Dumb ol' 'murican: Hibbs on 3/31, part 2 (?)

Yeah, back for the second round of the day (and that worked PERFECTLY, too, both G & J posted between me so it doesn't like I'm bloviating as much as I am), but, man, it's already 10:30, and I'd like to have some "me time" today, so let's see if I can keep this shortish and still retain some meaning: ALICE IN SUNDERLAND GN: Bryan Talbot is a creator that I feel doesn't get enough respect, though that may be largely because he seems to disappear for years at a time then releases ginormous works that just blow your tiny little mind, man. ANd this piece of work is a very radical departure for Talbot -- multimedia collage and photoshop enhances his already utterly amazing line work to a degree that I've never seen him approach before. And there's 300+ pages of this tooth-achingly beautiful work here, certainly the largest project he's tackled. I, really mean this, this is some of the best work of his already long and illustrious career.

But while I wholly and steadfastly recommend it in terms of sheer craft and presentation (an oversized HC original 300+ page GN for $30? It's a steal!), I'm a little less excited about the actual content. This is largely because I'm a dumb ol' 'murican, who likes a certain amount of linearity in my content; whose never particularly liked historical content (except as insofar as I can relate it to my individual life), and prefers fiction to non-. These are my biases, and while they make me a poor "critic", they are what they are.

There's an astonishing level of "dream logic" going on in ALICE IN SUNDERLAND, as Talbot relates historical information about the city/region of Sunderland in the UK, both of the physicality of the environment, and the colorful connections between many of its most famous residents over a (let's say) thousand year period -- it jumps willy nilly between decades and centuries, and always circling back around and through and between Lewis Carroll and ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and it's done in a constant array of ever changing styles -- going from an "Arkwright" style to nearly Dave McKean, to Herge, to historical period work, to rubber-faced cartooning, and back and around again, always changing, never standing still.

And I only made it through about 50 pages of the narrative before I finally gave up and decided to just look at the pretty pictures instead.

If I had to compare it to something narratively (and it's a shitty comparison, to be sure), it might be the tour of London in the middle of FROM HELL, where you find out about the giant pentagram inscribed on the soul of London. Except there's not a pentagram, or even an underlying murder. And, let's say, ten times as long.

There is so much craft and skill and deep understanding of comics on display here that you'll shake your head in wonder. The question is whether or not you're interested enough in the subject matter to have it carry the work. For me, that answer is no, but I still took home a copy for my personal collection because I know I'm going to want to look through it again and again, even if I never end up reading it at the end of the day.

That's kinda the worst review ever, isn't it? And yet... I'm still going to give it a VERY GOOD, because I can not heap enough superlatives on Talbot's craft, and I really do think you should seriously entertain buying it despite my aesthetic failures as a critic.

OPTIC NERVE #11: The sharp-eyed of you will notice that this wasn't on the Diamond shipping list. The regular customers amongst you will say "hey, that wasn't in on Wednesday! (or Thursday!)", and you'd both be right. Direct shipped from D&Q, arrived on Friday, partly because we can make thier (wickedly absurdly high) minimums, but also partly because Diamond isn't going to have this out for a few weeks, as I understand it. So, your LCS may not have it yet. Just saying.

Anyway, the box came, I unpacked it, and seconds after throwing it up on the rack me and Jeff both dived in and read it. What followed is why, really, I need to mic the store, and record every word that we say on Fridays, and edit into a podcast. It was a really fascinating conversation about authorial intent, and comparative analysis, and artistic influence (this issue is just DRIPPING with Tatsumi), where I took a point counter to Jeff's.... not because I thought he was wrong, but because it's the proper kind of conversation one should hear when one enters a comic book store. As opposed to our usual "Dur, who is stronger? Hulk or Thor? Dur!"

Anyway, Jeff made some rather excellent points about why similarly veined work by Tatsumi or Clowes works, and this doesn't, but they're his points to make and I'll let him do that... next Sunday if he keeps to his ABCs! (though he's crazy swamped with stuff too right now, so don't expect that essay to necessarily be the next thing he writes)

So, let's put that conversation to the side, and get to the heart of the comic itself: it sucked.

Sorry, thoroughly loathsome protagonist, systematically acts like a jerk because he can't handle change, and he ends up alone and unhappy at the end. The End.

That's nothing I want to read, when it comes down to it.

I gave #10 a GOOD, let me remind you (Heck, that's the WEEK Graeme joined us!), and I gave #9 a VERY GOOD (look, pre-Lester Critic, even!)

And this one was AWFUL.

Even more so when I went back and reread #9 & 10, because, let's face it, this story started in 2004 (January to be exact), so I thought "I must be missing something from the previous issues, which I remember liking". No, on reread, I STILL thought the first two parts were good comics, and act 3 just a waste of time and paper. Yes, it's possible to have an anti-protagonist, I guess you'd call it, where their character arc doesn't triumph, but deflate -- the problem is, there has to be something compelling about the protagonist, or their situation, to keep me interested. Here, not so much.

Interestingly, Rob Bennett opined to me today that he liked it very much. And Tomine is about as far from what one would consider Rob's normal tastes.

That's what I thought. How about you?

-B

Time Keeps On Slipping Into The Fyooo-Chaaaah: Graeme on 3/28 and the deadlines.

Is it just me, or did everyone else feel as if we'd never get to the weekend this week? God knows why, but the last five days seemed to go on forever... Luckily, there's always comics to make things go quickly, even as the work sometimes looks as if things have gone too quickly for the creators involved... GREEN LANTERN #18: There's one good thing, and one good thing only about this issue, and I say that as a fan of Green Lantern in general and someone who's semi-enjoyed this series in particular (It's always nice enough, but seemingly directionless for the most part - The stretch between the first three issues and One Year Later was especially bad). It's not the story, however; Geoff Johns phones this one in two different ways - Firstly, the plot is pretty much non-descript beyond "An old villain returns to threaten Green Lantern," which feels like almost every arc from this series so far (First arc - Manhunters, Second arc - The Shark, Third arc - Mongul and those plants from the Alan Moore Superman annual, Fourth arc - Cyborg Superman, Fifth arc - Abin Sur's kid). More to the point, there's nothing else to the writing in the main story - Maybe because it's only sixteen pages long? - that we haven't seen before. Hal Jordan is irresistible to women, yeah, we get that. But the idea of the Star Sapphire - which is another anti-Green Lantern ring, like the Sinestro ring that gives us our back-up strip this time out, jumping between Hal's girlfriends is just kind of retarded, and not helped at all by the amount of full-page splashes and dialogue like "Tell me, Hal... Do ya want this body instead? It's awfully yummy."

The one good thing about this issue isn't the back-up strip, either. It's fine enough, but the presence of Dave Gibbons on art makes it feel even more like a 2000AD Future Shock than anything else, especially with the twist ending (which is, admittedly, cute).

No, the good thing about this issue is the art. Daniel Acuna has shown his chops before, whether it be his covers for the DC books around Infinite Crisis or his Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters series, but there's something less polished about it, something rushed, that makes it even more attractive than before; the wonderful use of color and texture is still there, but the rougher edge gives it a more approachable quality that I'd like to see again. That's not enough to make this any more than an Eh comic, though.

SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #4: Again with the strangely rougher looking art, as Tim Sale seems to be either working with thicker brushes or on a smaller scale than usual - the fight scene in the first half of the book looks particularly blocky compared with Sale's usual linework - which may be something to do with Sale's extra-curricular duties on Heroes taking up more time than expected. Writingwise, Darwyn Cooke's story continues to be light on plot but filled with unexpected moments that save the book; Superman's dream while unconscious, or the long-running nostalgia trip of the kryptonite explaining the secret origin of the story's second villain. As the series continues, this story seems to be losing steam, but still enjoyable - a high Okay to low Good depending on your love for Jimmy Olsen - but who knows? If the other Superman titles weren't as strong as they are right now, I may be more forgiving.

And am I the only one really really curious about Hibbs' both potential and exciting (in whatever permutation works for him) news that he hints at below? You big tease, Brian.

Not comics: Hibbs on TV

Missed my last night deadline, but I got some potentially exciting news (or maybe exciting potential news... or maybe even exciting news, potentially) that focused me on that during my (ha ha) "free time" last night. So today I'm going to shoot for TWO posts -- one now, one tonight. We'll see if that works.

It’s not comics, no, but I've been wanting to make a television post for a while. Up until last year I was maybe watching 4 hours of TV a week, but I've been sucked in by the glass teat this season a lot. Modern TV is so strange -- there's almost barely things like traditional "seasons" any more; shows start and stop more or less willy nilly, it seems. And the advent of boxed set makes that a really superior way to watch a lot of shows. I'll be skipping our box set adventures (like, say THE SHIELD), for stuff I've been watching "live"

There will probably be some spoilers in here (especially on some shows, like BATTLESTAR GALACTICA), which makes this a post a number of you (= Jeff Lester) can't read... because YOU're waiting for the boxed sets. Funny.

In more or less alphabetical order, here's what I've been watching lately:

24: I really loved the first season, because the idea itself was so fresh -- "real time TV". I pretty much hated the second season, with its "we have no idea how to stretch this" scenes of Kim-in-Peril. I watched maybe 3 episodes of season 3, and decided I no longer cared. Totally skipped season 4. But something drew me back for season 5 -- maybe it was the Nukes. All of the problems the show has are still very much on display here: it is really really hard to break a story into twenty-four satisfying chunks without stretching dumb things out dumbly. We're what? halfway through this day? And my attention is flagging again. I don't think I am going to make it all the way through this season. It's been very very EH. At best.

30 ROCK: The single non-animated sitcom I watch these days, and its getting better and better with each episode, becoming more topical, and more adventurous in its storylines. I quite like it, and think it is consistently GOOD.

