Interesting to see what happens when you present two creators with the same brief.  In this case, there wasn’t a literal brief, but comics creators Rick Veitch and Kyle Baker were so struck by the twisted reality of the Gulf War that they wanted to respond to it in the form of satire.

Both Veitch and Baker can write and draw more than capably, and have been involved in some of the better comics of the last 20 years or so.  On this occasion, Veitch is the writer and the artist on his project Army@Love is Gary Erskine.  Published by DC imprint Vertigo, it’s a story that looks at the big picture of American involvement in the Gulf, with particular emphasis on media and corporate complicity.

Two collections have been published, telling interwoven stories about one particular platoon who’ve been sold on participating in the war by ads making it out to be the most extreme of extreme sports, with sex thrown in.  Though there’s the appearance of chaos, the work is tightly scripted, with plenty of salient points to be made about the politics of blood and oil.  The big scale of the story puts it in the same ballpark as Catch-22, and if it falls short by comparison it’s still an ambitious and valuable piece of work, barbed and scathing.

Kyle Baker’s Special Forces, available from Image, is an altogether different kind of comic.  Where Army@Love is interested in the big picture, Special Forces thrusts you guts-deep into the thick of the action, an angry blast of hiphop compared to Veitch’s considered piece of Americana.  Baker’s starting point is a real life incident when an autistic teenager was signed up and sent out to Iraq, one of many dubious registrations that swept social misfits off America’s streets and sent them packing to Baghdad.

In Baker’s story, that autistic kid is Zone, and he’s bizarrely well-suited to military life.  Just give him a clear set of instructions and he’ll obey them to the letter, without fear and with the ability to take more damage and greater risks than regular troops.  And that’s exactly what happens in the story: a collection has just been published detailing Zone’s mission to take out an enemy commander.

Where Army@Love cuts between the Gulf and America, and different strands of story, Special Forces stays firmly with the operation that Zone and his comrades are on.  The former gives a sense of the wider factors involved, and is hence more distanced.  The latter is very much an experience of immersion, responding to a crazy situation along with the characters embroiled in it.

Neither Army@Love nor Special Forces quite hits the spot for me, but they both still have much to recommend them.  Veitch’s scripting is more than capable on Army, but some of the situations feel forced, and Erskine’s art has a certain stiffness about it.  Baker’s cartooning is, if anything, too loose at times, and the story could be tighter.

The solution is clear: put the two projects in a blender and you’ll end up with a yummy concoction that combines the best elements of both.  Or that might at least shape your own attempt at creating a comic satire of the Gulf era.  But, hopefully, the time for a project like that is coming to an end.  Politics will continue to provide material for anyone planning to reduce their blood pressure by turning their anxieties into art: in the UK we now have neo-Nazi Nick Griffin as a Member of the European Parliament, and there are sure to be further examples of corporate shenanigans and mercenaries behaving badly in Afghanistan before troops return to America.  Better spill ink than blood…

There’s something about Scalped that brings out the fanboy in me.  Normally when I read a comic, I’m very aware of the devices being used to make such a beat happen, evoke a particular emotional response, and so forth.  And I have no complaints about that: letting the likes of Grant Morrison and his artist collaborators play with you is a special privilege.  But what Jason Aaron does goes somewhere further than that.  While I could dissect at least some of what he’s doing on a technical level, there is in his work something that takes you beyond technique alone.  What it comes down to is the whole being more than the sum of the parts.  And that’s a salute both to Aaron’s writing chops, and the impeccable prowess of his primary artistic partner, R.M. Guera.

The milieu the two operate in is an American Indian reservation, where Dash Bad Horse has turned up and turns out to be working for the Feds.  He better keep that secret, because he’s living in massive danger, and his natural inclinations drive him further into jeapordy at every crossroads.  For a while, he’s been sleeping with Caroline, the wildfire daughter of his boss, Chief Red Crow, and in The Gravel In Your Guts, the recently released fourth volume of the series he joins her in a penchant for white powder.

