“Spacemen From Space!” August 12-22
(Written and Directed by Ian W. Hill)

The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

Queen of the Final Frontier: Moretto and Baker command the stage

I’ve long believed that only the true virtuoso knows all the wrong notes to hit. Though often harbored in the kitsch-tastic Brick Theater (on whose board he serves), Ian W. Hill’s mission is not so much one of guilty pleasure as exuberant discomfort. But he has a humane ear for what people respond to and an honesty about what he himself enjoys that make him the ideal mastermind for this revel in the most glaring transgressions and illuminating leaps of episodic pulp.

“Spacemen From Space!” is a repackaged live DVD of all six episodes of a 1930s movie serial that never existed, or couldn’t have ’til now — the story of a jet-packed adventurer and a radio cowboy singer who must race to foil a remote-control plot from the stars, it balletically trips over itself in the forward rush of media and tech it can scarcely absorb before advancing through.

Of course we citizens of the future know where all this is heading, but the ensemble-of-thousands in “Spacemen” just have to follow along with a vocabulary breathlessly outpacing understanding — “infra-sonic beam frequencies,” gravity-canceling harnesses and other proto-junk of the post-industrial pileup litter the dialogue, and the ingeniously dazed cast are dramatizing a whole century that wasn’t ready for its close-up encounter with A-bombs and NASA disasters.

Hill has an expert ear for phrasings which bypass sequential sense but surpass logic in spite of themselves — “an ancient Eastern principle as yet undiscovered by our modern empirical science” — and there are baroque line readings, missed cues and production shortcuts aplenty (like the multiple voiceovers, each a different tone or even variable vaudeville dialect, for one masked character), in a masterwork of informed carelessness and well-orchestrated mistakes.

But there is an admiration for the headlong assurance of antediluvian filmmakers and a wistfulness for their innocent unself-consciousness. In the uneasy alliance between Cowboy Adam (a heartbreakingly sincere Adam Swiderski) and Rocket Brannon (a sublimely smug James Isaac) we see the clickover from a majority-rural to a mostly-metropolitan America — the turning point at which central-casting country & western like Adam’s became unprecedentedly popular — and an advance echo of the coastal/heartland Two Americas of our own sourly bickering decade. Those associations — and the occasional anachronistic sci-fi tagline (“resistance is futile”) — fan out across the script like projection-booth tachyons traveling up and down the timeline of crap culture and woeful politics.

Cowboy Adam is the kind of stolidly principled leader you desperately want to believe in (not to name any names), and he and Brannon are fighting off an attack from a kind of unreal-America planet hidden on the opposite side of the sun, which is causing Earth’s weather to go haywire as the prelude to an invasion (if only global warming were really so simple). Meanwhile the aliens’ local competition, fiend-of-the-week The Lavender Spectre, wants to grab a secret mineral coincidentally buried beneath Adam’s ranch that can control all weather and keep him on top instead (going to war over natural resources — thank God it’s just a movie serial!).

Adam’s and Brannon’s various worshipful sidekicks, right-hand men and tough-talking love interests materialize our tragic trust in paragons, but the fever is not contained to one world; the attacking planet’s queen, Oneida (in a tour de force of seething Bankheadian hauteur from Cara Moretto), and her prime minister Lord Nugas (played in lethal deadpan and stealth pathos by Aaron Baker) turn out to be fans of the drifting radio-wave adventures of Cowboy Adam and Rocket Brannon, respectively, and sassy newshound Chickie West (Ali Skye Bennet, who deserves the extra hundred thrilling installments other characters keep alluding to) is only stowing away for the story — all the cosmos is a stage, and like the phantom “televisor” images of various machinating villains, all will be reduced to consumable broadcast ectoplasm in time.

There’s a killer-robot army rising up in revolt on the enemy planet to seal the deal of “Spacemen”’s parable of Bush-era misrule, but the human cast members emote to wheezing, honking extremes regularly, as if expressing the sheer volume and velocity of 20th century experience is overstretching the machinery of their mortal shells.

