The Wackness
Directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Olivia Thirlby
Rated R
Release date: July 3, 2008

Like its protagonist, The Wackness is inelegant but likeable; get past the clumsy posturing and he/it even manages to be affecting. Despite its strange title and nostalgic packaging, The Wackness is a fairly simple coming-of-age tale made worthwhile by its well-written, superbly acted leads.

Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is spending his last summer before college selling pot and pining after fetching, popular Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). He’s also attending regular counseling sessions with his kooky client-turned-shrink Squires (Sir Ben Kingsley), who happens to be Stephanie’s stepfather and has some woes of his own. The two men bond, of course, and loving, learning, and moderate hilarity ensue.

Gunplay
Created & Written by Jorge Vega
Pencils by Dominic Vivona
Colors by Nei Ruffino
Letters by Shawn de Pasquale
Penny Dreadful Written by Priest
Penny Dreadful Illustrations by Kevin Mellon
Platinum Studios
Cover price: $14.99; Available now

Jorge Vega‘s Gunplay suffers most from the limitations of stuffing an epic plot into a slim trade paperback. The 2007 Platinum Studios’ Comic Book Challenge centers around a Civil War buffalo soldier whose curse compels him to kill one person every day of his life, a concept with enough dramatic potential to fill a series ten times this long.

Much of the story is told not through panels and speech bubbles, but in alternating chapters of a penny dreadful-style prose piece. Priest’s descriptive, sometimes ostentatious, writing and Kevin Mellon‘s dynamic sketches make a respectable attempt at anchoring the tale’s heart and soul. However, stuffed as they are between the pages of a more traditional comic book, they feel less like a conscious stylistic choice and more like a way of squeezing in more story in fewer pages.

It’s probably the only time you’ll ever hear Nicolas Ghesquière and Stan Lee mentioned in the same breath: The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes the case for an unlikely but fruitful link between haute couture and comic books with the Costume Institute‘s new exhibit, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.

The exhibit, which opened on May 7, 2008, divides the Marvel and DC stables into eight “bodies” — The Graphic Body (Superman and Spider-Man), The Patriotic Body (Wonder Woman and Captain America), The Armored Body (Batman and Iron Man), etc. — with a selection of couture outfits and movie costumes representing each category. Visitors are invited to consider the official thesis that “[t]he fashionable body and the superhero body are [both] sites upon which we can project our fantasies,” and the most part the show builds a surprisingly convincing argument.

Ned the Chainsaw Guy #0
O:PhX – The Hangover of Doom
Written and Directed By Oren Kramek & Omer Goodovich
http://www.nedthechainsawguy.com
Cover price: N/A; Available now

Ages ago, Ned was the one to end the Demon-Titan war with his fabled Chainsword. Today, he’s a lazy freelancer with Fabio hair and an obscured face, sitting and waiting for a zombie invasion or similar to give him something to do. Oren Kramek and Omer Goodovich have good instincts — now, if only they’d learn to rein them in. The blend of epic mythology and tongue-in-cheek humor make Ned the Chainsaw Guy an appealing read, but the complicated backstory creates unnecessary work. Likewise, lush colors and well-drawn characters are easy on the eyes, but extra clutter and a confusing layout make it a chore to actually comprehend the action.

The Big Apple has always been better known for its unflappable cool than for any geeky tendencies. But last weekend, the city’s third annual Comic Con had geeks of all stripes crawling out of the woodwork to pack the Javits Center. Three days of intense, nonstop excitement have me thinking in superlatives, so here’s the Web’s most insightful summary of some of the weekend’s neatest highlights.