The interesting thing about WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN #3 is that it's basically a microcosm of the whole event, in terms of my critical approach to it. See, it's not the kind of story I personally enjoy, so if I were to rate it subjectively, I'd give it an EH.

However, I can't ignore the fact that as a genre piece, WORLD WAR HULK and its tie-ins are actually doing a damn sight better than their predecessors - unlike "Civil War" or "House of M", the basic plot makes sense here, and that much-sought-after moral ambiguity manifests itself because on the one hand, you can sort of identify with the Hulk and his motives, but on the other hand, you can't really support his decision to destroy the rest of the Marvel Universe... though I suppose many readers would like nothing more than to see the Hulk crush Iron Man and the pro-reg morons. But, you know, realistically speaking, it's just not going to happen.

Of course, this is all window-dressing; the "point" of WORLD WAR HULK (perfectly encapsulated in WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN #3) is to provide the punchy-punchy and lots of explosions. It doesn't have to be profound, and I think Christos Gage understands that - after all, he built this three-issue miniseries around the shaky premise that the Hulk has targeted the X-Men based on what Xavier might have done, had he actually been present at that fateful Illuminati meeting. Of course, the logical error immediately presents itself: he wasn't there, and if the Hulk is going to attack every person who could have been involved in his exile, this crossover would last eight years. Moreover, if Gage were seriously trying to sell the plot, he'd have a pretty big hurdle to jump - we, as comic fans, know the Hulk won't kill Xavier because, as Rene Magritte would've put it, ceci n'est pas une X-Men comic.

Which is why, if you were to look at this comic in terms of narrative progression, what happens is the Hulk fights the X-Men, he fights them some more, Juggernaut turns up for a nicely-rendered double-page spread, and then Cessily of the New X-Men lectures the Hulk on all the crap mutants have to deal with. The Hulk, in awe of being out-angsted, takes off. It's pretty self-nullifying, in that the story has no real consequences for the Hulk or the X-Men (well, except for Juggernaut), but the battle is entertaining enough to justify the miniseries.

On a broader scale, there's a great degree of parallelism between what Gage is doing here and what Greg Pak is doing with the larger WORLD WAR HULK story. To some extent, it's all about Hulk vs. Superheroes, and while I may personally find it tedious, I can't fault it from a critical standpoint: Pak and the other WWH writers are doing exactly what they set out to do, and unlike Millar and Bendis, they're actually achieving their objectives rather than aim high and hit low. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN and its parent story make for a GOOD summer-actionfest-blockbuster type of comic, and it's probably all the more appealing to readers who are sick of debating the merits of Superhero Registration.

Labels: Diana

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I have no idea why I'm so surprised at just how gratuitous and disappointing GENE SIMMONS' DOMINATRIX #1 is. I mean, if ever there was a book that sounded as if it was going to be gratutous, it would be something called Gene Simmons' Dominatrix - And am I really the only person who's both disappointed and relieved that it's not a comic about Simmons' actual Dominatrix? Think of the rock star gossip and awkwardness that we've all missed out on - that was advertised with the line "T'n'A meets CIA". The cover art, as well, in its weird air-brushed glory, fit with the idea that this was going to be an entirely tawdry exercise, and yet... somehow, it still disappointed.

I think it's that there isn't even the slightest pretense of this being a comic about anything other than the apparent transgressiveness of having its central character be a Dominatrix. Ignore the flat dialogue that attempts to titilate (we see the main character at work, saying things like "Beg me for it worm... And maybe I'll let you have it," and also get her friends get excited about her job, saying things like "I want to hear more about this wack job that you beat up") or the ridiculous cheesecake artwork - You too can watch the main character's internal struggle as she washes dishes by focusing on her breasts! Look, she's so excited by daily household chores that her nipples are standing to attention! - and you're left with something that's so depressingly inept, it's almost comedic; a spy is so excited by his session with his dominatrix that he accidentally blurts out a secret so bad that he immediately gets kidnapped. But that's okay, because he has a magic pill that gives him superpowers - but he doesn't take it, he gives it to his dominatrix, because... um... well, just because! And then she beats this guy up! Because that's what dominatrixes do (There's even a caption where she feels guilty about it, because she's not getting paid to hurt him)! And then, after she beats up the bad guy, instead of trying to do anything about the guy she saw kidnapped, or the secret she's apparently learned that is so dangerous that said guy gets kidnapped, she goes home to have some tea. Only to get ambushed by a super sexy spy who's also dressed in fetish wear!

Of course, when you read the text piece at the back, suddenly the story itself seems like high art. Especially when you get to the quote from Gene Simmons' original pitch for the series: "maybe one zipper going UP HER BACKSIDE (the guys have a zipper in the front...she has a zipper in the back-easy access!!)"

"Easy access," ladies and gentlemen.

Oh, it gets worse. That text page is supposedly written by the fictional lead character, who asks the female readers of the book to send in photos of themselves for Gene Simmons to pick his favorite out of, which is kind of unsettling on all manner of levels (That they have to do so calling themselves "submissives" and be dressed in their "best s&m or m&m outfit (after all, we all know chocolates and leather go well together)" just adds to the "Oh, Jesus, Gene Simmons is looking for free masturbatory material" moment). Add that to the artwork in the story that completely objectifies its heroine and the script that fails to pull a sympathetic lead character out of its various scenes but does succeed in making her unfulfilled, lonely and a sellout (There's a couple of scenes where the tone of her narration is "Well, anything for the money") in the process, and you're left with a book about a woman in charge - although, yes, you can make the argument that a dominatrix is another male fantasy object and not in charge as just subservient to men in a different way - where the overall feeling is one of women being mistreated and abused more or less as usual in the industry. Crap, then. Click Here to Read More...

This week is clearly a Big Win for DC -- Marvel barely put out even nine comics this week.

AMAZONS ATTACK! #6: There is absolutely positively no way to discuss this issue without being spoilery, so AVERT THINE EYES, MADAME, if you care about not having the ending ruined!

I haven't exactly been thrilled by this series from the start, because while the premise was self-explanatory, I was more interested in WHY the Amazons Attacked (as well as the HOW of it, since last I recall, they'd been sent off forever to be with the Greek Gods).

We get a little of that, but none of it was very satisfying for this reader -- a bit of hand-waving of "oooh, magic!", I guess. Circe, for what appears to be no good reason, brings Polly back from the dead using some of her own soul, which makes Polly all evil 'n stuff, but that really doesn't explain any of the OTHER Amazons' action, or how/why the bana-whatever are involved (since, again, last I remembered, the bana-whatevers and the themy-whatever branches didn't like each other at all, and hadn't been reconciled)

But, ah, it was all a feint within a feint, as the last page reveals that the New Gods have usurped the Old Gods. How? No clue -- in fact, GG always struck me as pretty much the weakest of the New Gods, with her only powers being "being haggard and cranky". Another 2-3 pages of the hows and whys would have been so much better.

I guess the premise is "have the population hate Diana that much more", though there isn't any story indication that *actually* worked, really. Instead, it just becomes a mess -- Paradise Island is back (Superman can hear it!), but Diana doesn't seem to give a fuck. Instead, she's worrying about Nemesis, and Sarge Steel in her next issue. Clark apparently doesn't/can't perceive Polly being on the isle, and no one seems to really be at all concerned where the Amazons (each roughly on par with Diana... therefore each roughly on par with Clark, yes?) all went. For that matter, none of the JSAers seem to be especially concerned about their fellow JSAer Polly. Oh well.

Where are the Amazons? Stealing an idea from Grant Morrison, and his White Martian story, they're all spliced into GenPop, but without their memories. I could vaguely sorta accept that in the former case, because there were only 7 of them, but in the Amazon's case, there has to be thousands upon thousands of them, and it seems to be a bit much to swallow. Either way, either this will be entirely ignored until someone wants to put Paradise Isle back together, or it will be some major plot point in FINAL CRISIS. I'm expecting the former, however.

So: to recap: the amazons are rescued from "limbo", attack for no special reason, have no lasting impact, then are basically thrown back into limbo again, waiting for a better plot to come along.

AWEsome!

No, wait, I mean... "AWFUL"

OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND: GRACE & WONDER WOMAN: Strangely this sorta pissed me off even more -- Grace is now "retconned" (well, it could have been the plan from the start) to be a Bana-mazon, but the big magical spell that GG cast to splice the Amazons back into GenPop didn't work on her. Dunno why -- there's no story reason given. But here's the thing: Diana FINDS OUT that the amazons are spliced into GenPop, without memories (that took a while, huh?), but doesn't seem to give one fuck at all. Anyway, why even bother to have that kind of a "mystery" at the end of AA if the SAME WEEK you let the one character who would be most interested know about it? How does that make sense? Putting aside that whole "are the DC editors even talking to one another?" question, this issue wasn't a miss; in fact the last two issue of this five more or less redeemed the whole series. I liked the characterizations and the interplay between Diana and Grace, and the plot moved briskly at least. If Diana wasn't such a "We don't know WHAT to do with her!" character these days, I'd've liked this better. As it is: reasonably EH.

COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1: It is unfortunately titled -- after all the title says it is leading TO adventure, not that there is any adventure contained within. Which is kind of true -- the closest you get to adventure is Cliff wanting to whack-off to Kory's sleeping body (Read this immediately after "AUNTS IN YOUR PANTS #1" for more amusingly perverse ideas). Like Graeme, I liked the idea of Adam Strange being thrown over for Steve "Champ" Hazard (a great name), but telegraphing him as a complete psycho-beast is sloppy sloppy storytelling. The Forerunner stuff was at least adequate, even if I don't buy any one's motivation -- but its basically just an extended origin sequence, and the future-adventure setup seems to be "What Jason and Donna are doing, except evil", which doesn't have me rushing for more, exactly. That said, I like the idea of a parallel earth where all of the planets of the Solar System have a sentient race, and they all hate earth. That's an OK sci-fi high concept. It veers close to being GOOD, but I think we'll stick with OK for now.


What did YOU think?


-B

Labels: Brian

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Back in late April, I bought the Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection boxed set off Amazon for a pretty good price. In early May, Edi and I started watching the show (I had seen most of the show when it was first aired, Edi hadn't seen anything) at the rate of an episode or two (almost) every night, and a few weeks ago we finally came to the end. It happened the same day I read the abridged print version of Joss Whedon's interview with the Onion A.V. Club, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer #5, and it occurred to me I was pretty well situated to talk about the new comic in relation to the show, and maybe kick around some thoughts about both the show and Whedon generally. I cannot guarantee at the outset I'll get anywhere interesting with it. It'll include spoilers of the series, and require that you be familiar with the show: I tried writing a sensible overview of the whole phenomena and it couldn't have been duller or more imbecilic. Also, you'll notice this essay neatly detours around the significant influence of the other talented writers on BTVS the show, and the writers-to-come for BTVS: Season Eight. Although I think there's some very interesting material to be explored there, it'll have to wait for another time. This damn thing is big enough as it is.

As you know, I'm usually most interested in the crunchy subtext, and BTVS is a particularly interesting show for that. In part, this is because Whedon and crew were particularly facile with metaphor and subtext; there's the initial conceit of the show, of course--high school as a horror movie--but also the subtextual stuff going on in particular stories and arcs, such as the genius twist of Season Two's "Innocence" where Angel turns evil after sleeping with Buffy. But BTVS is also particularly interesting because that initial conceit gets thrown out after four years, and the show goes on for another three with an official eighth season now turning up in print. Whedon has said in the past he intended to start BTVS, get it established, leave it in capable hands, and then go off and do other stuff. Yet, he continues to return to the character. And why is that? Is it because as long as people are interested in the Buffyverse and willing to be milked of their hard-earned cash, Whedon is interested in showing up every morning with the milking pail?

Well, sure. Whedon is always swinging for the fences of pop culture fame, and I have no doubt he wants Buffy on t-shirts, and lunch boxes, and action figures, and in cartoons. He wants that because he strongly believes Buffy represents a special turning point for the roles of women in heroic literature, and it would be a great thing to have little girls have a strong ass-kicking hero they believe in. He also wants that because, like any other individual who works in Hollywood, he is well and truly aware of how much money those sorts of things make, and how much power is conferred to someone who reaps that cash harvest.

But, interestingly, Whedon is one of those artists for whom material considerations and limitations tend to improve rather than impair his work: If Seth Green wants to leave to pursue movies, it'll turn out to be the perfect time to move Willow in a completely new direction for her relationships. If Cordelia has to leave to be part of Angel, they'll bring back Anya. Although he's complained against needless and stupid changes made by others to his screenplays, Whedon will happily change his own stories in the crafting, break and bend the rules of his own mythology, and the joy he takes in doing so more often than not is experienced by his audience. (I previously wrote very briefly about this ability, which Graeme had quite correctly referred to as cockiness, here.) And although he's happy to break his own rules, he's exceptionally faithful to certain storytelling precepts, such as giving the viewers a strongly defined conclusion. One of the things that struck me watching the seasons one after the other is that with the exception of Season Four (the Adam/Initiative arc) and maybe Season Six, one could stop watching after the end of the season and feel satisfied. In the first season, Buffy owns her power. At the end of the second season, Buffy learns the cost of having that power (and runs from it). In the third season, she and the gang graduate from high school. And although I disliked a great chunk of Season Five, I admired the moxie of the ending being both definitive and open-ended. (Considering my memories of seasons six and seven, I was tempted to tell Edi, "Hey, you know, let's just pretend that was the end of the series." I'm glad I didn't.) In some ways, it was this desire to give Buffy a complete arc each season that made it harder and harder to do more things with the character as time went on, and force other characters into the spotlight more and more.

So the idea of Buffy: Season Eight in comics can stem from both Whedon's desire to make more cash, to give the brand that much more power, and his desire to tell a story, to have something to say that he can best say with Buffy and the characters of the Buffyverse. Or rather, the idea that Season Eight might be a bit of a cash grab won't stop him from developing a story with something meaningful to say. What should be interesting is seeing if we can tell from the first five issues of Buffy: Season Eight what Whedon might want to say, or what he might end up saying.

As I mentioned, BTVS was built around the "high school as horror movie" conceit it abandoned after three years (although I think the "college is hell" conceit for Season Four works pretty well, too). These conceits are successful in part because the same fears of powerlessness (and, also, a corresponding fear of power) that fuel horror movies are part and parcel of teenage life. As the series goes on, Whedon becomes more interested in that fear of power, and the cost of power, than the fear of powerlessness. Being the Slayer is a terrible responsibility for Buffy: the early seasons show her complaining about how it screws up her chance for a normal life, and the later seasons show exactly how it screws her up. A lot of what I found thought was careless plot hammering in later seasons the first time I watched became clearer on rewatching--even though it bites her on the ass time and time again, Buffy keeps secrets from her friends; she struggles with feelings of superiority and callousness that come from her power; she equates sex with danger; and she is too quick to accept responsibility for things that happen, to the point of defensiveness. Buffy learns lessons and moves forward with each season's arc, but she doesn't always become a better person or learn the right lesson--for most of Season Seven, for example, she's an insufferable ass (although what part of that is weaknesses in Sarah Michelle Gellar's portrayal--she clearly is ready to leave the show by this point--and what part of that are strident speeches made by Whedon on the price of being a leader, I leave for a smarter viewer than I to suss out). One nice trick in BTVS the TV show is the use of history (the school subject) continually being used as a metaphor for, well, History: at the beginning of the show, it's the subject Buffy has the most trouble with but as time goes on, her relationship to the subject grows more complex: sometimes people talk as if she's a natural at the subject, other times the nuances of it elude her. But it's never a topic she can dismiss: in Whedon's universe (and in the Whedonverse), history is inescapable. No matter how she tries to run, or what she tries to hide, the history of the Slayer lineage (or what she's done, or who she's slept with, or how she's fighting) is always inescapable.

I suspect, in fact, this is the reason Whedon was never able to break away from Buffy. The struggles of Buffy, one of a long line of vampire slayers, to accept that lineage is something that perhaps struck close to home with Whedon, a third-generation TV writer. Despite his attempts to be a screenwriter and filmmaker, Whedon was through all of Buffy the TV show, only successful in the medium of his father and his grandfather. Like Buffy, he couldn't escape his lineage and, like Buffy, Whedon grew most powerful embracing it and using the resulting power to exert control over it. (Now that I think about it, like Slayers, television writers are vitally dependent on their watchers. To what extent might Buffy's complex relationship with the Watchers' Council--she's fond of hers, but dismissive of the power the others try to exert on Slayers--mirror Whedon's relationship with the people who it possible for him to make a living?) I wonder if all the frustration and ambivalence and outright fear Buffy expresses of her power and responsibility are echoes of what Whedon went through during the making of the show (and Angel, and Firefly)--the frustration, ambivalence, and fear of an artist saying: "Yes, this is what I can do well. But is this all I'm going to be able to do?"

In the first four issues of Season Eight--the equivalent of one TV episode--Buffy is the leader of a worldwide group of Slayers, and she's more comfortable in her power. Xander is the Nick Fury-like organizer of the group, Willow is her powerful back-up, and Giles is her recruiter and diplomat in the supernatural world. In issue five, The Chain, a Buffy decoy dies trying to carry on Buffy's name, saying, "There is a chain between each and every one of us. And like the man said, you either feel its tug or you ignore it." Because the Buffy decoy does so, she takes solace even as she dies, saying "You don't even know who I am. But I do." While this suggests Whedon is more comfortable with the idea of one's place in history being irrelevant as long as you know who you are and where you come from, the use of the chain--a symbol of bondage, slavery and oppression--as the connector points to continuing ambivalence. (Or maybe I'm wrong, and the bondage Whedon talks about is his connection to Buffy and the Buffyverse, the possibility of being "the Buffy guy" for the rest of his career?)

In any event, Season Eight suggests that Buffy is more comfortable in her roles as leader and as Slayer, and Whedon more comfortable in his role as "the Buffy guy" and these are both comforts that couldn't be conveyed on TV, since in this medium Buffy is free of Gellar's "get me the hell out of here" airs and Whedon is free of his "what the hell am I doing still working in TV?" frustrations. In fact, free seems to be word of the day for Season Eight. Whedon is free of the concerns of a show's budget and he can deliver visuals as big as he can think of: the first four issues of Buffy have had magical battles, dream sequences, an army of zombies fighting an army of Slayers, dragons, castle raids...the list goes on.

And yet, this freedom may prove to be Season Eight's biggest weakness: all those scenes in the TV show of Buffy and crew in the library or the magic shop researching their enemy was a clever way to have the characters be proactive without spending more precious money on new sets, new effects, new fights--but it's also where Whedon and his writers were better able to make us care about the characters. (As I mentioned above, Whedon is one of those artists whose work apparently gets better under material considerations and restrictions.) At five issues in, I can give you a rough idea about what's happening with all of the above characters, but I can't recall reading a scene from the books that actually would have made me care in its own right--the emotional impact comes only from the affection I already have for the characters. Whedon points out in that Onion AV interview it's going to be harder for him to create what he calls "juice"--to create a character in the comics that has any of the appeal of someone on the show--but I think even more challenging may be taking a creator who's always drawn tremendous amounts of inspiration from his actors (what would BTVS had been like if James Marsters had never read for Spike, originally a one-off villain?) and giving him nothing to bounce off of but his ideas, his editor, and the book's art. The work on Season Eight so far has been pretty and competent, but more than occasionally rushed and never particularly inspired. Finally, there's been talk about Season Eight taking place over fifty or sixty issues, which is four to five years of real time. That's certainly plenty of time to craft a sweeping mega-epic, but is it possibly too much time? (If Season Five had lasted five years, I would've bailed and never come back long ago...) In fact, the last three seasons might've fared better at twelve or thirteen episodes each instead of twenty-two. Unless Season Eight has well-planned plateaus--areas that feel like climaxes even if they aren't the arc's ultimate one--it could take far too long (and cost far too much) for the audience to stay interested.

I think Whedon's idea for the arc (Buffy may have found peace, but the U.S. military--and maybe the world--is clearly still quite afraid of her power, and, I'm guessing, but just as Season Seven had the uber-vamp, Season Eight will have a Slayer-Slayer) and his enthusiasm for the comics medium will make his run worth reading. I certainly have enough affection for his characters that knowing what's happening to them next is tremendously appealing. But if Season Eight hits none of the remarkable high notes of the TV series, maybe that shouldn't be a tremendous surprise: lineage or no, it took Whedon a lot of time to become a master of the TV format. It might be naive to think, despite his considerable talents, he'll be able to do as much with the comics medium in a much shorter (and yet, thanks to the miracle of publication schedules, much longer) time. Ultimately, what may serve Whedon best may be what he'll least want to do--take some huge risks with the Buffy characters and the comics medium in the hopes of coming up with something new. If nothing else, taking such risks might help him identify again with the fear of powerlessness, and bring his relationship with Buffy full circle.

I guess like any good set of Watchers, We'll just have to wait and see.

Labels: Jeff

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Okay, so so much for that "returning and beginning again" thing yesterday - That's what happens when you suddenly find yourself working a 13-hour day the night before and being unable to get to the store to pick up new books to read, apparently. That's what I get for letting other people at my company to get sick without my permission, it seems.

(Also: People who say that they want me to write more on this site? I'm flattered and all - and ignore any potential snark there, because I genuinely am - but convinced you mean someone else. I already write almost daily on here...)

(Also also: Thank you very much to everyone who's contributed via the Paypal link, by the way. I will now try and review some comics to earn my share.)

52 AFTERMATH: THE FOUR HORSEMEN #1: I don't know if it says more about how much I enjoyed 52 or how little I'm enjoying Countdown that I find the follow-ups from the previous weekly miniseries so much more interesting than the goings-on in the current universe-shaking mini. That extends even to this Okay opening issue of the spin-off of one of the more disappointing elements of the Morrison/Johns/Rucka/Waid series; despite the overly expositionary dialogue - the Veronica Cale/Wonder Woman scenes in particular are leaden with the feeling of "this is what you're supposed to know" infodump - Keith Giffen manages to pull an initial swerve with the recasting of the Horsemen as spirits possessing survivors and emergency workers in the remains of Black Adam's 52-ending rampage. It's an unusual book - it feels too subtle and dark for both Superman and Wonder Woman to be starring in, in a strange way - but one that's almost worth paying attention to, for that very reason.

COUNTDOWN #35: Wow, cruel trick to lure in readers with a JG Jones cover only to hit them with Manuel Garcia's less impressive art on the inside (To be fair to Garcia, I think a lot of the problem is with the inking; if there was more variation in line weight, things would look a lot better). Storywise, the book is as disappointing. Not only is the script overly reliant on cute scene transitions and flat dialogue ("What if, together, [Kyle Rayner], Jason Todd and Donna Troy decide to navigate the multiverse in their search?" asks one of the Monitors, and instead of you thinking "That would be terrible!", you think "Oh, like all of the already-solicited spin-offs, you mean?"), but the plot is equally reliant on unsuccessful cliffhangers (Did any of the cliffhangers from last issue end in a way that surprised anyone?), nonsensical plot developments and absolutely atrocious pacing. Continually disappointing, and still pretty Crap...

COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1: ...But this, on the other hand, turns out to be surprisingly Good. Maybe I'm just a soft touch for a story that sees Adam Strange replaced by a man called Steve Hazard - Apparently, you can't defend Rann unless you have a wonderfully melodramatic name - and treats its characters with respect and affection instead of interchangable chess pieces in some crazy sales plan, but this was very much better than it had any right to be. Congratulations should be flying in the direction of Adam Beechen and Eddy Barrows (who provides some clean art here, with the occasional Rags Morales touch in places) for this one, because, really, who saw heart and fun coming from this book when it was announced?

Labels: Graeme

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Infamy is a tricky thing.

It has a way of making your work slightly immortal, in that a title's mention might cause a listener's ears to perk, and their mind to wander through all the books they've ever read, searching for the source of that scratchy feeling they've suddenly got. For years, if someone were to utter the words Boiled Angel in front of me at my junior year winter formal or my younger sister's Holy Confirmation or something, I'd react. Internally, but instantly. They are trigger words. But I'd hardly read ten panels of Mike Diana's work in those years. It was only the infamy that hit me.

Stephen R. Bissette once wrote of his infamous horror anthology, Taboo, in its next-to-last volume:

"I'm glad Taboo was gutted like an organ bank while it was still walking, that it was heartlessly abandoned by its creators. Taboo demanded so much, more than I could continue to give. No longer possessed like a madman, no longer wishing to be a thankless midwife and proprietor to its insatiable needs, I, too, abandoned it, leaving it as everyone else had: unwanted, dismembered and exsanguinated, its rank heat dissipating in an unforgiving night.

"Undead."

Immortal, undead... but what is the character of these mad and dreadful things? It's easy to shock yourself on the internet - why, just yesterday I visited a popular anime review site, and treated myself to a summary of a new rape/humiliation porno production, with a surgical experimentation theme. Brain transplant bestiality, a forced sex change operation... shocks come so easy these days. But infamy carries the weight of history, and captures a bit of time it was born in. I often find my response to infamy is superficial - I react only to the prior reactions of others, in that I react to the charge of infamy itself. It's better to get up close, and really rub my face in notorious comics. Right in the store parking lot! I don't care if they all stare! They can't hurt me with their eyes and laughs. My car will snuggle me like Mother.

Anyway, Taboo makes for a perfect study, being a pretty infamous series, and one rich in history. The most infamous of all of its ten volumes is the second one, cleverly titled Taboo 2, but some background will also help.

Taboo was first published in 1988, though it was conceived years prior, while Bissette and John Totleben worked on DC's The Saga of the Swamp Thing, which most of you know became a very popular horror series with the addition of writer Alan Moore in 1984. Perhaps fired up by this success, the two artists cooked up the idea of a whole anthology of new horror comics, one that would press the form toward the horror frontiers explored by other arts.

Mark Askwith (comics writer and event producer) provided the title, and Dave Sim initially planned to fund and publish it under his Aardvark One International line of comics-that-aren't-Cerebus, an effort that would actually only produce one title, the 1986-89 Stephen Murphy/Michael Zulli series the Puma Blues, which eventually became embroiled in a distribution controversy between Sim and Diamond, the scintillating details of which I shall save for my multi-part Puma Blues coverage at some point in the future. The important part is that Sim got out of the business of publishing anything other than Cerebus, and Bissette opted to publish the book under his and then-wife Nancy O'Connor's SpiderBaby Grafix & Publishing; by that time Totleben had backed away from active participation, although he retained co-creator credit.

That first volume of Taboo, released in 1988, has some nice stuff in it. There's a nice introduction by Clive Barker, who was later supposed to be a bit more present in the series, in that Bissette had planned to serialize a comics adaptation of Barker's short story Rawhead Rex with the aforementioned Mr. Zulli collaborating on the visuals. That project had originated at Arcane Publishing with rights holder Steve Niles; however, after Arcane's option expired (and Arcane went out of publishing), it was purchased by Eclipse, a publisher Bissette & Zulli opted not to work with. The adaptation was eventually published by Eclipse in 1993, written by Niles himself, with art by Les Edwards.

As for the actual comics in that first Taboo (ah, comics, yes yes...), there was a surreal Alan Moore/Bill Wray piece, about a woman who finds the energy to feel alive while sitting in the studio audience of a suicide game show. Eddie Campbell provided some reportage on the strange Australian case of The Pyjama Girl. Charles Burns presented Contagious, the first iteration of his teen sex plague idea that would culminate in Black Hole. Some interesting stuff.

But Taboo 2 is where the infamy really began.

After the ordeal of publication was over, Bissette recounted the history of Taboo 2 in the 1990 debut issue of Gauntlet. This tale would later be reprinted in Taboo itself, as the last thing in its final issue. A parting bow.

Having assembled the contents for Taboo 2, Bissette sensed there might be trouble due to three features: one from underground comics veteran S. Clay Wilson (who'd also appeared in the first Taboo), one from Cara Sherman-Tereno, and one from Zulli. Wilson's piece proved especially contentious - enough so that co-publisher/spouse O'Connor declined her editing credit on the volume, receiving instead an "assistant editor" credit with Totleben.

The book was sent for printing at the Canadian house that handled the first Taboo. It refused to print the material, perhaps owing to the political climate in Canada at the time (so Bissette mused). The materials were then sent to a US printer, which declined the job on grounds of sexual content. A third printer agreed to take the job.

But you know, you're never quite aware of how many steps it takes to create and release a finished book (circa 1989) until you read a litany of troubles like the one that followed. A typesetting house refused the project, as did two copy shops. As did a color separation outfit. A different separation outfit, approached to handle the back and inside covers, had to be assured that certain symbols on display were not Satanic. Upon approaching a bindery, the book was refused because the people there believed incorrectly that John Totleben had drawn a vagina somewhere in his front cover art. Nine binderies refused the book in sum.

Finally, the damned thing was released in the Autumn of 1989, all 10,000 copies. Some of which were then seized and destroyed in customs busts in Canada and the UK. At the end of 1989, Bissette was refused a business loan by his bank, which had handled the prior issue's money, for the purposes of reprinting the volume.

That is infamy.

But what is in this infamous book? How do the controversial pages work?

It's easy enough to start with Wilson, who provided four full-page drawings, tucked away in a section called S. Clay Wilson's Black Pages, festooned with skulls and CAUTION AVOID EYE CONTACT! stamps, thoughts from underground ally Tom Veitch printed on both sides.

I'm going to get a bit graphic for the next four paragraphs.

Drawing #1 is titled Rebel Reject Robots Dally with the Bastard Daughters of Corrupt Technocrats. It depicts robots (really metal-flesh cyborg things) waging war against naked or near-naked women, setting hair on fire with lasers, choking and raping, etc.

Drawing #2 is titled Rotting Zombie Harpies Dispatch a Vampire. In it, several nude women with rotten, torn flesh hold a naked vampire aloft, one of them stretching and tearing his penis with her teeth while another thrusts a stake through his heart. Dual phallic power seized, you see.

Drawing #3 is titled The Checkered Demon and a Vampire messmate "Race to the Bottom." A vampire with a thin mustache and glasses sucks blood from a (mostly naked) woman's neck with a straw, while Wilson's signature lil' devil creation snorts something out of the woman's vagina via glass apparatus. A bottle of Fuck You Beer sits on the floor, for those who choose to look.

Drawing #4 is titled The Merry Makers Parade By... Oblivious to the Odious Acts in the Alley. This scene presents a man standing in a filthy alley, holding a club in one hand and his grotesquely engorged S. Clay Wilson-type penis in the other, a woman laying on the ground bloodied and with her face caved in. Off to the side stands another man, clutching a smaller naked girl, a finger pressed into her mouth. The merry makers indeed parade by in the background, appropriately oblivious.

On one hand, it's easy to see why many might balk at this material. It wouldn't be any easier a sell today, I suspect.

