KILL SHAKESPEARE #1 is, in a way, a book that makes me feel that I'm not smart enough.
Okay, that's not exactly true. What I mean is, the reaction to the book makes me feel that I'm not smart enough. I look at things like Tim Callahan's scathing review over at CBR or Frank Miller's Shakespeare scholar girlfriend's rant at Bleeding Cool and think, clearly there's something wrong with me that I actually kind of enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that it's anything more than an entertaining populist detournment of Shakespeare's characters that takes them into something closer to high concept action movie territory (The McGuffin, that Hamlet can only regain his destiny and free will by stealing the quill that belongs to a wizard whose name is William Shakespeare dances across the line of genius and stupid so often in my head that I really don't know which side it really belongs on, to be honest), but that doesn't mean it's not entirely enjoyable on that level. I disliked reading Shakespeare enough in high school that I can only assume that complaints about mischaracterization are entirely valid, but it also feels to me that that's missing the point, a little - that this is very clearly an INO use of those characters, taking the familiar names and settings and using them for entirely different, meta-textual and referential means.
(What I'm interested to see if whether there's something to this reappropriation, or whether it's just a gimmick. As much as I'm defending it above, I have an anxious desire that there's something more to it than we get with the first issue - If it really turns into a case where the Shakespearean connection is merely a way to get readers' attention and that the book doesn't actually offer any true commentary on the original Shakespearean plays by the end of the series, I'll be disappointed.)
Interestingly enough (to me, at least) is that I feel like the anti-Tim Callahan; while he hated the writing and liked the art, I'm pretty much the opposite. It's not that Andy Belanger's art is bad, but it's wrong for this book, for me - It's too clean, and too polite. I found myself wishing for the brushwork of a Stefano Gaudiano or the energy of a Davide Gianfelice, something to add texture and life to the story and make the period setting feel more authentic and dangerous. With a different artist, Kill Shakespeare could've been great; as it is, I still think it's Good, even if that means I'm not as smart as I'd want to be.
Spot the mistake in this sentence, which paraphrases my thought process in a recent reading of X-MEN: MESSIAH COMPLEX: "Hey, it's a massive X-book crossover, just like back in the '90s, but with writers I really like, like Ed Brubaker and Mike Carey! This'll be like a trip down memory lane, but good!"
That's right. It's those last two words. If there's one thing that Messiah CompleX taught me, it's this: X-Men is the Peter Pan of comics, only replace "the boy that never grows up" with "the superhero comic that never seems to change whatsoever."
It's really kind of stunning to me, the way in which writers seem to have absolutely no impact on X-Men comics anymore. Brubaker and Carey (and, for that matter, Peter David, Chris Yost and Craig Kyle, who are the other writers in this collection) are strong writers who normally have individual voices, but there's really no way you could tell that from reading this story; in a way, it's almost a testament to each writer that the chapters written by different people all seem to have the same authorial voice, but the problem is really that said voice is this weird undead Fabian Nicieza thing, as opposed to the sum of its individual parts (Reading recent X-Men comics, it has to be said that there's probably a case for Nicieza being the most influential writer for the franchise in the last twenty or so years - Definitely, the current crop of X-books hew closer to his writing in terms of dialogue and plot than Claremont).
Equally stunning is the fact that Messiah CompleX reads entirely like an X-book crossover from the 1990s, complete with "X"-based pun in the title (Remember The X-Cutioner's Song? Those were the days...). Switch up the artists - or maybe just the coloring - and you could've traveled back 15 years and given it to an X-fan without their blinking. The themes, the atmosphere, the plot points all feel the same - Everyone hates mutants! But maybe there's hope! But there's a traitor in the X-Men's midst! And time travel will be involved somewhere! And look at how much Gambit loves Rogue! - as does the cast (Complete with too many villains with convoluted, if not entirely unclear, motivation), and their relationships. For all the "NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME AGAIN" nature of stories of these scale, the problem is that everything stays the same. It's as if Grant Morrison never happened.
And yet, if you ignore all of that - all of my disappointment in discovering that the X-Men today (well, three years ago) is pretty much identical to the X-Men of twenty years ago, and that creators I like can get lost in stories like this - and approach it on a level of simply, "does it work as a story," then... It does? Kind of? There are dead ends, and unexplained characters and decisions throughout, but the whole thing has a momentum that carries you through nonetheless, no matter how false it is. As the first chapter in a trilogy, it works well as a set-up, especially if the writers wanted to screw with the readers' expectations (In particular, Bishop is proven right at some point), and despite everything, makes me want to read on and find out what happens next... even though I already know that what happens next won't be anything other than maintaining the status quo. A confused, slightly-self-loathing Okay, in that case.
