Review: Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box by Warren Ellis

Comics

Would I enjoy Warren Ellis’ Astonishing X-Men: Ghost more if it weren’t an X-Men story? Yes. And not only because he takes characters I’m familiar with in directions that don’t seem consistent with their histories.

The X-Men here are as savage as I’ve seen them. The team, composed of Cyclops, Emma Frost, Beast, Wolverine, Armor and a visiting Storm, seem to have lost their way. They’re nihilistic, prone to torture and murder, jumping in and wrecking things with no regard for consequences. Only Storm voices disapproval or surprise. The rest have grown accustomed to new ways of action, anchored in a sense that extinction is possible for mutants as a group.

This could be an interesting new direction for the X-men; indeed, it looks to be the way the franchise is trying to go (I’m not fully up to date). But what would be a new angle for a cohesive franchise seems like more grist for the mill for one that scatters its output—and viewpoints—over multiple channels every month. To argue “the X-men are changing,” you need to have a definitive take on who the X-men are, which doesn’t seem possible these days.

Ellis has to shoehorn his dimension-spanning story into an awkward set-up revolving around the old “no more mutants” House of M crossover. While he largely succeeds, it’s hard to feel it wouldn’t be better if he could set his own clean slate.

There are other small problems with the narrative. All the pieces needed to solve the mystery drop neatly into the characters laps. The characters are all a little too quippy; the dialogue can be amusing, but it also feels like Ellis fills too much panel space for a few world-weary takedowns.

The X-men are exempt from the carnage they dole out. In key scenes, a laser passes through a defensive shield only where it can do the least damage and a human-level combatant goes toe-to-toe with some monster. Worse, the miniseries dismissively discards a longstanding character only to conclude he was basically right. It doesn’t feel like much care was put into the overall tone and cohesiveness.

Simone Bianchi’s art doesn’t add to the appeal. It’s detailed but murky, with an overall low-contrast approach that has little leap from the page. The action is stiff and confusing.

But for X-men fans, the minseries is still worth reading. Ellis has enough fun concepts to burn that you wish he had more issues to devote to them. Reading it, I imagined it as part of an ongoing series, with space between issues to build the mystery—and its implications.

Review: The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris

Books, Science

In his book-length history, “The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason and the Laws of Nature,” Timothy Ferris makes a compelling argument that the freedom of exchange of liberal democracies is a crucial component of effective scientific research. But in making the point, he’s more sure-footed talking about science than politics.

A central issue is the shakiness of Ferris’ terms. He defines liberalism as being oriented toward promoting individual freedom—a freedom to participate, if you will. But as he pursues this point, it can be hard to follow whether he’s advocating a traditional view of liberalism or a hard-edged contemporary approach.

The former, which could be called a constitutional view, would still have the government acting to promote the common good, through roadways, education and means of information exchange, the like the Post Office or current world wide web. The latter would offer more of a libertarian approach, with limited government ensuring equal treatment under the law and little else. (Both are matchbook definitions, obviously.)

Ferris argues for government funding of universal public education as well as dedicating 2 percent of GDP to scientific research and development, so it appears he leans toward the former view. But his political definitions aren’t always clear as he applies them to his examples, which is problematic for a book that holds politics so close to its thesis. Near the end, he argues for a Totalitarian-Liberal axis that operates independently of a Conservation-Progressive axis. It still isn’t entirely clear, but this example would have been more useful toward the beginning of the book.

Still, it’s interesting to follow Ferris as he explores the history of science as it relates to the political context surrounding great discoveries. He touches upon the Vatican’s censorship of Galileo, John Locke’s flight into exile and the regressive nihilism of the French Revolution, the Soviet State and Mao’s Communist China. There are some detours on the way, especially a chapter-length denunciation of academic postmodernism, which feels like a faded target—and one that’s inspired the personal ire of the author.

Quotes:

Some think that tolerance means treating all opinions as equally deserving of respect, but the point of liberalism is not that all views are equally valid. It is that society has no reliable way to evaluate opinions other than to let everybody freely express and criticize them—and, if they can garner sufficient support, to try them out.

If the world is relatively anti-intellectual today, it is because the world got a bellyful of the communists’ pseudoprophetic intellectualism and turned its broad back on the lot of it. [I’m not convinced of that one.]

Review: DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke

Comics

 

I love Darwyn Cooke’s art; I think he does an excellent job capturing action and using streamlined details to evoke memorable characters. But I’m not as big a fan of his writing, and the weaknesses of his approach can be seen throughout both volumes of DC: The New Frontier, which is generally regarded as a contemporary comics classic.

Part of the issue is that he’s playing with a massive cast of characters—basically anyone published by D.C. Comics during their golden era, from Superman at the top to King Faraday at the more obscure. It certainly is fun to see Cooke visually redesign this sprawling cast.

But because of the volume of characters, they generally come of more as names than people. You have to use what you know about them elsewhere to know them here. Oh, sure, Lois Lane loves Superman—that’s what happened in all the other comics. But the impressions we get in this series are fleeting. Motivations are unclear, especially when a “Red Scare” set-up is used to add flavor and then abandoned when the story dictates it.

The characterization we do see is meant to be noble but comes off as a little hokey instead, particularly Hal Jordan flying combat missions in Korea despite a refusal to use his machine guns. Rick Flagg is compelling as a patriot damaged by a career in secret ops while Martian J’onn J’onzz adds some humor, and Wonder Woman has an interesting, if undeveloped, path from believer to subversive.

The storytelling mostly seems to kill time until the next big moment. People blow themselves up for the greater good at least four times in the story, and while their choices make a certain kind of sense, they seem most motivated by Cooke’s impulse that he’s due for another spread. Things do cohere with a big threat near the end, but that’s only after another plot thread is dropped entirely.

The book’s strengths—merging early DC comics into one coherent universe—are also its weaknesses. I imagine your affinity for classic DC characters will determine your enthusiasm for the story Cooke is telling. In both instances, I come down square in the middle.

Engineering Mosquitoes Out of Existence

Science, Well Worth Reading

The July 9 issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating article by Michael Specter looking at how a biotech firm is looking to fight dengue by engineering male mosquitoes that can thrive when provided tetracycline in the lab, live long enough upon release to compete for mates and fertilize offpsring that then wither and die.

Flooding an ecosystem with infertile males has helped eradicate other pests, like the screw-worm, but that relied on good old radiation to scramble the genes. Mosquitoes are too small for that to work, so researchers have turned to genetic techniques instead.

As Specter reports, regions that bear the brunt of dengue are open to the approach, but Key West, which has endemic dengue it manages with insecticides, has proven resistant. A town hall on the subject raised fierce opposition. As one participant said, “I, for one, don’t care about your scientific crap…I don’t care about money you spend. You are not going to cram something down my throat that I don’t want. I am no guinea pig.”

The article is a great read, outlining potential problems in the GM approach while making a persuasive claim that it’s the right one. It’s concerning to see several people make the simplistic argument that “natural” is good and “man-made” is bad. After all, a virus is natural and a vaccine is engineered. But if enough people in Key West catch dengue, they may find they want some “scientific crap” after all.