AMAZING RACE: Every man is allowed one thing that they KNOW is shit, and that they watch it BECAUSE its shit, and THE AMAZING RACE is my one main "I have no excuses" show. I was a real early adopter of reality shows -- *I* was the one who turned all of the CE's onto SURVIVOR, for example (stopped watching that around season 5, I think?) -- and this is my sole reality show left. It's very very not "real". Really, I'd like to see all of the extra footage where a producer has to intervene with the police; or where a contestant is delayed because the cameraman trips getting out of a car, or things like that. Still, I keep being entertained by Ugly Americans running all over creation and being the fools they can be -- I especially love how Charla and Mirna affect this weird spanish-tinged accent everytime they talk to anyone whose primary language isn't english. I do wish the show had a few more metrics as it was running -- a clock or miles traveled or something, but I can see how that would be an editing nightmare. I suppose what I like about the show is that it isn't hermetically sealed in a house or an island or something like that. There's a SENSE that "anything could happen", because there's only so much you can stage manage the WORLD. Its the one reality show that I'd like to watch a documentary about the making of it, and of what happens "backstage". Plus, watching Rob and "Ambuh" getting thier asses kicked by the midget and her idiot cousin? Pure Television gold. In any objective reality, the RACE is merely OK< but I like to fool myself that it is GOOD.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: I love this show, I really do. And, in fact, I've even got Tzipora (who HATES all things Sci-Fi or Fantasy related) hooked on it. She's a season and a half behind, because I REFUSE to buy separate 2.0 and 2.5 box sets, and the library hasn't gotten 2.5 in yet. But it is everything you want SF to be -- thought-provoking, action-packed, twisty, human-driven.

Up until a point, at least.

I'm probably one of the few people who actually went "Hm, maybe not" when they announced a full 22 eps for Season 4; because I'm pretty unconvinced at this point that they actually have more than 12-13 viable stories each season -- because, let's face it, a really significant chunk of Season 3 was "filler" that neither moved the mythology forward, nor focused on areas that I cared too much about. When the show is "on", it is ON, but when it's not? Well, it's still some of the best TV on the air, but I don't care that much.

The season finale bugged me a lot -- not just because we have to wait until January (wtf?) to find out what happens next. I was especially annoyed by the "All ALong The Watchtower" use (that's like the Steppenwolf in STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, yeah?), and the reveal of 4 of the final 5. Especially Tigh. And that between Tyrol & Boomer and Kara & jock resistance guy (I'm blanking), there's too much Cylon-on-Cylon action going on. I'm pretty unconvinced they can make either Tyrol or Tigh "work" as Cylons, but the show has certainly given enough reason to offer them the Benefit of the Doubt. But, man, January? There are certain episodes within the season that I'd call VERY GOOD or EXCELLENT (the finale itself probably even rates a GOOD), but over all I'd give Season 3 a strong OK, which is a prodigious drop from s1 & 2.

BLACK DONNELEYS: Probably going to drop this in the next week or two. The structural conceit of this being a flashback told by an unreliable narrator is kind of grinding, and the characters are kind of all too young & pretty for me. Basically, it's (Irish) SOPRANOS Jr., and while there's an appealing denseness to the episodes (esp for network TV), I'm not finding any of the characters memorable enough to care about them as characters. Its OK, though.

THE DAILY SHOW: OUr DVR (not TiVO) via the DISH network is funny with THE DAILY SHOW -- we can't set up "record series", or it attempts to tape every broadcast of each episode. Its the only show we tape that acts like that. So, we've got to manually set the episodes each week. Fairly annoying, and sometimes I forget. A lot of time I don't watch daily -- I'll watch 2-3 at a go, but there's a lot of things to genuinely love about the show. Not only is it (usually) very very funny indeed, but I especially like the way they book authors of political or cultural books that would be lucky to break 5k copies, and give them a chance to engage in an often substantiative dialogue in front of millions of people. You don't get the sense they're booking these people because they *can't* get the a-listers, but because they truly believe its good to expose people to other points of view. So damn good for them. and damn GOOD, even at its worst no-news days, and plug-a-movie interviews.

DAYBREAK: Didn't even make its full season on the air, so I guess no one liked the GROUNDHOG'S DAY-meets-THE-FUGITIVE show. And, yeah, the execution wasn't stellar, but I liked the concept enough that I actually went and watched the unbroadcast episodes on ABC.com. Took me a while to get through them because I don't like watching TV at the computer, but all in all, I thought they did an OK job. Bonus points to ABC for actually putting the second half of the season on-line, for free. That's pretty classy, really.

HEROES: I'm ready for it to come back, already. If they can pull off the endgame as well as they handled their middle section, this is going to be one of those shows you're still talking about in 10 years. It took a while to get going, and there were definitely some stumbles in the early episodes, but, pretty much around the time we met Sylar, and the "save the cheerleader" plot got started, this became one of the most fun serialized shows on TV. Largely because they seem to have a clear end for this story planned, and it's THIS season, not strung out indefinitely like BSG or LOST (that's also what I liked about DAYBREAK). I like most of the characters (except for Mohinder, yeesh, he's the worst Prof X-type ever), and it just zips along with multiple cliffhangers, and more importantly, revelations, every issue. Based on where we're at so far, this is an easy GOOD, and, depending on how well they resolve it all, it could be VERY GOOD.

LOST: This show, on the other hand, drives me fucking bugshit crazy most weeks, where things move along glacially (if that), and the "mystery of the island" is CLEARLY being made up as it goes along. I also can't really stand most of the "others", and think the show jumped the rails when it started to be ABOUT them, rather than "our" survivors. If, next week, Locke were to find a button, and, upon pushing it all of the others seized up with black smoke pouring from their ears saying "norman, coordinate", I'd be happy with that I think. Each week this season I've been muttering, "man, I should stop wasting my time with this crap", but then I'm all whining to myself "but I've already invested 40+ hours in this, I don't want to walk away after that!" Thankfully, this week's episode, with Nikki & Paulo made me glad that I've stuck around. Yeah, it is kind of the definition of "filler", but it was nice to see seom actual suspense on the show again, and to have something introduced AND resolved in one go. Plus, all of the cameos were cool (I wonder how much of that was "leftover" footage from previous seasons, and how much was freshly shot?) -- it was basically the best episode of TALES FROM THE CRYPT ever shot. I'm always a fan of ironic justice. So, most of this season: anywhere from AWFUL to OK (probably EH on the balance); this week's episode? VERY GOOD.

THE RICHES: 3 eps in, and the contrivances are starting to creak (and the sooner they resolve the Traveller boss thread, the better -- what a 2-d character and story there), but Izzard and Driver make this show very watchable, and I'm in for at least a dozen. Overall, I'll go with a GOOD.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: When I was a kid in the 70s, I would beg my parents to let me stay up late for SNL, and growing up into an adult, it's a habit at this point. There were years, decades maybe, where you could watch SNL on "Fast Forward", taking maybe 20-30 minutes to get through the whole show. This season has been markedly better though -- I'm probably up to 40-45 minutes of actual watching, and they've been taking more chances (not a lot, but some) of doing more surreal humor, or tinkering with rhythms. There also seems to be a greater emphasis on new ideas, rather than relying solely on a character being endlessly repeated into the ground. Overall, the show seems to have found a new stride this year, and while there still LOTS of not-funny, the ratio seems to e getting better. Overall: OK

THE SIMPSONS: Two weeks ago I think they reached the bottom of the bucket. The plot was Granpa marries Selma (or Patty, whatever), and that was pretty much it. No act 1 leads to a radically different act 2 leads to a radically different act 3 -- just a straight line through on a very unfunny premise, that probably should have had a laugh track attached to it. I didn't even bother to watch last week's ep. I think they may have finally cured me of this particular habit -- I'm having a hard time remembering the last genuinely funny episode I've seen. (probably last year). Very very very depressingly EH.

SOUTH PARK: When its about the kids being kids, the show is honest and often very wise... but frequently dull. I mean, lice? But when they comment of celebrity or politics or just the dopiness of mankind, it always has the potential of hitting the home run. I'm sometimes amazed just how precisely topical they can be on waht would seem to be an impossible time frame -- there's times they appear to be writing, animating, and voicing an entire show in a matter of days. SO far this season has been a bit weak (I mean, seriously, lice?), but it is never less than very very OK.

That's what I'm watching, at least. What do YOU think?

-B

You run around and groove like a baggy: Graeme, 3/28, and so on.

I really don't know what's worse; that I have a Happy Mondays song stuck in my head from out of nowhere, or that I can't remember the name of it. Is it "Loose Fit" or "Kinky Afro"? It's the one that rips off "Lady Marmalade" - That's "Kinky Afro," isn't it? I have no idea where it came from or why, but all I can tell you is that it's making me want to see what Mondays songs are available on iTunes, which can't be a good thing. Let's try and distract me, shall we? TEXAS STRANGERS #1: In the nicest way possible, Texas Strangers is the best Saturday morning cartoon that you never saw. The set-up is a weirdly perfect mix of different influences: Harry Potter in the Wild West meets Shrek (A giant green Scottish monster?), but it's done in such a way that I'm convinced that it's not going to succeed in the direct market, if that leap of pessimism makes sense. It's all about the format, more than the work itself - I simply don't feel as if a $2.99, 32-page monthly book is the right kind of book to make kids want to pick it up, for some reason. And that's a shame, because the book itself is a lot of fun - writers Antony Johnston and Dan Evans waste no time setting up the overall arc of the series before getting into the plot for this particular story, which is full of all manner of western cliches given a twist. There's nothing especially new about anything in the story, but it's solidly done and with enough energy and abandon to work - there's something weirdly early-2000AD-esque about the way that it pulls together pop culture artifacts in order to make a story for kids, but the difference here being that it's not the latest horror movie or TV show that kids wouldn't be familiar with being presented as something new and exciting, but instead things that kids would be very familiar with being used because of the familiarity. But there's more to this than the (perfect) high concept; it's things like the ridiculousness of the cliffhanger ("He's been kidnapped! And he's lying in a truck full of dynamite! While being shot at!") that make this worth reading.

Also a plus for the book is Mario Boon's art, which is blocky and clear, like Mike Parobeck trying to do Scott Pilgrim. It's not perfect artwork (It's just a little bit too blocky, for my liking) and, again, looks like it's a pitch for a cartoon series that should be watched while in pyjamas and eating cereal, preferrably at age seven, but it works for the series and the story. It's helped immensely by Traci Hui's colors, which add atmosphere and impact where the linework itself is lacking. But, like the story itself, it's something that makes me want to read the book in another format; the scale and clarity makes it perfect for being shrunk down into a color digest like Marvel's Runaways and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane collections, where pushing six issues of the series together will provide a chunky block of story that just feels more worth kid hands and minds to me. As it is, this first issue is a high Okay, but I feel as if the eventual collection could be much better.