But on the other hand, I can't say it's all that unexpected as per its place in the S. Clay Wilson catalog. He'd been doing that sort of stuff for a long time by 1989. And more pertinently, his presence in Taboo establishes a link to the past, a sort of continuity between what was taboo then, and what is taboo now (meaning 1989). While a wholly new reader might indeed by stunned by the garish drive of Wilson's vision -- all wild detail and goony faces and nervous energy -- other readers may not react at all beyond the understanding of Wilson's place in comics history. The prior issue of Taboo ran a drawing by the late Greg Irons, another underground artist - it would later run a story by horror magazine stalwart Jack Butterworth, and the first English translation of Alejandro Jodorowsky's and Moebius' debut collaboration, Les yeux du chat.

Does this mean the Wilson material isn't in here for nasty shocks? Oh heavens, no. I remind you: skulls and CAUTION stamps. But the distance we're allowed by time affords us a greater chance of looking at this potent material, and seeing its place in Taboo as part of chain of horrors, a tradition the series reflected on and carried forward. This is among the benefits of examining infamy, this distance.

What of the other stories Bissette suspected as shocking? Well, Cara Sherman-Tereno's story (actually a two-chapter serial set back-to-back, the first half dating back to 1978) is an overwrought bisexual vampire saga, notable mainly for some outrageous phallic symbols and a straightforward interest in addressing topics like AIDS. It's a middling piece of socially aware subgenre horror, although I suspect the semi-graphic gay sex bits set off a few alarms somewhere. Its presence in Taboo indicates an egalitarian approach to sexual subject matter, as well as a desire to apply horror tropes to then-contemporary pressing subjects. Quite simple.

And then, there's Zulli's Mercy. Plotwise, it's nothing striking. A sleeping man is haunted by plenty of ye olde Catholic guilt, sexual shame mixing with punishment, and so he wakes up and snips off his penis with a pair of scissors. Th' end!

No, this story's importance to the Taboo tapestry is that it demonstrates the series' devotion to exploring the graphic capabilities of the comics form. Anyone who's read the Puma Blues knows that Zulli is very capable of smartly handling bold and complicated visual concepts, on top of his obvious ability to render delicate, precise realist characters, as often seen in his works with Neil Gaiman.

Here, he provides several tight arrangements of vertical and horizontal panels, whipping from childhood flashbacks to images of Christ being scourged without warning, varying panel height and width to control the impact of specific moments. And all atop everything -- not confined to caption boxes but spilling across bunches of panels at once -- are all of the story's words, all of them being heard in the main character's head, fonts galore and sizes varying. The subtlest thoughts are squirreled away between panels, almost too out of the way for the reader to find - this is fitting, since they are the thoughts that lay deepest in the slumbering character's psyche. They are also the only ones to carry over to the otherwise wordless waking action, punctuating the gory finale with the aftershock of nightmare.

It's simply excellent work. Zulli would handle a fine, if more stylistically subdued adaptation of Ramsey Campbell's Again in Taboo 5. But he would also become something of a phantom of lost projects; along with his and Bissette's Rawhead Rex project, Zulli would also get involved in perhaps 'the' big unfinished Taboo project: his and Gaiman's Sweeny Todd, which only appeared in volumes 6 and 7 (and the volume 6 entry was actually a preview book that only came wrapped with the preordered segment of vol. 6's print run - good luck finding it today).

Still, other graphic experiments were present. Taboo 2 also featured a story by writer Tim Lucas and Simonida Perica-Uth, a fascinating little piece of words and pictures going off in two directions. Lucas' words, set out in plain typeface against blocks of white, tells of a metaphorical domestic drama about a wife who can only conceive when her distant husband speaks to her during lovemaking, though his silence is imprinted on their children. It's strange, gently surreal, and more disquieting than anything. Meanwhile, Perica-Uth presents each page as a collage, heavy on ancient Egyptian images and little flights of whimsy, like cartoon sperm floating in the sky. The arrangements of Perica-Uth's human figures do generally match what Lucas is writing about, but the approach dislodges the plot from a magical realist houshold world, and plunges it into an imaginary space of cosmic forces fucking and posing, pinning myth on workings of love.

Lucas was perhaps the most effective of Taboo's relative comics novices; he was (and remains) primarily a film critic, one who innovated the now-common approach of considering video and print quality while reviewing movies released for home viewing. He later founded Video Watchdog, and recently published Mario Bava - All the Colors of the Dark, an 1128-page, full-color hardcover monster with over 1000 images and a manuscript running nearly 800,000 words in length.

In Taboo, he primarily wrote a serial called Throat Sprockets, a sort of non-vampire story about a mysterious sexploitation film that pops up in a grindhouse, its images prompting an intense fetish for neck-biting in viewers. The best chapter was in Taboo 3, a wildly veering piece of reflection on ephemeral relationships, so jarring in its transitions and pace that it teeters right on the line of pressing ambition and simple incompetence - a little like the best exploitation films! The project was never finished in Taboo, or in the comics form at all, though Lucas eventually revised it all into a prose novel.

Indeed, that might be the last quality of Taboo, one discernable through the infamy - leaving things undone. Another serial debuted in Taboo 2: a little something called From Hell, which teamed two the prior issue's seperate contributors, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. It wouldn't finish in Taboo. Not a lot did.

Taboo kept running into money troubles. Moebius' Starwatcher Graphics kicked in a little money. For Taboo 4, Kevin Eastman's Tundra kicked in a lot. It was needed - as of Taboo 5, Canadian and UK distributors would no longer solicit orders, essentially limiting the book's readership to the US. By that time, Taboo was being published in association with Tundra, and Bissette became involved in other matters with the company. A special issue came out. Taboo 6 and 7, last one in 1992.

Bissette had many problems with Tundra, not the least of them his feeling that its decision to publish From Hell as a standalone comic in addition to its Taboo serialization effectively crippled his sales. And then nothing. Bissette left Tundra. And then Tundra melted into Kitchen Sink. And in 1995, Bissette came to Kitchen Sink and released Taboo 8 and 9, two 'coda' volumes stitched together from the remains of an unpublished sexual abuse awareness special, unseen bits of since-completed serials like Throat Sprockets and Jeff Nicholson's Through the Habitrails, and other paid-for odds 'n ends. Kitchen Sink didn't publish comics for much longer. Taboo was never seen again.

But I can still recall seeing images from Taboo. From the Kitchen Sink catalog I got by dialing the telephone number in the collected edition of The Crow. I heard stories about it, somehow. Hell, some of them probably went around for the purposes of selling some back copies. But it worked, you know? The stories. I'd hear 'Taboo,' and I'd know it was something bad. It'd get me like that. I know it better now, and I'm glad. I can feel the history on it. The life experience of the old ghost, still haunting.

Labels: Jog

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Like Jeff said, you being active in some way really DOES matter -- whether it is giving us a buck, or even just posting to the comments threads, it keeps us going knowing that people ARE interested.

So, since like 25% of the people posting in the shipping list thread asked, let's talk about Asshats.

I like that word, because it's really only sort of a swear -- it sounds dirtier than it really is, I think, because for me it really is more about idiocy than anything else. After all, who needs a hat for one's ass? It would quickly fall off!

(Mechanical) things are the way that they are in the DM for what are usually actually very very sound reasons. That's not to suggest or imply that the DM is perfect, or that there aren't 47 different things that go wrong in the execution, but when you look at the underlying principles behind, say, the solicitation process, they evolved into what they are because they work for the participants of the DM.

There's a reason, for example, that books generally ship monthly -- much slower than that, and the audience is much more prone to drift; much less than that, and the audience gets confused whether they've bought an issue or not.

Honestly! *one* of the (many) reasons we put in a POS system was that we get asked "did I buy this already?" quite a bit. MOST comics readers don't come in weekly. MOST don't have a pull list. MOST don't read the news sites. MOST aren't totally-organized in their collecting, making themselves lists or whatever.

So, for me, screwing with how-the-customer-buys is just an idiotic thing to do. And that makes you an Asshat.

There's no way I'm going to do this every week -- because there's weeks where no one was especially egregious, or there's nothing meaningful to say, or there's some really valid other reason. But sometimes you get some pretty obvious boners, and it's worth handing out the Award for Auspicious Asshattery.

There's even TWO this week!

AAA #1 goes to LOCAL #10. Holy, frickin' cow, this book was supposed to ship in NOVEMBER 2006. Nine months late? Are you insane? And you have the AUDACITY to not resolicit? I deeply deeply love much of what Oni puts out, but they have some of the sloppiest shipping schedules in the business. Listen: freakin' AVATAR is a more-likely-to-hit-their-shipdates publisher these days (Avatar has, to their credit, seemed to have mostly solved their shipping problems)

AAA #2 goes to an old friend of Asshattery: Robert Kirkman and WALKING DEAD #41. Dude, #40 came out LAST FUCKING WEEK. Double-you-tee-eff? Man, am I going to be swimming in "did I buy this?" questions for the next few weeks! I repeat: MOST comics customers don't come in weekly. Don't undercut your own sales. What's funny is that I believe that if WALKING DEAD shipped on an old-school schedule, like how I know that some of you could remember the days when you could set your clocks by comics -- BATMAN came out the second week of the month without fail, or whatever -- anyway, if I could tell people, "yeah, WD comes out the last week of the month, guaranteed", we'd be selling 30% more copies just like that. WD would be a top *50* comic, y'know? And the ironic thing is that I tend to suspect that with the freakish exception of MARVEL ZOMBIES, as a creator-owned book under the Image deal, Kirkman pretty much has to be making more money off of WD than any of his page-rate Marvel work.

What really makes this harder for me is that I GENUINELY like WALKING DEAD. There may be sequences I hate (like the rape stuff), but over all this is pretty much certainly Image's strongest and most consistent book. If I had written reviews last week (ah, sorry, sorry, it was order form week with a new computer system, and new hybrid method of taking orders!), I would have given #40 an "Excellent", full of wonderful and vivid characterization.

Which brings me to a special Award for Auspicious Asshattery: Diamond comics for shorting me 2/3rds of my order of WALKING DEAD #41, so I can't even fill subs, let alone have copies for the rack. Though, actually, this sorta works in my favor, because now it will look to most of my customers as though there were two weeks between issues. Hmmmmm.....

(Robert Kirkman is now allowed to make the "...and such small portions!" joke in the comment section, if he feels like it; and I will be obligated to say something self-deprecating in return)

-B

Labels: Asshats, Brian

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Howdy! I'd like to ask you to do something for me. I'd like you to use the little Paypal button below the list of the SavCrits and give us a dollar. (Actually, if you're reading this on an RSS feed, I'd like you to do two things for me: First, go directly to our site; then, use the little Paypal button below the list of the SavCrits to give us a dollar.)

Here's my thinking on the subject. As of Graeme's post this morning, there have been approximately 50 posts this month (not counting my garage sale posts or the Douglas Wolk signing pix) and there will doubtlessly be more by the time August ends this Friday. (Maybe 55 posts?) If you came across a zine in your local comic book store that had the dozens of reviews everyone's done, plus Abhay's smart-assery, plus Jog's coverage of Igor Kordey's career at Marvel, and the overview of Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent, would you play a dollar for it?

Let's say I follow the public television model and only do this once every four months. Would you pay for a dollar for a zine that would then be (let's assume) four times that size, with four times the reviews and four times the etc., etc.?

Now, I think you know right now whether you'll push that little button and give us a dollar or not. Some of you aren't going to give us a dollar because you don't have to, or you don't have paypal set up, or you can't be arsed with remembering your paypal password, or you think if you give us a dollar today, everyone will be hitting you up for a dollar by this time next year. No matter what reasons I put forward for why you should give us a dollar--with the possible exception of me suddenly breaking into piteous cries of extreme financial distress--I think you've already decided whether or not you'll give us that money. But in the interests of making this entertaining, I'll still go ahead and tell you why you should.

Clearly, the North American comics industry has been changing dramatically over the last several years. Interestingly, and for very different reasons, the North American newspaper industry has been as well. For example, despite being essentially the only daily paper in town, The San Francisco Chronicle recently went through a rather grueling round of layoffs and cutbacks, in part because circulation numbers diminish as more people get their news and opinions electronically. In the past, I think newspapers would have, over time, come to employ fulltime critics to perform reviews of graphic novels and the comic medium as they did with other developing media. But because the newspapers are struggling to find their place in a dynamically different workplace, that's probably never going to happen: they're using freelancers, or they're assigning their regular critics to cover this field. Comics doesn't have its Tim Goodman, or its Frank Rich, or its Andrew Sarris. Despite my delight that in Douglas Wolk we may finally have our Pauline Kael, Douglas isn't (yet) set up at the New Yorker, able to focus on educating and inspiring weekly and not having to worry about hustling for the rent. Coverage in the news about comics is still spotty, and it will probably remain so from some time until it figures out how to understand how to best take advantage of the public's new habits. Until it does--whether as Boing Boing Media Networks or Google Press, International or Digg Universal or whatever--a rejuvenated field has little more to rely on for its criticism than passionate individuals who continue to contribute to the field with their own free time and resources.

We all do this out from a sincere passion and love for the artform, and that won't change no matter how many people click the Paypal button. But what we do here does take time and energy and commitment, and financial remuneration has a way of making the time we clear from our schedules easier to justify, to ourselves and our loved ones, and it is my hope that it will provide the sustenance--emotionally, at least--for smart, knowledgeable people to continue to write engagingly about this medium at a good clip for some time to come. It'll also make a strong incentive to expand the site, whether that's adding interviews, podcasts, or merely another wave of critics for an even wider view of the marketplace.

To phrase it a bit more succinctly, Making with the clicky shows both that what we do matters, and also that it matters that we do it. Looking back on the first forty days or so of the rebooted Savage Critic, I very strongly believe both those statements to be true. So much so, in fact, I sent in the first dollar myself earlier today.

As I mentioned above, I'm thinking of a public television model for this, and one of the things they do with public television pledge weeks is they offer incentives. So the person who offers the first donation will get a DVD of Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera mailed to them, and the person who donates the most by the end of this week will get a copy of Jim Woodring's Seeing Things. If you want, I'll even personalize each with a little critical blurb (or not, as you prefer--they're certainly both such significant pieces of work they can get along just fine without me.)

But I'd like to think you don't need any such incentives. It's the last week of the month and payday is right around the corner. If you think what we do here is valuable, take a second to remember your password, and take the plunge. Although I'm only speaking on behalf of myself here, I'm sure all of us at The Savage Critic would appreciate it. Thank you.

Labels: Jeff, money

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I've been sorta blaise about posting the shipping list (I missed 2 of the last 3 weeks), partly because I'm not sure how it really fits the NEW Savage Critic(s), and I wanted to see who might say "hey, where is it?"

Not that many people mentioned its absence, but one of them was a Professor of Marketing, and I figure one should listen to professional educators if you're going to listen to ANYone. So, here's the list:

2000 AD #1549
2000 AD #1550
30 DAYS OF NIGHT EBEN & STELLA #4
52 AFTERMATH THE FOUR HORSEMEN #1 (OF 6)
ACTION COMICS #855
AMAZONS ATTACK #6 (OF 6)
AMERICAN VIRGIN #18
AMORY WARS #3 (OF 5)
AUNTS IN YOUR PANTS (A)
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #5 CWI
BATMAN ANNUAL #26 HEAD OF THE DEMON
BIG BANG COMICS PRESENTS AGENTS OF BADGE #6
BLACK PANTHER #30 CWI
BOMB QUEEN IV #1 (OF 4)
BRIT #1
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #36
CONAN #43
COUNTDOWN 35
COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #1 (OF 8)(CD)
EMILY THE STRANGE VOL 2 DEATH ISSUE #1
ENIGMA CIPHER #2 (OF 5) (RES)
EX MACHINA MASQUERADE SPECIAL
FALL OF CTHULHU WALPOLE CVR B #5
FALLEN ANGEL IDW #19
FANTASTIC FOUR #549 CWI
GENE SIMMONS DOMINATRIX #1
HACK SLASH SERIES SEELEY CVR A #4
HELLBLAZER #234
HELLBOY DARKNESS CALLS #5 (OF 6)
HOT MOMS #10 (A)
HUNTERS MOON #3 (OF 5)
JUGHEAD #184
KISS 4K #3
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #130
LAST FANTASTIC FOUR STORY
LOCAL #10 (OF 12)
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT HALO
MICE TEMPLAR #1
NINJA SCROLL #12
OUTSIDERS FIVE OF A KIND WEEK 5 GRACE WONDER WOMAN
PUNKS THE SUMMER COMICS SP
SILVER SURFER REQUIEM #4 (OF 4)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #179
SPIDER-MAN ONE MORE DAY SKETCHBOOK OMD
SUBMIT #1 (A)
TALES TO DEMOLISH #1
TEEN TITANS #50 (NOTE PRICE)
TEEN TITANS GO #46
TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD IMAGE ED #8
USAGI YOJIMBO #105
WALKING DEAD #41
WARHAMMER 40K DAMNATION CRUSADE CVR A Of(6)
WARHAMMER FORGE OF WAR CVR A #3 (OF 6)
WASTELAND #11
WETWORKS #12
WITCHBLADE TAKERU MANGA MACK CVR B #7
WONDER WOMAN #12 (AA)
WORLD WAR HULK X-MEN #3 (OF 3) WWH


Books / Mags / Stuff
ADVENTURES OF RED SONJA VOL 2 SHE DEVIL WITH SWORD TP (RES)
ASIADDICT GN
ASTHMA GN
BATMAN BATMAN AND SON HC
BATMAN SECRETS OF THE BATCAVE TP
BECK MONGOLIAN CHOP SQUAD VOL 9 GN (OF 19)
CABLE DEADPOOL VOL 7 SEPARATION ANXIETY TP
COMPLETE BITE CLUB TP
DC TOP COW CROSSOVER CLASSICS TP
ESSENTIAL DAREDEVIL VOL 4 TP
FONE BONE PLUSH TOY
GIRLS AND CORPSES MAGAZINE PREMIER COLLECTORS ISSUE VOL 0
GIRLS AND CORPSES MAGAZINE VOL 1 FALL 2007
HULK AND POWER PACK PACK SMASH DIGEST TP
INCREDIBLE CHANGE BOTS GN
JEREMIAH HARM VOL 1 TP
JUXTAPOZ SEPT 2007 VOL 14 #9
LOOKING GLASS WARS HATTER M PX HC
MANHUNTER VOL 3 ORIGINS TP
NINJA SCROLL TP
NOTHING BETTER VOL 1 TP
PREVIEWS VOL XVII #9
SQUIRRELLY GRAY SC
SUPER SPY GN
TANGENT COMICS VOL 1 TP
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE VOL 5 TP
TOKYO IS MY GARDEN GN (RES)
WIZARD MAGAZINE SPIDER-MAN ONE MORE DAY QUESADA CVR #192


So my question is: DOES this fit on this site any longer, or should I move it over somewhere on comixexperience.com? Any opinions?

What looks good to YOU?


-B

Labels: Brian, Shipping Lists

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Goddamn, but my ass is getting kicked by this week already. Is this some kind of weird karma for the fact that there's a holiday weekend coming up, or am I just cursed?

BATMAN #668: More than anything else, this three-parter that JH Williams is illustrating makes me very excited for the rumored Morrison/Williams creator-owned book that the two are apparently planning - What makes this Very Good has nothing to do with Batman whatsoever, and everything to do with the way the two creators play around with the comic format and visual identities of different parts of comic history. Which isn't to say that I'm not into this particularly-Avengers-esque (that's Steed and Mrs. Peel Avengers, not the Iron Man and Captain America ones) story, just that it's almost more exciting to imagine what else the two could get up to, in other circumstances.

COUNTDOWN #36: Yet again, the series gets to the point where - for the plot to get where it's supposed to go - the characters have to act like idiots. Zatanna really calls Mary Marvel a brat who needs to get spanked? The Justice League seriously meet with Jimmy Olsen about his joining the team? What? Seriously? Blah and Crap, really.

GREEN LANTERN CORPS #15: I love the craziness of this whole comic; I mean, there's a sentient planet that's being attacked by an evil sentient city that manages to disrupt the planet's gravity and tear it apart, which is not something you see every day. It's got the dumb insanity and overwhelming sense of everything-happening-at-once that something like Infinite Crisis had, but without the feeling that you have to read seven different comics to get what's going on, which makes it pretty much the definition of Good superhero emergency comics for me.

THE SPIRIT #9: Just like a Buffy episode as we head into the last third of a season and it all starts tying together, plots from earlier issues come back to haunt poor Denny this time around. It's a shame to think that Darwyn Cooke's leaving the book so soon, considering the consistently Very Good work he and J. Bone put into this series issue after issue - Maybe I'm greedy, but I'd love to see this kind of thing all the time.

SUPERMAN #666: Kurt Busiek really gets the old-school Superman thing even as he updates it, something that this devilish little treat proves handily; it's relatively throwaway and - if you ignore all the murderin' and stuff - reasonably light, but no less enjoyable for all that, partially for the injokes and fun of seeing Mean Superman, and partially for the joy of Walt Simonson's bold and exciting artwork. It's not the kind of Superman story I'd want to read on a regular basis, sure, but as a special Satanic one-off? Hellishly Good.

TANK GIRL: THE GIFTING #3: Who knew that an Ashley Wood/Jamie Hewlett collaboration would look like that, that's what I want to know. And something else I want to know - Just who is Rufus Day-Glo, now credited with layouts on the book? He(?) really has a Hewlettish touch to his(?) stuff, whoever it is... Otherwise, the series continues along the "pretty, but ultimately unfulfilling" road that it's been on since the first issue - Maybe we need some Philip Bond in the fourth issue to balance things out. Eh

Tomorrow: We return and begin again, sadly...

Labels: Graeme

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And, of course, after taking two days out for the weekend to get caught up on other writing I had to do, I have two days left and all manner of books from this week to review. So let's get all of the Marvel ones out of the way first, shall we?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #543: I love the fake-out on the cover of this book - "Oh no! Peter is covering his face while pulling cloth over a body on a hospital gurney! Aunt May must be dead!" even though the entire issue is essentially one big piece of filler because JMS can't quite finish off his "Aunt May has been hanging onto dear life" plot until, what, November now, because of Joe Quesada's schedule. While I kind of like the idea that Peter Parker is now breaking real laws because of what he feels is his great responsibility to the people he loves, the execution of it manages to almost suck all the life out've the idea. Very much Eh.

ANNIHILATION CONQUEST: STARLORD #2: On the plus side, Timothy Green's artwork continues to shine, and those were some unexpected deaths. On the minus side, a lot of the quirkiness of the first issue seems to have gotten lost in the jumble of "war is chaos" scenes here, and as a result, the book seems much less charming and more generic this time around. Okay.

ASTONISHING X-MEN #22: It's not going to stick, of course, but part of me really would like the last page here to be the final death of Cyclops, if only because I'm very amused by the idea that one of his last memories is having sex with Emma (Or perhaps I've just got a dirty mind, and that's meant to be something else). That said, even as we're clearly approaching the endgame here, the book seems to have lost a lot of the focus and intensity of its earlier issues; maybe it's because of the schedule, or perhaps I'm just not that interested in the generic alien monsters or seeing Colossus and Kitty have sex...? Either way, Okay, depressingly. I want to enjoy this more.

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #8: They had me even before they introduced a sumo wrestler called Fat Cobra as a challenger to Iron Fist in this new martial arts tournament storyline, I have to admit. Ignoring the great art by David Aja (with Roy Allen Martinez taking the Travel Foreman flashback artist role this time around), Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker hit just the right notes of awe and humor when dealing with the mystical city of K'Un-Lun and the mystical tournament between it and six other mystical cities that Danny is forced to compete in... Month in and month out, this really continues to surprise and amuse with just how Very Good it is.

IRON MAN, DIRECTOR OF SHIELD #21: For some reason, this feels as if it's the first issue written once the Knaufs had read the end of Civil War - We get nightmares about the death of Captain America and a plot involving the Initiative - instead of the first post-World War Hulk issue, but for all that, it's as Okay as ever. There are probably many people who enjoy the deliberate pacing and strong leadership of Tony Stark in this book, but I'm not one of them. Roberto De La Torre's art is still nice, though.

THE ORDER #2: So much more enjoyable than the first issue - I thank the idea of Britney Spears analogs fighting bears with jetpacks, personally - with a team dynamic and book dynamic slowly emerging as things go on. I'm still not the greatest fan of Barry Kitson's art, but have to admit that Mark Morales' inks make it look better than I've seen it; Matt Fraction's script seems to have recovered the sense of humor that I thought was missing from the first issue, and I appreciated seeing the PR flack appear and having that side of the show played up more... Whether things'll continue along these lines or next issue will be back to the more straightforward superheroics of the first remains to be seen, but for now? Good.

Tomorrow: DC! Tank Girl! And arguably nothing else...

Labels: Graeme

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The weekends go fast. Lots of reading. Today, I spent a good chunk of time with an old issue of The Comics Journal I picked up for two bucks - it's #202, from March of 1998, and no less than 62 pages of it are devoted to Gary Groth's career-spanning interview with Kevin Eastman, with a special emphasis on the life of Tundra, the infamous alternative comics publisher that he founded, and ultimately blew $14 million of his Ninja Turtles fortune on. Detail after absurd detail piles up - you can hardly believe it all really happened, the circumstances are so surreal. Really one of the classic Journal interviews.

Oh, last week.

Batman/Lobo: Deadly Serious #1 (of 2): Remember in the old Sam & Max comics where Sam would get off the phone with the Commissioner and say something like "Bad trouble in ancient Egypt, Max," and then in the next panel, by god, they'd be in ancient Egypt? That's kind of how this comic starts, with Batman summoned away to space in panel 1, on page 1. And he's staring down Lobo by page 4. No scene-setting shilly-shally while writer/artist Sam Kieth is around!

No need for introductions; as far as this issue goes, there isn't even anything all that Batman or Lobo-specific going on. There's some typical odd couple clashes -- physical and moral -- but mostly the title characters run around and react to a strange entity that's possessing innocent schoolgirls and straight-laced women with space clipboards, and transforming them into shredded-clothing murder machines... and the entity is often passed from body to body by same-sex kissing!! Don't worry gang, it's actually all about how women are driven to explode by male subjugation! Can Batman and/or Lobo trample through the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored before Earth is doomed or something?!

It's sort of fun, very much a loosely-plotted lark that gives Kieth an excuse to draw pretty girls and ugly alien creatures, and Batman's extra-long cape. He remains as good as ever at that, although I generally prefer seeing his energy channeled through the daffy personal vision of something like My Inner Bimbo (the one extant issue of it); here, Kieth treats the superhero bits almost as an obstacle, which makes for a hint of unease with the antics. OKAY for what it is. I'd have liked it more as a Sam & Max story, but that's also what I thought about The Three Paradoxes, so maybe it's me.

Guy Ritchie's Gamekeeper #4: You know a series is skipping off the rails when one of the variant covers sports a character that's not only absent from this particular issue, but hasn't been introduced to the story at all, and the official website contains plot spoilers that have to stretch at least a couple of issues into the future. Maybe the promo stuff got pumped up since Ritchie is going to direct the film adaptation? It doesn't say much for the pacing if what I'm seeing is supposed to be basic scenario stuff.

It will be a fun movie to watch if Ritchie bases his visual choices off of artist Mukesh Singh's, in that all the action bits look like murder scenes from Susperia. Sadly, there's none of that this issue, which devotes itself almost totally to backstory, including that interminable b&w flashback I'd be getting sick of even if I didn't now know how it pans out at some point in a later issue. It's not that Andy Diggle's dialogue is lacking in craft, but straight-up thriller material such as this isn't going to benefit from dwelling so long on generic plot contours. And almost totally stripping an issue of action only underscores just how generic it is.

There's still spark in the art - I can't get enough of Singh's jutting ink stroke tree branches, and he can compose some nicely sterile metal and glass urban environments. I especially liked how, going over the flashbacks, only the bloodletting done by the hero is in color, so as to emphasize its radiance in his memory. But that's all this book's got keeping it at EH level in an issue like this.

SPECIAL BONUS IN-DEPTH ART COMMENTS:

Black Summer #2 (of 7): Juan Jose Ryp sure can draw a man's face being ripped off.

Wolverine #56: I liked Howard Chaykin's version of the character better the more he looked like a caveman, the final splash being the apex of my joy. Although, if my co-worker was a drunken, emotionally ruined screw-up to a 'kick the shit out of him by the dumpster' extent, I'd probably protest his continued operation of the gigantic weapon that's the only thing keeping the extremely dangerous mutant at bay down in the metaphor pit. Wait, that wasn't an art comment.

Labels: Jog

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Howdy. Here's what I've been reading and watching lately. God help me, I'm still so trained to write reviews in old school SavCrit style, you get it all in one big glop. I'd like to do something similar about the comics I've been reading, but can't quite tell yet if my week is going to open up enough to let me do so. Anyway, for now, here's what's what.

CEMETERY MAN: Cinematically, I've been in search of some satisfying lowbrow thrills and it really seemed like this cult favorite was gonna do the trick: after all, it's an Italian horror comedy based on a graphic novel by the creator Dylan Dog about a morose gravedigger who must not only bury the dead but kill them when they inevitably return to life. After all, it's got zombies. And boobies. And Rupert Everett at his deadpan best. And yet? Still not very good. It's designed to be a horror film for the Smiths set, with Everett being a proto-emo moper trying to separate fear of death from fear of life, and confusing, as the youth do, love and death, and passion and pain. But not only is Everett about five to ten years too old for the role to make any sense, the filmmakers run out of script about two-thirds of the way through and begin throwing anything at the screen to see if it'll stick, with Everett encountering different incarnations of the woman he loves and being led to greater and greater acts of violence and passion. And then they throw in an ambiguous ending to make the whole thing seem like a mysterious riddle, rather than a cobbled together waste of time. In some ways, it reminded me a lot of Donnie Darko, except I liked Donnie Darko and thought it accomplished a lot of what it wanted to, while this flick was sub-EH. But there are still people who act like this movie was a greater invention than ice cream, so what do I know?

