Yeah, yeah, I suck, you're tired of reading it.

But I spent most of today installing (much of) the hardware for our new POS system at Comix Experience, and getting the new DSL up and running at the store. Yes, after 18 years, Comix Experience is actually going to enter the 20th Century.

What's funny is tomorrow will be the first without-Jeff Friday in a loooong time, and Jeff was kind of complaining about not having internet at the store, and tomorrow will also be the first full day of having internet, so, huh. That's more ironic than rain on your wedding day...

I've also been spending a lot of time setting up a Secret Future Plan for the Savage Critic, and, while we're probably a month away from saying anything real, I think it's going to make the place rock. Hard.

So, like, I might be kinda quiet for the next month, because I'm putting like 80% of my brain into Getting POS online (and another 10% to the Secret Future Plan), but I definitely plan on doing at least one post from the store tomorrow, just because I can.

Honestly though, I hope to reward you for your patience (and I don't want Graeme to think he's alone out there, darn it!)

-B

Labels: POS, retailing

Click Here to Read More...

When I say that the best example of the current state of DC's superhero comics available this week is Marvel's NEW AVENGERS: ILLUMINATI #3, I hope you'll all understand that it's not really a compliment.

I know that Brad Meltzer and Brian Bendis are fans of each others' work - I remember reading an interview between the two where they were comparing notes on Justice League and Mighty Avengers with something approaching glee - but it's a really strange thing to read a comic that so clearly embodies the worst attributes of each of them. On the one hand, I almost want to congratulate Bendis on his incredible ability to write (or co-write; Brian Reed is responsible for some of this as well) a comic that's not so much a story as much as well-illustrated continuity porn fanfic without much of a plot just like Meltzer's current JLA run has been - It's certainly a different style for him if nothing else, as he normally works his fandom into a stronger framework that shelters it slightly. But on the other hand, Good Lord, what the hell is this book?

I have no idea how this saw print, unless it was literally just the "Well, they're all hot creators" thing - Not only is the entire plot of the issue somewhat weak (It's literally "The heroes go looking for the Beyonder. They find him. Then they leave, because he's convinced them that he's gone away... but he hasn't!"), not only is the issue based around an unnecessary retcon of a series and character over twenty years old - and, man, is that depressing to realize - but it's a retcon that doesn't really work, either: If (spoilers) the Beyonder is just a mutant Inhuman who somehow has the powers of a god, and if he remembers Black Bolt and is therefore on some level aware of his origins - as is what's suggested here - then why does he go through the whole "What is this thing you call 'life'?" thing during Secret Wars II? I mean, if he knows that he's not only not a god, but instead a living thing that - at some point - used to be a mortal himself, then why doesn't he have any grasp of that concept?

There's something almost admirable about the way that this issue, much more than either of the earlier issues, seeks to specifically address a subject that was neither a dangling plot point nor a question on any fans' lips, but instead just something that's clearly been bothering Bendis and/or Reed since they read the last time the Beyonder was given an origin and they didn't like it - It's the same (depressing, anal) drive that created things like The Official Handbook To The Marvel Universe in the first place, the urge for things not only to make sense, but to explain to everyone else just how they make sense so there, as well. But sadly, that and the art (which is good, but somehow lacking compared with earlier issues - Maybe it's just me?) are really the only two things that this issue has going for it; otherwise, it's just the continuity porn that DC's big books have been trafficking in for the last year or so with some extra novelty for coming from the other side of the tracks. Awful. Click Here to Read More...

I was explaining PERCY GLOOM to someone the other day, and the best I could come up with was that it was a philosophical story done by David Lynch and Walt Disney (but without the Nazi thing) in a beautiful, somewhat retro pencil style but with a depressed, disassociative voice similar to Chris Ware's stuff.

The person I was talking to looked as if I was insane, and then walked away wondering what I was on about. The last comic that they'd read was Mike Zeck's Punisher in the '80s, and I think they probably regretted asking what I was reading these days.

Nonetheless, Percy Gloom is a wonderful book, a fairy tale for grown-ups who've lost their faith in humanity and want to get it back. It's calm and gentle in the best way, without sacrificing narrative thrust - What little there is, admittedly, but it's there - but present in such a manner as to making it impossible not to fall for the main character or the book. The entire thing has a dreamlike quality, both in terms of the illogical logic and the old-fashioned, formally daring artwork, and the book itself works best on that level for me; I don't want to analyze it that far for fear of destroying my enjoyment of it, but suffice to say that it is an Excellent book and a leader in the recent spate of worthwhile graphic novels released (See also The Homeless Channel, also out this week, PLAIN Janes, out last week and the upcoming and still to be released The Black Diamond Detective Agency); those looking to spend pennies should have a problem deciding what to spend them on right now... Click Here to Read More...

Thanks to Dan Shahin to pointing this out to me:

You can even zoom in and see the comics on display in the window!

-B Click Here to Read More...

rassen frassen plague carrying children...

Been asleep most of the last 48 hours, that's why this is late.

REMEMBER: due to Memorial Day, comics are THURSDAY this week. DO NOT go to your Local Comics Shop on Wednesday, or they will laugh at you behind your back!

ACTION COMICS #850 (NOTE PRICE)
AMAZONS ATTACK #2 (OF 6)
ANITA BLAKE VAMPIRE HUNTER GUILTY PLEASURES HANDBOOK
BETTY #165
BLACK COAT OR GIVE ME DEATH #1 (OF 4)
BLUE BEETLE #15
BOYS #7 (RES)
CHUCKY MEDORS CVR A #2 (OF 5)
COUNTDOWN 48
CROSSING MIDNIGHT #7
CTHULHU TALES RISING ONE SHOT (O/A)
DAREDEVIL #97
DARK XENA #2
DEADMAN #10
DEATHBLOW #5
DRAWING FROM LIFE #1
FALLEN ANGEL IDW #16
FRESHMEN VOL 2 SCOTT BENEFIEL CVR A #4
GREEN LANTERN #20
HAWKGIRL #64
HELLBOY DARKNESS CALLS #2 (OF 6)
JSA CLASSIFIED #26
JUGHEAD AND FRIENDS DIGEST #20
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #6
KISS 4K #1
MAGICIAN APPRENTICE #7 (OF 12)
NEGATIVE BURN #11
NEW AVENGERS ILLUMINATI #3 (OF 5)
NEW EXCALIBUR #20
OKKO CYCLE OF WATER #3 (OF 4)
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #112
PUNISHER PRESENTS BARRACUDA MAX #4 (OF 5)
RAY HARRYHAUSEN PRESENTS WRATH OF THE TITANS #1 (OF 4)
REAR ENTRY #16 (A)
RIDE DIE VALKYRIE #1 (OF 3)
SHAOLIN COWBOY DARROW CVR A #7 (RES)
SILENT WAR #5 (OF 6)
SILVER SURFER REQUIEM #1 (OF 4)
SPAWN GODSLAYER #1
SPECIAL EDUCATION #3 (OF 4) (RES)
SPIDER-MAN FAIRY TALES #1
STAR TREK NEXT GENERATION THE SPACE BETWEEN #5 (OF 6)
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #17
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #44
TEEN TITANS #47
TEEN TITANS GO #43
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #42
USAGI YOJIMBO #103
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #681
WHEELA (A)
WHITE PICKET FENCES #1 (OF 3)
WITCHBLADE CHRIS BACHALO CVR A #106
WOLVERINE #54
X-23 TARGET X #6 (OF 6)

Books / Mags / Stuff
52 VOL 1 TP
AVENGERS NEXT REBIRTH TP
BLEACH VOL 19 TP
BOYS VOL 1 TP (RES)
CIVIL WAR COMPANION TP
DC COMICS COVERGIRLS PX HC
EC ARCHIVES SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES VOL 2 HC
ELVIS ROAD HC
FEAR AGENT VOL 2 MY WAR TP
FUN HOME TP
GIRLS VOL 4 TP
HOUSE GN
HOUSEWIVES AT PLAY FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS TP (A)
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT COULDNT GET WORSE SC
MARTIAN MANHUNTER 13 INCH DELUXE FIGURE
MARY SCARY HC
NEW X-MEN CHILDHOODS END VOL 4 TP
OUR GANG VOL 2 SC
PENNY ARCADE VOL 4 BIRDS ARE WEIRD TP
PREVIEWS VOL XVII #6 (NET)
PRISM COMICS LGBT GUIDE TO COMICS MAG 2007
PUNISHER MAX VOL 3 HC
SOULFIRE DYING OF THE LIGHT TP
THREE PARADOXES GN (RES)
ULTIMATE GALACTUS TRILOGY HC
WIZARD MAGAZINE WORLD WAR HULK CVR #189


What looks good to you?

-B Click Here to Read More...

I don't think that it's the greatest secret that I love the Legion of Super-Heroes. Besides Green Lantern, I think it's my favorite superhero high concept (As cool as "It's an army of teenaged super-heroes! In the future!" is, "He's a space cop with a magic wishing ring!" is very hard to beat, let's face it), and you pretty much have to have a heart of whimsiless stone not to find the original 1950s stories featuring the characters charming at the very least. My favorite era of the characters - because everyone who loves the Legion has their own era, I think, usually corresponding to when they first found the characters, just like everyone's favorite Doctor Who - is easily the last eight or nine years (!) of Paul Levitz's run on the books, from when Keith Giffen took over on art all the way through him coming back again, after Steve Lightle and Greg LaRoquette (with Mike DeCarlo's beautiful inks... Man...); it was a run that took the soap operatics - and some of the dialogue tics - of Claremont's best X-Men and soldered it onto Silver Age DC weirdness to come up with something uniquely fun and confusing and demanding your attention. From there, it was all downhill for me: every subsequent take on the team was interesting but ultimately not as interesting as what'd come before, whether it was Giffen's byzantine "Five Years Later" storyline or the post-Zero Hour reboot or Abnett and Lanning's revival after that. The stories all walked the fine line between nostalgia and wanting to seem updated and contemporary, and couldn't manage to do so and weave exciting stories into the mix as well.

