Comic Cuts - 26 October 2018

Now I've managed to get over the impasse of the Introduction, the text for the fourth volume of Forgotten Authors is almost done. I've indexed over 150 pages and might even have finished all 235 pages by the time you read this. I've still got some work to do (the print and e-book versions have to be reformatted in different ways, mostly involving the 300 footnotes), but I'll hopefully have it finished shortly.

Having actually sold a few of the books listed last week, I've been listing a few more items on Ebay. Go take a look: there's some Modesty Blaise items, a Dan Dare book, a couple of Frank Bellamy spares I've had to clear from my shelves... a right old mixture.

Having watched quite a lot of grim thrillers of late, I fancied something a little lighter for my downtime, and began watching Bones season one. I've seen the show before, back in the days when we had cable TV from Virgin. It was one of a number of shows that was caught up in a spat between Virgin and Sky back in 2007, after which I lost track of it. I've seen DVDs around and picked one up cheaply in a charity shop a month or so ago.

Apart from some gruesome-looking skeletons, the show has a lighter edge to it. somewhere in the middle of the scale – which has X-Files at one end and Moonlighting at the other – of shows featuring bickering male/female partners. It's about on the level of Castle, if you've seen that.

The skeletons are inevitably delivered to The Jeffersonian Institute in Washington for examination by their leading forensic anthropologist, Dr Temperance Brennan, nicknamed "Bones" by her reluctant FBI partner Seeley Booth. She is detached and lacks social skills; he is an ex-Army Ranger sniper who relies on instinct and distrusts "squints", as he calls Brennan's team. He's impatient, unhappy with his assignment, but grows to understand the quirks of the team, tolerating them without necessarily liking them.

The whole show hinges on the relationship between Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Booth (David 'Angel' Boreanaz) and there's enough spark between them to keep the series lively without you wanting to bang their heads together all the time. There were a couple of episodes where we begin to explore some of the characteristics of the leads to learn more about them, and these are handled better than most, producing three dimensional rather than two dimensional characters, the sum of more than one part rather than defined by a single incident. I noticed Noah Hawley was a writer and script editor on the series, and I've loved his more recent work on Fargo and Legion. Wikipedia has him working on the first three seasons of Bones, so I reckon it'll be worth grabbing the next two when I see them.

The other show I've been watching is season 3 of Daredevil from Netflix. I thought the first two seasons were fantastic and The Defenders, with Daredevil as one of the team, was pretty good. We've had to wait for ages for this third season and let's hope it's not the last. Iron Fist and Luke Cage have both been cancelled, the first perhaps not a surprise, but cancelling the latter has been a real shock, especially as the writing team was already delivering scripts for the third season. Something is going on between Marvel Studio and Disney and I'm not sure what it is.

One of the reasons I found the first season so compelling was that it... well, I can tell you exactly what said back in October 2015:

Well, Daredevil didn't disappoint. It retains the darkness of the DD 1998 reboot and the feel of those Brian Michael Bendis or Ed Brubaker series' that appeared in the 2000s. The characters are all integral to the story... Foggy isn't just a comedy sidekick to be wheeled out when the mood needs to be lightened; Karen Page isn't just wheeled out when the story demands a screaming woman for DD to save; and their actions have consequences, sometimes deadly. I'm really looking forward to the next season.

The same applies to this, the third season, which takes elements of 'Born Again', the 1986 serial from the monthly Daredevil title. Frank Miller was bought back to work with David Mazzucchelli on the series, Miller having rescued the character from certain doom a few years earlier. It also reminds me of the 1998 Daredevil reboot, which is where I really came onboard as a Daredevil fan. Sister Maggie, the fight with Bullseye in the church... it's all out of that 'Guardian Devil' storyline.

The reappearance of Vincent D'Onofrio is also to be celebrated. Kingpin is the personification of the criminal mastermind, the spider at the centre of the web, and D'Onofrio is a terrifying presence, the embodiment of self-control, with none of the histrionics that some actors bring to table when they're asked to play a villain.

What I like about the series is that Matt Murdoch, beyond his heightened other senses that allow him to "see" his surroundings, he doesn't have a power punch or invulnerable skin. He's as frail as the next guy. And Kingpin wants control of the city and its rackets, not some ridiculous high tech McGuffin machine or mystical stone. It's all grounded in the real. Oh [quick spoiler alert], and I'm glad to see that the costume has been ditched in favour of the black mask from the first season. Nobody looks heroic in a red leather onesie.

Randoms scans this week inspired by devils of one sort or another...