Hello there, fine readers of this blog. I'm running very late today and I've decided during this current fickle flirtation I'm having with 'content,' that it's better to be speedy than right. Must I choose? On a day like today, where it's almost noon and the pajama pants are still on and I promised myself I would absolutely, positively get out of the house by 1:30, the sad answer is yes.



And so, after the jump, Pairings #2: my thoughts of Sugarshock and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Willow, two one-shots by Joss Whedon and colleagues.


SUGARSHOCK: I read the first part of this online--maybe two parts, I can't quite remember--and it did...very, very little for me. It seemed little more than Joss Whedon goofing off, which at the time I found...annoying? Exasperating? I think maybe in the back of my mind, the teeny puritan "Team Comics" part of my soul was a little bummed that Dark Horse appeared to be making a genuine efort to create an online bridge to print comics, and their best hope for drawing in new fans decided to make farting noises with his hand & armpit for eight pages.

And when the print version of this came around, I read an online review somewhere blasting the collection for being exactly that for its entire length. So why I picked this up....I think a few people I trusted (such as Hibbs) said they enjoyed it, certainly...but as I recall, I picked it up and something clicked. Oh, right, I thought. It's a comic book.



Let's just push aside the talk of 'comix,' 'graphic literature,' and what-have-you for a minute, and and talk about comic books, the publishing equivalent of child prostitutes--not children that are prostitutes, mind you, but rather prostitutes for children. Before anyone ever thought to collect them, comic books were there on the newsstand, robbing boys and girls of nickels and dimes (in an era where a dime got you a loaf of bread and people were motherfucking starving, mind you), disposable romances, seedy encounters. Comic books were being brightly colored, gaudy, deliberately enticing--it didn't matter what comic books wanted, as long you wanted them. They looked like they'd be the greatest thing ever--a four-color sump of sex and violence and laughs, and the stuff you only got on Sundays now in your sweaty little hands and nobody would ever have to know--and ten minutes later you were done and it wasn't nearly as good you thought it was going to be, but there was also some sense of relief mingled in there with all the shame. And everyone got what they wanted. Then those johns came along who had to go and 'fall in love', and keep their memories alive by buying up their childhood experiences, keeping them preserved by pressing them flat at the bottom of their shirt drawer, or in between their mattresses, trying to make something honest out of comic books.

That's not a bad thing per se. Not every title turned out on the street by a Donenfeld or a Liebowitz wanted just to make rent, many of them also secretly wanted to be loved (although they'd never admit it, and there's nothing they found funnier than those johns who professed to love them). And even the ones who somehow end up reputable--reprinted! stocked on library shelves! winning awards!--find themselves uncomfortable and a little at odds, rough around the edges, unable to hide their coarse history.

Comic books are innately agents of chaos, chaos and capitalism--and if you think the latter, when left unchecked, won't inevitably lead to the former, you haven't been paying attention lately--driving crazy those who order 'em, shelve 'em, make 'em. Mark Waid's frustration and bewliderment at the failure of his BRAVE & BOLD? Ordering and stocking AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583? In the comments for Brian's shipping post of 12/30, Rudi talks about his comic store switching to pulls only. Not only is this apparently a suicidal business move on the part of the store, it's depressing and weirdly anti-comic book to me, because the comic book industry was built on poor impulse control. And poor impulse control is just the term squares use for romance.

Yeah it's squalid, but there is something of the divine to our comic store visits: divine in the way madness is divine, that love at first sight is divine, in the way that romance is a frenzy we nonetheless associate with our higher selves instead of our lowest. Marketing, word-of-mouth, handselling, all of these play their increasingly crucial part, but never count out that first and truest instinct--the moment you pick up a book on a shelf and you look at it and something clicks. Oh, right. It's a comic book.

In other words: yes, Dark Horse only wants my money; yes, Joss Whedon is only being clever; yes, this book doesn't even have an issue number (it's just SUGARSHOCK) and I read at least eight pages of it for free online (and if I read more, they didn't even stick). But Fabio Moon is being colored by Dave Stewart on paper. There's a robot with a wallet-chain, and space gladiators, and the sound effects for the opening concert are: LOUD MUSIC, LOUD MUSIC, WEIRD BUZZING. The Lincoln joke doesn't work, but the caption describing the Saddest Song In The World did, and there's a weird convoluted backstory for one of the characters that makes no sense. It makes no sense why it's even in there, much less on its own (there's a cutaway scene when one of the characters tries to explain their motivation). If I wanted to make a case for Sugarshock, I'd say it's like Ellis' and Immonen's Nextwave, or Morrison and Williams' Seven Soldiers #1, where a writer tries to recreate the wonder and absurdity of reading a comic book to an audience all but inured to the wonder and absurdity of reading a comic book...and where the success is in no small part attributable to the significant chops of the artist doing the heavy lifting.

But I don't really want to make a case for Sugarshock--I'm not sure it deserves it, it probably doesn't want it, and for me it doesn't need it. I bought Sugarshock, I enjoyed reading it, and I guess it works for me as a costly printed piece of matter in way it didn't as a free, formless piece of digital information. What can I tell you? There's many reasons those on the streetcorners gather to mock their johns, and foolishness is certainly one of them. GOOD. Not a GFE, but would repeat.



BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: WILLOW: This is also an irreverent one-shot by Joss Whedon from Dark Horse, and is also $3.50. It did not work for me. Joss Whedon is addicted to up-ending expectations the way a chainsmoker is addicted to cigarette lighters, and so it makes sense to me that just as Sugarshock is a one-shot where the events tilt on (deliberately pointless) backstory, Willow is a well-known character's mystical walkabout stripped almost entirely of context--in fact, the point of the issue is that the character must discover her own context in a realm cluttered with everyone else's.

And yet? Didn't work. Are Karl Moline and Andy Owens saddled with drawing a character fans have seen a hundred-plus hours of on TV, while Fabio Moon isn't? Yup. Are they yoked to a script with a propensity for shifting references and scales while Moon gets all his sci-fi crazy kept consistent? Yup. But Moon (with Stewart on colors) has crazy chops Moline and Owens (with Michelle Madsen on colors) currently do not.

Also, I think Willow's mix of hesitancy and decisiveness, her headstrong skittishness, only works for me when you've got Alyson Hannigan saying the lines. I don't think that's just years of a TV crush talking: you can hear Hannigan's Willow second-guess herself as she stammers, or come to a decision as she's making it. Without that, the Willow I encountered here (and in Buffy: Season Eight, before I bailed) is too much the writer's friend--you don't know why she does or doesn't grok something, other than it's the point in the script where she's supposed to.



And also the artists just can't figure out Willow's face. They've definitely figured out there's something going on with her nose, but what that is, they're not quite sure. Sometimes it's big; sometimes it's small. If ever a comic book gave the impression its artists had put a post-it note on the drawing table reading: "Remember! Nose!!" Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Willow is that book. That--and a sub-EH rating--are really the kindest things I can say for it.

Labels: Jeff, reviews

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Man, oh man. Am I out of shape with this writing review thing... that Firefox extension I added? The one that's supposed to write them for me while I play flash games? It totally doesn't work! But when Douglas announced he was going to be writing reviews during 24 Hour Read Comics All Day day, a bunch of us Savage types figured we would also post so...

Savage...Critics...Assemble?

After the jump: stuff so old, the newest thing is like two weeks old. Woo! Hang fire!



BLACKEST NIGHT #3: My significantly atrophied critical faculties fail me here—I can’t figure out whether to give Geoff Johns not enough credit or too much credit. If I go for the former, the gruesome bathetic murder scene in this issue rips off of the death of Tim Drake’s dad in Identity Crisis in a very ineffective way. If I go for the latter, it, and the appearance of Ralph and Sue in issue #1, suggest Johns is doing a weird riff on Identity Crisis so as to—what? Comment on that mini’s ‘opening of the way’ for death and debasement in the DCU? Bite Didio’s hand while seeming to praise his work? Tweak the noses of blood-&-circus style fans who thrive on this stuff? (It doesn’t seem accidental that the power of the Black Lanterns, like the sales of superhero books today, grow with every death.) And if so, isn’t that like Michael Bay decrying shaky cameras and shit editing?