Thing is, it’s a choice that makes utter sense.  Dash is under tremendous pressure, what with a conflicted relationship with his mother Gina that wasn’t resolved before she died.  Plus, his agency paymasters are of questionable use, having reservations about reservations and the people who live on them.  Oh, and the badass Red Crow is getting hassle for results from his backer Mr Brass, with brutal consequences for everyone on the rez.  So, if Dash finds relief in drug use, it’s no surprise.  Just don’t expect…well, don’t anticipate things to go the way that a second rate writer would take them, because with Jason Aaron you’re in safe hands.

Aaron has a knack for using devices that could only work in comics, a pleasing indication that he’s someone who really does love the medium.  There are a handful of issues utilising narrative methods that purely function on a comics page, to emotional rather than gimmicky effect: the issue where Dash ends up taking drugs with Caroline spends most of its pages with each revealing the things they’d like to say to the other but never do.  It’s tender, sad, and true, and it makes sense of Dash’s eventual spoken request to share drugs with his lover.

There’s a sense of richness and depth to Scalped, which in part stems from the many aspects his characters have, which itself relates to the rez’s tragic history.  Frequent flashbacks take us back to the seventies, when Dash’s mum was one of a group of radicals holding out for political changes, and Red Crow’s future could have gone many ways…all of them probably involving hurting others.  That era is returned to again and again, like the scab it has become in the memories of its participants, more of the truth eeking out and shedding new light on what’s happening in the here and now.

That sense of history gives Scalped a scope that few stories have, comics in particular.  The fact that it’s rooted in events drawn from real social history, and deliberately not imitated note-perfect, makes it all the more powerful, perhaps explaining why I rate this series so highly.  R.M. Guera’s brilliant art only heightens the effect: you can feel the dust at the back of your throat in the outdoors scenes, hear the purr of the wheel in the casino, and relish the sensuality that oozes from Dash and Caroline when they’re together: over here you can look at the first issue.  Add covers by Jock, and you’ve got a winning package all-round.

Considering that Terminator Salvation is based on such solid ground, I’m sad to say that the film is otherwise a reeking disappointment.  And that’s a shame: I like a good summer blockbuster, and the first two Terminator films had a lot going for them.  The basic concept of the franchise has always packed a mighty punch: computers take over the world, and all hope rests on a man whose father was sent back in time from an apocalyptic future with an android assassin on his tail.  That alone was plenty to make the first film work, and the second improved on it with the premise that this time the android assassin is a good guy.  Third outing, I have no idea: I saw the film that was called Terminator 3, but the fact that I can provide no pithy description tells you all you need to know.  And now we have the fourth in the series.

The solid ground the film is based on is that its protagonist is an android who believes he is a man.  This science fiction staple can produce wonders, as the writing of Philip K Dick testifies: it was an idea he used on more than one occasion.  This time the android is a man (played by Sam Worthington) who starts the story in 2003 as a condemned prisoner, before coming to 15 years later to find the planet kneedeep in killer robots.  Naturally, he takes up arms against them, and is soon immersed in the human race’s last stand against the metal tyrants.  All of which sounds like great fun, so how come the film just…isn’t?

Fundamental problem is that they didn’t spend enough time on the story, instead hoping that by filling the screens with things that go thud thud thud and blam blam blam and skeeow skeeow, audiences would forget the need for narrative and leave satisfied.  Only, it doesn’t work like that.  The effect is like watching someone else play a computer game: they certainly seem to be having a hellacious time, but they’ve had the console for over an hour now and you aren’t getting a look-in.

Actually, even as a computer game it doesn’t work that well, since there’s precious little in the sense of raising stakes.  Sam, and buddy John Connor (Christian Bale) are variously shot at, tossed around, run through explosions and so forth, but it’s an empty sort of experience given how sketchy the story is.  Past glories are called up, but frankly the effect of a genital-free CGI Arnie, complete with theme music from his earlier appearances, is risible.  What is there about Arnie’s schlong that we need to be protected from it?

But perhaps we were asking too much of director McG to deliver not only a compelling narrative but a suitably mighty cock for the Governator.  Bold decisions are needed sometimes.  I’m told that Lara Croft owes her distinctive curves to the comment from the director of the games company that her tits should be 50% bigger.  I like to think that McG didn’t waver when it came to the dimension’s of Arnie’s unit, and went supersize — only for some prissy type to demand that his penis remain unseen.

