Looking through this week’s offerings has me hypothesizing:

• In Black Widow 5, Natasha will bitterly decry the subjugation of women as sex objects while she adjusts her thong.
• The second issue of Legion of Super-Heroes will need to go a fairly long way to reverse my initial impression of the series, which I found too meta.
• I’m probably part of a very small minority of readers who hope Mystique will succeed in killing Charles Xavier. Sure, it wouldn’t stick any longer than the next issue of Excalibur, but come on. The man’s track record as an agent of change is pitiful. He’d be much more effective as a martyr than he is with a pulse.
• I’ll buy both the current (55) and previous (54) issues of Ultimate X-Men, because I just now realized it’s being drawn by Stuart Immonen. (I like writer Brian K. Vaughan, too, but I skipped the previous arc because Gambit gives me gas.)
• Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly will probably make me cry with the third issue of We3. I almost always avoid sad stories about animals, but this one snuck through the blockade, and it’s just too good to ignore.

As Rose noted in comments on another post, A.O. Scott of the New York Times has deemed Sideways the most critically over-rated film of the year. I tracked the article down through a search engine at the library (since it’s crossed over into pay-to-view territory at the Times), and it’s interesting reading:

“In ‘Sideways,’ a good many critics see themselves, and it is only natural that we should love what we see. Not that critics are the only ones, by any means, but the affection that we have lavished on this film has the effect of emphasizing the narrowness of its vision, and perhaps our own. It both satirizes and affirms a cherished male fantasy: that however antisocial, self-absorbed and downright unattractive a man may be, he can always be rescued by the love of a good woman. (What’s in it for her is less clear.)”

And, over-rated or not, it did pretty well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning: best picture, achievement in directing, best supporting actor (Thomas Haden Church), best supporting actress (Virginia Madsen), and best adapted screenplay. Interesting that Paul Giamatti didn’t get a best actor in a leading role nomination, considering how much love he got for the movie. Not surprised that Sandra Oh didn’t, given that her character actually objects to the way she’s treated by the lovable shlubs.

Saturday night’s super-hero toons made me very happy, because I’m an eight-year-old trapped in a near-middle-aged man’s body.

After what seemed like weeks of reruns of the most recent episodes, we got a new outing of Justice League Unlimited. The opening act made me a bit nervous, as it seemed to set up yet another 30 minutes focusing on characters who’ve been around from the beginning (Batman, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman). I’m not a big fan of time travel stories, either, nor do I have much taste for DC’s Old West characters, who also appear.

But I ended up liking it a lot. It was more of a caper comedy than a “we must save the future” slog, and the gunslingers all got nice little moments in the spotlight. I also got laughs at things that I’m certain weren’t intentional. (Blame my other half. He walked through the room during an early scene, watched a bit, and said, “Wow, it’s the cowboy fetish episode.”) Thank goodness one of the bandits who donated their outfits to the heroes wore a pants size that would fit so snugly on Wonder Woman. (Tom the Dog raises an interesting question about Batman that I would have considered if I hadn’t been laughing at the chaps and the six-guns-in-one.)

I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying Teen Titans. I thought the first season was pretty mawkish and dull, but it really seems to have hit its stride. This is the conclusion to the “Titans East” story, and it’s carried along by the terrific action sequences. (I can’t think of a super-hero cartoon that’s ever done them better, honestly.) There wasn’t as much of a focus on the guest stars this time around, but as the second half of a two-parter, that can be excused. It was a Cyborg-centric outing, and a pretty darn good one at that. It succeeds where similar character studies have failed on this show by highlighting how the spotlight character interacts with the people around him rather than dwelling too much on his inner angst.

This brings up a counterpoint between the two shows that surprises me. JLU promises a wider look at the DC Universe (or at least the toon equivalent), but I find that TT is much better at delivering it. I’ve been a bit let down by the way JLU has dealt with supporting characters; I get a bit frustrated watching all of these great second-stringers wandering around the satellite or limited to bit parts in big battles. There have been successful exceptions (the episode featuring Zatanna, for instance), but the show hasn’t really hit its stride or lived up to the potential of its cornucopia of characters.