This makes me wonder - There are certain series that I only follow in trades (Runaways, Spider-Man Loves Mary-Jane - I really like that Marvel digest format, for the price alone - and Fables, to name just three), and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's something about how much story I feel I get for my money, or that the individual issues don't feel so good alone? It's an entirely different reading experience, of course, but what I'm really wondering is what series you lot feel should only be read in large blocks. Ultimate Spider-Man, for example, has always kind of tempted me... Should I be picking that up? Give me fun recommendations of things to pick up and avoid, people.

Two For Thursday, by Hibbs

I know you don't care about my excuses (why would you?), but, man taking Ben to the dentist in the AM, and following that with a park trip (MAN, was it a god-damn lovely day at Walter Haas today! More cute moms then I have seen in a long time!), then his nap, then work, the home to try and catch up on news-in-comics-today that I couldn't do in the morning, and the big pile of mounting emails, and geez, it's already 10 pm, and I still have 2 hours of work in front of me at least. Sheesh. So just 2 more books here, as fast as I can.

I'm going to keep with a "Dwayne McDuffie" theme today, since it's apparently "Dwayne McDuffie week" since he also had two OTHER (other than my last reviewed FF) comics out this week -- FIRESTORM #34, and ACTION #847.

ACTION #847: If I recall what the original plan we retailers were told about, before they started injecting more issues in before we get the end of the "SUPERMAN III" (heh) story in what appears now to be #851 (4 months of fill in, wow), there was only supposed to be 1 issue gap in publishing, and this was that story. As such, McDuffie tries to frame it as happening concurrently with "S III", and does a pretty good job disguising its fill-in nature. It is big, it is fun and full of Action, and it makes Superman a heavy-hitter bad ass, without necessarily raising things to a "then he pushed the planet out of orbit" state. So rah rah, hurray, and all that. On the other hand, my suspension-of-disbelief meter dipped into the red of the idea of Clark taking an old man with a history of heart attacks (or am I mixing my continuities?) into deep space in an experimental piece of technology (yes yes he says he used it before, but I mislike off-camera stuff). I also really don't like the idea of Superman ALSO having an "invisible plane", y'know? Still, really those are minor quibbles in what was both an action-packed and emotional story, and I'll go with a low GOOD.

FIRESTORM #34: This one, on the other hand, I didn't care much for. Part of it, like I've said before, is my general wariness around the New Gods and their semi-overuse (this week's HAWKGIRL is also a NG story, and clearly NG is a substantial part of the soon-to-be COUNTDOWN), and I also thought Firestorm himself was too jokey -- read more like Ronnie Raymond, now that I think of it, then what I've thought of as Jason's voice. Also, I'm reading this knowing there's just one more issue to go, and there's a lot of inter-personal stuff that needs to be, if not tied up, at least brought to some conclusion for Jason's character. No real progress in this issue for any of that. So, yes, I have my biases, but this still felt tragically EH to me.

Right, back to the Big List of Things That Have to Get Done.

What did YOU think?

-B

The Frog Abides: Some Thoughts from Jeff on Sgt. Frog, Vols. 10-12

Warning: This post contains some spoilers, not the least of which is that I'm a tremendous idiot. Also, this post isn't so much a series of reviews as probably really a review of a reviewer and therefore eminently skippable. First, you should probably know about my love for Sgt. Frog, a love that I caught from John Jakala off the Interweb a few years back. Jakala had included Sgt. Frog in a list of books he was currently enjoying and, considering nearly every other book he was reading was one of my favorites, I figured I should try out Mine Yoshizaki's comedy manga about a cute frog-like alien invader living in a house with two kids.

Second, you should also know that I read Sgt. Frog. Vols. 1-10 at a pretty decent clip, maybe one every other week for the first nine volumes, then the tenth volume was published just as I finished the ninth, and then I had to wait until volume 11 was published a few months later. (I have no idea if this was the rate at which Tokyopop had always published them, or if they had cranked them out at the height of Sgt. Frog's popularity and they were now putting them out less frequently now that his popularity wanted). I waited too long, in fact--I was cued into the existence of Volume 11 by reading notice of the publication of Volume 12. Thanks to the wacky world of book availability, Hibbs was able to get me Vol. 12 almost immediately after it came out, but it took another three weeks to get Vol. 11.

Finally, I must confess an act of spectacular idiocy; I believed something I read on the Internet, and applied it indiscriminately. In this case, it was something I read a few years back as the manga wave was really beginning to hit, that someone (Dirk in his first incarnation of Jounalista, maybe?) had excerpted from a message board. There, someone explained the reason why they liked manga was that the stories came closer to resembling actual stories--characters grew and changed, and the stories actually ended. Thinking back on it, I'm sure now that the person was probably writing that in some manga, the characters grew and changed, and their stories actually ended. But stupid me, I more or less applied that as a blanket statement to manga overall.

And why shouldn't I? Akira ended. Lone Wolf & Cub ended. And the first Tokypop manga wave book I read, Love Hina, ended--even if it did so about four volumes later than it shoud have, it still ended.

So, with most of my biases and idiocies apparent, my hope is that the foolishness with which I greated the final story of Volume 10, Sgt. Frog, titled "The Last Battle: Keroro Platoon's 24 Hours," will be more readily understood. I really thought I was reading the last Sgt. Frog story.

I mean, it made sense at the time. After half an entire volume of wacky frog-related hijinks, in which ghosts were encountered, and soccer matches were mocked, and teen girls were caught half-undressed, came a story where another troop of frog invaders attack Earth, but with far greater success than anything attempted by the Sargeant and his troop (the manga had done a pretty good job of adding new members of the troop, and their human mascots over time, so that by volume ten, you had five frogs and five human mascots). At the end of volume 10, Sgt. Frog's troop has been conquered, the utterly inept Sargeant has been replaced with a frighteningly efficient clone, and Fuyuki and Natsumi, the two kids who've adopted the Sargeant, have failed in their plans to save the Earth.

So, yeah. I know it was kinda dumb, but I assumed that Volume 11 would be the final volume of Sgt. Frog and that would be the end of things. Which, now that I think of it, is probably why I was so reluctant to actually read Volume 11 and was more than willing to not think about it: I didn't want the fun to end. And when Volume 12 was announced, I was utterly baffled--the Last Battle of Keroro's Platoon stretched across two and a half volumes? It seemed kinda crazy, but I was willing to believe it.

Cut to, I dunno, the end of January, when I finally get volume 11 in hand. I pick it up--and I'm completely lost. I mean, I roughly remembered what had happened, and I recognized who was who and what was what, but I was completely and utterly baffled by my lack of emotional connection to the material. Against my will, my very first thought was "What the hell is this crap?"

This is another thing I've noticed about manga, by the way: since most of it is published weekly in manga magazines and then collected in volumes, it's pretty effortless to read continuously as one volume flows easily into the next. And when you've got a bunch of volumes all out on the market, it's absurdly easy to just suck on the teat of continuous material until you're sated or it's exhausted. (Which is why bookstores in malls have to deal with kids lying around on the floors like a bunch of pubescent opium smokers, and why a lot of us adults see those kids and have to suppress a long twitching shudder of disgust--I mean, sure, we were lazy when we were kids, but these children seem to have somehow regressed, and are sprawled on the floor like overgrown, baggy-panted infants. And it's just Ewwwww, if you know what I mean.) But if you get off the teat for a bit, it takes a little bit of effort to get back into the swing of things.

Consequently, I figured I should put down Volume 11, pick up Volume 10, and get my emotional investment in the narrative momentum going again. But it took me a long time to pick up Volume 10, and it was with a great reluctance, maybe a few pages before bed each night, and I pretty much figured, one way or another, my love affair with Sgt. Frog was over. Considering I was about twenty-eight years over their intended demographic, it probably was a bit overdue.

And yet, by the time Volume 12 finished. I was ready for more--in fact, I'm re-reading stories before bed and looking forward to Volume 13, even if it seems unlikely I'll still have the passion when the book's finally released in June of 2007.

What changed? Well, first, when Keroro Platoon's Last Stand wrapped up in the first 38 pages of Vollume 11 and nothing had changed, I was tremendously frustrated that what had appeared to be the natural conclusion for the series had been used up and tossed aside. Indeed, it seemed to me that a story in the same volume, where the Bandai model-loving Sgt. Frog creates a fully-armed miniature of himself and launches it on the household told the story behind the story--Bandai, which owns and publishes Sgt. Frog, had gone beyond making the Sargeant a loveable Bandai model obsessed marketer and was keeping the character around because he'd become a popular Bandai model himself.

(And so you can again understand my bias--between the time I'd read Volume 10 and purchased Volume 11, I'd purchased and built my own Sgt. Frog bandai model so it's hardly surprising this would occur to me. Also, I've always been prone to reading odd subtexts into Sgt. Frog--to me, its central conceit of a group of invaders from a warrior-based culture being tamed by cute kids, chores, creature comforts, and cute teen girls in their underwear, is a very clever commentary on Japan's cultural transition after World War II.)

I think the trick is, the more nonsensical and trivial a Sgt. Frog story is, the more I end up liking it, and vols. 11 and 12 are filled with such dashed off bits of charm. (Volume 12 has a story about jumping rope, for crying out loud, as well as a story about bathing. Oh, and watermelon.) Although the new characters are still proliferating, as one would expect from any franchise that has the future to think of, and the annihilation of at least one possible story conclusion renders the series one step closer to being Garfield, I advise fans of silly fun to check out Sgt. Frog. Even though this series is trying to sell you something, and you can lose your taste for the material if you go without it, you don't have to be as big a dumbass as myself to enjoy the goofiness. I give Vol. 11 a high OK, and Vol. 12 a high Good--would that all of the U.S.'s cartoons disguised as evil toy shills be half as good as this.

Following in the footsteps of Hibbs: Graeme on the first of the 3/28 books.