The entire ensemble rides out this grim fairytale of collapsing illusions acrobatically. Trav S.D., as a suspicious science genius, rocks a pencil moustache into a full old-master painting of caricature; Justin RG Holcomb as Adam’s explosive radio producer Chip Kaiser sets a new standard for back-row bombast (and his simple “Ah’ll see yew at BREHK-fast” is the new “Release the Kraken”); Yvonne Roen as an unscrupulous psychic doesn’t wait to channel Zsa-Zsa; and Douglas MacKrell as a zombified professor makes Edward Everett Horton giggle in his grave.

The finely-tuned antique patter; the embryonic feminism of fish-out-of-water like weird-science frontierswoman Dr. Sally (a combustible Amy Overman); the stereotypical Western-wear, period-chic city attire and Halloween-futurist alien finery of the play’s wardrobe closet; and the makeshift genius of the modified pots-and-pans prop-design are all double-edged spatulas of bygone-era mirth and in-context empathy.

Hill’s clever, tuneful cowboy songs comprise a hilarious unconscious commentary track; the characters’ homilies are wise beyond all intention (at one point Adam proclaims that “nothing’s impossible when it comes to love between two earthlings” — thanks for prying open that marriage definition, cowboy!); and the production may have written the epitaph for the whole Obama era when an alien, summing up his faction’s plans for democratic utopia, declares “we have already installed a suggestion box.”

It’s easier to look back and laugh than to smile at the present. But “Spacemen” reprocesses the storms of tyranny and deprivation that were gathering in the real-life 1930s as stories of triumphal uplift. And as Chip advises Adam at the end, the best thing he can do for his country right then is to sing another song. There’s no real magic mineral that can stop the rain. But spirits like Cowboy Adam, who put what’s right ahead of what’s real, are what made America great — or at least a great idea. And somehow, from the cliff’s edge of snark, “Spacemen From Space!” rescues the feeling that that power of belief is not just an artifact, but a basic element.

[http://collisionwork.livejournal.com/]

Geoff Grogan’s gamechanging giant comic picturebook Fandancer was originally titled Mystique, and readers not as property-conscious as his legal advisors will recognize this as the completion of a couplet with “the feminine.”

The book starts with a breathtaking battle-scene set in some alternate reality where the core of Kirbyan conflict was held by amazon champions instead of barbarian contenders. This gives way to a surreal racial memory of a solitary Eve in struggle with a rapacious devil-male, aswirl with treacherous pond-reflection Narcissus imagery and floating anatomical schematics; not a creation myth but a destruction one, as the state of nature defined by the mother is compromised forever even as history as we know it lurches into motion.

Grogan composes his visuals and narrative in layers of idea and orbits of imagery; the lapse-dissolve of overlain scenes and symbols has a dreamlike authority and lush formal command, and thoughts collide and release new perspectives and ancient understandings. The beautifully pastelled initial sequences give way to a mindbending conceptual mashup of photocollage and remixed panels and text from old romance, sorcery and mythology comics, a kind of 2001 “ultimate trip” through a delirium of amorous anxiety and female imagery exploitative, reverent, and many milestones in-between.

Like Buddhist awakening or VR revelation this opens back out into a graphic hyperreality of supersacred spandex warrior-woman and profane Baal-helmeted anti-dad colliding, an op-art/fashion-spread spray of evil-eye-warding circle motifs crowding the layouts like the embryos of a new masterless future.

Grogan’s most well-known medium, broadly dynamic yet obsessively constructed reconstitution of images from unrelated but chromatically fitting (and sometimes thematically coincidental) collage fragments, is a kind of devotion, and Fandancer is a visual incantation, a feverish moving Lascaux cave-painting and a trancelike conjuring of a sensed but long forgotten creator and completion. In Grogan’s concentric, shifting narrative it’s not made easy to know what’s going on, and through the veils of blinding desire and imposed disguise it’s not easy for the essential woman to be knowable — at least to the eons of male artists and observers who mold her in their view. But somewhere at the center of Fandancer, through the maze of history’s ripples and the obstacles of straight stories misshapen and scattered, in Grogan’s searching vision the heroine breaks free.