All of which is one way of saying that the Mark Waid and Barry Kitson relaunch of the title a couple of years ago was both an exciting and depressing proposition. Depressing because, well, it's the second hard reboot of the concept in, what, ten years or so? And exciting because Mark Waid knows his stuff, and loves the concept as much as any fan; even if you're a tepid Kitson fan like me, at least the book would be readable. And it was; for the first year, it was an amazing book, one of the best superhero books that DC published. Seemingly informed by Joss Whedon both in terms of snarky dialogue and pacing (each issue containing a complete story in and of itself, while also moving a larger plot forward), Waid's revival succeeded where others had failed by jettisonning both plot nostalgia (Although he does love his easter eggs) and the need to be contemporary in a book that's meant to be set a thousand years from now. He found the easiest explanation for the quaint nature that's - I think - essential to the Legion working (that the Legion themselves are nostalgic fanboys in a way) and worked forward from there, and if you bought into that idea, the rest was all tightly-plotted and carried out with humor and tension. The first year of the book (as collected in the first two trades of the series, for those who haven't read them) is just Very Good superhero work.

And then the second year happened. And with it, 52.

Now, I have no proof that it was really 52 that derailed the book, but something clearly did, and Waid's involvement with the weekly book that took up everyone's time much more than they'd intended it to seems like a pretty guilty looking suspect. For whatever reason, though, the second year of the book - which, to cheat, really counts as #14 onwards - blew it. There was a wealth of good stuff, but it was unfocused and the tightness of plotting and pacing from earlier was missing. There were fill-ins on the writing and art side, and plots drifted in and out of the reader's attention in a way that suggested that similar drifts were happening for those responsible for the book. It was frustrating not just because I wanted the Legion to be better, but because it had just been better, just a few months earlier. When it was announced that Waid and Kitson were leaving the book with this month's issue, it was depressing but not surprising - You could almost sense that the fight's gone out of both of them, for whatever reason (A feeling helped by the fact that they missed the penultimate issue of their run, letting a big plot moment be handled by the fill-in team who're about to take the book over from them).

So.

SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #30, on its own, is actually pretty good; there are two swerves here that show that Waid is not only playful with his characters but inventively so, and also that he loves the history of them enough to tribute in unexpected ways (Did anyone really see what happened to Cos coming? Or, for that matter, did anyone think it was out of character that he accepted...?). Taken as a single issue, it's as much of a love letter to the series as you would've wanted Waid to end on; respectful of but not tied down by what has come before in the concept's, what, 50-year history. But, depressingly, it's kind of hard to take it entirely on its own - it is the final part of a multi-part storyline, and it fails in that respect - It feels like an epilogue, and that the main battle that was teased in the previous issue has all happened off-panel, which is somewhat disappointing but again, not incredibly surprising given the sway of the last year's books. Also, it rushes a couple of reveals to longrunning plots that really should've been given more space or else abandoned altogether, and in doing so kind of undercuts them entirely. The strongest feeling I had at the end of the issue was one of frustration - that Waid was leaving in the first place, that he hadn't stuck around a couple of more issues to let the story breathe a little more, and that the final issue of a run that started out so strongly was, ultimately, just Okay.

So it goes. Here's hoping that someone at DC really does give the book to Christopher Bird; if nothing else, I know that he's probably a bigger fan of Levitz's run than I am, so we'd have nostalgia to share. Click Here to Read More...

I'm desperately trying to catch up on reviews, after this weekend being much busier than I'd expected - Chopping up Jeff Lester's body takes time, after all - so excuse the rushing through the following books... Luckily, none of them are really worth paying that much time on...

BIRDS OF PREY #106: Gail Simone's heading towards the end of her run with something resembling abandon; this issue's essentially entirely all fight scene as opposed to plot development, and really enjoyable because of that - It's just banter and violence all the way. I'm not sure whether Gail's defined her characters (outside of Barbara and Huntress) enough for them to survive her when she leaves the book, but for this issue it's not something to worry about. Good mindless fun.

COUNTDOWN #49: Hibbs is right; three issues in, and it feels as if none of the plots are in motion yet - It doesn't help that the cover underlines that stalled feeling by featuring three characters, two of which haven't even appeared in the series yet. For all the talk of the writing team of the series having learned from head writer Paul Dini's TV experience, it seems to have been entirely missed that no TV show would get away with such a slow, sloppy start as this book. Crap.

FANTASTIC FOUR #546: After two issues of well-done build-up, this conclusion feels rushed and unbelievable, partially due to the McGuffin Machine that T'Challa just so happens to have lying around at home (It's just one step above "Luckily I have my Beats-All-Bad-Guys-Ometer right here!"); it's as if Dwayne McDuffie was suddenly told by his editors that he really had to wrap up everything he had planned and start working on getting the original team back together in time for the new creative team arriving in four issues' time or else. Both sad and Eh.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1: Obviously a delayed tie-in to the movie, this "Sandman: Year One" issue is surprisingly flat - The origin story is cliched in almost every way (He had a rough childhood! He's trying to prove himself to his absent father!), with no sparkle or surprise in the execution. There's also a strange back-up strip that's so simple that it makes me feel as if I'm missing a context for it... All in all, a somewhat disappointing Eh.

MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #1: All of the fun in this Okay first issue came from the small things - Tony Stark as Steve Jobs, for one thing - and not from the revised origin, which may make the whole thing make a little more sense, but still just comes over as extremely hokey. I wouldn't be surprised if this is more or less what the movie version of the character is like, though...

NEWUNIVERSAL #6: I'm not sure why I'm still reading this book - It's extremely slow, to the point where at the end of this issue (which will also be the end of the first trade), almost nothing has actually happened, in terms of actual plot - but there's still something enjoyable, if seen-before, about its "if superheroes were real" take on the characters. A low Okay, but I look forward to seeing something moving forward pretty soon.

SHE-HULK #18: "A tin-plated tyrant... who thinks he knows more... than everyone else. Remaking the world in his own image. You know who that is? That's not Iron Man, Tony! That's Doctor Doom!" It's almost worth reading the rest of this lackluster, Eh issue (with appalling art - Cliff Rathburn, your inking is really not a match for Rick Burchett's pencils) for those lines alone. Sadly, the rest of the book reads like filler while waiting for World War Hulk to arrive. Didn't this book used to be fun?

Tomorrow, if I have time: Mark Waid's last Legion issue, and why it's both great and sucky at the same time... Click Here to Read More...

Best laid plans, and all that -- forgot about CEO, forgot the POS computer was arriving, forgot that the order form better get done, forgot that... well, lots of stuff this week, darn it.

About a half hour here before Tzipora gets home with my Fast Pass, and I can go in (early!) to the store (Jeff's Last Day!) (FOO!), so bang some out quickly here:

SATAN'S SODOMY BABY: I don't really get it -- this is selling for $20 on eBay already? Apparently part of it is that the east coast got it before the west (Didn't retailers make it clear to Diamond this is Bad Juju? RE: CIVIL WAR #6); part of it is there apparently aren't any reorders available (oh, you wacky Dark Horse, who wouldn't know how to set a print run if it came with an instruction manual!); part of it seems to be that Diamond has decided to not distribute it into Canada, due to content.

But.... it's basically just an issue of THE GOON. Maybe I'm a jaded West Coast Liberal (you THINK?), but the content didn't seem THAT much rougher to me than THE GOON can get.

(even more curious was Diamond's [really?] decision to prebag all of the West Coast's copies before distributing. They don't even do that with the actual Adults-Only comics that have, y'know, penetration in them)

Reasonably funny, very well drawn, just a little over the top -- it's a solid, or perhaps high, OK all around. Just don't pay $20 for it!



CRIMINAL #6: If I have a "problem" with this one, it's that there's not a sympathetic character in sight, yet, in this arc. And yet such is the skill of Brube and Phillips that, actually, I don't care -- I'm enjoying the ride very much, thanks. VERY GOOD, and let's cheat in case I don't get all the way through, very clearly the PICK OF THE WEEK.


MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #1: Honestly, I don't care much for Iron Man in any universe, because, traditionally, Tony's tech has been kind of like Dr. Strange's magic -- it can and is redefined on the fly as needed by the dictates of the plot. The suit makes him such a complete badass, that you're generally reduced to either getting him OUT of it, or making the man have really bad problems (bad heart, alcoholism, creeping fascism, whatever)

I've largely given up on the "real" Iron Man (excepting say, HYPERVELOCITY, below), but there's still a small potential of interest for me in these kinds of "kid friendly" versions.

I don't think, if I was a kid, that I'd have liked this much, but at least they give a noble stab at making Iron Man's origin timelessly work by not having it tied to the Commies, or Desert Storm (Sheesh), but to AIM. Not that I think it *does* work -- largely because of the whole Tech = Magic thing, and you'd think that AIM (if they were to live up to their concept) would have "better magic", but it's a good try, and one I couldn't rate lower than EH.


