Script review site ScriptShadow compared two versions of Mute, which Jones wrote with Mike Johnson. The first script, written in 2006, is actually set in modern day Berlin. It's only in the more recent version, set in 2046, that we get the futuristic film noir. But ScriptShadow reviewer Carson Reeves says the differences in the two versions are likely aesthetic, as the overall story remains largely the same despite the futuristic setting. Spoilers below.

We've known for some time that Mute focuses on a bartender who has lost the ability to speak and gets caught up in the Berlin underworld when his female partner goes missing. The entire script is available here, but Mute tells two parallel stories. One is about Leo, the titular mute, who falls for his fellow waiter, an Afghan woman named Naadirah. One day, Leo is unable to find Naadirah, and tears through Berlin's gangsters to find her, though he eventually learns that she is harboring a shocking secret. The other story focuses on Cactus Bill, an American stuck in Berlin who is waiting on fake passports for his wife and daughter so he can get out of dodge. Reeves notes that while Leo's story is all action, no talk (at least not from Leo), the Cactus Bill scenes are extremely verbose; Cactus Bill does little more than talk and wait around for passports.

At the moment, Mute is on hold while Jones takes on Source Code. But Reeves believes that, even with a few bumps in the script, Mute will at least look incredible, if it ever gets made.

[ScriptShadow]

Let's get the familiar names out of the way first, shall we? Marvel have the first issue of Ultimate Comics: Armor Wars, which places Planetary and Transmetropolitan writer Warren Ellis in charge of Iron Man again, freed of too many continuity woes and watches what happens. Also out of continuity, Spider-Man Noir reimagines Peter Parker in 1920s New York, while the in-continuity (and non-Sam Jackson-esque) Nick Fury realizes the futility of existence in Secret Warriors Volume 1: Nick Fury, Agent of Nothing. Less existential pondering and more ass-kicking can be found in Hulk: Planet Skaar and Hercules: Prince of Power, both of which explain the finer points of "smashing," I believe.

Smashing may help the political state of the Romulan empire, which is somewhat shaky in IDW's Star Trek Romulans: Schism, while Dynamite add their voice to the licensed choir with what may turn out to be the surprise of the week: The first issue of Galactica 1980, resurrecting (and promising to improve) Lorne Greene's far-from-finest hour as the original Battlestar Galactica finds Earth in the middle of disco.

DC Comics have a couple of interesting collections to consider this week: Showcase Presents Warlord Vol. 1 reprints the beginnings of DC's premiere sword and sorcery comic - with some great art by Mike Grell - while Tom Strong Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 does the same for the first year of Alan Moore's retro "science hero" series which lurches from semi-parody to sincere tribute to stories gone by, with amazing art by people like Chris Sprouse, Art Adams and Dave Gibbons.

If you're looking for more Gibbons, this is definitely your week; he pops up (again working with his Watchmen collaborator Moore) alongside many other creators in the enjoyable The Spirit Archives: The New Adventures hardcover collection of a short-lived 1990s attempt to revive Will Eisner's classic character, but the motherlode for Gibbons fans - or Frank Miller fans, for that matter - is the deluxe collection The Life and Times of Martha Washington In the 21st Century, which brings together all of Miller and Gibbons' alternate future political satire, from Give Me Liberty all the way to last year's The Death of Martha Washington. Individual, powerful and weirdly compelling, it'd be the book of the week, if it wasn't for two other Dark Horse releases.
Those would be Beasts of Burden, a new series by Space Ghost (and Milk & Cheese) writer Evan Dorkin and artist Jill Thompson about the pet protectors of a particularly supernatural neighborhood (Look here for a sample of what to expect and fall in love), and Super Spy creator Matt Kindt's new graphic novel, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man, which takes a serious and beautiful look at the old cliche of the man who was as tall as a building. Both are highly recommended.

Whether you're looking to buy all of Dark Horse's impressive slate this week or something else, the Diamond Shipping List can help you decide what you should be spending money on, and the Comic Shop Locator Service will make sure you know where to spend it. Just remember to pick up something new and unusual this week; it's a good week to go outside your norm.

Along with Karl Kerschl, of the previously mentioned The Abominable Charles Christopher, Cameron Stewart is part of Transmission X, a small collective of enormously talented professional comics artists who are trying their hand (with great success, I might add) at webcomics. Stewart has, among other things, provided artwork for Catwoman, Grant Morrison's Seaguy, the Eisner-nominated Vietnam series The Other Side, and the high-energy, post-apocalyptic punk rock book The Apocalipstix.

