Alert: there may be spoilers herein.  Consider yourself warned.

In a rare (these days) bit of self indulgence, I took myself to see J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek yesterday.  Of all the recent films apparently aimed at the movie-going geek audience, this is the first I’ve managed to see and I wasn’t disappointed. Abrams did an outstanding job with the story while simultaneously thumbing his nose at Trek canon.  It was made very clear in the film’s dialogue that this was a new timeline, thanks to a raging Romulan visiting from the future and changing all sorts of things. Whatever happened before in the Trek we’ve known for all these years has been suddenly rendered irrelevant.  I had the delicious feeling of being unsettled through much of the film; I didn’t know what to expect (would Kirk gain command of Enterprise after all?) which made for a gripping story.

Of course I can’t help but wonder if there will be more from this writer with these actors. With the destruction of Vulcan the Federation could change in any number of ways, and the story possibilities seem endless: Old Spock will likely work to prevent the destruction of Romulus, creating a possible new time paradox (undoing the need for this film’s raging bad guy to begin his rage); Kirk might attempt to use time travel to prevent the untimely death of his father, and the now-emotional Spock might be convinced to join him to save his human mother and the whole of Vulcan; and how will the rest of the Federation evolve with the influence of Vulcan so greatly diminshed?  It feels as though Abrams — or someone — has a responsibility to write these stores, see how they would play out.

In its way the original Trek made for some of the most useful TV storytelling of its day by exploring social issues (race relations, war) from within in its science fiction context. This new Trek is a great adventure, but if anything it’s about inner treks as much as space treks. Young Spock embraces rather than spurns his emotions and copes with the loss of his people; Kirk deals with the bevy of issues that come from the murder of his dad. Yet these adjustments to their stories seems strikingly appropriate; the almost-universal theme among heroes in literature is that their past carries a deep, transformational loss. Of course, when the loss event occurs it can create a hero or a villain: the Romulan becomes a world destroyer; Spock and Kirk become world saviors.

Despite the near-equal screen time shared between Kirk and Spock, this is Spock’s story through and through. Like the best of classic Trek, the science fiction trappings of Spock’s alien birth allow viewers to explore our own humanity while Spock struggles to understand his. Now with the torch undeniably passed from first generation to current generation, I look forward to what might come next!

It’s been a whole week since Super Young Team came out, and who can wait for the sluggish split seconds of static review-page postings with proper graphics and ordered design? It’s blogging that’s less than five minutes ago, so here it will be. Anyway, the comic’s really called Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance, for those of you not loaded with the right subcutaneous secret information. It stars the J-Pop-influenced supergroup created by Grant Morrison, with perfectly-decrypted scripting by Joe Casey, a master reprocessor of information overload. ChrisCross’ graphics are a handheld blockbuster of comic history’s all-time faves and coming attractions. The Super Young Team are a new generation with a vague impulse for greatness and a conditioned appetite for anesthesia. The main crisis they face is whether they’ll figure out how to listen to their heroic urgings over the chatter of their media handlers. The team’s very names — Big Atomic Lantern Boy, Shy Crazy Lolita Canary, [more], [more] — signify an ever-aggregating matrix of colliding meanings; Casey’s splintered narrative structure is perfect for embracing many perspectives while keeping it all moving in a digestible direction. ChrisCross keeps up the optimal image-feed, with collage-like layout and an overlap of styles synched to the pop species of any given player, from the cartoony ad-graphic stars to the ben-day aura or samurai scratchiness of heroes past. Casey has an ear engineered ideally for the self-captioning dialogue of exhibitionist but introspective youth figuring themselves out as they go along, and he and ChrisCross together have a superior processing speed for the eternal essence and ephemeral incarnations of mythic heroism and humanity (check the hologrammic haunting from the Ultraman lookalike/archetypal upgrade). Our own Earth has hopes rising as old foundations melt down, with energies that could break out or be smothered, and technologies that could turn the tide either way. This book is a navigation tool for a new world and an unknowable mega-media landscape, evolving in real time and epic scale.

