“Rectify” Is a Quiet Marvel

> Daniel was convicted of a brutal but ambiguous crime. Now that he’s out of prison, everyone wants clarity. Credit Illustration by Tomer Hanuka In the first episode of “Rectify,” Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released from death row, and he gives a speech to journalists and protesters gathered outside the prison. Rather than assert his innocence or talk about justice, he offers a zigzagging meditation on the nature of fatalism. “I had convinced myself that kind of optimism served no useful purpose in the world where I existed,” he explains, in an underwater monotone, as the protesters look on, baffled. “Obviously, this radical belief system was flawed and was, ironically, a kind of fantasy itself.” Humbly, as if ending a philosophy seminar, he concludes, “I will seriously need to reconsider my world view.” For three years, “Rectify” has been a small marvel, an eccentric independent drama, filmed in Griffin, Georgia, and airing off the beaten track as well, on Sundance. With its skewed insights into carceral cruelty, “Rectify” took the slot that “The Wire” used to occupy: it’s the smart crime drama whose fans have trouble persuading others to watch, because it sounds too grimâ€"or maybe too good for you. It’s a frustrating dynamic that has haunted other dramas without cowboys or zombiesâ€"“The Leftovers” and “The Americans” come to mindâ€"but “Rectify” ’s reputation for difficulty is misleading. The show’s dreamy pace makes it a satisfying high, like a bourbon-soaked bob down a river on a humid day. It’s a show about the way that time gets distorted; it’s one that distorts time, too. As with many structurally daring series, it’s joyful, because its insides match its outsides. It’s also, more straightforwardly, a gothic mystery about small-town secrets. When Daniel was in his late teens, he was convicted of the rape and murder of his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Hanna. He served nineteen years, most of them in solitary confinement. The crime itself was a foggy, ambiguous incident that involved psychedelic drugs; two boys testified against him, and, under pressure, Daniel confessed. DNA cleared him of the rape but not of the murder, so plenty of localsâ€"and, at times, Daniel himselfâ€"suspect that he did it, because he was found cradling Hanna’s naked corpse, which he’d decorated with flowers. But Daniel’s younger sister, Amantha (Abigail Spencer), never lost faith in his innocence, and she’s been sleeping with the liberal Jewish lawyer she lobbied to work on his behalfâ€"the big-city Reuben to her Norma Rae. Everyone involved wants clarity, now that Amantha’s faith has paid off. No one gets it. The murder case is reopened and leads down alarming paths. Few people want to face the uglier facts, including the knowledge that Daniel was raped in prison, multiple times. While he was on death row, his father died and his mother remarried, so he has two new stepbrothers, Ted, Jr., and Jared, who is still in his teens. In some ways, Daniel is himself an adolescent, prone to self-indulgent, self-destructive whims. In isolated Paulie, Georgia, he’s a distinctly odd figure, a socially awkward autodidact who meditated and read obsessively in his cell. He speaks in an off-kilter, whispery style, making even sympathetic neighbors uncomfortable. His mannered intellectualism marks him as an outsider, queer in several senses, as much as any suspicions of criminal guilt do. The one person who truly gets him is Ted, Jr.,’s wife, Tawney, a sweet born-again Christian who is desperate to save Daniel, and with whom he develops a dangerous chemistry. Their flirtation takes place, however, largely through elevated conversation about Thomas Aquinas and Buddha, forgiveness and humility. And, in fact, a lot of the pleasure of the show is in the dialogue, which favors the stuff that Daniel jokes is not “gallows humor” but “lethal-injection humorâ€"it’s more humane but less funny.” “It felt good to use the telephone that wasn’t smarter than me,” Daniel tells his sister, about a pay phone. His companion on a road trip tells him, “Everything that happens between men and women is written in mud. And butter. And barbecue sauce. Paula Deen said that to me in a dream I had one time.” Ted, Jr.,’s boozy koan: “First you hate it. Then you like it. It’s called beer.” While the talk takes its time, the plot moves fast. The first season covers six days in six episodes, and climaxes in two crimes, one committed by Daniel, one against him; by the fourth and final season, currently airing, only a few months have passed. Several of the best episodes are one-offs, featuring characters we never meet again. In one, Daniel drifts into the orbit of an antique dealer named Lezlie, a Pan-like anarchist, who invites anyone who is not a gentrifying yuppieâ€"the class he regards as ruining Paulieâ€"to party