ANT-MAN #8: Now that we're past the origin stuff, and the special guest stars, this here is the first issue that I think shows what this book will be, on its own -- and its actually pretty entertaining once you get past the absolutely loathsome protagonist. Not much of a surprise, but this is the most "Image-like" (Current Image, not Historical Image) book that Marvel is publishing, and for that, at least, this is a good experiment. The problem? It's also *selling* like an Image comic for us -- to people who still really want nothing other than capes and powers, but have "grown past" just Marvel and DC stuff. You'd think (perhaps) that there actually a lot of people in this boat, but nah, not really -- those people who don't develop a taste past the capes tend to stop reading comics rather than find this type of material. This is probably the first issue of this I have genuinely liked, but I don't see how it has the slightest chance of even making it to issue #16. Still: I thought it was a low GOOD.

SHADOWPACT #13: What a strange strange issue. First off, Scott Hampton draws it (buh?), second off, it basically has none of the book's cast in it, and third, it's mostly setting up month's worth of more stories. Why is that last one weird? Because this, too, sells pretty much like an Image book, and I can't imagine they'd get a third year from this (and I'm surprised they got a second, to be honest). Now, having said all that, I really liked it -- especially with the nice Hampton (!) art, and I'd probably recommend it if it didn't just come to an abrupt stop like: "whoops, out of pages, see you next month!" abrupt, which, as a $2.99 entertainment experience, knocks it right down to EH all by itself.


Right, OK, that should be enough today, eh? Time for work, and getting Jeff drunk enough that he crashes into a tree on the ride home tonight, thereby killing both of us, and avoiding me running the store without him! (Yes, I'm going to miss him, damn it!)

What did YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Because you kind of demanded it - Well, "Viewer" did, even if he's apparently part of BBC Canada and therefore may be biased! No comics! Just season (and series) finales of TV shows!

GILMORE GIRLS: I have to admit, I kind of stopped caring about halfway through the season, and kept watching mostly out of apathetic momentum. I found myself in love with this show thanks to a combination of ABC Family reruns of the entire series and being home sick one afternoon, so perhaps I was spoiled by the idea of daily episodes and wittier writing, but too much of this last season seemed to be slow and often nonsensical; you could tell that the writers really didn't know what to do with its characters (Especially Logan at the end of the series: "I love you so much, I can't be without you. Marry me." "I can't." "Okay, I'm leaving you." Wait, what?), and spent the last twenty-odd episodes with plots that stopped, started and went nowhere. Nothing felt organic or even that believable, which may be why I ended up so forgiving of a final episode so entirely unorganic and unrealistic. Instead of complaining that, wait, Rory just all of a sudden gets offered a job covering Obama's campaign for the year and has to leave in three days, and how exactly did Luke manage to sew all of those dropcloths together overnight on his own, I was just somewhat relieved that everyone was getting something resembling a happy ending, no matter how unrealistic. I wanted the characters that I'd enjoyed so much earlier to rest in a kind peace, instead of end up in uncomfortable angst-ridden faux cliffhanging permanence. As an episode in and of itself, it would probably have been unsatisfying and annoyingly full of writerly laziness, but as the end of a disappointing season, it was surprisingly Good.

But I'm glad that it's out of its recent misery, nonetheless.

LOST: If nothing else, I hope that someone in the make-up department got a raise for the subtle-but-noticable way that they managed to age Matthew Fox in the fake-out "flashback" sequences - Ignore the beard, as hard as that was, and you'd notice the flecks of grey in his hair, which has receded ever so slightly from his time on the island. I'm not so convinced about the twist at the end of this episode - It makes me think of the time jump at the end of the second season of Alias, which just ended up being abused and derailing the series in the third season as the writers realized that they really had no idea what to do with the idea. Yes, it makes for a good shocking reveal at the end of a season, but how is the show going to follow up on everything now that we know that they do get off the island?

Much more interesting was everything that was happening in the island timeframe - We had action and adventure and death-defying Russian assassin men with one eye! We had Hurley in a van knocking over the bad guys! Locke back from the dead, and more importantly, back from the crippled - again! Explosions! This season started with some really weak episodes, and it's kind of amazing to consider how much has improved in its second half; its as if the writing staff looked at Heroes and thought, wait, we don't have to have impossibly slow storytelling where we drag things out for weeks on end! We can have episodes that provide some forward momentum for a change! Somewhere around the episode where Hurley found his van, the plot kicked back in and the show became fun again, and more importantly, compelling again.

The end of the season was a series of moments that you've wanted to see all along (albeit punctuated by the flash-forwards that I'm not sure really added that much to the whole thing) - It was Very Good, and enough to make the wait until January next year seem disturbingly long. Here's hoping that it'll give the writers enough time to work out what exactly to do with Future Jack and his magic beard.

VERONICA MARS: This was the depressing one - After another uneven season (Did any show outside of the cancelled OC have a really strong season all the way through this year?), the last two episodes of VM ended up being the strongest the show has been since the first season, and also - not coincidentally - the darkest. For all its Nancy Drewness, this has always been a show about a moral ambiguous heroine who doesn't recognize where the line is, so it's weirdly fitting that the (unintended) final episode is all about how incredibly fucked up Veronica makes the lives of everyone around her - Her father gives up his principles and his ambition to protect her, Wallace ends up semi-naked and electrocuted, Logan... well, he could've had a series of his own to deal with his self-destructive issues, which Veronica only amplified. And at the same time, Veronica herself went singlemindedly along, not even recognizing those whole breaking-and-entering, theft, manipulating her friends things as being not so good for the hero of the piece. It was both Excellent and surprisingly bleak, and would have been even if the show was continuing for another year; as it is, leaving the series with Weevil returning to a life of crime, Keith about to probably lose the vote to keep his job, and Veronica a social outcast again returned everything to the way the first season began and provided an accidental and wonderful circular feeling to the whole series.

That said: Veronica Mars, The OC and Gilmore Girls all ending this year? Whatever am I going to replace these shows with next year? Unlike Hibbs, I liked the look of that Bionic Woman trailer, and Josh Schwartz and Amy Sherman-Palladino both have new projects coming up... I may not be Tim Goodman, but if any BBC Canada or other channels want to send me any screeners, I'd be happy to watch them in the name of scientific review, of course...

Meanwhile, much more importantly: It's Jeff Lester's last day at the store today, and as much as I wanted to do some kind of fake review of him with the punchline being that he's Excellent, it'd be kind of unnecessary; not content with being the moving force behind this blog (I don't think Brian would disagree with that that much), a voice of sanity and humor when needed and the kind of Kirbyhead who gets excited when the Devil Dinosaur omnibus is announced, he's also the kind of man who emails to congratulate me when I manage to work P!nk, Elliott Smith and the muppets into the same post. With no snark or sarcasm, he'll be very very much missed around these here parts.

And, no, I won't be that nice or sentimental when I see him this evening. Click Here to Read More...

I can't tell if this week is going quickly, or if I'm just getting old and forgetting what's happening each day. Nonetheless, I'm tried and it's almost the weekend, and one of those things is definitely good. So, let's move on from there, shall we?

MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #2: In which we discover that last issue's everything you know is wrong cliffhanger is, in fact, wrong in and of itself - So everything you know is wrong again! Ha! Sucks to be you! Sadly, the "you" in this case turns out in a very real sense to be "everyone who's reading the book," and this turns out to be a second Crap issue in a row.

It's not even that everything is a lie is a lie is that bad of a dodge - It gives some weight to the extended recap that was the first issue, after all - but that it's a dodge that it takes seventeen pages to get to, most of which are filled with meandering dialogue that goes exactly nowhere (Seriously: "I think. I think I am. And so, therefore I am. I think." That's an entire page right there. Or maybe "I remember nothing. Nothing. Nothing!" "He's bad. Real bad." That's a double page spread). And once we get that twist, it's half-undone by the end of the book, where Madman seems to think that maybe it's true or maybe it's not, and Allred tells us that everything happened the way we've previously read it except where it didn't. It's not that I don't want to read existential superhero comics - I'm a Grant Morrison fan, for the love of God - but I don't want to read existential superhero comics that are so weightless and meaningless. None of the concepts are really even thought through, never mind explored fully - Mike Allred writes in his (pretty interesting, but maybe not in a good way) lettercolumn text piece at the back that he wants this comic to be "an epic mindtrip" that evokes similar questions to the ones that 2001: A Space Odyssey gave him when he was a kid, but the only similar question it brings up for me is that "When is this bit over?" part that I had when all the solarized color was being used towards the end. It's an admirable goal to try and create a comic that asks the big questions, but it's a pretty hollow one if all you're really going to do is ask those questions without any real context or intent to try and at least suggest answers.

The art is still really nice, though. So there's that. Click Here to Read More...

It seems like I keep starting each week's set of reviews, but never quite finishing them lately? Gonna try (since it is such a small week) to get through virtually everything by this time next week...

COUNTDOWN #49: 52 was always, always, without fail the first comic I read each week. And, three weeks in, its the same with COUNTDOWN. But, I'm reasonably confident that won't be the case a month from now -- I'm really not feeling it. (You know there's something wrong when Doug Wolk's chosen successor starts his second issue review with "Well, that wasn't very good at all, was it?")

I may need to go back and look at the start of 52 again, but it seems to me that by this point in 52, the individual character arcs were all well into play:

Will Ralph find Sue?
Will Booster find respect?
Will Renee find herself?
Will the "space heroes" get home?
Will Black Adam fall even farther?
Will John Henry... hm, harder that one... make up with Natasha, I guess?

