DC Comics recently announced plans to re-release 1978’s Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali, a beloved piece of pop cheese, in a new hardcover edition. With any luck, this will inspire Dark Horse Comics to reprint their major contribution to novelty comic books featuring famous athletes, Godzilla Vs. Barkley. This single-issue special was put out in December 1993, not long after Barkley was awarded the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award but before Shut Up and Jam!. The story—scripted by Eisner-winner (but not for this comic) Mike Baron—follows Matthew, a spirited preteen, as he cajoles his hero into facing certain death.

Poking fun at a comic like Godzilla Vs. Barkley might seem about as challenging as dunking on a five-foot tall hoop. Baron and his collaborators are no doubt aware of how goofy their premise is, so why bother? Well, the funniest thing about GVB is not the actual Barkley-Godzilla face-off–though Barkley does get in a couple good jabs about Godzilla’s breath. It’s the comic’s relentless depiction of Charles Barkley and Matthew as total creeps. At the end of a story about a superstar athlete, the plucky boy who inspires him, and Godzilla, Godzilla looks like the best person.

Godzilla Vs. Barkley begins with a sighting of the monster off the west coast, followed by a splash page from Jeff Butler (pencils) and Keith Aiken (inks) that’s admittedly kinda rad:

We then transition to the beach, where we meet Matthew, a boy who likes to watch pro basketball and blithely ignore the ravages of age.

Baron and co. waste no time establishing Matthew as an entitled little jerk. They also get the obligatory John Hinckley reference in early:

Matthew’s denied access to Charles Barkley and his grandfather tries to console the boy by giving him a deus ex machina shaped like a silver dollar. He also refers to Barkley as a “great warrior,” which may explain Matthew’s later insistence that his hero is a match for an irradiated monster several times his size:

Meanwhile, there’s something oddly soothing to me about this panel of Godzilla destroying a fighter jet. I think it’s the muted blue:

Matthew reaches Barkley, who seems to lack peripheral visions but gets really excited about having his name called.

Barkley is surrounded by handlers. These men and women work to keep Sir Charles away from Matthew and headed toward an appointment at the Optimists’ Club, meaning there actually two enemies in Godzilla Vs. Barkley: giant monsters and community service organizations.

Barkley could not care less about stopping Godzilla but Matthew’s bald flattery wins him over. He immediately fires all handlers. Mike Baron’s Charles Barkley is at least as unstable as the real thing:

Barkley appraises Matthew’s coin while driving, and the conversation turns to whether or not he should put it in his mouth. We learn that “you don’t put strange money in your mouth.” You do give an unfamiliar child a ride in your convertible after firing your staff at his behest.

We are more than halfway through. Charles Barkley still does not care that Godzilla is ravaging the west coast.

The coin is flipped and lands on its side. Barkley grows taller by several hundred feet. This is dumb, but not much dumber than Pym particles.

“It’s a little-known fact that Godzilla is a sucker for b-ball.”

Barkley lures Godzilla to an Air Force base and goes out of his way to destroy government property.

Playing commences and Matthew starts seeing dollar signs.

Barkley cheats unapologetically. Also, to the right of where this image is cut off, we see Matthew and his grandfather watching the game alongside Jack Nicholson, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Cosby.

Godzilla destroys the giant ball in a display of poor sportsmanship for which his opponent has set the precedent. Charles Barkley condescends to Godzilla:

Godzilla gets giant Nikes and, like a trooper, agrees to do 1,000,000 lay-ups. Our closing image is, appropriately, of Barkley, Matthew, and boy whose money greedy Matthew has just taken in a bet:

Esai Morales (left) and Eric Stoltz

For the duration of Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, two constants propelled the narrative forward: the fleet was always looking for something, being chased, or both.  The show was sometimes overstuffed, but never stagnant.  Battlestar spinoff Caprica–premering January 22 on SyFy, available now on Hulu–is set fifty-eight years before the near-obliteration of the human species that inaugurated BSG.  It promises to trace the rise of the Cylons, humanoid machines that did the chasing in BSG, and as such, Caprica is unavoidably the beginning of a story we already know the ending to.  Caprica‘s premiere hints at what might give the show momentum, but also where it might stall.