I don’t know. I just can’t figure it out. Certainly I think Johns was better served by promising, as he did with The Sinestro Corps War, to kinda bring the awesome and then totally bringing the awesome as opposed to here, where he totally promises to bring the awesome, and then brings the “yeah, it’s okay if you think Pet Semetary was Stephen King’s best book.” A depressing lack of zombie sharks—and an obvious misalignment with the zeitgeist on my part—makes this an EH.

CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #3: Brubaker continues to be the victim of his own success as his attempts to reconnect me with Steve Rogers remind me how the character is always toeing the line of whininess with his big red boot: “Here I am in space watching men die, far from bleaty-blahhty-bloo-blah-blah.” It kinda me wishes Brube had bit even more from Slaughterhouse Five and put Steve on Mars where he coulda had mad sex with a Montana Wildhack-analogue. All the Bucky stuff I liked just fine—as action setpieces go, it was a little calculated, maybe, but fun. Also, am I only the one who feels like this issue felt like a Butch Guice issue inked by Brian Hitch rather than vice-versa? Either way, averages out to an OK or higher.

CHEW #1-4: Is this book really that popular, or am I just falling for Rich Johnston’s line of favorable BS he scatters for valued former sources? Don’t get me wrong, I like the book—Layman’s really crafted his chops on all kinds of licensed material and it’s great seeing them turned on such a ridiculous premise, and Rob Guillory’s art is both appealingly wonky and admirably disciplined—but its wild success seems odd, if not without precedent. I guess Chew could be to Fell what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was to X-Men and Frank Miller's Daredevil comics: a blur between homage and parody that because of talent and zeitgeist (and investor greed?) is suddenly vaulted into the realm of its own odd thing, a duck-billed platypus of a comic book, in a way.

In any event, my food issues and appreciation for the craft at work put this work in the GOODish range and I’m curious to see how Layman spins the premise next. I was gonna talk this issue's neat little use of photocopied panels into the ground, but I'll spare you.

Fantastic Four #571: I think this, better than any other book, exemplifies my currently conflicted feelings about the state of mainstream superhero stuff.

Because, on the one hand? It’s really quite good. The story—in which Mr. Fantastic is enlisted into a cadre of alternative dimension Mr. Fantastics intent on rewriting reality for the better—is suitably epic; the characters are recognizably themselves without being simple cardboard cutouts of themselves; and I’m really loving the art by Dale Eaglesham (with fantastic coloring by Paul Mounts) which feels very full, very polished. (In fact, it almost feels too polished which, since the polish Joe Sinnott brought to Kirby on FF is where the title really ‘began,’ works for me.) Really, just about everything you need to know is summed up in the double-page spread in this ish, where an army of Reeds dispatch a Galactus on Earth 2012, all waving about Ultimate Nullifiers like they’re boomers at a Stones concert—in fact, Hickman and Eaglesham even throw in Gold and Copper Surfers in addition to the Silver one (a nice nod to our current Gradation Age of comics).

So, yeah. Awesome. And yet, reading it just makes me feel like Marcello at the end of La Dolce Vita, a sullen hedonist staring gimlet-eyed at the proceedings: “Right, right, you go there; when’s Doom going to show? Oh, there he is. And the undercurrent of questionable ethicality?” It’s pretty easy for me to imagine a pie chart for a lot of superhero comics these days, something like:



And you know, that’s okay but I feel like I see this formula all over the place now (even in Morrison’s Batman & Robin) and it dulls my enthusiasm a tad.

It is worth pointing out, by the way, that it’s Hickman’s second issue (if you don’t count the Dark Reign mini—and since I haven’t read it yet, I don’t) and he’s already worked in Doom and Galactus—presumably the same way Prince might do ninety seconds of Purple Rain early on his show and get to the shit he’s really got up his sleeve—so I’m probably jumping the gun here. But when there’s something this GOOD, and my reaction to it is so muted, it’s probably just as well I haven’t been bombarding the site with reviews…

INCOGNITO #6: Again, I chalk up me being underwhelmed by this as Ed being a victim of his own success. Because if you look at this as a superhero story, it does everything a superhero story should: gives you a character with a costume, a sense of the universe he works in, origin story, arch villain, dramatic final fight (and with a mirror image to boot, so as to underline the character’s internal conflict and everything). I all but heard the closing soundtrack song performed by Aerosmith, ‘(Love Won’t Go) Incognito,’ that would play during the closing credits of Stephen Sommers’ film adaptation.

But if you look at this as a crime story, it falls short of the mark set by Criminal, or even the first volume of Sleeper. For one thing, because the tone of the ending feels so different from the first two-thirds, it doesn’t even feel like an ending (or else an out-of-place one) and crime stories—particularly the ones we’re used to reading by Brubaker—end.

It was a GOOD issue and a highly GOOD mini and let’s face it, getting Sean Phillips art month in and month out is nothing to complain about. But, wow, am I looking forward to the return of Criminal, I really am.

STRANGE TALES #1: Amazingly gorgeous, but apparently I’m still such a Marvel fanboy deep in my soul that I was a little stung by how mocking the tone of everything seemed. Even Paul Pope, the guy who regularly pulls the sublime from the ridiculous, decides to play Kirby’s Inhumans for laffs, with a story hook that feels copped from a Harvey comic. I got the feeling the cartoonists involved in the project (except Peter Bagge, who did his Hulk story roughly five or six years before everyone else) dearly love the design work of the characters they’re worked on but find some other aspect—be it superheroes or work-for-hire or fan culture—deeply repugnant. While Bertozzi’s MODOK story did kinda tug my heartstrings in its deeply fucked up way, the first half of Bagge’s story was the only thing that seemed to have anything to say other than:



I can’t help but give it a GOOD for the art, though, and admit I’ll be getting the next two issues. I'll just have to armor up my tender fanboy heart before doing so.

Labels: Jeff, reviews

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Yeah, so I haven't written about superhero comics for a while largely because - not to go all David Brothers in this piece - while I've been enjoying a lot of stuff coming out, I haven't been driven to write much about a lot of it. So instead, I've been dipping my uncultured, pervert-suit-loving self into the world of INDEPENDENT SMALL PRESS COMICS, not to mention the dangerous and exotic Orient of sequential art they call "man-ga."

Joking aside, here's some pretty great shit I read recently, and what I thought about it. (Obviously, there is more after the jump.)



Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Pantheon Press

Yeah, I'm hardly the first person to come out and say that this is a pretty stunning artistic achievement. I've been putting off writing about it basically for that reason - after guys like Wolk and Mautner weighed in, what good is there in a schlub like me throwing his opinion horseshoe onto the post?

The thing is, I think it's easy to get lost in Polyp's shadow. The book is unmistakably a formalist masterpiece on first skim-through; Mazzucchelli's virtuosity with almost every aspect of sequential art is immediately evident. It's easy to get lost in symbolism and allusion with this book, since every single image seems weighted down with meaning, but there's a reason all of this symbolism and allusion is captivating in the first place: it's a good story, told astonishingly well. Yeah, Mazzucchelli's providing some incredibly stunning images and sometimes forcing you to read a comic in a way you're not used to, but it's all stunningly intuitive - Polyp somehow manages to be incredibly deep without being overwhelmingly challenging. It's not just this big stylistic monolith; it's also an engaging, emotional and entertaining story about two fully realized characters with dialogue that makes them easy to care about.

It's remarkable the balance Mazzucchelli was able to achieve here. It rewards each successive reading without requiring it; it can be a breezy, entertaining read if you want it to be and an annotator's dream if that's your thing too. It really is the kind of book you could hand to pretty much anybody. I've seen the comparisons to Ulysses thrown around, and considering the experimental storytelling on display combined with the penchant for alluding to Greek mythology, I can see where it comes from. But Ulysses is commonly seen as an undertaking or even a chore, while this is just a pure joy. Needless to say, utterly EXCELLENT.