Everything else in 52 gets back to those points, even with all of the flash and dazzle, and, so, 52 was effectively a human story about human motivations.

And, yes, I know its absolutely unfair of me to keep comparing this with 52, but the book physically demands such comparisons.

In COUNTDOWN, here's what I think we have so far:

Will Jimmy get a story?
Will the Monitors do [something barely understood by the audience]?
Will Karate Kid... well, dunno, but let's go with "prevent the Great Disaster"?
Will the Rogues...again, unclear yet again so far, but probably some sort of redemption/destruction split
Will Mary find herself (/powers)?

Of these five threads, only the last two seem to have much of a human core around them. #2 & 3 are... well they seem like comic stories ABOUT comic stories, y'know? And Jimmy... he's meant to be the POV character, the "everyman" of the DCU, but ironically that's what renders him the least dramatic, really -- he's Jimmy Olson, Superman's Pal, and ain't nothing gonna happen to him. "Jimmy Must Die!" buttons notwithstanding. He's the safest character in this series, let alone the entire DC universe.

Maybe it will get better, who knows, but at this moment in time, I'm really only vaguely interested, and I don't see any immediate evidence that this is going to change. So: EH.

This issue also starts a backup of "History of the Multiverse", just like 52's "History of the DC Universe" (which really wasn't), and really everything you need to know is the first line: "The Timestream. A place unaffected by the flow of time..." Buh, wha?! AWFUL.



CAPTAIN AMERICA #26: I'm going to pretty much echo Graeme, all the way along -- this is effective, compelling work, and I liked it very much, especially its structure and use of 0ff-panel (esp. the Falcon's speech thing), but one thing bugged me: in the bar where Bucky confronts the redneck guy, the redneck guy calls him a "jackhole". Yet, both Falcon and Luke Cage use "$#!^". That really really bugged me. Other than that? VERY GOOD.

IRON MAN HYPERVELOCITY #5: One of those "and that's why covers are important, kids!" moments -- I had skipped reading #2-4 of this mini, but the cover here made me said "Huh, give it a read" Glad I did -- pretty ripping cyber-sci-fi action that made me think than nothing less than a Warren Ellis comic. I was fairly lost on the stakes, etc, but I was still wonderfully engaged with the story as it transpired, which is exactly what a comic should do: VERY GOOD.


OK, that's enough for right now. More tomorrow, I hope...

What did YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

At first, I really wanted to tease the hell out of this, and say stuff like "Wow, I've seen preview pages of Scott Pilgrim 4 and they go in a totally new direction" or "Hey, I just got the cover to the new Scott Pilgrim; check it out." But I felt like a tool every time I sat down to write it.

The fact is, I was having lunch with my friend John yesterday and we went to this Crown Books clearance center and John, having a three year old, was perusing the children's books section while we gabbed. He was the one who held this book up to me and made some sort of wisecrack about Spider-Man's changing status quo, and I went, "Oh my god! Bryan Lee O'Malley!"

I mean, it says Bryan O'Malley on the cover but it had to be him, right? I mean:



Obviously, it's him.

I wrote Bryan about it and he replied:

Yeah, it was one of the first things I did in comics, way back in 2001. Go ahead and run images if you want.

Christopher Butcher actually helped me colour it, which is why it's so pink. That was right before we moved in together.

Sadly, my poor photographic skills (and possible legal conflicts) prevent me from reproducing all seven pages of the book, but I will spoil the ending for you:



just because Spidey in his doctor's outfit looks a bit cooler than on the cover. Oh, and:



just because it chokes me up a little.

Sadly, there were only two copies at that Crown Books and the other one is going to one Benjamin Hibbs. But they did have copies of Spider-Man: Air Rescue Officers (with Spidey in a very cool outfit, holding a cute dog on the cover) and Spider-Man: Firefighters (outfit not that cool, but holding adorable kittens!) all written by the same author (Michi Fujimoto) but different illustrators (Charles Park and Robert DeJesus, respectively). Needless to say, they're all a pretty pleasant change of pace from Ultimates #13 and All-Star Batman & Robin.

Labels: Bryan Lee O'Malley, Jeff

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It's completely irrational, I know, but I can't tell you how much that I almost wanted to hate CAPTAIN AMERICA #26. If nothing else, I wanted to at least start this review with some kind of joke about it having been so long since the last issue came out, I wish I could remember what had happened in it. None of this is in any way fair, because none of it actually has anything to do with the book itself; it's all everything else, all the surrounding noise, that had turned me against the possibilities that Ed Brubaker, Mike Perkins and Steve Epting had something good to offer.

By this point, you see, I've started to settle into a slight boredom with the death of Captain America. It's not that I'm not enjoying the Marvel books more these days than I was pre-Civil War, because I am (although I do kind of see the death of Cap as the real "break" between then and now, for some reason, not Civil War itself; maybe because the death of Captain America was an actual event for characters to respond to, as opposed to the end of Civil War the series, which was essentially "Hey! Our seven issues are up!"?), but more that the death feels as if it's been run into the ground by this point thanks to The Confession oneshot and the Fallen Son miniseries and all of the crazy media hoopla surrounding the story itself. I'm a child of the internet age, daddio, and if it isn't a news story that's broken in the last five minutes I'm gone, you dig? That said, I'm a fan of Brubaker's writing - His CRIMINAL #6 this week is just plain Excellent, tight and tense, pulling you into it without trying and barely giving me enough time to wonder whether it's he or Sean Philips who has the smoking women fetish - and felt sorry for him even as I was getting bored of reading characters talk about what Cap meant to them; Bendis and Loeb seemed to be writing scenes that felt as if they should've been Ed's, and I wondered what the actual Captain America book would read like, when it returned. Would its thunder have been stolen, or would it go somewhere else entirely?

The answers, respectively, are No and Kind of. Fittingly enough, the second part of "The Death of The Dream" shows you characters reacting to - to channel Jeph for a second - The death of Captain America, but Brubaker manages to show something beyond the handwringing sadness that we've seen so far. His characters show more genuine emotion and humanity because of the complexity of their responses, and by focusing on that, he manages to move the story (and the series) past Steve Rogers dying. It's an interesting and subtle difference from things like Fallen Son, I think; that series feels as if it's there to remind you, over and over again, that Marvel has done something daring by killing off their character, and as much of a guilty pleasure it may be, it never transcends the sense of "We are so awesome". This issue does so quickly and quietly, not focusing on the death itself but everything that comes after, making the death a story as opposed to an "event", if you can see the difference. More than of his other mainstream Marvel work, it also feels like one of Brubaker's "mature" books, like Criminal or Sleeper - More in a grey area morally and (again, fittingly) more hopeless. Even though I have no doubt that Captain America will live again - I don't even doubt that Brubaker himself has already put plans in motion to bring him back himself, from the scene with the corpse this issue - there's still no easy solution to any of the concerns of the characters in this issue, and it's that complexity that makes this a Very Good return for the book that manages to make me want to find out what happens next.

Dammit. Click Here to Read More...

Well, at least they didn't kill Ando (What, you thought I was joking with that spoilers thing?).

That was actually one of the few things that I outright really liked about last night's Heroes finale - After last week's semi-cliffhanger of Ando setting out on his own to take care of Sylar once and for all, coming on the heels of all the talk of sacrifice and everything else, I was pretty convinced that Ando was a goner, setting Hiro on the road to being a true hero who has known loss, etc. etc. Almost everything else, however, seemed just slightly off, as if the writers knew where they wanted to go but just couldn't work out how to get there. It seemed rushed, as well; I wanted to see Nikki do more than just hit Sylar once and more of a fight between Peter and Sylar than just punching each other, but I remember looking at the TiVometer at the act break where Sylar appeared and thinking, "Wait, they have fifteen-odd minutes to finish this off?"

There was a moment, when Peter was having his travelling-in-time/flashback/epiphany moment, where I was terrified that the grand finale would be that Peter would heal the world with the Rainbow Power of Love, and it's something that I was even more convinced would happen when his radioactive glowing hands made him double over in slow motion - I could almost hear Elton John cracking his fingers in preparation of a special medeley of "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" and "Candle In The Wind" - so the fact that they didn't do that was nearly my favorite part of the whole show, even if the faux deaths of Peter and Nathan would carry more weight if they hadn't spent a couple of scenes earlier in the episode pointing out that Peter could theoretically regenerate from exploding anyway (And let's face it, Nathan probably just flew him up into the sky and dropped him before getting out of the way as he exploded). "No bodies = No death," as just one of last night's comic cliches goes.

(Alternatively, the other big cliche from the night - the villain who refuses to die - just pissed me off. Sylar's not that interesting, people who write Heroes.)

But, no, the best part of last night's finale for me was the ending. It was completely Quantum Leap, to the point where I really wanted the episode to close with Hiro running from the men on horseback, saying "Oh boy," but there was nonetheless something oddly optimistic and open about it, as opposed to the progressively-more-claustrophobic storytelling of the last few episodes. It actually felt like a new beginning, as well as a continuation of the existing mythos. And was that George Takei behind that mask...? Overall, it was a high Okay, and arguably low Good end for a show that I had no hopes for when I first saw it.

Shall we get to the comics I didn't get to review this week for one reason or another, before everything starts again tomorrow? Let's.

