Sunday, September 18, 2005
So, Bones, or, as I shall persist in calling it from hereon in because I am teh funny, CSI: FBI. That tells you all you need to know. FBI Agent Seeley (David Boreanaz) Booth who, probably due to childhood taunting over his first name, was an Army sniper until deciding to try and make amends by becoming an agent, works alongside Dr Temperence (Emily Deschanel) Brennan, a forensic scientist from the Jeffersonian Institution and writer of books. He finds the bodies, she fiddles with them, her sidekicks quip, the FBI glowers, the case is solved.
In the first five minutes Booth says "Yeah, we're Mulder and Scully", later there's an argument which I guess is a reference to the CSI/Law and Order rivalry in an argument over whether it's cops or scientists that solve murder cases. The answer from this would seem to be that it's scientists, but they need cops, or FBI Agents, to do the dirty work of arresting people or shooting them.
It is by no means a bad show, it is just the CSI map laid down over the FBI, complete with ludicrous science and a scene where Brennan arranges fragments of a skeleton into the correct order while some American indie is played over the top. None of the characters are shown to have much of a life outside of work, though there is a scene with her ex-boyfriend coming into her apartment at dawn to reclaim his TV and do some infodumping about how she's emotionally distant, has issues with intimacy and was orphaned at a young age. This latter point is repeated several times during the show, presumably in the hope that this will pass for emotional depth. This is pretty unnecessary and just slows things down.
And for ludicrous scientific stuff, Brennan's team have created the world's first holographic display computer, allowing them to feed in data from skull fragments and allow real-time alteration to build up composites of what the person would have looked like. Next week I assume they will have a human cyborg that will solve crimes if they teach it what 'love' is.
Acting is competent, Boreanaz seems to be acting pretty much as Angel in his lighter moods, Deschanel is like most of the women from CSI, her character is gutsy and driven and blah blah blah. Like I said, the show isn't bad, it's just been done before. This may have been based on what producer Kathy Reichs used to do for a living, but she's been passed on the TV highway while she was writing her books.
So, Fell #1, by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Short detective stories is the name of the game here, sixteen pages, with a couple more for backup data and stuff. The key point, as Ellis explains, is that with price increases comics are not in a position they were some twenty or thirty years ago, where kids could afford to buy a comic with the loose change in their pockets, and with the changes in the way comics are created these kids can't buy a random comic and have a complete story before them, which doesn't insist they have to know what happened in any other issues to understand what happened there.
The idea with Fell is that you could read just one issue from the run, any issue, and have a story that you understand. And it'll be cheap too. The unanswered question is exactly why Ellis is doing this. After all, with a story that includes failed suicide attempts, attempted rapes and alcohol enemas, along with typical Ellis-ian dialogue, this isn't exactly for the kids. This is a police procedural after Ellis has spent several days watching The Shield episodes one after another. Detective Richard Fell has transferred to Snowtown for reasons unclear, Snowtown being a lawless kind of place with minimal civic services and even less police. But Fell has read a couple of books on neuro-linguistic programming so is a very good judge of character, which I guess is crucial when you only have sixteen pages to solve a crime.
It's all very noble what Ellis is doing here, but it's going to be selling to exactly the same people as almost all his other work sells to. Plus, considering the story is only sixteen pages long, aren't the different audiences that Ellis might be aiming for going to see this as rather thin and pass over it. Market limitations rather screw this from the start, even if the team for this only get paid if it turns a profit.
Being a mainstream comic person I didn't even know Ben Templesmith existed prior to this, let alone come across anything he had a hand in. His style for this seems to be satisfactorily grimy, in limited space he really gives the idea of a city of crumbling walls, stinking stairwells and unceasing wind. His characters are a little more inconsistent, the bar-girl Mayko, who Fell meets in the middle of the story to allow Ellis to show us how clever he is, seems to wander freely between three different hairstyles, before ending up with her hair covering her face and a big nose. There seems to be an experimentation going on between whether to draw people 'straight' or cartoony. Colour is used in washes, urine yellow for most building interiors, blues for exteriors, Fell has blonde hair (on the cover) or yellow hair (interior) to add some vital colour to the scene.