I can't work out if it's cunning marketing or stunning mismanagement that the covers to FANTASTIC FOUR #544 and BLACK PANTHER #26 are so similar this week: Both the posed shot of the new Fantastic Four (now with added Black Panther and Storm!) looking tough just before they come to kick your ass. I kind of feel sorry for Storm, because on each cover, she's the one standing in the back of the shot, her arms raised in a "I'm just about to throw a lightning bolt! No, really!" moment while secretly cursing the fact that her latest outfit is yet another flashback to the one she wore back in the '70s, but that doesn't stop me from wondering whether the two covers are meant to look so alike considering the fact that, with this month, Black Panther essentially becomes the second Fantastic Four book (Well, ignoring Marvel Adventures and Ultimate FF, that is). There's already some continuity flubs - both books have different versions of how the Panther and Storm are introduced to the team, for example - but there's something to be said for the move together of the two books; Reginald Hudlin makes the idea work from the Panther's perspective in his book, and then graciously hands off the characters to Dwayne McDuffie in the Fantastic Four book - There's even a caption saying "To see the the new FF's first adventure, see Fantastic Four #544!". Hudlin also manages to get in digs at the new post-Civil War status quo (with appalled media reactions to two members of the anti-registration side replacing Reed Richards, one of the architects of the registration act) and fairly heavy foreshadowing subplots. Surprisingly, considering my past experience of the book, BP #26 is rather Good.

It helps, of course, that Dwayne McDuffie manages to make Fantastic Four so enjoyable again. He manages to capture the right tone for the book - high adventure with tongue-in-cheek - almost straight off, from the title of the story ("From the Ridiculous To The Sublime - But Not Necessarily In That Order," which is a quote from a conversation between the Human Torch and the Thing towards the end of the issue) and through the return of familiar characters acting, unusually for Marvel these days, in familiar ways. There's a welcome return to the feeling of family between the characters, as well, that hasn't been felt since Mark Waid's run, if anything else even stronger here; trust, love and the impossible urge to make jokes about everything, just as in the Lee and Kirby run... The last time that the book felt like this for me was Walt Simonson's short run, fifteen-odd years ago, which pleases me considering that's one of my favorite superhero runs of all time. Less Simonson-esque is Paul Pelletier's art, which is clear enough, rocking his traditional "early Dale Keown" look (large lips for everyone!) but with the energy that Mike McKone's been lacking for the last few months. There're also occasional Kirby touches, whether they be the energy pulses while the Watcher gives everyone a show, or the Thing's flight goggles... Small things that are nonetheless oddly welcome, you know?

It's, maybe fittingly given the book's history, the most optimistic and (less fittingly, given the book's history) also the most old-fashioned thing that Marvel has published in a long time - Maybe not The World's Greatest Comic Magazine anymore, but definitely a good enough start at becoming Marvel's Greatest. Very Good, and who expected that?

Crossing the Streams: Hibbs on 3/21 and 3/28

Well, I didn't do that much reviewing last week, but I think I made it clear, regardless that the 3/21 PICK OF THE WEEK was THE BRAVE & THE BOLD #2. Kinda decisively, too. PICK OF THE WEAK? Dunno, let me think... looking over the week of comics, I'm sorta hard-pressed to find THE "yuck" book, but I guess I'd lean towards CONVENTION CONFESSIONAL #3, which makes the "standard" indy comic mistake of trying to blame everyone and everything for misfortune except for one's own work.

BOOK / TP OF THE WEEK is a lot easier -- my clear pick is FAFHRD & THE GRAY MOUSER. Rollicking adaptation by Chaykin, lovely art by a pre-HELLBOY Mike Mignola, I'm really glad this is now in print after something dumb like 15-20 years.

(A CLOSE follow-up would be BUDDY DOES JERSEY, packing HATE #16-30 in a single book, albeit without color. Actually, it works better without the color. Bagge was really on a roll in this period, and this is a very dense, and very funny read.)

Let's start to roll forward on the books for 3/28, eh?

BLACK PANTHER #26, FANTASTIC FOUR #544: I think I'll deal with these as a piece, since BP is basically FFII now. What's sorta interesting to me is that BP had things I felt should be in a "FF" comic (most notably the stuff happening at the negative zone prison), while FF had stuff that felt like it more belonged in the "BP" comic (Primarily the "bombs in the embassy" thing). If you're wondering about "order to read in" BP definitely comes first (so much so that the non-subplot portion of the comic pretty just ends with "go read FF")

Oddly (or perhaps not, really), the two stories only kinda jibe -- there's two different takes on the first meeting with BP & Storm and Ben & Johnny, and they don't fit all that well together; there's also two different "T'Challa redecorates the Baxter building" sequences that felt written against one another to me.

Reading them together, I think I might have figured out why Hudlin's Panther isn't working for me, because it stands out juxtaposed against McDuffie's take. Both are writing about one of the smartest men on the planet, a tactical genius, and so on. But it seems to me that Hudlin gets him there by writing all of the OTHER characters as idiots. HIs Ororo is weak, and fawning, because it makes T'Challa look stronger. Hudlin's Ben Grimm is a idiot, and so's his johnny (well, Johnny probably IS an idiot, but not Grimm, no.) McDuffie, on the other hand, just writes T'CHalla "up", without undercutting the rest of the cast.

McDuffie also begins to play off threads he left in the BEYOND mini-series, and the back half of the issue becomes properly cosmic like a FF story should be.

I thought BLACK PANTHER #26 was very OK, and I liked FANTASTIC FOUR #544 enough to give it a GOOD.

WONDER WOMAN #6: Oh. Ouch. Lots of problems, not sure where to begin. Let's start with the "naivete to the 'modern world'". Cute (-ish) once, but Picoult tries it out three different times in one 22 page story. Overkill. Further, Diana isn't *that* naive. Second: Since when is DIana overly concerned what people think of her? It seems vain and empty-headed to me, and not the thoughts of one of the world's premiere super-heroes. Thirdly, I can't see Diana acting like that in regards to Sarge Steel's demand that WW be captured -- let's not forget she was once (recently, even!) the Goddess of Truth. The Diana I know would simply fly up to Sarge Steel one day and say, "I heard you were looking form me?" (if asked how? "mm, Batman?" would probably work). Finally, we get to the big reveal at the end and... and... Circe? Again? The LAST Circe story was just a couple of weeks ago... and that one didn't even CONCLUDE! I don't know, the art was pretty good, but the story? fairly AWFUL.

That's it for tonight... what did you think?

-B

My secret addiction: Graeme comes clean.

Am I the only one who has a problem with spoilers? And by problem, I mean "Can't help myself and end up reading all of them?" I realized this when I sat down to write what was going to be something about last Sunday's Battlestar Galactica season finale (very short version: It all depends on what they do with the two big plot twists next year. If they follow the "shocks" up with story that makes sense, then I'm sold, but I'm somewhat uncertain that they're able to actually do that right now. That said, I thought it was very good, with the one major misstep of using a song from real life - I didn't recognize it from the music, but as soon as Tyrol said "There must be someway out of here," I was completely pulled out of the story by the recognition), then remembered the conversation Bri and I had had about the show last Friday, talking in code because Jeff hasn't seen any of the third season yet (Hibbs would say something like "What do you think about One-Eye?" and I felt like we should be talking about killer dinosaurs or something). Damn, I thought, I'll have to put in a spoiler warning or something for people who haven't seen the episode yet. And then I remembered that I was thoroughly spoiled for the last episode by this time last week. I hadn't intended to be; I had convinced myself that I was going to try and stay pure for the show this year, so that I could have the inevitable "What the frak" (because, you know, it's Battlestar Galactica) moment the way it was intended. And then, somewhere I can't even remember where, someone made an offhand comment to the finale being spoiled online and put a link. And even as I thought, I don't want to read that, I clicked on the link and read the whole thing.

Today, I did a similar thing; knowing full well that I was going to pick up this week's 52 this afternoon, I still read Wizard's synopsis of the issue ahead of time. I couldn't really tell you why, beyond the fact that I was curious and it was there. I certainly had no real reason to know what happened to Animal Man those three hours earlier than I would be buying the issue itself. I just couldn't help myself.

There is, I'm convinced, money in this compulsion. I can't be the only person who just has to know even though they may not particularly want to know, and I know that this goes way beyond comics (sites like Spoiler Fix make that obvious). All I need to do is meld that need with people's general insecurities and create a new kind of horoscope for the 21st century. Do away with that whole birthdate thing, and just run a website where people would pay me to spoil their lives for them. "Tomorrow, you'll regret having that second cup of coffee. But by May, don't be surprised if romance has come back into your life, if my recent interview with your ex-boyfriend is anything to go by." It's a winner of an idea, I'm telling you.

I'll get to it just as soon as I read what's going to happen in the season finale of Gilmore Girls.

More and More: Feedback to Feedback, and A Few More Reviews from Jeff of the 3/21 books.

Hmmm. You'll either get multiple reviews from me today (or tomorrow), or I'll be reviewing books well into next week, or you'll never find out what I think about any book beyond 'E.' Richard Starkings left some very interesting feedback to my review on Hip Flask: Concrete Jungle, and I'm still trying to figure out how to parse my reply. On the one hand, I appreciate that part of the reason why we still haven't seen the conclusion of this story is that he is dutifully waiting on Ladronn. On the other, Starkings' justification for why it's okay for him to sell a thirty dollar book of all middle is that he's paid much, much more than that ("NO ONE has paid more to read it than I have") and it will be years and years before he sees any profit, while "any stores that sells a single copy (my local store sold out by the weekend) has made a profit already."

To reply will take a certain amount of judicious disentanglement that I'm not sure I'm capable of at the moment. I suppose those stores that sell copies will turn a profit at that price range, although if the retailer isn't prudent about mentioning to the buyer that it's an incomplete story and there's no guarantee that it'll ever be finished and that they therefore shouldn't be buying it for anything other than the beautiful art, they run the risk of having the buyer feel ripped off and losing future business. So, yes, a store can turn a short-term profit with Hip Flask: Concrete Jungle and hopefully not cut itself off from long-term profits. But it's also a much tougher sell to make responsibly than, I dunno, a complete product.