Yes, things are that bad: I’ve spent two paragraphs on a virtual Arnie’s endowment because the film is so void of anything to say.  It basically trundles along at high speed, its protagonists encountering first one then another and another robotic obstacle, all the while blaring out a noisy soundtrack, presumably to drown out any inner voices concerned about exactly what the hell is going on and wondering why they’re not engaged by what’s happening in front of them.  And, well, that’s just not good enough.

Years ago, I did a course on creativity and innovation led by NLP trainers Michael Breen and Eric Robbie, two seriously smart guys who know what they’re talking about — Michael built Paul McKenna’s training business into a multi-million pound success in the recession of the nineties, and Eric’s work in advertising includes the classic ‘fox and polar bear’ animations for Fox’s Glacier Mints.  One of the tools they introduced us to was a typology of approaches to creativity developed by Alex Osborn back in the thirties, based on his observation that the people he worked with had different ways of being creative.  Bob Eberle took Osborn’s approach further and evolved it into the model known as SCAMPER — each letter stands for three processes that can be applied to any input (musical riff, felt pen doodle, story concept, business idea…).

The M in SCAMPER stands for Magnify, Minify, and Modify, and it occurred to me recently that there are examples of all of them at work in various facets of popular culture.  Magnify is the one that drew my attention most, and one example of it in action is Tim Cunningham’s lovely short film 1:10 Score.  He’s taken one aspect of the classic heist film — making a model of the place to be robbed — and turned it into the entire focus of his film, with a protagonist who’s got obsessed about his diorama and needs the robbery to succeed to pay for it.  Tarantino does something similar with Reservoir Dogs, a heist film that’s all about what happens after the actual heist.

So, one way to use magnification to create a story is to look at something you’ve already seen and amplify one element of it so that it becomes the core of a new story.  Hmm.  OK, let’s take The Yards, which I saw recently, and find an aspect of that to magnify.  The one that seems most obvious is the business of how the family and their rivals carve up business restoring damaged trains, and foreground that rather than the family conflict which the film actually concentrates on.  As such, it becomes less a film about dynasty, and more one about the ground level mooks who do the dirty deeds that the senior members of the family profit from.  Magnify even more, and the new story could be based on the incident where the hero, who’s gone along to observe, ends up dealing serious damage to a cop at the railyards.  The effect is to make the tale more West Side Story than The Godfather, with the emphasis on young men caught up in the only work they can find, and how a relationship can be affected by violence.

The principle of magnifying doesn’t have to keep you within conventional bounds.  Performance artist Laurie Anderson does a wonderful spoken word piece imagining what would happen if sperm were the size of sperm whales, and imagines a sperm whale flying from New York to Tokyo at Mach 7, this being the scaled-up speed of human ejaculation.  That skit may have been the inspiration for a Channel 4 trailer I’ve seen, in which loads of men get dressed up identically to pose as sperm, for a documentary in which the herd of men are followed and winnowed down until just one of them gets to fertilise an egg.

Colin, the £45 zombie feature that made an impact at Cannes recently, could be looked at as a case of magnifying the basic concept of a zombie film, which has hordes of the undead, to focus on just one mobile corpse.  A more literal example is Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, and a writer friend has pitched a Dr Who concept based on a briliantly simple premise that’s another case of magnification.  Anyway: you get the idea.  Magnifying is a way of developing concepts, and one that’s well worth exploring if you want to come up with ideas that you’d not have come up with otherwise.  And that’s just one of 3 options for the letter M, itself one of 7 letters in SCAMPER, which makes for another twenty ways of coming up with new ideas.  Subtext being: don’t come to me with your tales of writers block, when you haven’t explored the options available to take that block and do something cool with it.

Somehow, in the recent piece I did on the best graphic novels, I forgot to mention Paul Pope.  Oops.  And considering he’s responsible for some of the most vital, pulsating graphic fiction you’ll find on the shelves, that’s quite an omission.  I’ve written previously about Heavy Liquid, and now 100% too has been collected in a cool hardback edition from DC imprint Vertigo.