COMIC FOUNDRY #1: There's a lot to like in this first issue and a ton to nitpick, although I'm not sure it'd really be worth your time or mine to sort everything this issue has into those two piles. I think it's highly OK, although the mag should seriously get a good ad rep so there are ads for somebody other than Previews and Rocketship in there (if nothing else, a higher page count would make that price tag sting a little less). And this is probably really dickish for me to do since I can just email the guy and tell him directly, but I thought Ian Brill's fiction piece brilliantly parodied (although I think maybe inadvertently so) chick lit's over-reliance on brand names (Think The Devil Wears Prada, but with comic nerds) and cannily used the protagonist's superhero creation, The Reality Surfer, as a metaphor for youthful indecision. It wasn't the most brilliant piece of short fiction I'd read in some time, but it was effective. More than any other piece in the magazine--and, like I said, there's a lot of stuff to like in here--it makes the case that Tim Leong's ballsiness might really bring something new to the comics magazine marketplace.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN: Continuing in my search for cheap lowbrow thrills, I picked up the inexpensive Grindhouse Experience boxed set which has 20 films jammed onto five DVDs for a low price. Astoundingly, I found a good movie on my first try (although the transfer was, as you'd expect, terrible): Confessions of a Police Captain, an Italian cop procedural from '74 with Martin Balsam and Franco Nero that plays like a variation on Touch of Evil. Balsam plays the jaded police captain who starts the movie off by setting a killer off on a bloodbath, and Nero plays the idealistic district attorney investigating Balsam to determine just how corrupt Balsam actually is. (The great thing about the movie is that it's set in Italy, so corruption is never a question, it's just the degree of corruption). Despite the occasional shootout or stabbing, it's not really an exploitation flick, although it is the sort of film that sounds salacious enough to have played a grindhouse in the '70s. It is, however, a chance to see Martin Balsam play the shit out of a leading role, and to watch a film with insight into the urban Italian mindset of the day. While not exactly a diamond in the rough, it's a highly OK little flick and I'm glad I saw it.

DR. SLUMP, VOLS. 4 AND 5: Out of all of my guilty manga pleasures, this is probably the guiltiest since I miss being in the target group's age range by about thirty years or so. And make no mistake, Dr. Slump revels in its childishness, with cheap jokes built around the size of Tarzan's "dingy" or aliens trapped on Earth mistaking a toilet for a new spaceship, and stories sporting titles like "Yay Yay Wildland." But not only is all this nonsense executed with an infectious sense of joy, but Akira Toryama's cartooning chops are formidable--I'm shocked at how everything he draws is so appealing and visually consistent, be it robots, a parody of Golgo 13, the back of a TV set, or a valley at sunrise: it's all clearly part of the same kooky universe. I've been meaning to donate these volumes to the library forever now, but I find myself picking them up and flipping through them whenever I come across them. They're deeply goofy comics for little kids (and maybe not the sort of stuff you want to pass along unless you're comfortable explaining why Dr. Slump wants to see Ms. Yamabuki's panties so badly) but they're really quite GOOD.

DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL. 7: Probably the first volume where things lag a little bit. Of course, in the world of Kazuo Umezu's horror/disaster manga, a lag means only that after the flash flood is through ripping people to shreds, strange mushrooms begin to grow on all the food and tough decisions have to be made about whether or not the strange fungi should be eaten: it leads to a 30 page section where motivations get even thinner than usual and cruelty exists less for thematic purposes than to keep the chain of events clanking along. After that, however, we get deformed monster-children, a hasty religion devoted to the hero's mother, the new opiate of the masses, and a one-eyed Lovecraftian menace that threatens to devour everyone and everything. Vol. 7 suffers by comparison to the other books in the series as the pace flags just enough to suspect that Umezu is either vamping or winging it entirely. Still, quite GOOD and apeshit enough to make for a fun read.

FLOWER & SNAKE '74: Strange little impulse purchase, which I made in part because they mentioned Riichiro Manabe did the score, and his music for Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster is probably my favorite Godzilla score ever, and in part because I have such fond memories of the ultra-insane Sex & Fury which this seemed to resemble. Turns out it's not nearly as inspired (or inspiring) as the Lady Snowblood-styled Sex & Fury, and instead comes off a bit like Belle de jour if you stripped that film of all of Bunuel's lovely surreal touches and put an obsession with enemas in its place. Flower & Snake '74 is about Makoto, an kink-loving impotent clerk living with his pornography making mother, who is hired by his boss to break the boss' wife. The 70+ minutes of bondage and enema inducing are made watchable (unless, you know, that's your thing) by the novelistic approach to Makoto's character (he's been rendered impotent ever since childhood where he caught--and killed--a black G.I. making love to his mother) and, similarly, a cast that has the (very) slightest bit of depth to the personalities. (And it's pretty easy to make the case for Makoto, traumatized by the conquering of his mother by an American, representing good ol' fucked-up post-war Japan in the filmmaker's eyes). There's also a few shots-- such as when the bloody spirit of the murdered G.I. appears against a blood-red sunset--that are technically impressive. But, generally, unless you've got an annual subscription to Comic A-G, it's the kind of exploitation trash you're not missing much by skipping. Highly EH.

GOLGO 13 VOL. 7: As is the way with these volumes, Takao Saito makes us pay for the awesome (Sweet Jesus! Golgo 13 snipes a nuclear power plant!) with pages of technical research and blathering secondary characters. In the second story, G-13 ends up in a compact piece of gangster noir set in a small Nevada town, with the tale's highlight being a one-page knife-versus-gun fight that's an engaging and spiffy bit of page design. Finally, Takao Saito is interviewed by the charmingly insane Kunio Suzuki who gets bonus points for writing craziness like "Golgo 13 was the textbook of my life." If you've been digging Duke Togo 'til now, you'll probably think it OK.

JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE VOLS. 1-3: The Overlooked Manga Festival at Shaenon K. Garrity's Livejournal has become an invaluable resource for me, and as soon as I read her overview of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I knew I had to get my hands on it. The pleasing mix of epic scope (several generations of family and friends travel the world to fight a vampire who's taken possession of the patriarch's body and his superpowers; everyone has a psychic power based on a motif from the major arcana of the Tarot deck), astounding dopiness (many characters have names that are lame puns on '70s and '80s rock and pop performers; the art looks like the project was originally intended to be Street Fighter II slash fanfic) and over-the-top gorey horror tropes (how else to describe the fight scene that's largely a man being cut apart by a straight-razor wielding voodoo doll?) make it an entertaining, deeply dopey read. JoJo's Bizarre Adventures isn't without its significant weaknesses--at three volumes in, the story is deeply formulaic (like levels in a fighting game) and there are times when the author, Hirohiko Araki, gets bored or runs out of ideas and whisks his characters off to the next location and the next enemy--but it also takes frequent turns into the inspired, such as the section where the heroes have to fight a porn-reading orangutan on an abandoned oil freighter. So far, the book reminds me of what the early days of Image Comics were supposed to be: product so juvenile and energetic it's irresistible (as opposed to what the early days of Image Comics actually were, which was product so undisciplined and yet fiscally calculated it was simultaneously annoying and dull). I should really call this stuff highly OK, but considering how eagerly I gobbled down the first three volumes (and how much I'm looking forward to the next three) I guess I'll reservedly call it GOOD. It won't appeal to everyone, certainly.

LUCKY V2. #1: I loved how this issue uses the autobio up front to heighten the punch of the extended dream narrative in the back. It's not done in the way that you might think with recurring visual motifs or what-have-you, but through some brilliant tricks of pacing. By breaking the autobio stories into brief one or two page segments, and by continually excerpting her performance of the dream story in the back in a hyper-compacted fashion, the dream story, My Affliction, feels much, much longer and recreates the feeling of being trapped in an seemingly endless dream. It's really fucking brilliant, and makes the issue well worth the $3.95 cover tag. A VERY GOOD issue, and one that moved me from being a casual fan of Bell's work to avidly interested in what she'll do next. (By the way, is it wrong that Gabrielle Bell's style reminds me of J. Backderf's? I feel like I should be seeing more of a David B. influence, but that cover and the use of blacks really makes me think of Derf. Not that it's a bad thing, but I can't think of a tone more opposed to Bell's than Derf's.)

MONSTER VOL. 10: The most satisfying of this week's Viz Signature releases, and not just because it's about 30 pages longer than Golgo 13 and a dozen pages longer than Drifting Classroom. Although you'd think Naoki Urasawa's introduction of yet another kindly drifter (Grimmer, a former spy turned freelance journalist) would undercut the story's narrative tension, Monster succeeds by setting up any number of potential victims to be preyed upon by Johan's evil scheme, the mystery of Kinderheim 511, and all those crooked cops and violent gangsters lurking around every turn. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for long narratives jammed with characters and odd details (the strangely understated and creepy street sign for the Three Frogs Bar in Prague made the whole volume for me)--I thought it was a VERY GOOD chapter, in any event.

MY DEAD GIRLFRIEND VOL. 1: Eric Wight's first book from Tokyopop made me curse the heavens, not just because I'd spent money on the thing, but because the book could've been so much better if Tokyopop had treated the material as more than a simple IP grab: Graeme in his review gripes about the pacing of this book and what he suspected was an imposed three act structure on the story. And certainly, there's some really awful pacing choices in this book that seem designed to drag the story out for another two volumes. But even more frustrating than that are choices that suggest Wight really didn't consider his structure too much in the first place. In the opening few pages for example, the protagonist recounts the family curse that results in all of his ancestors dying a highly absurd death. As the hero finishes up, we see that he's been delivering a school report... and that all his classmates are monsters. It's not done in a way that maximizes the reveal, by the way: it's just done as a standard transition by someone telling a story without much thought for the best way to get the maximum impact from it. Similarly, once the supernatural setting is fleshed out, you can't figure out why the protagonist is so upset about the idea of dying, or even dying absurdly: all of his ancestors, including his ghostly parents, are still around, playing cards and telling stories. In this Addams Family lite setting, death is only one more moment on an unending continuum, making the protagonist's anxiety about it come across as deeply prissy.

The reason all this bugs me so deeply is that if there's one section of the American comics marketplace that should understand the importance of an editor helping a creator shape the material and maximize its impact, it would be one of the top three North American manga companies. I mean, Wight's panel to panel storytelling is good, his character design is appealing, and his art has a Bruce Timm-ish quality to it I really like--it wouldn't take much for someone read the material he has, criticize it constructively, and help him find the best way to present the material, and I get the impression that most manga companies in Japan wouldn't let it get out the door without that. But Tokyopop, like most of the other big comic companies here in the U.S., is more than willing to keep the overhead low, push the material into the marketplace, and reap the dividends, should there be any.

On the other hand, what do I know? Graeme gave it a Very Good, and the book's front, back and inside covers are practically leprous with blurbs from industry professionals praising the book. So maybe I'm wrong and I read this book on the wrong day or something. But it must've been a worse day than I realized, because I thought this was a frustratingly EH piece of work.

SAMURAI COMMANDO VOL. 1: You ever see that Sonny Chiba movie G.I. Samurai (also known in some places as Time Slip)? I stumbled across it on video a few years ago, and it's one of my favorite b-movies for both the elegance of its plot hook and its execution: a troop of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers on maneuvers end up back in feudal Japan and decide, basically, to conquer the country. Despite being armed with firearms, a tank, a helicopter and other modern weaponry, the soldiers aren't prepared for the combination of their own internecine conflicts and the power of their enemies. As I said, it's one of my favorite action flicks, so I got pretty hopped up to come across this manga by Harutoshi Rukui and art group Ark Performance reprinted by CMX: it's essentially the same premise, except that the Colonel of the Forces instead makes allies with the warlords of the past and together they declare war on the present. (Both the movie and the manga work from the same material, the novel, Sengoku Jieitai by Ryo Hanmura.)

However, while the Chiba movie balanced out the blabbity-blab with ninjas attacking helicopters, Samurai Commando (which appears to be only two volumes long) spends so much time setting up the premise, introducing the characters, and hinting at their backstories, and so by the time you've got gunfire and decapitations by samurai swords, it's too little, too late. It's a shame too, because the art by Ark Performance is dynamic and strangely airless in a way that I think fans of Jim Lee would like: this could have been, like Death Note, a nice little transitional manga for comics readers of the Big Two looking to branch out a bit. But instead, it's a very EH little manga, and given the choice between recommending it and suggesting you visit Amazon and pick up an out-of-print copy of G.I. Samurai for less than five bucks, I have but little choice but to exhort you to do the latter. Pity.

TRAIN_MAN VOL. 1: It's easy to see why this tale of a reclusive Internet introvert struggling to find romance with the help of his online community is wildly popular: it's nearly impossible to read this and not have your heart strings plucked, to the point where I found myself a little resentful of the brazen emotional manipulation. Each chapter gives the Train_Man a minor challenge that seems insurmountable to his sheepish soul, and each chapter shows him succeeding, with page after page of laudatory exclamations from members of his online community. And yet, to bitch about the first volume of Viz Media's Train_Man being sweet to the point of near implausibility is like chastising a teddy bear for being cuddly: that's what it's supposed to do, it's clearly marketed as such, and it's very effective at what it does (I'd be lying if I told you I *didn't* read the volume all in one breathless sitting). It's Good material, provided you've got a weakness for the cutesy, but I can't guarantee you won't hate yourself just a little for enjoying it.

Labels: Jeff, manga, movies

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I was planning on skipping this week, but I'd like to write briefly about one of the most interesting comics that came out this month. Maybe not THE single most interesting, but ... Top 5. If it were my Myspace friend, I'd put in my Top 8. Its Myspace song would be Okkervil River's Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe. Later: I'd discover it was a 40 year old police officer, and I'd inadvertently been caught in an elaborate sting operation to track down internet pedophiles. The regret, the horrible, horrible regret. All because of this comic. It's that interesting.

I'm of course talking about the two-page Honda Elements SC Advertisement fumetti in this week's Marvel comics.

THE PLOT: a lion, recently escaped from the zoo, has met a Honda Element, somewhere "in the city" (presumably New York City). Plainly, the lion is a super-genius as not only can it escape from zoos, but it also can talk; however, the lion is insane as it's talking to a car. Cars can't talk. Anyway, the comic ends with Crazy Fucking Lion teaming up with the Friendly, City-Slicker Honda to go find a drugstore where it intends to purchase hair products. And then, off to Marquee, to snort blow off of Lindsley Lohan's skeleton! Aaah, New York!

It's two pages about a schizophrenic talking supergenius lion, which is intended to sell Honda SUVs, and I found this in an ad for Marvel Comics The Order #2 and Mister Iron Fist #8-- not in Vertigo comics, not in Fantagraphics comics, but plain old mainstream, run-of-the-mill Marvel comic books.

We all know that comics aren't for little kids anymore-- they're wildly inappropriate for little kids. But, fuck, are they even for college students anymore? They're for people with enough disposable income to purchase sports utility vehicles. I didn't have that kind of money in college-- did you? I don't know a thing about cars, not a thing, so to me, a SUV is for families-- at least late 20's, early 30's. And that's not just the audience for The Order, but enough of the audience to capture the attention of advertisers...?

It didn't just end up in these comics by accident-- Marvel must have people who sell ads. Honda must have people who evaluate whether it makes sense to purchase ad space, whether it'll hit their target demographic, meet their branding strategy, etc. The comic reflects not only an aging comic audience, but a series of business decisions, money changing hands, memos going out, phone calls, e-mails, teleconferences-- the channels of fucking commerce, you know, lit up and shit two pages of Honda ads into my Mister Iron Fist comic book.

The other ads in these book are o-kay, but not as good. The Army has a recruiting ad-- recruiting standards have gotten so low thanks to the War that the Army is willing to accept nerds now. Great. Fucking fantastic. The 81st Fighting Hemophiliacs... watch out terrorists. You can not only bring democracy to the Middle East-- you can bring the Philosophy of Star Trek. That's what that region needs. I say Go! Sign up! Say hello to Iran while you're there, Cosplayers. And then there's a men's underwear ad that's all about negatively stereotyping women-- which... not only did those advertisers decide to sell to the comic book audience, but they even got the casual misogyny right! Cheers, Mad Men!

But the Honda ad's the most interesting. You know, the lion is a symbol in the Book of Revelations for Christ-- the "Lion of the tribe of Judah." Check out this awkward line of dialogue from the Honda ad: "You're a lion on the lamb." The lamb? Also a symbol of Christ, only from the Gospel of John: "the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). So really isn't this Honda ad essentially all about the Second Coming of Christ? And I think what Honda is saying is if and when the Second Coming happens, Jesus will not only return, but return in a Honda Element, North America's Truck of the Year in 2003. Also: he will apparently have beautiful hair because the Honda Element will help him to purchase hair conditioner before he redeems the world.

Fucking A! That's what you call a hard sell.

I love how much credit it gives to comic book fans, too-- they can't just do a straightforward ad campaign. They have to use Dadaist humor in order to connect with comic fans, since comic fans are so cynical and discriminating...? Really, Madison Avenue? Come on, now.

The Order #2 and Mister Iron Fist #8 were both fun or whatever, but that lion ad? HOLY SHIT.

Labels: Abhay

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(The nerd conundrum for the new millennium: who's stronger, Annalee or Graeme?)

Sorry these took so long to post; Douglas's signing is at the start of my workweek and was followed immediately by my garage sale (which turned out great, by the way), and after the last nine weeks or so of six day workweeks when I finally got time off, I totally slacked.

Of course, I've got no right to bitch after meeting Douglas Wolk--not only had the guy only been home 22 hours in the last month (the way he put it was, "22 hours total," which leads me to infer they were non-contiguous hours), but he still had something like 11,000 words to write before(?) he left for Burning Man (which he may be doing today, I can't remember) for his six or so regular columns.

Yeah, he's kind of a dynamo, Douglas, and yet still manages to be an incredibly sweet guy, very low-key, filled with great stories, be they about how he got his new column at The Nation, or one of the bands on his record label. (Yes, Douglas Wolk is that kind of terrifying ultra-achiever: the hyphenate.) Not that I'm an expert on either man, but he really reminds me of Scott McCloud when I first met McCloud at San Diego back in 1990--very, very smart, very kind, self-assured but not content to just rest on accrued laurels. (I hope that doesn't sound like a diss against current day Scott McCloud, by the way, because it's not: it's just that when I met McCloud in 1990 and complimented him on the great work he was doing on Zot!, he thanked me and told me he was leaving the book to do a mammoth how-to on comics, a fact at which I could only stand there and gape. "Well, you've earned my trust as a creator, so if that's what you want to do I'll be there..." I not-very-encouragingly said.)

Anyway, here's just a few photos of the signing, and if you get a chance to turn up for one of Douglas's signings in the future, you should do so because he's great.


(the man himself, Douglas Wolk)




(I don't remember what Douglas was saying here, but it obviously entrancing)



(Douglas Wolk, Peter Wong, Ian Brill, Annalee Newitz, Graeme McMillan... it's like the entire Internet showed up for this photo!)




(Hibbs achieves enlightenment, courtesy of Douglas Wolk)

Labels: Brian, Douglas, Graeme, Jeff, photos, signing

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And in a strange bit of synchronicity, in the same week that I was talking about the Battlestar Galactica comics (Hi, Annalee), Dynamite Entertainment's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SEASON ZERO #1 presents itself for abuse.

Looking at it one way, I can see the draw of doing a Season Zero for Dynamite; the show itself has such tight continuity that it's hard (if not impossible) to be able to do any meaningful stories during that time frame - It's something that completely destroyed any sense of tension in Greg Pak's twelve issue run, as you knew constantly that everything had to work out in the end because the characters were just about to meet the Pegasus and you'd already seen that - not to mention the probability of stepping on storylines that the television crew are planning or wanting to keep for themselves. But on the other hand, I don't really care enough about what the characters were doing before the TV show started to read an ongoing book about it. Setting a series then removes the main thrust of the entire concept, as well as the series' main antagonists in any meaningful way, and instead relies on things that we've already seen in backstory from the television show (that, to be honest, in some cases work better as backstory and dramatic counterpoint to what's happening currently) to drive the story. And, again, we already know where we're going to end up, so without the introduction of all new characters that the creators can actually do something surprising with (thereby pissing off the fans who want to see Starbuck's ass), everything again seems kind of toothless and playing-for-time.

And that's the main problem with the first issue, at least. Yes, there's a small bit of interest in seeing Ellen, Tigh, Adama and his wife celebrate peacetime and talk about how easy life is going to be aboard the Galactica, but aside from that, the story feels pointless and a diversion from what Galactica is meant to be about. The conflict comes from a new set of characters with uncertain motives, but we've not seen enough of them to really understand why what they're doing is interesting, and because the one event that brought everyone together is years away from happening, the majority of the cast is missing, and - with the exception of Tigh and Adama - the character interplay that makes the TV series so engrossing is nowhere to be found.

As strange as it sounds after what I've just said, though, the creators try their best in the circumstances; Brandon Jerwa's structure matches the crosstime-cutting of some of Ron Moore's episodes even if his dialogue isn't quite there yet, and Jackson Herbert's art - while stiff in places - is thankfully much closer to the understated visual style of the show than Nigel Raynor's from the previous series. It's just that, ultimately...? I'm not sure anyone could make this book more than an Eh.

Labels: Graeme

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And this is where I surprise many of you by saying the following: OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND: METAMORPHO/AQUAMAN #1? You should really go out and pick it up.

I'm not changing my tune on the entire "Five Of A Kind" event, I have to point out. It's an entirely unnecessary series of books that almost works against the stated intent - I don't feel that anything I've read in the first three books (Nightwing/Captain Boomerang Jr., Katana/Shazam! and Thunder/Martian Manhunter, for those of you with a short memory) has done anything whatsoever to promote the new Batman And The Outsiders series, and may even have done the opposite and made the series seem less attractive with each successive issue - in the name of cash grab and filling shelf space. If you threw the entire series in my face and asked me yay or nay, I'd go for the nay option after complaining about you throwing something in my face in the first place. But nonetheless, this Metamorpho and Aquaman team-up succeeds where the previous issues have failed by managing two things that the others didn't: Having a story, and having some really rather amazing art.

Story first, because - as good as it is - it's the lesser of the reasons to look at the book. G. Willow Wilson, a writer new to comics (This may be her first published comic? I think she has a Vertigo graphic novel out soon, but I can't remember when it appears), comes up with a oneshot that succeeds on its own terms - It's nothing that will bowl you over, perhaps, but it's a solid short story that ties in to Metamorpho's history and attempts to introduce and explore its two characters' personalities as much as their superheroic powers and identities. As basic as that sounds, it's still something that none of the other books in the line have lived up to, and as a result, more than I was expecting here.

Much more than I was expecting, however, was the artwork by Josh Middleton. Don't get me wrong; I've liked Middleton's art in the past, but somehow was still unprepared by the clear storytelling, quirky linework and textural color he brings to the table here - It's a wonderful look that raises the writing up on every level and makes the book so much more enjoyable. Stylized and full of life, it's the kind of thing that can make you want to go back and find everything that he's worked on, to see just how he got to this (Disney meets James Jean, to my eye) place. Without Middleton's artwork, this would still be a fun enough read and still the best by far of the Five Of A Kind books, but with it, it's a high Good and worth reading even if the idea of Batman and his Outsiders makes you break out in hives.

Labels: Graeme

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It was the day of Jemas.

A lot of things had happened to various Marvel comics since Bill Jemas had become president of consumer products, publishing and new media, with Joe Quesada as editor in chief. Reader attention had been mobilized, and several noteworthy projects had begun. Not every effort initiated in that time would be successful, nor would all of even be noteworthy, but in retrospect one can sense an atmosphere of relative experimentation, albeit one formed from financial strife.

And nothing screamed 'relative experimentation' like the extended X-Men line.

I've heard some call this period of X-history a 'progressive' era, one that extended roughly from writer Grant Morrison's debut on the freshly re-branded New X-Men in July 2001 to the X-Men ReLoad event of May 2004, a line-wide creative shift which served, in part, to erase some of the departed Morrison's most visible story and character changes, and in a wider sense marked a return to more emphatically traditional mutant superhero stories. But that period didn't just begin with Morrison; it saw a large number of upsets occur, in both the creative teams and the very directions of several series.

And there for the duration, just as indicative of the time as Grant Morrison, was Igor Kordey.

A Croatian-born illustrator, designer and comics artist, Kordey first became visible on the US comics scene as a painter, his first work for Marvel being the two-issue Tales of the Marvels: Wonder Years in 1995. His 20th century work at the publisher would not extend beyond that, and the two-issue Conspiracy miniseries of 1998.

Instead, he contributed to a number of licensed books, most notably offering extensive contributions to Dark Horse's Tarzan line, including a sadly unfinished 1999-2000 series titled Tarzan: The Rivers of Blood (four out of an intended eight issues published, never collected), which had been in the works for over a decade. Kordey both drew, and co-scripted with fellow Croatian Neven Antičević, who devised the story with noted Danish writer/translator Henning Kure. Two other Tarzan projects are worth noting for our purposes: the 1995 one-off Tarzan: A Tale of Mugambi and the 1998 miniseries Tarzan/Carson of Venus (both collected into a 1999 trade, named for the latter work), with Croatia-born writer Darko Macan. The two would reunite before an English-language audience during that period of mutant growth at Marvel.

The path of Kordey's latter career at Marvel quite neatly follows the trajectory of the 'progressive' era for X-Men and related books. It began in November 2001, on a revamp of the consummate '90s mutant character Cable. It ended with the July 2004 X-Men ReLoad revival of Excalibur, the very series set to do the heavy lifting of continuity adjustment. Kordey was set as the series' regular artist, but he was suddenly released from his duties the day prior to online solicitation posting, despite having completed issue #1 and begun work on issue #2. All of his material was replaced. He has not worked for Marvel again, although, interestingly, it appears that he was offered the troubled Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq project, that Dan Jurgens eventually drew.

But it wasn't just a straight path from the revivials of 2001 to the counter-revivals of 2004. There are always bumps in the road. Surely the biggest bump in Kordey's time with Marvel was his infamous run on Morrison's New X-Men, where he began as a fill-in-for-a-fill-in. These, it is sad to say, are likely the works Kordey remains best known for across the whole of English-language comics. Given the popularity of New X-Men, and its status as prime X-Men book of the day, it was likely many readers' first and only exposure to Kordey's art.

And if all you had read were those issues of New X-Men, you might have thought Kordey wasn't worth much. Pages seem ripped apart with gashes of thick black ink. Poor Cyclops looks like he's been punched in the face for a full hour. Those leather Frank Quitely costumes seem to seethe like hot, stretching tar. Reading over the material, it's frankly not as bad as I remember it being, but it's still not good.

The problem was, Kordey could draw an entire 22-page comic in about 10 days. And he did, when both primary New X-Men artist Frank Quitely and fill-in artist Ethan Van Sciver couldn't keep with the deadlines, and X-scheduling got tight. He shouldn't have, but he did. "I was my only judge, jury and executioner all the time," Kordey later mused (see link above). He drew more issues after that. And an awful lot of readers disliked him, greatly and biliously.

But for much of his time at Marvel, Kordey was a fine talent. From his b&w line art, it's clear that his range extends from graceful cartoon observation to well-defined, idiosyncratic realism. He could also do some nice action and careful environments, although neither of those examples are from Marvel projects. Color did not sap any power from his lines, which worked well with both rich and faded hues. But his lines were not quite like what usually graced a superhero comic, even though they were rather close; I suspect that some readers who did see more of Kordey's work than was displayed in New X-Men, probably didn't care for it much anyway. Yet it was the rushing, I suspect, that always colored the wide view of his work. Hell, people disliked those New X-Men issues so much I've been on message boards where Kordey's work was used to slam Quitely, some posters unable to distinguish between the two men's work. Dislike that potent can be projected.

Yet Kordey's style was fitting for Marvel in 2001. Kordey didn't entirely draw like a superhero artist, and he can thus been seen as a perfect representative for books that didn't entirely want to seem like superhero comics, for a short time, for better or worse.

Take the Cable revival. Written by David Tischman (usually a writing partner for Howard Chaykin, who was initially meant to supervise the series but couldn't), it saw the famed time-travel gun messiah decide to travel the globe, finding various scrupulously-researched 'hot spots' and affecting present-tense change by shooting things and alluding to his backstory. It was a decent run, with some vivid secondary characters and convincing political settings, but it ran into the same problem faced by several of these superhero hybrid projects - the superhero elements sat uneasily in the larger work. For me, every mention of baroque X-Men continuity kind of tossed me around; it's not that you can't have a serious political gunfire comic with superpowered people (Golgo 13 isn't all that human, after all), but you have to be very careful with the mix. Tischman didn't do a great job of matching mentions of the Legacy Virus and such up with his larger international action story - it's like that whole 'Marvel superheroes' business kept getting in the way, lousy stuff!

Interestingly, in the back of the first trade paperback collection of Tischman's run as writer (Cable: The Shining Path), Tischman's series proposal is included as a bonus feature. And that proposal actually does a much nicer job of integrating the mutant superhero and political explosion elements of the project. For example, in the first storyline Cable finds himself mixed up with a group of Communist revolutionaries in Peru. This group has neatly mixed mutants in wih humans, and Tischman proposes using this setup to draw parallels between Communism and the famed 'dream' of Professor X - both deeply idealistic, and both doomed to fail when put in the real world. You can make out echoes of this theme in the story itself, but the execution tips the balance greatly toward the politics, leaving the superhero stuff to look lost.

Also in the proposal was an ongoing focus on Cable's role as Askani messiah, master of a future peaceable-yet-proactive philosophy that he hopes to plant the seeds for, thus saving the future. Tischman and Kordey even managed to cleverly use Marvel's 'Nuff Said no-dialogue gimmick month to have a special issue in which Cable finally overcomes the techno-organic virus that had always held his amazing mutant powers back, thus giving him the uncontrollable power of a god. Tischman seemed to want to develop the spiritual aspect of Cable in greater depth as the series went on. He didn't manage it himself; having started on Cable #97, Tischman ended his run on the book only as far as issue #104. For Tischman's final four-issue storyline, seeing Cable dealing with clashes between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians, Kordey aided with the story for the first three chapters, and became primary writer for the final one.

At that point, the writing chores were taken over by the aforementioned Darko Macan.

I think it's very useful to read all of Tischman's material, plus Tischman's proposal, and then all of Macan's material, because the whole thing is an excellent example of how one writer can pick up the work of a prior writer, introducing his own themes and his spin on the material, while continuing the work already started. If Tischman wanted to go farther with Cable's spirituality, and his attaining the power of a god, Macan absolutely presses it to the limit. The final issues of the regular Cable series, #105-107 (featuring some rare fill-in art on #106 from Mike Huddleston and John Stanisci), sees the title character really struggling with his powers; he accidently wipes out dozens of minds in a secret fighting arena, evaporates a building housing a nuclear weapon, and becomes tempted by a Singapore zillionaire who wants him to shape the whole world -- not just a few countries -- as a corporate-backed God. The last of the Tischman issues and the beginning of Macan's run are collected in the trade Cable: The End.

And that was the end of the Cable ongoing series.

Which leads us to Soldier X.

Which is actually the old Cable series, with Macan on writing and Kordey on art, but retitled in a multi-series, mid-2002 effort to goose sales and better set up revamped properties as individuals (and maybe make them easier to get rid of, should the need arise). X-Force became X-Statix, Deadpool became Agent X, and Cable became Soldier X.

Kordey and Macan lasted for eight issues on Soldier X. Sales were not good. The material was never collected. But these issues are some of my favorite things from the X-Men revamps of the period, ideal back-issues to stumble across, loaded with eager personality, and willing to boil the tortured concept of its lead character down to the essence of superhero metaphor, while retaining the global outlook of the stories that came directly before it.

