The Savage Critic: May 30th, 2002 By Jeff Lester

Welcome, my friends, to the preemption of the show that never ends. I'm Jeff Lester, webmonkey for the CE website and the guy who writes most of the CE newsletter. Because of the way things are set up around here, Bri normally emails me this column, I try to catch all the "it's/its" mix-ups that he could care less about, and then I post it online.

So after a year-plus of being the first one on the block to read these, I kinda wanted to try my hand at it, you know? In part, because I knew it wasn't as easy as it looked, but I was gettin' a little tough on the Hibbs-man, e.g., "Hey, Brian, why do you say you review all the books when you don't really review all the books?" I know what he says each week about why he doesn't review what he reviews, it just seems like a cheat. If you say you review all the comics, you should review all the comics. Archies, pornos, manga. The whole nine yards. So I volunteered to try a week, because I wanted to try and do it all. Maybe even the graphic novels.

And, of course, got my ass ground into hamburger trying and still didn't even come close. I tried my best but damn, the only thing worse than reading a comic book you don't want to read is reading a comic book you don't want to read and having it suck. It just wears you down, man.

Still, it seems necessary to me. I'd like to think the more conscientiously books are crafted (and, hopefully, attentive reading and criticism helps that process), the healthier the marketplace gets. Here's the conundrum, though: the healthier the marketplace gets, the harder it is for all the books to be crafted with care, or even read by someone as diligent and pro-comics as Hibbs. I mean, I'm willing to bet that the best work of the week wasn't INSANE CLOWN POSSE DARK CARNIVAL #1, but what if it was? You know?

So, what am I saying here? I'm saying, keep trying new things. Keep looking for what's good and keep promoting it. Because while the American comics industry is a joke compared to something like Europe or Japan, it still hasn't gotten half as crappy as, say, the American film industry.

Okay, on to the funny books…

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #41: OK. That first page read really disjointedly to me. Like, Charles Schulz in his last decade on Peanuts, y'know? "The universe has a mean sense of humor. But at least we get to make our own hours." Wha? But everything else was okay, and compared to the crap conclusion to "You Can Call Me Al," it reads like frickin' Watchmen.

ARCHIE AND FRIENDS #58: Eh. I was kind of bummed that this wasn't all Josie and the Pussycats but rather "featuring" Josie and the Pussycats (of course, I was also bummed that they weren't all having sex with each other, but I guess that's not a very realistic expectation). But the second story actually ended up being a pretty good Archie and Friends kind of story. Plus, Jughead actually yells "A renegade lawnmower with a dog at the wheel!" Now that's what I read comics for!

ARCHIES WEIRD MYSTERIES #21: The Weird Mystery is how quickly Betty started acting out of character in the first story. If I haven't read an Archie comic in twenty years and even I can tell the characters aren't themselves, you're doing something wrong. The "homage" to The Monkey's Paw in the second story was kinda cute, but why would you pad with a page of lame puns when you've got a story that gives you the freedom to do whatever you want? Awful.

BART SIMPSON COMICS #8: Boy, that Ian Boothby is an ace at writing The Simpsons, isn't he? Too bad none of these stories are his. I smiled once or twice at the Chuck Dixon story, but that was it. If you want your heart to break, though, flip to the back where they reprint Dan DeCarlo's layouts. That circular inset panel of the two yokels is a little piece of heaven, pure master cartooning chops, and really reminds you how much The Simpsons style is less an extension of an artistic sensibility than smart design workarounds covering a real deficiency of same. If I were this book's target audience, I'd give it an awful. But since it's really no worse than the Richie Rich books I read as a kid, let's call it Eh.

BATMAN #603: Good. Brubaker is drawing inspiration from Miller's work on Batman which I like. This whole Bruce Wayne: Fugitive thing is a mess, though—I think for a lot of reasons, but the pacing's clearly not helping. Here, Brubaker puts all the pieces in place to cleverly resolve the Bruce Wayne/Batman schism he's been working, and then puts it in motion much faster than I would've thought. Oh, well. Very nice art by Sean Phillips, by the way.

BLACK TIDE MILLER CVR #4: Crap. The most interesting thing about this book was putting the Bullpen page on page two. Whoops. And some fun facts about lasers.

BLADE #3: Ass. If Blade is dumb enough to fall for the "she wasn't a vampire, they just drugged her and put special contact lenses and fangs on her," then he's too stupid to live. Don't editors ever, y'know, edit anymore?

CAGE #3: Good. Loving the art, and I guess every writer is allowed to rip off Yojimbo once. Taking its own sweet time, though. Part two of the Cops version of "The Call" was just as rushed and unsatisfying as part one.