PAINKILLER JANE #1: I tried, I really did, to give this one a lengthy review of its own, but it kept defeating me whenever I tried to talk about it. I thought it was surprisingly Okay, a messy and more interesting take on the same character and, for that matter, style of storytelling as Jimmie Robinson's Bomb Queen, and I wanted to make some connection between the nerd fantasy figure of those two characters (Impossibly hot, socially awkward, bisexual women who hide their awkwardness under a selfconscious asskickin' and name-takin' persona and the cheesecake way in which they're illustrated - A fantasy for nerds not only for the "No-one understands me" thing, but also because they're the physically idealized woman and shown on panel as sexually active and therefore, "available") and Tank Girl, who I'm bizarrely convinced is one of the archetypes of this particular character cliche... but I could never quite get my thoughts together in any kind of coherent form. The comic itself is interesting enough, moreso when it seems to go slightly off the rails, as in the page of one panel character studies that ends up kickstarting the plot. If I can ever make sense of what I was trying to say about the fantasy female figure thing, I may come back to this one.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS SPECIAL: Fun, and with an amazing line-up of artists that fit with Jeff Parker's writing better than regular artist Roger Cruz. Get Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred on this book permanently, and you'd have something that both the kids and The Kids would have on their shopping list each and every month; their studied retro touch pushes the book out of the "upgraded Marvel Adventures" feel and into the same kind of updated pop joy of something like Allred's own Madman or Darwyn Cooke's Spirit. It's Good, and an odd reminder that the original X-Men concept really did work, in a way.

This week! Onomatopea writing may mean shorter reviews, Jeff's last day on Friday, and a three-day-weekend will hopefully give me the chance to finish Percy Gloom, Fantagraphics' Chris Ware-meets-Disney graphic novel that's so far been incredibly enjoyable... Click Here to Read More...

It's time to start the music! It's time to light the lights! It's time to get things started again after a weekend where Kate and I went camping with "hilarious" results (Read, wow, I'm not the biggest fan of that whole "sleeping bag in a tent" schtick). So, as sultry songstress P!nk once said, let's get this party started.

BATMAN #665: It's the real All-Star Batman, as Grant Morrison gives us a Batman that doesn't give up in his fight against injustice, a Robin that does stupid things like riding his motorbike into supervillains, along with romance! hookers with hearts of gold! and the promise of crazy science-fiction adventures yet to come! It's pretty much an antidote to Frank Miller's Divorce Therapy Batman Annual, and Goddamn, but it's a lot of fun. I'm sure that there are some grumpy frowning fans out there cursing the hint that all of the 1950s Sci-Fi weirdness is now not only in continuity, but also the basis of Morrison's entire run, but... Feh. This is really rather Good stuff.

EX MACHINA #28: Here's the thing - As much as I like to read this each and every issue, it's kind of depressing to realize that the book hasn't really changed or grown in the last twenty-seven issues. Which isn't to say that this particular issue isn't Good or anything (and it is), but it feels like, as a series, it's stalled and that's pretty much not a good sign. It should feel as if it's going somewhere, shouldn't it...?

FALLEN SON: THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA #3: The more I think about it, the more I kind of like this series. I mean, sure - It's full of stillborn dialogue (Yes, yet another character manages to work the title of the series into a conversation; this time it's Clint Barton: "I want to talk about Steve. The death of Captain America. And what the hell you're doing about it."), a plot that - by necessity - goes nowhere, and it completely screws with New Avengers continuity. But look past all of that, and you have a curiously old-school Marvel book (Say what you like about Loeb's work, but he does seem to understand what makes Marvel characters tick. Sure, he might not always be able to get it over to the reader, but still...) with some great artwork; John Romita Jr.'s work in this issue is particularly nice. A slightly guilty Okay, in that case.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #9: Brad Meltzer, please stop overwriting every single scene. Honestly, someone needs to tell him that not every scene in every book has to have the same kind of narration where someone not only explains what's going on but also the psychological reasons behind it. As much as this book has become solid I-grew-up-in-the-'70s continuity porn, it's the overdose of verbage that's killing it. Solidly Eh.

THE MIGHTY AVENGERS #3: Yeah, just a week or so after I was saying something about the way that Bendis's failures are at least interesting, he serves up this entirely Eh issue that doesn't offer anything other than Frank Cho's masturbatory horny Tigra scene. If it wasn't for that whole "lead time" thing, I would take that personally...

And, yes, I'm the one person who missed Brubaker when he was in town this weekend. Blame the camping and those results that are apparently "hilarious". Yet another reason to dislike those sleeping bags... Click Here to Read More...

Small week!

A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #58 (A)
AMERICAN VIRGIN #15
ARCHIE #575
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #179
BIRDS OF PREY #106
CAPTAIN AMERICA #26
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #33
COUNTDOWN 49
COVER GIRL #2
CRIMINAL #6
DEVI #11
DYNAMO 5 #3
ELEPHANTMEN #9
FALL OF CTHULHU MAVILLAIN CVR A #3
FANTASTIC FOUR #546 CWI
FINAL GIRL #1 (OF 5)
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1
FUTURAMA COMICS #31
GODLAND #18
GUTSVILLE #1 (OF 6)
HELLBLAZER #232
HEROES FOR HIRE #10
IRON MAN HYPERVELOCITY #5 (OF 6)
IRREDEEMABLE ANT-MAN #8
LEFT ON MISSION #2 (OF 5)
LOADED BIBLE 2 BLOOD OF CHRIST (ONE SHOT)
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #2
MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #1
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT FANTASTIC FOUR SILVER SURFER
NEWUNIVERSAL #6
NINJA SCROLL #9
OUTER ORBIT #4 (OF 4)
PVP #33
RED PROPHET TALES OF ALVIN MAKER #7 (OF 12)
ROBIN #162
SATANS ##### BABY
SHADOWPACT #13
SHE-HULK 2 #18 CWI
SNAKEWOMAN SPECIAL COLLECTORS EDITION #0
SPIRIT #6
STAR TREK KLINGONS BLOOD WILL TELL #2
STAR WARS LEGACY #12
SUPERGIRL AND THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #30
SUPERMAN BATMAN #35
TESTAMENT #18
UNCLE SCROOGE #366
UNIQUE #3 (OF 3)
WALK-IN #6
WARHAMMER 40K DAMNATION CRUSADE CVR A #4
WETWORKS #9
WISDOM #6 (OF 6)
WONDER WOMAN #9
X-MEN #199

Books / Mags / Stuff
ACTION HEROES ARCHIVES VOL 2 HC
BACK ISSUE #22
BECK MONGOLIAN CHOP SQUAD VOL 8 GN (OF 19)
BLACK PANTHER CIVIL WAR TP
CASANOVA VOL 1 LUXURIA HC
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #10 DR DOOM
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #9 CAPT AMERICA
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #38 SHE HULK
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAGAZINE #39 MYSTIQUE
COYOTE VOL 5 TP
CSI CASE FILES VOL 2 TP
DOCTOR STRANGE OATH TP
DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES VOL 2 DRAGONS OF WINTER NIGHT TP
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMICBOOK HEROES VOL 1 BATMAN TP
FELL VOL 1 FERAL CITY TP
HELLSTORM SON OF SATAN EQUINOX TP
HOMELESS CHANNEL
ILLO MAGAZINE #1(NOTE PRICE)
INFINITE CRISIS SER 2 INNER CASE ASST (NET)
IRON WOK JAN GN #24
KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER THE LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR
LEGEND OF GRIMJACK VOL 7 TP
MARVEL 1602 FANTASTICK FOUR TP
MEGATOKYO VOL 5
OTHER SIDE TP
PERCY GLOOM HC
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE VOL 3 MY SECRET LIFE DIGEST TP
STREET FIGHTER ALPHA VOL 1 GN (OF 2)
SUPERMAN BATMAN VS ALIENS PREDATORS TP


What looks good to you?

-B Click Here to Read More...

As Hibbs pointed out at the store yesterday, despite giving my notice, I'm not outta here yet.

Speaking of yesterday, my thanks to special guest star Ed "The Happy Clown" Brubaker for stopping by. As Hibbs mentioned, it's great seeing The Brube in a good place--Christ knows he deserves it (and worked his ass off for it)--and taking the time to drop by on my next-to-last Friday and shoot the shit with us was really above and beyond. Thanks, Ed.

Thanks also to Mojo of the mighty Poor Mojo website for stopping by with Red Stripes. Some of you may have noticed that I recently added the Poor Mojo Newswire to the sidebar over there. I was reluctant to add a non-comics site (or rather a non-strictly-comics site) because that way leads to madness and ruin, but the Newswire has grown pretty indispensible to me over the last few months. They cull their news from a bunch of different sources, so while you'll get a story that hit Boing Boing, or something that Ellis noticed, or a link to a Wired story, you get it without a lot of the self-congratulation and self-promotion, and they also have a loving dash of lefty politics, local stories and excellent webcomics to boot. And they link here every now and again, which is always cool. But, yeah: Poor Mojo Newswire plus Google Reader=nine kinds of awesome.

I'll spare you further shout-outs (hi, Charlie!) but needless to say, thanks to everyone who dropped by and wished me well. Every once in a while I realize I'm not gonna be behind the counter every Friday seeing great people with regularity and I wonder what the hell I'm thinking.