[http://www.lookoutmonsters.com/fandancer.html]

An uncommon stack of one-shots and first issues to take chances on has swollen my comics budget these last few weeks; let’s see how many left me feeling that food and rent were overrated anyway…

There’s lots of lone-vigilante comics kicked off by some personal tragedy or amorphous toughguy animus; I’ve never seen one where the founding trauma is disillusionment with the way the world works and the vow of vengeance is taken against the status quo rather than some cardboard criminal class.

That’s the novel core of Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s utterly refreshing “Scarlet,” about a Pacific Northwest slacker girl turned urban revolutionary. It’s not the Pacific Northwest of carnival WTO protests nor the Big Idea drama of a Brian Wood’s “DMZ”; Bendis’ choice of the micro-personal everywoman/nobody of noir for what will become a political thriller promises to give the most readers an emotional stake in the character, and already is making the manifesto aspects of the dialogue and plots ring entirely true (and way beyond any comic you could compare it to).

Bendis is giving a voice to the unaligned majority who know it’s all going wrong but would rather gain a country than pick a side; at the same time he makes *you* decide whether his protagonist’s elegant definitions of what ails us address the essence of the problem or just answer it with more unworkable one-liners. The everyday backdrop and true-to-life expression rank with the best of post-Pekar indie monologue ’n’ margin comics, and Maleev is a revelation on every page, from his bleak yet lyrical photojournalistic main style to the stretches he takes on the collaged narrative detours, from snapshot to webpage to sheer geometric abstraction. Most of Bendis’ franchised superhero stuff hasn’t been my thing, but this creator-owned book is thoroughly *his* thing, and I’ve never seen that go wrong.

The motif of lost and fluttering pages, lifted up from bureaucratic mountains and unknowable layers of catalogued secrets, flying through the air and into the gutters like yesterday’s headlines or the leaves of burned books, is a central image of Kathryn & Stuart Immonen’s “Moving Pictures” GN, and Kathryn’s quietly ingenious narrative shuffles and spins between moments in time as sad turning points and terrible choices settle into place.

Centered on the unlikely and dangerous romance between a museum curator working to hide France’s art treasures during WWII and a Nazi officer charged with obtaining them, the book alternates between the genteel veneer of their interrogation sessions, the tense liaisons which play out just as much like a hostile inquiry as these people who might have shared a passion in the days of genuine civilization struggle to understand each other’s attractions in wartime, and the fraying relationships of co-workers and loved ones as the woman, Ila, stays behind to safeguard the artworks (and fitfully attempt some harboring of fugitives) and her colleagues and best friend head literally for the hills or back home to Canada, respectively.

As drawn by the infinitely versatile Stuart, these characters and their world are scenes of superlative motion and expression but pictures approaching stasis — alternating between a Bauhaus-y brevity that recalls everything from Tintin to Spiegelman on the main narrative, and an engraved detail for monumental paintings and photos that preside over the action as reminders of the characters’ passions and pasts, these are moments inexorably sliding into history; the players walk through relics and masterworks that feel like a tomb at the eye of war’s storm, and are moving toward long-ago decisions and fates we can’t predict but already can’t change.

Kathryn writes some of the most three-dimensional characters and inventive storylines in comics, capable of deep insight and endless surprise, whether that instinct and attentiveness are being applied to the breakneck patter and spontaneous pacing of a Big Two event like the dazzling recent “Heralds” at Marvel, or the anxious wit, slicing cross-examination and creeping, patient dread of this compelling GN.

As the book progresses, the noose tightens on the refugees in the museum’s catacombs, “undesirables” in the town, and Ila’s conflicted heart, and we leave on notes of masterfully underplayed melancholy and unease. Comics have made some eternal works of their own detailing the heroism of those not meant to survive the Holocaust; “Moving Pictures” explores the guilt of those who were always likely to. Both Ila and the officer speak often of the “job” they’re sworn to do, and we all cling to routine and an old sense of purpose; this book navigates the elusive line between trying to keep a covenant with normalcy and just committing to bloody business as usual.