Also hard for me to disentangle is Starkings' perspective as a publisher/fan, which is that $30 is relatively very little to pay for an incomplete story compared to the tremendous amounts of money he's paid for the incomplete story. And while I believe this to be true, and do appreciate he's waiting for Ladronn to finish the story, there's a bit of misdirection going on. As Starkings says, it will be YEARS and YEARS before he sees a profit on the book. To apply the same logic he used earlier, that is relatively little compared to the amount of time it'll take for a reader to see a profit on the book, which is usually NEVER. Unless (successfully) engaging in speculation, the reader NEVER turns a profit on a book although they can defray their losses somewhat by reselling it.

This point is particularly difficult to untangle since Starkings is writing from the perspective of a publisher/fan as if I were a retailer/fan, instead of just a fan. But it seems to me that publishers, like all businessmen, are gamblers and gambling on turning a profit is part of the game. A reader who pays money for an entertainment is also a gambler, and gambling on getting your money's worth is part of that game. But they are two different, albeit interrelated, games, and when the publisher tries to help his odds by worsening the reader's, it's probably worth pointing out, if you're on the reader's side of the game.

Part of the problem with the direct market, it seems to me, is that retailers are treated as part of the publisher's game only when it suits the publisher, and the rest of the time they're treated as readers (which is why, for example, Marvel and DC feel no compunction about shafting the retailers about solicit information). Certainly, with that being the case, I can't see why all retailers don't act like their interests are first and foremost with the reader's side of the game. But even if it weren't the case and publishers always treated retailers like partners in the gamble of publication, I'd think that retailers are still better suited helping the readers win (by picking up books worth their money and time) than by helping the publishers win (by turning a profit). This makes it a much harder game for publishers, but there are correspondingly greater payoffs that make the difficulty worth it. And, of course, if a publisher turns out a product that's worth a reader's time and money, and the retailer can help the reader get it, everyone wins.

All of that is why even if I were a retailer/fan, instead of just a fan, I'd still think it's wrong for him to suggest that the reader help underwrite his investment; because the reader never shares in the final dividends if that investment pays off, apart from what he holds in his hands at the moment he pays his money. If that book is worth $30 to the reader, fine. If not, it's really not in the best interests of the retailer to try to convince the reader, otherwise.

Finally, Starkings is such a fan of Ladronn that he sees Hip Flask as "90 pages of Ladronn" and therefore well worth ten grande lattes from Starbucks. What's difficult is he never explains how many grande lattes an incomplete story is worth--in the wacky world of comic book currency, I would say it's worth one grande latte (and in the wacky world of real world currency, it's worth the electricity for your TV and having to watch an advertisement or two for a grande latte). If you're a similarly huge fan of Ladronn, you may feel that you would gladly pay ten grande lattes for Hip Flask: Concrete Jungle but for most of us, seeing that the book is neither solicited nor sold as a Ladronn art book, might feel that we are not getting our grande lattes worth of story.

My humble Solomon-like solution is to average out the number of grande lattes the Ladronn fan and the incomplete story purchaser are willing to pay--5.5--and make that the new SRP of Hip Flask: Concrete Jungle. Whether Starkings is paid in actual grande lattes or the equivalent amount of cash (approximately $16.50), I'll leave up to him.

So, yeah. Still trying to parse my reply. What do you think? As I said, I'm trying for "judicious disentanglement," and I keep ending up with "scrappy exhaustiveness."

Oh, and since I'm here:

BIRDS OF PREY #104: The BoP meets Secret Six was one of the more satisfying team crossovers I've seen in a while, especially because Simone's fondness for the characters seeps through the text--it reminded me of those very early Marvel team-ups where, say, the Fantastic Four would pop up in the Avengers for four pages and everyone would compliment each other on their hair. As for the big last page resurrection of Ice, I didn't know that she had died until someone in the cast mentioned it six pages earlier. So I guess you could say the impact was lost on me. A Good issue, anyway.

BRAVE AND THE BOLD #2: Really gorgeous to look at and fun to read, so much so that one can overlook the issue's strengths (without making a big deal out of it, Waid is clearly writing Supergirl differently than the Supergirl over in LSH because this is obviously a different Supergirl) as well as the weaknesses (I can say with absolute confidence that Mark Waid has never had a seventeen year old girl flirt with him). Very Good material if you like superhero stuff, and worth picking up.

CABLE DEADPOOL #38: A very Cable-free issue of Cable & Deadpool but still enjoyable. I snickered at a couple of pages, particularly six-inch-tall Deadpool's propositioning of Agent X's two girlfriends ("C'mon, girls! I may be small, but I know how to navigate!") and any time the hapless Bob, Agent of Hydra showed up. It's all pretty fannish stuff, I admit it, but enjoyable and Good.

DETECTIVE COMICS #830: It's the second part of the story about the guy who squirts liquid plastic explosive on stuff! Again, the art was nice, but once it became apparent that Robin wasn't going to have to chop his own arm off with an axe to get away from the plastic explosive, I kind of lost interest. (Not only does Robin not have to chop off his own arm, all he has to do is find the miniature detonator--which he does but can't reach. Stuart Moore has constructed the deathtrap equivalent of someone telling you there's a big hairy spider right between your shoulderblades. Actually, I lie; even that is more exciting and tense than the deathtrap we see here.) Pretty art again bumps it up to Eh, but considering how lovey-dovey I'm being with the week's books, that's probably a sign the book is barely that.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the: Graeme finishes 3/21 books, and just in time.

The final (?) cat update for now: She's home and relaxing, with a belly entirely shaved from all the doctorin' and scanning that she's had to go through in the last couple of days. Her heart, it turns out, is enlarged because of liquid inside it that they're still not entirely sure about, but all her test results checked out remarkably well; we literally went from being told that maybe we should get ready to say goodbye on Sunday night to everything apparently being alright a day later. We're monitoring her breathing - and as a result, both of us have real problems with the idea of leaving her alone in the house while we have work today, but what can you do? - and both Kate and I are nervously playing with her and hoping for the best, still. It's too early to say that she's fine or that the danger's passed. But nonetheless, it's really rather nice to have her home, if nothing else. Thanks to all who left or sent messages of goodwill.

AQUAMAN: SWORD OF ATLANTIS #50: In which Tad Williams comes on the book and decides that somethings just have to change. Maybe it's because I don't follow the book regularly - Aquaman at the best of times is a hard sell to me, much to Kate's disappointment (She's had a crush on the character ever since he was on Smallville for the first time, back when she liked Smallville. Nowadays, she's gone off the show; the "Lois dresses in PVC catsuit and pretends to be a stripper in order to seduce a wrestler who dresses in a schoolgirl outfit so that she can break into an underground wrestling ring" plot being the last straw. And when I put it like that, suddenly hundreds of non-Smallville viewers head to BitTorrent in anticipatory masturbatory glee) - but this issue seems to move at a ridiculous pace, with characters spouting exposition in order to get all the plot and character furniture just the way that the new writing tenant wants it: New characters are introduced, old characters are reintroduced, the old Aquaman is killed off in a very offhand manner (which means, of course, he'll be back before too long), and there's something enjoyable about the wild abandon of the whole enterprise. I've seen complaints about the style not being serious enough for fans of the previous Underwater Barbarian take on the character, but Shawn McManus's cartoony look fits with the broad writing just enough to make you think that, just maybe, there's nothing that bad about such an old-fashioned superhero comic that dares to bring back Aquaman's sidekick who makes jokes about shitting himself as if he was in Finding Nemo. I have no idea if I'm engaged enough to pick up #51, but #50 was definitely much more Okay than I was expecting it to be.

What I Read and How I Read it, Part I: Jeff and the 3/21 Books.

First, is it wrong to be a prayin' man about an action movie? Point of Impact is one of my favorite sniper dude novels (although I've loved all of the Swagger books by Stephen Hunter) and I'm kind of worried about its adaptation, Shooter which came out this weekend. I mean, they certainly could've done worse than getting Mark Wahlberg for the lead (at one point, our man Keanu Reeves was attached, which would've been awful) but I'm worried about the director Antoine Fuqua who's done at least one good action movie (Training Day) and at least one absolutely turdy one (King Arthur). Have any other Point of Impact fans seen Shooter? Will I hate it? It's times like this I wish Garth Ennis had a blog or something--I remember him recommending the Hunter books to somebody at some point, and I'd totally trust whatever he had to say about the film. Second, speaking of Ennis, anyone know if there are going to be letters pages when The Boys resumes publication? I sure hope so: Ennis always crafted an entertaining letters page and it'd be great to have those back.

Third,

52 WEEK #46: A weird, but not unwelcome, shift in tone as Black Adam fights the mad scientists of Crazy Island. Normally, I'd give it more points off for that but considering I didn't like last issue's tone very much, I'll just take the cheap way out and give it a very high OK.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #539: Very anticlimactic, as May gets shot but not much happens other than Peter getting very pissed. I did like how jarring it was to see him openly swinging around as Peter Parker, though, and May's not out of the picture yet so... I dunno. OK, I guess? I've really checked out of the storyline which probably doesn't bode well overall, but I keep checking in to see if/when I'm gonna start caring again.

AQUAMAN SWORD OF ATLANTIS #50: Williams is a witty writer, and the art by Sean McManus has a ton of charm, and I also appreciated that Williams was bringing back old plotlines (like good ol' Sub Diego)--but I also think that witty and charming aren't the main qualities I want in my underwater barbarian book. This was OK, though, and there are enough plusses that I'll be back for more.

ARMY @ LOVE #1: Fans of the batshit should rush out and pick this up--it's probably the closest book I've read to Prez #1 in a long, long time. Honestly, it's no more wrong-headed than Exterminators or Testament but it's both more puzzling and more enjoyable than either of those books thanks to the talents of writer/artist Rick Veitch. Veitch is armed with talent and a decent hook--how the sexual tensions in the ranks during the current war are translating into some very strange new dynamics on the battlefront (my favorite image from the book may be the black sacks placed over prisoners' heads that manage to conjure up both Abu Ghraib torture and a bondage club gear simultaneously)--and absolutely no idea how to connect that to the current generation. Despite the cell phones used by troops and the Wiccan sub-commander, Veitch's idea of sexual chaos springs right from the '70s, with two married couples each with cheating spouses, the workaholic husband, the young wife with the itch her hubby isn't scratching, etc., etc.--kind of a satire of John Updike novels where instead of cocktail parties you've got a war in the Middle East. It probably would've killed back in '72.

