Ranking Captain America: Civil War

Last night my son and I went to see Captain America: Civil War. Let's how this stacks up against other comic book movies I have reviewed.

I have previously ranked the Batman movies, the Superman movies, the other DC movies, the Avengers movies, the X-Men movies, the summer 2015 comic movies, the Spider-Man movies, the non-Marvel and non-DC comic movies, and the Man-Thing.

As ever, my ranking system is
Green=excellent  Blue=pretty good  Black=Okay  Red=avoid

This one was pretty good. Not as good as the first Captain America movie, maybe a little better than the second. I read a review that said it was a relief to have some smaller scale fights after the huge, city-spanning explosion fests of many recent super-hero movies. I'll go along with that. A lot of one-on-one or two-on-two hand-to-hand combat scenes. And in the movie's big set piece, a battle between two groups of superheroes on a runway at the airport in Berlin, there was no world-saving at stake. Just a well-choreographed, fairly clever fight between two groups with different goals.

Calling this a Captain America movie is a little bit of a misnomer. It does carry forward some of the themes of the second Cap movie, but it's really an Avengers flick. Iron Man has almost as much screen time as Cap, and most of the others show up as well, along with Avengers newcomers Spider-Man and Ant-Man, who bring much needed levity.

A fun movie, not great but quite watchable--at least for those who've been keeping up with all the Marvel films. I'm not sure how this would play for someone watching it cold. There are a lot of references to things that've happened in earlier films, a lot of baggage between characters that explain their motivations but aren't spelled out. So maybe not one I'd recommend for everyone, but only for viewers who like superheroes and have been keeping up with developments in the Marvel film universe.

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Here's the master list of all comics movies I've rated so far, in order from best to worst:

Crumb
American Splendor
Iron Man
Heavy Metal (1981)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Avengers
Superman (1978)
Captain America
Batman Begins (2005)
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier
Spider-Man (2002)
X-Men 2: X-Men United
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Superman II
Batman (1989)
Ant-Man
The Dark Knight (2008)
Iron Man 3
The Wolverine
Sin City (2005)
X-Men: First Class
X-Men
Avengers 2: Age of Ultron
Swamp Thing (1982)
Spider-Man 3
Iron Man 2
Watchmen (2009)
Batman Forever (1995)
Superman Returns (2006)
Thor 2: The Dark World
Incredible Hulk (2008)
Mystery Men
Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Man-Thing (2005)
Superman III
Supergirl (1984)
Thor
X-Men 3: Last Stand
Hulk (2003)
Fritz the Cat (1972)
Batman and Robin (1997)
Batman Returns (1992)
Superman IV

Amazing Spider-Man (2012) (Haven't seen)
Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) (Haven't seen)
Batman (1966) (Haven't seen)
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Haven't seen)
Catwoman (Haven't seen)
Constantine (Haven't seen)
Deadpool (Haven't seen)
Green Lantern (Haven't seen)
Hellboy (Haven't seen)
Judge Dredd (Haven't seen)
Man of Steel (Haven't seen)
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) (Haven't seen)
V for Vendetta (Haven't seen)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Haven't seen)

What I'm Reading: Roundup

Prince Valiant Volume 1: 1937-38 Absolutely beautiful over-sized hardcover of the first two years of the Sunday-only strip Prince Valiant. Drawn by Hal Foster, who brought an unprecedented skill and dedication to his work, this was an influence for decades on comics artists.

The strip still runs today, although unfortunately today's newspapers don't provide artists with the full-page canvases they had in the 1930s, when the Sunday comics were entertainment for a whole family and one of the main draws of the newspaper. According to the introduction, Hal Foster wrote over 1,000 pages of notes on the details of Prince Valiant's life, from childhood to death, and when he turned the strip over to an assistant in 1980 shortly before his death, was still working from that original plan. I wonder if the artist today, Thomas Yeates, who has done the strip since 2012, still uses those notes?

This was a Christmas gift. Provided I can find the funds and the time, I will definitely be getting Volume 2 at some point.

Squirrel Girl Marvel nowadays has a whole little corner of their universe dealing with the humorous adventures of quirky, lesser-known characters. She-Hulk, Patsy Walker (i.e. Hellcat), and Howard the Duck all have or have recently had fun series, and the creators seem inclined to let them interact. In fact, several of the characters hang out with each other in a building in Brooklyn where She-Hulk's alter ego, Jennifer Walters, has her law office and Howard the Duck has a detective agency.