Like Battlestar before it, Caprica starts with an act of war, this time a suicide bombing.  But the culprits are radicalized teens, not killer robots, setting the scene for a very different kind of conflict.  Two of the people to lose family in the attack are Joseph Adama and Daniel Graystone.  Adama [Esai Morales] is an attorney and father to BSG‘s William Adama (here, a preteen).  Graystone [Eric Stoltz] is a captain of industry, and creator of the first Cylon by pilot’s end–thanks largely to technology his precocious daughter Zoe (taken by and implicated in the bombing) leaves behind.

As Adama, Morales lacks Edward James Olmos’ prickly gravitas, but Alessandra Torresani is effective as Zoe, a girl bright enough to be infuriating. Stoltz, meanwhile, makes Graystone threatening and sympathetic by turns. (It will still be a while before I can see him without thinking of Pulp Fiction‘s overdose scene. Not his fault.)

Much of BSG‘s tension came from placing well-intentioned people in a boundless moral gray zone. The basic nobility of the Adamas or Laura Roslin wasn’t in doubt throughout the series. The wisdom of the decisions they made usually was. If the pilot’s any indication, themes of compromise and consequence won’t be absent from Caprica.  Graystone is driven by ambition as much as grief, and Adama, one of this series’ reliably “good” people, is not a very good person.  But the premiere spends as much time in more Dickian territory.

Zoe, it turns out, is survived by a virtual duplicate of herself. Her father quickly discovers this, which gives Graystone a chance to see his daughter once again, as well as a facsimile of human consciousness to place in the body of one of his company’s robot soldiers.  The premiere mostly breezes through the fake science behind Zoe’s death-cheating, and I’m not sure whether to criticize the choice or be grateful for it.  There’s talk of “synaptic recording” and the traces of oneself that one leaves throughout life, all of it unconvincing, but also less important than what comes next: scenes like one where Graystone and the virtual copy of his daughter realize that even beyond death, they can’t really stand one another.

Caprica‘s high concepts sometimes give way to high camp, as in scenes where characters visit “virtual nightclubs” using their “holobands.”  (The Caprica pilot veers closest to the Matrix trilogy not when characters question reality’s parameters but during moments of embarrassing sci-fi debauchery.)  Even so, the switch from war in space to family melodrama gives the Cylons a renewed creepiness. And so far, Capria is convincing as a series about family. The pilot succeeds in the best way a show of its kind can–by making it clear that it has depth and potential distinct from the series that preceded it.

If game design is an academic subject—and, let’s stop kidding ourselves: it isn’t—then John Raptis and Terry Cavanagh are this season’s Newton and Leibniz. Both recently released platform games (Raptis’s Hoggy and Cavanagh’s VVVVVV) centered around one single mechanic: instead of being able to jump, you have the ability to flip gravity, sending your protagonist from the floor to the ceiling or vice-versa. But while their central concept is the same, the two games really couldn’t be more different in execution.

As you'll note in this level, Hoggy's gravity-flipping doesn't affect enemies or other objects.

Hoggy, released a few months ago for the iPhone and iPod Touch, is very much a puzzle-platformer, and you guys know how I feel about puzzle-platformers (hint: I love them). The game comprises some 45 levels, which are accessed by jumping into jars scattered throughout a cavernous overworld, much like more recent Mario games. Each level holds some number of fruit, and the eponymous hero’s goal is to eat all of them.

The gameplay leans much more heavily towards puzzles rather than action. Hoggy moves left and right when you tilt the device, so Raptis kindly refrains from throwing too many timing- and precision-oriented challenges at you. In particular, the protagonist will refuse to ever jump off of an edge. Sometimes this is helpful, but often it forces you to take more circuitous routes via gravity-flipping.

The game also boasts a truly excellent final boss. I’m picky about my bosses, but this one was just great. Multiple stages, each testing different skills you developed along the way, with nothing gimicky thrown in at the last minute. I like my bosses to be sort of a “best-of” overview of the game I just played, and this one certainly qualifies. The game is fairly short—you’ll beat it in a few hours, and probably not have much reason to play again once you’ve beaten all the levels—but for $2.99 (right now, anyway; as with all iPhone apps, the price fluctuates often) it’s hard to complain.

You have no idea how hard it was to make this screenshot.

