David Hine who’s been writing very straightforward Arkham Asylum and Detective Comics material lately, as well as the “we’re just waiting around until JMS gets here” run on The Brave and the Bold. Mostly, though, this looks like a Shaky Kane vehicle–an excuse for a very distinctive artist to indulge his particular fascinations. How many comics in the last 15 years have included the “flashback on mock-yellowed paper to the more innocently bizarre comics of an earlier era” gimmick, anyway? Supreme, Alias, Startling Stories… this would be a bit more surprising if I hadn’t seen that done so many times before.
That said, I did laugh a few times at the backup feature on “Golden Nuggets Comics” (publishers of Spicy War Stories), and I really liked a few of the images here, especially Kane’s drawing of the cover of the Russian fetish comic book… I just wish so much of the “weirdness” here was less familiar. (Like the “Eye of Ka-Bala” dude, with the huge eyeball where his head should be; this was surprising when the Residents did it 35 years ago.)
Graeme, I’m guessing you’re the biggest Shaky Kane fan here–can you talk a little about how this fits into his body of work?
GRAEME: It’s funny, because my response to your (completely correct) take of “I’ve seen this before” had me ranting internally “Well, yes, but he did it first!” Kane was one of the first creators I’d read who made his commentary on old mainstream comics the text, as opposed to the subtext. His work on Deadline in the late ’80s and early ’90s was almost entirely based on repurposing Kirby tropes and running them through some kind of Ditko-idea blender, but there’s something about what he’s doing here (or what Hine is bringing to the party, besides a weird and hopefully very tongue in cheek self-loathing – Although, even as a joke, some of the comments about his mainstream work seemed a little pointed) that’s very different in more than just the visuals, taking the retro deconstruction and placing it in a context outside of itself where it has to interact with the “real” world. More than anything, this issue reminded me of Brendan McCarthy’s issue of Solo from DC a few years back, and the way the two create an intentionally sordid, pun-filled version of comics history to play in. It was like David Lynch had decided to rewrite Marvels, or something.
That said, I’m not sure if I actually enjoyed it. It was almost too meta for me.
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EVAN: See, the meta-ness of it provided my biggest enjoyment. I loved the blatant subtext of Big 2 vs. Quirky Idiosyncracy. It seemed like Bulletproof Coffin didn’t have any of the rosy nostalgia of other pastiches/homages like the ones Douglas mentioned. Shaky Kane’s art kinda reminded me a little of Krigstein with some Paul Gravett. I laughed out loud at stuff like “Z-Men: Final Meltdown” and the creators folding themselves into stand-ins for Kirby and Ditko with the arcs of their fictional careers. The Twilight Zone vibe of the issue–where things in the world may be being created by an outside force–actually reminded me of the Alan Wake video game. Must be a popular meme in ideaspace, nowadays.
PETER: Just finished Bulletproof and I have no idea what I just read, but I liked it. I, too, liked the cover of the Russian smut mag. The rest of the artwork looked “mushy” and old-school, but I know nothing about Kane.
With that being said, I have nothing else to offer for this particular comic. It’s all new to me, and I certainly enjoyed the mystery of the whole thing. I’ll definitely pick up the next issue.
Readers: tell us what you thought!
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