TT seems to make more of a commitment to introducing its supporting characters and guest stars. When Terra or Bumblebee or Aqualad or whoever appears in an episode, you can be reliably certain that they’re going to have some meat added to their bones. This might be because TT has a less ambitious fictional universe and deliberately keeps itself to a smaller scale. It’s probably not a fair comparison, but looking at results in terms of viewing pleasure, TT wins.

Scott at Polite Dissent has posted his own thoughts on the eps. Go take a look.

The latest edition of Flipped is up at Comic World News. In this exciting installment, I blather about things and hope it comes off as coherent.

I intended to pick up some manga titles I’d never tried before over the weekend (y’know, thumb down the shelves at random, grab a couple of first volumes that don’t feature massive knockers on the cover, let a higher power sort it out). This didn’t quite work out, and I’m going to blame the weather.

See, it was cold and icy here, and I had a very short window to be out and about. And I thought to myself, do I really want to be trapped at home with potentially terrible manga? No, I decided, I do not, so I chickened out and got more One Piece and Iron Wok Jan!

I also thought about trying a couple of Johanna’s recommendations (particularly Fruits Basket and Cheeky Angel), but I had zero luck finding the first volumes of anything. Clearly, I’m going to have to go with an on-line ordering binge.

At this time of year, I always feel strangely compelled to see at least a couple of the movies that will likely be Academy Award nominees. This is a slight problem, as there are only two cinemas in town. The one at the mall run movies that make you feel stupid just by looking at the poster. The one downtown has a better mix and was showing Sideways, so off we went.

And I have to say I just don’t get what the big deal is about this movie. I can see why the industry likes it. “It looks like it cost a dollar to make, and it features emotionally stunted creative types! Swoon!” I’ve admitted my bias against most entertainments with unsympathetic protagonists, and this one fell squarely into that category.

What I really couldn’t get past was the notion that the characters played by Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh — bright, charming, sexy women with a lot on the ball — would be so hungry for companionship that they’d hitch themselves to such obvious losers. That’s not to say that Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church weren’t good in the movie. But they were good at playing totally self-involved, arrested adolescents. The resolution for Oh’s character was particularly unsettling for me.

It’s disappointing, as I’ve liked some of director Alexander Payne’s other work. Election, while dealing with similarly unsavory characters, had a different kind of self-awareness that made it a lot more palatable. There was a level of distance that let viewers decide how they responded to the characters and their actions. In Sideways, I didn’t feel like I was allowed to laugh at Giamatti, that his middle-aged malaise was in some way noble or tragic instead of just pathetic. And since I never found it anything but pathetic (and recognized it from too many other movies where hot women squander their charms on shlubs to give them a new lease on life), I could never get engaged.

And while I’m on the subject of movie-going, can I just say how much I hate the act of watching a movie with strangers? The level of rudeness has become so predictable that I don’t know why I even try any more.

We were sitting near a couple who pulled off a trifecta of bad manners. They showed up late and made a big deal of picking where they sat, in spite of the fact that the theater was practically empty. They brought their own snacks and spent most of the early portion of the film crackling wrappers and offering each other bottled water. (You can do that bottled water thing silently, you know. You just wave it in the direction of your companion and look to see whether he or she takes it or non-verbally declines. It’s not something that requires dialogue.) And the woman of the couple was a narrator. She would make obvious pronouncements like “She’s pregnant,” or “Oh, the 1961” that anyone with a functioning brain cell would keep to themselves because they’re so damned obvious.

The “young man with a dream” story is as common to manga as dead girlfriends are to super-hero comics. These callow lads want to be sports heroes, great chefs, and master gamesmen. There’s a surprising amount of variety within the genre, and the level of drive the protagonists display can range from amiably low-key to full-out obsessive. But what happens when the dream in question is kind of stupid?

In the case of Shonen Jump’s One Piece, you get a daft and surprisingly heartwarming comedy that’s probably a lot smarter than it seems.

