The Adventure of The Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer

Nicholas Meyer's latest Sherlock Holmes novel feels less like a Detective novel and more like spy/political thriller, but I am impressed by his ability to still craft a full-length Holmes novel at more-or-less the same length as the novels by the characters' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Very few authors penning these "pastiche" adventures are able to accomplish this feat; the results are often a 320-page "brick" or longer, depending on the format size of the font.

He's also light on gimmicks. There's a lot of footnotes & self-aware framing sequence business in which Meyer inserts himself as a character, cobbling together a manuscript based upon pages of notes chronicling an unknown adventure within a battered notebook purportedly belonging by Dr. Watson, though all of Meyer's Holmes pastiches follow the same rules: each book is based on some newly-discovered material, which Meyer sets about to make presentable.

Protocols is Meyer's fourth Holmes novel. His first, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, is his most-successful and best-known effort; it was adapted into a successful film starring Nicol Williamson, Robert Duvall and Alan Arkin. It told an alternate history of Sherlock Holmes seeking help from Sigmund Freud to eliminate his drug addiction; his casual use of cocaine (referenced several times in the original stories) had made him drug-addled and corrupted his memories of a past childhood tragedy: his mother was caught having an affair with Holmes' mathematics tutor, Professor Moriarty, and in a jealous rage, Holmes' father killed her, while Moriarty snuck out like a thief in the night...and young Sherlock Holmes - who was only a little boy at the time - saw it all. The appeal came from Meyer's witty efforts to psychoanalyze Sherlock Holmes by teaming him up with the most-famous analyst of all, who needed to be a better detective than Holmes in order to get to the root of the problem.

My personal favorite of Meyer's Holmes novels is The Canary Trainer, which Holmes narrates himself (something Doyle attempted in two of his short stories: "The Blanched Soldier" and "The Lion's Mane") and attempts to retell The Phantom of The Opera with Irene Adler as the diva-damsal and Holmes as the hero. There's no puzzle here, either, but it's a lot of fun. 

"Protocols" has fun moments, but it is weighed down by the fact that this is basically about Holmes' encounter with real-life evil and realizing that his best efforts won't lead to a happy ending. We're warned early on that this is a story of failure, so we're reading this book for the air of maturity that we wouldn't get from tacky Sherlock Holmes stories where he's fighting Dracula or Martians..and I think that's what inspired Meyer to write it.

A recurring element of Meyer's Holmes novels is he will feature historical figures in key supporting roles. The one who gets the most to do is civil rights activist Anna Strunsky-Walling, who is reimagined by Meyer as an adventuresome woman in the same mold as "The woman", Irene Adler, but her pictures indicate her to be more of a scholarly-type:

Maybe Meyer fancies her; the picture doesn't quite match his prose; in my mind, as I read all the scenes with her teaming up with Holmes & Watson in Russia, I kept picturing actress Emmy Rossum, with red hair and a twinkle in her eyes:

        Yeah, that's more like it.

 So, all in all, not bad; more a fact-finding mission than a puzzle, more Dan Brown than Arthur Conan Doyle, but entertaining and well done. Meyer's got another book coming out this year - I'll check it out.

   Sherlock Holmes will return in..

"The Best Movie of 2020"...?

Birds of Prey (And The Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)...was in theaters for a month & a half. It had an R-rating, which kept kids from seeing it, unless accompanied by their parents; it had a limited budget, which meant the nature of the plot would be kept on a street-level, with little room for spectacle; the budget kept the wardrobe from access to creating elaborate superhero costumes; and it had a terrible trailer, fronting toxic misandry disguised as "woke" feminism. For a movie based on DC Comics characters, it performed below expectations, but two curious things happened this week that got people talking about it again. First, this Gamespot article:

    I usually confuse them with                             Game Stop.

Second, it has a better score on Rotten Tomatoes than Wonder Woman 1984:

I usually don't set up my conclusion this far after the intro, but the point I'm going to make is that I enjoyed Birds of Prey, but...to say it's the "Best Movie of The Year" has me wondering if there were any movies we missed before handing this movie that distinction, or, given everything that's happened in 2020, should this ranking be valid. Actually, there will be an Academy Awards presentation next year, so that point is moot; it's very likely that most of the films up for consideration will be films that debuted on streaming services...

  Begun..the Streaming War has..