Speaking of "What the hell were they thinking":

ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #5: The first page made me laugh, I admit it, but the rest of it just seemed wildly off and I think it's the cognitive dissonance caused by Miller's words and actions being acted out by Jim Lee's illustrations. As I think I mentioned elsewhere on this site, at some point Miller made the transition from being a comic book artist to being a cartoonist, and there's stuff that I think would work for me--that whole JLA scene, for example--if it was drawn by Miller: it would read as expressive rather than insipid. It's a critical problem of tone for me, and ultimately I think this book won't work out for me in the long run for the same reason I wouldn't really care to read a Steve Ditko "Mr. A" story illustrated by John Buscema, or a Jules Feiffer script illustrated by Curt Swan, or a Charles Schulz strip illustrated by anybody, really, but Charles Schulz. I mean, sure, if you offered to show me those things I'd leap at the chance to read 'em, but I bet I'd be left pretty cold and non-plussed in the end, just like here. Eh, really, but once you factor in the delays and the cost and the politics, feel free to ratchet that down accordingly.

ARMY @ LOVE #3: This sheer denseness of this issue's plotting, combined with the military setting and broad farcical satire reminded me of Joseph Heller's Catch 22--although if you can imagine Joe Simon adapting it for Heavy Metal or something. It needs to expand its cast (which it's kinda/sorting doing already) and maybe not disappear down the hidey-hole of its own world-making but, other than that, it's a god-damned weird little book and I'm enjoying it a lot. Good stuff.

BATMAN #665: Morrison is quite audaciously (to use the high-falutin' literary language taught me by Ghostbusters) "crossing the streams" with his Batman--trying to mix Bane and pre-Silver Age Batman stories and Miller and Adams and Sprang and fuckin' everything--but I admire the ambition more than the result. I mean, this was the second best issue for me on G-Mo's run, and yet even still it seemed oddly unresonant--like a series of sketches rather than the completed work.

(Arghh. I just had an idea that I'm proving remarkably inept at conveying so lemme sketch it out to you behind the scenes and lemme know what you think: Morrison does a much better job writing Superman than Batman because Morrison is, like Superman, at heart a loving and dutiful son [as any article where Morrison talks about his Dad will attest] whereas Batman is not. In order for Morrison to "get" Batman, he has to reinvent Batman as the consummate Pop poseur--like Morrison himself--where both Batman and Bruce Wayne are, to some extent, artificially constructed personas created from equal parts utility and self-amusement. Therefore, the Batman Morrison writes in JLA is what I would think of as a more "real" Batman because that Batman is, in effect, "acting" in front of the JLA. Left to his own devices (or book title, I guess), Morrison's Batman isn't really that character--or always that character, at least--any more than Grant is really (or always) Mr. "Look At Me! I'm dressed up in drag and I just ate a pound of hashish!"

And yet to me, Batman is not the consummate Pop poseur, so the whole thing never quite works for me. I dunno; does that make sense?)

In any event, more fun to think about than to read. OK.

CABLE DEADPOOL #40: It sure seems like the subtext here is Fabian Nicieza beng annoyed by his plans for Cable being scuttled by editorial's desire to have Cable go back to being the brooding mutant all-powerful militaristic team leader over in X-Men. Certainly, all of Cable's narrative caption iterate a very specific kind of frustration for the situation he's trapped in (and that situation does happen to be a crossover with X-Men). On the other hand, maybe he's just writing it that way to fool overzealous readers like myself. In which case: well played, Mr. Nicieza, well played. Either OK or Eh, I can't decide.

COUNTDOWN 50: Hibbs and I were talking about this issue--which I think I liked even less than the first issue, amazingly--and I finally nailed the analogy, although I apologize for how old-school it is: Countdown is like Secret Wars II to 52's Secret War. In the same way, the success of Secret Wars changed Jim Shooter into hubristically believing he had the Midas touch and deciding to force a second miniseries on the entire Marvel Universe, Dan Didio seems to have fallen for the belief that it's his ideas and his knowledge of what makes a successful comic that made Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis and 52 a success.

Hibbs, who immediately got what I was saying before I even finished my sentence and went me one better: "Yeah, and 52 is just like Secret Wars because even though it wasn't very good, it was the first of its kind and well loved, and Secret Wars II was more of the same, only larger and worse, and everyone went on to pretend it never existed!"

Now, I'm not sure I'd go that far (yet) but I wasn't heartened by what I saw this week: a weirdly out-of-left-field JLA/JSA/LSH scene; too much set-up with the Rogues and a deeply unbelievable cliff-hanger (among other stuff). It's pretty dreary stuff, flat, and, in some places, deeply unbelievable. (My theory is that this is actually taking place on Earth "Everyone Knows Everything About Everyone Else.")

Or, as I call it: Earth-Eh.

EXILES #94: Wow, that was kinda grueling. Glad I'm not around for next issue's visit to the Planet of the Mary Sue Killers. Sub-Eh.

FLASH THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE #12: Art's strong, script is strong, coloring is, I think, great (really vibrant and lends some of the art a real power to it): why couldn't we have gotten this from the first issue? I wasn't exactly down with some of the plot machinations (seriously, is there a mandate that at least 30% of DC's production be time-travel related?) but highly OK. Worth looking out for.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #9: I thought the art lacked oomph this issue. I mean, how can you have Timber Wolf having a dinosaur race with gorillas and have it look that uninteresting? Brad Meltzer's stuff needs all the help it can get (although I admit it, I could read about Speedy flirting with Hawkgirl for days, probably). Wayyyy tooooo slowwwwwwwwwww, and yet still OK, I thought.

MIGHTY AVENGERS #3: The instant I read the Tigra sequence I immediately imagined the late night call Bendis must've gotten beforehand: "Yeah, hey, Brian? Frank. Lissen man, I just read the script for issue #2 and this shit's great, really, but I'm not sure I'm gonna make it through the entire arc just spanking it to Lady Ultron. Could you maybe throw in Tigra or somebody to keep my 'interest' up, if you know what I'm talking about? Thanks, bro. Okay, talk to you later, bye." Good overall, though.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #109: A really smart, engaging read with a darkly ironic reason for Peter to keep being Spider-Man folded in. I liked this a lot. Very Good.

ULTIMATES 2 #13: 8 page gatefold or not, that was one astonishingly slack issue. (Number of pages in which there were 4 words or less per page? Seventeen. And the scenes with more dialogue weren't particularly good, either. And the panels where Captain America is standing around expressionless like a guy with Asperger's wearing a flag, or that full-page half-shockwave? What about the Cap/Jan relationship? Is Tony still dying? What about apologizing to Thor? And what's with that ending? If I was being generous to Millar, I'd say he was making some kind of larger point about the passing of America's golden age or something as World War II moves it into the day of the Military-Industrial Complex, but I'm not being generous to Millar: it reads like shit he put at the end of his outline five years ago and he can't remember why he put it there but he doesn't have time to come up with anything else.

It'll probably read all right in trades, I guess, but compared to those first six issues? And considering Stan and Jack did, what, the first 64 issues of the Fantastic Four in the same length of time? Underwhelmingly Eh.

Labels: Jeff

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It was a painfully slow day at the ol' CE today -- there were points I expected tumbleweeds to start rolling through.

Thankfully, things were deeply enlivened when Evil Ed Brubaker did the surprise pop-in around 3 PM, which nicely helped us kill 3 hours, hooray!

Ed, once a long time ago, lived in San Francisco, and was a CE customer. Back in the days before he became a Corporate Sell-Out, Working For The Man, Ed used to come around and be a Little Black Rain Cloud, always moaning about how much the comics business sucked, and how he got no respect, and yadda yadda. Don't get me wrong, we loved it, because, yeah the comics business can and does suck, and Ed wasn't getting the respect he deserved, and yadda yadda. It's just that if I could cartoon at all, and you held a gun to my head and said "draw Ed Brubaker", I might draw a picture of Eeyore in a Porkpie Hat.

So I was a little surprised (happily so!!) to see Little Miss Sunshine Brubaker, all happy and smiling and filled with joy to all things comic-al. I guess having the nest selling single issue of the last year can do that to a feller, right?

Honestly, it couldn't have happened to a better guy, and we couldn't have possibly be happier for all of his success, and I like the fact that it's made him a Smiling Guy, because while I liked 'ol Dour Ed, I like the Happy Brube better, I think.

So, anyway, yay that!



I've decided that, no matter what he says now, I'm not going to remove Jeff from the "contributors" list. He doesn't actually ever have to post, but he'll always have the ability to, in case he changes his mind.

I'll make no secret of the fact that I think he's (easily!) the best of the three writers here (I'm the worst, pretty clearly), because he is actually edumicated about writin' and stuff. I just know if I like something or not... Jeff knows WHY.

Anyway, I hope he decides that posting a review of something occasionally doesn't violate this new focus. Even if it is only quarterly or something, I don't think he should let that particular set of muscles grow cold (unless he starts doing reviews for pay, in which case, yah forget about us!)

As for me, Jeff told me... uh three weeks ago now? You'll notice that's pretty much when MY volume of posts starting dropping, too. I mean, the Savage Critic as a blog, and as more than just my voice? That's all Jeff's fault, so having Jeff here was one of the things that kept me posting as often as I have -- trying to top him, and all.

(Look, there are worse motivations one can have)

So, I don't know much, but I do know that I won't be doing daily posting "any more" -- I'll shoot for thrice a week, though. Graeme says he enjoys posting daily, so, alright, he can be insane and keep that up (My problem is my boss is CONSTANTLY looking at my work...)

As for the future of the blog, really what I'd like to do is find 2-3 more people who share a similar style or sensibility and who know when to snark, and when not to, and get it so the Critic IS "multiple content daily", but NOT dependent on one person to make it so. I'd also really like it if we could figure out a way to monetize the Critic without selling out TOO badly (or triggering your epilepsy), but everything we've looked at so far seemed like it was too little money involved for the general intrusiveness of ads.