Method 1:

[Free Comic Book Day 2009/Avengers, by Brian Michael Bendis (script), Jim Cheung (pencils), Mark Morales (inks), John Rauch (colors) and VC's Cory Petit (letters)]

Take a fearsome villain from one stack of classic Marvel comics, a mystic weapon from another, mix in a buttload of superheroes and have them fight to get the weapon away from the villain while bantering in standup-comedy boilerplate like office workers trying to outdo each other the morning after the latest SNL YouTube clip, sucking the air out of each joke with endless call-and-response in progressively smaller word balloons.

Bendis has always been vocal in his view that he’s as committed to his company stuff as to his creator-owned, but books like this read like the work of someone who really doesn’t like standard superheroes and event comics and assigns his characters a running MST3K commentary for 24 long pages.

Bendis rightfully made his reputation as the master of dialogue; some carped that he wrote great dialogue and hardly any story, but his best work comes together from the human interactions which make up all experience; as in reality, the story takes care of itself. The differentiation of personalities was perfect in books like Ultimate Marvel Team-Up and the classic Alias, though in later books like Secret Invasion Bendis’ snappy exchanges had decayed to somewhere between an old episode of Dragnet and the stuff people bark into their cell phones on the way to meeting at a McDonald’s. When Bendis cell phones it in, the characters either lose all distinction from each other, or retain a nominal difference, giving a sense of what they’re like but not who they are, with their mannerisms being as superficial as their assorted powers and costumes.

As to that, Bendis understands that Spider-Man jokes obsessively, but errs in having the character (who narrates this whole issue) refer to being his “usual silly self”; too often here (and many other places as handled by Bendis) the character’s humor resembles not the anxiety of a scared hero trying to make a situation lighter than it is, but the desperation of comedy writers spitballing before getting down to script a weekly show. The crux of Spidey’s humor is in putting the least appropriate spin on serious matters in an attempt to make them seem less dangerous; Bendis hits the bull’s-eye beautifully in one exchange (Thor [knocked almost unconscious]: “He came back to the Earth with power this Thunder God could not best.” Spidey: “I’m sure you’re just being modest…”), and everywhere else just assigns Spidey the compulsive talking of a writer at pains to fill pages. And when not only Spider-Man talks like that but everyone talks like Spider-Man, no one is very funny very often. Or has much personality to speak of.

Method 2:

[Free Comic Book Day 2009/Wolverine: Origin of an X-Man, by Fred Van Lente (writer), Gurihiru (art) and Dave Sharpe (letters)]

Take a familiar Marvel hero and add visions readers would never expect to the concepts and situations they know so well. The wit and weight of Van Lente’s writing and the charm and bite of Gurihiru’s art always combine for all-ages comics that have something for everyone rather than pleasing the most people possible with the least substance necessary.

This story of Wolverine’s first mission is one of those continuity inserts that can tiresomely overstuff a character’s canon rather than adding to it, but Van Lente knows how to find the spaces in an established mythos that fit the logical landmarks in a hero’s progress and fill in information that you didn’t see coming but feel you should’ve known.

Logan is sent out on his trial run against a standard sci-fi zombified-town menace with an exceedingly original twist. It’s too clever to give away, but suffice it to say that it hinges on midcentury monster movies’ allegiance to psychology as a panacea and explanation for everything, which allows for tricky brain-science plot points under the surface and outlandish surreal set pieces — from OMAC Project-lookin’ robot assailants to a giant nanotech seahorse-demon (!) — on top of it. There’s no cognitive dissonance at all as intriguing characterization, village-of-the-damned dread, bizarre battleground slapstick and lots of shreddin’ coexist. Van Lente isn’t just playing in Stan Lee’s sandbox, but Joseph Campbell’s, and there’s plenty universes in those grains.