For someone raised in the two-party system of Marvel and DC, getting excited about the Gold Key or Charlton heroes was always a superhuman feat, but if the first re-rebooted issue of “Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom” is any sign, then Dark Horse and its creators have moved these books to the center of what matters. A science-fluent writer like Jim Shooter can update the technology-run-rampant origin in ways which resonate with current ambitions and fears (we’ve gone from nuclear-pile accident to particle-collider accident) rather than just numbing us with jargon or putting old slime in new vials, and Shooter hits the perfect key between modern theoretical-physics pop’s sense of wonder and period atom-age pulp’s paranoia.

This book honors both what we know now and what we felt when such freak deities of science first started populating our public imagination, and the old school is represented by some literal sci-fi pulp characters released into our reality through a very novel device Shooter has introduced for the bleed between matter and mind as quantum theorists perceive it. In the title character he gives us a plausible view of a Dr. Manhattan with a conscience, coolly analytical yet matter-of-factly ethical in a way that sinks roots into silver-age decency with zero corn. Artist/colorist Dennis Calero’s elegant chiaroscuro and frosty palette are perfect for the credible yet alien atmospheres and mythic melodrama. The textbook/dossier package design by Lia Ribacchi is uncommonly gripping and dignified too, yet another factor making this book a basic element of comics history and showing the state of the art.

On the other end of Doctor Solar’s cool spectrum is the screaming grindhouse of Scott Morse’s “Strange Science Fantasy,” drawn like a series of storyboards for a Roger Corman road epic and written entirely in captions resembling the callouts of a very long trailer. Playing out the fever dream of a post-historic cult of drag-race warriors and saviors, the first issue speeds by in a second but imprints your brain with hours of clever detail. This book is speeding right for the cliff of comics’ horizon and then gripping the air like a champ.

Returning to the sci-fi verite of the Millar-Hitch run on Fantastic Four with Hitch himself on art and Millar’s late-run successor Joe Ahearne scripting, FF Annual #32 reprises and advances that era’s exploration of superhero-team comics as domestic drama, where the domicile happens to be a high-tech bunker with open utility lines to several flavors of the beyond. Bravura widescreen action panoramas and molecularly intimate characterization, with a particularly well-handled portrait of Johnny Storm’s eternal but slightly regretful youth.

That was 52 pages of paradise; “Shadowland” is more like a pamphlet from purgatory, and there’s four left to go (though not for me). A pro-forma franchise to keep one corner of the MU’s “darkness” going for any who miss it during the companywide “Heroic Age” lightening of mood, “Shadowland” is clearly a sleepwalk for its gifted, vocally superhero-hating writer Andy Diggle, and I’m content to be woken up when it’s over.

Going even farther back in time, the latest mini to bear the name “Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four” buy Christos Gage and Mario Alberti is an unqualified delight, set (so far, though it may time-hop) in the mid-’60s Marvel world of campus fervor and geopolitical slapstick, as a still-in-school Peter Parker and an early FF get stuck in the middle of an international incident between Doctor Doom and other invited and uninvited delegates to an international conference at the college. The topical humor of the Lee & Kirby days, and an unprecedented wit of dialogue and plotting from the ever-refreshing Gage, with interesting post-Gene Ha art from Alberti, make this a book worth traveling back to every time.

More simply regressive was the new “Thor, the Mighty Avenger,” a remix of the character’s origin which seems to try for period charm but ends up reading like the kind of knockoff that would be produced if Marvel had been acquired by Tower Comics in the late ’60s and Thor had been thrown to some of its lesser talents. Sad, because this book is done by two of comics’ greater talents; the poppy yet textured, post-Azaceta art by Chris Samnee is top fight, and writer Roger Langridge is, elsewhere, one of the most gifted humorists in comics. But even Asgardians have their off centuries. There might be some reality-bending twist in store for however long this book runs, as in “Age of the Sentry,” but I didn’t care about that one either.

For our two parting shots, in a great robbers ’n’ cops serendipity of scheduling, Darwyn Cooke’s gorgeous oversized “Parker: The Man With the Getaway Face” special is a succinct and stylish primer on why “Mad Men”-era misbehavior still seems so attractive, and Joe Casey and Chris Burnham’s shooteriffic “Officer Downe” one-shot is a hilarious guts-and-glory farce that shows what happens when the long hunger for moral consistency leaves us nothing to eat but hot lead.

