The Savage Critic: April
30th 2003
By Brian Hibbs
I nearly backed out of doing this week,
too – partly because I began the week very very hung over from the store’s
14th anniversary party (I suck – I spilled a beer on Geoff
Johns. The one and ONLY spill this year, and I did it... though,
that’s at least not as scary as the year Alex Ross cut his [drawing!!]
hand on a piece of glass. If Ross ever dies suddenly, we have the DNA
to clone him...); but also partly because I ended the week very very
tired from Free Comic Book Day, which, despite me not advertising it
or anything, still had a pretty amazing civilian turn out.
All Hail Joe Field!
But, well the week was a small week,
so getting through this will be a breeze and, even better, I got my
first PayPal donation (thank you Tim S!) which obligates me to write.
That’s right, donating money through PayPal (to brian@comixexperience.com) pretty
much guarantees I’ll keep writing.
Anyway, better get to it – Tzipora
and I are going to see X-Men 2: Electric Boogaloo in about 2
hours....
ARIA THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT #2: Pretty
as heck, but there’s been enough time between issues I had even forgotten
I had read #1. I also spent more time playing “spot the source” than
anything else. The musical gag was pretty funny, though. Good.
BATMAN #614: Hrm. On the one hand,
it is really gorgeous looking work. And I did quite like Jim Gordon
stopping Batman from killing the Joker; on the other this Batman-narrated
Guide to Joker’s Worst Atrocities (notice he doesn’t really mention
the INNOCENT CIVILIANS killed, which, y’know, would have to be 50x the
body count shown... at least) was incredibly fucking clumsy, and, all
of a sudden, like a truck smacking me in the face, I have grown utterly
and completely sick of the Guest of the Month trick this book has been
pulling. Where the hell did the, y’know, PLOT go? Thanks to the art,
I won’t be as harsh as I might be otherwise, but, really, with this
much vamping there’s no way I can go better than OK
BATMAN ADVENTURES NEWSSTAND ED #1:
I didn’t really like this one either, despite it being Ty Templeton.
Foo. This does the opposite of “Hush” and throws just about every character
into 22 pages... and felt way too crammed for all that. Plus, um, the
Penguin is mayor of Gotham? Wha’...? When did Batman Returns become animated continuity? Adequate,
but nuttin’ special: Eh
BLACK PANTHER #58: Yadda yadda yadda.
It’s a flashback, so I don’t really care (not that I really care about
the “new” Panther either); and the book is cancelled soon, so I don’t
really care-squared. Well done, enough – just don’t care. OK
BRATH #3: I think as a TP this could
be very enjoyable, especially if there were like 10 of them, and you
could borrow them from the library and read them all over the course
of a weekend. But at $2.95 for 22 pages? Er.... not. No offense to the
creators, natch – I doubt I’d be willing to pay $2.95 even for Barry
Smith Conan – because this IS well done enough Barbarians Vs.
Romans comics, but there’s nothing here that feels worth the monthly
price is all. Eh
CATWOMAN #18: When I first looked at
the art, I had to go back and check that Andi Watson didn’t draw this
issue. Neat. This is a weird ass book. On the one hand you’ve got this
Gutter-atti Soap Opera, while on the other it is illustrated in that
simple “animated” style. Then there’s the fact that what I’d expect
from a Catwoman comic is “caper” stuff, and, instead, most of the meat
in this issue is about spying on an adulterer and possible murderer,
and the jealousy of a middle age man. And yet I still like it just fine.
Yah, I like it, it is just not what I expect, or, even, really want.
A low Good
GREEN LANTERN #163: Weekly comics are
really really really a bad idea when they’re not good: you end up hating
it that much more. This is peanut butter and shoe leather – two tastes
that really don’t go together at all – because there’s just no sense
beneath all of the bickering that Ollie and Kyle like each other ONE
TINY BIT. When Ollie and Hal fought, you could tell they were still
best friends. Hell, even with Ollie and Carter I still thought they
at least respected each other. Ollie doesn’t belong in this story at
all, and they’re telegraphing the Abin Sur’s son thing in such a ham-fisted
manner I want to scream. Sorry, this is just Awful.
GRRL
SCOUTS WORK SUCKS #3: Several giggles and grins, but this issue seemed
a bit padded – I think Mahfood only really had three issues of story
this time out. A low Good
HELLBLAZER #183: Again, way too much
magic floating around this book these days. I prefer the con artist-oriented
approach. An interesting enough idea and I liked the antagonists’ motivation
and why the murder wasn’t especially “evil” – but this is too “big”
for my personal tastes in JC. This is more what I’d picture a Hollywood
JC movie to be, in fact. Now, just to have him say “Whoa” a lot and
we’re there.... Eh
JLA #80: Super-Waco. Not a JLA story.