Squirrel Girl is my favorite of these titles. SG is Doreen Green, a computer science student at Empire State University (where Peter Parker used to attend college). She can talk to squirrels and even has a squirrel tail she uses to help her fight bad guys (and when it's tucked up in her pants it gives her a bodacious booty). Doreen really prefers talking it out with villains and seeing if their are ways they can achieve their goals without using violence, but she's willing to take 'em on physically if that doesn't work out. It's really hilarious and appropriate for kids ages 5 to 100.

Mirror I recently started picking up this series drawn by Emma Rios, one of my favorite artists. It's set on an asteroid inhabited by humans who have been doing experiments on animals to breed warriors (or something) for a big war in space. But that's just the background, the emphasis is on the relationships between the humans and their intelligent human-animal hybrid creations, some of whom rebel against their human masters, some of whom fall in love with them, or serve them for their own reasons. Really, each character has his own unique motivations. Gorgeous, highly intricate artwork and interesting character work.

What I'm Reading: Game Time: A Baseball Companion

Game Time is a collection of essays by Roger Angell, who covers baseball for The New Yorker magazine. I believe most or all of these essays appeared in that magazine. They range from the very beginning of Angell's career in the early 1960s to 2002.

The essays are uniformly of high, even literary, quality, with an emphasis on personalities, lives, and relationships, rather than action on the field. I notice that even when he does cover action on the field, or over a season, it comes out like a story. It's a joy to read, although when reading a lot of essays back to back certain New-Yorker-ish tics come to the fore. For instance, everything is always fine: it was a fine game, so-and-so is a fine player, it was a fine play at third. And the reflex to get deeper, to figure out what it all means, on one or two occasions in the book becomes almost comical. But all in all, the writing is superb (or fine, even).

I think my favorite essay is one titled "Distance" from 1980, which is mainly about Bob Gibson, a once-fearsome pitcher who had at that point been retired for five years. Gibson was the most dominant pitcher in baseball in the late 1960s, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals who did not hesitate to plunk batters crowding the plate. He was African-American and grew up poor in an era when blacks got little respect, so he carried himself with a certain pride than many interpreted as stand-offishness. Angell caught up with him in Omaha, his hometown, where he had opened up a popular bar-restaurant after retiring but lost none of the old prickliness.You can sense the difficulty Angell had in interviewing such a reticent man, yet he succeeds in giving the reader a detailed and moving look at an athlete past his best years, who never really had a place in life except on top of the baseball mound. He also succeeds in making us sympathize with Gibson, quite a feat for a man who previously had a well-earned image as a cold and emotionally austere man.

My least favorite essay was called "One for the Good Guys," about the New Yankees late-season surge in 1996 that brought them to the World Series against Atlanta for their first Series appearance since 1978, and what a great group of players they had, and how well-deserved it all was, and how the city and country fell for them, and barf barf barf. Fortunately, this appears to be a one-season lapse on Angell's part, and for most of the rest of the book he avoids Yankees boosterism.

Now Angell has a number of books, most of which appear to be collections of already-published essays like this one. I would imagine they are all of similarly high quality. Game Time would be a great read for any baseball fan with literary leanings, though probably any of the others would be just as good.

Peanuts in Real Life

I must have the exact conversation presented in this May, 1956, Peanuts strip at least three times a week:

Place Names in Rock Lyrics: America

For this feature we've previously done Sweet Little Sixteen, Dancing in the Streets, Night Train, Rock'n Me, Pop Muzik, Girls, Girls, Girls, Fire Down Below, Truckin', Everywhere That I'm Not, Mess Around, Back in the USA, and Back in the USSR.

Our song today is America, by Simon & Garfunkel. It came out in 1968 on their Bookends album, but was not released as a single until 1972, to promote their Greatest Hits album that came out that year. Oddly, it only hit #97 on the Billboard chart. It's a pretty song with some pretty great lyrics. Personally, my favorite version is the lengthy prog rock workout (10 1/2 minutes) Yes gave it in 1970.