“Grand Theft Ovid,” through July 24
“Theater of the Arcade,” through July 25

The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

Everyone’s famous to five favorites, our drone armies increasingly travel on the eye-hand coordination of remote users and the line between blockbuster film and living-room videogame is fuzzing by the minute in both subject and quality, so a breaching of live theater’s realer time was right in the queue. The Brick Theater’s second annual Game Play festival loads the content openly and both sides are elevated and upgraded.

Eddie Kim’s “Grand Theft Ovid” reprocesses the great cautionary tales of Greek myth to tag the source code of our historically looping mistakes. Done in live machinima with a mission-control of onstage gamers and some fruitful interference from linked-in hecklers, “Ovid” overwrote an insightful translation by Carrie Thomas onto recurrent daydream images of popular videogames. The programmed lamentation of Daedalus for his fallen son (portrayed as a helicopter crash from Grand Theft Auto 4) was both a rote removal of emotion and an inescapable tide of misery; the theme of kids sent to die by oldguys, in remote lands too far away for many to care about, was encoded powerfully under the surface. Loss of loved ones and moral bearings was high in a murky, poignant Orpheus and Eurydice played to Call of Duty and Legend of Zelda. The fall of Niobe’s sons and daughters due to hubris punished by the gods, run through a Halo sniper sequence, showed that one death is tragedy and 14 is slapstick, a grim yet infectious punchline for our century of spectatorship. Talent borrows and genius steals, but in “Grand Theft Ovid” these founding fables are returned with interest.

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The promo preamble for Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Theater of the Arcade” asks “are these the plots of classic video games, or searing narratives of modernist drama”; the bonus plotpoint is that they are *specific* narratives from modernist drama, in a kind of Capcom vs. Marvel in which the playwright assumes the avatars of five of his famous peers to play the academy against the arcade.

The binary choices of forward, back and sideways in the first-person-commuter survival struggle of Frogger is crosswired with the terse existential riddles of Becket; the animus of Donkey Kong is imported to a Tennessee Williams tenement gothic in a grindingly hilarious portrait of obsessive misbehavior (and authorial fixation); the business-as-usual of Asteroids hacks a Mamet watercooler tragedy of working stiffs in space. Since Pac-Man was always a kind of musical, keyed more than most games to its pre-ringtone themes, it’s only just that it be cut-and-pasted here into a Brechtian morality-revue (echoing Blitzstein as a distant Player 2), with the insatiable protagonist as a devouring capitalist with a tight reign on the means of consumption in what had everyone on my side of the stage’s jaw not snapping but dropped at this diabolically brilliant evening’s highest-scoring segment.

As Frogger and others, Robert Pinnock takes many steps forward in his progress as the wise and weary Buster Keaton of the vital fringe, and Hope Cartelli’s histrionic spectrum expands its bandwidth in the desperate cheer of the Pac-Man CEO’s discarded trophy-mistress and the cutthroat cool of the Asteroid-cracking firm’s corporate axewoman. What Cartelli has done for hysteria these last few years Fred Backus has done for hostility, and in a tight multiplayer competition he takes the championship for eyepopping repertory workout, in back-to-back turns as the debauched Weimar demon and the shit-job-in-space’s tarnished, trash-talking golden boy. Lewonczyk may have found his ideal directorial foil in Gyda Arber (or at least I’ve found her if they’ve done this before); his manic wit is given a serene and inspired precision of mood and lithe, inevitable-feeling choreography of motion that finds the extra beat all console Olympians need.

“Theater of the Arcade” cycles the entire canon of Great Plays you were fed in highschool through the medium of what you were actually concentrating on at the time (and I took that directly from something Jeff said after the show; genius cobbles, journalism steals). In a concluding round with the Mario Bros. palette-swapped into two Sam Shepardesque road-wallowers, the protagonists end the play smashing through the metaphorical barrier of bricks that symbolizes the fourth wall of narrative awareness and the bastions between genres and levels of literary legitimacy. We know there’s just a fifth wall and a sixth beyond that one, and the boxes the brothers are trying to think outside of have just gotten smaller since the days of public cathode-ray screens. But “Theater of the Arcade” proves that greater and greater things can still come in these packages.