The gung-ho title is all about people living their life at full-tilt, and this being Paul Pope they’re a cool assortment: a boxer, an exotic dancer, an artist and their friends.  They cross each others’ paths in a club that’s the backdrop for all kinds of intersections and adventures.  It’s nominally set in the future, but Pope’s science fiction is of the sort that projects contemporary anxieties forward, making his decades hence New York an easy place to resonate with for those of us still getting used to the idea that this is the 21st century.

I get a sense of restless energy with Pope’s artwork, the feel that he loves every line he puts down, and the physicality of the whole process.  More than pretty much any artist I can think of, there’s a sense of sheer exuberance about what he’s doing, a zest for cartooning that I associate with few of his peers, Walt Simonson being a notable exception.  Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin would be two more.

It’s interesting to note what all the above have in common: they’re writers as well as artists…maybe what comes across is a restless desire to show you the next piece of what’s happening, to capture on paper an image that’s been seared in their minds.  Simonson, Miller and Chaykin shared a studio in the 80s, doing some of that decade’s best comics, and they must have spurred one another on in their efforts: Pope works alone, and likes to do so in frenetic three day bursts of activity when he burns through pages…again, the sheer physicality of his approach comes through.

That degree of involvement in the work he produces must surely mean Pope is putting a lot of himself into his work.  In 100% the stories are all to do with love and sex, but more than that about putting 100% of yourself into what you’re doing.  That go-for-it spirit is matched by a thread of positivity, seen for instance in the story of the aspiring artist whose installation of whistling kettles is all about reaching the magical moment when they hit the same note in unison.  The artist’s backers see this as cheesy, and urge him to let them loose forth a cacophony, but that would defeat the sense of communality and achievement that’s important to him.

The notion within the choir of kettles is of signal to noise: can you create a distinct and clear impression with your work, or will you allow yourself to be twisted into producing yet more chaos in a world that’s already floundering?  It’s clear where Pope’s heart lies, and it’s the story of his success as a creator, a cartoonist with a uniquely distinctive voice that’s won him acclaim within the comics world and secured him design work with fashion labels Diesel and DKNY: he’s also done posters for the likes of The White Stripes.

Enough of Paul Pope the brand.  At any rate, remember that he’s a tremendously talented creator, with his best years ahead of him.  Right now though, to capture what he’s been up to, 100% is an excellent starting point, a visceral account of people doing the best they can in the shadows of New York’s future.

I’m wondering if one of the reasons production company Slingshot is so named is because of the whole David/Goliath thing.  If so, Tormented is testimony to the aptness of the christening, better than many much higher budgeted shockers I’ve seen emerge from America.

The story is simple enough.  A bullied kid kills himself, and returns from the grave to exact revenge on his tormentors.  Not rocket science, but then it doesn’t need to be: the whole point is to deliver a low budget horror film, and the team behind Tormented do so with panache.  That’d be pan-ache, the misery you get from being whacked in the face with kitchen utensils: no fancy French vocab here.

Writer Stephen Prentice gets the feel of school bang on, even if everything’s necessarily exaggerated to fit the genre and time available.  The tribal gatherings of different pupils are caricatures, but there’s no harm in that.  What’s surpringly well done is the whole business of bullying, the genuine evil with which teenagers can behave to each other.  And that’s important, because if we don’t sympathise with the victim — even his name, Darren Mullet, is ill-fated — then we won’t relish his revenge nearly as much.

And what revenge!  The fat boy zombie wreaks havoc among the in crowd, starting with a startling underwater entrance when he dons goggles before sitting on a female tormentor at the bottom of a pool until she karks it.  Then there’s the girl whose hands he guillotines off, and the dimwit whose head he impales on the school railings.  The only off-kilter retribution is of an emo pseud whose hearing Mullet obliterates: wouldn’t it have been more effective to have some hint of the noise the Sandman wannabe was subjected to?

Holding the unpleasantness together is a well-structured tale of a head girl who falls in with Mullet’s chief tormentors: she could have saved him at his hour of greatest need, but was preoccupied with getting the news of her place at Oxford to study Law.  And she makes the mistake of falling for one of the most egregious offenders.  This riles Mullet beyond the point of endurance: she’d been the apple of his eye, now she turns out to be just another teenage girl he’d never have a chance with.