There's more comedy than before, and maybe a excess of ambition to the structure - the first six issues tell a long story, which zips the character's 'present' timeline to two years after the end of the prior series, yet acts as a lengthy flashback to near the prior present, as a Daily Bugle reporter reviews a disc of information sent to her from Cable about his transformative adventures. Even as the flashback material occurs, we see Cable's present-day recorded narration via caption; sometimes it falls into the trap of telling us what we're seeing, but more often it exposes the stony character's impressions on what's going on.

But the first issue barely even features the main character, instead following the reporter as she sits through terrorism fear bedlam on an airplane, has her job endangered, meets with bumbling agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., encounters a sumo wrestler in a Sailor Moon costume, and more. Kordey's character art by this time has grown broader, perhaps as a result of his punishing workload, but it matches Macan's tone perfectly. Often, Kordey delivers 23 pages of new art instead of the typical Marvel 22; this is because several of the recap pages are fully-realized pieces of art, with a different character explaining the plot to the reader in their own voice. At one point, the recap page actually appears in the middle of an issue, as a minor character stops the book with converse with YOU. Several jokes are made at the expense of the book's cool new title, and the plotting is deemed "enchantingly meandering" by its own cast of drawings.

I can't say they're wrong - the plot is all over the place, with Cable meeting up with what seems to be his wrinkled Yoda-like mentor Blaquesmith, except the once-sage little imp has become a total hedonist. He directs Cable toward a young mutant in Russia, who seems to have Christlike healing abilities - touch and be cured. Along the way, a large supporting cast attaches, including the girl's drunken father, her controlling-yet-devout mother, a gang of Armenian gangsters, a mob of devout Christians looking for healing, and a bizarre Russian surplus superhero named Geo, who's taken to blowing up empty fast food restaurants in protest of globalization. The action moves (gradually) from Russia's urban environments to the countryside, and then on to St. Lenin, "an old factory, where a mad artist used to work on blending Orthodox and Communist iconography. In a way it made perfect sense. It made sense because it made no sense at all."

Some might extend that notion to the story itself. Characters often don't act so much as converse. Sequences of mutant action mix with images of the grotesque, like the little mutant girl kissing a grown man's massive chest of boiling sores. This mix of tones and approaches is handled very carefully by Kordey, though, his art often adopting an especially Corbenesque character, emphasis placed on squat, weathered characters walking through rough but vivid places. It also manages to 'sell' the mutant superhero angle a lot better than the prior stories, if only through its general air of anything going.

And Macan's story really does cohere very nicely. It's a detailed parable for personal spiritual awakening, kissed with a unique concern for Westernization and ethnic & capitalistic conflict. The Armenians are determined to be better exploiters than victims, but all of them dress like American gangbangers, and some are obsessed with a movie hero notion of being 'hard' men. They want the little healer girl for money, but her mother wants her because religious faith is all she has, and there is nothing finer than to be the mother of a Saint, even if it means the child is martyred. The girl herself makes a mid-story transformation from healer to a type of succubus, drawing strength out of people when she used to give it away - a nice little story about religious faith, that. Geo challenges the confused Cable to stand for something:

"I want the right to be a hero WITHOUT LOOKING like one! I want a world where I could be EQUAL without being the SAME!"

Feel free to indulge in any metafictional reading that pleases you.

Anyway, Cable eventually wakes up. He even undergoes a scourging, his skin torn apart by "three thousand" bullets, then even more of it torn off his body in long strips by people eager for healing. Needless to say, he rises again, even if he doesn't die. He grows to giant size, and strips all the metal off his skin, and decides that if he has the powers of a god, he ought to start acting like one. Clearly, the superhero-as-God theme isn't a new one (even the unfortunate film event Superman Returns came complete with an ill-advised Jesus subtext); what makes it work here is Macan's investment in an emphatic catalog of beliefs among characters, recognizing that religion and politics and philosophy and ethnicity often cannot be separated. And I can't say I've ever seen that subject matter addressed quite so effectively through the broad men-as-gods sweep of a Marvel superhero comic.

The final two issues of Kordey's and Macan's Soldier X more or less act to complete the work's themes. Issue #7 suffers from what seems to me like evident compression problems, owing to a creative team being asked to clean off their desks and wrap things up. Sales weren't good, you know. Cable flies around, using his powers for uniquely non-violent godly purposes; he wants to demonstrate that having destructive powers doesn't mean you need to use them. He discovers that the Blaquesmith he met was a fake, but the impressionable imp becomes Cable's disciple, reversing the master-apprentice roles.

And issue #8, just like with the end of Morrison's New X-Men, whisks us far into the future, to the year 4006, long after the seeds of Cable's Askani way have taken hold. For this issue, colorist Matt Madden works directly from Kordey's pencils, creating a delicate, unreal sensation. The story follows a young Askani boy and an older woman, who travel to a nearby town to defuse a race skirmish, and serves mainly to underline the themes of the stories that preceded it, and show that the man-and-god influence of Cable has congealed into a semi-misinterpreted religion that nevertheless equips people to face most of the same problems as existed in the past. Not a bad Christ metaphor, which is what they're going for. But Cable gets off a little easy in comparison - we get a flashback/flash-forward to Cable's peaceful death, in one of those sequences (I'm a sucker for) where nearly all of the characters from Macan's and Tischman's stories show up to implicitly say goodbye.

Ha! I told you Macan worked to further Tischman's themes! All of these Cable/Soldier X plots add up from the nation-by-nation focus of early issues to the broadest effect of all, if one ironically dispersed in impact. This is a rare occurrence in modern superhero books, where lines are often drawn by writers. Here, it is Kordey, the artist and sometimes-writer, who is the constant. And that may be due, by and large, to his embodiment of the time.

Solder X went on for two more issues, under a different creative team, and then ended in late 2003. Marvel didn't seem to know what to do with Kordey. He'd have been excellent on The Punisher MAX, had the series not had months to go before it started. Instead, Kordey was puzzlingly placed on what I gather was the most traditional, most stylistically conservative of the X-Men line, Chris Claremont's X-Treme X-Men. Kordey was not an easy fit with such classical superheroics at all. He ran into content clashes with editorial. He blanched at being assigned inkers, which to my mind (given my limited exposure to the work) seemed to act as a means of slicking his work up, to hammer it into a 'proper' superhero approach.

By the time ReLoad came around, Kordey was gone. He'd later do lovely work on the IDW series Smoke. He'd work on the first two albums of project for French publisher Delcourt, L'Histoire Secrète. I don't know what he's doing now.

But you can still find his works scattered. They might not collect them, but they can't hide them. I continue to see Kordey's Marvel work as perfectly of its time, yet never really dimmed by what few years have passed. I think his reputation will get better, as time burns off the snark and controversy, leaving the work. He was fast. He was good.

Maybe he'd have even gotten this column in on time.

Labels: Jog

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It's both a complement and an insult to say that HALO: UPRISING #1 reminded me of some old European Heavy Metal-type comic, I guess.

Visually, at least, it's all complementary. Alex Maleev's art has never really fit the American superhero market to my mind - not that that's a bad thing - and his recent work for things like Illuminati or Civil War: The Confession have seemed pretty but out of place, some awkward attempt to give those books gravitas that they didn't really deserve. Here, however, his photo-referenced, John Van Fleet-lite, work makes more sense; I'm not familiar with Halo at all - I've never played the game (Games? Is there more than one?), and I didn't look at the graphic novel released last year - so I came to this with no preconceptions as to how the world should look, which may be one reason why it worked so well for me, but I think another is that Maleev's work should be on some kind of "War is Hell" book, even one that's all about how Space War is Hell as well, you know? He has the grit and realism for that kind of thing. It's not just the artwork that makes the visual aspect work so well, however; the lettering is a factor, with its square dialogue balloons and slightly-too-large font. It's different enough to remove the reader from the other Marvel books' context and, indeed, place them in a Heavy Metal frame of mind instead.

The less-than-complementary aspect of it reminding me of a European book is in Brian Bendis' script which isn't so good. It's not just that his dialogue seems to be more artificial and self-conscious than usual, but that there are times when what the characters are saying seems completely divorced from the visuals (In particular, there's a torture scene where a character is clearly in pain and begging to be released in the dialogue, but nothing is happening to him visually; he doesn't even look as if he's in pain) - it all reads like some kind of bad translation or misunderstanding of original (probably French) dialogue, for some reason. Not that the writing is especially bad, but it certainly falls into Bendis' special "Interesting failure" category at this point.

Whether you dig this book or not depends, I think, on how much you want to dig it. It's certainly flawed, and not for everyone - if you dislike Bendis and Maleev, there's not enough sci-fi to pull you through, for example - but I can't really say that it's appalling or such. Instead, it's pretty much just Eh. But then, I never really liked Heavy Metal. Click Here to Read More...

Ah, starting off the week with a sick day is either (a) a good way to have a three day weekend, or (b) a really, really bad way to make a busy week just that little bit busier. You be the judge, but I'm leaning towards the latter option. For now, have a round-up written in a state of belly-churning haze. I'm pre-emptively apologetic about it, if that helps...

ACTION COMICS #854: If there was any doubt in my mind that Final Crisis was going to involve some kind of continuity reboot yet again, this issue - or maybe COUNTDOWN #37, which really started the whole "Jimmy Olsen knows Superman's secret identity now" thing - removed it entirely. Much more than Jimmy knowing who Robin or Wonder Woman are on their downtime or even having superpowers himself, knowing just who Clark Kent really is marks Jimmy for some kind of death/rebirth/mindwipe down the road very very clearly. Which is kind of a shame, considering the other things that Kurt Busiek sets up in the Action issue, in particular Jimmy's new ownership of Krypto the Super-Dog. Action is still a fun Good, but Countdown only manages to be passably Eh (Nice Stephane Roux art on the back-up origin of Poison Ivy, though).

BLACK CANARY #4: Somehow, both Hibbs and myself completely missed that there was a third issue of this, but that kind of suggests that we care about it more than is actually the case; this final issue just manages to hammer home how little this story was actually about Black Canary, and how much it was really about removing the developments that Gail Simone had come up with in Birds of Prey so that DC can go ahead and get her married off to Green Arrow without having a pesky foster daughter or any of that "independent, smart" stuff. Seriously, whoever came up with the "You made me think that my daughter was dead, but really you'd just kidnapped her to be trained by monks so that she doesn't grow up to become an assassin and I can never see her again? Of course I'll marry you!" ending? What was that? Crap.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #29: Just when you think that he'll zig, Brubaker tends to zag, especially on this title, which continues to be much more interesting without the lead character than with... Now, if they could just get poor Sharon into an outfit that doesn't look like something Dazzler wore in the '80s, everything would be Good.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #12: It'd be lazy to say "Yeah, what Hibbs said," but that's pretty much the case. Meltzer's run ends with what is more or less a fill-in issue instead of any kind of summation of what he's done so far, including advancing (or in some cases, creating - Geo-Force is an informant for Deathstroke, but really he's double-crossing him? Huh?) subplots that he had no intention of finishing any time soon. You can see what he was going for, but it falls far short of being anything other than Eh.

OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND: THUNDER AND MARTIAN MANHUNTER #1: Interesting mostly because of the needless Countdown crossover (Someone is killing the New Gods! I get it already!) and J'Onn J'Onnz's portrayal - I guess that "angry young Martian" thing from his recent mini didn't last long at all, then - than anything else, this is thoroughly Eh. The new Batman and The Outsiders series isn't looking in the least bit promising at this point.

SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #4: Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk reunite with their Agents of Atlas again in the fun lead strip - which feels curiously old-fashioned, in the way that the creators and characters are going through different books instead of just being launched into their own ongoing immediately - and the reprints include Mary Jane #1. It's as if this cheapie anthology title is made for me to continually tell everyone that it's quirky, offbeat and thoroughly appreciated in these regions, which probably dooms it to cancellation within the next year. Until then, it's Good and worth checking out.

TERROR INC #1: If anything was designed to give me that special "Wait, what?" feeling over and over again, it's this gonzo crime horror book. It's one of these things that I'm convinced that I shouldn't like, but I do, and feel guilty about it. There's nothing original or even that entertaining about it, other than the strange relentlessness of the whole thing, which I'm sure will have worn thin by the end of the next issue, but still... It's... Okay, somehow. Which feels wrong to admit.

What did the rest of you think?

Labels: Graeme

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I missed the boat on Ultimate Spider-Man. I'm big enough to admit that. I read, what, maybe the first four or five issues or so, and thought "Eh, that's pretty good, but do I need to be reading Spider-Man for?" Cut to, what, six or seven years later and I've devoured all of the Essential Spider-Man, Essential Peter Parker, and Essential Marvel Team-Up books and - finding the current Spider-books lacking - find myself on the lookout for something to provide those old-school Spider-thrills.

Cue ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #112.

I'd been hiding from this book for awhile now, despite suspecting that I'd like it a lot. The idea of catching up with a book that had 100+ issues of tight continuity and references put me off, and I longed for a good jumping on point. And then, as if by magic, Stuart Immonen appeared.

Here's the funny thing, though; as much as I love Immonen's art, the reason this book was enjoyably Good for me was almost all down to Bendis's writing. Immonen's art, in fact, seemed more static and awkward than usual here, with his Peter Parker in particular seeming kind of off (I think it's his tiny little mouth), although there are still parts that impress (His school hallway crowd scene towards the end of the book, for some reason, sticks with me). Bendis's writing, meanwhile, manages to juggle the so-familiar-that-it's-almost-funny sitcom plot of Peter's school life with the none-more-ominous return of Norman Osborne in such a way that he makes it look easy, and this is a book where the Bendis dialogue tics are a strength rather than schtick - Suddenly Peter is funny again, and the angst is legitimate teen angst, rather than dull, "Is my wife going to die," angst. It's such a whole new world that I feel even more dumb for missing the boat the first time around, until I read all the rumors about the Ultimate universe folding up post-Jeph Loeb's involvement... Click Here to Read More...

But then, I didn't get to review issue #1 of this over here. Also: this series reminds me so much of The Winter Men, which was a really nice series, and still has a long-lost final issue to go, and I wish it'd be out soon.

The Programme #2 (of 12): Well, I suppose you can tell whether an issue of soap opera is for you by your reaction to "Get out of my sight before I tell daddy to load his shotgun and blow your lousy Jew-loving head off!"

Which is an actual line uttered by a jilted lover to her formerly straight-arrow boyfriend, who met a pretty Jewish girl, got called a fascist, dropped acid and woke him up to how America's supersoldier program is bad bad bad. The boy later turns some subversive dials on the supersoldier machine, heads for Canada, writes books on American imperialism, but then gets dragged back home by the CIA to tend to our errant superman, who probably ought to beat up the Soviet villain flying around the Middle East.

This brand of high-pitched melodrama and ultra-blunt politics won't appeal to everyone, and it doesn't entirely appeal to me, particularly since artist C.P. Smith, when faced with long stretches of dialogue, has a Tony Harris type of habit for broad facial expressions and exaggerated body acting, which never quite work for me in as heavily realist a character art style as this, even when colorist Jonny Rench splashes it all with as many garish hues as he can manage. I still think the interplay between realist character art and splashy color/shadow work gives the book a unique feel, energizing Peter Milligan's script with a lot of extra nervous energy, but this chapter suggests that maybe the series needs to lean heavily on the fantastic in its story content, so as to better serve its visual aesthetic.

Still, I can't complain too much with exchanges like:

"The Spirit of Lenin! Whoever came up with that name should have been shot."

"He probably was."

OKAY, and I wait to see how it goes.

Labels: Jog

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I'm sure that the usual suspects already have the knives out for THE FLASH #231, Mark Waid's reboot of the title that made his name fifteen or so years ago (and, by the way? Now I feel surprisingly old). I don't know what their complaints will be, exactly - That it's unrealistic to see the former reporter Linda Park be recast as a scientific genius doctor thanks to a remedial course on some alien planet offpanel? That they don't want to see their childhood favorite superhero with kids, because that's not what they think kids want to read about? That the issue of just what happened to Wally and family post-Infinite Crisis is more or less avoided beyond saying that they were on vacation on an alien planet? - but this was one of those books that, as I read, I could almost feel people wanting to complain about. Maybe I'm just getting cynical and sensitive in my old age, because personally, I thought that this was really Very Good.

One of the pluses is that this clearly isn't Waid revisiting past glories - not only has he ditched his old device of Wally narrating each issue starting with "My name is Wally West. I'm the Flash, the fastest man alive," but with the addition of Wally's kids, he's revised not only the set-up of the book but also the tone; it reads as something lighter than when he was last on the book (and definitely much lighter than Geoff Johns' run on the series, or the short-lived Bart Allen version of the character), as much superhero sitcom as all-out action book (Something reflected in the punny title: "The Wild Wests"). Daniel Acuna's artwork - reminiscent in places of Kyle Baker's work on things like "You Are Here" - helps with that, especially in panels that are essentially visual gags to play off the dialogue (Wally's expression as he deals with superspeed diapering, for example), and his lush coloring helps make the depiction of the speed effects one of the more impressive in the character's history.

The result is a book unlike any other superhero book that DC is putting out - Visually impressive with a digital look approaching painterly animation, and a family-friendly tone that thrills and amuses without excess. I hope that the rumors are wrong, and that this team is on the book for the long term because, really? This is the kind of superhero book that I'd love to see more of.

Labels: Graeme

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David Lapham is either very clever or very confused.

TERROR INC. #1 is the latest release for Marvel's MAX imprint. Like most MAX comics, what this actually means is that it's a standard Marvel story with copious amounts of awkward sex and violence attached in a very forced and artificial way (not unlike Justin Timberlake's faux-ghetto routine - he's from sodding Memphis, for God's sake, who does he think he's fooling?).

It's a bit backwards, isn't it? Rather than be branded "for mature readers" due to content, I get the feeling that this issue's content was determined with an eye towards justifying the brand. You have to wonder whether Lapham's first draft came back with "MORE BLOOD & BOOBIES" written all over it.

The last time I saw Terror, he stole Arana's severed arm and was trapped in a future nobody cared about. Lapham anticipates this problem and seems to start from scratch, spending most of his first issue introducing the protagonist. This is where I don't know whether he's being smart or scattered: Terror survives by stealing body parts and attaching them to himself, making him a sort of patchwork monster. And the story itself is a chimera as well: a bit of 300, a bit of MARVEL ZOMBIES, a bit of CONAN, a bit of... well, take your pick from the "mercenary tricked by government" sub-genre. Is Lapham just throwing stuff out there in a blind panic? Or was this a deliberate creative decision? It's hard to say for sure, because I've seen plenty of writers gleefully hurl the kitchen sink at their readers' heads in an attempt to engage them; then again, Lapham can be tricky when he needs to be.

Either way, I can't give it much more than an EH, because even if the structure was intentionally designed to mirror the main character, it didn't make for very interesting reading beyond "well, isn't that a cute idea." Part of the problem may be that, as a hybrid creature, TERROR INC. doesn't seem to offer anything you can't find elsewhere; the downside of incorporating so many different sub-genres is that none of them have much breathing room, and if zombies are your thing, you'd probably be more satisfied with something like THE WALKING DEAD or MARVEL ZOMBIES, simply because those books deal with the subject matter as a central theme.

Labels: Diana

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I'm going to try my very first classic Savage Critic style lightning round-- horribly slow and wordy lightning! Excited? Don't be!

The Chemist: This is the new Image "crime" comic from Jay Boose. Though Boose's day job is (or was) apparently Pixar animator, the comic reminded me more of a "Youth Restricted" anime from the 1980's: the cool car, sexually charged bimbo sidekick, amoral and sexually frigid super-professional main character, even the main character's name (Vance!), all remind more of Riding Bean, say, than Monsters, Inc. The comic starts promising as Vance and his sidekick are at first portrayed as unrepetent drug dealers, which I found quite charming; unfortunately, the comic pulls its punch and while the girl sidekick is still a drug dealer, Vance pussies out on us: "I reverse engineer prescription pharmaceuticals for the ninety percent of Americans who couldn't afford it otherwise." What the fuck is that? Apparently the thrill-a-minute world of discount pharmaceuticals is lucrative enough to give him a cool car, an apartment out of Beineix's Diva, an intimate knowledge of how to handle gunfights with generic mobsters, etc. It feels like the Hollywood choice instead of the story choice, but, like I said, the girl sidekick is a happy-go-lucky drug-abusing dealer so points to Boose for going that far at least. Anyways, it's not really a crime comic, so much as a light-hearted male fantasy of banging a mentally-retarded pixie. All the drugs are mostly window-dressing for a comic about the bimbo sidekick acting cutesy / quailtarded. I like caper stories enough to have had a good time, and I like that it gives so much space to its characters even if I didn't enjoy their company as much as Boose does. You know: not great, not horrible, good choices, bad choices-- what's there to say? The art's accomplished. It has that "frames from a cartoon" feel that certain older Kyle Baker comics once had-- the colors are rich and consistent, and the acting is expressive. Unfortunately, a reluctance to cover too much of the art with word baloons often leads to cramped, unpleasant lettering. I hope Boose does more comics; I just wish the main character sold crack.

Fun Home: The lady's dad turns out to be gay! Very Good.

Drockleberry Book One: Swell art (the easy comparison is to Tony Harris and I'm too lazy to go past the easy comparison) compliments this inscrutable, slow, ambitious, confusing, adjective and jaggedly-paced apocalypse thriller. Early on, the going is rough and the dialogue frequently devolves into sub-Vertigo "look, Ma-- I have attitude!" one-liners. For example: "If bad news were x-lax, you and I and this whole fucking planet would be sink'n balls deep at the corner of shit fer luck and go fuck yerself"-- do you understand what in the fuck this means? I don't! Is the author trying to sound like one of those UK writers? Or worse: are they from the UK? Let's hope not! It's often more content to show off than clearly present a story-- here's an excerpt of narration to give you an idea: "The weavers, for all their great mystery, were predictable in at least the one sense, that they would suffer nothing which threatened the pristine, if not baffling order of their amaranthine efforts." So: yeah, it's pretty amaranthine all up in that mug, but the art is strong enough that it's not such a terrible thing having to watch this comic show-off, no: Andrew Dimitt's work is increasingly stylish as the pages go by. It took me around 40 to 50 pages to start to understand the plot, though-- Dimitt frequently seems to set up scenes where the plot is about to be explained in clear language, and then cuts around those scenes. But the plot, to the extent I understand it, seems kind of compelling. It's a bit dismaying how much of the apocalypse Dimitt has happen off-camera, though, but at least that seems like there's a reasoning behind that choice. At minimum, Book One ends on an interesting note, a strange and promising cliffhanger-- I'm under the (possibly mistaken) belief that Dimitt is taking a break from Drockleberry to pursue BENTHIC ANGELS, a project with Dan Goldman(SHOOTING WAR). Anyways: I'm a sucker for comics about the apocalypse and Dimitt provides enough eye candy that I'm willing to indulge him enough time to work out some of the early kinks. And this is the kind of reason I visit the Act-i-vate site: flawed work, yes, but because a talented creator is taking advantage of an opportunity to attempt things he wouldn't be allowed to elsewhere in comics. How much can I shit on that without looking like an asshole? Less than I have in this review. Be advised, though: the final 20 pages or so seem to only be available at the Act-i-vate site as of the date of this review.

Jeff Smith's Captain Marvel: How would I know? I'm a grown man.

Jonah Hex #21: Jordi Bernet supplies his typically wonderful art for an exploitation ramble from "Gray & Palmiotti." The comic opens with comic book bimbos being mercilessly raped, then it cuts to a 100% unrelated story of criminals on the run from Jonah Hex who are instead scalped by a deranged Native American, until winding back to reveal that the bimbos have been raped to death during the comic's long and pointless digression. Cue: more violence, and hee hee, the end. I don't read this comic regularly, but if they're all this empty-headed, oblivious to story, pointless and cheerfully exploitative, I might start. I'd seen a couple of Phil Noto's issues which were slick and appealing, but I think Bernet is better casting for the book since Bernet seems more comfortable drawing a Wild West with dirt in it. Still: does every issue feature racially-numb-skulled amaranthine imagery and completely pointless gore? I hope so! Let's find out together! Yet another comic book where I'd have been happier if the main character had sold crack.

Lil Abner: This stretch of strips from March 23 1955 to April 18, 1955 is a pretty good time if you enjoy humor about rural inbreds as much as I do. Lil Abner needs to win a cake-baking contest for his wife, but he's too embarrassed to admit he cooks to the other men in his town. Cross-dressing capers ensue, and the plot whizzes around hither and dither in a pleasing way. Years later, Al Capp would be accused of sexually harassing Goldie Hawn. But I really like how characters in classic strips like Abner have their own way of speaking-- it seems like people in Comic Strip World used to have their own language. Even in comic books, there used to be all sorts of amaranthine expressions that originated in comics: "Great Ceasar's Ghost" or "Sweet Christmas" or "Holy Human-shit, Batman" or "Blood-Soaked Pubic Hairs!" It's strange that such a once-popular aspect of cartooning has almost completely dissappeared. Or maybe it hasn't disappeared and I'm just forgetting a bunch of examples. I don't really care.

I Killed Adolf Hitler: Scandinavian comic superstar Jason presents another funny-sad funny-animal comic, this time a time travel action adventure story involving professional hitmen, a time machine, and Hitler. I liked how the comic used Hitler: the comic spends a lot of time with people who believe their lives would be better if someone else weren't around, so including Hitler in the narrative makes a satisfying amount of sense, for obvious reasons. Except there's something about a Scandinavian dog version of Adolf Hitler that's both disturbing and funny to me for some reason I can't quite articulate. The genre horseplay early on wasn't terribly interesting to me, but eventually it settles down to being about regret and sexual frustration and depression, all that good stuff what was the dance that brought me. I don't know-- it's a good time. It doesn't come up in the comic, but many historians believe that Hitler had a fetish for urinating on his girlfriends.

Plain Janes: I read this comic a long time ago, and while I didn't like it much, I had a few positive things to say at the time since I like Jim Rugg and how he draws so much. But boy, this comic has just festered with me since. Festered! I really just get mad to think about it-- it become this thing in my head of ... Look: they release a comic-- it's incomplete. It has no third act, no plot resolution, none of the character arcs are resolved-- it does not have a proper ending. They wait a while for suckers like me to buy it. Then, they announce a "sequel." Explain how that's okay to me! Explain it! The writing and the art are both fine, it's the product of talented people, super, great, fine, but boy, I just can't stop being mad about this comic and the culture that produced it. I keep hearing nice things about the other Minx books, but I just don't trust them. Of course: I'm not a teenage girl, so how worthless is my opinion? Very! Still: anger!

What do you think? Oh, how special you are! Haha, just kidding: you suck-- I don't care what you think.

Labels: Abhay

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Over at Newsarama, Hibbs talks more about the POS system in the store:

"I’ve only been using POS for two weeks now; and only the one system, so nothing I say on the topic should probably be granted that much weight, really, but I can already see how this is going to transform the way that I operate my store, my ability to properly order things that have fallen “off my radar”, my accidents in double or triple ordering some material, my access to data for customer searches and special orders, and so on. If I can enact even half of the efficiencies that POS promises my store should quickly become that much more efficient and profitable."

It's not necessarily that easy, though. Go and read why.

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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Let's get the obvious things about KILLING GIRL #1 out the way first. Yes, artist Frank Espinosa is a very stylish artist, especially when he handles the coloring as well as the brushwork, as he does here; the art here is easily the best thing about the book, to the point where I wonder whether Espinosa's absence from the series in the last Image solicits (Toby Cypress is listed as artist, instead. Having seen Cypress's art in The Tourist awhile back, it may actually be an improvement, but I digress) will hurt the series' chances with the audience in the long run.

That said.

Espinosa may be too stylized for his own good, especially on this book - his retro '50s sense of line and color is not only at odds with the subject matter. It's too attractive, for want of a better way of putting it - it's not that there's an interesting cognitive dissonance (Hi Johanna!) between the two, but that they just plain don't work together - and also, at times, hard to read what's happening successfully. It's frustrating to read, because you know that Espinosa's a talented artist; he simply needs an editor to tell him to take another pass at a page every now and then for his stuff to be completely drop-dead wonderful.

The story, meanwhile, doesn't live up the art, no matter how flawed the art may be. Sad to say, there's nothing in the writing that you've not seen before, and done more successfully, at that; the dialogue is cliched, the plot relies on coincidence too much (The boyfriend of the assassin's long lost sister just happens to run into her at a stoplight? Really?), and the whole thing is slathered in narration that makes you feel as if the lead character has only ever read shitty airport spy novels in her entire life. Which is to say, it's not a very good story, sadly.

The end result is a book that pairs the most generic of writing with art that could do with being a little bit more generic, which is as unsatisfactorily Eh as it sounds. An oddity, but not necessarily an interesting one.

Labels: Graeme

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[Apart from the fact the only stuff I've posted on a comics review blog lately is this pictures, a movie review, and a shill about my garage sale?]

I'd opine there's something wrong with throwing these books in a quarter bin. Some of them are too recent, most of them are too expensive, and a few of them are just too good to get thrown into a big long box and let go for a quarter.

This is exactly the kind of hopping-blind anxiety I go through for the annual garage sale: usually, I start out by worrying that nobody's gonna show if I'm not making some outrageously good deals (except Joe Keatinge and Chris French, who then go on to mock me); then I move through a stage of avarice where I go and pull the books that are surely worth a bajillion (which I then check on Ebay to find, most of the time, that if I hustle I might be able to sell the books at a profit... as long as I bill out my time at about ten cents an hour), then laziness sets in and I throw most of 'em back in the box, then despair, etc. It's quite the comic book passion play, with me moving through all the stages of the long box.

Anyway, these books are definitely going out--stuff I've since gotten in trade, stuff I read and enjoyed but realized I would never read again, stuff I thought was overhyped but might be a fun read for a quarter--and I've still got to make the call on many others (since I have Promethea, Preacher and The Invisibles in trade, why am I holding on to the singles?): there's gonna be a lot of fun early '80s junk, I'll have at least one bin of supercheap toys, a long box of trades, and about 25 PS2 games that are hitting the chopping block.

Again, that's this Saturday, from 9 to 4, at approximately this location (there's about eight dopes who pay extra to sell along Cortland rather than out of their garage, and I'm one of them. Of course, they usually don't let us know until the day before the sale, if then....) and I hope you can make it. If you know me and think you can make it, drop me a line and I'll put aside something for you.

Now, if you excuse me, I've got more sorting, hauling and panicking to do...