But in 2007, Army @ Love reads wrong--the same way goofy ol' Prez read when it hit the stands. Admittedly, this is just the first issue, but I'd think even the most casual observer of today would skew the idea of erotic-thanatic shenanigans toward Myspace pages, Youtube videos and the Missed Connections of Craig's List than the idea of War as a great big key party with landmines ringing the hot tub at Plato's Retreat.

Also, knowing Veitch's propensity for drawing ugly people, the editors have teamed him with Gary Erskine on inks so that now the people are now merely unattractive. While not a bad idea, it's kinda falls flat as everyone looks paunchy and middle-aged in a way that works against the book's conceit.

But, again, Veitch is talented and he's got something to say, and I found something deeply appealing about Army @ Love's wrongness. If nothing else, it is entertainingly apeshit in a way that I find more encouraging than Exterminators and Testament--the mark of a master off his game rather than new talents who still can't figure out the game's rules. If you like "teh cazy," you'll find it at least OK. If not, I only ask that you put up with it for as long as possible so freaks like me can enjoy it.

My lack of surprise: Graeme looks at Vertigo, 3/21.

For those of you who want a sick cat update, we're waiting to hear more but she seems to have an enlarged heart, which is what's causing her to breathe erratically. Of course, what caused the enlarged heart and vomiting is something that the doctors are still investigating, using both the highest and most expensive of technologies. Nonetheless, both Kate and myself are wusslike emotional wrecks about the whole thing, and pretending to investigate the possibility of turning her into an immortal cyborg cat so that we don't have to deal with this again in the future (Perhaps an immortal cyborg cat assassin, so that way she could pay us back for the cost of the cyborg parts. Who knows?) as we realistically face up to what appears to be the oncoming train of a fact that our cat won't be staying around for awhile. You'll all know it's bad news when I never mention the cat again; it's bad enough being a downer like this at the start of reviews, but if one started "And today, our cat died," then I would suddenly have turned into the first emo comic reviewer and should be ashamed of myself. Instead, shall we talk about "adult" comics? ARMY@LOVE #1: Weirdly enough, I read a black and white preview of this about a month or so ago, and remember really, really disliking it; it seemed scattered and disjointed, aimess and mean-spirited. But reading the finished book, it seemed as if there was a rewrite somewhere, and I'm not entirely sure where - Maybe there were pages added, or dialogue was tweaked to bring things into greater focus? Don't get me wrong, it's still a mess, but it's less of a mess now and I'm not really sure what has changed outside of the color being added.

The majority of my problem with the story is that it doesn't seem to have any more depth than your average episode of Desperate Housewives. The somewhat self-congratulatory text piece where Rick Veitch writes about the book being new because it's comedy from tragedy without the distance of time appears to miss the modern satirical landscape of things like The Daily Show, Colbert Report or The Onion, which have done exactly the same thing, but better, for years, and the book itself reads dated and unaware in the same way (The military encourages, what, immorality (?) as a way of motivating its soldiers - but doesn't that seem oddly lazy or quaint as a satirical idea in light of the Abu Garib scandal, years ago?). There isn't any subtlety or nuance in the satire, whether it be political or social, nor does there really feel like there's any direction or intent to it beyond wanting people to think it satirical and shocking.

Artwise, Gary Erskine's inking over Veitch's pencils manages to both update his look and still keep it looking like an alternative book from the 70s. I'm not the biggest fan of Veitch's art (and suddenly I have a horde of Swamp Thing fans after me), but it's off-kilter and broad enough to work here, in the character work if not the action sequences, but I do tend to wonder whether an artist with a stronger style would have given the book a stronger sense of personality, and solved some of the problems I had with the writing and made the issue more than just something that makes you go Eh. The coloring's nice, though.

JOHN CONSTANTINE: HELLBLAZER #230: I'm getting way too cynical about these things, I think; I got to the end of this issue with its "To Be Concluded" and thought, well, why? Not that I didn't want the story to be finished, but because I felt that it already had been - We'd found out who had really killed the girl in question, and he seemed to be getting his come-uppance... The only things left (especially if the story was to be continue for only one more issue) were gore and more professional cockney menace, none of which we need anymore. There was nothing wrong with this issue, per se - new writer Andy Diggle has the voice of the character down and Leonardo Manco's art is gritty and ink-splattered as you'd expect, and that's kind of the problem: We've seen this before. By this point, we've seen this 229 times before, in fact, and this approach to it (Returning, I guess, to the source material?) just underlines that and makes the book look its age. Yes, it's the longest-lasting Vertigo book (and right now, one of the longest-lasting DC books in general), but that isn't enough reason to keep it going in and of itself, you know? Eh, again, and I'm sure that my lack of response to both Vertigo's newest and oldest books either says something about my jadedness, Vertigo's lack of surprise or presence as a publisher these days, or both.

Excuse me while I seem distracted: Graeme continues to plow through 3/21 books.

Ah, the joys of pet-parenting; Kate and I are just back from the Pet Hospital on 9th Avenue, after dropping off our cat for an overnight stay because she's having trouble breathing and not vomiting over our carpets. I'm trying to think comics, but really I'm flashing to imagined images of a little black cat hooked up with IV drips and a thermometer sticking out her mouth. BIRDS OF PREY #104: I don't know if there's a difference between "You didn't see that last page coming!" because it's a well set-up, yet unforeseen plot twist that, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense, or because it literally comes out of nowhere with no foreshadowing or reason to particularly exist. I mean, obviously there is, but both make the "you didn't see it coming" thing true, and so does it really matter that the end of this issue - apparently bringing a long-dead character who has never appeared in this book back to life - is the latter rather than the former? The saddest thing may be that the shock ending that's getting the Newsarama coverage is the worst thing about this otherwise Good issue - Bringing her two teams (the Birds and guest stars the Secret Six) together brings out the best in Gail Simone's dialogue, and her plotting is tighter than it's been in a long time. If we get a good rationale for why certain mystery character is back from the dead next issue, this could even be a return to form for this book.

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #2: As (I think?) Ian Brill was saying the other day, Mark Waid's new team-up series proves that he's the new Bob Haney to Grant Morrison's John Broome. Or something. Nonetheless, this book is just plain fun; superheroics that embrace the fantastic and over the top while managing to come up with a better characterization in one issue for Supergirl than Jeph Loeb and Joe Kelly have managed in the last year or so of her own book. Excellent stuff, and even better than the first issue.

THE FLASH: THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE #10: Wait, so last issue wasn't filler? It was the first part of an ongoing storyline...? Then why does this issue have nothing to do with what happened last month? Yet again, it's competent enough, but not especially enjoyable. Eh, and all done before and better with the previous version of the character.

RUNAWAYS SAGA: Mentioned just because my mate Mindy was partially responsible for the actual recap meat of the issue, and because - despite the fact that she didn't believe me when I told her this - the diary of 11-year-old Molly really reads like the way Mindy speaks, in my mind. It's tough to do any kind of review of a "Saga" book, because who wants to review what's essentially a clip show? But that said, there's more to this than most, not least of which the humor of Molly's take on what's happened to date or Humberto Ramos's very enjoyable art. If you're looking to catch up on the series before Joss Whedon takes over next month, this is a Good way of not only getting plot details but also a taste of the tone of the book. But, like I said, I'm biased.

THE SPIRIT #4: Maybe it's me, but this seemed weaker than the last three issues - Very Good, say, instead of excellent - and part of me wonders if it's because of the subject matter. The Spirit makes sense to me as a crimefighting detective, and as soon as you take him out of that and try to put him in a story about fighting terrorism then my interest starts to wain. Add to that the taking-you-out-of-the-story narration of a CIA agent who suddenly switches from just-the-facts to "What am I doing? This is sooo wrong!" (Like, totally), and I'm left hoping that next issue sees some straight-forward criminal-punching and pronto.

Y: THE LAST MAN #55: You can tell that this is the last storyline, because the characters are beginning to talk about their own development just to remind the reader. Ignoring the expositionary value, though, this feels like the strongest issue of the series for awhile - we're back with the main characters, and finally getting back to the quest that started the series. I'm waiting for the traditional Vaughan twist midway through this arc - Beth doesn't love you anymore, Yorick! She's a lesbian! - but could probably happily deal with another couple of episodes of this kind of thing before we get there, to be honest. Good.

Still not done with this week's books - I have Aquaman, Army@Love and Hellblazer to get through, and at the suggestion of some of you I picked up Fray this week in trade - so no PICK OF THE WEAK yet, but I can easily say that PICK OF THE WEEK is Brave and Bold; all superhero comics should have planets that are entirely like Las Vegas. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to call the pet hospital again to continue being annoying and asking for updates...

A Quick One While He's Away: Graeme and a book that didn't come out this week after all.

A short one today, because I'm tired and a wuss. It's been a long and strange week, what can I say? KING CITY Volume 1: Proof that this whole internet thing has legs: I picked this graphic novel by Brandon Graham up not because I knew anything about it, or was familiar with Graham's work, but purely because I'd read a couple of positive reviews (by, I think, Chris Butcher and Kevin Church?) and was curious. Luckily, it worked out - This is an unusual but enjoyable book that's very much of its own thing even as it wears its influences on it's sleeve. If you added Eduardo Risso, Paul Pope and Pete Fowler together, you'd have something that looked like Graham's artwork in this book - contemporary, sexy and full of attitude but oddly cute, nonetheless - but it's art that's being used in the service of a story that doesn't entirely match its quality. It comes close; the plot is sprawling, mixing an updated noir kick of good people doing bad things and lost love with fantastical elements (cats as infinite weaponary, zombie wars, self-perpetuating drugs), but its lack of focus is offset by its inventiveness; there are some great concepts in here used just enough (or, in some cases, barely used at all), and none of them outstay their welcome. While the dialogue occasionally seems generic and by-the-numbers - particularly at the start of the book - the narration works better throughout, and is occasionally wonderful (When Joe, the main character, sees the femme fatale of the story: "I bet she's got just the right amount of eyelids and teeth. Plus a full set of magical equipment. Breasts: The old one-two."). The end result, though, is a Very Good book that works as a complete piece as much as the first half of a longer story, and perhaps more importantly, leaves you wanting to read the second half almost immediately. If only to see what other things that the impossible cat can do.