A fairly short entry today, hopefully with a part two tomorrow...
BRIGHTEST DAY #0: In terms of Setting Up The Story, this is a decent enough follow-through on BLACKEST NIGHT -- I'm a little worried if it might be overstuffed though. There are, what, 10-12 "main characters" here to deal with, whereas "52" really only had 4-5 mains. Everyone gets checked in for 2-4 pages, and there's a number of intriguing things set up, but there's "only" 27 issues to move things along, and that's a whole lot of juggling. Some of the characters might have a larger focus outside BD, maybe -- Zoom and Boomerang in The Flash, MM and the Hawks in JLA possibly, whatever, but it's still a crazy large cast and it seems like not so much space to handle it all. I thought the first issue was a low-ish GOOD, and I'm looking forward to the ride, but I'm wondering if Geoff might not be over-extending a bit here...
THE FLASH #1: didn't do a thing for me. sorry to say. Pretty darn EH, and if it weren't for the free Flash ring with #1, I'd be pretty worried about the long-term health potential here. Nothing screams "MUST READ!" to me, which is the kiss of death for entertainment in 2010...
SIEGE: LOKI #1: just mentioning this because I rapped Gillen pretty hard on the knuckles for the Thor Siege tie-in, and I thought Loki was much more "on message" as portrayed here. I kind of liked this one a decent amount (I'll give it a GOOD), but I have to say that the "classified" original solicitations on the five one-shots here really leave me scratching my head -- there's nothing going on here that couldn't have been solicited, and the deeply cynical bit of me says that what was really going on was someone said "we need five more Siege tie-ins, so we're going to schedule them. You, editors, make the books appear from thin air!", and thus these comics were "classified" because, up until 3 months ago, MARVEL didn't know what would be in them or by who. In other words, these were manufactured items created to suck more money out of your pocket, rather than anything done for compelling creative reasons, and even if they end up being decent (like this one), that's more a happy accident than anything else. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that, however.
STAR TREK: MCCOY #1: Or, as the cover says "Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor", which is a MUCH better title. John Byrne has been really hit or miss for me for much of the last decade, and I thought this one was a solid "hit", I'll go with a solid GOOD here, with my wanting to see more.
GREEN ARROW #32: Really? I don't want to beat up on this book too much, I really don't, but man this is a steaming pile of CRAP. There's a few conventions of comics that don't really withstand scrutiny -- like "Secret Identities", but that's because sledom do comics underline just how fucking stupid they are. But, it is double-underlined here, then highlighted with an orange highlighter pen. "Gasp, you mean Green Arrow is ex-Mayor Oliver Queen? Wha-?!?" OH, PLEASE! Trust me, if I threw on a domino mask, you'd still be able to tell it was me, and I'm neither the mayor of a city, nor a high-profile member of the JLA.
Then there is the whole trial/verdict thing which was just unbelievably bad -- "I'm tempted to overrule the jury, but, ah, what the hell, let's just banish you." How is that even remotely plausible anywhere anyhow? Stinnnnky!
"I saw part of me in Mia's eyes"? Really, through the non-eye-showing mask? Really?
Ugh, and the whole dismantling of the GA/BC marriage for just goofy mandated reasons...
And the ending with Hal standing in for the JLA and saying, in essence, "we don't care that you're a murderer, since a biased Jury let you off" *shudder*
I read a lot of bad comics, but I think I can completely say that Green Arrow #32 is the worst one I've read so far in 2010 -- it's not even crap, it's (the dreaded) ASS. Foo!
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Like I said, hopefully more tomorrow (or maybe Friday) -- I want to talk about OTHER LIVES and MARKET DAY and a few more comics, too.
In the meantime, what did YOU think? (And are these "same day" reviews working for you? Or is it too early?)
I'm running behind on, oh, almost everything post-WonderCon - I blame the late nights and con-going debauchery (Breakfast with Heidi MacDonald sounds innocent enough, but any breakfast in Mel's Diner is pretty damn debauched, if only from the "That can't be good for you" viewpoint) - but I wanted to drop in and say this: Dynamite: Please stop driving me away from your Green Hornet books.