“That Old Soft Shoe,” June 6-27
(Written by Matthew Freeman, Directed by Kyle Ancowitz)

The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

We been dumb so long it looks like smart to us — eight years of absurdity make the most mild gestures toward common sense seem like a new age of enlightenment. All the competence and sincerity have robbed us of the right to ridicule what’s still broke. But “That Old Soft Shoe” is fighting to restore our franchise to crack wise to power.

The play is set in a secret prison whose harsh-interrogation office-drones are getting worried as the timeclock ticks over from let’s-roll to hope ’n’ change. The dance routine of the title has a very specific, absurdist role in the action which I should leave for audiences’ eyes only, but metaphorically it matches the sitcom psychobabble the players speak in, a speech pattern permanently scrambled by the dense forest of official legalese and the verbal dance they have to do around what they can’t admit.

Their worst nightmare arrives in the person of an inspecting senator visiting on behalf of the proverbial new boss, masterfully pitched by actor Steve Burns somewhere between Groucho Marx in all those old movies where he’s called in to take over already-teetering universities and kingdoms and Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder.” A slogan-spouting, nod-and-winking nutcase, Senator Corpuscle is there to slap a kinder, gentler label on business-as-usual but his anarchic manner has us cheering for the ability to blurt out the obvious.

“Soft Shoe” is part of the Too Soon Festival, a month of theatre based on fresh wounds and jumped conclusions. It’s too soon to describe the moral moving target of the Obama years — an in-law of mine just got a shitload of student-loan debt relieved and a nephew’s going to college on the new G.I. Bill, and the entire architecture of executive power and provisional rights has been left intact and at the whim of how good or bad a chief we’ve got, and how ’bout those highway improvements!

There’s still a lot we don’t know — like what-all else exactly is in the healthcare bill, though the *other* back-roomful of people who came up with that one sure seemed satisfied. Behind the play’s many big and nervous laughs is the sneaking feeling that we’ve moved from a season of leaders who were sure they knew what’s best for us to a long stretch not of something that makes it all better, but of those who decide for us what’s good enough.

“Happily After Tonight,” June 9-24
“Jeannine’s Abortion,” June 24-27

The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

Out-of-touch princesses and displaced elves are a standby of postmodern satire and metafiction. But it’s not that our fairytale and children’s-classic icons have fallen on hard times so much that we have — we’ll cheer the hero’s rise if we must, but we’d rather shout in triumph when the mightier are brought low. Celebrities’ descent and paragons’ debasement are the once-removed rollercoaster drops we wait for, signals of the superiority of our safety and the relief of our survival — the slasher franchises we enjoy are no more bloody than the unlicensed originals of Grimm’s fairytales (or the Bible’s).

So it’s not so much a natural progression as the natural state of popular stories to see Alice, Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and the Big Bad Wolf repossessed into a starlets-and-serial-killer tragic-farce, and Mateo Moreno’s bloody, trash-talking and hilarious “Happily After Tonight” mines timeless narrative gold and tells us the truth of what we’re watching for.

A sassily-precise and balletically violent small ensemble, highlighted by Moreno as writer-director-lead villain, Stephanie Wortel as a longsuffering paparazzi-shy Sleeping Beauty and Benjamin Gooch as a bar-crawling Prince Smarmy, play out the central tale of a broken-homed Red Riding Hood, an at-risk clubland runaway Alice and a mass-murdering misogynist Wolf that taps the dysfunctional-family phobias of Black Forest fables and backwoods gore-porn alike.

Sacrificial fantasies are our staged escape from the predators in our midst — it’s fashionable to note that story never dies, but all we ever wanted was to survive the people in the stories, from primal lore of lives lost along the hard slog of history to scandal-sheet and true-crime tabloid testaments of those who weren’t as lucky as we are who we’d like to think weren’t as smart.

When Red Riding Hood as avenging Woodsman-trained warrior chick squares off in a final murder-slapstick smackdown with the Wolf, she’s making light of our greatest fears and killing for our sins.

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An asymmetric fugue of control and mania has been Hope Cartelli’s mission as an actor, and she well imparts peaks and valleys of frenzy and ennui across the landscape of “Jeannine’s Abortion”’s cast as director (from a script by Eric Bland).