Labels: garage sale, Jeff

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I have to admit, I kind of like the idea behind Top Cow's "Pilot Season." The idea of trying out six books and seeing which two have the best response before greenlighting ongoing series for them seems like a smart move - although the cynic in me wonders whether the voting is going to end up rigged, or whether the series that get the nod to continue are going to have the same creative teams - and the choice of creators on some of the books is both interesting and potentially exciting. Take the team behind RIPCLAW: PILOT SEASON #1; Jorge Lucas may be the kind of artist that you could've imagined on a spin-off from Marc Silvestri's Cyberforce, but Vertigo darling Jason Aaron is a more unusual choice for writer (A Wolverine fill-in aside, isn't this his first non-Vertigo work?). Together, they come up with a strange, kind of patchwork, revamp of the character and concept that works perhaps better as a pilot for a series than a story in and of itself.

(Which means that it's a successful execution of the Pilot Season idea, maybe, but not necessarily a successful comic book, if that makes sense. But I'm maybe getting ahead of myself.)

The off-kilter humor of the writing is something that seemed too off-kilter in the opening of the book, for some reason - The initial over-the-top scenes of "one man against the entire underworld," including traditional "How many people...?" "Just one, sir" exchange, read as cliche at first, and it wasn't until the first hint at Ripclaw's new status quo that it all seemed to fall into place for me... so much so, in fact, that I went from thinking that it was a half-assed story that wrote down to its audience to wondering just where Aaron would take the character if he got the chance to continue. To say more might ruin the McGuffin of the new take, but suffice to say that it's something that makes the character less of a Wolverine rip-off by using an idea that I'm sure someone has already used for Wolverine.

Lucas's art is a plus for the book, though; his artwork - showing influences from (cover artist) Tony Moore, Moebius, and Silvestri, amongst others (which is both less pretty and more generic than it sounds, however) - manages to hit the right tone of being serious and dead-pan at once, and also matches Aaron's script in the almost-pitch-perfect-but-not-quite stakes. They'd be a pair worth paying attention to, if the book were to continue.

And that's maybe what it comes down to. Would I read more issues of a Ripclaw book, based on this pilot? Yeah, probably, to be honest; it brings a different tone to the Top Cow books than what they've already got, and if the team decided to take things even further off-kilter based on what worked for me in this issue, it could be a quirkily successful addition to the line. A guarded Good from me, but what do you think?

Labels: Graeme

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Strange but true: I had a dream last night where I suddenly remembered that I had agreed to write a series for DC Comics at SDCC. As in, it was still August, and everything else was entirely like real life, but I had somehow forgotten that a couple of weeks back, I'd said to Dan DiDio that I would write something (I don't remember what, the way that dreams can be both entirely clear and completely opaque at the same time - I think that it was Justice League?) for him for a few months. I remembered this, in the dream, with something approaching a sense of dread: "Why did I say I'd do that," I moaned to someone, "I don't have time to write comics."

That sound you heard was the death of all fun in my life. Shall we review?

It's embarrassing to admit, but when I was twelve years old or so, Booster Gold wasn't just my favorite comic book but also my favorite comic character. I'm not entirely sure why, exactly; I think there was something about his being (back when he was starring in his original series, before the JLI days) a flawed hero who nonetheless was trying to be better, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Dan Jurgens' art didn't help a lot. When I was twelve, Jurgens was somewhere close to my favorite comic artist, as well.

(You may mock, but Jurgens was pretty directly responsible for my love of Grant Morrison; Morrison's Zenith was starting in 2000AD around this time, and the idea of materialistic, kind of selfish superhero like Zenith was an easy sell to someone who thought that it was probably just a weekly, black and white version of his favorite comic character. Little did I know what I was getting into, but then again, I was twelve.)

All of which is my way of telling you that it's fair to say that I was rather excited about BOOSTER GOLD #1. In addition to the whole fanboy nostalgia about the character - if not Jurgens' art, which hasn't grown up with my tastes, sadly - it's also been sold as one of the two 52-spin-offs that actually involves the writers that made the original series so good, and it's all about time travel. How could it fail?

For those expecting me to now list the way in which it fails, you should all be less cynical; the issue is actually pretty Good. It's not going to revolutionize comics or even your opinion of Geoff Johns (who I happen to quite like, actually. Sorry, Alan), but it does exactly what you want it to, and does it rather well. Johns (and co-writer Jeff Katz) lay out a first issue that clearly introduces the characters involved as well as the new concept behind the series with a minimum of expositionary clunk - Call me old-fashioned, but I actually appreciated the data dump dialogue when it appeared - and then repeat the Justice Society trick of ending the issue with four peeks into what's lying ahead in the first year of the book, whetting your appetite for more. It's a smart pilot episodic format, giving the reader everything they need to decide whether or not they'll want to keep reading, and even if you're not the kind of person for whom time travel stories that also work as continuity implants seems like a big draw, you still have to appreciate the everything-you-need-in-one structure.

Jurgens' art, which defined late-80s, early-90s superhero comics for me, is solid enough, but maybe it's that association with a specific timeframe that makes it seem dated for me, along with his tendency towards a genericism of figure and facial experessions. It's not bad, but it's just... solid. There's a potential for this book to be quirkier and more fun, and as much as I like the idea of the character's creator being involved in this new series, I do kind of wonder what a more left-field artist could've done with the material.

All of that said, I finished this issue and didn't feel the feeling of fanboy depression that I'd expected. It's not like being twelve years old again - which can only be a good thing, really - but if you liked the Booster stuff in 52, you'll be on board with this for the foreseeable future. Insert your own time travel-related punchline here.

Labels: Graeme

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Hello, all. Let me tell you, I just couldn't wait to climb up here onto the internet today and tell you about my week so far; it's been a real roller coaster, unlike anything experienced by anyone before.

First off: the cheesesteak place by my office changed their primary cheese from white American to yellow American. This was big, and completely upset the lives of everyone in the city. I almost had a heart attack, and not the sort of heart attack I usually almost have when eating there. I couldn't believe there weren't news crews at the scene; I mean sure, sometimes I guess other sexy and upsetting things happen in the city -- somebody inflating a giant pig on the capital steps whenever a member of the state legislature is seen as naughty, for instance -- but I think we all need to get our priorities straight. Cheesesteaks are the stuff of life.

But there was another sharp turn in store for me this week, yet one I'd been hoping to clutch my ribs over: I happened upon a cache of bargain-priced English-language European comics in a store that had recently moved, and in that pile of stuff I managed to complete my English-language collection of Valérian: Spatio-Temporal Agent.

Which, by its nature, isn't going to be very complete, but let me explain.

Sometimes, comics hits from one culture translate well to another. Take Death Note. A very popular work in its native Japan, and pretty damned successful seemingly wherever it goes. It's caught on well among the English-language manga crowd for sure, and I expect the anime adaptation will do the same for anime viewers.

But then, sticking with manga for a moment, there's always something like Mushishi, a hugely acclaimed work that's also shown up on Best Of manga and anime lists, right alongside mighty hits like Dragonball Z. Yet there is little force behind the Mushishi manga in the US, which has had its US release schedule pushed back to a twice-yearly beat, which all but ensures that we won't be catching up to those Japanese editions any time soon. The anime just recently got released around here. Maybe it'll do better.

And Japanese comics, as you might have heard, are 'big' in English-speaking environs. Pity the poor Franco-Belgian comics, where even the longest-lived hits have a hard time in North America. Like the book I'm talking about here, which I'll now refer to as simply Valérian.

The brainchild of writer Pierre Christin (who would also write several stories for Enki Bilal) and artist Jean-Claude Mézières, Valérian has been in release since 1967, where it debuted in the pages of the famed comics magazine Pilote, which was already the home of the mighty Astérix and the famed western serial Blueberry. Christin and Mézières had attended school together as boys, and they reunited in the US of the mid-'60s, as Christin worked in Utah as a visiting professor and Mézières had been spending time as... an actual cowboy. Together, the created a hugely influential and popular sci-fi work, which has resolutely avoided catching on in the US, at least.

There are currently 21 'core' Valérian albums. The most recent was just released earlier this year. Of those, a grand total of seven have been officially translated into English and released for US consumption. Of those seven, two have been released no less than three times, including the obligatory run in Heavy Metal, and several different book collections from publishers like NBM. I don't have every iteration of all of these; rather, I have a series of four oversized albums released by Dargaud Canada Ltd. (later Dargaud International Publishing Inc.) from 1981-83, and a trade paperback omnibus titled : The New Future Trilogy, collecting three albums (somewhat in the style of the ill-fated DC/Humanoids venture) and released by iBooks in 2004.

It's interesting to see how the early books in particular are sold. The Dargaud volumes (and Dargaud is also the French publisher, so keep in mind I'm talking about the English-language wing of the time) don't contain any indication on the back cover as to what's exactly in these comics - rather, there's a solid wall of laudatory (if selective) quotes from American comics professionals, reading like:

"...one of my favorite SF epics..."
JIM STERANKO

"...truly beautiful comic artwork..."
ROY THOMAS

"...A wonderful balance of intellect and craft... a comic page that is structurally whole..."
WILL EISNER

"...tite ass shit indeed, Broseph..."
HARVEY KURTZMAN

Wait, no. Kurtzman's quote was simply "...WOW!" But you get the point.

I guess I understand the impulse. Maybe readers who really like one artist or writer will want to follow what said artist/writer likes. It's a technique that's met with limited success; surely some readers will recall Warren Ellis all but falling unconscious onto the pub floor promoting The Metabarons, and that sucker has still never been fully released to the US in English-language form. I suspect things were tougher for Valérian in the early '80s, although it's worth noting that some of the introductory material included in these books went out of its way to avoid talking about comic books, focusing instead on newspaper strips. Which makes sense, given the tender state of the comic book market at the time, and considering that the average Valérian page of the time was assembled from two or three serialized strips stacked atop one another. Look here, and note how the page is bisected into "25a" and "25b" in the bottom right corners of some panels.

I guess I should point you to Mézières' homepage in general; there's a million great things there, some of which are even in English, like the aforementioned Mr. Eisner's introduction to the initial Dargaud tome. Plenty of pretty pictures too.

But wait, what's this comic about? It's the adventures of the titular Valérian, who looks a bit like one Casanova Quinn, and travels through time and space on missions for the human space capital of Galaxity. He has a partner named Laureline, an assertive girl Valérian picked up from 11th century France, and quickly went from eye-candy romantic interest to near-protagonist. There's elements of continuity from book to book, including a massive shake-up about halfway through that saw Galaxity erased from time itself and the main characters left to wander as freelancers, but all of the Dargaud books are neatly self-contained, mostly concerning themselves with sci-fi adventure and gentle social/political satire.

And really nice art, by the way. Mézières started the series off in a very cartoonish manner, somewhat reminiscent of certain MAD artists to US readers. But he quickly tightened his style into something cute but detailed, with much attention paid to endearing character art and colorful environments. His use of shadows and backgrounds in these early stories can be quite striking, although detailed 'realism' (for what it's worth) always co-exists with sprightly comedy, some strong cartooning chops on display.

Indeed, Valérian is a true all-ages comic, at least in these stories. The earlier Dargaud stories, including World Without Stars (1971) and Welcome to Alflolol (1972), seem a bit like politically-active children's cartoons, in which Valérian and Laureline become caught up in some metaphoric business, like World Without Stars' literal war between the sexes on a distant world, involving hard, militaristic women and makeup-wearing male aesthetes. Both forces learn to not destroy their world before long. In Welcome to Alflolol, the duo see an ancient race return to their beloved home planet, which has happened to become the center of the Terran Galactic Empire's industrial development. Will they be cooped up on reservations? Forced to work for their living on a world they used to know? The resolution is pat, but Christin's sense of comedy and character is sound.

But Valérian the series got better as it went on, and Christin's satire grew more sophisticated, and Mézières stretched his art to more intensive design levels. The excellent Ambassador of the Shadows (1975) sees Our Heroes stuck escorting a belligerent human diplomat to the chaotic Central Point, a patchwork construct of societies that somehow runs the universe through its diverse counsel. The Ambassador plans to use warships to increase human influence, but he and Valérian are kidnapped, and Laureline is left to search through a multitude of small, capitalistic societies -- psychic jellyfish and shape-shifter prostitutes and literal dream merchants -- armed only with a lil' critter that shits out multiples of anything you feed him, money included. But in the end, paradise is found in the middle of muck, various minds are expanded, and there's maybe little hope for even enlightened humans.

I also enjoyed Heroes of the Equinox (1978), a simple story of Valérian's participation in a mystic quest to venture to a mystery island that must be conquered for a planet's people to have children. He competes against some parodic characters, including a war-like Norse killer, an armor-clad Communist who unconvincingly insists that he loves democracy, and a druggy primitivist magician. All represent certain social impulses, with Valérian embodying the creative team's preferred hands-off liberal humanism. There's some fun poked at superhero-style fights, and a gentle parody of Moebius's Arzach stories (Jean Giraud being a friend and peer of Mézières).

But mostly, Mézières' art indulges in some thrilling uses of repeated panel designs and concurrent action, with four plots occurring at once on different zones of the page, then reconstituting into one entity, then splitting off again, sometimes with small panels overlaid on the main action, and segments split by lettering. At times, it anticipates some of the formal innovations Howard Chaykin brought to US comics in American Flagg!; none of the art samples I can find demonstrate this visually, but I can show you the boldness of Mézières' line.

It's entertaining, satisfying stuff. It proved influential, both on the later Star Wars series of films, as well as on various visual works that Mézières himself worked on, such as The Fifth Element. Eventually, the artist's style would grow sleeker in terms of character art, and Christin's stories a bit more brooding. People without a home and all. Yet, there was always a bit of melancholy; a slightly downcast view on human affairs as always needing a change, philosophically and politically.

I can't tell you how Valérian is today. I hope it's doing better than Astérix. Have you seen the most recent album of that? The comics industry satire? Reading it is akin to walking into a bookstore, only to find an elderly man standing by the comics section, his eyes wide with alarm, piercing shrieks erupting through his lips from deep in his chest as he whips his cane against the manga shelf, over and over, knees bobbing with each strike. This scene continues for several minutes, until a barista creeps up with a sample of raspberry pound cake, and nudges him toward the exit. That’s about what it’s like.

Our viewpoint is limited, though, if we don't import, and seek translation. Or learn French. That cuts out the majority of English-language comics readers. Maybe it's no big deal - even in English the series has never taken off. But it's a good one, an important one, and one I have great affection for. Maybe it's the responsibility of devout readers to go through the trouble of seeking out everything that their language and their surrounding audience won't support for viable domestic release. I think many will hope for the next try at English, since there's been so many tries already. I've just managed to finish finding the English stuff. I'll get back to you when I go French.

Labels: Jog

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I'm a little conflicted about Brad Meltzer's run on the JLA. My first thought is "well, 12 issues is a mini-series, not a run, man". My second thought is that I have generally enjoyed the "density" of his comics writing -- while one may or may not like the specifics of the content, any given issue issue of JLofA has not been a 4-minute read like too many comics these days. My third thought is that there's a very fine line between characterization and vamping, and that line is often drawn through conflict ("FONFLIF!!") between characters.

Meltzer's run has largely been three stories. "The Tornado's Path", "The Lightning Saga" and the "Trapped in a cave-in issue"... and that's it. Again, that's not even a "run", kinda. It feels to me, as a reader, like Meltzer tried the monthly comics game, then suddenly realized "shit, this isn't for me" -- I bet $5 that's not even close to the truth, but that's what it feels like for me.

JLofA #12 is the third issue of the run to feature two 50/50 covers that form a single issue. This bothers me really deeply. Surely this is exactly not the kind of high-profile-if-not-event comic that can stand on its own without artificial outside gimmicks spiking sales? Weirdly, I probably wouldn't have minded if this was JLA #511 (261 of v1, 113 of JUSTICE LEAGUE [blank/international/america], 125 of JLA, and 12 here), and Holy Mother of God, I just realized that Meltzer's first issue is thus #500.... Has no one else said that outloud yet?

This one's a nice cover, too -- probably everyone who buys it WILL want both halves -- I know that I, just looking at the left side right now want to see the other bit, too.

JLofA #12 is also $3.50, being "double sized". It's got some fairly effective character studies going on, with the sole problem that, really nothing happens. There are beats here -- but there's not any conflict; well not at least any conflict that, as far as I know, Meltzer is going on continue.

See, here's the thing: its all well an nice to set up future plotlines for characters for someone else to carry the ball on. But I tend to think that history shows us that the next person or two in line tends to want to make their own mark on a book/character, and tends to ignore those kinds of hanging chad.

We have: Vixen has no animal powers, Hawkgirl and Speedy are screwing, Black Lightning is a snitch, and Tornado... Tornado is a dick? I mean, Meltzer went out of his way to bring Reddy back, and this is where he leaves him?

Geo Force... does he even have a plot? What's he doing in the league? Has he even ever been in an "adventure" with them? He's so generic a hero that I tend to mentally edit him out of comics not drawn by Jim Aparo

I don't know, if I were the incoming writer, I'd want to ignore most of those fairly boring concepts, and ditch some of those characters and bring in others that I wanted to put the spotlight on.

In a way, this issue is just "look, the Magnificent Seven are the League" (even if 2 of the 7 in the framing device didn't appear to slightly reflect their current manifestations {cue DC editorial: "that's on purpose!"}), "plus here are 5 other characters I like"

(though, reading this back, I just realized I've left Canary out of the mix.... so, Magnificent Eight, then? Canary belongs in the League, in my opinion, because she's the Bridge between Society and League. Hell, Moore made her an Archtype in WATCHMEN)

Like I said, I'm torn -- I thought I got my "$3.50" of value out of the issue over all; it is GOOD in that regard. But this is a run, by dint of its promotion, and its "pedigree", that seems like it wants to be "quintessential"... and is kind of just... there.

My idea of the "perfect" League is the Mag7 (or 8) and a small additional cast of oddballs or outcasts -- Zatana, Firestorm, Booster Gold, characters with something slightly askew to them. Both Reddy and Vixen could fit those bills, but it seems to me that Meltzer left both characters at a nadir.

Geo Force and Hawkgirl are really basically just dull characters (sorry), and, really, I'd have to say that if either have any consumer interest it's probably more likely because of their connection to other characters. I mean, the only reason I'm even willing to take the time to type the words "geo force" is because the swerve of Terra in Wolfman and Perez's TEEN TITANS worked so damn well 20-something years ago. But Brion has barely any defining characteristic beyond "brother of Terra".

And Black Lightning, poor Black Lightning, trapped in plothammer after plothammer as some desperately tries to figure out what the hell to do with him. Plus, yar, that's a damn ugly costume.

You have to give Meltzer credit for trying -- he's really really terrifically earnest in his attempts to make it all feel "epic". But, at the end of the day, I sorta don't think these 12 issues are going to make so much of a mark. And you can quote the last line of Meltzer's last issue for the reason why: "It's the true beauty of [the League] -- for all its changes, the League never really changes"

That's not what I'd call a thematic note with any weight or resonance.


What do YOU think?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Following Graeme's lead, here's quick takes on the superhero books still sitting around from weeks previous. (And yeah, Graeme, really weird week here, too. Very mood swingy.)

Stormwatch PHD #10 -- It surprises me to realize this, but this title is probably my current favorite team book. (Although statements like that say as much about what else is available as the quality of this title; and the last time I said something like that, it was about Power Company, so we see what that's worth.)

Anyway, the strength of this title is characterization, as the plots so far have been pretty simple "bad guy team infiltrates, then attacks" or "someone is attacked, find out who did it". The roster's huge, with new characters and returned-from-the-dead from previous title incarnations and, in this issue, faux historical characters. Someone is killing retired Stormwatchers, which gives writer Christos Gage reason to create yet more superheroes. I don't mind, he's good at it. Ghetto Blaster? New Romantic? Not only are they on-point concepts (summarizing powers and look succinctly), they capture the sense of a particular era.

(I don't mind simple plots for superhero titles, actually. They're easier to remember month-to-month. There's a reason they're classics. And the fun comes with the details put around the edges.)

The characters are why I enjoy the series, especially since Gage has come up with two of my favorite new superhero women. First, Gorgeous, a former moll whose power is manipulating people. I find her an insightful comment on the roles women are forced into and how they subvert them from the inside. She's a classic version of the streetwise sexpot who's got the upper hand because she knows a lot more about people than they realize. All they see is body and blonde. Think Harlow with a psychology master's.

Second, Black Betty. She's got generic magic powers, but she's so inspirationally cheery that it's a pleasant contrast from the usual version of those types of characters. Unfortunately, she isn't given any distinctive dialogue this issue, so you'll have to take my word for it. I also like the way these characters have relationships -- marriages, flings, and everything in between.

Artist Andy Smith does sexy superheroes (WildStorm's reason for existing) well, in the classic exaggerated "realistic" style, although he sometimes makes people appear generically interchangeable.

This was Good. So much for brief, hunh? Let's see if I can move more quickly.

Gen 13 #11 -- Waste of paper. Tries to do something clever with meta-commentary on previous versions and multiverses, but way too many characters means the reader is quickly lost in forgettable interaction. The concept's time is over. Bury it. Awful

Hawkgirl #66 -- Didn't read the series, mainly because when this latest version relaunched, I didn't care for Howard Chaykin's nipple-tastic art. So why am I praising the final issue of the series? Because Walter Simonson shows how you should close a title in a shared universe.

The big premise, the Hawks' cycle of reincarnation, is resolved; there's a big fight with the big villain, who's defeated; the love story recurring subplot is given a happy ending; Kendra's psychological problems (stemming from mystic schizophrenia) are fixed; and the two Hawks fly off together into the sunset. The characters are put back to the way that works best for any future writers, and readers get as much resolution as you can have in a never-ending superhero universe. Good

Supergirl #20 -- Hey, we put a new writer and a new artist on Supergirl, and there's lots of online buzz about new readers being interested in trying the title, so let's make their first issue tie in with the illogical Amazons Attack! That'll annoy the continuity fans following the crossover who don't like change AND the new readers who have no idea what's going on and don't care! Idiots running the ship, I swear.

Turns out it was all bait and switch anyway; Bedard and Guedes are only on for three issues until the real new creative team takes over. Right. Fool me once...

No rating because I was so annoyed I didn't read it.

Labels: Johanna

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Here's the list for this week, that's arriving at Comix Experience. Scroll down a bit for some other news, too, in case you're in the habit of skipping these posts...

2000 AD #1547
2000 AD #1548
A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #63 (A)
ACTION COMICS #854 (CD)
AMAZONS ATTACK #5 (OF 6)
ANNIHILATION CONQUEST QUASAR #2 (OF 4)
AQUAMAN SWORD OF ATLANTIS #55
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #112
ARMY @ LOVE #6 (MR)
BLACK CANARY #4 (OF 4)
BOOKS WITH PICTURES #6 (OF 6)
BOOSTER GOLD #1
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #6
CAPTAIN AMERICA #29 CWI
CATWOMAN #70 (AA)
CHECKMATE #17
COUNTDOWN 37
DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES VOL 3 MANIAK CVR A #3 (OF 12)
FLASH #231
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN #23
GRIFTER MIDNIGHTER #6 (OF 6)
HELLBLAZER #235 (MR)
HIGHWAYMEN #3 (OF 5)
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #261
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #12 (NOTE PRICE)
KILLING GIRL #1 (OF 5) (MR)
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES IN THE 31ST CENTURY #5
LOVE THE WAY YOU LOVE #5 (MR)
LOVELESS #19 (RES) (MR)
MAD MAGAZINE #481
MAINTENANCE #4 (MR)
MARVEL ADVENTURES HULK #2
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED TREASURE ISLAND #3 (OF 6)
NEW X-MEN #41
OUTSIDERS FIVE OF A KIND WEEK 3 THUNDER MARTIAN MANHUNTER
PROGRAMME #2 (OF 12)
REX MUNDI DH ED #7
RIPCLAW PILOT SEASON #1
ROBIN #165
SCARFACE DEVIL IN DISGUISE #2 (MR)
SHADOWPACT #16
SIMPSONS COMICS #133
SPAWN #170
SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #4
SPIKE SHADOW PUPPETS #3
SUB-MARINER #3 (OF 6) CWI
SUPER VILLAIN TEAM UP MODOKS 11 #2 (OF 5)
SUPERMAN BATMAN #39
TERROR INC #1 (OF 5) (MR)
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #112
WOLVERINE ORIGINS #16
ZOMBIE HIGHWAY DIRECTIONLESS (MR)

Books / Mags / Stuff
30 DAYS OF NIGHT DARK DAYS TP NEW PTG (MR)
BABY SITTERS CLUB VOL 3 MARY ANNE SAVES THE DAY SC
BALTIMORE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER & VAMPIRE PX HC
BETTY BLUES GN
BIZENGHAST VOL 3 GN (OF 5)
BONE VOL 6 OLD MANS CAVE COLOR ED SC
CATWOMAN ITS ONLY A MOVIE TP
CEST BON ANTHOLOGY VOL 3 GN (MR)
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE OCT 2007 #1634
COMPLETE PEANUTS VOL 8 1965-1966 HC
DP 7 CLASSIC VOL 1 TP
DUNGEON PARADE VOL 2 TP DAY OF THE TOADS
FALLEN ANGEL IDW VOL 3 TP
FLASH GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD
FORTEAN TIMES #226
GIRL GENIUS VOL 6 SC (C: 0-0-1)
GOOD AS LILY
IRON MAN DIRECTOR OF SHIELD TP
JAMES BOND DEATH WING TP
KAT WHO WALKED IN BEAUTY PANORAMIC DAILIES OF 1920 HC
KODT BUNDLE OF TROUBLE VOL 20 TP
LIBERTY GIRL VOL 1 THE RETURN TP
LIFE AFTER BLACK BARRON STOREY THE JOURNALS HC
NARCOLEPTIC SUNDAY GN (MR)
NEW AVENGERS VOL 6 PREMIERE HC
NEWUNIVERSAL VOL 1 EVERYTHING WENT WHITE PREM HC
PIRACY IS LIBERATION VOL 2 INFOTRIP GN (MR)
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #157
WILL EISNERS SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOL 22 HC
WIZARD KING TRILOGY BOOK 2 ODKIN SON OF ODKIN (MR)
YESTERDAYS TOMORROWS GN



In other news, I'm doing my Final Order Cutoff (FOC) for the week, and I was STUNNED to see LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER HC on the list, for shipping 11/14/2007.

Its not going to be resolicited, apparently, and retailers have until Wed night to put their final number down -- so if you don't already have a copy coming, I'd strongly advise you to call your LCS RIGHT NOW. If they're anything like me, they're ordering semi-blindly, as our subscription data for the title is over a year old at this point. I've no idea what TODAY'S demand for the book actually is.

I'm also unsure to what extent DC is going to overprint or will go back to press, or whatever, so jump jump jump on this now....


Other than that, what looks good to YOU?

-B Click Here to Read More...

Before I launch into a bunch of things written very, very early morning today, I have to ask: Has anyone else been having a really stressful and strange last few days? At work, I've had maybe the oddest series of (bad) coincidences in a short period of time since last Friday, and in attempting to calm me down from climbing the walls and looking for the Graeme Voodoo Dolls, people have been telling me that everyone seems to be having a weird time of it lately. So abuse the comments section below and comfort me.

CRIMINAL #8: It's got to be dull for you to keep reading that each issue of this book is solidly Very Good, so instead I'll skip over the wonderfully noir dialogue ("It had been a long time since a woman had looked at him like that...") and artwork that reminds you of Toth's simplicity with scratchier personality, and instead point out that this book also contains the best recap page in comics these days.

DAREDEVIL #99: Continuing the Ed Brubaker love, things are coming to a head emotionally here, and it still works even if I have no idea who the supervillain at the end is - some kind of Scarecrow rip-off? - purely because of the melodramatic intensity that the creators manage to sell you on. Despite the whole "part five of five" thing when you start the issue, this is very, very clearly an old-school "Next issue is #100!" one, and Good for that.

GREEN LANTERN #22: According to the cover, this is The Sinestro Corps War Part 4. According to the third page of the issue, it's Sinestro Corps Chapter Two. And while, sure, it can be both (fourth part of the crossover, second chapter in this particular series), there's something about that kind of sloppiness that makes me want to make cheap jokes about Countdown, just because. Nonetheless, the story itself is full of high stakes and tough-guy dialogue ("It's ironic, isn't it, Jordan?" "What, Amon? Me about to use your father's ring to break your nose?" Oh, Hal. You're so macho jerk) and rompiness and, even though not that much actually happens, it manages to skate just under the line of Good thanks to my goodwill about the larger story and Ivan Reis's artwork.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK #109: Emphasizing just how much last issue was a last-minute fill-in, this issue picks up directly from the ending of #107 and continues WWH #3's turn towards the Hulk turning out to be an unjustified bastard after all. It's sad to admit that the more the actual plot kicks in and replaces people getting beaten up, the less I find myself interested in World War Hulk, but I guess I'm just a simple lad with simple tastes. Eh.

THE NEW AVENGERS #33: If you melded recent superhero novel "Soon I Will Be Invincible" together with "Invasion of The Body Snatchers" and a complete lack of attention to Dwayne McDuffie's Fantastic Four run, then you'd come up with this Eh issue. The supervillain stuff is pretty generic - and isn't the Wizard currently in Fantastic Four and, um, nothing at all like he's being written here? - and seriously bogs down the issue, which at least offers a healthy dose of Luke Cage being unhealthily paranoid now that the Skrull plot is happening. More of that and less of everything else, please.

THE NEW AVENGERS/TRANSFORMERS #2: Crap, and worth mentioning only because of that cover - with such a terrible Wolverine and such a great Transformer - and the sad sight of Todd Klein's computer lettering.

NOVA #5: I keep expecting it to zig, it keeps zagging. Color me happily surprised to see the fill-in Nova story explained so quickly and this particular cliffhanger. Sure, both events will surely be undone within the next two issues, but I'm enjoying the irreverence with which Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are treating their material. Good, and just saying that makes me pause and thinking "Huh," in a surprised manner.

OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND: KATANA AND SHAZAM! #1: Or, as it should really be renamed "Katana, with a guest shot by Shazam that really doesn't matter one way or another." When the best thing about a comic is that you're happy to see the writer (Mike W. Barr, in this case) still getting work, then you know that it's pretty Crap.

THE UN-MEN #1: What's good about this issue: The logo and Tomer Hanuka's cover art. What's not so good: Everything else. Another bad-mood-book that replaces originality, wit and intelligence with world-weary faux-cynicism and shallow social commentary, this is the kind of Eh thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and a longing for when Vertigo launched and was the place where anything could happen. Ah, to be young and naive again...

Labels: Graeme

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What is this year? Daniel Robert Epstein at only 31, Drew Hayes at 37, Tom Artis, Marshall Rogers, Arnold Drake, Bob Oksner, Iwao Takomoto, Johnny Hart, and on and fucking on and on. And Vonnegut, and whoever else you want to add in there; whoever I've forgotten; I'm sorry.

Still... Mike Wieringo? What a fucking cruel year.

