Klaus (Written by Grant Morrison, Illustrated by Dan Mora)



Nothing like reading a Christmas story in the middle of Summer, eh?

Klaus consists of one seven-issue miniseries then four one-off issues that published once a year around Christmas. Klaus: How Santa Claus Began is a charming little story of a hunter returning to his home town after a long exile and finding it until the iron grip of a tyrant and taking it upon himself to do something about it. And we know by now that a running theme in Morrison's books along with metanarrative is the idea of the Dreamtime and how we need our dreams to truly live. Santa Claus is a fitting playground for Morrison because toys aren't supposed to just be trinkets to be "acquired" for a quick high then left to rot or worse, smashed for a hollow laugh, they're a gateway to our imagination and by extension our very souls. Of course it wouldn't be a Grant Morrison story without some bonkers shit going on, so yeah, throw some extra-dimensional aliens in there as well.

And what's not to love about a version of Santa whose sleigh is pulled not by reindeer, but giant wolves.

The one-off issues feel like superhero comics in Christmas gift wrap as Klaus has random adventures involving Christmas icons from around the world like Grandfather Frost and the Yule-Goat. It seems like Morrison planned some kind of Christmas-themed Justice League that never came to fruition, and since the last issue published in 2019 I wonder if this is another thing that got kicked in the head by covid. "Klaus and the Witch of Winter" is alright but gets really ham-fisted about global warming, as does "Christmas in Xmasville" with the commercialization of Christmas. The best one is "Klaus and the Crying Snowman" in which the villains of Ragnarok are actually space aliens who were just passing through to refuel their ship when the Norseman attacked them (again, wouldn't be Grant Morrison without something completely insane), which lacks the preachiness of the first two and shows us how being able to forgive yourself is just as important as being able to forgive others. "The Life and Times of Joe Christmas" is an interesting experiment, being told in reverse order and with no dialogue and makes for a warm, quiet note for the series to go out on.

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The Umbrella Academy (Written by Gerard Way, Illustrated by Gabriel Ba)



This is what I was talking about during my quickie on Way's Doom Patrol. When you're aware of Way's fanboyism for Grant Morrison you can see Doom Patrol's influence all over The Umbrella Academy, mainly in how it switches between Mad Lib absurdity and nightmare fuel, but the book is very much Way's thing.

A major theme through the books is family and how important love is to our humanity. In Apocalypse Suite, Vanya is constantly rejected and put down by her family due to her lack of powers, so when she finds out she does have powers her thoughts instantly turn to revenge. And while it's hard to excuse her actions, it's also hard to blame her. Dallas has the Umbrella Academy trying to put things back together after Apocalypse Suite and Number 5 struggling with his long stay in a post-apocalyptic future and induction into the Temps Aeternalis turning him into a heartless killing machine. And Hotel Oblivion kicks off when one of the villains imprisoned within the titular hotel, a prison in a pocket dimension that might as well be Hell, in an attempt to give his infant son an actual life.

Hotel Oblivion feels a little... off. It's not bad but has way more going on than Apocalypse Suite and Dallas and ends in an obvious setup for more adventures with the Umbrella Academy that, far as I know, have yet to surface. Hotel Oblivion released almost a decade after Dallas so it feels like Way, unsure of when or even if he'd be able to do more with the series, dumped everything he'd been planning into one volume while still leaving an opening for more stories if the chance comes around.

If you poke around the site long enough you might notice that I don't "get" dark humor. It could be my lack of a Y chromosome, but seeing somebody who didn't do anything wrong get the shit beat out of them usually just bums me out. I bring this up because, somehow, I found Hazel and Cha-Cha kind of amusing. I chalk it up to Ba's surrealist style keeping them from getting too disturbing.

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Batman: Arkham Asylum (360, T)



Of course I played this to see how it compares to the graphic novel, but hey, it's a damn fine game in its own right. It was interesting to see what parts were brought over: the inmates taking over the asylum, the scarab symbol, even Amadeus Arkham's cell where he carved the spell is featured. But the graphic novel was a slow exploration of Batman's psyche and Rocksteady figured most people weren't buying a Batman game to play Eternal Darkness, so the action is brought to the forefront with the psychological mindfuck aspect relegated to the Scarecrow sections.

I'm fifteen years late to the party and everyone else already knows about Batman: Arkham Asylum, so I can't add much more than my own personal anecdotes to the discussion. I was surprisingly competent at the stealth sections (i.e. I'm surprised I was able to complete them at all), but I could never seem to get the hang of ground-level hand-to-hand combat. Maybe it's just more of my WoW-rotted hand-eye coordination. I had an easier time when I found the game is more forgiving of you vaulting over enemies than counterattacking them (the downside is the vault doesn't maintain your combo counter), but man, it's hard to feel like the Dark Knight when you're flipping around the room like a monkey on speedball.

Also, I have to make a few quibbles about the upgrade system but take everything I say with a grain of salt because maybe it's just more of me being a dumbass. On a first playthrough it's hard to tell what upgrades are going to be useful going forward. I bought a couple because they sounded cool, like being able to single out explosive gel sprays, but could never figure out how to use them. Oh, I figured out how to activate them, but couldn't figure out how to work them into combat situations. I also fucked up big time because one of the upgrades allows you to throw an enemy when you get a combo of 8, but because I was so shit at the combat I had a hard time getting that high so I kept passing that one up. But that upgrade eventually leads to the ability to do instant takedowns after 5 hits which I could get up to no problem and would have saved me a lot of headaches in the late game. Again, chalk this one up to me being an idiot, but maybe the game could have shown those upgrades while still locking them behind the previous levels.

Besides, the single best upgrade in the game is the inverted takedown and if I ever replay this game it's the first one I'd buy. It's so overpowered that the hardest part of the game for me was when you revisit that giant room in Intensive Treatment where the Riddler first contacts you, but the gargoyles now have bombs on them so you can't use them. I wound up hiding in the vent you enter the room through, waiting for a lone thug to turn his back to it, gliding behind him and doing a stealth takedown, then quickly retreating back into the vent to wait until the thugs dispersed and I could repeat on another one.

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