VVVVVV (Windows, Mac, and soon Linux; $15), by contrast, is an entirely different beast. There are maybe two areas in the game that I could seriously refer to as “puzzles”, but the rest, hoo boy. We’re talking old school, ultra-sadistic game design here. If you’ve played Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back, you know he’s a fan of frequent checkpoints and even more frequent deaths, but VVVVVV just takes it to a whole new level. My first time playing through, I finished in an hour and a half and died six hundred times (apparently this is pretty good), so on average I was killed every nine seconds. It’s a game that revels in its cruelty, and the room names (a wonderful touch that I was constantly forgetting to look at, as I was so engrossed in trying not to die again) provide a nice commentary on the suffering you’re sure to endure throughout.

As I said above, it’s a reasonably short game, but there’s much to do once you’ve finished. Aside from time trials and other hard modes (including the hilariously impossible beat-the-game-without-ever-dying challenge), there’s an assortment of trophies to unlock and a minigame to play, both of which you’ll learn about after you do… something. But even without those bonus features, VVVVVV is one of those rare games that you want to play again, just because. I’d never been one for speed runs, but I’m already hooked on playing this repeatedly to improve my time and death count. It’s bizarre to find a game that’s so fun to play yet so cruel to the player, yet Cavanagh has done it.

Anyway. Buy Hoggy. Buy VVVVVV. Support independent game developers.

The A-Team teaser trailer leaked early yesterday–most of the sources still up don’t allow embedding–and its minute and a half of footage basically satisfies earlier speculation here on The Gutter about what the film will be. (Liam Neeson gets to mug, but not too much, and Rampage Jackson fails to fill Mr. T’s unfillable shoes.) Now, though, an even more important question: is there any need to check out The A-Team this summer now that we’ve already seen Bradley Cooper fire the guns of a tank in free fall? (Sub-question: is there a term for the moment in a film trailer that almost certainly shows us the best a film has to offer?)

Stop it!

Luckily, there’s a blog for that. Toy-A-Day posts downloadable blueprints for paper toys you can assemble yourself with some simple cutting and folding.

Cut loose, DIY-style, and without the baggage. Even if you’ve outgrown Doctor Octopus (I haven’t), you can make your own Mr. Natural!

Or Gorbachev.

Pantone announced their color of 2010: 5-5519 Turquoise. Seeing it, I immediately grew nostalgic for a time in computing history when backgrounds were tiled and Netscape ruled the internet. But why was I feeling this wave of nostalgia?

“Turquoise Transports Us to an Exciting, Tropical Paradise While Offering a Sense of Protection and Healing in Stressful Times,” according to Pantone’s website. Well I guess if referencing old browsers and old operating systems is your version of a tropical paradise, then Pantone, job well done.

The appeal of Marvel comic books, from the sixties onward, has partially been that characters from different parts of the Marvel universe routinely interact, many living in the same town. Marvel tends to be slightly better at having a shared universe than competitor DC, and Marvel’s ambitious “Dark Reign” storyline takes this phenomenon about as far as it can go.

For the past year, Norman Osborn (formerly the Green Goblin, still evil) has presided as head of U.S. national security, backed by a group of villains disguised as heroes. (Osborn received the job through a series of circumstances too convoluted to summarize, and which required Marvel readers to suspend more disbelief than usual.) The effects of the new status quo have been felt in nearly all individual Marvel titles.

“Dark Reign” has been inconsistent in quality, but I’ve mostly enjoyed it, maybe because I read a few Marvel titles every month rather than every week. (As you can imagine, Osborn and his underlings have become a little overexposed.) Osborn’s rise to power is implausible (even in superhero comic terms), but better-executed than DC’s attempt at a Lex Luthor-as-president storyline several years ago.

Over at The Comics Reporter, comics blogger Tom Spurgeon recently laid out a criticism of “Dark Reign” that did ring true for me:

The reason Norman Osborn doesn’t 100 percent work as a villain in the wider Marvel Universe is that a key and yet frequently under-appreciated aspect of the seminal Spider-Man comics revolves around the fact that Peter Parker frequently encounters adults. The vast majority of these adults are disappointments … The Green Goblin is the ultimate dickish, disappointing adult, and thus Spider-Man’s arch-villain …

Norman Osborn popping into his Green Goblin costume is … a total invasion into Peter Parker’s world by someone who should know better. But when Norman comes up against other costumed villains as he does in this new Marvel stuff, he’s an adult wearing an adult costume … fighting other adults: a dick, but not a special one tied into some characters overarching theme.