I liked Wieringo because he could draw, but I liked him more because he could write:

Art monkey; Wrist-for-hire; Have pencil-will travel--- there's a ton of them. But I think these terms stem from the fact that the trend has been for quite a while now that the 'vision' for the comic book is strictly that of the writer, and the art team is simply there to make that vision real on paper. The 'Marvel method' of creating comics has gone the way of the Dodo, really. All scripts done for Marvel are now, like at DC, done in full-script form, so unless the writer is feeling generous enough to bring the penciler in on the initial writing of the story (and there's little or none of that happening), then the penciler is relegated to the status of 'flunky', in my humble opinion. And for someone like me, who spent his childhood writing and drawing his own stories-- and who has been in a very collaborative relationship on a creator-owned project as I was with Todd Dezago on Tellos, it's a bitter pill to swallow to have to return to being relegated to nothing more than (fill in the blank with any of the aforementioned terms).

From here.

Set aside the substance of what he's saying in that quote; save it for later -- what a pleasure to have a comic artist write so honestly and cleanly about his work, fears, anxieties, ambitions! Who else did that? Who else ever bothered? I can't begin to imagine what friends and family lost, but for the rest of us, it might be important to note that his fans didn't just lose an artist who could draw a lovely comic, but someone rarer and even more generous than that as well.

I honestly didn’t think that many people would pay attention…. but over the years, that attention has grown and this blog has become important to me in more ways than one. Not only has this little corner of the web become a place for me to share and interact with folks online, but the blog has been– on more than one occasion– cheap therapy/cathartic for me when I’ve been stewing something over in my head. Being able to get thoughts down in type and share them with you folks who provide feedback has been a great thing.

From here.

The Wieringo family has asked that in lieu of cards or flowers, please donate to the ASPCA, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, or the Hero Initiative in his name.

Regular nonsense from me later this week.

But I suppose, in a nutshell, I could say that to succeed in this business—work constantly and always be open to criticism. The only way to improve is to continually work at improving your craft. Nothing will make an artists work grow more than just incessant drawing. I thought I was ready for regular work when I got my first assignment, but I wasn’t. I had no idea how much I still had to learn—and STILL need to learn—when I got started. And the learning process never ends. An artist always has things they can improve on and so the education of art is a life-long process. Stay open to that and everything should be OK.

From here. Click Here to Read More...

Something that becomes immediately apparent as soon as you start reading COUNTDOWN #38 is the way that it's incredibly like the comics that Dan DiDio and the current DC braintrust probably grew up reading. It's not just the incredible number of coincidences that Brian's already pointed out - a throwback to days when audiences were younger and less demanding - but also the dialogue. The third panel in the comic has the following exchange:

"Superman, any idea what's going on?"
"I'm not sure, Powergirl, except for the obvious..."
"Oracle said something unleashed a global computer virus."

It's exactly the kind of self-identifying thing that people have made fun of the original Crisis on Infinite Earths for; all you need to complete the set is for Hawkman and Green Arrow to walk on and have a fight about Reaganism while mentioning each others' names every second page. Similar, too, to those 1980s stories is the sense that everything is part of some larger story - although, unlike the comics that they're clearly modeled after, there's nothing in this issue that makes you want to run out and pick up back issues to understand what's going on, because there's no sense of excitement and urgency in anything that happens here - Characters appear and die, and other characters watch from behind the scenes and give melodramatic speeches to themselves, and it's all rather dull.

It's also rather nonsensical; the Question and Batwoman find two supervillains who everyone is looking for, and just let them go because the Question thinks they're too dumb to kill the person they're supposed to have killed? And none of the other characters think that that's weird? Or, for that matter, no-one seems to want to stop the mysterious being that murdered the Deep Six in front of their eyes (And good job introducing the Six there for readers unfamiliar with Kirby's Fourth World, guys. This series really needs, if not an editor who's really trying to make each issue easier-to-understand for new readers, then a website that'll explain the minor characters slightly better...)? Other than because it doesn't suit where the plot's supposed to go, there's no reason for either of these things to happen and neither really makes the characters involved look intelligent or capable.

In my weaker moments, I kind of wish that I was doing some kind of 52-Pickup for Countdown. Not because I want to try and replace Douglas - my arcane knowledge is nowhere near as good as his - but because I want to see someone really dig into this book on a regular basis and talk about the strangeness of plots being developed by the Dan Jurgens back-up, or the way in which the story is propelled as much by the future solicitations and interviews as much as what's in the comics themselves. But then I realize that something this Crap, which fascinating, probably isn't worth the time...

Labels: Graeme

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What is it about Grant Morrison and JH Williams? The two of them get together, and all of a sudden, the pop thrills get dosed with feelings of dread and portentiousness. Take BATMAN #667, for example; up until this point, there's been a devil-may-care feeling about Morrison's Batrun - the idea that, no matter what death-traps may show up, it's not to be taken too seriously and everything will end up fine in the end. But now that Williams has appeared for the first of three parts of "The Island of Mister Mayhew," it all seems much more dangerous and grim. Which isn't to say that it's not enjoyable, because it is - but there's such a change of tone that it's somewhat disconcerting to the few of us who were enjoying what we'd previously seen...

The real star of the show here, though, is JH Williams and the amazing work he puts in here. Even if you can somehow ignore his sense of design - which is pretty tough, considering some of the pages he puts in here (His old school opening double-page splash, with the logo contained within a Bat-icon isn't even the most eyecatching one on the issue - the hand-shaped panel with exploding plans gets my vote, instead) - this would still be one of the most visually impressive mainstream books of the year based on the different art-styles Williams appropriates for the different characters; seeing him do perfect versions of Chris Sprouse's line, Howard Chaykin's, or Ed McGuinness's would be worth-seeing on its own, but to see him manage to mix those styles not only into the same story, but the same panel is pretty damn great.

Don't get me wrong - This would still be worth reading even if Andy Kubert or whoever was drawing it, but it's the artwork instead of the writing that raises it from a "If you like Batman, sure, go ahead" to a Very Good must-see.

Labels: Graeme

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The first thing you'll notice about CASANOVA #8 is that it's very, very blue. The shift in color palette is initially completely overwhelming - writer Matt Fraction's said online that it's pure Cyan, and given the way that it practically glows on the page, I believe him - and it was only after a second read-through that I realized how smart a move that was, pulling the reader away from the change in artists from Gabriel Ba to Fabio Moon so that, by the time your eyes have recovered from the blue, you're already used to Moon's less-Mignola-esque, prettier, artwork (As much as I love Fabio's stuff, it's still awkward to see him draw characters that I'm so used to Gabriel's take on; I think I like it, but there's such a sense of "That's not the way they look!" that I'm not sure. Having a few pages of Fabio in your system while you try not to be distracted by the color choice helps, though).

The second thing you'll notice is that Fraction's a smart writer - It's not the way that you're dropped right into the story and only given the exposition midway through (It's just like Mission Impossible, if Tom Cruise wasn't, you know, Tom Cruise!), but the way that the story's structured so that the reveal at the end both comes as a surprise but also makes complete sense within what you've read up until that point that convinces you that there's something worth paying attention to happening here. Which isn't to say that this second series isn't as playful or unexpected as the first (to the point where it seemed as if it was unexpected even to the creators, sometimes), because it is; the sense of "anything can happen" is, if anything, amplified by the time you get to the last page of the story, with the introduction of an element that almost seems too fantastical for a series that's made its mark by being full of spectacle and the fantastic.

This issue pulls of the trick of being both a reminder of, and reinvention of, what you enjoyed about the series the first time around. It's both familiar and unknown, full of confidence (arrogance?) in knowing what it can do and wanting to find out what else its capable of at the same time. Pretty much Very Good, then.

Labels: Graeme

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Archie #577 tries to tackle a modern issue, but the presentation is so one-sided and ignorant that it fails even as brainwashing.

The Archies, it seems, are ready to record a song that's been popular when they've played it live. (The lyrics we see are "RU the 1 4 me", which suggests that they've been listening to an awful lot of 80s Prince.) They scrape together money for studio time and decide to sell the record on their website, only with no physical CD "to reduce overhead". But boo hoo, their fans make copies for each other instead of buying, so they don't make any money.

There's so much wrong with this story in terms of internal logic that it's hard to know where to start. We're supposed to believe that they're savvy enough to have a website and conduct a financial product analysis, but they've never even thought about downloading until it prevents them from getting rich? And there's little incentive to want to support such spoiled kids. Instead of asking each other "hey, have we made enough money to cover recording costs yet?" they brag about how their ship has come in and use the term "fortune" in their plans.

The exaggerated ending has the kids working at Big Burger in order to replace their lost savings. Why don't they play a few more gigs? They presumably get paid for those. Or sell signed physical CDs at shows, for an experience the kids can't get online? If they refuse to create an object for sale, why are they complaining that people aren't willing to give them the money they feel they deserve? Kids are drawn handing each other CDs, so that suggests (whether the creator intended or not) a desire for something physical.

Not to mention that we're talking about an Archie comic, where every other ad is for an Archie logo bag or Archie cartoon DVDs or different kinds of collections or subscriptions or packs of back issues. The publisher has obviously figured out a lot of different ways to make money off the same material, giving the audience choice.

But what do you expect from a writer who has one character ask another, in terms of determining how their website downloads are doing, "how many records have we sold so far?" And yeah, there's only so much you can do in six pages, but I think this one should have been double-sized if they were serious about handling the subject.

I've been told that a review isn't "real" unless it discusses the art, so here: the faces are sometimes squished in odd ways. Since most of the panels are talking heads with various arm motions, this is a detriment, but it's made up by the variety of expression shown.

There are three other stories in this issue. Archie and Veronica go canoeing, which always ends badly because Archie is a klutz. (So why does Veronica keep agreeing to go?)

Betty and Veronica go to the beach together, where they argue over Archie. This is a poor story, because there's no reason to it other than pointing out that the triangle among the three is ridiculous, especially given how long-lasting it's been. It's questioning one of the basic premises of the series in a way that leaves the reader unsatisfied. If the reader agrees with the characters, then they feel silly for even reading the comic. If they disagree, there's nothing else to the story.

Last, Archie takes a Boy Scout-like group on a hike where Jughead brings the food. Amazingly, Archie is competent in this story, perhaps because he actually doesn't do much but stand around.

Rating this issue doesn't seem like fair play, because it is what it is. It's formulaic, as are many superhero comics, but that's comfortable for its target audience of younger readers. If I have to, I give it an Eh.

Labels: Johanna

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(I'm going to hell for that post title, I just know it!)

This Friday, August 17th, from 4 to 7 PM, Comix Experience is very happy to host DOUGLAS WOLK, international bon vivant, Savage Critic, and author of the most excellent Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean

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At 4:00 AM, my funnybook reviewing powers at their peak. The good never sleep while there's funnies to be reviewed!

Batman #667: The secret to J.H. Williams III’s success in superhero comics isn’t that he produces the most thought-through visual work around; with superhero comics there’s a risk of over-thinking things, missing the immediate appeal of the genre while pursuing an inappropriate sophistication. But Williams absolutely grasps the beauty of primal costumed impact, and infuses his relentless experimentation with the joy of direct aesthetic assault. I kind of squealed every time he shaped an evil panel like THE BLACK GLOVE, iconographic villain of the piece.

Williams’ approach here differs from his recent(ish) Detective Comics issue, which got a simpler, campier version of his Desolation Jones style; here, Williams produces an overview of superhero designs, with each of the many characters detailed in their very own homage-powered style, indicative of their discreet worldviews and developments. This is appropriate for Grant Morrison’s story, plus his run on this series. Always, Batman is confronted with alternate visions of himself: Damian, the three evil Batmen, and now many Bat-variants.

It’s the same approach with Morrison’s All Star Superman, though Superman and Batman are opposites - while Superman’s confrontations with his alternate selves inevitably lead to a certain peaceable education, Batman must always bleed and grit his teeth. Also: while ASS contains itself to simple, digestible issues, Batman sprawls across jumpy storylines, making review of a set-up issue like this tricky. I do wish the conversations between the many heroes had been insightful; when a fat Roman hero stumbles to his death, a symbolic tapestry in the background mocking his stumbling death throes, it seems merely banal.

Yet Williams adds a unique level of depth to his projects, and it is he that’s most compelling here. Plus, that last page is one of the nicest Batman pages I’ve seen in I-can’t-remember, and it’s GOOD to behold.

Blade #12: Howard Chaykin is one of the artists whose style Williams adopts, actually. Remember when Chaykin’s art was kind of hard to come by? This here is the second of three Marvel books he’s drawing this month, two of which are double-sized. And boy… parts of The Punisher MAX #50 looked rough (book three will be Wolverine #56). I presume Chaykin’s current style gets things done much quicker than before, but surely there’s such a thing as too quick! This comic, luckily, is a lot tighter; Blade has consistently been the best forum for Chaykin’s latter-day airy superhero style, affording him lots of opportunities to indulge in elaborate costuming and swooping, dancing midnight fight concepts.

But he doesn’t have Blade anymore, since this is the final issue. I’ve really grown fond of the book over this year; sure, writer Marc Guggenheim never did quite get a grasp on keeping the ‘individual’ issues, er, individual, but it turns out he’s pretty adept at layering plot strands into a big, slobbering narrative - this’ll make for a decent hardcover, if one is planned. The book also had a nice sense of absurdity about it, happy to mix up Count Dracula and Doctor Doom and Spider-Man and Civil War into a big, loud Marvel Universe thingy, albeit a thingy occurring on the fringes of more weighty stories.

This concluding issue characteristically mixes ancient prophesies with corny jokes and fairly affecting characterizations, while still taking setting aside a panel to assure us that the Yellow Kid joke vampire from the Civil War tie-in is still alive, I guess in case he’s needed for World War Hulk. It’s a charmingly square thing, pleasingly non-slick, with an oddly satisfying denouement. OKAY all around. The best sort of series to stumble upon in a bargain bin.

Labels: Jog

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I have mixed feelings about DAREDEVIL #99.

On the one hand, Ed Brubaker's decision to gradually move away from the Frank Miller paradigm is commendable; it's always nice when writers remember there's more to Daredevil's history than the Kingpin, Bullseye and Elektra. And if, when he first started out, Brubaker relied on some of those familiar icons, he's now making a point of using new characters, and old-timers who never really had a chance to dominate the page while Miller's definitive A-listers were around. Spotlighting these less-popular individuals puts some variety and unpredictability back into the equation.

Of course, the flip-side of that decision is that once you start bringing in villains and supporting characters who haven't been around in any meaningful capacity for a while, reintroduction is necessary. You can't just assume that your readers will peg the Enforcers on sight, or that they'll recognize the significance of the name "Cranston" without any context. This issue marks a rare misstep for Brubaker, in that he ends the issue (and the arc) on a cliffhanger that doesn't work if you don't know who you're looking at. No one explicitly identifies this character, whose appearance is very similar to another Marvel villain... it's kind of a mess.

But all that really does is downgrade the issue to GOOD rather than Very Good; Brubaker's a master at this sort of slow-burn criminal conspiracy thing, and the consistency of Michael Lark's artwork lends an appropriately dark and murky quality to the story. I also like how our expectations are being toyed with in very subtle ways - I'd grown so accustomed to Milla being an annoying prat that I never thought there might be a deeper reason behind her latest string of freak-outs; and while Lily Lucca seems to fit the "femme fatale" archetype to a T, she might actually be telling the truth when she says she's not interested in disrupting Matt's marriage. It's these little things, as well as the more grandiose unveiling of master plans, that make DAREDEVIL worth a read every month.

Labels: Diana

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The first moment in The Bourne Ultimatum I truly loved comes about fifteen or so minutes into the film, when Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is about to meet with reporter Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) about articles Ross has been publishing about Bourne and his mysterious past. Seeing what's about to go down, CIA uber-clench Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) places a call to have both men eliminated. The call reaches a man (Edgar Ramirez) sitting on a bed in a nondescript room, his bag on a chair nearby, and when he gets the call, he takes the bag and exits without hesitation.

This shot of Paz, the man in the room, is indicative of the rest of the film: it happens very quickly; it relies on your knowledge of the previous films to convey meaning (Paz, like Bourne, is a hired killer for the CIA but unlike Bourne he still does whatever he's told without hesitation); and it seems so straightforward as to lack any deeper subtext.

If there is subtext to The Bourne Ultimatum, it stems from precisely that scene and others in the film like them. The Bourne Ultimatum is, from what I could tell, a fetishized love letter to the assassin, to lonely men in empty rooms and the things of which they're capable. Bourne himself is one of these men; a trained killer who, after losing his memory, finds himself locked in near-constant battle with the CIA as he struggles to find out who he is (first film), take revenge on what was done to him (second film), and find out how he was created (third film). As Bourne becomes more and more unstoppable, the films cannot help but create a greater appreciation for this man without a history, without a place, who lives forever on the run and five steps ahead of anyone else. His only real threats are other men like him--similarly streamlined men with backpacks and furtive steps, capable of entering anywhere, killing anyone with anything. The Bourne films take the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald--the nobody with the gun believed to have done the work of mysterious men--and turns him into a superhero, and I find that both alarming and oddly comforting.

The alarm, I would think, is easily understood: no one would like to see a upswing in the number of blank-faced young men breaking into apartments and killing people with magazines, textbooks and Hummel figurines. But I hope the comfort is too: cities are filled with lonely men in empty rooms the world over, and the Bourne movies are made for them, flatter and woo those lonely men with no lives as if they were prettiest girls on their blocks. The Bourne Ultimatum, in fact, makes the connection between lonely men and cities manifest, as the camera frequently zooms in and out on the facades of one international city after another--London, Madrid, New York--similar to the way it does on Bourne's guarded face. And, of course, no matter what city, Bourne and his kin can dash about in ultimate confidence, able to maneuver through it with a speed and ease native policemen cannot. Even more than they celebrate the magic and mystique that surrounds the assassin, the Bourne films romanticize the global, post-industrial urban worker: rootless and without community, appearing in any city to do any job asked of them, these men appear to own nothing but their own specialized skills and yet can do anything better than anyone else. In The Bourne Ultimatum, the non-Bournes are men of color, played by Edgar Ramirez and Joey Ansah, and they are presented as Bourne's equals in every way. When battling Bourne to the death, their fights aren't charged with the fear of the Other, but by a strangely liberating feeling of equality: in the world of this film, all of God's childrens got the skills to kill with a bathmat, a candlestick and a Peugeot.

Now, like its predecessors, The Bourne Ultimatum is so well-made and so satisfying I'd hesitate to link the movie's success to this subtext. Director Paul Greenglass and screenwriters Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi create a movie shorn of any unnecessary detail, and allow viciously unrelenting momentum to take the place of character, theme or meaning. At times, the viewer is one split-second behind what's happening onscreen and then, without warning, there'll be a pause and the viewer will have a second to appreciate what's coming next, and then things accelerate again. It's completely exhilarating, although also a little depressing if you think about it a little bit afterward: part of why you're able to follow what's happening is that so little of it is new. The films play like classical variations on each other and, as well, the man on the run genre. But they're made with so much intelligence and clarity of vision you leave the films feeling both smarter and more clear-eyed after seeing them.

It'd be lovely if this intelligence and clarity was joined to something morally or spiritually edifying, which is probably where my temptation to bemoan/praise/pick at the film's possible subtexts comes in. Still, the Bourne trilogy (almost certain to be a quadrilogy, considering Bourne's monstrous opening weekend) has proven to be a surprisingly sharp series of action films, the kind that Hollywood burns to make more of but by and large lacks the skills to do so. If you haven't already, check them out.

Labels: Jeff, movies

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"From the pages of 52 and Countdown" announces the cover of BLACK ADAM: THE DARK AGE #1 - although those last three words are missing entirely from the cover, for some reason - and what's interesting about this first issue is the way that it feels very much like an uncomfortable mash-up of those two books' styles. From Countdown, there's the immersion in continuity without setting out what that continuity is for new readers, and from 52, the unexpected twist that makes sense if you do understand the continuity.

Which isn't to say that the book approaches either of their levels of quality; there's nothing here that approaches the fun and sense of anything-can-happen of 52, nor the oppressive crush of editorial edict that runs through Countdown; instead, you get something that misses both the highs and lows of both books - This is an entirely Eh piece of uninteresting continuity which somehow manages to offer some detours on the way to its known conclusion. Congratulations, then, to Peter Tomasi, even if I have no desire to see Teth-Adam get himself beaten up to avoid being recognized or see yet more supervillains-as-terrorists stylings.

One of the genuine sadnesses about the book (When you expect very little from a book, it's almost comforting when it gives you very little after all) is that Doug Mahnke's art feels less like his work than usual - Maybe it's Norm Rapmund and Christian Alamy's inks, or a move towards a new (and slightly more generic) style? - which removes one of the more obvious selling points of the series. The overall effect, when paired with the writing, is a firmly mid-level book that's intended only for a die-hard pre-sold audience. Which seems rather fitting for a contemporary DC superhero book these days, really.

Labels: Graeme

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You know what's been completely bastardized? The term "charming". Used to be, if you called something charming, then people knew what you meant - that is was (to quote dictionary.com) something that was "pleasing" or "delightful." It was a good thing to be charming, back then. And then, somehow, irony and sarcasm got in the way and calling something charming was suddenly a backhanded compliment, a snarky way of saying that it lacked excitement or didn't wow you for some reason. Charming became this kind of cursed word.

Fitting, then, that GLISTER #1 is something that I found completely charming in the earlier sense of the word. Pleasing and delightful are two other good words to describe the book, mind you, but what’s interesting to me is that I love it in completely the wrong way (Well, maybe not completely the wrong way; I mean, I’m not wrapping it in saran wrap and taking it into the bathroom for extended periods of time or anything). I realized this after writing an earlier version of this review, and thinking about what I actually liked about the thing – I started thinking that, yeah, Andi Watson’s writing is gentle and familiar, like a bedtime story with its expositionary narration and safe sense of the absurd, normalizing ghost stories into friendly capers, but it wasn’t really the story that sold me on it, and as much as his art is attractive and simple and tells the reader what’s happening well, it was more the stylization that sold it for me, and the way that it went together with the cover colors and design and and and oh right, I love it because it reminds me of an idealized kids’ book of my youth that never really existed.

And I kind of feel guilty about that, to be honest. I mean, taken on its own terms, it’s still Good; the story may be slight, but it’s well-done and entirely enjoyable, and there’s something to be said for people who can do this kind of all ages book that’s actually made for all ages, and not just children. But for some reason, I can’t stop myself looking at the whole thing in some bizarre art object way, and considering how the paperback size and retro colors of the cover remind me of the books from the 1970s that were lying around the libraries of my youth, or the way that the artwork reminds me of Edward Gorey even though it doesn’t really look like Edward Gorey’s work at all (One of you, I’m sure, will be smarter than me and able to tell me who I’m really thinking of instead of Gorey). I bring all these other things to the book that it maybe doesn’t deserve, and end up fetishizing it (again, not in the saran wrap way) into something that I want to call Very Good, even if only for people who think too much and are design and packaging geeks like me.

So maybe the best way to think of this book is charming, as ruined as that word may be, and let you all make up your own minds beyond that.

Labels: Graeme

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(Honestly, I wrote this yesterday, but blogger wouldn't let me post it then...)

OK, lets see how dusty my muscles have become...

COUNTDOWN #38: I was actually starting to think that this was getting at least a little better -- there was some plot movement in the last couple of weeks, and the return of Giffen to the breakdowns helped the storytelling a little. But, no, I read this issue and was left with another horrible taste in my mouth.

Part of it is just the sheer sloppy nature of the book. Maybe its that there's too many things going on in the DCU, and the traffic managers can't get it right; maybe its that books aren't where they are supposed to be, and there are fill-ins all over the place, and the cover was mocked up 12 weeks ago... but I knew there was a problem when I saw that cover with "The First Appearance of Mr. Action!" on it; and the burst-logo "Collector's Item!"

Neither is true (though the second is far less true than the first), and if you can't get your cover right, what else can you do wrong? I don't know... maybe they're trying to be Ironic? Maybe even Sarcastic? But, either way, it just don't work.

This sloppiness continues inside in a couple of places: there's the "the rogue's are stated again and again to be bumbling idiots, yet they keep escaping from deathtrap encounters versus people out of their weight class" or "The Calculator tries to black out cities, and drop airplanes from the sky to distract Oracle, but doesn't think to send some simple muscle to her place... at the same time Karate Kid and No-Powers Girl effortlessly break in" (Sure, he's from the future... but I dare you to go back in time to 1007 AD and effortlessly find... well my History-Fu is weak, come up with the appropriate comparison)

(Plus, you know, if you're DYING, I'd be kind of interested to understand why you're going to a computer specialist, really -- wouldn't a prominent DOCTOR, say a Midnight, or even a Fate be a much better decision? Jes' sayin')

But I think my favorite sloppy-ass Howler was the sequence on the boat with Zatanna where she casts a spell on the crowd of onlookers in danger. That spell? It is something very much like "teg dniheb em!", or, really, the equivalent of "watch out!" -- it's not a spell, its a warning! (now, of course, if the art showed the crowd magically teleporting behind her, then, sure, spell... though I would think that "snailivic to ytefas!" would have been a better phrasing in any case)

That was basically the moment I looked at the comic and though, "Man, they really don't care, do they?"

Everyone and everything in this story is dancing to dictates of the Plothammer -- but the plotting doesn't really make much sense, or come from a place that is especially interesting, and none of the individual storylines seem to have much thematic connection to the others. Plus, there's way too many Big Coincidences -- the threat to Oracle JUST HAPPENS to occur when KK shows up; A random ship in the ocean where Z and MM are JUST HAPPENS to be the one where more Kirby Kharacters die; and so on.

And all of this serves to make everything occurring seem to be weightless and unmoored to the universe around it. WHEN are events happening? I mean is "Amazons Attack" OVER at this stage? All of the characters in the first part of the book seem focused on Oracle's issues. Clearly "The Sinestro War" isn't happening concurrently with this -- there's Hal on Earth on page 2. In fact, why are the Monitor Corp so hung up on the Joker's Daughter and Donna Troy when Superxxx Prime and the frickin' ANTI-Monitor are wandering around out there?

I don't know, I'm almost certainly over thinking this all.

Things are probably still redeemable -- certainly LOST got infinitely better in its latest eight episodes or so, fixing a lot of the meandering problems it had in the 20 episodes before that, and steering straight towards a visible (if not understood) conclusion -- and maybe Mike Carlin can fix this mess in the back half of the title... but I wonder if the audience is going to care... or, if they even care whether they'll come back. Comic readers (esp mainstreamy superhero focused ones) are often very pedantic about their "collection". It is hard, if not impossible to entice people back into a mini series they've already sampled and dismissed. Its not like an ongoing monthly, people will leap on and off of those at will -- but minis just "feel" wrong in the collection if you don't have them all. There's an "I'll wait for the trade" moment if there is one at all.

Also: for the record, my FOC (Final Order Cutoff) for COUNTDOWN #35, I adjusted my number downwards yet again, and it just hit half of _52_ -- we were ordering about 75 copies of most issues of _52_, and my order for COUNTDOWN now stands at 37. I suspect this week's "Mr. Action" cover will chase more people off, and next week will be 35 copies or below. I don't think, at this point, it is going to stabilize until it gets to the 25-30 copy range. Which, ugh, is going to be really bad for the hassles of dealing with a weekly comic.

Either way, this individual issue of the series, as a single use of your $2.99, is pretty AWFUL.

What did YOU think?

-B

Labels: Brian

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My intention was to be back by now with a surly review, a sweeping overview, and some general sass talk, but one of the freelance jobs I've been doing since leaving CE keeps expanding and expanding, and blotting out all my free time.

But! I did want to make those of you who follow the blog that my annual garage sale is coming up on SATURDAY, AUGUST 18th from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights.

Those of you who follow the blog or shop the store will probably remember previous years where I breathlessly blabbed about what I was selling, posted photos, and just generally begged people to show. I may actually be too busy to do that this time around (and it's not like this site is starved for content these days) but I may give you at least one picture post as I get closer to the actual date.

Because Joe Keatinge and Chris French did such a masterful job of cleaning me out last year (both years, in fact), I'm not sure yet if I'm gonna have as wide a selection as previous years. But I know I'm going to be letting go all my uncollected Walking Dead issues, probably all of my issues of 52 (I've got 52 of 'em, but whether or not I can actually find them all is another matter), stuff I talked myself into buying and regretted later (hello, City of Others!), assorted Kirby stuff I've since collected (some of the New Gods and Jimmy Olsen stuff I don't need now that I have the Omnibus, a bunch of old "Marvel Comics Presents" reprints)...all of it for a quarter apiece (or twenty cents apiece if you buy ten or more, I think). I've still got a lot of digging to do, so there'll probably be more on top of that, but that's what I'm thinking of for starters.

Additionally, I'll have manga, trades, action figures and toys, some DVDs and a freakin' buttload of cheap PS2 games since I put that electronic crack pipe in storage a few months ago. Since I no longer work at CE and pick up any number of crazy-ass things on a whim, this may be my last hurrah so if it sounds tempting you should go.

And with that, I'll return you to regularly scheduled reviewing blog and get myself set up for my 3:00 meeting. Remember, Saturday, August 18, Cortland Avenue, 9:00-4:00. It'll be worth your while.

Labels: Jeff

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Greetings, children of the cosmos! Today's column is going to cover one of my favorite topics: mind-expansion.

And I can think of no better way for us to start off than expanding our minds away from comics, and toward the filmic arts. It’s a natural progression, really; as widespread media coverage of the San Diego fiesta teaches us year in and year out, the true excitement in comics is actually excitement in movies, whether through direct adaptations of comics, or maybe just general ‘geek-friendly’ pictures, which are apparently just as good. Now, I may not have actually watched any of those things since Superman Returns and its concluding three reels of people weeping into their shirtsleeves, but I do know what side my bread of anticipation ought to be buttered on!

Oh, but I think I may have unwittingly revealed my tragic secret, folks. The thrill is gone for me, personally. I mean, the announcement of a new comic-book movie used to have my hairs standing on end. The two-fisted gallantry of Ghost World, the blood and thunder of American Splendor - I couldn’t wait to burst into the theater lobby cosplaying as Joyce Brabner. But these days, mere adaptations just don’t get my ass into a nine-dollar seat. Iron Man? The Dark Knight? In the Valley of Elah? Feh. Wake me when someone’s got Bratpack up on the screen. These days, I need something stronger to get me perked up. Like, say, a more potent fusion of funnybook something-or-other and movie-like presentation or thereabouts.

Yep, what really does it for me these days, is comic-book creators actually making movies themselves.