In Sin Titulo (or simply, Untitled), Stewart puts on his writer hat as well, telling the story of Alex Mackay, an emotional dysfunctional young fellow about to spiral down the rabbit hole. Alex has been having a strange recurring dream, one in which he sees a dead, gnarled tree on a beach. Sometimes he sees someone on the beach, but the image is never clear, and he always wakes before he can see who it is.

He gives little thought to the dream until one day when he goes to visit his grandfather in the retirement home, only to discover that he's been dead a month. And, when he goes through his grandfather's effects, he discovers a recent photograph of his grandfather with an attractive young woman, a woman Alex has never seen before. When he asks the retirement staff about the picture, however, their strange and terse reactions make him suspect that something sinister is at work. As he begins to investigate the woman in the picture and Wesley, the retirement home's menacing orderly, Alex is quickly drawn into a series of ever-deepening mysteries involving coma patients, murder, teleportation, and the mysterious tree, and finds his life, liberty, and girlfriend all placed in jeopardy.

Stewart is well-versed in the language of comics, and Sin Titulo is at its very least a prime example of expert visual scripting. Each episode is set in a rigid eight-panel structure that neatly conveys the suspense and noir tone of the series, and that Stewart can so easily convey small emotional shifts through his thick black lines makes it fantastically jarring when a character displays genuinely intense emotion.

Sin Titulo is far grittier than most webcomics currently running, and when violence occurs, it's not the stylized violence of many comics, but very real, very present violence. Characters get beat up, get in car accidents, and when they do, their bones break and blood gets everywhere. When a punch becomes a frightening thing, characters who throw them become all the more terrifying, as with the squat, muscular orderly — even before we get the sense there may be something supernatural to him. This sense of realism pervades the comic; cubicles, diners, hospital rooms are all stark and unfriendly, but utterly familiar.

But what makes reading Sin Titulo an intriguing and unnerving experience is the way Stewart, borrow a page from the likes of David Lynch, juxtaposes this realism with the fantastical. On panel, we see plenty of punches thrown, but off-panel, we learn that characters have been ripped to shreds. Alex's vivid childhood memories are haunted by a monstrous apparition, and he begins to encounter surreal visuals: a network of cinderblock rooms where the blond woman speaks over a monitor and an old telephone, and a beach front dinner setting , where a blindfolded waiter serves up an unappetizing crustacean. And then there's the fact that Alex isn't the only one visiting the beach and seeing the mysterious dead tree.

Sin Titulo is not a comic for those who like quick and satisfying answers to their mysteries. Just as Alex's head has stopped spinning from the latest series of unexplained developments, a new wrinkle emerges. But for those willing to sit back and watch the story unfold and the protagonist unravel, it's a well-paced and often unsettling read.

[Sin Titulo]

Sandman Slim follows the adventures of Jimmy, aka Stark, aka Sandman Slim, who was dragged down to Hell as a cocky teenager and somehow survived for eleven years, before busting out. The only person he cared about is dead, and he's out for revenge — and he doesn't really care what he has to break to get it. Along the way, he gets dragged deeper and deeper into the politics of the L.A. magic scene, the ongoing feud between Hell's generals, the schemes of angels, Homeland Security, and the decadent plans of L.A.'s filthy rich magic users.

As someone who's read every novel by Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Richard Stark/Donald Westlake and Ross McDonald at least once, I found the frothiness and nihilism of the novel instantly appealing. Here's one especially Spillane-esque section, from towards the end of the book:

There's only one problem with L.A.

It exists.

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will...

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance camersa and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

In another section, Stark visits a house full of rich magician assholes and scenesters, and describes them using timeless phrases like "They shit cancer."

Another crucial ingredient in the noir formula, a massive cast of corrupt day-players, each with his/her own agenda and hypocrisies, also manifests pretty well in the book. It takes place in a universe that will seem familiar to anyone who's watched Supernatural or read any of a dozen other dark urban fantasy novels set in a vaguely Judeo-Christian universe. Angels are dicks, demons are pretty nasty, and the world is full of monsters of various stripes — including humans, who are usually just out for their own gain.