Tomorrow: Probably lots of short reviews, because it's Sunday...

Two Kinds of Heartbreak: A Quick Look at Hip Flask and Yukiko's Spinach

What a relief. I felt really, really shitty yesterday and my main thought of the day was something like, "No! Can't...get...sick! Must...change....blog's...reputation...for being...unhealthy!" And today I feel a million times better. I'm still sticking to my new theory, however, which is that blogging on a regular basis makes you ill. It takes up so much time you can't spend as much time in front of the Renewvo Regeneratron (or "Playstation 2," as it's more popularly known) as you need in order to stay healthy. Anyway, before I get set to go open the store I thought there was a very faint link between the following two books:

HIP FLASK CONCRETE JUNGLE: See, this book breaks my heart. It's a collection of several issues of Casey and Ladronn's Hip Flask mini from what I believe was several years ago collected into a Euro style hardcover album for (gasp!) 30 bucks. I read it at the store last week, and thought Casey did a pretty good job giving the characters and world a very consistent tone. But it's the painting by Ladronn that really got me--I'd bought the first issue or two included here and thought they were lovely, but at this size they are brain-achingly gorgeous and almost feverishly textural: rhinos in smoking jackets, and hippos in trench coats, and zebras in tuxedos, and soft-skinned women recoiling against leather-seated interiors with a pale blue sky settling into a windowpane. Like nearly every science fiction comic from the last twenty-plus years, the city looks like the one in Blade Runner, but Ladronn's use of color makes that ol' trope come alive again, and I just spent most of my time looking through this book with my mouth agape. It's like a magic mud puddle, half an inch deep but able to reflect all the colors of the world so vividly you swear you never truly saw them until then.

And yet--it's thirty fuckin' bucks and nothing happens in it. Somebody dies. Somebody else dies. Every single character appears to have a shadowy past. Things are alluded to. Flashbacks are plentiful. Dead ends are pursued. Since I invoked its name once, lemme do so again: it's like paying thirty dollars to watch twenty minutes from the middle of Blade Runner. And considering I bought two of these issues, like, three years ago, I have the sneaking suspicion the story isn't even finished. It's heartbreaking because the art is so good, you have to see it, and yet I can't recommend you buy it at this price. My only hope is that every library in America buys it so people can go check it out and get lost in it for a while.

YUKIKOS SPINACH NEW EDITION GN: See, and this book is about heartbreak. I guess I read Mariko Parade (or maybe Love Hotel?) about a year or two back, knowing nothing about Frédéric Boilet and the Nouvelle Manga movement other than what the book told me on the flaps, and I was pretty underwhelmed by its love story between a French cartoonist and a Japanese student. The whole thing struck me as big ol' flapdoodle over nothing, the Franco-Nihon equivalent of Jungle Fever and a new marketing term to peddle the same ol' second-rate filler.

But over time, I realized that a few of the author's observations stayed with me. There was a description, as I recall, in Mariko Parade about how one of the essential components to eroticism for the Japanese is a sense of loss, and that the affair, once begun, is already sweetened by the sadnes of its inevitable end, and there was something about that observation that allowed me some insight into stuff I read or watched since.

So when this new edition of Yukiko's Spinach came out--the original work by Frédéric Boilet that started all of this off--I picked it up, sure that it would be more codswollop, but hopeful there would be something decent in it.

In fact, Yukiko's Spinach is a much stronger work than the stuff Boilet did later--a poignant little story about seduction and sex and love buttressed by a formalist structure. Although Boilet uses extensive photoreferences to tell his story, he makes extensive use of sketches to counter-balance that. Even better, the way he frames the story of the cartoonist remembering his affair, the action happens in photoreferenced illustrations but the memories of the scenes are replayed through sketches and thumbnails. In doing so, Boilet draws attention not only to the way in which the book is constructed, but underlines the way in which the lover is constructing his memory of the affair and, by the end, potentially using those thumbnails not just for the construction of memory, but as a blueprint for future seductions.

Surprisingly, Yukiko's Spinach isn't half as twee as the title suggests, nor half as cynical as I make it sound, but occupies some perfect middle ground between romance and maturity, seduction and idealism, love and lust. And, as promised, the book in fact shows how a love affair, by ending even as it begins, can be suffused with a sadness that is genuinely sexy and sweet. A Good read and if the sort of thing you think you might like, you probably will.

Yes, I'm really posting before I go to work today: Graeme, 3/21 books, etc.

You know what I'm surprised that I haven't seen this week? More outrage about the latest New Avengers solicitation (which, if you haven't seen it, is this: "No hype! No BS! The most important last page of any Marvel comic this year! Do not miss it!" That's it, apart from the credits and other infomation about length, price, etc.). It was only, what, three years ago (two years ago, maybe?) that the comics internet was falling over itself in outrage about the claim that House of M #3 would break the internet in half, so the near-total silence about the New Avengers line (which even starts "No hype! No BS!" just to bait people) has to be some kind of good sign that either we've all grown up a lot since, then, or that Marvel's BS hype has entirely worn out its effectiveness. Or, of course, that I'm blind and have missed a thunderstorm of people being upset and excited all at once right beside me. Their eyes may even be swiveling, which I've heard happens all the time these days.

Nonetheless, I'm amused to see what the last page of the comic is going to be, considering it has to be beat the "Look. Captain America is on a slab. Dead." of Cap #25. Maybe it's Cap alive again already? Or someone else dying so that we can get a five-part miniseries about that, as well? Part of me hopes that it's something entirely offbeat, like Brian K. Vaughan has abused his new staff position at Lost, and the last page is one tiny little talking head and the rest is a speech balloon where Iron Man appears and, because he can see the future these days, gives away the ending of Lost to the readers. Although, of course, that would depend on there being an actual end of Lost already, as opposed to the writers clearly just making shit up as they're going along: "What would you say if I told you that there was a magic box where, once you open it, your heart's desire is inside?" I'd say you have no idea what you're writing anymore, and I really, really hope that was a metaphor for who was trapped inside the cell at the end of the episode instead of, you know, a real magic box, personally.

That said, poor John Locke. His dad? Kind of a bastard.

Anyway: C! O! M! I! C! S! Quickly, because I've just babbled for far too long already.

52 WEEK FORTY-SIX: And just as I'm complaining that the series is unraveling, they do an issue like this and I'm sucked back in. Not that any of my concerns from last time are really addressed - aside from maybe that the balancing of storylines seems to be coming back, and it looks like there's more to Steel's storyline than I thought (The announcement that Steel is going to be starring in a new Infinity Inc. series from this past weekend was both unexpected and somewhat head-scratching - He's the breakout character from the book? Really? - but any new Peter Milligan writing would be nice, I have to admit) - but seeing Black Adam defeated by the island of misfit mad scientists was both surprising and amusing. I expected Adam's rage to be the driving force behind WW3 in a month, but now it's beginning to look like there's more going on than I'd given them credit for. The scenes with the scientists was great, as well - simultaneously making them comedic ("I'll say it if no-one else will... Feel free to cackle hysterically, gentlemen!") but also weirdly threatening at the same time, considering that they, you know, beat Black Adam without really breaking a sweat. For the first time in a more weeks than should be the case, this book is fun again instead of just being relentless plot-hammering. Maybe that turnaround really is just around the corner. Good.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #4: This, on the other hand, felt like a mess: Rushed, unclear, and pointless. After three issues of building up the new Nazi badguys as the villains of the piece, they're largely dealt with offpanel so that we can see Wildcat's son - who has powers that let him turn into a werecat, which are never really explained - beat up Vandal Savage before he gets hit by a fire engine, and then it's back to subplot city. It's an unsatisfying conclusion all-round because the reveal of Savage as the villain behind the villains, and subsequent focus on him as opposed to the guys we've been seeing since issue 1, feels like bait and switch, and what little we do see of the Nazi showdown is there more as grist for the angst-mill (and nonsensical grist, at that: "I blew up Jesse! I hurt her so bad, I am evil and an ugly monster and I - Oh, wait, she's up and about a couple of panels later with no immediately obvious effects. Never mind.") than anything else. More than anything else, it feels as if Geoff Johns was told that he'd have to cut the storyline down so that they can fit in the Justice League crossover next month, and that he did it by literally just throwing out scenes until he had 22-odd pages of comic left. Pretty much Eh.

More tomorrow, potentially.

Change For Change's Sake: Hibbs' on 3/21 part, uh, 3?

Everyone's out of the house, blessed silence is mine for an hour or so, hurrah! So... work on Onomatopoeia (everyone hit their deadlines EARLY, hurray!), or do some reviews?

I better review, because if I hold THAT til night, then I'm too cranky, and only do 1-2 books, and I can do Onomatopoeia in "neutral" much easier...

AQUAMAN: SWORD OF ATLANTIS #50: I've said several times that I just don't care about Atlantis too much, but this issue got me a lot closer with a number of new and fairly interesting additions to the concept. Heck, it even has the (re)introduction of A's "sidekick" Topo. But, ultimately, I still didn't care that much about it, and I think it has to do more with the meta issues of Who Is Aquaman then the specific content of the book. I really detest, for example, that the new Aquaman is "Arthur Curry". Or the somewhat creepy interactions that Mera and "Arthur" have (she's old enough to be his mother, isn't she?) Or, for that matter what a punk and anti-heroic passive ending they gave to the "Dweller". And while the Narwhal character was fairly intriguing, he visually looked way too much like "Arthur" for me. Mm, and the sort of tossed off way they "fixed" San Diego, where they'll (you know it) never ever deal with the ramifications of a major American city being treated like that. And yet, this does feel a bit like a sustainable direction despite my whinging. Williams has to learn how a comics page works, a bit more (all through my reading of this, I kept thinking "this'd work better in prose", while forgetting that is William's background) -- little fun details like the "I inked myself" joke end up falling flat because there's not a good image/text counterpoint. But even with all of that, I'm still going to go with a fairly high OK, with the sense that this book *could* become "GOOD" at some point soon.