My anticipation for The Spirit is running wild, of course. But, you know, I kind of like these things better on a shoestring. No big money. No heavyweight movie talents. Just a person from one medium venturing out there and getting things done in another. For example, there’s Mike Allred’s 1996 feature Astroesque, the film layer of his multimedia Red Rocket 7 project of the time. I don’t know if you’ve seen Astroesque; it’s on a dvd with the Christopher Coppola-helmed Allred adaptation G-Men From Hell, and it’s mostly footage of Mike Allred running away from (or perhaps toward) people in a ditch, with extra added fart jokes and guitar strumming. I can’t even look at Madman Atomic Comics today without thinking “that Mike Allred guy sure knows how to run.” It’s 100% true.

Or how about Sam Kieth’s 2000 feature Take It to the Limit, which I believe originated as a horror project for Roger Corman, and ultimately ended up as a family-friendly rock-climbing movie? Hell, let’s not even be recent; the IMDB denies this exists, but Neal Adams totally directed a 1987 kiddie flick titled Death to the Pee Wee Squad, starring his kids Jason and Zeea (take that, Robert Rodriguez), and no less than Troma Entertainment has a poster to prove it. Haven’t seen that one.

Now, you may have picked up on a slightly facetious tone thus far. But I genuinely do admire these attempts to make films -- complicated, troublesome, life-shortening things they are -- with little money and maximum enthusiasm. And I do think it’s fascinating to watch seasoned comics professionals branch out into this rocky territory.

But the most fascinating one I’ve seen hails from 2005, and it doesn’t even resemble a movie so much as episodes from a public broadcast show gone incurably mad. Yet it's funny, and surprising, and altogether recommended. Directed and written and starring and partially scored by none other than the great Gilbert Hernandez. You’ve heard of Hernandez, I’m sure. As co-creator of Love and Rockets and a general comics legend, Beto needs no introduction, yet it’s worth noting a few things about his body of work for our purposes.

While best known for his tales of the Latin American village Palomar, Hernandez has explored many varied genres and subject matters. His comics reflect a great appreciation for soap opera, fantasy, sex, and various species of low-budget film. Sometimes his works mix and match tropes to the point of tonal incoherency; his 1996 Dark Horse miniseries Girl Crazy veered from cheesecake superhero spoof to gore-spattered will-to-power fable without ever slowing down. He also has a love for intuition and improvisation, which sometimes leads him down odd paths; while somewhat underrated, his 2002 Vertigo miniseries Grip: The Strange World of Men did wind up spending an awful lot of space bending over itself with flashbacks for the purposes of explaining things the reader has been shown. But, at his best, all of these elements combine to form comics of uncanny poise and worldview, all of it transmitted through his often stunning command of the primal elements of the page, the viewpoints and the location transitions and that beautiful illusion of movement. Few do it better.

Most of these elements are also at work in The Naked Cosmos, Beto's grand foray into shooting actors and scenes with a video camera. I can't quite call it a movie, since it's structured like a quartet of episodes of a television program. Indeed, some sources claim that these episodes actually aired on public access television in the Las Vegas area, although my own searches indicate that this is merely the concept behind the work, a simulation of various episodes that actually builds and climaxes as a singular thing. Regardless of what it is, rest assured that it's very funny, very eccentric, and prone to lapsing into wonderfully jarring zones of melancholy and violence. From a filmmaking standpoint, it certainly represents a level of forethought as to how to cope with the project's obvious monetary limitations. Hell, a strange television show needs to look low-budget, and director/writer/star Hernandez more than rises to the challenge.

Also, by 'star,' I actually mean 'performer of all adult male roles.' Yep, Beto plays a whole lot of characters in this thing, and his wife, Carol Kovinick, plays nearly all the rest (so, all adult female roles). Daughter Natalia Beatriz Hernandez plays all children, regardless of gender. There's also exactly one scene in which Beto shares the screen with another male character, his face obscured. I have unilaterially decided that this is Mario Hernandez, although I have no proof to back that up, nor do I actually know what Mario Hernandez looks like.

The plot concerns a fellow named Quintas (an effeminate, black-garbed Hernandez with lipstick, eyeshadow and a blonde wig), who's the host of the show we're watching - The Naked Cosmos. Quintas only wants to urge his viewers, the children of the cosmos, to harmonize with the astral plane and stuff like that. He's very weird, and somehow sad, prone to pondering the existence of a mysterious purple disc that seems to take everyone away for fun and memorable rides except for him. Sometimes he needs an injection, which momentarily causes his facial veins to pop and foam to pour from his mouth. Beto completely freaks out with the character at least twice per episode, including several episode-closing exhortations to look to the skies, howled at the top of his lungs.

Quintas also wants to have an entertaining show, but he's often interrupted, especially by Kalisto (Hernandez with a thin felt mustache, a Zorro mask, and a purple cloth around his head), his clone, and the rational, scientific blowhard yang to his spacey, gentle yin. Catchphrase: "You have the mind... OF A CHILD!!" Both clones pine for Mistress Velda (Kovinick in a blonde beehive), a perky researcher of some sort, and both seem to answer to the Chief (Kovinick wearing a leopard mask and speaking only Spanish), for seemingly little reason. Rounding out the cast is Ego (Hernandez in a long blonde good ol' boy wig with a shaggy mustache), who has the power of teleportation, Mr. Mims (Hernandez with glasses, in hyper-nerd overdrive), the show's meek aide, and Zansky (Hernandez standing upside down with his face pressed through a black screen, with little eyes and glasses and hair pasted to his chin), a naughty Ninth Dimensional entity who introduces educational film clips that are actually random bits of various public domain movies pasted together.

Basically, each 'episode' consists of bizarre sketches and routines, broken apart by still details from some astrological map, and that old public tv standby of footage of high-tech equipment set to spooky space music. Most scenes take place in front of a simple background, although sometimes characters wander out into the desert, and occasionally there's a special bit like the aforementioned films or a runtime-padding exploitation-style travelogue scene set to narration (the setting: Las Vegas, of course!). The humor is deeply, deeply odd, and only rendered more surreal by Hernandez's wildly devoted performance(s), joyfully blurring the line between a character in a show nervously reading off of cue cards and Gilbert Hernandez reading his character's lines off of cue cards, although sometimes he seems to be making his lines up as he goes along. There's even a bit where Quintas narrates a story, which is visually depicted via Gilbert Hernandez drawings.

It's actually quite tempting to draw parallels between this madness and Beto's comics work. There's plenty of comics references, including some sanctum sanctorum dialogue and a scene where Quintas reads a copy of Amazing Adult Fantasy #11. But even Hernandez's structural approach to the film, small half-scenes breaking off into different ones in different locations that eventually add up to a cumulative impact rather than a directly narrative one, are reminiscent of some of his page layouts as of late, with bits and burbles of talk snapping off, the reader's eye careening from location to location (I found the Beto bits from the new Love and Rockets #20 to embody this style nicely). Granted, Beto also layers his film with an added coat of concept, it being a type of formulaic television program, but the likenesses are still interesting.

Hernandez also includes a full-length 20-page comic book with the dvd, for even easier comparison, but he opts to use that forum to fill in the lives of the characters outside of the show, melding the tragic(!) saga of Quintas and Kalisto into a two-fisted, blood-spattered superhero epic, complete with a double-page center splash of war against a horde of mutants. It both serves as prelude to and summary of the actual film, in that Quintas' and Kalisto's rivalry ultimately leads to a (literally) show-stopping battle in the desert, Gilbert Hernandez flailing madly in two costumes at an off-camera opponent as the visuals cut from Quintas to Kalisto to Quintas to Kalisto. Needless to say, only the innocents are hurt when opposing forces of the human condition meet, leading to a burning action figure and Gilbert's many characters flailing in sadness before vast desert vistas, as if the latest episode of Jack Horkheimer's Star Hustler has ended with Jack shooting a man while looking him in the eye and lamenting before his video background.

It's bananas. Yet, it's a wholly Gilbert Hernandez type of bananas. Honestly, this may be one of the most emphatic translations I've seen of a comics artist's 'feel' from sequential art to another medium. Consider my head in the stars! You can still order this dvd (region-free, though NTSC) from Bright Red Rocket, its publisher, and I think Beto's admirers will probably enjoy it. Hell, you might enjoy it if you just enjoy weird stuff, like a comics legend prancing around in silly costumes and bugging his eyes out at everything. Part of the joy of culture, I think.

Labels: Jog

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So, the Point of Sale has now been live for a week, as of today, and I have to say I'm in love.

There have been issues, of course -- the primary one being me trusting the Barcodes that were already in the system thinking "well, they must have scanned clearly at Starclipper, so they must all be 100% right!" Well... no. Nice idea in theory, but pretty crap in practice. I'm not 100% clear on why the differences exist -- perhaps they're from Diamond-provided codes that hadn't actually ARRIVED at SC for confirmation when they sent me the database, or something along those line -- but either way the problems are easy enough to fix, even in the middle of a transaction, and looking up books is as fast as your typing skills will allow. (So... slow for most of us Comix Experiencer types!)

I'm pretty comfortable with the gun-gun-gun nature of transactions now -- in fact, I sorta doubt I can get much faster because there's a small but crucial lag (a quarter second? Less?) between gunning an item, and the system recognizing it, but there's NO DOUBT that scanning in a stack of comics takes a whole lot longer than typing "7x299[category]" does on a cash register.

Where I can improve my time is in learning the shortcuts built in the system -- some of which are intuitive, and a few that aren't.

MOBY is the only POS system I've ever used, but, even with only a week of being live and using it, I can pretty unreservedly recommend it. The small quirks of "well, that's not how *I* would have implemented such-and-such" are often down to me just retraining my mind to HOW to do something. Everything I do and think about comics retail is very much defined by having done it in certain ways for EIGHTEEN YEARS, so challenging my preconceptions is always a decent thing.

I'll give you an example: order check-in. MOBY has a check-in procedure that I, personally, find overly-pedantic. You have to scan every bar-code in TWICE, you have to manually confirm the pricing on an item, you have to positively tell it that there are no damages.

I understand these choices -- and if I was trying to "idiot proof" a system myself, I'd probably make very similar ones. Thing is, I've got a damage rate of like .001%. Prices don't change from solicitation on 99.989% of all comics, and, so far, the barcodes for the Marvel and DC books that show up with your weekly invoice (if you've asked them for "extended format") look to be similarly accurate. I'm hoping to convince them to build me a feature that allows me to just say "YES! The invoice is fine, just import it as is", and then fix the 2-5 mistakes "in post"

(I always tend to believe that "as long as you have enough 'coverage', you can *always* 'fix it in post'" -- and doing so is usually faster than being a total fuckin' anal pendent about getting it 100% correct upfront)

Anyway, my part of check in took me an hour last week, and only 40 minutes this week. I bet I can get it down to 20 minutes or so eventually.... but I'd rather it be, y'know, 30 seconds of "Yeah yeah, it is all good", followed by 5 minutes of fixing mistakes...

One thing I LOVE about MOBY is that I can make a suggestion, and then Mark will actually work on it -- now that's customer fuckin' service!!

We've still got some minor problems and things to work out and around, but the overwhelming bulk of the work is now done, and the ability to reorder with the push of a single (series of) button (s) is... OMG! I used to spend 3 hours walking the floor every week reordering stuff, and now its going to be an approximately 10 minute process.

What you do, see, is tell it what your "minimum copies on hand" should be -- "I *always* want to have at least 3 copies of WATCHMEN on hand" or whatever -- then when you do the reorder process, if you have less than 3, it does all of the math to tell you how many you should be ordering, and spits it out in a format that Diamond understands. All I have to do now is CONFIRM the data I've been given, and maybe massage a book here or there, or look for things that maybe I didn't want to commit to a specific number until I actually saw the final product. Roolage!

My efficiency is going to double (at least)

Ultimately, if you're an existing comics shop: bite the bullet, and Just Do It -- I'm going to get back all kind of time that I used to use doing rote scut work, that can now be used more productively. If you're a NEW store, then don't even THINK about opening without POS in place.

FOr myself, I can definitely recommend MOBY to you. I may be screaming about it in a few weeks when I have to do my first order form with it, and have to beat the learning curve, but I can most certainly tell I'm going to save buckets of time in the long run by computerizing this stuff; I'm not going to sell out as easily of stuff I "forget"; and I'm NOT going to double-order stuff because I'm a doofus. Those two alone will probably pay for the cost of the system and the software in six months!

So yeah, fourteen flavors of sheer awesome, and it's going to make a damn fine comics shop way way better.

Now that we're on the downslope of the data entry that needs to be done, I'll also be making a return to reviewing. Graeme, monster that he is, wants me to review the porn, but that might be too much of a Big Boy move after not reviewing jack or shit in like six weeks or something.

So, reviews from me again starting (probably) tomorrow, yay!

In the meantime: Here's what arrived this week at CE:

AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #11
ANNIHILATION CONQUEST WRAITH #2 (OF 4)
ARMY OF DARKNESS FROM ASHES #1
ARSENIC LULLABY PULP EDITION #1
AVENGERS CLASSIC #3
BAD PLANET #2 (OF 6) (RES)
BATMAN #667
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #8
BATMAN STRIKES #36
BERLIN #13
BLACK ADAM THE DARK AGE #1 (OF 6)
BLADE #12
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL #128
BOYS #9 (RES)
BPRD KILLING GROUND #1 (OF 5)
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #16
CASANOVA #8
COUNTDOWN 38
COVER GIRL #4 (OF 5)
CRIMINAL #8
DAREDEVIL #99
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGERS GUIDEBOOK
DEADMAN #12
DMZ #22
DYNAMO 5 #6
EXILES #97
FABLES #64
FANTASTIC FIVE #3 (OF 5)
FANTASTIC FOUR AND POWER PACK #2 (OF 4)
GEN 13 #11
GHOST RIDER #14
GLISTER #1
GREEN ARROW YEAR ONE #3 (OF 6)
GREEN LANTERN #22
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #16 (RES)
GRIMM FAIRY TALES RETURN TO WONDERLAND #2 (OF 7)
HEDGE KNIGHT 2 SWORN SWORD #3 (OF 6)
INCREDIBLE HULK #109 WWH
INDIA AUTHENTIC UMA #4
IRREDEEMABLE ANT-MAN #11
JACK OF FABLES #13
JLA CLASSIFIED #41
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #30
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED LAST OF THE MOHICANS #3 (OF 6)
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED MAN IN THE IRON MASK #2 (OF 6)
NEW AVENGERS #33
NEW AVENGERS TRANSFORMERS #2 (OF 4)
NEW EXCALIBUR #22
NICOLAS CAGES VOODOO CHILD TEMPLESMITH COVER #2
NOVA #5
OMEGA FLIGHT #5 (OF 5) CWI
OUTSIDERS FIVE OF A KIND WEEK 2 KATANA SHAZAM
PHANTOM CVR A #18
POWERS #25
PUBLIC ENEMY #4
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #10 CWI
RED SONJA #25
SADHU THE SILENT ONES #1
SPIDER-MAN FANTASTIC FOUR #4 (OF 4)
STAR WARS LEGACY #15
STAR WARS REBELLION #9
STORMWATCH PHD #10
ULTIMATE X-MEN #85
UNCLE SCROOGE #368
UN-MEN #1
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #683
WORLD WAR HULK FRONT LINE #3 (OF 6)
X-FACTOR #22
ZOMBIE PROJECT #1


Books / Etc.
100 BULLETS VOL 11 ONCE UPON A CRIME TP
ALAN MOORE THE COMPLETE WILDCATS TP
BLACK METAL VOL 1 GN
CLIVE BARKERS GREAT & SECRET SHOW VOL 2 TP
COMPLETE JON SABLE FREELANCE VOL 7 TP
DOME HC
DUMMYS GUIDE TO DANGER VOL 1 TP
EC ARCHIVES TWO-FISTED TALES VOL 2 HC
ESSENTIAL DAZZLER VOL 1 TP
FEMME FATALES SEPT 2007 VOL 16 #4
FORGOTTEN REALMS VOL 5 STREAMS SILVER TP
GHOST RIDER VOL 2 LIFE & DEATH OF JOHNNY BLAZE TP
HEAVY METAL SEPTEMBER 2007 #112
LAST CALL VOL 1 GN
LEES TOY REVIEW AUG 2007 #178
LORI LOVECRAFT VOL 2 MY BLACK PAGES TP
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR VOL 6 DIGEST TP
PIRATES VS NINJAS POCKET MANGA VOL 1
SHOWCASE PRESENTS ADAM STRANGE VOL 1 TP
STYLE SCHOOL VOL 1 TP
SUPERMAN CHRONICLES VOL 3 TP
TOYFARE 10TH ANNIVERSARY ED CVR #122
VAULT OF MICHAEL ALLRED LTD ED HC
VIDEO WATCHDOG #133
WOMEN OF MARVEL VOL 2 TP
ZOMBIE TALES VOL 1 TP



What, as they say, looks good to YOU?


-B

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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So-- I'm in a hurry this week-- please forgive me if this is dull as a result as I think it might be; Jog and Graeme both review this book already, but I want to attempt to talk about MULTIPLE WARHEADS #1 by Brandon Graham (via Oni Press)— it feels a bit early to talk about the series though.

I’d read KING CITY, but I never read Brandon Graham’s ESCALATOR: I had bought ESCALATOR at a San Diego Con two or three years ago on a Sunday morning. I was feeling horrible that day—I’d had a bad lunch, or I’d eaten something the night before that had gone down profoundly wrong. So I’m miserable—absolutely fucking miserable, all day long. Evening comes, and I’m walking past a hotel, when it all reaches a climax: I put the books down and proceed to begin violently vomiting into the nearest bush. I finish, and… the book is gone. (Just ESCALATOR and some mini-comic, luckily).

If you’ve never been to a San Diego Con before, I always thought “they stole my comics as I was vomiting” was as perfect a one-sentence description of, like, the entire experience as you’ll ever hear. And that was back before it got really crazy.

Anyway, MULTIPLE WARHEADS… Let's get that stupid, boring "reviewing" business out of the way, first: I agree with Jog and Graeme that this is a totally fun comic. Now, armed with the knowledge of my opinion, venture out into the world of Men! Men in Italian Suits, who drink Cappuccino, and wear Cufflinks! You are ready!

It seems like comics have got this younger generation of cartoonists, blasting out these comics that aren't just heavily influenced by junk culture but unquestioningly embracing junk culture. It's some of my favorite stuff going right now, actually. One thing I’ve noticed: there’s a tendency towards these bizarre affirmations of comics. Not the content of comics, or the object-ness of comics, so much as just comics gratia comics: as a lifestyle choice or a destination in and of itself. "OH MY GOD, COMICS CURED MY ACNE!"

Examples: TEENAGERS FROM MARS featured a Comic Book Liberation Army. Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos and Rafael Grampa released a gnarly comic at the San Diego convention called 5, which featured, among other things, one story concluding with Cloonan happily chaining herself to a drawing table, and another with Lolos smiling and happily drawing comics while alone and in TRACTION(!). CASANOVA Volume I, Issue 7, Page 6, Panel 6: "I love comics!" Brandon Graham concludes the first volume of his terrific Tokyopop graphic novel KING CITY with a one page comic essay on Drawing Comics, featuring exhortations like "You could steal pens and paper and make the best comic ever sitting on a dumpster."

MULTIPLE WARHEADS has a good one: it goes from a sex scene to characters post-coital, in bed, vulnerably discussing the latest issue of BARBARIAN REVENGE.

(For fun with generational shifts, compare that for a second to the following passage from Ivan Brunetti's SCHIZO #4: "I have reached the October of my enthusiasm. I don't think drawing cartoons is a moral thing to do. I should be mopping the AIDS ward at the county hospital. I hate everything I've ever done. Every night when I go to bed, I pray for death." Or to page 25 of the ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY Library of Novelty collection entitled Ruin Your Life: Draw Cartoons and Doom Yourself to Decades of Grinding Isolation, Solipsism, and Utter Social Disregard. Or to any panel in Dan Clowes's PUSSEY, say.)

MULTIPLE WARHEADS mostly skates along on Graham's considerable cartoon energy, with a little maybe-from-real-life relationship energy sometimes peeking out from under the surface. Watching him spread some of that around isn’t a bad way to pass time. Graham’s worlds are built through an accretion of seemingly random details. I guess I'm used to that from Grant Morrison comics, where there can be crazy surface details, but it's just sugar-coating for whatever Morrison's really talking about. A lot of newer work uses a similar principle, but it's not coated to much by way of a philosophy or discernible themes yet so much as exploring purely personal concerns: heartbreak, friends, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, etc. KING CITY is a wallop of fun and one of the books I've most enjoyed this year for it, but I couldn't tell you what I took away from it. Similarly, MULTIPLE WARHEADS is more pleasurable at seeing an obviously talented cartoonist let loose than for any theme or observation being conveyed, say. Maybe there’s something there about relationships but it hasn’t really crystallized yet.

Which is sort of a worrisome thing for the future: that the tangible results of all that enthusiasm from all these promising cartoonists sometimes do little more than reproduce the emotional state of eating pixie sticks. My favorite Cory Lewis comic to date is about kickball…? Joss Whedon just launched a webcomic (with totally pretty art from Fabio Moon & the so-so-so-great Dave Stewart) entitled SUGARSHOCK. It’s… it’s about a rock band of young girls…?

SUGARSHOCK …? Uhm, dude, I liked it and all, but: Joss Whedon is 43 years old.

Joss Whedon doesn’t lie awake worrying about whether a rock band of young girls will make it happen; he worries about his house payment. Or the rattling sound his Lexus is making. Or whether his daughters get into Vassar.

I enjoyed MULTIPLE WARHEADS #1, and I think you would too, but would it be unseemly to acknowledge that sometimes I look at it and its contemporaries, and experience a minor slice of existential terror? I don’t know about you, but on this end of the screen, shit, I’m not getting any younger over here. Getting older has positive qualities, more than I expected, but, Jumping Jesus Crap, I’m terrified of it anyway. I’m not sure what the theme of MULTIPLE WARHEADS is, but is there kind of an unspoken thing to all these books of … “Look! Look at our Youth before it fades!” I'm terrified of being old and hearing kids blather incoherently about video games and anime; or even worse, infinitely worse: being old and hearing kids blather incoherently about video games and anime and UNDERSTANDING WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT! You are the Ghost of Christmas Future, Joss Whedon!!!

But like I said in sentence #1—it’s too early to say. Maybe Corey Lewis will end up doing comics about spikey-haired 38-year olds who, ZOMG, get the most awesomous prostate exams of all time. Scott Pilgrim: Deadbeat Dad. The Pirates of Coney Island sick with worry about what will become of their children if they were to die unexpectedly. Guy with Inexplicable Werewolf Penis (?) from MULTIPLE WARHEADS #1 struggling to meet a decent woman on Match.Com. Maybe they’ll keep the energy and have their themes evolve, without succumbing to the despair of ... without becoming SCHIZO #4, basically. Maybe? Maybe that’s possible…?

In the meantime, you could do worse than to give MULTIPLE WARHEADS #1 a look.

Labels: Abhay

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It's the end of the comics week, which can only mean one thing - Essential Dazzler comes out tomorrow. Is it wrong of me that I kind of want to pick that up? I mean, sure, there are good comics appearing as well - Casanova #8! - but... Essential Dazzler. How bad can it be?

FANTASTIC FOUR #548: I'm sure that I should feel as if the tension is building and the story is headed towards some grand climax at this point, two issues from the big anniversary issue, but... I don't. Which isn't to say that this fight issue is bad, exactly, just kind of Eh; yeah, the team is back together (which is to say, Reed and Sue have rejoined the action), and yeah, they're fighting the Frightful Four which is kind of retro-cool and all, but when the cliffhanger ending is that they have to fight Klaw, then you're somewhat lost in the Had-To-Have-Been-There-o-Verse.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #8: Color me entirely torn on this one - On the one hand, there's an attempt at a character arc being pushed into a done-in-one spotlight on Liberty Belle here, which is both ambitious and somewhat welcome (One of the problems with JSA is that there are too many characters for the book, if y'ask me, and it's nice to see some attempt at fleshing out some of the lesser-known ones), but on the other, it's all handled rather poorly, tying in to and relying a little too much on your knowledge of other books and other characters... A good effort, I guess, but just barely Okay, and that's mostly because of Fernando Pasarin's art.

NEW WARRIORS #3: Oh God, from the cliched - and hardly contemporary - "Usual Suspects"-ripoff cover down to the generic dialogue, lackluster plotting and entirely gratuitous guest-appearance by Wolverine, this is so close to the very definition of Awful that I'm saddened to say that I thought Paco Medina's art was kind of groovy, in a bloated-Terry-Dodson way. Still: Best avoided.

SHE-HULK #20: Well, if nothing else, it's novel to see writers - in this case Dan Slott and Ty Templeton - work so quickly to tie up every possible loose end they can in such a small amount of space. The result, mind you, is still an Awful mess of rushed and unfulfilling resolutions that end up making you wish that they'd tried to leave somethings open, but you can't have everything. That said: After the fourth-last page of the story, now do you believe me that this takes place post-World War Hulk, Charlie...?

SUPERGIRL #20: On the plus side, Renato Guedes really does draw a very good Supergirl. On the minus side, it's a shame that the art is wasted on such a flat, crossover-driven story as the one Tony Bedard supplies. Given that next issue guest-stars Karate Kid from Countdown, I have the feeling that all of Bedard's short run is going to be crossover-centric... Eh, overall, really.

THOR #2: There's something to be said about the deliberately slow pace of the revival of Stan Lee's favorite classical mythological figure. Exactly what that something is, I'm not so sure, but there's definitely something - we're two issues in, and what I'm getting is possibly that JMS doesn't really have much of a plot lined up but can definitely do "quirky" characters. As with the first issue, the best thing about the book is definitely Oliver Copiel's artwork, which is clean, clear and the star of this Okay show.

WORLD WAR HULK #3: The Hulk! He's broken Dr. Strange's hands in the psychic realm! Hulk is apparently the hardest thinker there is! Or something. Ignoring the weak "Strange Smash!" cliffhanger, this is continuing to be the event that doesn't disappoint - in the main book, at least - although I'm worried that the gladiator turn of events is going to change that for the last half of the series, as the attempt tat moral ambiguity ("He wants revenge on those who exiled him and accidentally caused the death of his family! He may be wrong - - Or he may be right! Which side are you on, true believer?") gets replaced by "He's turned Madison Square Garden into a superhero gladiator arena where he gets mind-controlled superheroes to fight for his pleasure! He's very clearly insane and must be stopped!" A low Good.

What did the rest of you think?

Labels: Graeme

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Gah! Busier than the average bear today, so excuse both the lateness and shortness of my love letter to Kurt Busiek and dislike of Dan Didio. Or something... But, somehow I missed part one of the story that continues in this week's ACTION COMICS #853 - Was it in the Superman issue I didn't read from the week before? Or is my Countdown-lethargy causing blindness to comics that cross over with it? - not that that stopped me from understanding what's going or enjoying the issue. As much as I want to snark that this is because Kurt Busiek knows how to write comics that don't rely on you reading seventeen other comics to understand them unlike the Countdown team, there's enough truth in that for me to take it more seriously than your average throwaway cheap shot. I mean, surely there's something wrong with Countdown if I have to find out that Jimmy Olsen's sudden knowledge of Robin's secret identity from that series is actually a plot point (as opposed to an unexplained arguable editorial oversight) in a crossover as opposed to the main book...?

Whereas COUNTDOWN #39 stumbles along in its own Eh way, with Jimmy's superhero career as comedy relief in the middle of what is essentially filler (Oracle's defenses can be beaten by punching them a lot, apparently...? She should work on that. Also, now that we're a quarter of a way into the series, shouldn't we have passed the teases for the series by now? Instead, we still don't know why "Jimmy Olsen Must Die" - indeed, no-one's even demanded that in the series at all yet - and Eclipso hasn't even appeared in the book, never mind seduced the innocent Mary Marvel as one particular teaser ad promised. I'm all for weekly pacing being different than monthly and all, but by this point in 52, there had been major movement on all the core plots as well as the introduction of many new characters - The Great Ten, Isis, Supernova and Batwoman by week Thirteen, I seem to remember. Not to get all, "Why, in my day, weekly comics had lesbians and plot development" or anything, but Countdown just seems slow by comparison, something that seems all the more obvious with issues like this), Busiek uses this Good tie-in issue to add some mystery and, well, action, to the basic concept. He also offers plain old good writing complete with not only characterization but also foreshadowing (Jimmy gets upstaged by a dog at the start of the issue, only to get saved by Krypto at the end of it, etc.), in-jokes (Clark's yawning as the television talks about an all-night mission by the JLA), and the invention of the evil internet. You know, fun dumb superhero stuff.

World-building from the Busiek school - in service of the story, as opposed to being the entire point of the story, which is what Countdown feels like too much of the time - is just one thing that Kurt has been a king of in his Superman writing in the last year and a half, and it'd be nice for him to be recognized for keeping the flagship character's books as strong as they have been (including essentially bailing out Geoff Johns more than a few times) by the powers that be. Given the fact that he can do solid superhero storytelling like few others can - with a sense of humor that doesn't overwhelm the story, with a sense of drama that doesn't tend towards needless grittiness or false danger, and with a sense of what other writers are doing in other books without appearing to be an advertisement for them - maybe he can be the showrunner for next year's weekly spectacular...?

Labels: Graeme

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Well, I said I'd have more than one review this time. Didn't say it'd all be comics. It's sort of all comics-related, right? Also, I bought the new issue of Otaku USA (my anime review came from its free sampler dvd) at a bookstore this week, so it counts as 8/1 on Planet Jog, although I think it got put out a week early. Anyhow.

Mushishi Vol. 2: Not a quick release here. Mushishi is a popular manga in Japan, a fan-favorite that’s spawned a beloved anime series (and a less-beloved live-action film), but Del Rey has seen fit to bump its English-language release back to a twice-yearly schedule, which probably isn’t a good sign financially.

Too bad, because Mushishi is an often superb comic, each volume stuffed with five standalone tales of Ginko, a Mushishi, a wandering, cigarette-puffing magician/doctor/shaman, seemingly stepped out of a forgotten Hayao Miyazaki guest issue of Hellblazer. Ginko can manipulate Mushi, tiny organisms that embody primal attributes of the natural world and tend to affect human moods and perceptions.

Of course, Mushi really serve as a means for writer/artist Yuki Urushibara to craft exquisite little stories of, say, Mushi as an extended metaphor for human wanderlust - Ginko encounters a man chasing Mushi rainbows, and torn between following his irresponsible father, or following dad’s wishes to be a grounded person. Symbolic images of flowing rivers and dams abound. Ginko also gets caught up in the case of a fellow Mushishi, a man like a god who’s weakened by human foibles, plus a mysterious girl who lives and dies every day, and a family desperate to love the doppelganger Mushi children that killed their real son.