Another way of thinking about this is that Spider-Man and his recurring villains are all freaks of science in one way or another. But unlike Peter Parker, Doctor Octopus, Electro and Osborn use their abilities selfishly and narrowly–they’re superpowered hacks. (The disappointing adult bit.)

Spugeon’s unspoken assumption is that Spider-Man works best as a character in stories where Parker’s barely past puberty, in his late-teens or early 20s, and in way over his head. (Debatable, sure, but the best Spidey stories of the last decade certainly support it.) This has a lot to do with the young vs. old dynamic Spurgeon mentions, but for more reasons than the ones Spurgeon lists. Osborn’s not just the top Spider-villain because he’s a disappointing adult–it’s because the idea of a powerful grown-up determined to harm a good-hearted young person is, at its core, pretty terrifying.

For this reason alone, “Dark Reign” ought to be a great Spider-Man story, however well it works out elsewhere–a chance to see what happens to the archetypal down-on-his-luck comic hero when things get as bad as they possibly can. But for the most part, there have been only occasionally forays into “Dark Reign” territory within the Spidey books, not the atmosphere of sustained paranoia that the situation (or at least a creep like me) demands.

The last few months have seen a series of comics called Dark Reign: The List, which feature Osborn at his most Nixonian, checking tasks off his to-do list. Each issue has had a different creative team, and focused on a different character. Some have been much better than others. (Dark Reign: The List – Punisher was a gorgeously drawn, winningly over-the-top issue-long fight sequence; Dark Reign: The List – Daredevil convinced me to stop following Daredevil comics for the immediate future.) In some, but not all, things have even changed by the issue’s end–the Punisher issue actually ends with the title character in several pieces.

Dark Reign: The List – Spider-Man, out Wednesday, is the last of the List comics. It’s also probably the last chance for the kind of Spider-Man-Osborn confrontation that readers have been waiting for. Will it deliver? Probably not. “Siege,” a storyline that supposedly marks the end of Osborn’s time in power, begins in December, so it’s hard to imagine the issue will provide any feeling of conclusiveness. Will I read it anyway, just in case? Probably, yeah. A dark reign indeed.

Well, I wasn’t exactly late to the rack with Asterios Polyp. I bought the graphic novel when it came out this past summer, encouraged by the superlative-filled reviews that came out along with it. Then, knowing I’d only be able to read it for the first time once, I kept it on my shelf for two months, waiting for what felt like the right time. Since I started the book, there have been other times when I’ve been reluctant to pick it up, and for different reasons. Asterios Polyp is economically told, elegantly drawn, and at times a real disappointment–a disappointment for being very good, rather than great, but a disappointment still.

Asterios Polyp‘s scripter/illustrator David Mazzucchelli isn’t one of the most prolific comic artists around, but he has one of the highest batting averages. In the ’80s, he collaborated with Frank Miller on the Daredevil storyline “Born Again“–a high point in the character’s history–and “Batman: Year One,” a contender for my favorite single superhero story. In the ’90s, Mazzucchelli was part of the team that adapted Paul Auster’s City of Glass for comics. Publishers Weekly began their review of Asterios by claiming, “for decades, Mazzuccelli has been a master without a masterpiece. Now he has one.” The first part’s not quite accurate, unless you add “all his own” after “a masterpiece”–his Daredevil and Batman work stands with the best superhero stories. If Asterios Polyp is a masterpiece itself, it’s in spite of some serious flaws.

Mazzucchelli has been rightly praised for using the comics medium to full advantage. His story hops back and forth between different moments in the life of the title character, inviting readers to dictate their own pace, to linger on a page or skip back to an earlier one. He also works with a veteran’s consistency and restraint: each page’s line drawings are tightly composed and colored with a small palette of muted hues. And when Mazzucchelli lets loose, he’s all the better: the centerpiece of Asterios Polyp is a wordless dream sequence patterned after Orpheus’ trip to Hell. Mazzucchelli renders Polyp and his supporting cast with rougher, sometimes frenzied-looking line work, and the result is a stunning display of visual storytelling.