Monkey D. Luffy, the dreamer in this instance, wants to be King of the Pirates. There’s some question as to whether he actually knows what pirates do. Luffy grew up in a seaside village that provided refuge for a rather unusual pirate crew, led by good-hearted Captain Shanks. Since the pirates used Luffy’s home as a hideout instead of a target, the boy never saw the darker aspects of piracy. From his perspective, pirates are good-natured rogues, living lives of adventure on the high seas and drunken fellowship on dry land.

Shanks and company discourage Luffy’s attempts to join their crew. (Did I mention Luffy can’t swim?) He’s impervious to discouragement, though. By the time the pirates save Luffy and his town from a group of mountain bandits, the boy is hopelessly hooked on piracy as a career choice.

Luffy isn’t much of a long-term thinker, though. By the time he sets off in a sad little tub, he has no crew and only a vague notion of what he’ll do next. And he still can’t swim. As a child, he ate a strange fruit that turned his entire body to rubber. While that has its uses, buoyancy isn’t one of them.

So Luffy sails off to assemble a crew and pursue his goal, armed only with a beloved straw hat (a gift from Shanks), a rubber body (surprisingly effective for clobbering), and impenetrable optimism (maybe it’s made of rubber, too). In short order, he runs afoul of pirates a bit more representative of the lifestyle. They pillage and murder, often taking sadistic pleasure in the fear they inspire. It’s hard to see how Luffy will fit in with this ilk.

Happily, he doesn’t modify his full-speed-ahead tactics a bit. Luffy clearly has his own vision of what piracy is, and he’s blissfully dismissive of any counter-examples. His oblivious determination is also reflected in his attempts at crew recruitment. First up is Zoro, a noted bounty hunter of pirates who wants to become the world’s greatest swordsman. Second is Nami, a clever thief who preys on pirates and wants to score enough loot to buy a village. Both take an understandably dim view of Luffy’s profession, but the dork who would be King is undeterred.

In the course of the first two volumes, Luffy bounces through a range of misadventures. He finds Zoro in a town under the thumb of the sadistic Captain Morgan, befriending and inspiring Koby, a would-be navy officer, in the process. Next, he hooks up with crafty Nami in a town under siege by evil pirate Buggy the Clown. There’s peril aplenty, with Morgan, Buggy, and their colorful henchmen doing their best to bring Luffy’s quest to a lethally premature end.

But there’s plenty to laugh at, too. While creator Eiichiro Oda does some exceptional physical comedy and builds some nice set pieces, the most satisfying laughs come from reversal of expectations. Koby, Zoro, and Nami all do their level best to explain to Luffy what pirates are really like, generally right before Luffy does something courageous and generous. He’s a tough kid to dislike, and it’s hard not to root for him. Dreams of piracy aside, he doesn’t sink to other pirates’ level, and he doesn’t let their brutality disillusion him.

Oda’s visuals are a cartoony treat that remind me a lot of Todd Nauck of Young Justice. He does terrific character design, particularly on scurvy antagonists like Morgan and Buggy. Oda has also come up with some creative renderings of Luffy’s rubbery frame, but he saves them up for maximum impact and comedy. He strikes a very nice balance of actual brutality (Luffy’s kinder, gentler approach to piracy wouldn’t have any impact if there wasn’t a contrasting reality) and highly stylized antics.

Is One Piece a great manga? Not really, but I don’t think it aims to be. It seems more satisfied to be creative genre entertainment. What raises it above its legion of “young man with a dream” peers are the subtle ways it subverts its own genre. In the final analysis, it offers good pirate fun, solidly crafted and sneakily smart.

Everyone has a list of entertainments with repeat value: movies they can watch over and over (Addams Family Values), books they can re-read (Putting on the Ritz), music that always hits the spot no matter how many times you listen to it (k.d. lang’s Absolute Torch and Twang). In comics, Amelia Rules! has crept to the top of my list of titles that never fail to bring a smile.

Amelia McBride has a lot to deal with for a nine-year-old. Her parents have divorced, and she and her mother have moved from Manhattan to what she’s dubbed “Nowhere, Pennsylvania.” Her whole life has turned upside-down, dumping her into a new school with new friends as she navigates her drastically different circumstances.