Any superheroes of any stripe could have fit seamlessly into this story,
which is Rule Prime for “is this any good or not?” Sadly, this is “not”.
A very low Eh, because even a “high Awful” seemed a bit
too harsh.
LEGION #19: This run is really hitting
a high point these days. This is good Superhero SciFi, and this
may be the most visionary (as in “having a specific SciFi vision and
sticking to it”) Legion run since the Levitz/Giffen days. Very Good.
LIBERTY MEADOWS #31: Cho can draw,
but he can not pace. Even lower on the “$2.95?!?! Are you nuts?” scale
than the CrossGen books. Eh.
MARVEL UNIVERSE THE END #4: I said
“Good twist, that took it in a different direction than I expected the
story would head!” Until Jeff gently pointed out that the “twist” was
just putting the story back where we expected it go before we’d read
#1. True ‘dat. So, we’ll mark it down to OK
NAMOR #1: Twenty five cents and worth
every penny! What the fuck are they thinking? People really don’t seem
to want Atlantis stories. It never worked for Aquaman, and it surely
won’t work here. Fuck, even the Little Mermaid couldn’t sustain
a comic book. At least the current Aquaman is trying to logically think
out what life underwater would be like (hint: it isn’t just like abovewater,
except with bubbles coming out of your mouth – scenes like the one in
the market seem utterly and thoroughly preposterous) An intro-priced
issue also doesn’t do you any good if you’re not giving any reason for
people to come back – nothing happens here. Not a single thing. Even
the cliffhanger involving Bobo (and good lord, there’s a perfect name
to use to make your American audience not take you seriously at all)
was meaningless because there wasn’t even the slightest emotional involvement
in Bobo, nor, frankly, could I even pick the character out of a line
up of other Atlanteans. I’ll cut a little slack because this comic was
apparently drawn overnight since they fired the original artist, and
it’s only about a month behind where it was “supposed” to ship (though
might be nice to mention that women [or men!!] never showed that much
skin in the 20s on the beach....), but I can’t possibly imagine this
book, on this track, lasting past issue 18. Awful
NEW X-MEN #140: Pretty, and well told
enough, but I really didn’t find myself caring all that much about who
the killer is, or if they’ll be found, or even that Emma is dead. OK
ORBITER
HC: If it hadn’t had her name on the cover, I never would have guessed
Coleen Doran wrote this.. probably would have guessed Cully Hammer or
something. I liked it a lot... but it’s not at all her typical style.
On the other hand, just from the first few pages you can instantly tell
Warren Ellis wrote it. 20 or so pages in the Ellisisms begin to fade,
and this love poem to manned flight takes off. There’s places it bogs
in technobabble a bit (is it technobabble if it’s based on real and
actual science? Or it that purely “crosscircuit the framistat with the
whoziwhats and it will create a reversal polarity field of ioproton
particles!”?) and, frankly, I wish that the RETURN to space had been
something more internal than the external cause here, but divorced from
any thoughts about the price this was Very
Good. However, it is $25, and yowch,
it wasn’t $25 good. When this comes in softcover it will be a must have,
but in HC I will let you rely on how big your paycheck was this week.
PARADISE X #10: What the hell was that
babble on the first few pages about DD and Elektra and Bullseye? Did
that make sense to anyone but the creators? And like Jeff Lester said,
“Don’t Deathlok and Machine Man have anything better to do than stand
around and talk about Daredevil?” Really Awful.
PETER PARKER SPIDER-MAN #55: Better
“ha ha” than the months before, but, once again, Wells’ humor depends
SOLELY on “hey, ain’t so-and-so a lame character?” Even the robot jokes
were kinda “he’s a lame robot, get it?” I mean, so Rocket Racer is lame....
we all got that 2 decades ago. OK
POWER COMPANY #15: A Manhunter and
Batman story, feeling more like a paean than something new or engaging.
Eh
RAWHIDE KID #5: Decent ending, but
what happened to Calamity Jane? Zimmerman kinda forgot about her right
there at the end, huh? The gayness had nothing to do with the story,and
was just played for camp, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared it
might be. OK
RISING STARS BRIGHT #3: 66 pages out
of, what? 2 panels in Rising Stars? Sadly terribly dull. Why
do I have this feeling RS won’t ever finish? Eh.