The dramatis personae of post-young Brooklynites start off in run-on rough-draft autobiographies and monologues of impassioned trivia (Daniel Kublick’s early speech on mini cereal boxes ranks with Illeana Douglas’ penis-claw solo from “Search and Destroy” among the all-time great revealingly meaningless jags), and dips of contended desperation (like Jeff Lewonczyk’s depressive cocktail-party discourse, which has me using phrases like “post-young”).

The characters are calling to each other from different worlds — be it the wavering orbits of committed relationships, one friend’s flight to China or another’s impending abortion proceeding from one of the liaisons none of the others know she has — and Cartelli’s good ear and antic eye keep all the separate planets spinning well.

For knowing cosmopolitans (all but Jeannine — played by Siobhan Doherty — named after the actor in the role), everyone else is more than vaguely nervous abut the title event — but the real stillbirth at issue is the lives they think they’ve missed. Jeannine’s choice does seem to act as a pivot in those lives, with all the rest nudged into a decision that resets their fate — fractious Morgan and Emily confronting what drives them crazy about each other and realizing they prefer it; Daniel and Lindsay (Carter, in a performance of lifegiving, scattered intensity) choosing settled marriage (and some impulsive overseas charity work, but hey).

The only ones who don’t change much are Jeff, who leaves for parts unknown, keeping true to his solitude, and Jeannine, who closes the play with a soliloquy on the fairweather mind and the constant, self-determined body that relies mostly on iffy similes from literature and pop culture and leaves the character mostly hidden behind her concrete decisions. Many parts of her will remain unknown too, which are places no one has to go, since in the end, she is really all she needs. And that, like individual choice, is still not exactly a crime.

Warning: This post tells you everything that happens in the movie it reviews, and I wouldn’t want you to actually have to see it, so read on:

What is it with young couples being terrorized by demons and mutants? It’s like post-feminist Hollywood has only progressed as far as no longer showing every sexually-active starlet getting her Puritan comeuppance by werewolf or slasher, and instead visiting misery on attached twentysomethings, as if following some strange dysfunctional focus-group data on how the divorced majority of America wants to see monogamy portrayed.

Anyway, that’s the basic purpose of “Splice,” a kind of “Paramedic Activity” about two young scientists precipitously creating a new lifeform for an icky corporation, after which offend-the-gods gore-carnage ensues. I guess they named it “Splice” instead in the hopes that this piecea’ crap will at least get one of those obscure editing awards that scrolls across the screen at subliminal speed during eight seconds of the Oscars.

The genetically-engineered tyke becomes a surrogate, though secret, child figure to the transgressive junior eggheads, and the movie turns into some kind of strange horror-parable about 4 a.m. feedings (though, yes, in the flick’s tourette’s-like reference-check of every sci-fi suck-fest ever made, someone does actually shout “It’s Alive!” at one point).

The kid matures rapidly, thus crushing all hopes of finding some genetic cure for co-star Adrien Brody’s inability to age past 16. The girl can’t talk but can arrange Scrabble tiles like in those chimp-intelligence experiments where the apes learned to type; also like the chimps, the Foster-Kid of Frankenstein is capable of cognitive mischief, as when she spells out “N-E-R-D” to describe her surrogate mom.

Miming the desperation of the derivative and uninspired screenwriters, the mom-scientist sees the tiles upside-down and decides to name the kid “Dren,” which was Joanie’s nickname for Potsie Weber when she sent him secret crush-notes on “Happy Days,” the show that put “jump the shark” in our vocabulary to begin with.

The little freak matures into womanhood and seems to turn into Sinead, though the real model is poor, thankless Thandie Newton in the B-movie version of “Beloved”; never since then has a hapless unknown had so much nudity still show through such bad Halloween prostheses and been so egged on to sink her fangs into the scenery.