The very best story sees a young woman driving out the deadly Mushi inside her by transcribing tales of the Mushishi, literally transforming her sickness into living words, plucked off her skin and out of the air. But all the tales are of heroes vanquishing evil, until Ginko promotes a harmonious style, which benefits girl and ‘sickness,’ and provides a hugely inspired parable of counternarratives sapping human fear of the Other. EXCELLENT work, popular manga loaded with mythic and literary heft, and I absolutely recommend it.

Witchblade (the anime) Episode 3: Horrible. Anime studio GONZO put out 24 episodes of this in 2006, and pretty soon it’ll be slithering onto R1 dvd. Maybe the new Otaku USA dvd just had an especially bad episode, but it was such a dreadful, pandering mess that I doubt any amount of backstory could redeem it.

The story is original to the anime (which isn’t to say it’s original). Endearingly clumsy anime character type Masane and her comically large boobsock-hugged breasts are just trying to get by in post-cataclysm Tokyo, while raising a helpless, mysterious little girl of the type that must appear in 65% of all yearly anime or someone gets fined.

But Masane is also the current bearer of the Witchblade, which turns her into a lip-smacking wanton for violence (sex), her thong vanished so deeply between her cheeks the animators are content simply to draw a bare ass. Confronted with a menacing tank, she murmurs “come… you big thing… I feel you…” before slicing off the machine's phallic gun in a splash of goopy white stuff, which I'm sure is completely different from semen. Female empowerment, but still pleasureful for men! There are two such skeevy fight scenes this episode, executed in a swift, cost-effective manner. The rest of it is minute after grueling minute of the most banal Bubblegum Crisis knockoff corporate intrigue imaginable, capped with some unbelievably pandering I-LOVE-my-child!! sentimentality. It's a celebration of maternity! Hooray!

I’m forced to wonder if, for some Japanese audiences, this sort of thing really is an encapsulation of what contemporary American superheroine comics are. Like, this is the image we project, and what another culture deems ‘correct’ to beam back. But then, I’m probably thinking too hard about a stupid cartoon designed for sad men to watch with their pants off. CRAP.

Labels: Jog

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How do you solve a problem like Dr. Strange? There's something about him that doesn't quite seem to work these days--he can't sustain a series of his own, his supporting cast is the same tiny group of characters it was 30 years ago, and even though everyone seems to like him enough that he's always positioned as one of Marvel's big guns, he keeps generating narrative dead-ends or appearing in big stories only to be written out of them in short order.

The difficulty with making a Dr. Strange comic work is twofold. One of them is that his stories need to look absolutely gorgeous and sort of surreal or there's no point, and nobody's really stepped up to give him the kind of visual splendor he got in his prime from Steve Ditko and later Marshall Rogers and P. Craig Russell and sometimes Gene Colan. (I can imagine J.H. Williams III doing a perfectly terrific Dr. Strange, but who knows if he's got any interest in the character? From my conversation with him at Comic-Con, it sounds like he's already got a very full plate for the near future. And somehow I can't imagine Paul Laffoley would be all that interested in doing comics.)

The other is that nobody's ever been able to define or even suggest what he can and can't do--which works fine when you're doing a story that's entirely within the realms of the mystical (or "imaginary solutions to imaginary problems"), but falls apart when you're working in a setting where physics applies. Dr. Strange's powers are, literally, hand-waving. I don't even know if he belongs among the Illuminati, frankly. He worked in the context of the Defenders because the point of that series was that the group's characters had nothing in common--he and the Hulk don't operate within the same frame of reference. (It's the same principle, in a way, as the Grant Morrison Seven Soldiers, where e.g. Klarion and the Manhattan Guardian may cross paths but understand what they're experiencing in completely different ways.)

This brings us to New Avengers: Illuminati #4, which exemplifies the Strange problem, because he has to be present in it even though he has nothing to add to it--and even though, if Bendis and Reed wanted to make him solve the problem by waving his hands, they could easily have done so. The opening scene, with the cabal chit-chatting about their love lives, is a really good example of bad Bendis--maybe the dialogue's actually Reed in a Bendis-imitating mode, but it certainly seems Bendisesque. It's not just that they're talking about things they wouldn't talk about, it's that their dialogue is intermittently way off from their established speech patterns. (Charles Xavier would never, ever say "Plus--if, listen, if I did do this...") And four of the five characters on the cover don't even appear in the issue, which wouldn't bug me if they had a symbolic presence in the body of the issue, but the Marvel Boy stuff that makes up the bulk of the plot has nothing at all to do with the women-problems business from the first few pages.

The plot, yes--I like Graeme's phrase "unnecessary continuity implant." Two huge flaws with the story here. First, it requires a working knowledge of the Morrison/Jones Marvel Boy miniseries and the entire Kree/Skrull narrative to make sense. (I've read Marvel Boy, although not lately, and I can't even remember what happened in it or how this would fit in.) Second, if you're going to do a continuity implant, it has to change the meaning of what was happening in the original story; this doesn't, and I don't see how it can be meaningful to future stories, either, unless Noh-Varr ends up becoming the next Captain Marvel, which would mean 86ing the entire point of his character. An Awful issue.

I was afraid World War Hulk had gone way off course with last week's also-unnecessary issue of Incredible Hulk--in case you missed it, the point was that Rick Jones and... was it Miek? The insect-thing... are, you know, Two Sides of the Same Coin. (Plus have we found out yet what happened with Amadeus Cho and his Legion of Hulk-Helpers? I'm pretty sure we haven't, and that's the part of this story I want to read most. I keep thinking that Cho is basically Peter Parker in the part of the story between where he gets his powers and where Uncle Ben dies: a very powerful, very arrogant kid who thinks he knows how everything works and is heading for a major fall.) With World War Hulk #3, though, I'm back on board, particularly since he's figured out how to make Strange work in as physical a context as there could possibly be.

This is a massive, gleeful crank-it-to-11 action comic, and it works because Pak and Romita don't try to get around the potentially corny bits--they just charge full-speed-ahead into them: "No, Doctor, you can't." "I can. And must. Now bring me the box." Pak's got a bad habit of repeating sequences and catchphrases--how many times do we need to be told how the ship blew up and Caiera died? or read someone saying "may he who dies die well"? But he's very much in control of his characters thematically. The way he gets around the Strange-in-the-physical-world problem is to make Strange's part of the story about his most physical attribute as a character: his hands, which are the instruments of his failed caretaking in his origin. (Strange reaches out his hands to Bruce in friendship, and has them crushed by the Hulk; at the end of the story, they're replaced by immobile weapons.) Lots of great visual touches from Romita, too: the '70s Sal Buscema-isms of General Ross's flashback, the reversed-out linework when Strange drinks the Zom potion, the crinkly, extra-Janson-y artwork on the flashback inside Bruce's mental landscape. A Good issue, elevated by what's hands-down the best final page of the week.

In the non-Strange division, over in the corner, there's poor cancelled Irredeemable Ant-Man #11--when a "fan-favorite" creator like Robert Kirkman can't sell a Marvel Universe series for beans, there's a problem. (The first comics store I went to this week didn't even carry it. The second had two copies of this issue peeking out from behind an Essential Amazing Spider-Man TPB.) Next issue is the final one, but this one seems to have been plotted as the wrap-up, oddly enough--most of the dangling plot threads are brusquely dispatched here (I think the only ones left have to do with Eric's love life), it's called "Redeemed" for that soothing full-circle sensation, and it ends with the status quo of the beginning of the series mostly restored.

I've really enjoyed the formalist tricks of this series, especially the sixteen-panel grid Phil Hester's given it--there aren't sixteen panels on many pages, but the panel borders are always more or less where they would be if there were. Honesly, though, I don't know how much longer Kirkman, Hester and Parks could've sustained it: the series is built around one joke, which is that Eric O'Grady is a weaselly jerk who keeps doing the right thing more or less by accident. His victory here consists of lying through his teeth to save his own skin, then selling out the person who's come to rescue him--all of which is funny in theory, and only sort of works on the page. It's an Okay issue of a series that's generally been more impressive in its ambition than its execution. Click Here to Read More...

Part two of the things I picked up at SDCC last weekend, because it's either this or continuing to be completely fascinated by "Survivorman" on the Science Channel (Why would anyone do what he does on a regular basis? WHY?)...

BEESWAX BOUND: Much to my embarrassment, I didn't realize that the person I was talking to at the AdHouse table was Joel Priddy until after I'd left, and looked at the minicomic he'd given to me - Sorry, Joel. Although even if I'd realized who you were, I would've been too shy to say that I really like your stuff, including this collection of sketches and expanded blog posts (Read Joel's own take on the mini here). There's enough material and promise here for three or four full-length books ("Fracas" alone could fill a couple), and the way it sparks the imagination of the reader more than makes up for any slightness you might feel about the minicomic format. Very Good.BB

BLACK METAL: This kind of feels like the first post-Scott Pilgrim book in a lot of ways - definitely the first thing I've read that seems to learn from what Bryan Lee O'Malley does well without reading like an obvious attempt to copy it. It's a very enjoyable book, gloriously dumb and reveling in it, and the speed with which it moves somehow shunts it past the the self-consciousness I normally find in Rick Spears' books (and also makes me want to revisit his Pirates of Coney Island, for some reason). Chuck BB's artwork is attractive enough and ready-made for Cartoon Networkization, which seems fitting; this is pretty much an Adult Swim show that accidentally came out as a Good book.

MULTIPLE WARHEADS #1: Jog talked about this last week, and he's spot-on with how good it is - Pretty much a continuation (in terms of stylization, not plot) of his King City book, this confirms Brandon Graham as one of the most interesting creators out there right now for me - he manages to mix the sublime and mundane in a way that feels both new and familiar, even as it's in a very specific world. Very Good and enough to make me want Graham to magically put out new work every week.

THB: COMICS FROM MARS #1: Going along with my born-again love of Pope post from yesterday, this sealed the deal. What was a pleasant surprise here was the gentleness of the writing - I could tell from Pulphope that Pope is someone who believes in people, but the sweetness of the final story here was a really welcome surprise. Excellent, and on a tangent, anyone from DC who read this and didn't think that Pope should just be given Kirby's Fourth World characters and be allowed to do whatever he wants if he ever wants to do anything with them is insane.

(This isn't the place for it, but with news of Marvel turning Kirby's Eternals into an ongoing title coming in quick succession to DC's announcing that Jim Starlin is killing off the New Gods, however temporarily that lasts, just made me think that what's wrong with the Countdown-centric direction of DC's superhero line right now is that it's so reductive and willing to eliminate what doesn't easily slot into Dan Didio's idea of what makes good comics. Grr, bah, etc.)

12 REASONS WHY I LOVE HER: Yeah, I know, this came out ages ago - It's one of those books that I meant to pick up when it came out and somehow forgot. What tempted me in the first place, and turned out to be the best thing about the book, was Joelle Jones' artwork, which is graceful and cartoony in the best ways, letting the characters act in ways that support (and, in some cases, gloss over rough patches of) Jamie Rich's dialogue. The (admittedly slight) writing feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure due to the out-of-chronological way the story is told (I choose to believe that things end as well as they could), but that adds to the book, I think; you can take it as a romance or anti-romance as the mood takes you. Good enough to make me want to check out Rich's other books, finally.

Tomorrow, back to the books from last Wednesday, if only because I want to point out why Kurt Busiek is still winning after all these years. Click Here to Read More...

So here's the pull-quote part of this whole review: In a year that's really been full of some pretty amazing books so far, Paul Pope's PULPHOPE is not only the most impressive release to date, but a book that everyone who has an interest in creativity owes it to themselves to read. And here's the most amazing part about that statement: I mean it completely.

(For a second's digression, this year really has been pretty damn good for graphic novels, hasn't it? This past month alone, I've read three that I really have to get around to writing about purely because I loved them so much: Robot Dreams and Laika, both from First Second, and Clubbing from the pretty-impressive-even-if-no-one-else-seems-to-be-saying-so Minx imprint over at DC. Add to that things like The Homeless Channel or Garage Band, and it really seems like a pretty good year, all things considered.)

I picked up Pulphope partially because I was at SDCC and felt as if I could get away with spending $29.95 on something I was only randomly curious about ahead of time - I'm cheap, what do you want? I wasn't the biggest Pope fan ahead of time, I have to admit; I'd thought that he was an interesting visual stylist, but didn't really have much of an opinion beyond that. What I got for my money was a book that owes a lot in terms of design to people like Tomato and Julian House (As a particular and somewhat random example, anyone remember House's designs for the Primal Scream single "Miss Lucifer"? It's like that, kind of), filled with not only some beautiful - and warning, kids, some potentially pornographic depending on where you draw your particular lines - images that come so close to visual overload but never go overwhelm. It's stunning to look at, from its abstract (logoless, wonderfully) cover - reminiscent of Pollock but cleaner, a shiny pop version - onwards, but that's not where its real value for me was.

Y'see, this book has essays by Pope. They're similar in style if not content to his posts on his blog, which are insightful and distractedly conversational, but his writing here is more focused in intent - each essay deals with Pope's creativity, whether it's particular influences, his past, where he sees his work and himself in context with contemporaries and history - and kind of inspirational, to be honest; you can't help but feel the passion Pope feels not only for his own work but for the creative impulse in general. It's wonderful writing, even if you have absolutely no interested in Pope's art and design (which, by the way, would mean that you have no taste after the 228 pages of awesome herein), and essential, compulsory, reading for creative people of all stripes. You might not agree with what he writes, you may not even like what he writes, but you'll end up inspired by it nonetheless.

Pulphope is a book that engages you emotionally and intellectually; it's something that doesn't fail to impress on a visual and visceral level, and - if you're anything like me - will get things bouncing around in your head for days afterwards. I've been talking about it to people for days after reading it, and continually going back into it and discovering new things to think about and admire. Really, it's that good. It's downright Excellent.

Labels: Graeme

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I'll have more than one review next time, but until then...

Garth Ennis' Chronicles of Wormwood #6 (of 6): In which the writer whose name is in the title concludes this tour of a spiritual cosmology in an appropriate place: the End of Days. Ennis has been pretty consistent with using the anything-goes attitude Avatar exhibits around their ‘name’ writers to write some genuinely idiosyncratic comics, stuff that might not fly at more guarded publishers for reasons beyond more-gore/more-sex/more-nasty. And this series has read like a particularly personal little thing, the religious manifesto of a man approaching 40, and becoming all the more convinced that there’s nothing willing to help people besides themselves.

The notion’s carried fairly smoothly through the series, from the idea of heavenly religious characters tossing away glory and wandering on Earth, to protagonist Wormwood’s inability to keep a relationship going, despite being the Antichrist and miraculous and all. I’ll confess to getting bored with the midsection’s tour of Heaven and Hell, your typical afterlife portrait of a cosmos inclined toward maximum irony (the terrorist was expecting 40 virgins, but got 40 little babies with dirty diapers - good one, Paradise!), although it does give artist Jacen Burrows some enjoyably ugly scenes to draw. But ironically, Burrows’ visual style has developed to the point where the particulars of his character art are more affecting than his ‘big’ pages, and so the book does best when kept intimate.

Anyway, this issue’s the Apocalypse, and it’s little surprise that Ennis sees such a planet-quaking threat as little more than state-of-fear hi-jinx wielded by the powerful to keep the people scared and easier to rule. Certainly Wormwood’s ultimate decision seems inevitable, given the book’s theme (helpfully spelled out via narration at the end). But this has been more a sorting-my-head-out comic from a prominent talent than anything else, and a highly OKAY one, with a GOOD conclusion.

Labels: Jog

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Time for a very quick review at the end of a very long day, which also comes at the end of a very long week...

OUTSIDERS: FIVE OF A KIND - NIGHTWING/BOOMERANG #1: Or, as the cover has it, "Nightwing and Captain Boomerang Jr." When you put it like that, don't you feel sorry for poor Boomerang? I mean, it's not like "Captain Boomerang" isn't a pretty embarrassing name to begin with, but adding "Jr." to it? Seriously, DC Logo Designer, that's just cold. Even "Kid Boomerang" would've sounded better. "Boomerang Boy." "Boomerang Lad." "Private Boomerang." Any of those are better than Captain Boomerang Jr., people.

You'll be happy to know that the comic itself doesn't live up to the promise of that title; you don't have the two characters hanging out in a bar, drinking and dealing with their father issues or anything like that (To be fair, it comes close. Poor Boomerang, Jr. keeps wondering if Batman hates him for that whole "My dad killed your sidekick's dad" thing, and yet somehow even that isn't interesting. You know, the more I think about it, the more Captain Boomerang Jr. sucks); instead, we have a generic team-up adventure set-up by Batman in the most contrived fashion ever: "I want to build a team, but in order to decide who I love most, you will compete for my affections!" It all goes down pretty much as you'd expect, and with the lack of surprise comes a lack of interest and attachment. In fact, the most interesting thing about the comic comes in the two-page back-up where Tony Bedard, writer of the upcoming Batman and The Outsiders book but not writer of the main story of this issue, more or less throws away everything that comes before in order to have the line-up he wants after all. It's a fun and unsettling moment when you really get the feeling that you've wasted part of your life reading everything that came before. I believe the official way we put it here is Crap, indeed.

Tomorrow: Something I liked a lot.

Labels: Graeme

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The opening of NEW AVENGERS: ILLUMINATI #4 is out-of-character, cheap schtick that plays to fanboys even as it parodies their favorite characters with mundane dialogue full of fantastic concepts, as each member of the Illuminati talk about their shitty love lives ("You can leave your body and go to the astral plane... Why are you online?" "I can't get hockey scores in the astral plane"). It's also completely awesome, and easily the best part of what is otherwise a dull, plotless pile of Eh.

Illuminati is turning into a weird series. There's something purposefully disjointed about it, with all of the jumping back and forth in timeframes, but outside of that, there's still no sense of anything within the series having any real weight or continuity; each issue seems to have nothing to do with the ones on either side of it, and as a result, the whole thing kind of feels like a super-hero sit-com without the com - each episode is interchangable and easy to rerun in whatever order you want.

It doesn't help that the body of each issue tends towards the unnecessary continuity implant - Who really wanted to see heroes attack the Skrulls after the Kree-Skrull War, or a pre-Secret Wars II appearance by the Beyonder? Or this issue, with Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy getting beaten up in the name of turning him into a good guy? Yes, Bendis may be stealthily introducing the next Marvel Event and everything that comes into it (Anyone else expect Marvel Boy to become a new Captain Marvel when Mar-Vell goes home, after the end of this issue?), but that's not enough to make each individual issue exciting or even worthwhile in and of itself.

That said, go and read the first four pages of the comic and wish that the rest of it had been like that.

Labels: Graeme

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Already destined (well, probably) to be a low-seller thanks to its subject matter and lack of big name creative talent, it's nonetheless true that Duncan Rouleau's METAL MEN #1 is possibly the most enjoyable thing that DC has put out this week.

Part of the thrill of the book is that it's clearly part of someone's own creative vision; I mean, yes, not only is it not tied (it seems, at this point, at least) to Countdown or Amazons Attack! or the Sinestro Corps War or any other storyline coming out of any other book - Even the "From the pages of 52" on the cover is somewhat misleading, as this doesn't pick up any storylines from that series other than showing that Doc Magnus and TO Morrow knew each other way back when - but there's something about both the writing and art that is wonderfully out of step with contemporary mainstream trends. Rouleau's art, which has always trended towards the busy and cartoony (I almost want to say "manga-influenced," but I'm probably wrong in that) has now morphed into something not unlike Chris Bachalo's current look but with clearer layout and panel design; his trend towards characture not only making sense here, but also making his designs for the title characters more attractive than they've looked in years.

What was most surprising, though, was the writing. I haven't read Rouleau's first attempt at writing (Active Images did a graphic novel of his last year that I think was called "The Nightmarist," but I can't be sure), so I wasn't prepared for how quickly and effortlessly this issue sped past: Bouncing between chapters with puns for titles ("To Serve With Love"?), setting things up for the future while laying down the past, all with dialogue that gives insight shortcuts into the characters and the context... It read Morrison-esque even before his "Based on ideas by" credit at the back of the book, and I mean that in the best way.

It's an attractive and amusing book, respectful without being a slavish recreation of the original incarnation, and definitely Very Good. Which probably means that the backlash will start in about three seconds...

Labels: Graeme

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Hello everyone, I'm really excited to be standing here in your computer screen today.

You see, yesterday was my birthday and a lot of exciting things happened. My mother phoned to remind me that I have the same birthday as Harry Potter, as she's done each year since the Harry Potter series began. I got scratch-off lottery tickets in a birthday card and I won fifty dollars, all of which were immediately earmarked for future spending. I spoke to people, and drank liquids, and reflected on the inevitable fading of youthful vigor from my body, one more step taken toward that crucial perched-on-the-dive moment where the implications of life's end must be confronted as intimate certainty.

Ingmar Bergman recently died, you know. He once called Andrei Tarkovsky the most important film director of our time. Tarkovsky once wrote that "The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." I thought of this while writing a preview synopsis for World War Hulk #3 for my site, and then I smiled as I thought of knee-slapping lawyer humor to include. Alternative dispute resolution jokes? This’ll slay ‘em! Hulk, you are the reaper's kiss.

So, being older, I think it's only proper that this column take a more sophisticated approach for this week. A topic that will reflect the wisdom that I've attained over my long journey toward this post-birthday internet posting moment. A theme that absolutely screams maturity, always and forever:

Hating superheroes! From within!

Yes, the world of superhero comics has been known to produce the occasional work that takes a dim view of the rest of the genre. Why, I've heard that some such series may be seeing release at this very time! A fine tradition, replete with cutting-edge notions and razor wit. Have you heard that people dressing up in outlandish tights and running around across rooftops at night might perhaps harbor some... deviant sexual tastes? Or that some characters that claim to stand for fine ideals... actually might not? Or, you know, that Batman has sex with Robin... on top of the blueprints for Stephanie Brown's Batcave memorial that shall never be built?!?! Maybe that last one hasn't quite manifested in that form yet, but give my pitch time.

Still, there's no denying that some readers are inclined to detect superhero-hating vibrations coming off of a wider range of comics than is entirely reasonable. Like a high school student cringing at every passing laugh in the classroom, certain that chuckles are at their expense, these readers bubble with a mix of insecurity and self-absorption, certain that their taste in genre material is widely loathed, yet convinced that it is somehow always the topic of attention. What needs to be done, I think, is a quick overview of what a real, true-blue, at-heart superhero-hating superhero funnybook quacks like.

Hence, Marshal Law, brainchild of writer Pat Mills and artist Kevin O'Neill.

I love Marshal Law. Or, at least I love the first Marshal Law storyline, originally published by Marvel's Epic Comics in six issues, from 1987-89, and collected by Titan Books into a trade paperback subtitled Fear and Loathing in 2002. It's also been announced that Top Shelf plans to compile as much Marshal Law material as it can into a single full-color omnibus volume, for sale in about a year. It'll be a good pickup for interested folks, I'm sure, but in my opinion it's only that first Titan trade that you need (and it's what I'm commenting from). That was where Mills was at full power, and where the concept was fresh enough to be thoughtful, and free of the pressures of continuation. The first Marshal Law could have acted as the last, as it is a very complete work in theme.

And that theme is somewhat more complex than you'd think from reading a synopsis, or looking to the stuff the book inspired. Hell, I don't think the early Marshal Law quite gets enough credit as a shaded work. It's not just about hating superheroes - it's about what hating superheroes has to mean while creating works that employ superhero tropes in their telling. In the process, the book not only acts as prosecuting attorney, but places itself under cross-examination.

But first: the hate.

A lot of the classic 'superheroes are dumb' ideas are in here. You will indeed find gross sexual practices, as well as good-looking supermen who are really mean and ugly. But at its core, this story is less interested in the super than the hero. Our super-powered title character, you see, hunts heroes. He hasn't found any yet, but he hunts nonetheless. In the meantime, he tangles with superheroes, who run rampant through the post-quake urban sprawl of San Futuro as killer gangs. Marshal Law is a government-sanctioned, official vigilante. Clad in leather, arms wrapped with barbed wire, the words FEAR AND LOATHING printed boldly across his chest where a nice S or a bat logo ought to be, he cuts a striking figure. He hates superheroes very, very much, although he knows that he and they are very much alike. Hell, he even has a boy sidekick of sorts, a crippled young man who's good with computers and has a mother who hates superheroes as much as the Marshal.

Plus, both Law and lawbreakers got their powers the same way - signing up as young people for an ill-fated war in the jungle, one where all the soldiers were made mighty, in the tradition of the oldest, greatest superheroes, also the products of government experiments. Like the Public Spirit, who was muscular, platinum-haired, deeply religious, proudly patriotic, media-manufactured, and conveniently away on a space mission while boys went away to die for the apple pie ideals he represented, and the survivors returned to a nation with nothing much for them to do. Law, at least, built up his hate, and you can guess that he hates the Public Spirit most of all.

As such, Mills (he of the famed Charley's War) positions superheroes as soldiers - former soldiers, acclaimed soldiers, part-time soldiers, but always men and women of war. This is the key genre concept of Marshal Law, and one it shares in certain ways with major superhero works that preceded it. In his introduction to the Titan volume, Mills praises Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen as masterpieces, and both of those earlier works contain themes of superheroes as government tools, and notions of the superhero as soldier.

Batman used it for rhetorical flourish, and a means of imposing his individual worldview on his surroundings. Watchmen, characteristically, employed the notion as yet another means of throwing the fantastic nature of its cast into sharp relief against the machinations of realism. But in Marshal Law, ‘soldier’ is neither another costume for a superhero to wear, nor another cruel, vaudevillian role for mighty talents to fill. For Mills, the soldier is the superhero, in that the ‘superhero’ is an ideal made flesh that’s sold to transform young people, to get them into foreign lands. They are both the bright fighters on the page, as well as the eager readers of their own prescribed myth. Hey, why not? Nothing could go wrong with this science, this spirit! This country! Hard work and guts!

It is so simple it hurts. They are superheroes because they are the beneficiaries of a superpower, in both the fantastic and geopolitical sense.

So, Marshal Law hunts down his own fellow veterans, unhappy with the false things their 'heroism' stands for, the violence and useless wars and popping Hitler in the kisser and all that. His eye is really on the Public Spirit, and he gets his big shot when a mystery superperson known as the Sleepman starts going around raping and killing women who dress like the Public Spirit's current lover, Celeste, a deep-cover mind-control super-siren. Marshal Law thinks the Public Spirit murdered an old lover, Virago, who was also a siren. Now he thinks he's murdering again.

Easy, right? Rebel avenger faces down false god, saves the day, slaps around America's lies, laughs at dumb capes, etc. Right?

It could have been that simple, but Mills is far too keenly aware of the ironies behind a superhero hating other superheroes, icons of hitting tackling icons of hitting through socks to the kisser. I'm going to get into spoiler territory now, but the story's 20 years old so I think the statute of limitations has run.

More than anything else, the story of Marshal Law is a collection of narrations, and not just by the 'good' characters. Most sequences are dotted with caption-based thoughts by someone, and in this way we learn that, say, the Sleepman also hates superheroes just as much as Marshal Law. Actually, he's kind of fond of the leather-clad nut. We hear of Celeste's mercenary view of the superhero life. Crucially, we get the perspective of Law's boss, a cynical man who sees both Law and the Public Spirit as the same, both providing succor to the masses. One a catchy batch of popular down-home appeal, the other a pleasingly grim 'n gritty avenger who cleans things up good. Hell, one could probably replace the other, if the fashions change. Both are good cogs in the wheel of policy. Mills clearly knows this.

As the story goes on, it becomes uncomfortable in its own skin. Law's hatred of the Public Spirit causes him to nearly miss the truth behind the mystery: that the Sleepman is actually his own boy assistant, who is also the Public Spirit's secret son, and his superhero-hating mother is actually the thought-dead ex-lover of the Public Spirit, the mind-control siren Virago. Both hate superheroes for different reasons - the Sleepman due to the self-loathing of a stunted adolscent, Virago because of personal betrayal. It's not hard to read these characterizations today as critiques of different modes of genre hate, that powered by personal discomfort and that powered by personal disappointment, respectively. There's sympathy for both, yet both are ultimately ruled ineffective before the Marshal's deeper, comprehensive hate.

But even he's not let off. The story's sixth and final chapter all but collapses into a fit of anxiety, as the Marshal and the Public Spirit fight to the finish, and the Marshal's dead girlfriend (oh, she got raped and killed by the Sleepman, by the way) critiques the concept of the superhero, and the makeup of both characters, from a feminist perspective. The Sleepman declares Marshal Law to be his mother. The title character is revealed to have maybe created half of his problems by playing the opposite of his fallen idol, standing as the architect of a false revolution, the newest form of exactly the fake ideals he hates. He's Watchmen as the superhero genre, rather than Watchmen as the end of the superhero genre. He fails to bring the Public Spirit to justice his way, he fails to kill the Sleepman, and he's left weeping in a graveyard at the end. This is good, however, as his tears show that maybe he's on his way to finding a more effective means of revolt.

The message is plain: heroism will not be found in superheroes, but it also can't be manufactured by playing into the same games in a 'cooler' way. Mills suggests that one has to reject the masculine, violent accoutrements of the genre as a whole to avoid merely reinforcing it. The heroism that Marshal Law craves probably can't be found through any idealistic clashes, and that's what really sets the story apart from similar critiques - there's no yearning for a lost innocence, or a desire to purify the superhero genre. The book spends half its length smashing what is, then spends the next half exploring the futility of reform. That's what I mean by comprehensive hate. We can't expect better. We have to leave it all beyond recognition. Maybe we just have to leave it.

It didn't happen that way for Marshal Law. The book was popular, and new stories were made. Marshal Law kept on fighting, more-or-less acting as the new badass-type status quo superhero that his first storyline warned that he might become. Parodies of famed Marvel and DC characters were wheeled out for beatings, noisy slapstick became the norm, team-ups with established characters were had, and the series settled in to being another superhero book, 'hate' flavored.

Kevin O'Neill's art always looked good, at least. I've hardly mentioned him at all, huh? Rest assured that he's very good on all of these stories, but especially in those moments in the first storyline where he gets to play up the iconographic elements of comics art, a hugging mother's arms forming a heart, or a young boy's head being plastered on a burly superhuman body. Like that first story as a whole, its strength is not in subtlety, or subtext, or gentle caresses against your cheek. I like when a comic caresses me, sure, but don’t go expecting it here. It's roughness leads it into added trouble - the story's treatment of its female characters perches unsteadily between criticism of the genre's sexualized treatment of women and exploitive shock tactics like the hero's chick getting raped and killed to drive him onward with burning spirit. Always conflicted.

I guess I should also say I don't really agree with Mills' conclusions about the genre, not totally. But I respect the story as a funny, intensive work, a smartly-made thing that articulates its points well and is willing to follow them all the way. Far enough that the concluding impression one has of the story is that of a genuine existential howl. A perfect birthday gift.

Labels: Jog

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