So, if you have any ideas, I'm always glad to hear them.




There's also a new TILTING AT WINDMILLS up on Newsarama. Follow that link to read me talk about late comics and weekly comics both. I think it turned out pretty OK for once!



Muh, one quick review before I go off and decide to have some "time off":

ULTIMATES 2 #13: Maybe, just maybe it is because there was most of a year between issues that this didn't connect to me at all, but I kinda doubt it.

The big problem is, of course, the protagonists are struggling against a faceless horde, and are rescued by another faceless horde, so there's nothing even remotely resembling human stakes through most of the proceedings (this is a common mistake of Millar's, of course)

Big widescreen action is fine enough, but it needs to have something human to anchor it against -- and I don't really care about any of these iterations of these characters enough to do so naturally. There could have been some interesting through line in here via "Sorry for thinking you were a mental patient, Thor", but that's never addressed here at all.

About the only thing I DID like was the Black Widow scene at the end.

And what about the art? I hope it's not me, because I found parts of it to be downright sketchy -- probably the biggest offender is that full page half-shot (? I thought a page was missing) of the explosion. Jinkies!

Most perplexing of all is the final scene. Why is this here? Did I forget some opening sequence from a year and a half back this is meant to link to? Even if there is, I can't see what possible resonance that scene could have to the events of this issue, or those leading up to it.

All in all, not worth the wait, and while it may tighten up in paperback, for this, as a single entertainment experience, I have to go with AWFUL.

What did YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Have I told you that I hated the movie Garden State? I really didn't want to; I like Zack Braff - well, I like Scrubs, at least - and I'm an indie kid who's all about the emotional sentimentality, so I felt as if I was the target market for it; I even like Simon and Garfunkel's soundtrack for The Graduate! But when I saw it, it was an awkward and uncomfortable movie that was emo in all the worst ways, the cinematic equivalent of putting on your sister's eyeliner and sitting in a corner telling yourself that no-one understands your pain, man. Even "The Only Living Boy In New York" can only help so much. The worst part of it for me, though, was that I couldn't buy into the central concept. My own mother had died not that long before I saw the movie, and so maybe everything was far too raw for me at that point, but I spent the entire movie annoyed at the way that the main character's mother's death was both hijacked as life-changing cathartic McGuffin and sidelined as not-as-important-as-Natalie-Portman-playing-kooky at the same time. I wanted to go into the movie and tell Braff that it's not like that, and then ask him to go back to being funny again.

Anyway.

LOCAL #9 is a death of a mother story that resonated with me to a ridiculous degree. It's not as if my relationship with my mother was anything like Megan's, nor even that I reacted in the same way to my mother's death that Megan does to her's. But nonetheless, there's an emotional honesty to the story here that's impossible to miss. Maybe it's in how quiet the issue is - even for this series, which is hardly slambang fireworks each issue - and the way that Ryan Kelly's artwork mirrors that silence with the space he gives to Megan throughout the issue (the page where she's travelling home, alone, crying on the train, is beautiful), or maybe it's in the way that the issue breaks from what's gone before and becomes much more reflective and full of memory; Megan becomes, in a way, less self-involved and stops hiding from her past and herself because she's forced by events to remember, for once in her life.

It's a skillful issue, the best of a series that has consistently been worthwhile. It works in two separate ways, the way that one-off issues always should but rarely do, both as a short story complete in and of itself, but also illuminating the series and the character as a whole. We get to understand Megan more this issue, not only because we find out about her childhood but because of how she reacts to current events (Which also shows how much she's changed; the Megan who kept changing her name as a way of staying distant and safe from the world in #5 would have taken the news very differently - Again, illuminating the series, like I said). Perhaps best of all, it's wonderfully messy; it doesn't seek to reveal all in its 20-odd pages, nor even to self-consciously set-up questions for future issues or the reader to answer. It just lets you look at people trying to do the best they can, even if they don't know what that is. There's no resolution or attempt at explanation or judgement, and it's all the better for it.

PICK OF THE WEEK - yes, I know, I've not talked about what else is out this week yet, but trust me here - and Very Good. Go and buy. Click Here to Read More...

I've been putting this off for a couple of days now, hoping to at least piggy-back it on some genuine content, but things have been harried this month and if I don't do this now, I may not ever.

My last day at Comix Experience is Friday, May 25th, and this month is going to be my last contribution to the store newsletter as well. My first column for the newsletter was issue #37--exactly a hundred issues ago--so that and the big signing last month seemed like perfect high notes to go out on. This also means I won't be contributing to this blog after the end of the month as well.

Now, comics bloggers retire in the same way that Marvel characters die--it seems more likely than not they'll be back just as you start to miss them--and I can't say for certain that won't be the case here; not only do I enjoy shooting my mouth off about comics, but the work of Graeme and Hibbs always inspires me. However, I have some other things I want to do, and it was getting harder and harder to find the time and energy to devote to them when I was either trying to stay on top of the tremendous amounts of work being done in this medium, or concretize my opinions about that work.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my posts, as well as contribute feedback. The rewards for being a critic aren't numerous, but learning that someone else has found a new favorite book or author thanks to a review I wrote--or simply found amusement in the wisecracks--is priceless.

If you get a chance to stop by the store this Friday or the next, and feel like saying "hi," please do so. I'm looking forward to ending my tenure as Comix Experience counterguy with as much fun, noise and chit-chat as I experienced for the vast majority of my run there.

There. That wasn't so hard, was it? So let's return you now to your regular run of savage criticism...

Labels: Jeff

Click Here to Read More...

Dear MUNI - It really shouldn't take that long to get from the Sunset to downtown first thing in the morning. Seriously, please sort your shit out so that I don't have to wait 20 minutes in the tunnel between stops again. Thank you.

Appropriately, on the day I'm spectacularly late for work, reviews of a couple of spectacularly late books.

ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #5:Hibbs is right - At this point, Frank Miller is clearly just taking the piss and trying to see how far he can push things. You know that as soon as you see the first page, which has Wonder Woman in a cleavage-displaying trenchcoat (and with an impossibly-thin waist - Jim Lee, I know you know human proportions better than that) saying her first line in the series: "Out of my way, sperm bank."

Yeah, exactly.

Of all the ridiculousness in this issue - which includes Miller literally lapsing into self-parody, giving Batman a caption that reads "I love being the goddamn BATMAN" - it's the treatment of Wonder Woman that really stands out. It's not so much the cliched, fetishized, man-hating narration ("Men always lie. About everything. Men always make a mess. Out of everything.") as it is the fact that her man-hating ways fall apart when Superman kisses her, which happens after she tells him "You bastard! You bastard. I hate your guts. I hate your guts. You make me sick. You make me sick."

Thanks for sharing your crazy fucked-up take on gender politics with us there, Frank.

All of that said, the issue - despite being eleven months late (Or is it ten months? I can't remember, was this meant to be bi-monthly, way back when?) - is entirely Eh. It's not even funny-bad, it's just boring. Miller's writing? Kind of messed up, but nothing that we haven't really seen from him before. Lee's art? Not as good as it used to be. The whole package? Not only not worth waiting a year for, but not even waiting until you get to the store for; this will be defended as a funny subversive take on the iconic characters by many, but I kind of wonder what's meant to be actually funny about it.

That said, ULTIMATES 2 #13 isn't much better. Sure, it's exactly the kind of thing that has worked for its fans for the past 25 issues across the last, what, five years or so, but that means that it has the same flaws, as well. Ultimates really works best as the self-conscious Image book - it's really all about the art, and better if you don't concentrate too much on the story. That's definitely the way to approach this final issue, which begins with Loki telling Captain America, "Do you honestly believe [Thor] could kill me with a hammer?" after Thor has, indeed, just slammed his hammer into Loki's head and failed to kill him. So it comes as no surprise when Thor ends up killing Loki with his hammer later in the book. Foreshadowing, you see? Just like a real writer! Okay, cheap shot, but the only thing that's really surprising about the writing of this finale is the lack of spectacle - we're shown extended sequences of an Asgardian army appearing to fight giant wolves, trolls and monsters (the bad guys get three pages worth of their appearing in DC, and the Asgardians two pages), but don't really get to see that battle; instead, we get a foldout showing the main characters in tightly rendered action poses with the epic fight as background. It's a really odd and unsatisfying choice, but what can you do? Everything else goes exactly as you expected (Complete with Millar's trademark dialogue. You know that he'd script any scene in exactly the same way at this point; even someone buying a loaf of bread would get five pages, including two pages where the customer hands over the money to the person behind the counter and you get a close-up of the customer smirking and saying "Keep the change sweetheart." Then there would be a couple of panels of him leaving the store, before you see the person behind the counter turn to her friend and, in a full page splash, say "Jeez. What an asshole."), and as such leaves you unsatisfied by its perfunctory nature. Eh, again, but those who loved it before will probably love it again.

Tomorrow - The best book of the week. Click Here to Read More...

ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER #5: Paul Levitz apparently thinks that DC's publication of THE BOYS could do some theoretical harm to their core superhero business, or taint the icons, or something.

This makes me wonder what Paul made of THIS.

Since it is the ACTUAL icons.

The strangest thing is that, had Frank Miller been drawing this, I'd probably have found it amusing and satirical and maybe even a little funny. But with Jim Lee? Lee is THE mainstream superhero comic book artist, so it adds a layer of weight and Importance to it all that just absolutely demands it be taken Seriously, and, thus, renders any satire as stone-faced earnestness.