But Kadrey also laces his novel's set-up with a fair amount of wish-fulfillment: Besides having survived a long stint in Hell and returned to talk about it, Stark is also almost impossible to kill thanks to a Nietzschean "whatever doesn't kill me" type thing. Early on in the book, he gets shot multiple times, and the bullets only cause him a bit of discomfort. He's got a magic knife that can cut anything and start any car, and a magic key that can transport him anywhere, including Heaven or Hell. And a Veritas, a kind of magic eight-ball that answers questions truthfully, but snarkily. Oh, and he knows special Hell magic that nobody else on Earth knows. So he gets to have the perfect heroic combination — he's miserable and filled with self-loathing and bitterness, but he also has a toychest full of awesomeness that most people would kill their extended family for.

In other words, it's the perfect escapist storyline — for some reason, escapism actually works better with a permanently grim and/or depressed hero. Just look at Batman.

Oh, the other thing about Sandman Slim is that it's frequently side-splittingly funny. Stark has sworn to kill all of the people who sent him to Hell and had a hand in killing his girlfriend. But the first co-conspirator he catches up with is Kasabian, who was sort of a pathetic lapdog back then and has now been consigned to running a video store in a crappy neighborhood. Kasabian shoots Stark, who decapitates him in turn. But Kasabian doesn't die (magic knife, remember) and Kasabian's disembodied head sits on a shelf for much of the rest of the novel, commenting on the action and begging for cigarettes. The whole book is like that — gruesome slapstick mixed with down-and-dirty Hammett-esque mayhem and double-dealing.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of a slightly darker, cleverer version of Monster by A. Lee Martinez, the last book about a semi-human monster who defends the world from other monsters that I read. Where Sandman Slim has a jump on Monster is in its hero, who is both more tormented and more sympathetic than Monster's sad-sack protagonist.

Sandman Slim's main drawback is its plot, which doesn't bear much examination — about halfway, or maybe two thirds of the way, through the book, the exposition starts getting thicker and thicker, and various characters pop up to explain stuff, and then other characters jump in to explain those explanations. Soon enough, the simple tale of a horrendously scarred bastard who crawled out of Hell to kill a bunch of people who deserved it gets more and more muddled with a lot of other stuff. It sort of overpowers the fun revenge rampage you've been primed for since the start of the book — but the good news is, there's still plenty of death, destruction and despair to go around, and the book's final big action set pieces are a lot of fun. It's easy to see why people were talking about it at Comic Con.

All in all, Sandman Slim brings a pleasingly loathesome L.A. vibe to its tale of Hell's inmate's progress. As you'd hope for a novel in the "urban fantasy" genre, the city itself is one of the novel's main characters, teeming with crack dealers and Brad Pitt lookalikes and neo-Nazis — oh, and angels and demons and assorted other nasties. If you've been hoping someone would bring the full-strength SoCal toxic waste to the urban fantasy game, then Sandman Slim is your poison.

Allegedly, this book actually came out in June or July, even though my review copy says August. Which is why we only just got around to reviewing it. Anyway, it's out now: [Amazon]

This concept art shows Patrick Tatopoulos' vision for his noir film, based on the comic book by Kevin Grevioux. I like the idea, let's see if they can pull it off without getting too dark or hokey — it's a fine line between The Spirit and Sin City with monsters.

Click on the pictures to see the full images at their respective pages.
[AICN, Bloody Disgusting, IESB, Shock Till You Drop]

Recently re-released by Golden Gryphon Press as a trade paperback, Budayeen Nights is a vivid collection of nine tales set in the futuristic Middle Eastern city Effinger created for the Marîd Audran novels he penned from 1987 to 1991. Marîd is hands down one of my favorite science fiction anti-heroes, but more on that brain-blazed bastard later. Richard K. Morgan's writing often captures a similar noir sensibility, but his gritty underworlds can't quite match the Budayeen. Effinger really put the Punk in Cyberpunk. Virtual realities and mirrorshades are swell, but you only get a fully realized urban hellhole from a writer who's really lived one.

The Budayeen is a neighborhood in an unnamed city somewhere in the Levant of the 23rd Century CE. This is a future where the nations of the West and the Far East have torn themselves apart into myriad tiny squabbling fiefdoms leaving the Muslim world supreme. Thronging with thieves, prostitutes, lunatics and hustlers of every stripe, the Budayeen is a thinly disguised version of New Orleans' French Quarter, and some of it's seedier denizens who Effinger knew and loved. The residents of the Budayeen are the cast-off or disaffected from across the globe. Whether a member of the Transgender Continuum, an artist desperate for a muse, or just dedicated to an extralegal career path; they all find an uneasy oasis amidst the stringent demands of Islamic culture. There are no mosques in this anything-for a-buck neighborhood, but plenty of bars and graveyards that never lack for custom, "Business is business, and action is action", is the oft-repeated mantra here. In a swirl of drugs, crime, and decadence, people can live as they choose - but probably not as long as they'd like.