SUPERMAN RED SON #1: I didn’t start
liking it until Superman came in as a character (so I was iffy on the
first 8 pages or so), but once that happened, I thought it was terrific.
I like the fact that Kal is a decent, principled person, regardless
of his ideological upbringing, and I particularly like this spin on
Lex Luthor. Excellent.
ULTIMATE X-MEN #32: I just realized...
who IS the King, in “The Return of the King”, anyway? Nothing wrong
with this issue, but it seemed like treading water to me mostly. Eh
WOLVERINE XISLE #5: Oh. My. God. Could
the ending have possibly been lamer and stupider than that? What we
have here is an 8-12 page story (which Bruce Jones was really really
good at) streeeeeeeeeeeeetched out to 5 issues. This could have been
inoffensive as a single story in X-Men Unlimited, but as a five
issue weekly mini? For $12.50? That was the biggest rip off of comics
that I can remember in a long time. “I...I’ve always felt like a freak?”
Oh, please! The whole thing happened in one day? Uh huh. Logan did it
to himself? Uh...how? Waste of money, and a waste of trees. Pure, sheer
Crap.
For Sake
of Completeness, here’s a list of all of the OTHER comics that CE got
in this week, that I did NOT read (and, therefore, am unlikely to review!).
Note, that in most cases this is limited to 1) Manga, which I try to
read as it is collected; 2) “Kids” comics like most of the Archies;
3) titles that were subs-only, either by design or accident [this can
include being shorted by Diamond as well]; 4) Porno [oh, like you need
me to REVIEW it!], 5) Things that looked SO bad on the racks that I
didn’t bother, and 6) stuff that I’ve assessed before, and I care so
little about that I don’t want to waste my time reading anymore. You
decide which is which. There’s also the occasional “whoops we forgot
it!” in here as well!
ARCHIE AND FRIENDS #70
BETTY #125
BLACK SUN #6
BTVS #56 ART CVR
BTVS #56 PHOTO CVR
CSI CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION#4
GI JOE #17
GOD LOVES MAN KILLS REPRINT ED
KILLER PRINCESSES #3
KISS ART CVR #9
MARK OF CHARON #2
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE VOL 2KIRBY CVR #2
MERIDIAN #35
MICRONAUTS #7
PARADIGM #8
PATH #14
RESISTANCE #8
REX MUNDI #3
RPM COMICS #2
RUSE #19 KEY ISSUE
SHADOWS #2
STAR WARS REPUBLIC #53
THREE DAYS IN EUROPE #5
TRANSFORMERS MORE THAN MEETS EYE OFFICIAL GUIDE #1
VAMPIRELLA #19 REG ED
VIOLENT MESSIAHS LAMENTING PAIN #3
X-MEN RONIN #4
And, for even MORE completeness
sake, here’s a list of books, TPBs, GNs, magazines, and other things
that CE got this week. I generally haven’t read any of this by the time
I post these reviews. Though I generally attempt to give at least one
recommendation amongst the TPBs each week, since I HAVE read the material
at SOME point.
2000
AD #1333
2000 AD #1334
ASIAN CULT CINEMA #39
BATMAN ADVENTURES DANGEROUS DAMES AND DEMONS TP
BATMAN ANIMATED TALES OF THE DARK KNIGHT DVD
CINEFANTASTIQUE VOL 35 #1 FEBMAR 2003
CRISIS ON MULTIPLE EARTHS BY ALEX ROSS POSTER
DARK SIDE #102
FARSCAPE NEWSTAND ED #12
FROM THE CURVE GRAND GESTURESONE SHOT
G FAN #62
HOUSEWIVES AT PLAY MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS TP
HTDM PEN & TONE TECHNIQUES
HULK LEGENDS VOL 1 HULK/WOLVERINE 6 HRS TP
JADE SCREEN VOL 1 #4
JUNKO MIZUNOS HANSEL AND GRETEL GN
JUSTICE LEAGUE JUSTICE ON TRIAL DVD
LUNA GN
MAC RABOY FLASH GORDON VOL 1 TP
NEMESIS THE WARLOCK HC GN DEATH TO ALL ALIENS
SFX #103
STAR TREK MAGAZINE #48
STARLOG TRIPLE ACTION
SUPER-FRIENDS ATTACK OF THE LEGION OF DOOM DVD
TOO MUCH COFFEE MAN MAGAZINE #17
VIAGRAMAN GN
WIZARD COMICS MAGAZINE #141
WRETCH VOL 1 TP
XENOZOIC TALES VOL 1 TP
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