I'm not convinced either by Ellis's reason for doing this comic or the execution of the same, but the story is actually quite a good one and, once the scene setting is out of the way this might be quite a good little thing, especially as the length means we'll be spared more Ellis decompression or his more outrageous cliches. Completely stand-alone stories brings us back to CSI, and whether Ellis can make us care about characters when you don't rely on seeing them every time they're on.
In the first five minutes Booth says "Yeah, we're Mulder and Scully", later there's an argument which I guess is a reference to the CSI/Law and Order rivalry in an argument over whether it's cops or scientists that solve murder cases. The answer from this would seem to be that it's scientists, but they need cops, or FBI Agents, to do the dirty work of arresting people or shooting them.
It is by no means a bad show, it is just the CSI map laid down over the FBI, complete with ludicrous science and a scene where Brennan arranges fragments of a skeleton into the correct order while some American indie is played over the top. None of the characters are shown to have much of a life outside of work, though there is a scene with her ex-boyfriend coming into her apartment at dawn to reclaim his TV and do some infodumping about how she's emotionally distant, has issues with intimacy and was orphaned at a young age. This latter point is repeated several times during the show, presumably in the hope that this will pass for emotional depth. This is pretty unnecessary and just slows things down.
And for ludicrous scientific stuff, Brennan's team have created the world's first holographic display computer, allowing them to feed in data from skull fragments and allow real-time alteration to build up composites of what the person would have looked like. Next week I assume they will have a human cyborg that will solve crimes if they teach it what 'love' is.
Acting is competent, Boreanaz seems to be acting pretty much as Angel in his lighter moods, Deschanel is like most of the women from CSI, her character is gutsy and driven and blah blah blah. Like I said, the show isn't bad, it's just been done before. This may have been based on what producer Kathy Reichs used to do for a living, but she's been passed on the TV highway while she was writing her books.
So, Fell #1, by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Short detective stories is the name of the game here, sixteen pages, with a couple more for backup data and stuff. The key point, as Ellis explains, is that with price increases comics are not in a position they were some twenty or thirty years ago, where kids could afford to buy a comic with the loose change in their pockets, and with the changes in the way comics are created these kids can't buy a random comic and have a complete story before them, which doesn't insist they have to know what happened in any other issues to understand what happened there.
The idea with Fell is that you could read just one issue from the run, any issue, and have a story that you understand. And it'll be cheap too. The unanswered question is exactly why Ellis is doing this. After all, with a story that includes failed suicide attempts, attempted rapes and alcohol enemas, along with typical Ellis-ian dialogue, this isn't exactly for the kids. This is a police procedural after Ellis has spent several days watching The Shield episodes one after another. Detective Richard Fell has transferred to Snowtown for reasons unclear, Snowtown being a lawless kind of place with minimal civic services and even less police. But Fell has read a couple of books on neuro-linguistic programming so is a very good judge of character, which I guess is crucial when you only have sixteen pages to solve a crime.
It's all very noble what Ellis is doing here, but it's going to be selling to exactly the same people as almost all his other work sells to. Plus, considering the story is only sixteen pages long, aren't the different audiences that Ellis might be aiming for going to see this as rather thin and pass over it. Market limitations rather screw this from the start, even if the team for this only get paid if it turns a profit.
Being a mainstream comic person I didn't even know Ben Templesmith existed prior to this, let alone come across anything he had a hand in. His style for this seems to be satisfactorily grimy, in limited space he really gives the idea of a city of crumbling walls, stinking stairwells and unceasing wind. His characters are a little more inconsistent, the bar-girl Mayko, who Fell meets in the middle of the story to allow Ellis to show us how clever he is, seems to wander freely between three different hairstyles, before ending up with her hair covering her face and a big nose. There seems to be an experimentation going on between whether to draw people 'straight' or cartoony. Colour is used in washes, urine yellow for most building interiors, blues for exteriors, Fell has blonde hair (on the cover) or yellow hair (interior) to add some vital colour to the scene.
I'm not convinced either by Ellis's reason for doing this comic or the execution of the same, but the story is actually quite a good one and, once the scene setting is out of the way this might be quite a good little thing, especially as the length means we'll be spared more Ellis decompression or his more outrageous cliches. Completely stand-alone stories brings us back to CSI, and whether Ellis can make us care about characters when you don't rely on seeing them every time they're on.