But, really, REALLY, Levitz cancelled THE BOYS and continues to publish this? Really?

AWFUL.


What did you think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

So I was all about to post a review of All-Star Batman, but then I read Bri's comments about COUNTDOWN #50 (the post below this one, SavCritic fans!), and I had to post about that instead*. It's odd - For the second week running, I'm Brian's bizarro twin; I thought that this issue was less offensive than the last, but I had pretty much the same reactions to it that Brian describes: How does Jimmy know who Jason Todd is? If everyone knows that Jason kills, why does Superman not try and do something about that instead of find Jason and then float around while Jimmy goes to interview him? For that matter, since when does Superman have so much time to kill that he helps Jimmy find his interview subjects and assist him in breaking and entering in order to do the interview? (Since when does Superman assist anyone with breaking and entering? Yadda yadda yadda...)

The problem with this series - Well, one of the problems, really - is that, two issues in, it's telling us nothing that we don't already know. The Joker's Daughter dies in issue 1, after saying that she's from another Earth, but we know that there are 51 other Earths already. In the second issue, the Joker tells us that he doesn't have a daughter, but why should that be a surprise? We were told just last issue that she was from another Earth... It's one thing to reveal these facts slowly to the characters, but the creators have to throw a bone to the readers to keep them happy as well, and there's nothing revelatory or even interesting in a good way about this second issue at all (Maybe if this series had come out prior to the end of 52, and we didn't know about the multimegaverse already, there would be some attempt at tension or mystery...?); it doesn't even have the fanboy outrage I got from the mess of the first issue that didn't introduce any of the characters properly.

Another of the problems, with this issue in particular, is the feeling that it's done by the non-star team. I have nothing against Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti or Jim Calafore - oh, alright, maybe Justin and I have a familial blood feud that has spanned generations, I admit it** - but their work on this issue seems competent at best; there's no excitement in the dialogue or the artwork, and overall it feels like a rushed fill-in already. Maybe this is intentional, in some way, down to the desire to keep a relatively homogenized "style" for the book despite the different creative teams each week (much in the same way that 52's art rarely shone), but it makes for very dull reading. Interestingly, Keith Giffen's name is missing from the credits for the second week running - Wasn't he meant to be doing layouts on this book?

Overall, it's a pretty depressing second week for the series; I'd hoped for a surprising second issue that made me more optimistic about the whole enterprise, or at least more interested. What I got instead was just pretty Eh.

(* - Also, I kind of like the weird metajoke about the All-Star Batman review being later than intended. I'm sorry.)

(** - This is not true. My family is small and has no feuds with anyone else, unless they've been keeping them secret from me.) Click Here to Read More...

Just one real fast while it's fresh in my mind:

COUNTDOWN #50: Forget everything I said last week, I really didn't like this one. At all. There's five scenes in here, and I'll leave the bookenders for last. There's a (very quick) Mary Marvel bit which is unobjectionable; there's a sequence with Batman and Karate Kid that doesn't (on the surface) appear to have anything directly to do with COUNTDOWN, and seems a bit more like an ad for the JLA/JSA crossover... unless that doesn't resolve in any significant fashion in which case, wtf; and there's a Rogue's sequence which is adequate, but a bit overlong for the information it needs to unfurl.

Then there's the Jimmy bookending stuff.

Uh... what?

Obvious question, first: Jimmy knows Batman's secret identity? And the entire history of his legacy? And that Jason impersonated Dick for a little while? Even if I accepted #1 & 2, how is #3 even possible? Kal that much of a blabbermouth?

But there's a writerly sin here, too, page 4, last caption, totally highlighted as the end of narration, boom end on "he's willing to kill". With this in mind, why the hell is Superman sending Jimmy in alone? For that matter, why isn't Superman apprehending him for his crimes? Hell, for THAT matter, why is Bruce sparring with Karate Kid a few pages later? His now rogue partner is involved with a meta-human death, and Bruce isn't man-on-the-scene? Really?

(this is actually why you probably don't WANT the Big Three in play in these things -- they're so overly competent, you have to write around them to get anything done)

But the bigger sin is in the end Jimmy scene, even more specifically on that last page. First off, the clumsy fake-cliffhanger of the last two panels (!) comes exactly out of nowhere, and has nothing to do with the rest of the scene, and since we can be relatively assured that Jimmy Olsen isn't going to die (at least this early in the game, and, frankly, probably ever), it's a wholly false cliffhanger. But even worse is that the whole thrust of the Joker scene concludes with information THE READER ALREADY KNOWS (well, or at least, and reader who actually knows who Duella Dent was in the first place... but they're the only ones who might possibly care, all 52 of us) (Heh)

Actually, back to the "cliffhanger" -- I just flashed that it made me think of DC CHALLENGE, a really horrible DC mini-series, where round-robin writers took turns trying to top themselves ("Bwah-ha-ha, how will [Adam or Sean, I don't recall who is next in rotation], get out of this?")

If it had just been the middle bits, I wouldn't have been enthusiastic, but, y'know, it was all OK, but those bookends just soured me on the whole deal. AWFUL.

Parenthetically, COUNTDOWN #51 had pretty poor first-week sales at CE; LAUNCHING at only 75% of 52 typical first-week sales. This concerns me especially, because I had thought the first issue at least would attract more eyes, and I ordered in the 133% range (the first three months are returnable, however... albeit costing us 29 cents a copy. I FOC'ed Week 47 (my first chance) right down to the minimum required for returnability (100% of 52), but I'm still going to be returning chunks. There's a mathematical point where eating the cost of returns isn't worth the tradeoff of not having to eat unsold product (call it like 4:1), but the problem is determining what the bottom is on this. If I look to COUNTDOWN #51 as analogous to 52 #1, in terms of ratios of preorders to rack sales, then project forward, COUNTDOWN will end up well below half of 52; the only question is will it "hit bottom"? By 52 #12, I pretty much had the right number, will history repeat itself here, or will I know by, say, #4 this time? (God, I hope so)

I felt liberated by the returnable experiment of 52 -- I ordered more copies than I thought I could sell, and it paid off handsomely. Here, I feel shackled by it -- in order to cover my bet, I can't bet below a minimum that I *know* is way way too high.

Wow, I typed way more than I wanted to. More... maybe Thursday? I still have to finish this @#$% TILTING, and we've got a visit to a prospective school for Ben tomorrow, too, which will swallow most of the afternoon, so, unless I feel itchy, maybe I should shoot for every other day (ha, again)

What did YOU think, anyway?

-B


PS: Bionic Woman trailer? Ugh. Click Here to Read More...

It's almost fitting that reviewing EMPOWERED has left me completely conflicted and at war with myself, considering that the book itself did exactly the same thing. Is it an annoyingly self-conscious, have-its-cake-and-eat-it book, or an honest examination into fanservice that betrays a knowing hypocrisy? Is Adam Warren creating a heroine that undercuts the fetishism of superheroes, or coming up with something that's even more fetishistic than usual? Did I enjoy the book, or really really hate it?

Too many questions! Makes... Hulk's... head... hurt!

The thing is, Empowered may be the most purposefully self-loathing comic that I've read. Which, considering I've read Ivan Brunetti's work and am a massive fan of Evan Dorkin, is saying something. But there's an art to the way that both of those creators deal with their obsessive compulsive needs to point out and apologize for their own shortcomings, and also a self-awareness; they point out why they think they're shit in such a way that both apologizes for and undercuts the problematic material. Empowered, on the other hand, apologizes and then goes on to do it again. And again. And again... at which point, for me at least, it becomes a weirdly-distancing crutch and excuse for not even trying anymore.

There are a couple of things that Warren, through eponymous heroine Empowered, apologizes for throughout the book - Firstly, the short chapters that start the book, and secondly, the masturbatory-material origins of the characters and the book itself. Both are kind of frustrating to see, because they both speak to the idea that the creator was helpless to do anything about them, which is entirely untrue. If you feel the need to create new pages to apologize for the choppy nature of the chapters at the beginning of the book, why not either (a) leave those chapters out of the book altogether, especially as they don't really add much in terms of "continuity" or plot, or (b) spend the time you've spent creating those new apology pages to create other new pages that help put those short pieces into something resembling a more coherent longer form, you know? Or, if you feel the need to not only apologize for the bondage cheesecake nature of the book, but also point out to the readers that the book has its origin in being commissions for fans with "special interests", then why do the book in the first place? Why work on something that you don't want to stand behind without saying sorry before you're even done?

I can't help but feel as if the apologies aren't so much genuine apologies but attempts to head (deserved) criticism off at the pass, which may be what frustrates me so much about them. Well, that and the feeling that instead of just acknowledging the problems with the book, Warren had taken some steps towards, you know, fixing them. Well, that and the other that, and the fact that despite everything, the book is really rather readable.

This is where I get conflicted and hedge my bets: Empowered, for all of the above, is still pretty Good. A lot of the faults are overpowered by Warren's art, which was always good but has never looked better than it does here, reproduced from pencils only, and his writing, which doesn't transcend the porny origins of the work but at least has fun with them. His dialogue is smart and witty, and even though the characters are little more than well-illustrated stereotypes with barely a little tweak, you end up liking them nonetheless.

I was going to say "you end up pulling for them," but figured that maybe that wouldn't be the best phrase to use, considering.

It may not be a perfect book, it's definitely not a book for everyone, but it does what it does well. If only it could do so without distracting you by saying sorry every two seconds.