Along with his cultural twist to the film-noir setting, Effinger had a unique take on computer/brain interfaces that makes these stories stand out from (and age better than) the many offerings of the Cyberpunk style of the 1980's. Virtually every aspect of life in this dystopia is affected by the ubiquitous chip-in brain augmentations. Barbara Hambly describes the origin in her introduction to the story "Marîd Changes His Mind":

The technology itself, [George] said, had been designed for treatment of neurological damage. But like all technology, it was immediately seized upon and exploited by the entertainment and pornography industries so that its original intent was almost forgotten.

With an add-on or "daddy" plugged into the back of your skull, you temporarily can possess any knowledge. Need to speak perfect English or Bantu for that big meeting, repair a sewage treatment plant, or bone up on Transoxanian tax codes? No problem. There are even special daddies that turn off your body's need to eat or sleep. The more comphensive "moddys" go in the anterior implant plug at the top of your head. With one of these you can suddenly be a fearless super-soldier or plow through hours of filing and data entry without becoming bored. Total personality moddies transform you into your favorite fictional character. No surprise that the porno moddy industry is enormous. Recordings of superstar Honey Pílar have been voraciously enjoyed by over five billion fans. Moddy addiction begs the question: are these people even whole individuals anymore, or just frameworks for elaborate scripts to run on?

I was glad of the inclusion of Effinger's Hugo, Nebula, and Seiun winning "Schrödinger's Kitten," even though this opening story in Budayeen Nights stands apart from the rest of the collection in tone and setting. It portrays a Muslim woman's very personal relationship with quantum mechanics, faith, and history. If her fate is truly fixed by the will of Allah, what does that mean to He who is All-Wise and All-Knowing? Although still brutally violent, this odd and compact little story will open the mind to interesting thoughts.

The most of other stories deal more with Marîd Audran and the Tilt-a-Whirl filled with broken glass that is his world. Marîd starts out a small-time street punk with delusions of adequacy, a pill-popping coward and pansexual libertine. Vain and cocky, he thinks of himself as a rugged individualist and unwilling Defender of the Downtrodden. He's constantly thrust into situations of ever-increasing responsibility and danger by Friedlander Bey, who rules the Budayeen by that whole iron fist/velvet glove method. The two-hundred year old crime lord Bey is both an avuncular mentor and unforgiving master. He effortlessly justifies his vast empire of influence and finance with the teachings of the Prophet, may Allah's blessing be upon him and peace. Bey does not suffer Marîd's moral lapses lightly, and takes pains to enlighten him.

Against all his better instincts, Marîd must become - if not a hero, then less of a screw-up. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest reading Marîd's exploits in the three kick-ass novels When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss. Look for the recent trade paperbacks from Tor/Orbit with the covers by Howard Grossman and gorgeous illustrations by Craig Mullins.

Effinger's original dialouge really blows me away. The hard-boiled action crackles with language inspired by the noble Qur'an and the poetry of Omar Khayyam. The meticulous research of every detail Muslim culture weaves seamlessly with fully realized portraits from the mean streets. Tough-as-nails corrupt cops and transgender hookers conduct their business with all the formalized flourishes of Arabic ettiqute. Like Turkish coffee, it fills the atmosphere with a rich complexity and leaves you more than a little wired.

Two more Marîd Audran novels were planned and tantalizing fragments of both are in the Budayeen Nights collection. Of course, we can only wonder what might have been. George Alec Effinger died in his beloved New Orleans in 2002, impoverished after many years of painful health problems. In her forward and story introductions, Hambly, who was briefly married to Effinger, rather harshly describes some of the flaws and agonies that plagued a smart, decent and all too mortal man. He went to some very dark and strange places, and met a lots of interesting people there. These encounters fueled the creation of the Budayeen and the weird, dangerous and very human beings who still live and breath in these pages. Go ahead, they won't bite. Unless you pay for it.

Grey_Area is known among the robots as Christopher Hsiang. He means you no harm - he's just here for the books.

I'm pretty much a noir addict, especially the works of Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Stark and MacDonald. (I also loved Frank Miller's Sin City comics, back in the day.) There's tons of science fiction noir out there, but it's rare for an SF book to hit my noir sweet spot quite as well as Hammond's first two novels, KOP and Ex-KOP. Hammond avoids any hint of pastiche or satire in his tale of over-the-hill bruiser Juno Mozambe. And he never makes Mozambe remotely loveable or even cool. Mozambe's just as revolting and broken as the world he inhabits.