Dren’s got the cells of several species in her, which enables her to sting cats to death with her scorpion-tail, sprout goldfish-fins that she can for some reason fly with, etc.; Mrs. Scientist also put some of her own genes in there so Adrien gets attracted to the kid as his own wife gets more remote; there ensues a rapid succession of incest, mother-daughter torture-porn (a detour into “Bad Seed” mad-sploitation ’cuz the unstable woman scientist’s own mom had — eeek! — mental illness, eww), and rape, when Dren turns male (for no discernible reason but that someone watched the right five minutes of “Jurassic Park”) and ensures his/her/its survival by impregnating Mommy Einstein (just to put the “post” back in “post-feminist”).

I said “rapid” but it sure didn’t seem that way. I think even the editing award may not be a done deal. Suffice it to say it ain’t cool, dude. It Ain’t Cool at all.

Spent Saturday at the annual East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (ECBACC), a Philly con focused on black creators and narratives. Great personal-scale atmosphere (big enough to generate excitement, small enough to actually spend time with fans ’n’ idols), basement-empire enthusiasm from the indie-comics creators and vendors, sense of serious business and honest artistry from the high-expertise, low-ego panelists, and range of reasons for many ages to be there (I took a lot of notes from helpful pros and saw more kids at the con in one day than I see in comic shops in a year).

Three of the self-published comics especially stood out. Glibly invoking a Gødland grounded more in Jim Starlin than Jack Kirby is the closest I can come to preparing you for Genecy, the saga of techno-barbarians and cosmic deities from InVision Comics, but it’s its own strange strain of theoretical-physics folklore. A pre-Superman Eddy Barrows brings blockbuster visuals, colorists Tim Ogul and Oren Kramek tell an emotional epic with their well-paced cosmic fires and eerie offworld nocturnes, and Gerald Cooper’s script is full of well-considered variations on space-opera state-of-the-art — an almighty spirit who’s really an unwilling refugee and kind of self-aware radio echo trapped on our side of the ragnarok-like big bang that put an end to his kind; a warrior who easily fights off the skeletons who come to life off the floor of an abandoned temple but then almost succumbs to soldiers who spring to three dimensions from figures marked into the wall, on the implication that the former were base physical matter but the latter, as essentially creatures of language, are masters of strategy. There are a few B-movie malapropisms along the way, but they flow forward on the supernova of exuberance; the transmission isn’t entirely filled in yet, but Cooper is translating the captions and dialogue of the spheres.

InVision: http://www.facebook.com/people/InVision-Comics/100000520003375

RavenHammer Comics’ The Harlem Shadow had me at “Action-Soul-Mystery,” a pointed pastiche of the old Spirit-section tagline, but held me with a stylish and atmospheric noir drama about the mythic crimefighting that was going on uptown from all the masked adventurers who made it into the segregated headlines. Artist Rodolfo Buscaglia channels a skillful continuum of period-appropriate golden-age page-composition and canon-worthy Frank Miller-era aesthetic techniques, and writer Brian Williams hits the best keys of both heroic righteousness and pulp humor. This book stems from Lucius Hammer, the anchor series of a well-thought-out black-hero universe that Williams and artist Christian Colbert are developing as a kind of century-wide counterpart to the solidly postmodern setup and cast of Milestone Media.

Williams’ introductory story of Lucius Hammer, the presumed son of John Henry, creates a definitive superman figure who is literally semi-immortal within the story but metaphorically keeps young by incarnating each stage of America’s aspirational story about itself, from tall tales to wartime to the heyday of national and costumed superpower to the reality-surfing videogame present. Artist and character-designer Colbert is a major new talent, bringing this all to life with page-leaping energy and cinematic composition sense, in a good-natured yet muscular animation style that takes a place in its own pantheon of the best comics’ substance and charm, from C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel to Bruce Timm and beyond. Williams’ imagination in plotting and ear for natural character interaction are compelling as shown in individual scenes, and will suit this book even better when he gets down to telling a single story (as he does with The Harlem Shadow’s well-paced origin) rather than summarizing a century as seen in Lucius Hammer’s compact first issue. The caliber is so high that I didn’t even notice at first *how* compact – there are 10 pages of story in each book, and at five bucks a copy there’s one characteristic of classic publishing that should be emulated along with its archetypes. But at any length these guys have already got the secret to leaving me wanting more.

RavenHammer: http://www.slbdesign.com/rh/

ECBACC: http://ecbacc.com/wordpress/