I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason, Fantagraphics Books

I grabbed this one largely due to the strength of Jason's fantastic contribution to Marvel's Strange Tales, which is probably the least hip reason ever to pick up an indie cartoonist, but hey, whatever. The result: I really enjoyed it! I'd read strong reviews of this around earlier, and I was expecting something offbeat and madcap (and certainly wasn't disappointed in that regard), but I was also surprised by just how emotional Jason was able to make a story about an Anthro-dog murder society and time travelling hitmen. Yeah, the entire thing is patently absurd on every level - self-consciously and humorously so - but it's also a story about the impermanence of rage and the importance of forgiveness, alongside what a goddamn twat Adolf Hitler can be when all you want to do is shoot the bastard. The description on the back describes the book as "deadpan," and that pretty much nails almost every aspect of its execution, from the anthropomorphic characters' frequently emotionless expressions to the unexclamatory dialogue to, well, the entire concept of the book. It's a quick read and very rewarding, and something I imagine I'll come back to from time to time for a while. Smart, funny and surprisingly poignant, this was VERY GOOD.


Pluto v.1-5 by Naoki Urasawa with Takashi Nagasaki, Viz Signature

Yeah, so I really lied when I said no superhero comics, because Pluto is basically a far more talented creative mind attempting the "maturation" of traditionally kids' comics characters exemplified by the spandex rape celebration known colloquially as Identity Crisis. What separates the two? As far as I can tell, where half of the American comics industry and Naoki Urasawa split up is the topic of sensationalism. When something terrible happens in a Brad Meltzer comic, the record stops, everyone stands around and the buckets come out for ten pages of superhero weeping. When something awful happens in a Naoki Urasawa comic, the characters react in various ways and the plot moves on without fetishized close-up spreads of a dead body or rape victim.

On top of that, Urasawa is essentially - like Grant Morrison or Alan Moore - a humanist at heart, and his stories are all about the necessity of holding the high road and respecting the sanctity of life, even when shit gets tough. They're also about the idea that redemption's always out there, and the virtue of forgiveness. It's difficult to find a pure villain in an Urasawa story; even in Monster, where he most explicitly dealt with the concept of pure, unmitigated, unexplainable evil, there was always stress placed on the importance of believing in change. This absolutely extends to Pluto, a gorgeously drawn and masterfully paced murder mystery that reinterprets "children's entertainment" through the lens of adulthood and nostalgia to create a sci-fi whodunnit bereft of moral judgments, just people (and robots) pushed to emotional extremes by unexpected events.

Every character in an Urasawa story is fully fleshed out, and Pluto is no different; seeming bit characters always have considerable background, and every action a character makes is placed into context by the life experiences that drove him or her towards it. Urasawa might be one of the tightest plotters in comics today, with a supernatural skill for creating a fully-realized character even through the broadest of strokes, without resorting to base sentimentality.

In short, everybody working on Big Two shared-universe superhero comics should have this as required reading. This is how you fucking do it. EXCELLENT.


Yotsuba&! Vol. 1 by Kiyohiko Azuma, Yen Press

I got this at the recommendation of David Brothers, and it did not disappoint: this book is basically an elaborate creation developed by research scientists to make even the most cynical person smile. The titular Yotsuba, whose exploits form the book's content, manages to be the rarest of fictional children: precocious without being obnoxious. It functions more like an episodic sitcom than any sort of continuous narrative, although the episodes (at least in this first volume) definitely follow a loose thread - a girl who behaves very strangely has moved into a new town and house with her long-suffering father, and now each episode features her "tackling" a certain subject (hence the title - Yotsuba&Moving, Yotsuba&Global Warming, etc.), usually by taking something symbolic literally or misinterpreting a piece of advice. Her antics are always amusing because they're not random; there's always a piece of logic, no matter how twisted, that justifies her behavior, so the laughs, while considerable, never seem cheap. The end result is a comic that makes me smile every time I read a chapter, no matter what kind of mood I'm in, and that's assuredly VERY GOOD.


Casanova Vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba, Image Comics

Man, I feel like a moron for not getting into this earlier, since it has pretty much everything I enjoy in a comic: parallel universes, time travel, hilarious use of the word "fuck", and the absence of the overwhelming distaste for humanity that seems to, for me, infect all the Warren Ellis stories that meet the first three criteria. Casanova manages to channel the far-out wackiness of a Nextwave and combine it with real characterization and something resembling a point, and as one of the five people on the Internet who didn't like Nextwave I'm incredibly grateful for that. Other than that: incredibly imaginative, gorgeously drawn, took me a second read to grab a lot of the basic plot structure (it's QUITE complex) but that second read was rewarding enough I can't complain too hard. I've heard that as good as this is, volume 2 is a significant improvement, and I would greatly appreciate it if Image Comics and Mr. Fraction could see to the publication of a hardcover of those issues so that I can read them without rooting through back issue bins. Is there somewhere between GOOD and VERY GOOD? Because that's where this is.

Labels: Asterios Polyp, Casanova, David, I Killed Adolf Hitler, Pluto, reviews, Yotsuba

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This was certainly a week of high-profile titles, although uncharacteristically dominated by DC in that regard (if not in OVERALL output). DC had two A-list releases this week: the second issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's nearly-universally-praised Batman and Robin, and the first issue of James Robinson and Mauro Cascioli's seven-issue Justice League: Cry for Justice miniseries, a book DC's seriously promoting (unquestionably to the detriment of the regular Justice League of America title) as one of their major event books of the year. A review of Cascioli's art is pretty short: if you're the kind of person who enjoys the stiff realism of Alex Ross, this is your thing. If the stylish, partially cartoonish fluidity of a Frank Quitely comic rings more of a note with you, I'd recommend Batman and Robin, which has been praised enough everywhere and will soon be annotated by me on Funnybook Babylon.

But.

I think Justice League calls for some special attention. There've been a number of reviews that fairly accurately point out its flaws with considerable accuracy - Wolk was able to masterfully criticize it from this single issue alone, even though it took me a while to get the reference due to the fact that it's been a while since I read Promethea.

More below the jump: NOTE - OTHER COMICS ARE REVIEWED TOO IF YOU DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THIS!



Anyways! Justice League: Cry for Justice #1: From the start: this isn't a very good comic, although I very much enjoy Robinson's work both on Starman and the Superman franchise. The thing is, you have to realize this comic was written over a year ago: first it was an ongoing series, then it disappeared for a while, and now it's back as a mini that's going to feed into the ongoing series. It's pretty clear not only why this sort of mercurial narrative ground would drive the incredibly talented (and more than familiar with these characters' natures and dynamics, he proved he was able to write some pretty great Justice League stories on TV) Dwayne McDuffie to frustration, but also why the fans have developed such a cynical attitude towards the book - an attitude Robinson directly addresses in the text piece following the main story.

The problem is: the book reads like what me and my university buddies would come up with as a parody of Brad Meltzer's comic-writing style. It's hilariously maudlin, with such REPETITION of THEMES that it's about as subtle as a Michael Jackson impersonator kicking you in the taint. It's almost impossible to judge the book on a plotting rather than scripting level because Robinson's script obscures the plot to such a great degree that we don't know anything about it - supposedly Prometheus is involved, and he's attacking some Z-list heroes that were chosen by James Robinson and Dan Didio throwing darts at a George Perez spread in a con hotel room. These z-list heroes then cry, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, for justice, or vengeance, or revenge, or justification, or vindication, or pie, or whatever the fuck they seem to think is fair. The fact that they charge an extra dollar for six pages of text and a two-page origin already posted on the DC Comics website is just the icing on the taint-kick cake.

Robinson mentions in this text afterword that the book's conclusion was changed considerably by editorial fiat (seemingly, in his mind, to the story's benefit), but the issue's most noticeable and technical problems are all script: questionable characterization (Ray Palmer doing his impression of his wife's tapdance on Sue Dibny's parietal lobe in an attempt to look edgy and willing to torture), overly continuity-conscious dialogue ("remember that time I became a liberal?"), and a plethora of Identity Crisis-esque shock deaths that exist purely to provoke insincere emotional reactions from the main cast. Not to mention the completely disjointed pacing that leads to a first issue with very little of a driving hook at all.

The thing is, all of this reminds me a lot of Robinson's first arc of Superman upon his return to comics - "The Coming of Atlas" - and the considerable narrative flaws therein that were very much corrected over coming issues. The dialogue went from stilted to James Robinson stilted, the plotting became tighter and less manipulative (Robinson's entire first issue of Superman being dedicated to doomed Science Police members was a pretty big misstep)... the time period backs this up too: I really think James Robinson was just rusty as hell when he wrote this comic, and I don't really expect the book to maintain this amateur-hour quality level in the long term. But as an atomic unit? This was a pretty fucking AWFUL comic.