Director Jon Wright’s choices are at the least functional, and often more than that, the film intelligently put together while fully aware of the market it exists in.  There’s some humour from the cineaste girls, big Keira Knightley fans: they’d not be seen dead watching Tormented. 

I’m not sure whether one curious choice is Wright’s or Prentice’s: why is it that the zombie Mullet needs an asthma inhaler, when surely he doesn’t need to breathe any more?  And that’s not just me being a zombie geek: it’s been demonstrated in the swimming pool scene.  Maybe the inhaler has totemic significance, whatever that means.  At any rate, it didn’t convince me, but that’s a very minor point in what was a highly entertaining film.

I admire what Tormented’s creators have devised: there’s a market for low budget horror to amuse teens, and I’d rather it was satisfied by witty and refreshing British films like this than some of the garbage we import from America.  Fingers crossed for more along these lines, whether from Slingshot, Warp X, or whoever else is planning to make anything of this nature.

You get out of prison determined to keep your nose clean.  Only, your family’s connections are all criminal, even apparently legitimate work keeping New York’s subway trains running.  So, it’s no surprise when you end up in the rail yards one night to discover that a rival gang holds sway, leading to a run-in with a cop who you bash over the head with his own night stick.  Problem being that the cop can identify you, so your pals come up with their smartest suggestion: kill the cop in hospital.

What follows is one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve seen, as young Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) dons a surgical mask and looks for his victim.  Being a fundamentally humane guy, Leo can’t bring himself to commit the killing, and flees.  Meaning the cop gets to identify Leo as his attacker.  And the cops storm round Leo’s flat, giving his aunt a heart attack in the process.  Good grief, as Charlie Brown often said in less trying circumstances: everyone’s favourite under-ten misanthrope wouldn’t be surprised by the turn of events in The Yards at all.

This is grim stuff, and the fact that much of the story is filmed in coffin-like wooden interiors only makes it all the more bleak.  Director James Gray, and co-writer Matt Reeves, bring a Shakespearean dimension to the proceedings: it’s easy to imagine the same tale taking place in a corrupt court way back when, and not urban America in the late twentieth century.  No surprise then, that its weighty theme is fate, and the difficulty of a man trying to escape his when confronted by overwhelming obstacles in the form of an oppressive family seeking to protect its own.

Interesting to see what the team who brought us this story in 2000 would do with similar ingredients in 2009.  There’s a cracking tale about economic downturn to be written as a book or film by someone (please not Martin Amis, though he’s sure to reckon himself the man for the job), and Gray and Reeves are up to the task on the strength of The Yards, which bridges the personal and political with aplomb.

In seeking to escape the influence of his family, Leo becomes more deeply embroiled with the powerplay that his influential uncle is involved with.  And matters worsen when his beloved cousin Erica is killed by Willie, once Leo’s best friend and a rival for her affections: this is your actual damnation without relief.

The one aspect of the film that I’m not persuaded by is Leo’s essential goodness.  Once out of prison at the start, and having committed to not killing the cop in his hospital bed, he sticks to doing the right thing and doesn’t waver.  For me, that’s neither entirely convincing as a character trait nor compelling in a story where so much is at stake.  Leo’s sense of honour propels him through the story and leaves him seemingly whole and uncompromised.  It works, but it’s a touch too much in the heroic mode for it to persuade me.

The whole business of the corruption involved in railyard contracting is credible.  I don’t know to what extent the film is based in reality, but it sets the benchmark high for those aiming to create social drama with universal themes.  It works amazingly well: I’d love to see a Ken Loach film that captures the high ground so effectively.

A more recent point of comparison is Gomorrah, which has the moral weight of The Yards but is stylistically very different, utilising quasi-journalistic techniques and a multi-strand narrative.  This is territory which fascinates me, and that I intend to occupy myself in some form in the future; I’ve written a treatment for a feature about military corruption that I’m sure The Yards could teach me a thing or two for, and I have more or less tentative ideas for other stories that this fine film could influence.