CEREBUS #278: Very Good. First issue I've actually made it through in a while (that damn Biblical font!), although I didn't even try the essay. Although the book is uneven as hell (the last page had absolutely no emotional impact on me and the first five would probably be pee-in-the-pants funny to an auto-didactic biblical scholar), it was easily the densest read for the money and had some genuine laughs.

CODENAME KNOCKOUT #13: Eh. The sexy spy comedy that isn't particularly sexy, intriguing or funny. On the one hand, it's nice that there's a book out there that remembers that sex is supposed to be fun. On the other hand, it's still boring as hell.

COURTNEY CRUMRIN & THE NIGHT THINGS #3: Eh. As a writer, Ted Naifeh is one heck of an artist, I'll give you that. Effective art and storytelling, but an editor should have done a pass on the captions and the dialogue. And this could have been a self-contained issue if they'd just put a story summary inside the front cover. As it was, the story had several points I knew I was missing because I was a first-timer, and had no way to figure out.

DC FIRST BATGIRL THE JOKER: OK. The Bill Sienkiewicz art was great, and Grant writes a surprisingly effective Joker. But some lame flashback art and real sloppiness in the writing overall kept this from being better. (Batman won't stop the fight because Batgirl needs to prove to herself that she could be as good as the original Batgirl who sees the Joker kill four people in cold blood in her flashback but still thinks he was marginally sane back then? All of you people need serious, serious therapy. Really.)

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS IN SHADOW OF DRAGONS #8: Awful. Might have gotten a higher rating from me if I'd read issues #1-7, but I kinda doubt it.

ELECTRIC GIRL #9: Very good. I'm a little worried that the "slight but filling" feel I get from reading EG will be harder to have in the upcoming 56 pg. format but I'll wait and see how it goes.

ELEKTRA #10: OK. At least there was none of that off-panel "hocus-pocus, ninja magic!" junk that Bendis overplayed in his run. Still, I finished the book going, "And the point is...?" And part one of the cops version of "The Call" was way too rushed and contrived. Too bad cuz I normally like Bruce Jones.

FLASH #186: Very Good. It was Part 3 and I hadn't read Part 1 or 2, and there were still enough good ideas and characterization to drag me in. Plus, that art by Scott Kolins with Doug Hazelwood's inks and James Sinclair's colors are just top-notch. Not the best book for a "civilian," but still terrific stuff.

GREEN LANTERN SECRET FILES #3: The stories, respectively: Crap, OK and a very low Eh. Writing a Green Lantern story is as easy as eating a donut: the tragic history of the GLs is good for filling anywhere from one to three pages, depending. Writing one well, however… Oh, and I always find those pin-up pages to be crap.

HOWARD THE DUCK #5: Very Good. That Gerber can satirize such disparate targets as Oprah and Vertigo comics simultaneously is pretty impressive.

JLA #66: Joe Kelly's got a case of the try-too-hards, and yet this still suffers from what I'd call JLA syndrome: the JLA always act either like unorganized amateurs or highly organized professionals depending on what the plot requires. I feel for the guys who do JLA but still, awful.

METABARONS #17: OK. Again, a caption like this is why I read comics: "From inside an octocyborg, the four surviving whore-priestesses of the Shabda-Oud plotted a daring raid..." Too many annoying robo-hijinks for my taste, though.

OUT THERE #11: Eh. My first issue and probably my last issue. If this had been padded any heavier, I could've slept on it.

PARADISE X XEN: I finally figured out what the X in the series title stands for: eXposition! Bill Sienkiewicz's inks are too good to make this book seem like complete crap, so I'm reluctantly calling this merely awful.

S CLAY WILSONS PORK #1: Very Good. I'm convinced these are Hell's own Tijuana Bibles.

SKINWALKER #1: Good. Some decent work with the characters and the twin narration can make me forgive some bad spell-checking ("ominouse"?) and some ungainly lettering. And an unrealistic opening. And undistinguished art. We'll see.

SPAINS ZODIAC MINDWARP #1: Strangely, out of all the varied pieces here, I think the three-pagers from Screw show Spain to his best advantage: you never know if there's going to be a sex act, an action scene or a quick snippet of political proselytizing on the next page. Makes me wish someone could just pay the guy enough to go for an extended Burroughs-esque GN. Somewhere between Eh and OK.

SPIDER-MAN TANGLED WEB #14 THE LAST SHOOT: Eh, unless it's a two-parter, and I don't think it is. If it's not, what's the point in making us care about your main character if you're not going to show us what happens to him?

STRANGEHAVEN #14: Very good. First issue I've read—I'll probably pick up another. A little problem with dramatic beats but hopefully that'll get ironed out as things progress.