That's the world of Lagarto, an Earth colony that's gotten royally screwed over by the rest of the human race. It's sort of a New Orleans-esque place, mixed with some third-world country. Lagarto's brandy-making industry collapsed years ago, taking the planet's economy with it, and now all that's left is tourism and vice, which usually turn out to be the same thing. Offworlders come to Lagarto and treat it like their own private playground, and all the locals are corrupt, from the slumdogs of Tenttown to the local money-skimming elites. In a neat metaphor for Lagarto's fuckedness, the steamy planet includes particularly aggressive flies that lay their eggs inside of an open wound within seconds. Any time people get injured, or even nicked, they'll have maggots breeding inside their wounds in no time. There's also something called "the rot" that can eat you alive if you're not careful.

When we first Mozambe, he's a bag-man for the police department, going around collecting protection money from brothels, smack dealers and gambling parlors. He kids himself that he, and the corrupt squad he works with, are helping to keep the city safe by working with organized crime and preventing the city's criminals from running amuck. But Mozambe's just kidding himself, plus the nice stable crime organization he's used to working with is on its way out, and nothing but chaos and worsening corruption are coming in its place. Good honest poppy farming and ass peddling are giving way to snuff films and human trafficking. Mozambe's a dinosaur, increasingly unable to throw his weight around the way he used to. By the second book, Mozambe is pretty much a punching bag for all the lowlifes he used to terrorize. (But it's not much of a spoiler to say Mozambe always comes out on top, mostly because he's still more vicious and cunning than everyone else.)

At times, you could almost kid yourself you're reading a regular noir detective story, because Lagarto is a low-tech backwater, where criminals and cops both use knives and fists a lot of the time. But Hammond uses science-fictional elements to add to the bleakness and paranoia, rather than just at random. The offworld visitors to Lagarto are perfect physical specimens, with lily white skin and chiseled physiques in contrast to the locals, who are all mixed-race and show their ages. The offworlders frequently have enhanced muscles, super-genitals and built-in defenses (like electrocution and poison claws) making them almost impossible to beat in a fair fight. Pretty much every offworlder we meet is a sadistic fuck, who toys with the locals for temporary amusement.

And there are other science fiction touches, as well. Like the holograms people use to communicate, which always wear an eerily happy face no matter how freaked out or pissed off the person's voice may be. And the occasional bits of surveillance technology that the hardscrabble cops manage to scare up.

The main glimmer of optimism in both novels comes from Maggie Orzo, a spoiled rich girl who becomes a police officer and tries to convince Mozambe to help clean up the sewer of the police department. She's young and idealistic, but you also never forget that she's almost as privileged and sheltered as those psychotic perfect offworlders.

Both KOP and Ex-KOP are super fast reads, with enough brutality and corruption to keep you riveted, while they still offer up the occasional glimmer of hope that Mozambe (and Lagarto) can be redeemed. You can probably read either book in one or two sittings. A warning, though: They're not especially well-written, and KOP in particular has some super clunky exposition. At his absolute worst, Hammond doesn't just tell instead of showing. He tells, and then he tells using slightly different words, and then he comes back a page or two later and tells again a couple more times. At his best, his writing is pulpy and cheesetastic, as in this scene, where a kinky pornstar is trying to seduce Mozambe (unsuccessfully):

"Ooh, is it interrogation time?" Liz turned on her "Liz Lagarto: Porn Star" persona. "I don't know anything about any of that, offither." She little-girl lisped the word officer...

I felt weak as I took in her parted lips, her jasmine-smelling hair, her erect nipples... "I said stop it." The words came out limp, as another part of me was becoming anything but.

Really, the writing is no worse than a hundred other detective novels. I used to consume crime fiction like popcorn, and I've encountered far worse prose. The saving grace of KOP and Ex-KOP are the unrepentant nastiness of Mozambe - even when he's trying to be a better person, he expresses it by being a foul bastard - and the slow spectacle of this lifelong asskicker becoming the world's hacky sack. Plus the unrelentingly cruel worldbuilding that goes into Lagarto, which is dystopian and unrelentingly horrible, and almost beyond saving. Supposedly, Hammond is working on a third Mozambe book, and I'm totally on board. [Amazon]

Commenters on Amazon often decry the sexual content in Morgan's future-noir books. But Morgan says sexuality is a key part of the noir recipe, and you can't leave it out or noir won't even make sense. And he's struck by the fact that so much of science fiction is full of repressed sexuality, that's front and center but never acknowledged. Says Morgan:

I do get comments on it, especially from American readers... Readers will say, "Oh, I really do like these books, but I don't like the way Morgan had to go off into semi-porn. That's not how I get my jollies." My response to that is always, "Oh right, so you get your jollies from watching your characters blow each other's heads off with high explosive rounds, or punch each other into a bloody pulp. That's you get off, but you don't get off on somebody having oral sex."...