Captain America Reborn #1: I feel bad for Brubaker here, because when he plotted all this shit out like two and a half years ago there was no way he could have known how repetitive his planned resurrection method for Steve Rogers would seem - not only did the "unstuck in time" time travel methodology become a major focal point of the next few seasons of notoriously comic-related sci-fi interpersonal drama Lost, but 2008's Final Crisis also featured a time bullet and an iconic nonpowered hero being rocketed to the past (albeit with a totally different method). So he's getting a lot of flack for this, as well as what seems to me to be his deliberate choice to exposit the time travel physics to the reader by using terminology lifted from not only Lost (which was "stolen" from, uh, math in the first place) but Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, a book which featured a war veteran undergoing a metaphysical and temporal journey very similar to that of Steve Rogers.

The thing is, I don't think he's ripping off the ideas as much as using them as shorthand to explain the basic concepts to the reader. "Dude's consciousness pingpongs around in the life of his body" really isn't that unique, and having Arnim Zola say Steve Rogers is unstuck in time might evoke S-5 a little bit too directly, but it also prevents Brubaker from having to write, and us having to read, like five or six dialogue balloons from Arnim Zola carefully explaining what they did to Steve Rogers. "Well, you see, Norman, his body is in one place, but now his consciousness is inhabiting different time periods of his body in..." etc. Man, nobody wants to read that - "yo, Norman, it's like Vonnegut" gets the point across just as damn well. Unless you're a reader who hasn't seen Lost or read Vonnegut, in which case fuck you, and I applaud Brubaker for assuming superhero readership has a basic level of functional cultural literacy.

Other than that: it's the best Hitch has looked in years thanks to Guice's inks, even though a number of panels are WAY too evocative of his work on Ultimates and there's a pretty good photoshop "ruin the moment" opportunity replacing the last page with the infamous "letter on my head stands for France" image. And it's certainly a relief to read an issue of Brubaker's Cap that doesn't have Frank D'Armata's distinctive but incredibly muddy coloring.

But enough about that, how is the story? Well, it's a whole lot of exposition. It's well-written exposition, excitingly drawn and skillfully laid out, and I can't imagine new readers being in the dark after reading this issue - it pretty much recaps the important plot points from the last 25 issues of Cap without drawing the book's narrative to a complete and total halt, although longtime readers will, like me, probably feel at least a little bit unsatisfied due to how much of this comic is going over familiar ground. Still, though, it features Hitch drawing Bucky punching people and the first non-shiver-inducing Hank Pym appearance since Secret Invasion, and "it didn't have enough new shocks for me wahh wahh" really isn't a good reason to dislike a comic. It was pretty goddamn GOOD, and I expect the series will hit great to excellent before it's through.

Batman and Robin #2: Is there even anything new to say about this? Godawful background colors aside (welcome to Gotham City, where the skies come from a fucking Amiga game!) this is pretty close to the perfect superhero comic, other than a single confusing point (the final panel) on the second to last page where the fact that the location changes for that panel isn't made incredibly obvious. There's a whole lot to love here, and I'll be annotating it this weekend (I wasn't able to block off Wednesday for it like I usually do thanks to Canadian holidays) in more detail, but in short this comic was EXCELLENT.

Uncanny X-Men #513: I'm hearing a lot of grousing over this "Utopia" storyline, some of it deserved - for instance, the Humanity Now! coalition is a lot more difficult to consider as an effective metaphor for a real-world group since Fred Phelps isn't a robot who convinces totally normal people to follow his lead via nanobots. The whole idea of Humanity Now! being a bunch of humans trying to fight obsolescence is totally blown out of the water when their leader switches from using standard coercion tactics to silly sci-fi bullshit, but other than that I thought there was a lot to enjoy about this issue. Terry Dodson's art is certainly far more aesthetically pleasing than the effort put forward last week by Marc Silvestri and his Legion of Super-Embellishers (seriously, I'd love to see Silvestri's "pencils" for Utopia - I bet they're just faceless figure drawings on panel grids with arrows pointing to characters saying CYCLOPS and WOLVERINE), and the reactions of the mutants, as well as the continually escalating violence, all make sense. We've all stayed late at the bar and then gone out and done something stupid with people we probably shouldn't have followed at some point; this shit happens, and I don't think it's at all unrealistic for characters who should usually know better to get drawn into doing retarded things out of peer pressure, it's just how social groups work.

Other than that, it's pretty boilerplate Fraction, which is still better than most other superhero comics out there today - clever, self-aware dialogue; jump-cut scene changes; scientific geniuses being written as sarcastic douchebags. It's a fun, entertaining superhero comic, and I'm loving the ambiguity as to whether Scott and Emma are aware of each others' plans or not, but part of me wishes Fraction hadn't thrown away the one thing that really made this story seem real-world relevant. Still, this book was pretty OK as a whole.

Invincible Iron Man #15: This issue, on the other hand, is Fraction at the top of his game, with the driving "World's Most Wanted" premise of Tony slowly losing his intelligence (and therefore, practically, his individuality) finally kicking into high gear, leading to some insanely sad and well-written moments between Tony and Pepper where he just can't remember some of the most important events and people in his life. This story's interesting because while "Hey, let's take everything away from Tony Stark" is hardly a unique premise, I don't think anybody's taken it so far as to actually effectively lobotomize him as well as remove his worldly possessions and assets. He's got no money, no credibility, very few friends and now he's losing his mind too. Even after half of the Marvel writing staff seemed hell-bent on portraying him as a heel for the past few years, watching a man who's essentially altruistic (if sometimes incredibly arrogant) pay such an immense price is affecting, and new.

Also, like Larroca's art or not: this book has been coming out for fifteen monthly issues now without a single change in the creative team, other than the pages of the first issue Stephane Peru colored before his extremely untimely passing. That means the writer, artist, colorist, letterer and editor have stayed static for fifteen issues, and they've been almost all perfectly on time. That's worth praising in today's market. VERY GOOD.

And finally... Fantastic Four #568 must win some kind of award for the flattest climax in comics history. After fourteen high-octane issues of Mark Millar setup, we get a scripting assist by Joe Ahearne here and - I'm not sure if anyone else is reading Fantastic Force, but his panel transitions are incredibly disjointed there with tons of missing information, and as a result it's led to a comic that really feels more like a progression of random images rather than a story. This problem rears its ugly head pretty early here, with one page ending on the Thing about to make out with his lady and the next starting with his back on fire and Deb freaking out. Something like, I dunno, a panel where a flaming bottle is thrown through the window, or a look at whoever did it across the street, or something could have made this far less confusing, and this basic amateur-hour comics storytelling mistake is one of many in this issue.

The problem is, this isn't just two issues of Millar's FF, they're the climax of not only that run but also the events of Marvel 1985 and Wolverine: Old Man Logan. The guy's entire superhero output for something like two years now has rested on the character of Clyde Wyncham and his story as the Marquis of Death, and while I know Millar and Hitch's reasons for not working on this issue are both valid and personal (hospital visits for one, dead mother for the other), it's still incredibly disappointing to finally hit the big villain reveal and have it delivered so... matter-of-factly. We've been seeing this guy from the shadows for months, and now that he's appeared Ahearne just can't pull off that kind of over-the-top ridiculous villiany that Millar can. The guy just isn't scary, or even intimidating; he just looks ugly and talks a lot, and presents Reed with some pretty obvious moral conundrums. It's not a terrible comic, but it's really hard to read it without wondering what it could have been if Millar and Hitch had been able to give it their full attention, and it's certainly a disappointing climax to this entire story. EH.

Labels: David, Gay For Justice, reviews

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Capsule reviews! I still remember how to do 'em! Uh, kinda? They're sorta...long? Ish? And there's not...a lot of them?

Nonetheless. After the jump: BARACK THE BARBARIAN #1, BATMAN #687, FANTASTIC FOUR GIANT-SIZE ADVENTURES #1, and GREEN LANTERN #42.



BARACK THE BARBARIAN #1: Although the concept amused me, I doubt I would’ve picked it up if I hadn’t noticed Larry Hama writing it. Looking back on the legacy of G.I. Joe, there’s a case to be made that there’s no concept so silly Hama won’t try to finesse IT into something enjoyable.