52 WEEK 46: Well at least that, kind of, explains how the next month won't just be "Adam kills people over and over again" (though I'd think it would open up many many geo-political questions about what the world should do about Oolong island, no?) as we go to the inevitable World War 3. Because of the focus on Oolong, this was one of my favorite issues in the last good while. The Steel thread also comes back for a few pages, mostly to tie up a couple of OYL things, but I literally can't fathom how Clark led everyone straight to Lex, or, really, even why Lex was sitting right there, waiting to be taken. All in all? A GOOD issue.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #539: Here's what I'll say: if one was to read this comic without any great knowledge or understanding of Spidey continuity, it parses just fine. It moves along adequately, the emotional through-line is fine. I just don't believe that Peter woulda kept a black costume, in the first place, given the previous history. I also still can't figure out what he's currently on the run FOR -- he is, after all, a fully licensed and registered super-hero, and you'd think ol Futurist Tony would have gone on national TV and told everyone to leave Peter alone, right? (Unless, of course, he's a y'know, huge raging dick) So, yeah, plothammery plothammers dictate the shape of the story for the next X, and that sucks as it always does, but I thought the EXECUTION of the plothammer was fairly adequate. I'll even go with a high OK.

MS. MARVEL #13: Branding this as a "The Initiative" book is such a post-event mistake -- the kind that both Marvel and DC regularly engage in. The Initiative bits are so, really, tossed off (look at that scene where Carol's "team" gets introduced. "Hi." is about the most dialogue any character gets), despite the fact that they're going to form the spine of the book for the next bit, that I think this kind of comic really weakens the post-event Branding. Its not that the book is bad -- its not, its fine -- but its just pretty unrelentingly dull, and the whole "Best of the Best" thing... well, man, this is issue #13 (14 if you count that odd special) -- wasn't that supposed to be the premise of the title from #1? And STILL I don't feel like we're ANYwhere near that point -- it's just a lot of empty sloganeering at this moment in time. So, yeah, deeply, painfully EH.

THE FLASH #10: Liked this one, at least up to the point where Zoom showed up out of nowhere for no reason, then gets defeated way too easily making him seem like no threat whatsoever. I also still am wondering when Bart is going to develop a distinguishable character. Hm, no that's not quite it -- its more like I was reading this thinking "this could be Wally... why isn't it Wally? Just change the name in the captions, and its a Wally story." Why is Bart DIFFERENT from the Flashes before him? I just don't get the game plan other than "Flashes change during Crisii". Despite that, this was highly OK. A better artist, and maybe it could get up to "GOOD" before too long.

OK, that's it for now, time to get ready for work!

-B

Slightly Risque and Potentially Inaccurate: Jeff Reviews the First 15 Minutes of GTA:VCS

Ack, look at that Graeme McMillan--he finished his part of the newsletter and he's giving you comic reviews! Me, I barely posted anything yesterday and now, until I figure out what, if anything, I have to say about Yukiko's Spinach, I'm going to review the first fifteen minutes of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories for the Playstation 2. I received my copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories the other day. Despite being 100% pleased with the game I was spending playing Dragon Quest VIII (which, if you like old school video game RPGs and the design work of Akira Toriyama, you pretty much owe it to yourself to buy--half the monsters you encounter look like outtakes from Dr. Slump), I threw GTA:VCS into my console like it was bucket of water on some flaming curtains. That is the power the Grand Theft Auto franchise holds over somebody like me. I can't really say what I was thinking as I did so, because there wasn't a lot of rational thought going on at that point, but it was something like, "I'll just see what part of the city you start out in...."

Interestingly, the first thing I noticed playing GTA: VCS was the pain; my eyes hurt constantly the whole time I was playing it. After the clean cel-shaded goodness of DQ8, my brain couldn't quite understand why someone had smeared vaseline all over my TV tube so thoroughly. Also, the camera perspective made me feel like I had a blind spot on my left which I kept trying to compensate for. And, finally, the opening, after a lengthy credit sequence, is a helicopter landing at an army base, followed by your character walking into a military office and talking to his corrupt superior officer and getting a job to drive someplace. I've seen more dramatic openings in porn.

In fact, the opening dialogue kinda reminded me of bad '80s porn. GTA:VCS's opening goes roughly like this:

Corrupt Superior Office: Welcome to Vice City, Vance! You're gonna have a good time here!

Your Character: I don't care about a good time, sir. All I care about is my family. I had to enter the military to take care of them. I can't afford to mess that up. They're counting on me.

CSO: What? You won't mess anything up! I'm not talking about anything dangerous, I'm just talking about having a good time and making money!

[beat]

So, look. All I need you to do is go deliver a package for me to my friend on the docks. That's all! That shouldn't be a big deal, right?

YC: Well... okay.

Contrast this to bad '80s porn dialogue, which I recall running something like:

Corrupt Boyfriend/Film Producer/Talent Agent/Previously Absent Father Figure: Hey, baby! Welcome to [my sex club/ the sex industry/ the music industry/ my family estate], [Name of porn star]! You're gonna have a good time here!

Porn Star: I don't care about a good time, [boyfriend's name (usually Jake)/ Mr. (last name of producer/agent)/ Dad]. All I care about is [true love/ making it big/ becoming a star/ my horribly upset mother who sent me here]. So don't fuck it up for me!

CB/FP/TA/PAFF: What? Who said anything about fucking things up? I'm not talking about anything [kinky/ kinky/ kinky & demeaning/ kinky & demeaning & incestuous], I'm just talking about having a good time and [making money/ making money/ making money/ getting the family back together again]!

[beat]

So, look. All I need you to do is [blow me/ blow me/ blow me/ blow me and your brother Jake here]. That's all! That shouldn't be a big deal, right?

PS: Well...okay!

To me, the comparison is sadly apt--just as the "plot" in porn exists just to get the sex going, the "plot" in GTA:VCS is just an excuse to get you driving around as soon as possible and hooked in with the wrong crowd who'll give you missions. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing (I admit all I wanted was to start driving around the city to see what was different and hear what was on the radio--and while I can't tell you much on the first front, on the second I heard Japan, Marvin Gaye and, most satisfyingly, "Rock You Like A Hurricane" by The Scorpions), it's a far cry from the old days when Rockstar would start by ripping off the plot from their favorite crime movie then try to make you care about the character.

On the other hand, it's only the first fifteen minutes (or really, only the first five with a lot of driving around thrown in) of the game, and I didn't like Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories until about four or five hours in. And it's a budget title (cheaper than buying seven Brian Bendis comics) that was originally released, for Christ's sake, on a handheld and inexpensively ported over to a video game console reportedly on its last legs. So probably I should just shut up and enjoy the hot girl-on-girl-on-piano-in-recording-studio action while I can. But if you find yourself playing this game and feeling what Simon Pegg in Spaced describes as "a moment of clarity," take cold comfort in knowing that you're not alone.

No-one is Belushi, though: Graeme does 3/21, part two.

AFTER THE CAPE #1: I have no idea whether it's intentional or not, but the first issue of this new three issue superhero series from Image (specifically from Jim Valentino's Shadowline imprint, and his plotting here is perhaps the best argument for his return to autobiographical comics yet) reminds me of nothing as much as a generic mid-'90s indie book. It's not just the content of the book; even the format - the thick, inky pages that stain your hands, the lack of additional content beyond the story itself and full-page previews of the next issue's cover, the attempt at a Bullpen Bulletin page that's set in bland Times New Roman type just large enough to look as if there wasn't enough text to fill the page normally - brings to mind Caliber or Trident books of my youth. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

There's something that's missing about this book, and I'm not entirely sure what it is. I'm tempted to be a dick and say that it's "quality," but that's kind of cheap, and not entirely correct - The creators are definitely trying their best, but those efforts are somewhat misguided and unfocused, and the ultimate aim seems to be something unoriginal and unnecessary in today's environment. I mean, do we really need another story about superheroes with feet of clay and problems just like normal people, when the largest superhero publisher is pushing their entire line in that direction and doing it with the big name toys that we've known since we were children? The only way to make a book like that work if you're an indie publisher is to do something that the mainstream publishers can't, or won't - either take it farther, or do it better. On the evidence of this first issue, this series isn't looking to do either.

Howard Wong - who's listed as the creator of the book, but doesn't plot it, interestingly enough - gives us a script that's loaded with unsubtle scenes that don't hang together well enough to provide a consistent plot. We're shown that the superhero - Captain Gravity, whose very name sounds like an afterthought - is an alcoholic through a series of scenes with captions like "Hell one drink won't hurt" and "Nothing to worry about... it's just one drink." His good-natured wife, who straddles the line between trusting and naive, seems to miss that he's not only going to the office every day as he claims, but that he's also an alcoholic and criminal. We know this, because we have two unnamed characters talking about her behind her back: "Sad, isn't it? She still believes in him... How many more times is he going to put her through his bullshit? Breaks my heart, ya know?" More worryingly for the reader, the plot doesn't make sense, because none of the characters' actions are given any reason or context - How did the superhero become a criminal in the first place? And why? The story doesn't give an explanation, which seems lazy and dilutes the drama of what happens after the crime takes place, because we're not given any reason to care (Maybe an explanation is coming next issue? We're not given any reason to suspect that that's the case given the structure of this issue, but it's possible).

The art, by Marco Rudy, isn't entirely polished - The balance of black and white on the page is obviously "influenced" by Frank Miller, but it lacks the finesse that Miller brings, and the figures seem weightless and flat within the page; each texture is treated exactly the same in the way it's stylized from skin to metal to cloth, and therefore nothing grabs the eye or has any greater weight than anything else. Like the script, it's so close to being working, to being professional, that it's kind of frustrating that it's not there yet. And maybe that's what makes this book feel so reminiscent of a mid-90s indie book: Not the unoriginality, not the underwhelming attempt at superhero relevance, but the "not-ready-for-prime-time-just-yet" feeling. This isn't a bad book, per se - It's no Civil War: The Initiative - it's just not a good one. Eh, but nonetheless I want it to get better, in a weird way.