And by and large, leaving aside the science fictional effects and exotic drugs and such, the sex that I write is the sex that I've had. I'm not trying to go overboard, but the sex is mostly based on my own experience with various interesting technological and chemical upgrades, if you like.

The whole interview is well worth listening to. It's over here. [StarShipSofa]

Lim created these images with fellow artist John Liem. The style is especially apt for Watchmen, which already comes with a noir tone, but it's fun to see what he does with Transformers, Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight:

[Timothy Lim on Deviant Art via Slash Film]

Gotham City cannot be saved — or gentrified

The biggest movie of the year, The Dark Knight, is about the impossibility of saving cities. Heath Ledger's Joker aims to prove that all of the upright well-behaved citizens of Gotham are maniacs waiting to happen. As he says at one point, they'll eat each other the moment the chips are down. But really, they're only a ready-made mob because they're in such close quarters. When they're not jammed into trains, hospitals, crumbling buildings and public squares, they're crammed into barges trying to evacuate. So much for sustainable development.

Before The Dark Knight came out, Warner Bros. issued a direct-to-DVD animated prequel called Gotham Knight, which included one story about a man who wants to clean up the slummiest slum in Gotham, the East End, and he starts by putting in a golf course. You can see the crumbling tenements in the background as Bruce and the other rich dudes play golf. But we learn that this would-be "urban renewer" has a shady reputation, and he's involved in organized crime.

Batman is almost always ambivalent about gentrification in the comics. Gotham City is always getting destroyed and reduced to Dresden-esque rubble, and Bruce Wayne rebuilds it again and again, just as miserable as before. (Most notably in 2000's massive "No Man's Land" storyline.) In "Watchtower," a future-Gotham story by regular Bat-writer Chuck Dixon (and drawn by Judge Dredd artist Mike McMahon) a corporation turns a whole section of Gotham into its own super-safe gated community, complete with private cops in super-armor, and Batman ends up deciding the whole thing is corrupt and bringing it down.

In the miniseries "Run Riddler Run" by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger, someone wants to tear down the slums and put up fancy condos. Bruce Wayne almost invests in this scheme, because he's in favor of anything that makes Gotham safer. But as Batman he sympathizes with the downtrodden. He's torn, but never actually has to make a choice, because the people behind the real estate deal turn out to be bad guys and he has to break them into little pieces, dooming their real estate venture in the process. I asked Jones why Batman would be anti-gentrification, and he says:

Mark Badger and I always saw Batman as not just an opponent of street crime but also as sympathetic to the little people who are exploited by the big people. Like poor people being displaced by rich people. I never liked the one-note obsessive take on Batman's personality, wanting to see him as a real human being who had a fierce preoccupation with street crime but could consider other issues too... Most writers at the time were interested in nuancing Batman terms of personal psychology, but I was getting really bored with that. His mission to fight criminals was a political and communal act too — So who is this Bruce/Batman as a social being?

In Peter Milligan's story "Dark Knight, Dark City," we actually learn that Gotham itself is built on the site of a demonic ritual by apostate Puritans. As a result, the city's very foundations are cursed, and no matter what you do, Gotham will always be horrendous. The city is a character in many Batman stories, but it's not a friendly one — it's more like a member of Batman's rogue's gallery.

Living in a world Frank Miller made.

You can't really talk about the vision of Gotham City as a brutal, cursed monster without paying tribute to Frank Miller's role in reshaping Batman's surroundings in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, much as he made Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen slum much more hellish. Those superhero works were training wheels compared to Sin City, where everybody's corrupt and violence really is the answer to every situation (except for those rare occasions where the answer is sex instead.) There aren't good guys and bad guys, there are just assholes and monsters. Miller has justly earned a reputation as the master of ultraviolent comic-booky noir.