And that’s essentially the case here, where Barack the Barbarian comes to a corrupt city and runs afowl of dark wizard Chainee The Grim, his assistant Red Sarah, and others. Although the joke is essentially at the level of a Cracked Magazine from 1974 and things suffer from an utter lack of personality on the part of the lead character, Hama’s crafted a surprisingly strong hook for his tale: it’s a legend being told by a shaman to children of his tribe, a legend that the shaman admits is of a time long-past, a time about which the truth could never be known.

Now I know I’m a sucker for this trope, it being a patented ‘70s Kirby dance move (that Devil Dinosaur story with Stone-Hand, Eev and the computer bank that becomes the Tree of Knowledge is the first, but far from only, example that comes to mind), but it’s used to particularly good end here. First, it adds a certain wit to the shaman’s understanding of this magical age of ours (people are able to communicate across long distances by consuming magic berries, dinosaur skeletons are shown pulling wagons, etc.)

But second, and more trenchantly, it’s a fine sideways commentary on how so much of our current political landscape is rooted in continual attempts to transform our politicians with the language of myth, and the accidental or intentional misunderstandings perpetuated in the media about our government does (or doesn’t) get things done.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got quibbles. As I said, the main character has no personality and is portrayed as something of a naif a characterization I doubt anyone would apply to Barack Obama, and the art, although effective in its storytelling, is crude and sketchy in a way classic barbarian comics are not. Worst of all, the likenesses are recognizable but lack the zeal or zing of caricature (which should really be one of the big draws for a book like this, don’t you think?)

Finally, to be honest, seeing a strong black ass-kicking barbarian my heart gave a distinctly non-ironic tug (apparently I was a bigger fan of Zula than I would’ve thought) and made me more than a little rueful: is this how we’re going to get strong African-American characters into our comics? Whisked in through the back door of parody by the promise of easy money? In a way, I wouldn’t mind if the whole thing didn’t seem so flimsy and likely to crash in around everyone’s ears in three months.

But quibbling aside…I liked it, I admit it. This is an OKAY book with the potential to becoming more (and the likelihood, alas, of becoming much less). I’ll be curious to see where it goes.

BATMAN #687: Worth noting because this is probably how Batman & Robin #1 would’ve read written by just about anyone other than Morrison. And, certainly, compared to Morrison and Quietly, it seems just this side of dull. But I appreciated how it talked me through the character motivations while managing to jam in enough action not to seem dull and to give you an end that moved boom-pow-punch forward while resolving Dick’s internal conflict.

I guess what I’m saying is that it looks like we currently have two different approaches to the new Batman storyline, and I really appreciate that: I’m on the hook for both and I thought this was a solid craftsman-like GOOD.

FANTASTIC FOUR GIANT-SIZE ADVENTURES #1: The Marvel All-Ages books continue to toy with their neither fish-nor-fowl status and I for one could be a bit happier about it. The long lead story in this issue is drawn in a more traditional style by Vicente Cifuentes whose work grapples with competence but looks like ‘traditional’ superhero stories. It’s followed by two stories drawn, with considerable skill and aplomb, by Colleen Coover and Dustin Weaver. Since all the stories are written by Paul Tobin, it makes it easier—although not entirely accurate—to attribute the success of each story to the strengths of the artists. The latter two stories—and I admit the last one is really just a fragment (a very charming shout-out to Hergé’s Tintin)—are such charmers, but also possessed of such talent and craft, I’m kinda wondering why I had to wade through so much mediocre art to get to them.

Now, I know there are lots of things going on behind the scenes that could explain such an arrangement: if Vicente Cifuentes is an artist in another country, he could be working for a much lower page rate that Coover or Weaver, for example. But I wonder if the Marvel All-Ages team is attempting to serve two masters at once—-those who want well-written, well-told stories, and those who want the characters inside the book to look like the bedsheets they just bought—-to the potential detriment of both. Whatever the case, I’m frustrated that so many Very Good bits and pieces still only end up to something that’s a middling OKAY, overall.

GREEN LANTERN #42: I dropped out back at the delightful blood-barf fest of Rage of the Red Lanterns, and am dropping back in to kind of gear up for the upcoming Black Lanterns storyline. So it’s little tough for me to tell how much of my confusion is due to coming in at the tail end of the Orange Lantern storyline, and how much is due to writer Geoff Johns surreptitiously positioning the storyline as a sequel to Space Jam. I mean, how else am I supposed to interpret a cover that positions a possessed Hal Jordan as the space-opera successor to Daffy Duck?





Or maybe I just have bad luck in terms of which colored lanterns I check in on? The Blue Lantern scenes seemed cool, and there was something that seemed sweeping and epic with that last scene where two Green Lanterns meeting an unhappy fate while looking for the corpse of the Anti-Monitor.

The issue left me with the impression the Orange Lantern was being played for both comic relief and some pathos, like a more irreverent take on Peter Jackson’s Gollum. While I don’t have any problems with that approach per se, either the tone is off or I’m really out of synch with it: it’s not that I have problems with humor in the middle of my big space epic, it’s more that the humor struck me as overly broad and flat. It reads to me like Johns is shooting for Pixar but ending up at Dreamworks, you know? Farting raccoons, and that kind of thing.

And there’s also some shortcutting that may be unavoidable but still strike me as terribly clunky—at this point, everything is happening on such a ginormous scale that Johns has captions with power percentages to create any kind of drama. “Oh no, my battery power is down to 823%!” That, along with teasers of which deceased character will end up in the ranks of the Black Lanterns, make this feel like an epic taking its dramatic cues from fantasy football pools.

And while such naked groping at populism might not be a bad thing at all—-by the time the White Lanterns roar to the rescue in their shiny hypertime NASCAResque light racers, Michael Bay might be slavering at coke-dappled jowls to adapt the whole damn epic—-I think it might be a shame if such a fine opportunity for something as grand as a handful of comic books telling a story was reduced to something as puny as a ready-made, billion dollar Hollywood franchise.

OKAY issue, though.

Labels: Jeff, reviews

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First off, if you enjoy the roguish way in which I stammer and hum on my way to making a point, you'll probably enjoy my first guest appearance over at the Fourcast!, Fourth Letter's podcast, wherein I chat with the charming and sensible David Brothers and Esther Inglis-Arkell about Mark Waid's run on The Fantastic Four, the differences between DC and Marvel, and (very, very briefly) about how Jack Kirby might've handled The Transformers. I really enjoy listening to the Fourcast!, especially the way David and Esther represent their Marvel and DC fan positions. It's kinda like sitting down to watch a cartoon dog and a cartoon cat battle it out, and seeing them approach things with humor, intelligence, and respect, instead of very large anvils--and so I was pretty gratified to show up and play the podcast's version of the always off-guard animal control handler who ends up cranking his head crazily around his neck trying to take it all in. My thanks to David and Esther for having me on.

Now, then. After the jump, a few words about the third (and second) volume(s) of Naoki Urasawa's 20TH CENTURY BOYS.



20TH CENTURY BOYS VOL. 3: There was a page from volume two--that page where Kenji loses his shit, yelling "Donkey!!!" and lunging at the guy who killed his friend--that literally almost knocked me out of the chair--Urasawa just perfectly paced the sequence leading up to that page, and then used this incredible combination of tricks to make Kenji's reaction as visceral as possible.



I'm cheating you and Urasawa a fuckton here because the pacing leading up to this page helps give this so much power, but still: look at that. First panel tight close-up, second panel medium shot, third panel another close-up (but not as close as the first panel). And each panel is from a different angle. But thanks to the continuity of the one panel and those fifty kajillion speed lines, it all feels unified: it's like a movie shot where the handheld camera shakes at just the right moment, giving a feeling of chaotic spontaneity, of all shit busting loose. (And check out how Kenji appears to be battling those speed lines in the first two panels--they're all but breaking on his body like water--and in the third panel they're behind him, pushing him forward.) Sweet Jesus.

Although Volume 3 didn't have a similar single page that knocked me on my ass in the exact same way, it has at least three showstopping suspense setpieces, two of which are stacked right on top of each other: Kenji finds himself face-to-face with the mysterious Friend in a packed stadium; a ticking bomb scenario plays out differently than you would think; and a gathering of people at a mini-mart has disastrous consequences.