There aren't really verses and choruses, it sort of just flows. Here are the first three stanzas:

Let us be lovers,
We'll marry our fortunes together.
I've got some real estate
Here in my bag.

So we bought a pack of cigarettes,
And Mrs. Wagner's pies,
And walked off
To look for America.
"Kathy", I said,
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
Michigan seems like a dream to me now.

It took me four days
To hitch-hike from Saginaw.
"I've come to look for America."

Look, I understand they're looking for the real spirit or meaning of America, but I don't get why they hoped to find it in Saginaw, Michigan? Anyway, here's the final stanza:

Counting the cars
On the New Jersey Turnpike
The've all come
To look for America,
All come to look for America,
All come to look for America.

So the place names in this song are:
New Jersey (turnpike)
Pittsburgh
Saginaw

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And here's the master list:

Notes: The cities that has been mentioned most often is New York, with Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Philadelphia tied for second. The biggest cities we haven't heard from yet, at least in the United States, are Cleveland, Kansas City, and Seattle. Also surprising to me is that Memphis hasn't yet appeared on the list.

Atlanta x3

Baltimore x3
Baton Rouge
Boston
Buffalo
California

--(northern) California
--(coast of) California
Chattanooga

Chicago x3
Dallas
Delaware (Bay)

Detroit x3

Ft. Lauderdale
Georgia (country)
Houston
Las Vegas

London

Los Angeles x4

Miami
--Miami Beach
Moline
Moscow

Munich
New Jersey (turnpike)

New Orleans x4

New York City x6
--Queens
Nova Scotia

Paris x2

Philadelphia x4

Phoenix

Pittsburgh x2

Raleigh

Richmond
Saginaw

San Francisco
--Berkeley

St. Louis x3

Tacoma

(heart of) Texas
Tokyo
Ukraine

Vancouver

Washington, DC x2

Bleak Peanuts

When I reviewed the Complete Peanuts Vol. 1983-84, I promised a strip in there was slated for this blog's Bleak Peanuts feature. Well, it's a couple months later, but here it is:

Spike, of course, is Snoopy's brother who lives in the desert near Needles, California. In the 1980s he became a frequent guest star in the strip, displaying a sort of wry fatalism about his desert life among the cacti. Most of his strips have him forming clubs or making friends with the cacti, or writing letters to Snoopy of the humorous minutiae of his arid environment.

But this strip from October 1984 (and a few others that appeared in the couple weeks following), are a little different. That Ha! at the end is not much of a punchline, is it? How did Spike arrive in the desert, anyway? After all, he was raised at the Daisy Hill puppy farm just like Snoopy and his other siblings.

Well, clearly, he must have been adopted but his new family decided they couldn't or didn't feel like taking care of him, so they dropped him off in the desert to die or scratch out whatever existence he could. And ever since then, Spike's been waiting out his boring existence, hoping, as we see here, for some new owner to pick him and take him with her, somebody to love him and provide him the shelter and food that he cannot provide for himself.

The bleakness here may not be quite as obvious as some of the others, but once you understand the situation, this one cuts to the bone.

What I'm Reading: Town, City & Nation: England, 1850-1914

Working on my newest novel (it's going well, thank you!) has taken its toll on my posting frequency lately, that and that my most recent book doesn't lend itself to much light discussion. Town, City & Nation: England, 1850-1914 is a real academic book. But I enjoyed it--lots of good stuff about historical city development.

I think my favorite part was the section on English seaside resorts and their development. The first were upper-class getaways like Brighton in the early 1800s, but steamboats, and later railroads, made seaside towns increasingly accessible to the middle and then lower classes as the 19th century went on. The most famous of these more middle-class seaside town was Blackpool, which remained a favored vacation destination until the 1970s. This was a subject I was simply not familiar with before reading this book.

It's quite a thorough book, covering or at least touching on pretty much any urban history or economic topic concerning English cities in its time period. I found sections on different types of work in London and class relations in the great industrial cities to be worthwhile, and a section on crime in small market towns unexpectedly fascinating. On the other hand, I was hoping for more on transportation in cities during this time period, but that's probably well-covered elsewhere.

I can't claim that Town, City & Nation would be of widespread interest, but for those with into urban history, especially how cities develop, this is well-written and well-organized, and packed full of great information.