SUPERMAN TARZAN SONS OF THE JUNGLE #3: Eh. I didn't read Parts 1 or 2, but I didn't feel like I missed a thing, which is either a tribute to Dixon's brand of ultra-competent storytelling, or a testament to two issues of padding and set-up. Really a shame about the animated series style art. Thirty years ago, this would've been drawn by Joe Kubert and would've rocked ass for that alone.

TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE#14: It's like Promethea for really stupid people. Awful.

TITANS #41: Awful. You know you're in for a dull comic when the Titans spend three pages fighting furniture.

USAGI YOJIMBO #57: Very good. Stan Sakai's one of the best storytellers in the business. Good jumping on point, because I didn't know any of these characters and it worked just fine for me.

WITCH DOCTOR #1: God bless the Xeric grant for underwriting people learning the craft. Here, we've got a writer/artist who is okay on a single-page basis, but just can't get the story to flow from one page to the next (he changes narrative methods at least three times through the story). Awful, but hey, he's just starting out so cut him some slack.

WOLVERINE #176: Crap. An interesting although kinda dumb twist on the Wolverine myth (the idea of Logan's memory loss being part of his mind's "healing factor") with some okay art and truly hackneyed storytelling. The tie-in to the mostly awful Origin doesn't help things, either. And shitty lettering!

WONDER WOMAN #181: Eh. One of the worst page-turns I've seen in a while ("landquake!") and the art just isn't chicken-frying my steak. I thought I'd be more into this if Phil was also still doing the art, but then I read the back-up story and went, "hmmm, well, maybe not." Seems like the only stuff that was interesting you had to be reading comics for over 20 years to enjoy.

X-FORCE #128: I don't know if I've ever seen anyone have as much fun with the "One of us will die!" storyline as Milligan and Allred have been having here. But I was worried that all that fun was going to severely undercut the emotional resonance when someone finally bit it, and I think I worried correctly. I'd still give it a Very Good, though.

X-MEN UNLIMITED #36: There's three stories in this one, and they're basically crap, crap, and would-be-crap-but-John-Totleben's-drawing-it-so-let's-call-it-Eh.

For Sake of Completeness, here’s a list of all of the OTHER comics that CE got in this week, that I, Jeff, did NOT read because I either didn't want to take the only copy on the rack, or only subscribers got it and I wasn't going to pilfer the pull-boxes, or I was too whacked out on Krispy Kreme donuts to put them in my bag to take home. Probably just as well, considering how much time it took to read all the stuff above.

BETTY #113
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #130
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL #68
CARTOON CARTOONS #11
COMIC BOOK HEAVEN VOL 2 #6
DAWN CONVENTION SKETCHBOOK 2002
INSANE CLOWN POSSE DARK CARNIVAL #1
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #86
KODT HACKMASTERS EVERKNIGHT #15 PRIESTESS
PVP COLL ED HAT TRICK #1
SECRET MESSAGES SILENT INVASION ABDUCTIONS #5
SHADES OF BLUE #7
X-MEN EVOLUTION #7

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.

ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES TP
ASTRO BOY VOL 3 TP
COMIC BOOK MARKETPLACE #91
COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOL 1 JACK KIRBY TP
DAREDEVIL YELLOW HC
FANGORIA #213
FATHOM VOL 1 TP
FRENCH KISS #2
HUMAN TARGET FINAL CUT HC
INU YASHA VOL 11 TP
LONE WOLF & CUB VOL 21 FRANGRANCE OF DEATH TP
MORDRU ACTION FIGURE
PHANTOM STRANGER ACTION FIGURE
PREVIEWS VOL XII #6
ROAD TO PERDITION NOVEL MMPB
SIZZLE #14
STAR WARS INSIDER #60
TIM HUNTER ACTION FIGURE
VAMPIRE PRINCESS MIYU VOL 2 GN
VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE GN BECKETT
WAITING PLACE VOL 2 BOOK 1 TP
WARLANDS VOL 2 TP
WHITE DEATH GN
WIZARD THE COMICS MAGAZINE #130
XXX FILES TP

This Week’s TP recommendation is: The Comics Journal Library Jack Kirby TPB. The color portfolio section alone is worth the price of admission. Did you see that stunning "Day At The Beach" war comic cover? Fucking breathtaking.

Average Rating for the Week: books "reviewed" for an average rating of (out of a possible 7.00): To quote Barbie, "Math is hard!" I'd say it was a pretty "eh" week which is a shame considering how many books I reviewed (roughly 36).

Pick of the Week: If you're not easily offended, S. Clay Wilson's Pork (I'm still haunted by Puducchio having sex with the baby rhino). Otherwise, if you've been reading the issues, X-Force #128.

Pick of the Weak: Blade #3, a book so bad I created a new rating for it. If it reads like ass, and looks like ass…