As for the Birds of Prey characters and how they were depicted in the film..that team has gone through several incarnations in a short time. It began with just Oracle & Black Canary, with occasional appearances from Catwoman & Huntress, but also Male DC Comics characters like Robin, Nightwing and Blue Beetle. The 2002 live-action WB Network TV series debuted just before the comic book had even hit the five-year mark; I remember TV Guide critic Matt Roush dissed the series in just one sentence: "..a mechanical superhero dud that squanders its nifty premise with bad writing & acting." Yikes. Regardless, the comic book continued after that show evaporated, but the notion of having the Huntress be a core member of the team was incorporated into the comics when Gail Simone took over as writer after series co-creator Chuck Dixon left.

As a series, the comic has come a long way from essentially being a riff on Charlie's Angels, but has always been a middling success; in terms of sales, not as well as Batman or Justice League, more like Green Arrow or Hawkman, but better than Aquaman & Wonder Woman, popularity of Jason Mamoa & Gal Gadot notwithstanding. The most successful eras of the book were when Chuck Dixon was writing it in the early years, followed by the first couple years of Gail Simone's run. That was within the first 8 years. It has faltered creatively, been cancelled and relaunched several times the following decade, even rebranded as "Batgirl and The Birds of Prey" after Barbara Gordon, who had been Oracle after "The Killing Joke", became Batgirl again after regaining the use of her legs. The addition of Harley Quinn was inspired by the movie...and, contrary to longtime Birds of Prey fan opinions, I think her presence gives the book a lift - she becomes the straw that stirs the drink; people hate that she replaced Barbara, but I always found Barbara as Oracle to be a boring character. As inpirational & aspirational as Barbara is, whether as Batgirl or Oracle...being Oracle is a desk job. It's just endless panels of a woman sitting at a desk, facing computer screens. I will suggest that this allows for more identification with the audiences who love the character or can relate to her being in a wheelchair, but that's it. When James Tynion had Barbara reprise her role as Oracle, it was a miracle she wasn't put back in a wheelchair again..it just feels like the well has run dry, creatively, in comics right now.

Back to the movie. It is a weakness of it that you can find fan art on the internet that does a better job of outfitting Jurnee Smollett-Bell & Mary Elizabeth Winstead with wardrobe bearing a stronger resemblance to the comic book Black Canary & Huntress, but I thought the actresses made the most of what little they had to do, actually clocking in the same amount of time they usually get in the comic books. Cassandra Cain is not the same character from the comics, but I have noticed recent appearances of the comic book Cassandra incorporate elements of the film version's characterization, though I'm sure her hard core fans are apt to disagree.

Than there's Renee Montoya. This character had an interesting evolution: she starts off as a supporting character created for the 90's Batman cartoons, is then incorporated into the comic books..and then she becomes a new female incarnation of Steve Ditko's vigilante The Question. For this film, screenwriter Christina Hodson went back to the police officer incarnation of the character, offering a different take on her departure from the Gotham Police Department. I liked Rosie Perez, here, but I recall critics thought all of her scenes - and all the scenes with the Male cops in the precinct (her character is the only female cop present) - were cliches. With Batman, Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Bullock kept far offscreen, Montoya is going to be the only good cop in Gotham, a city long-established as being controlled by gangsters, where very few cops & politicians are good - everyone is either shady or looking out for themselves. Given this status quo, it tracks that Montoya would be manic - her only ally at the police department being the female District Attorney, which is a tenuous relationship, because she's her ex-girlfriend. Events play out understandably.

                

Now's as good a time as any to drop my theories about Renee Montoya's presence in this film: I'm watching the scene where Montoya is inexplicably chasing Harley Quinn through the "Pinata Alley" of the Toy District section of downtown Los Angeles, subbing for fictional Gotham City (this is the infamous "Egg Sandwich" scene; given the fuss for fried chicken sandwiches in 2019, this doesn't seem ludicrous to me)...and I'm thinking the chase dosen't make sense...unless it was intended for a different character to be chasing Harley Quinn...