There are compensations, though. Mother and daughter have moved in with Amelia’s Aunt Tanner, a woozily cool ex-rocker who helps bridge the generation gap. Amelia’s new friends provide plenty of distraction, too. There’s budding super-hero Reggie Grabinsky, sweet and silent Pajamaman, and arch-nemesis Rhonda Bleenie. They tip her off to suburban weirdness and the perils that lurk at Joe McCarthy Elementary School. They also welcome her into the Gathering of Awesome Super Pals (G.A.S.P.), Reggie’s super-hero club.

Cartoonist Jimmy Gownley has created a world that’s a perfect blend of the typical and the weird. Amelia’s family angst is balanced with Reggie’s hilariously narcissistic G.A.S.P. “missions” (freeing kids from the naughty/nice tyranny of Santa Claus, delivering payback to bullies who gave him a wedgie, grudge matches with a rival group of super-hero-dissing ninjas). He also uses universal childhood milestones as a springboard for witty, insightful observations on life.

In the two collected volumes, The Whole World’s Crazy and What Makes You Happy, Amelia has a disastrous first day of school, brats out on a camping trip with her father, has a wistful reunion with her New York City friends, flubs a big class project with Rhonda, and learns more about Tanner’s life as a rocker.

My favorite chapter is probably the Christmas story in The Whole World’s Crazy. Amelia is trying to maximize the haul from her first post-divorce Christmas, but she faces plenty of distractions. There’s Reggie’s disastrous anti-Santa scheme, along with her mom’s announcement that Christmas can’t be quite the gift bonanza Amelia hoped. Instead of melting down, Amelia gets perspective in the form of a visit to a friend’s house. She finds out she doesn’t have it so bad and takes steps to make someone else’s holiday brighter. It’s sweet without being a bit syrupy, and it perfectly illustrates the balanced approach Gownley takes to his characters.

He’s made Amelia a believable mixture of good and bad. She can go from zero to bratty in nothing flat, but she’s got a well-developed conscience. She’s got a selfish streak, but she’s also curious and compassionate. She’s funny and smart, but she also has the uncanny ability to say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. In other words, she’s an average kid, heightened just enough to make her a truly memorable comic character.

And Gownley has given her a brilliant foil in arch-nemesis Rhonda. Their relationship resonates a lot for me; some of my best childhood friendships started from a point of mutual loathing, and that’s how it is for Amelia and Rhonda. With her mad crush on Reggie, Rhonda is more than a bit resentful of the new girl in G.A.S.P. At the same time, the girls share a sarcastic streak and a dubious view of Reggie’s super-hero fixation. They connect automatically, but they push each other’s buttons just as easily. A simple conversation can devolve into an exchange of horrible barbs. As Amelia puts it, “It’s too bad Rhonda and I hate each other’s guts… otherwise we’re really good friends.”

The bottom line is that they’ve got each other’s backs. Rhonda may be obsessive and cranky (picture an unhinged Lucy Van Pelt), but she does small, surprising things to make Amelia feel welcome. In What Makes You Happy, they wind up working on a social studies project together with disastrous results. It’s a sweet story that encapsulates their like-loathe rapport and takes them to a new level of understanding.

Gownley infuses every page of Amelia Rules! with wit. The stories are stacked with terrific one-liners, wry and off-kilter observations, and energetically bizarre scenarios. He’s a terrific cartoonist, too. While his style owes a bit to Charles Schultz, he takes a wilder, more expressive approach. He also makes some of the best use of creative lettering I’ve ever seen in a comic, articulating the heightened emotions of his characters with word balloons of varied styles and compositions. But he doesn’t just excel at the craziness. Quieter, more reflective moments are rendered just as well, providing lovely backdrops to Amelia’s musings on life.

Amelia Rules! is a deeply satisfying comic, running the gamut from laugh-out-loud antics to sweetly humane observations. It’s the go-to book when I’m out of sorts and need something to lift my spirits.