at his ramshackle house. In another, Daniel gets a ride from a stranger and steals some goats. There’s a strong sense in “Rectify” that, when your memory has been rendered spongy and your safety shattered, each event might last forever or be gone in a flash. Perhaps the standout episode is “Donald the Normal,” from Season 2. In it, Daniel finally leaves town. He takes a bus to Atlanta, then puts on nice clothes and goes to a museum to see a beautiful painting that he knows only from a book. Throughout “Rectify,” the claustrophobically close-knit Paulieâ€"where the local waitress sleeps with both Daniel and the politician who framed him, and where Hanna’s brother glares at Daniel’s family in the supermarketâ€"is portrayed as near-enchanted in its isolation. Any mention of a larger Southern city (even from the former Atlantan Amantha, who has a liberal hipster’s condescension for her home town) makes it sound as distant as Mars. At the museum, Daniel is approached by an attractive older woman, played by Frances Fisher. “What do you think?” she asks. “I think I’ve looked at this painting in a book for so long that somehow my brain has trivialized it,” he says. “And as I stand here in front of the real thing I feel, if anything . . . disappointed.” She’s charmed by the alien quality that others find so creepyâ€"his formal speech, his lack of boundaries. She invites him to lunch with her book-club friends. These are sleek, rich city women. He tells them that his name is Donald and that he owns a bookstore in Alabama. This experiment in reinvention falls apart fast. Daniel has cuts on his forehead and cheeks, the remnants of a beating that put him in a coma. And, bright as he is, he can’t improvise a life he never had. He finds himself faking a conversation about a book he hasn’t read, something with a “pitiful” protagonist. “This bread, um, is excellent,” he says, trying to change the subject. “The panini bread?” one of the women asks. “Yes, um, the pallini bread,” he responds. “It’s . . . unusually fresh.” It’s a heartbreaking slip, a class error that locks him out of a whole world. The book-club women get into a conversation about a story that Daniel >has read, Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” and which he’s memorized. His lunch companion can’t believe it: “It would be torture to memorize.” No, he explains: it was a calming task, back during “a period in my life when I was having some difficulty dealing with the passing of time in a traditional sense.” Because Wolff’s story deals “with the bending of time,” memorizing it helped him bend time as well. References like this get at the show’s fearlessness in taking art seriously, not merely as a distraction but as a bridge between strangers, a way of reframing the world. Still, it would be an exercise in solipsism without the larger, more grounded ensemble, particularly Daniel’s opposite number, Ted, Jr., who becomes both his bully and his victim. As played by Clayne Crawford, Ted is a strutting, insecure shit-kicker, a high-school tough kid gone to seed. A salesman at the family car dealership, he’s the yuppie type Lezlie disdains, or, at least, he aspires to be: he and Tawney share a McMansion decorated in pastels. When the bank won’t give him a loan for a sketchy scheme involving leasing auto rims to black customers, he mortgages the house, despite Tawney’s resistance. When things fall apart, he gets scary. In another story, Ted might be a cartoon villain: the abusive husband who, at one point, confesses to something so close to date rape that it’s a distinction without a difference. (Crimes on “Rectify” are like that: violence so ordinary that no one reports itâ€"and, when someone does, the justice system makes it worse.) But the show sees Ted’s side, too. Like Daniel, he is a man humiliated by loss of control, with few coping skills when he’s been abandoned. In “Rectify,” anyone who feels something for others, however painful, must be redeemable. In the final season, Tawney and Ted, Jr., go to therapy, heading toward divorce. Daniel, who has been legally “banished” to Nashville, lives at a halfway house and gets an artist girlfriend. The crime is on the verge of being solved. If “Rectify” has a flaw, it’s one that so many humane shows develop in their final stretchâ€"a Tawney-like desire to save everyone, simply because these are characters we’ve loved for years. In one scene, Amantha, recognizing that an old enemy is helping solve the mystery of Hanna’s murder, asks, “Is there anyone left to hate?” Daniel wryly refers to himself as Humpty-Dumpty, but he’s often more like Kimmy Schmidt: he’s strange not because his capacity for wonder has been shut down but because it’s almost too open. As the finale approaches, it’s not the show’s problem that I’ve found myself wanting some ugly to stay ugly. Perhaps I will seriously need to reconsider my world view. >♦ "