I'm aware that the screenplay went through multiple rewrites. Batgirl was set to appear in this film at one point, until the studio executives decided to aim for having this film be R-rated, because "Joker" was also going to be rated R, but they mandated a core member of Batman's "family" was not going to be in an R movie, so I believe most of the Montoya scenes exist in an earlier draft, in a different context, with Batgirl instead. It would've been Barbara investigating the myterious vigilante (Huntress) who was killing mobsters, randomly chasing Harley through Pinata Alley, forming the team with Huntress, Canary & Cassandra at the end, surviving from getting shot by wearing Harley Quinn's bullet-proof bustier (I'm convinced that's a callback to TKJ)...and having her costume reduced to tatters, which I believe to be a callback to two different sources: a Batgirl arc in "Batman Confidential" where her simple costume is slowly picked apart during multiple brawls in long caper with Catwoman:

And in the 90's Batman cartoon episode, "Harley's Holiday", in which socialite Veronica Vreeland's designer outfit is not able to endure a long day of keeping up with Harley Quinn's antics:

The tone of the film reminded me a lot of "Harley's Holiday" and "Harliquinade" - two Harley Quinn-centric episodes of the 90's series in which Harley's antics leave a trail of destruction, played purely for laughs.

 Black Mask, a 3rd-tier Batman villain similar to Two-Face, with a different psychosis and creepier film noir-esque origin, fares worse than the gangster "Boxy", whose nightclubs get trashed whenever Quinn paid a visit; he's lucky to not suffer the fate of Black Mask in the film - blown up by hand grenade; after all, it was a cartoon for kids! Victor Zsasz is just a stooge in this film, but further proof of why I'm convinced Batgirl was going to be in this is she fought Zsasz before - memorably, for a moment where she pours salt in his open scars:

                       Nice.

So...I thought the movie was good. Definitely would've loved it more with Batgirl, but as-is, we got a live-action, poorly-marketed, farcical crossover that was likely meant to launch a spinoff series but didn't, because the fanbase was either too young to be allowed to buy tickets or miffed by uninspired, lazy, pandering marketing. It's an R-rated live-action film in the spirit of a 90's Batman cartoon (and early-90's superhero films, really), but would probably be downgraded to PG if you compare it to the far-edgier "Harley Quinn" series that debuted on the defunct DC Universe streaming service, but will continue on HBOMax. Barely a year later and it's become quaint..

Batman: Three Jokers

   I like those free playing cards...I 

  noticed nobody's talked about     them..

DC Comics' seems to be on the verge of planning a funeral for itself...how many more paroxysms can it take within a single decade? There's a rumor that 2021 might be the year that longtime fans might want to consider dusting off the free black armbands that were bundled with copies of Superman #75 from 1992 and I'll leave it at that:

           Who invited Darkseid?

I must note how some of the ongoing storylines have a weird, metaphorical quality; Scott Snyder's incomprehensible mini-series, Dark Knights: Death Metal, revealed that Batman and Superman are cadavers, keeping themselves alive to fight 'till the fight is won with mystic paraphernalia, to put it simply. In the main Batman book, Batman is acting oddly out-of-character, leaving his entire fortune in the hands of Lucius Fox, an employee, albeit a trusted one, via a conservatorship, but this is all preamble to establish one of Lucius' sons becoming the replacement Batman in an upcoming storyline, rather than heir apparents Dick Grayson or Barbara Gordon or his own son, Damian...well, it's your money, Bruce.

Let's get to the real meat among the potatoes: having finished reading Batman: Three Jokers, it is my belief that this mini-series is the last good Batman comic book we are going to see for a long time, if ever again. I'm not really writing this in stone by putting that statement in bold italics, but it feels that way right now; if there are any good Batman comics forthcoming...it's all gravy to me; I can't really see anything as good as, or better, than this mini-series; I don't believe it was intended as a finale or last Batman comic, but...I'm not sure we'll see anything better. We'll see, right? Meanwhile, I mean it with sincerity that this was the best Batman comic I've read since Mad Love. And I enjoyed it more than The Killing Joke. More on this in a bit..

Years ago, I remember an editorial from an issue of Comic Buyers Guide that described 2 types of Batman vs The Joker stories:

1) The Joker steals the Batmobile:

   🎶 And the Joker got away! 🎶

2) The Joker tortures Batman over a pot of tea:

   🎶A cuppa' arsenic, some tea    and you..🎶 

Three Jokers was teased as being like the first, but is really more like the latter. The tease came from scenes in 2 crossovers that are not particularly required reading:

                         This.

                       And this.

Eventually followed by the formal announcement:

Why wasn't this used as the cover art for the hardcover collection?

When it became clear the mini-series was going to be a sequel to The Killing Joke, everyone wondered if this was going to stick the landing. I'm not a big fan of Killing Joke, though I'm aware every dark take on Batman and The Joker takes it's cues from that story; fans of Oracle hate it, even though it's the only reason Barbara Gordon remained in a wheelchair, as a callback to that story. And Alan Moore is no fan of it:

 I saw that movie...Barbara is probably the only normal person Batman had a relationship with.