I could have sworn I linked to Thought Balloons in my sidebar ages ago. And I notice the absence of such a link after a week of cold pills? Sometimes I wonder if I have a properly functioning synapse left.

There were some pretty dandy comics out this week.

I wasn’t crazy about the art in Birds of Prey 78, but Gail Simone’s meticulous character work is more than adequate compensation. The “supernatural secrets of a rural town” story is engaging enough, and there are some interesting twists to the formula. For me, though, the highlight of the book is the attention Simone pays to the evolving relationships of her leads. It’s nice to see Huntress gradually becoming more engaged with her colleagues, and her bond with Black Canary — one of the first super-types to treat her with anything resembling respect — is unexpectedly moving.

Madrox 5 wraps up this entertaining mutant-noir comedy-thriller with a very strong final chapter. Madrox is a startlingly self-aware protagonist for a comic book. Happily, that doesn’t keep him out of trouble. Writer Peter David blends seamy private eye tropes, mutant mayhem, and musings on identity with real craft, and he’s got a great partner in artist Pablo Raimondi. The thing I liked best about this series is that, despite its high concept (He’s a mutant! Who clones himself! And he’s a P.I.!), it’s driven more by character than plot. That the plot is a well-constructed mystery is a nice bonus.

Manhunter is a title that just keeps getting better, in my opinion. Writer Mark Andreyko has crafted a morally ambiguous lead in Kate Spencer, and it’s interesting to watch the compartmentalized portions of her life slam into each other. That’s the big motif in Manhunter 6, as she prepares to try a criminal she tried to murder in her costumed alter-ego (and to reconnect with her son and mend co-parent fences with her ex). Readers get a glimpse of her history, too, and it’s a bit more unpleasant than you’d expect. This really is the way to explore the darker corners of the DC Universe (with a shiny-bright cameo from the Justice League for contrast). Art by Jesus Saiz nicely captures the contradictions.

I like Powers much better when its cast actually does cop stuff, so this issue (#8) was right up my alley. I think I’m going to have to ask my shop owner to cut out the letter pages (and… shudder… the personal ads) before putting this comic in my files, though.

What a pleasant surprise: Geoff Johns has written an issue of Teen Titans that didn’t make me want to reach for the lithium. That he managed this while dealing with the aftermath of a character’s death is particularly startling. In Teen Titans 20, Robin goes through a few stages of grief, trying and failing to wall the Titans off from one part of his life while using his time with them as an escape. That’s some fairly sophisticated characterization, made moreso because Robin’s coping mechanisms fall apart and get replaced by something healthier. Wait… what’s that? It’s actual uplift! Keep very still, or you’ll scare it!

Here are some current contests going on in the blogosphere:

• At Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog, Laura Gjovaag is giving away a copy of Colonia: Islands and Anomolies and a page of original artwork from the same. Deadline is 9 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 20.
• Dr. Scott at Polite Dissent wants you to win a copy of Nikolai Dante: The Romanov Dynasty, and he’s come up with different ways to enter. Deadline is midnight Jan. 31.
• Comic Book Galaxy is offering a nutty range of Street Angel goodies, not only to contestants but to their favorite comic shops. Entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28.

Speaking of comics (and when am I not?), what’s showing up this week?

• DC has the first trade of the excellent Ex Machina, along with the latest issue of Birds of Prey (#78) and the second volume of Land of the Blindfolded. (I thought the first volume was intriguing, and I’ll definitely give the second a look.)
• The sixth issue of Manhunter also arrives, continuing a follow-up story from Identity Crisis. The protagonist is charged with prosecuting the Shadow Thief for the murder of Firestorm. Since she wanted to kill him the Hawkman foe in her vigilante guise, she sees this as a chance to execute him in a more formal manner.
• At Marvel, Madrox concludes with its fifth issue. Peter Milligan, much-loved for his satirical take on mutants and super-heroes in X-Statix, treads more conventional territory in X-Men 166. (Early reviews have been mixed, but I’m still interested.)

Only template-related laziness has kept me from adding Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat blog. Linkage achieved.