(God, there it is again. Keep in mind how the page reads from right to left--see how the action of the last panel breaks out of the grid, showing how the pulling of the baby out of her arms is showing things literally going out of control?)

In each of these, Urasawa benefits not only from his insanely strong storytelling chops, but his ability to make you care about characters and then put them in breathtakingly tense situations. Because of the structural similarities to Stephen King's IT, the comparison between King and Urasawa comes pretty quickly to mind and I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoyed King's books to check this series out: to call Urasawa a world-class storyteller is actually an understatement.

And as a fan of both Urasawa's PLUTO and MONSTER, I'm fascinated by the way those books and this one is informed by the plot device of memory. Although not as much a keystone of PLUTO (at least as far as I've gotten into the story), both 20TH CENTURY BOYS and MONSTER revolve around characters who must remember their own past in order to avoid catastrophe. I'm curious as to what extent Urasawa uses this motif as simply a way to craft a story with maximum amounts of suspense (in such a story, the action of the plot unfolds in two different directions, with events in the present gaining sudden momentousness based on what's uncoverd in the past, and events of the past gaining poignance knowing what we do about characters in the present) or to what extent he believes such a motif to be a truism. For whatever reason, I'm more than happy (unfortunately) to consider Japanese creators within the context of their country's history, and I find it interesting to consider how Urasawa's tales take place in countries rebuilt after World War II in images seemingly markedly different from the images those countries held during the war. Whatever sympathies he might hold for those raised in and under those new images, to forget what occurred before is to invite disaster. I'll be interested to see how that might play out in later volumes of 20CB. As I said before, it's EXCELLENT stuff, and I hope you consider checking it out if you haven't already.

Labels: Jeff, manga, reviews

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Hey, you don't mind me writing about two Roger Langridge comics, one of which came out months ago, do you?

(If you do, don't click the link!)



FIN FANG 4 RETURN: I dug the original one-shot (from 2005? Fuck a duck!) but wasn't really sure if the characters were strong enough to merit a follow-up, frankly: not only are we lucky enough to see much more Langridge in the marketplace now than in 2005, but we're also seeing him on a licensed property to which he's almost perfectly matched. As much as I love the way Gray and Langridge handle Marvel continuity (it reads like it's written by someone who read everything Marvel published up until 1968, and then kept a pretty close eye on things until 1978, before finally saying to hell with it), all the initial juice for this concept, that of classic Marvel monsters re-emerging in modern times and trying to fit in, seemed used up in the first go-round.

And, honestly, the first twenty pages or so make a pretty convincing case for this viewpoint. The four main characters are re-introduced in an opening story that barely shows them together, and then rest of the issue is divided into short pieces for each individual character: it smacks of back-up pieces being reconfigured for a one-shot (r maybe just of an attempt to get another note out of a one-note concept. Although the first few stories have typical top-notch cartooning from Langridge (who gets more characterization out of Fin Fang Foom's eyes and lips than Salvador Larocca has managed to forcibly wrestle into his entire oeuvre), I was pretty bored.

Fortunately, the last three stories pick up the pace (and, probably just as importantly to me, the amusing continuity shout-outs) as Googam gets adopted by the richest woman in the world, Elektro the robot gets mistaken for the Spider-Man villain and ends up in the "S-Wing" of prison, and Fin Fang Foom fights Hydra for the fate of Christmas.

I'd like to think it's more than the dinner bell of Marvel continuity making my Pavlovian chops salivate: the Googam and Elektro stories have more than one gear to them, keeping moments small until the stories blow up big and crazy at the end, and the Fin Fang Foom story benefits from coming after these two smaller pieces. But if pressed, I'd also say that, yeah, having a Latverian nanny instruct Googam on all the many joys of her beloved homeland ("...Lake Doom was created in 1983 when ze Doom Dam was built as the ze mouth of Doom River...") or having Herbie the Robot act like a big douche really aided and abetted in my enjoyment of this book. Also, for what it's worth, I thought the colors by J. Brown were lovely throughout and exceptional on the final story, which takes place at twilight on Times Square--rather than playing up the Christmas angle, Brown pulls in purples, pinks and oranges to give the events a feeling of happening at dusk. Nice work, that.

So: it's not Langridge's Muppet Show, but I was won over by the second Fin Fang Four one-shot and would give it a GOOD, with the caveat that your love of anachronistic Marvel continuity may easily make or break this one for you.

MUPPET SHOW #3: Speaking of which...can I be a doomsayer for a minute and talk about why I'll be surprised if Muppet Robin Hood ends up working? It's not just that Boom! has found itself in the could-be-worse situation of having to do a follow-up to a miniseries (that has already found the perfect creator) with a team different from aforementioned perfect creator, it's that the Muppets themselves aren't nearly as enjoyable featured in long-form narratives as they are in bits and pieces. After the big origin story of The Muppet Movie, each movie goes on to feel a bit more uninspired until they fall into the position of having Muppets prop up public domain classics (and vice-versa).

The Muppets are at their best when encountered in bits and pieces, as on their show and Sesame Street, where they can quickly set up a situation, just as quickly blow that situation to pieces, and move on to the next situation before anything risks becoming dull. If there's one emotion I'd associate with the damn things (nothing is more humbling than typing Muppets twenty times in two paragraphs), it's delight, and delight, like Chinese food, works best when it's served hot and fresh: if left out long enough to get cold and cloying, one's impression of the whole experience suffers.

And this is--as if we're not all tired of reading and typing this--why Roger Langridge is so perfectly matched to this material. The third issue of this series focuses on the mystery of what, exactly, the Great Gonzo is (a subject that's been covered by other Muppet properties, as I recall) but what works is that this focus is given marginally more attention than the skits themselves, some of which focus on Gonzo (or on the theme of perceived identity) and some of which just have top-notch funny drawings. If you don't like a particular sketch, it's gone in a page or two; if you do like a particular sketch, your affection for the work carries you through the next sketch or two you might not like. It's more than the old "throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" approach: Langridge mixes up pacing, panel placement, joke payoffs, all while throwing in regular two page routines from the show to keep the reader off-guard, all to heighten the surprise and, yes, delight.

There are very few people in the industry who've worked for so long to deliver their work in such variation as Langridge (although does it mark me as too much of a buffoon to say I'd love to see what Eddie Campbell could do writing the characters?) so I pity who tries to take on the Muppets next, no matter what the length they're attempting. But full-length miniseries? I hope the creative teams figure out a helluva good way to change up the tempo. A lot. The Muppets are damn demanding little dance partners.

(Oh, and VERY GOOD stuff, obviously.)

Labels: Jeff, reviews

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"Well, it definitely wasn't going to be called Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? at that point. That was what some people at DC Comics started out calling it, and eventually it stuck, but the title did take me slightly by surprise." - Neil Gaiman

I had some of this review prepared before this little piece of news hit, but first I just want to address the recent Mark Waid interview posted at Ain't It Cool News, which is pretty much the balls-out closet-opening light-shining festival on the perceived insanity behind DiDio's DC that I've been waiting for, also containing a few incredibly choice (and very humorously put) words for Crossgen's Mark Alessi and former Marvel head honcho Bill Jemas. I think it's must-reading for anyone with an interest in the superhero comics industry at all, and especially for anyone who enjoys Waid's work. What's striking from it, though, is just how callously it seems the current DiDio office at DC treats its star talent - and make no mistake, Waid is star talent - when they don't fall in lockstep with their agenda. Some of the cirumstances around Waid's recent tenure at DC didn't fall into place due to the Siegel lawsuit, like reuniting Superman with the Legion of Super-Heroes, but there's no denying that Waid's account of his recent tenure, especially with Legion of Super-Heroes and Superman: Birthright, paints it as going something like this:

(Image courteously provided from my joking suggestion by the incredibly talented Adam Rosenlund)

So it's pretty interesting when DC actually pulls out a creator-driven comic that doesn't involve an almost-forgotten property (R.E.B.E.L.S. (I realize it's not completely off to the side), War That Time Forgot, Warlord). Thus, the second half of the much-reviewed, on this site and others, Neil Gaiman/Andy Kubert/Scott Williams/Alex Sinclair ostensible magnum opus "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?", named, as the starting quote indicates, largely by editorial.