              Hey...Batgirl's hot.

                   This tracks.

The only scene I like is that whole "speech" Batman gives at the beginning - variations of which have been pastiched for decades since:

 I played with the lighting on this shot to make it readable; I dislike how Bolland recolored everything in the reprints. 

So, Three Jokers is revealed to be a sequel in that it changes the fate of a character that appeared in The Killing Joke...technically, 2 characters, really. Aside from that twist, the real focus is on the psyche of the 3 heroes featured: Batman, Batgirl and Red Hood - Batman's ethics & morality, Batgirl's ambivalence and Red Hood's neuroses. Each of the 3 Jokers correspond with each hero in different ways; the Clown has the same capacity for violent impulses as Red Hood; the Criminal is as ambivalent and pragmatic as Barbara; the Comedian, like Batman, holds more cards than he lets on and plays them close. 

Jason Fabok's artwork  is fantastic, Geoff Johns scripts are his most deftly-crafted; this is a love-letter to the pre-Knightfall Batman comic books of the late-80's - early-90's, right before Batman: The Animated Series began to permanently set the style; there's a nearly-forgotten era of deceptively simple, gothic tales by Alan Grant & Norm Breyfogle, Marv Wolfman, Peter Milligan, Jim Aparo, Jim Starlin, Christopher Priest and Dennis O'Neil in the ongoing issues of Batman, Detective Comics and Legends of The Dark Knight, read by many who were brought into comic shops by the success of the 1989 Batman film, where the stories were told from a street-level/rooftop-level perspective, and the ethos of the film's story structure seemed to be echoed by the writers and artists. It was a golden time to be reading Batman comics. It's an amazing triumph for Three Jokers. It even offers a happy ending! There's a punchline for you...

It was better than good...better than good enough..

DullTales

I have no idea what the story is about, but the observational humor of this screenshot from the comics inspired me...it's true to life in ways we don't care to admit...

The Lady From The Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters And The Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O'Meara

Creature From The Black Lagoon is a popular choice of old-fashioned Halloween monster movie viewing, as an alternative to the numerous Dracula and Frankenstein movies out there. A recent release of the DVD for Creature shows that the text on the back of the container has stopped attributing credit for the design of the creature to Bud Westmore, the then-head of Universal's makeup department. This was not always the case; older editions of the film on DVD and VHS cassettes would give credit to Westmore, though the Blu-Ray edition did not.

      The cover of the current DVD.

So...what brought about the change? There's substantial proof that Westmore was a fraud who took credit for more work than he actually did; the design of the creature was created and drawn by Milicent Patrick, a former Disney Animator - she was an assistant to Bill Tytla for the character Chernabog on the "Nightmare On Bald Mountain Sequence" in Fantasia:

   That's right - she drew this guy!

Milicent Patrick had movie star looks and could articulate her ideas clearly; Universal's marketing executives concocted the idea of having Patrick go on a promotional tour of various TV and radio stations to promote Lagoon; this rubbed Bud Westmore the wrong way. As head of the makeup department, he wanted to be the only individual credited with anything and saw this as a coup, even though Patrick is on record as working hard to downplay her own contributions, knowing quite well that Westmore was fuming. It wouldn't have mattered; Patrick was doomed - Westmore came from a family of designers with considerable clout in Hollywood; he made certain she was fired from Universal and would never find work at any other studio as a designer. Wrongful Termination lawsuits in Hollywood did not become known, or common until the early-80s, both cases involving actresses; Cindy Williams sued Paramount after she was fired from "Laverne & Shirley" because the studio would not allow for maternity leave and her schedule would've required her to work while 9 months pregnant; in the late-80s, Valerie Harper sued Lorimar Telepictures, the company her self-titled sitcom, Valerie, when she was fired from the show after asking for a pay raise. 

Could Milicent Patrick have sued Universal Studios for Wrongful Termination? I would say yes, she could, but she didn't - most likely out of fear that she would never find any work at all. Mallory O'Meara's biography of Patrick does a great job of covering the essential details of her life, but stops short of insight into what Patrick was thinking afterward. Patrick passed away over 20 years ago at an assisted living facility; after being fired, she briefly took on a career as an extra, appearing in small parts in TV series and some movies, then married a wealthy man and spent the 1960s & 1970s as a philanthropist & socialite; in the 1980s she was living in squalor - the Hollywood mansion she occupied had fallen into decay after a mudslide. Her health had also fallen into serious decline; the last decade of her life was spent marking time. She had no children and was estranged from most of her family, except for one niece, who had whatever remained of Patrick's belongings that survived, including documents. There's no mention of Patrick keeping a diary, so she remains elusive. O'Meara admitted in the afterword that she could not find any corroborating information that could explain why Patrick once described herself as "..a Bugs Bunny expert." And O'Meara then has to hazard an educated guess as to what Milicent Patrick's mindset was like by finding correlations with her own biography; the end result was that I felt like I knew O'Meara more than I knew Patrick, which reminded me of the Julia Child biopic Julie & Julia, but I don't find any fault with her conclusions. I definitely recommend this book.

