Selina's Big Score by Darwyn Cooke

There are lots of sequences made up of close-ups of faces in this book: sequences carried by little details changing from panel-to-panel - eyes shifting slightly, a poker face turning into a grin. It's a dangerous tack to take in a book like this - that is, a straightforward, almost classical action/adventure/crime story - and it takes a cartoonist as expressive as Cooke to pull it off. I think that Cooke's art is nice to look at, but it's his skill as a storyteller that makes him more than just a retro stylist.

What Cooke is trying to do here - weave Selina Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman into a Donald E. Westlake a.k.a. Richard Stark-style heist story - isn't completely successful. Cooke lacks Westlake's black comic sense of humor, which, in the Parker novels, manifests as a brutal slapstick and a razor-sharp ironic p.o.v. towards all flavors of self-delusion. Cooke also doesn't have Westlake's flair for clockwork precise plotting. Without those things, its easy for that kind of story to turn into an overly romantic take on the independent, self-sufficient outlaw, which is more-or-less what happens here. "Less" only in that (a) we have two outlaws and (b) they turn out to be not as self-sufficient as they'd like to think they are.

Not surprisingly, it's part (b) that is one of the major themes of the Catwoman series proper, but Cooke isn't able to do much more than hint at it here.

So the pleasures to be had here are mostly in Cooke's cartooning: in the great "acting" of the close-up sequences and the staging of the elaborate heist scenes.

As a possible spiritual sequel to this book, I'd like to see Cooke draw a properBatman vs. Parker story from a Westlake script. (And if Westlake won't do it get Steven Grant or Mike Baron).

Mini-Movie Chat: Payback: Straight Up

Payback: Straight Up

So, there's an interview with Donald Westlake on the DVD. It isn't a very well-produced feature, in that if you don't already know who Donald Westlake is or what the Parker novels are you won't be able to figure out what he's talking about. For instance, no one explains that Parker's name has been changed to "Porter" in the movie, so when Westlake starts talking about naming his character "Parker", if you've only watched the movie, you might be lost.

Anyway, he goes on to talk about the two most recent Parker novels: Nobody Runs Forever and Ask the Parrot. He said that Ask the Parrot was a real chore for him to write, that he felt "snakebit" by it, and that the book was "slow". I couldn't tell if he just meant it was slow to write or if he thinks it was a slow read as well. However, as far as this Parker fan is concerned, those two books (which really tell one extended Parker story) are among the best in the series.

As for the movie itself:

Definitely closer to the original novel. The humor is darker and more muted: there's none of that Shane Black-style wacky macho posturing that made the theatrical version feel more like a typical Mel Gibson vehicle. The interesting thing is that though I liked the theatrical version for the most part, I felt that Gibson was miscast as Parker. But in the director's cut, with the goofiness trimmed away, Gibson seems to fit the character just about perfectly. We tend to think of a movie performance as something an actor does and while I don't want to take anything away from the work Gibson did, the two versions of Payback really emphasize how much a given performance in a film can be shaped by the director an editor.