Even though The Spirit is based on a Will Eisner comic that doesn't feature an especially scary cityscape, it looks as though Miller's film will be just as pulpy and noir as Sin City, with a bit more of a science fiction twist, judging from the first trailer and other early publicity. As the first teaser says, the city screams, and she's female. She's the Spirit's mother and his lover, but that incestuous double-bind probably is not the real reason she's screaming. I'm guessing it has more to do with the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson's fur coat-wearing supervillain, and various other scumbags.

In the world of noir, buildings are old and crumbling, and close together. Noir cities are full of alleyways and dark corners, crumbling docks and destroyed warehouses.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station.) And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag. (I won't even go into the vogue of post-apocalyptic New York movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield, which we've discussed at great length elsewhere.)

Miller's noir imagery has become so much a part of the fabric of genre entertainment that people reach for it as a shorthand when they want to seem edgy or dark. A new web series called Dead End City is using Sin City-esque visuals (via greenscreen) to try and lend some credibility to a silly storyline about zombies. And Sin City's Rosario Dawson is starring in a new NBC.com webseries, Gemini Division, which takes place in a Blade Runner-inspired dark future city where a conspiracy is creating genetically engineered terrorists. Even the usually cheery Star Wars is gearing up to go noir. We've seen a few ugly urban areas in the prequel trilogy, including the underbelly of the Jedi city of Coruscant. Apparently the new live-action Wars show way more of the seedy, dirty world in that faraway galaxy from our distant past.

Noir is the enemy of urban planners.

So what does it mean that we're being bombarded with visions of screaming cities on the verge of an election pitting an African American from Chicago against a Caucasian from Arizona?

It would be tempting to say the persistence of noir imagery benefits conservatives, who tend to identify themselves more with rural areas and suburbs and paint the cities as the source of social decay, welfare spending and crime. But the truth is more complicated than that. After all, the noir city is a place of blatant social inequality, where the strong prey on the weak, and the rich exploit the poor. It's not just full of criminals, it's jam-packed with victims as well. In fact, the old-school noir storyline has much to offer both progressives and conservatives.

The real downside to the vision of the monster city is that as oil becomes more expensive, exurban sprawl gets less and less sustainable. With the huge numbers of people living in greater urban areas in the U.S. now, it makes more sense to build more densely. But the persistence of Miller-esque dystopias makes more tightly packed city living seem a less attractive proposition. Move into a mixed-use retail/residential zone, with pedestrian access and electric trolleys, and you'll be gutted by a scar-faced maniac who smells like baby poo. It doesn't quite work as a brochure.

And meanwhile, the reality is that crime in the U.S., including urban crime, has declined steadily over the past decade and a half. The inspiration for Gotham City, New York, has had such a sharp decline in its crime rate that New York Magazine ran a package in January called "Post-Crime New York." (The magazine concluded we're not quite there yet.)

It would take a whole separate blog post to discuss the reasons for the declining urban crime rate, but let's just say cleaner, safer, more affluent cities make for less interesting backdrops for super-violent crime and monster stories. (Shockingly.) At their root, these are escapist stories, after all, and it's more fun to identify with a hero who jumps off a dark rooftop into an ocean of blight than one who roams a happy well-lit sidewalk.

What would a narrative about superheroes look like if it took place in a relatively safe, friendly urban environment? Or bounced between a safe urban environment and various suburban and rural areas?

One word: Heroes. With the possible exception of a few sequences in New Orleans, the NBC super-mutant show has never shown cities as dangerous or gritty places. We spend lots of time in New York in the first two seasons of the show, and it's always a perfectly nice place to hang out, no more dangerous or disturbing than Odessa, Texas or the other small towns we spend time in. The threats, in Heroes, come from shadowy conspiracies. And the danger is that the city will be destroyed, not that it will destroy anyone.

But it's hard to imagine the Heroes version of urban heroism becoming as influential as Miller's. Even though it's definitely a major escapist thrill to imagine living in lofts and townhouses as nice as most of the Heroes cast seem to inhabit.

The "anti-hero" comes to science fiction from a variety of sources, including noir and Westerns... but she also has her own uniquely science fictional avatars, that spring out of science fiction's tradition of skepticism and social criticism. The anti-hero is where science fiction's pulpy roots meet its most intellectual aspirations. Plus, he/she totally rocks on ice.

Noir:

My favorite noir hero is Dashiell Hammett's nameless Continental Op, who spends more time orchestrating convenient murders than he does investigating crimes. In the novel Red Harvest, the Op arrives in a town called Poisonville which is run by organized crime, and he systematically tricks the town's ruling gangsters into killing each other, first a few at a time and eventually in a full-on massacre. By the end, he's one of the few people left standing. In noir, nobody's morally pure.