| “Rectify” | Quiet | Marvel |

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BATMAN & MARVEL Rule Surprisingly Down NOVEMBER 2016 Comic Book Sales

By Michael Doran December 9, 2016 07:34am ET

Credit: DC Comics

The Dark Knight ruled the top of the comic book sales chart and Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" once again has them on top of the market share categories, but despite having five sales weeks compared to 2015's four, November sales were down against last year, but it still looks like 2016 will eek out a narrow gain over 2015 when December's sales are tallied. 

Credit: DC Comics

According to sales figures released by Diamond Comic Distributors Friday morning, Bane's return helped Batman #10 and #11 top the November comic book sales charts, in a top 10 also featuring All-Star Batman #4 (4) and Batman Annual #1 (7). Marvel's Civil War II #7 (3) was there bestselling title. 

Credit: Cliff Chiang (Image Comics)

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's Paper Girls Volume 2 from Image Comics was November's best-selling graphic novel. 

Despite DC dominating the top of the comic book chart and perhaps aided by six entries in the graphic novel top 10, Marvel is once again the market hate leaders after ceding the position to DC for a few months during the initial months of "Rebirth."

Their 38.08% dollar share and 39.46% unit share easily topped DC's 26.17% dollar share and 31.30% unit share. 

But despite the advantage of having an extra week, November sales lagged behind sales one year ago by 4.25%. Graphic novel sales were up versus last year a robust 21.56%, but a 12.71% deficit in comic book sales wound up pulling the month into negative territory.

November 2015 featured the strong debuts of DC’s Dark Knight III: The Master Race #1 and Marvel’s Star Wars: Vader Down #1 (over 820k copies between them) so while surprising, it may simply be a matter of circumstance and not a trend.

But you can always find more insight at our friends at Comichron. 

Year-to-date 2016 still leads 2015 by 1.82% in overall sales, so it still looks like the year will likely finish up for the sixth consecutive year.

The November 2016 Market Share, Comparative Sales Data, and New Titles Shipped charts, along with Top 10 Comic Books and Top 10 Graphic Novels charts follow below.

TOP COMIC BOOK PUBLISHERS

RETAIL MARKET SHARE PUBLISHER SHARE MARVEL COMICS 38.08% DC ENTERTAINMENT 26.17% IMAGE COMICS 8.99% IDW PUBLISHING 5.23% DARK HORSE COMICS 3.65% BOOM! STUDIOS 1.98% TITAN COMICS 1.61% VIZ MEDIA 1.52% DYNAMITE ENTERTAINMENT 1.40% ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS 1.01% OTHER NON-TOP 10 10.38%

UNIT MARKET SHARE PUBLISHER SHARE MARVEL COMICS 39.46% DC ENTERTAINMENT 31.30% IMAGE COMICS 9.06% IDW PUBLISHING 4.59% DARK HORSE COMICS 2.85% BOOM! STUDIOS 1.66% TITAN COMICS 1.30% DYNAMITE ENTERTAINMENT 1.23% VALIANT ENTERTAINMENT LLC 1.15% ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS 1.06% OTHER NON-TOP 10 6.34%

COMPARATIVE SALES STATISTICS

	DOLLARS	UNITS
NOVEMBER 2016 VS. OCTOBER 2016
COMICS	-10.33%	-13.26%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	19.48%	18.91%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	-2.72%	-11.35%
TOYS	28.48%	53.60%
NOVEMBER 2016 VS. NOVEMBER 2015
COMICS	-12.71%	-6.09%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	21.56%	25.78%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	-4.25%	-4.15%
TOYS	-9.53%	-12.99%
YEAR-TO-DATE 2016 VS. YEAR-TO-DATE 2015
COMICS	1.85%	1.97%
GRAPHIC NOVELS	1.74%	0.77%
TOTAL COMICS/GN	1.82%	1.87%
TOYS	-5.60%	-8.56%

NEW TITLES SHIPPED

PUBLISHER	COMICS SHIPPED	GRAPHIC NOVELS SHIPPED	MAGAZINES SHIPPED	TOTAL SHIPPED
MARVEL COMICS	88	44	0	132
DC ENTERTAINMENT	84	35	0	119
IDW PUBLISHING	46	25	0	71
IMAGE COMICS	50	9	1	60
DARK HORSE COMICS	28	26	0	54
VIZ MEDIA	0	45	0	45
TITAN COMICS	23	18	2	43
BOOM ENTERTAINMENT	23	8	0	31
DYNAMITE ENTERTAINMENT	25	5	0	30
ARCHIE COMIC PUBLICATIONS	15	4	0	19
OTHER NON-TOP 10	136	217	30	383

TOP 10 COMIC BOOKS

RANK	DESCRIPTION	PRICE	VENDOR
1	BATMAN #10	$2.99	DC
2	BATMAN #11	$2.99	DC
3	CIVIL WAR II #7	$4.99	MAR
4	ALL STAR BATMAN #4	$4.99	DC
5	INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1	$3.99	MAR
6	AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: RENEW YOUR VOWS #1	$4.99	MAR
7	BATMAN ANNUAL #1	$4.99	DC
8	VENOM #1	$3.99	MAR
9	THE WALKING DEAD #160 (MR)	$2.99	IMA
10	IVX #0	$4.99	MAR

TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS & TRADE PAPERBACKS

RANK	DESCRIPTION	PRICE	VENDOR
1	PAPER GIRLS VOLUME 2 TP	$12.99	IMA
2	MARVEL: THE HIP-HOP COVERS VOLUME 1 HC	$34.99	MAR
3	DC SUPER HERO GIRLS VOL. 2: HITS AND MYTHS TP	$9.99	DC
4	STAR WARS: DARTH VADER VOL. 4: END OF GAMES TP	$19.99	MAR
5	UNBELIEVABLE GWENPOOL VOL. 1: BELIEVE IT TP	$16.99	MAR
6	SANDMAN OVERTURE TP (MR)	$19.99	DC
7	DC UNIVERSE: REBIRTH DELUXE EDITION HC	$17.99	DC
8	VISION VOL. 2: LITTLE BETTER THAN BEAST TP	$17.99	MAR
9	MOON KNIGHT VOLUME 1: LUNATIC TP	$15.99	MAR
10	DEADPOOL V. GAMBIT: V IS FOR VS TP	$16.99	MAR

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