If someone were to tell you, "If you're good at something, stick with it," what can you do if you've been shut out of your chosen field? Milicent Patrick's life story starts off as a success story, then becomes a tale of someone who moved on after success was fleeting, then seems to fall into entropy and isn't vindicated until after her lifetime. It's sad, but it's real life..and monsters in real life don't have to wear fangs, green makeup or prosthetic gills; they can look like Bud Westmore...

      Milicent Patrick, Pioneer, RIP

Let's Get..The Spinoff!

I used that old press kit image of Darkwing Duck characters because I think it inspired the concept-heavy approach to reintroducing Darkwing Duck into the current Ducktales revival. In that picture, it's just a visual gag because the production team wanted to show Darkwing and his civilian identity, Drake Mallard, in the picture; for the 2017 reboot, however, it really is 2 different characters, now: Drake Mallard and Jim Starling. Jim was an actor who played Darkwing in a superhero TV series; Drake Mallard is the actor cast to play Darkwing in a big-budget movie. Jim went insane from the notion that he was passed over and the part was recast; he decides to sabotage the film's production and winds up becoming this series' incarnation of Negaduck:

Drake, in the meantime, having been a lifelong fan of the Darkwing character, decides to become the new Darkwing in real-life, relocating from Duckburg to St. Canard - the locale where all the classic Darkwing Duck adventures were set. His latest adventure introduces the new series' take on Drake's adopted daughter, Gosalyn.

And that's the new "Team Darkwing". I miss Jim Cummings as the voice of Darkwing/Drake Mallard, even though the production team has him onboard as Jim Starling/Negaduck, but it should be a law that the cartoon character's voice actor should only be recast if the original/defintive actor is either incapable of recreating their original performance, incarcerated or deceased. Cummings is alive and well, perfectly capable of recapturing every nuance that character needs. Chris Diamantopolous is okay as the new Darkwing, but he doesn't make me forget Jim. On the other hand, his performance is strengthened by the presence of Beck Bennett, who has been terrific as the new voice of Launchpad McQuack, and Stephanie Beatriz, who, in her debut as the replacement for the late Christine Cavanaugh as the new Gosalyn, is excellent here, as the character has been sharply revised to be more determined and/or less mischievous (the original version of Gosalyn had the capacity for this development and had similar agency, but often characterized as a wild card, often with no provocation).

           Prototype "Protoducks"

The 2017 Ducktales' Darkwing Duck would be the 3rd incarnation of Darkwing, though the 1st - Double-O-Duck (pictured) - only exists in concept art and some press kit material, including a lapel pin(!), but I'm inclined to count him and bring him up because the new take on Darkwing is closer to this prototype, from when it was initially conceived as a pitch by Tad Stones for a spinoff of the 1987 Ducktales featuring Launchpad & Gizmoduck as spies that was rejected by Jeffrey Katzenberg as not having "..a sense of family," then reworked, sans Gizmoduck, with a colorful new sidekick for Launchpad who was a single father...and ultimately reworked to be the real star of the show when the production team at Disney learned that they could not use "Double-O-Duck" because the owners of the James Bond brand owned "Double-O.." and had to come up with a new name.

Even though the new Ducktales show is considered a success and it seems like a foregone conclusion that Darkwing Duck is going to be picked up to become it's own series revival, it's something I'm ambivalent about. I find this Ducktales revival to be just okay; it's clear to me that the team behind the revival respected the success of the original Ducktales series from 1987, but with Darkwing Duck, the affection is a lot more genuine, so a revival of that will be much better than the Ducktales show we've had for the last 3 years. I figured if Disney is interested in keeping Ducktales in circulation like Warner Brothers does with Scooby-Doo, then expect additional revivals from other creative teams that might come closer to rekindling the appeal of the old series...as is, there's no denying the success..as another cartoon with talking ducks.