Polyp is an opinionated architecture professor, and Mazzucchelli’s at his best when visualizing abstracts like his character’s aesthetic philosophies:

Some formal tricks grow tiresome after repeat appearances. The book’s characters talks in different-shaped speech balloons, with different-looking letters, a noble attempt to convey their varied voices and perspectives that’s a little cloying in practice. Where Asterios Polyp suffers most, though, is in failures of characterization elsewhere. The title character’s opinions on art and life are unique, and illustrated uniquely, but otherwise, he’s not too different from the typical, blustery academic of film and lit. It’s tough to empathize with Polyp, not because he’s arrogant, but because he’s less well-realized in the script than in Mazzucchelli’s artwork.

This isn’t to say that for a work to be successful, readers have to identify with the main character. Some of Mazzucchelli’s peers (Ware, Clowes, Tomine) get by with unlikeable, pathetic wretches at the center of their books. But for Asterios Polyp‘s story to work, I’d argue that it has to happen–Polyp’s desire for his estranged wife drives the book, and whatever else Asterios Polyp is, it’s a romance.

Much of the book takes place in the small town where Polyp ends up after a fall from prestige, and if you think he runs into some colorful locals, then there’s a lot else that won’t surprise you. There’s a dilettante Marxist wannabe-rocker, a buxom housewife into astrology, a husky, well-intentioned mechanic–all likeable enough, but this is what readers know about them when they’re introduced, and this is what readers know when Polyp takes off again. Now Mazzucchelli is not responsible for my disappointment in the book, any more than he’s responsible for the hype surrounding it. Still, it’s hard not to look at one of Asterios Polyp‘s beautifully drawn pages and wish for its plot to have as much resonance–even if that’s asking too much.

It’s a shortsighted question based on mostly personal observations, but think about it: how many contemporary pop-rock bands can you think of that sound like they’re having any fun on record? Cutting loose, goofing off, writing songs about aliens? I’m not about to knock anyone for taking rock music seriously–hell, we here at THE GUTTER take video games and comics pretty seriously–but where’s all the youthful exuberance gone? The joy of creation, even unremittingly goofy creation?

Why so serious?

This might sound like displaced 50′s nostalgia talking, but it’s not: the perennially goofy Foo Fighters’ most recent release is a completely stone-faced (and mostly terrible) double album, and Weezer’s Raditude is far too aware of its own tween pandering to remind anyone of The Blue Album. AC/DC acolytes like Jet and Wolfmother came close to rocking for rock’s sake in the early ’00′s, but missed the point by sounding genuinely stupid and self-serious, rather than joking about it. In the last bastion of radio rock, the pop-punk scene, Green Day has regained some of its Dookie-era popularity with a political concept album, and Blink-182 and MXPX have been replaced by Yellowcard and The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.  Seriously, what’s with the attitude?

But I digress…

Thankfully, The Ultimate 50′s Rockin’ Sci-Fi Disc does not take itself at all seriously. Most of the songs on this collection have better counterparts that don’t have stupid lyrics, but then, that’s kind of the point. These songs are the lightest of the light, respites even from the youthful rebellion of early rock n’ roll–they’re just good, clean fun. The one truly memorable track of the bunch, Jimmy Lloyd’s “Rocket in My Pocket”, rises above the rest precicely because it’s not really a novelty song at all–the “rocket” in question suggests a sexual deviance that the rest of the tracks don’t even touch.

If that didn’t sound like a recommendation, it should have. The Sci-Fi Disc is fun to listen to, to have, and to share with other people. You might not have it on heavy rotation, or pour your soul into it, but you aren’t supposed to. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s all Science Fiction! Pick it up from the awesome roots rock mp3 blog Rockin’ Daddy.

I know there have to be more awesome Sci-Fi songs out there. What are your favorites? Post them in the comments! I feel a first-ever GUTTER playlist coming on… For my part, The Dream’s “Walking on the Moon” seems to fit the bill perfectly. It’s not sex-free, but it’s loose, goofy, and all about space. Listen for one of Kanye’s silliest verses ever near the halfway point:

[For bonus points, was my music rant completely off base? Too general to disagree with? THE GUTTER isn't exactly a music blog, but let's make an exception.]

Or try here if the embed doesn’t work.

via Hulu