So what we get here is DC somehow managing to turn even a title that's billed as being creator-driven into an editorial mandate, which was basically "hey, popular British dude, write something as timeless as that Alan Moore story about Superman so we can make it really clear that we are turning. the. fucking. page. on this era of Batman." Which isn't very creator-driven at all, and it sure as hell shows in the final product, since the only thing I can imagine producing this comic is pure, unbridled perseverence to get through this assignment. Gaiman didn't give up, and even though near the end he fairly clearly just went for broke and started asking Andy Kubert to draw crazy shit that he layered boilerplate Gaiman narration about the cyclical nature of stories over, he turned in this assignment. And that, apparently, is what he admires most about Batman.

I'm not especially versed in mixed martial arts, but even after watching a little bit you tend to notice some of the background details - like the clothing guys come out with before they get into the ring, especially the label and credo of a lot of the more religious Christian fighters - "Jesus Didn't Tap." Reading Detective Comics #853, all I could imagine in my head was Neil Gaiman, walking up to the UFC cage of wrassling ridiculously-conceived work for hire assignments, clad in a sweaty black hoodie featuring the motto "BATMAN DIDN'T TAP."

I enjoyed the supernatural detective story Gaiman was setting up in the first chapter a hell of a lot more than this denouement for a number of reasons. I realize this is going to be the third review for this thing in a row, after Brian and Graeme, but for some reason I still really want to talk about it since more than anything I’m bothered by just how unimaginably trite the resolution was - it turns out that the common thread between all of the stories of Batman's death is the fact that - surprise! - he doesn't give up! Batman does not tap out, he gets up and goes forward and solves the mystery and does his job, or he dies trying. But really, not only was this aspect of the character just illustrated in a far more interesting (if perhaps apparently less easily digestible) manner in Grant Morrison's recent Batman R.I.P., but despite his superhuman amounts of resolve, focusing on it as the character's most important driving force doesn't really make him all that different from the regular world's everyday heroes, and certainly doesn't provide anything near the sort of encapsulating vision of a character that Alan Moore's story this is so clearly based on did.

I realize that comparing this to one of the most well-constructed and popularly affecting Superman stories may seem unfair, but this is what everybody involved in this production set themselves up for with the title and placement in the character's career. And really, to be honest, there was no way this was going to work - Alan Moore's story was pitched to Julie Schwartz fairly passionately as a story he very much wanted to tell (ref. the introduction to the collected edition), while Gaiman's is, as previously stated, an offered assignment with a very specific editorial goal and some sort of grand, delusional plan that if you hire good talent and give something the right title you'll get a classic o' the medium and genre. The fact of the matter is, though, you won't.

Instead, you'll get Gaiman wrestling the concept down to the mat and not giving up, producing a 60 (I think?)-page brilliantly-drawn mystical meditation about how Batman doesn't give up and can't die and keeps coming back as a baby with a huge bellybutton after being delivered by a doctor whose hands are formed out of a Bat-Signal in space, shortly after a grown man reads "Goodnight Moon" with his mother to the gigantic underground proverbial treehouse he built underneath his mansion. It's suitably ridiculous, and on first read tugs the heartstrings and kind of reminds you of all the juxtaposition of the deadly serious and utterly ludicrous that defines Batman stories so much, but subsequent investigations just show that past "BATMAN DOESN'T TAP," there just isn't much there. So while there's something to be said for Gaiman giving this assignment his all and seeing it through, I just don't see anything remotely novel on subsequent readings and as a result I've regrettably got to give this fairly cynical cash-and-Eisner-grab an EH.

Labels: David, reviews

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In Grant Morrison's afterword to Irredeemable #1, he discusses an email exchange he had with the book's writer Mark Waid regarding patterning, or the practice of essentially permanently categorizing and cubbyholing a person's potential and MO. Morrison goes on to relate this to himself being "patterned" as a factory of insane gobbledygook - and while that's an opinion of him that may be held by many, I'd hardly call it a complete majority, so I was surprised at how defensively that came off - and of Waid being "patterned" as a dude who writes Silver Age throwback stories, which, well, is pretty true. A lot of people don't remember Empire.



And it's difficult not to compare Irredeemable with its seeming spiritual predecessor - they're both stories where Mark Waid, Biggest Superman Fan Alive, writes about really nasty people doing shitty things to each other, so some people seem to initially view it as a sort of novelty thing, like Avenue Q or that YouTube video with Bert & Ernie performing M.O.P.'s "Ante Up" - hey, Mark Waid's writing about bad people! Empire succeeded creatively, though, because it relied on more than shock value - Waid's a superb character writer, and all of his skills in that arena were on full display. So it's disappointing that Irredeemable #1 seems to sidestep the issue of character entirely so that Mark Waid can try to break his pattern.

I'm not saying it's a bad comic, not by any means, but the Plutonian (the I'm-sick-of-being-called-of-a-fag-so-fuck-you-guys spiteful, homicidal Superman analogue that drives the action of the book) isn't really a character yet, he's a just a guy flying around blowing shit up while people panic - something which takes up a decent chunk of the issue's bulk. It's a lot of shock and sadism, and it's certainly well-executed (and, I must admit, not overly gory or fetishistic in any way - credit to artist Peter Krause on the opening sequence especially), but throughout the issue we're only teased with a glimmer of the "why" for all this. It's certainly Waid breaking out of his pattern, but a part of me wonders if it isn't going too far in the other direction - if it's trying so hard to be mean that it loses sight of that human element that marks the best of Waid's work. Or maybe I'm just patterning the guy.

Peter Krause does a great job with the art - it reminds me a lot of Steve Epting in Captain America, except with a far more varied and vibrant color palette courtesy of Andrew Dalhouse, just the right mix of mythological iconography and creepy stalker faces for a book that's all about perverting the supposedly incorruptible.

None of this is to say that it isn't a Good comic - it is, and I'm fairly confident that my complaints about the book's lack of a human hook won't last long, since this is an ongoing series and I doubt he'll stay away from that for long. I think it's going to make for a really good ongoing series, and I'm incredibly happy Waid's finally in the position where he can give himself a canvas like this. But taken as a hermetically sealed first issue, I'm still going to be buying the second issue more on my trust in Mark Waid as a creator than in me being hooked into the story so far.

Also, if you ever wanted to see what a two-page four-star verbal blowjob was like, Grant Morrison's afterword sure is something.

On to some other stuff - it's a shame Geoff Johns's run on Justice Society of America is ending with such a whimper, since the first few issues of this run were superb and really seemed to be showing a ton of promise, but the endless droning of the Kingdom Come storyline killed so much momentum that I can really see why Johns chose to leave the book. It just doesn't have as much energy as his other work, and has that same plodding, co-written feeling that his late issues of Teen Titans did, where the car was just running out of gas. I think next month's Eaglesham-drawn Stargirl spotlight will probably be a winner, but other than that this issue and run overall have been fairly disappointing. Okay.

In terms of superhero fun, I'm really enjoying the "Messiah War" storyline crossing over between Cable and X-Force - this week's Cable #13 is the second part, sort of rearranging all the pieces of the stuff I remember loving as a kid (Cable! Deadpool being funny! Wolverine slicing shit up! Archangel flying! Stryfe's awesome blade armor! Copious time travel!) into a story that actually has some degree of forethought and coherence, unlike the flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants plotting of the Liefeld/Nicieza/Lobdell stuff I inexplicably loved as a kid. I really wish Olivetti would draw his own backgrounds instead of using 3D models and Quake II screenshots, but Duane Swierczynski writes quite a Good comic here.

Lastly, I've got to admit I've really turned around on Daniel Way recently - I thought a lot of his early Wolverine: Origins work was fairly awful, horribly paced stuff, so I'm really surprised by how much I'm enjoying not only that book these days (the focus provided by Dark Reign certainly helps, though) but also his Deadpool, which pushes out its eighth issue this week, the third part of the "Magnum Opus" crossover with Andy Diggle's Thunderbolts. It's a fun madcamp romp more than any sort of high art to be sure, but for God's sake the story is titled "Magnum Opus" in full self-awareness, and as a superhero comedy that manages to stay within the bounds of seriousness I can pretty much say that I laughed a lot and was genuinely surprised by a number of the plot turns, so that's a pretty Good comic to me.