The classic science fiction noir movie is Blade Runner, featuring Harrison Ford's hardboiled and conflicted cop, who's hunting the Replicants without being sure if he's doing the right thing. And of course Blade Runner is based on a Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and a lot of Dick's best work has a particularly noir flavor of pulpiness. Dick's protagonists are never sure if they're doing the right thing, and often are just out for themselves. That could be one reason why Dick is the author of choice for movie adaptations — his work is very close to a genre that movie people understand.

Another great science fiction noir author is Richard K. Morgan (no clue if the middle initial "K" is a requirement), whose first novel Altered Carbon is like a fusion of Chandler with Doctorow's Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom: hard-as-nails gumshoe Takeshi Lev Kovacs dies in a shootout, and then is restored from a backup and "resleeved" in a new body so he can investigate the murder of a rich guy (who's also been restored and "resleeved.") And then Kovacs promptly sleeps with the rich guy's wife.

And then of course, there's always Jim diGriz, hero of the Stainless Steel Rat novels, who starts out as an amoral trickster — before eventually devolving into a bit of a pussycat. And there's Gully Foyle, dubious hero of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. (And Alfred Bester becomes the name of a morally gray psy-corps agent on Babylon 5, who becomes more of a sympathetic anti-hero in Gregory Keyes' novels.)

Westerns:

The archetypal Western anti-hero is out for himself, and only incidentally ends up helping others. Often, he (and it's usually a "he," except for Sharon Stone in Sam Raimi's underrated The Quick And The Dead) is only a "good guy" in comparison to the really really shitty bad guys. Think Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name from the spaghetti westerns. Cowboy-influenced anti-heroes in science fiction are usually pretty easy to spot: Han Solo in Star Wars and Mal in Firefly have everything except the Ennio Morricone whistle/trumpet score playing in the background.

I'm also going to peg Vin Diesel's Riddick from Pitch Black as a Western-style anti-hero — he's basically a convicted murderer being transported across the prairie in a wagon train, and then the wagons break down. Will he help save his captors, or let the elements and the hostile natives take care of them?

The Mad Scientist:

Unlike the noir and Western anti-heroes, the mad scientist has always belonged to science fiction, as far back as Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. As the name implies, the mad scientist doesn't always have the greatest grip on reality, unleashing forces he cannot blah blah blah. The mad scientist is often just a foil for the hero in space opera and action-adventure stories — but he's also a protagonist a surprising amount of the time.

On TV, Doctor Who features a mad-scientist archetype as the hero, and the early episodes of the series in the 1960s made a conscious effort to portray the Doctor as an anti-hero rather than a more uncomplicated good guy. Over time, the Doctor became purer and more motivated by compassion for other sentients, but he still gravitates back to the anti-hero side of the fence occasionally, most notably in the late 1980s.

Cyberpunk:

Cyberpunk obviously borrowed a lot of themes and styles from noir, but also brought in its own flavor of anti-authoritarianism. The e-zine Computer Underground Digest debated, in 1991, just how anti-heroic the cyberpunk hero actually is. Brad Hicks wrote:

A cyberpunk is to hackers/phreaks/crackers/crashers what a terrorist is to a serial killer; someone who insists that their crimes are in the public interest and for the common good, a computerized "freedom fighter" if you will.

In the works of Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and others, cyberpunks are not terrorists in the conventional sense of the term, and the analogy to serial killers strikes me as a bit extreme. Cyberpunks are characterized by their resistance to oppressive authority (which makes them a form of freedom fighter), but the resistance tends to be highly individualistic. I wonder if cyberpunks might be based on the anti-hero model of westerns (Shane) or earlier science fiction in which the marginal but basically decent outsider steps in to use marginal skills to save the town, country, or civilization?

The rationalist skeptic, who critiques everyone else's ideals and delusions, is an outgrowth of the mad scientist, and usually has some scientific knowledge. But he's also a nihilistic superhero, who questions human-made belief structures. Avon from Blake's 7 is a bit of a mad scientist and a noir gun for hire, but he's also something else — a foil for rebel leader Blake's idealism who grows into a self-hating amoral hero in his own right. Avon serves as a role model for Horza, the bitter mercenary in Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel. The shape-shifting Horza tricks a shipfull of pirates into helping him track down a lost Culture Mind in the middle of a warzone. He's willing to make deals with his worst enemies and double-cross his friends, if the job requires it.