I've also got quite a lot to say about the first issues of Flash: Rebirth and Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye, one in review form and one in a sort of annotation-esque form (I'm not sure yet), but I owe some love to my homies at Funnybook Babylon so make sure to keep an eye out there for those and other great articles.

Labels: David, reviews

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I'm David Uzumeri, from Funnybook Babylon, and I'm pretty honored to be invited to this pretty elite crew. I'm probably most famous on InterNET for my work annotating Final Crisis and Batman R.I.P., but what you might not know is that I read comics that aren't by Grant Morrison! Hell, I read comics that aren't published by DC - or even by the Big Two! So I'm pretty happy to be here at Savage Critics, and I plan on reviewing my weekly titles (along with other items of interest) fairly regularly. If I seem a bit superhero/genre-centric, that's not because I'm averse to "indie"/mainstream stuff, but more because I'm still reading classics like Love & Rockets and I doubt I'll be contributing much with insightful revelations like "Wow, this Scott Pilgrim book is pretty good!", and I'm still building a reviewer's knowledge base to be able to insightfully criticize that stuff at the level I'd like. But superhero comics? I know those. So let's go.



Batman #686: It's kind of hard not to compare this to Grant Morrison's take, even though they're incredibly different stories; while Gaiman's working at a completely different tone and pace, they share certain idiosyncratic sensibilities that lead to a more supernatural yet methodical, empirical, almost scientific take on the character. Morrison and Gaiman's stories are, behind all of the devils and post-hypnotic suggestions and prismatic funerals (All the Jokers! All the Catwomen!), detective mysteries. And that's what Gaiman's doing here, holding a big fat prismatic funeral for the uber-Platonic-form of the avenging crusader, through the lens of our culture's iteration, Batman. I can't really comment on the ongoing mystery until the next issue, but this certainly raises and holds my interest. I certainly can't let this review go by without mentioning the art - Andy Kubert joins Jim Lee's embellishment team of Scott Williams and Alex Sinclair to do the work of his career, traversing through seventy years of Batman's artistic history and continuity with grace, style and ease. It's not an especially progressive story, nor is it at all high-octane, but it's clever and intelligent and, as sappy as it sounds, it feels like it came from a lot of love on Gaiman's part. More important than all of that, it's in no way a mirror or derivation of Alan Moore's similarly-named ode to the Man of Tomorrow - Gaiman's created his own beast here, a paean to the history and concept of the tortured masked vigilante. It won't change the world, but it's a VERY GOOD Batman story.

The only big caveat I have - and to the book's credit, it's something I didn't even realize until I was in the middle of the article, hanging out with friends about to watch Battlestar, talking about the issue and Gaiman - it's YET ANOTHER goddamn story where a bunch of people stand around telling stories! That was, like, half of Sandman, and utterly killed the pace of Miracleman when Gaiman took over. He gets a lot of mileage out of it, but it's still the same old trick, even though it's done really well - make no bones about it, Neil Gaiman likes to tell stories about people telling stories.

Action Comics #874: First, the art - I've always liked Pablo Raimondi, but I've also never seen him without Brian Reber. Hi-Fi do what would be a fine job on a normal Superman comic, bright colors and clear delineations between objects, but Raimondi's shadowy style acts in complete opposition to that, leading to what looks like, well, kind of ugly art despite what were probably the best intentions of all involved. It's an OKAY comic, certainly better than Robinson's earlier work in the Atlas arc in Superman, but it's far more effective as a section of Geoff Johns's Master Superman Plan than as a single issue. So if you're already invested in that stuff, don't miss this - it's the next episode of the ongoing Superman narrative, and some cool stuff happens. But it's certainly not a jumping-on point or a brilliant piece of work on its own, a byproduct of the nature of serial storytelling.

Thor #600: This is, as Brian's said, probably the best value you'll get in superhero comics for a long-ass time. There's about 42 pages of main story material here, plus about (I haven't counted precisely) eight pages of a backup by Stan Lee and David Aja and then another few pages of Mini Marvels from Chris Giarrusso, who turns in his strongest and funniest iteration of his Mini Marvels concept to date, combining just the right amount of reverence and irreverence for a both funny and accurate recap of Thor's status quo in the Marvel Universe. If this were a shorter book, I'd have qualms with the pacing in the main story - it's a lot of wordless fighting and punching and car-throwing and all that EPIC stuff, but I really can't argue with using the space like this when you have so damn much of it. Straczynski continues his celebrated run here, which has improved much since the first arc of Thor Vs. Real World Issues (did you know Katrina and Darfur are horrible?), and really makes fantastic use of both Norse mythology and the personality of Loki to bring twelve issues of scheming and Asgardian puppeteer-chess to a quick and total climax, changing the status quo of the book. I'm sort of mystified that it didn't get a Dark Reign banner, though, since it's actually a very important chapter in the mega-story of the Marvel Universe and draws a lot from its new status quo. VERY GOOD.

Batman and the Outsiders Special: Really Outsiders #14.5, this is the first issue of Peter J. Tomasi's run on the title and features what's likely Adam Kubert's last DC work, using an all-double-page-spreads (except for the first and final pages) layout style that moves the entire bulk of the advertisements to the back. I'm not entirely sure that the story required this - sometimes the panels even break right in the middle of the page, so it's difficult to tell if you're supposed to read it left to right (you are) or stop at the page fold - but it's strong work, and Dell's inks work better here than the did on his portions of DC Universe: Last Will and Testament.

The story, though... Tomasi's a longtime editor at DC, and he's worked with some of the greats on truly complex storylines (Seven Soldiers, for one). He clearly knows all these characters, but he assumes a little bit too much that you do too, and his Katana scenes skirt dreadfully close to Claremontian cultural simplification where the Japanese are all about RITUALS and HONOR and shit. He doesn't really set up the threat, either - they appear at the end, but there's no real menace, instead they're just slightly creepy generic Hills Have Eyes cannibal monster zombie whatever types. It reads like a book about B-list characters for people who care about those B-list characters and want to see them come back, and while it's alright at that I can't imagine people who picked this up for the Adam Kubert art draw compelled enough to continue following this in the main title with Lee Garbett (who can actually reach a deadline). EH.

Captain Britain and MI: 13 #10: I thought the last arc of this title kind of dragged, but this was just a really, really fun 22 pages, completely embracing the silliness of every concept within - I'm sure everyone's seen the Dr. Doom and Dracula on the Moon teaser by now but it only ramps up from there. In the wake of the recent cancellation rumors, this issue especially leaves me VERY glad that the title is continuing, since Cornell is undoubtedly one of the smartest and most imaginative writers Marvel's employing right now and this issue really found the title's feet in my opinion. It switches from character moments to high-concept insanity basically every scene, and it all flows together remarkably well; additionally, this issue is practically an object lesson to Batman and the Outsiders on how to present characters that the audience doesn't give a shit about and, well, actually provoke some shits being given. I always liked Blade as a cool-looking dude with some sweet swords who stabbed vampires and shit, but I never thought I'd actually start digging him as a real character until Cornell got his hands on him. A VERY GOOD classically Marvel comic.

Young Liars #12: Straight up - I love this comic. I think, with all due respect to Jason Aaron's justifiably-widely-lauded Scalped, it is the best thing Vertigo's putting out right now, full stop. I barely even miss Stray Bullets anymore. I haven't even reread the whole series yet - and when I do, I'm sure I'll have something to say - but I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to read every time I open this comic, yet absolute trust in Lapham that it'll fit into his broader picture. He's a superb storyteller at the top of his game, and this is the dirtiest, sleaziest, funniest, sometimes most touching and definitely most unpredictable comic out there. If you enjoyed the punk-rock viscera of the Amy Racecar scenes in Stray Bullets, or just comics in general that start at an insane tempo and don't let up and thrive off of fucking with reader expectations, then this is really a must-read. I know this is more of a review of the series as a while, but this issue - #12 - really just acts as yet another story that redefines what comes before it; it feels like every issue of Young Liars changes every issue preceding, like the whole structure morphs every time it's informed by an upcoming issue. Completely EXCELLENT.

Labels: David, reviews

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