I'm not the first, nor even the fiftieth person to say this, but there're no reasons whatsoever for there to be five Green Hornet books at the same time (That's as many Avengers books that Marvel have, and people actually want to read about those characters in large numbers). I'm vaguely convinced that there's something going on behind the scenes about this decision, because it's flooding the potential market on such a scale that even Dynamite don't normally do (Look at their Stargate books, which're finally being solicited; that franchise, which has a proven market, unlike the Hornet, is getting a slower and apparently smaller roll-out) - Maybe there's something about the terms of the license that means that Dynamite have to do this many series, or have X number of books released by a certain date?
Something that's particularly annoying as a reader, though, is that I have no idea how they interrelate. I mean, I know that The Green Hornet and Kato both take place in the same "Kevin Smith" continuity, and that The Green Hornet: Year One and Kato: Origins are, again, paired in terms of continuities (The Green Hornet Strikes series is off on its own, as far as I can tell), but... Are they all part of the same world? Is theGreen Hornet whose origins we see in Year One the same character who's retired in Kevin Smith's series? Will Smith's series ultimately lead to the near-future of Strikes? I am reading the books and have no idea.
And the worst part is: The books aren't that bad. Yes, that sounds like damning with faint praise, but they're perfectly enjoyable - Smith/Phil Hester and Jonathan Lau's Hornet is slick enough, if a little rushed (Why should I care about the new Kato at the end of the second issue? Why would I be bothered by someone dying next issue - it's totally the original, retired Hornet, of course - when I don't even know who any of these characters are, yet?), and Matt Wagner and Aaron Campbell's Year One is a solid chunk of pulpy goodness so far - and already overwhelmed by the weight of all the other books. If the line had launched slowly, with either one of these books, then maybe the line would've had the chance to build a fanbase, and slowly grow over time to the point where it could support multiple titles. As it is, I can't help but feel that Dynamite have not only doomed the franchise, but also made themselves look at worst greedy and best naive in pushing out so much product at once. Shame, really.
What?!?!? Reviews of the books that aren't even "5 minutes old" on the West Coast? Yeah, thought I'd try this for a week, and see the reaction. ReadySteadyGo!
AVENGERS ORIGIN #1 (OF 5): I don't know what all to say about the umpteenth retelling of the Origin of the Avengers -- it's a yeoman's job on the writing, and the Phil Noto art is relatively keen -- but I was much more interested that this is an "A" (ll ages) title from Marvel, and all of the house ads/etc, are aimed at a tween-or-younger audience. That makes it, somehow, not feel like the "real" Marvel U. I don't really think the book looks to appealing to tween-or-younger readers, however, and the retro-nature of it (Cunning, angry Hulk, pointy-headed Jan, Clunky Gold Iron Man) also works against that audience. If you're actually going for tween-or-younger, then more focus should have been put on Rick Jones and the other "kids" in his...gang? would that be the right word? But Rick is barely identified by name, and it's wholly unclear that he's the "leader" of the group, and there's less than no understanding of Rick's relationship to Banner... so I dunno. My point is target audiences are important things, and this wasn't properly presented as an "A" book in the initial wave of solicitations. This issue was solidly OK.
BOYS #41: I've kinda drifted away from THE BOYS lately -- feeling like Garth was sort of repeating himself over and over, but for some reason I grabbed the trades off my shelf when I went out for a smoke recently, and I chewed right through them in like a day. There's a real long game going on that's only barely discernible on an issue-by-issue basis, and there's lots of mythology going on that's just going to fly past you if you don't read it in big doses. On the other hand, the Annie/Hughie thing is much less plausible on the Long Game canvas, so I guess it's a trade off. I have to say though, I strongly disagree with the decision to mark "Herogasm" as THE BOYS v5 -- that storyline, despite having a few important moments in it, sucks so much forward momentum from the series that it isn't even funny. I think that's the reason that my sales on v6 have been so disappointing. Anyway issue #41 is part 2 of a storyline, so not a place to jump back on the book, if you've drifted away, but I wanted to mention that the book maybe reads better in collection anyway, and, perhaps, this is as major and transforming work for Ennis as something like PREACHER, it just hides that nature in jokes about penises and assrape. #41 was GOOD.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #34: I'm not sure how I feel about the hand-grenade that has just been thrown into Slayer continuity with this issue. In fact, I'm not even sure if I understand that ending particularly well. But I'm intrigued enough to come back next month to find out. I just wish the likenesses were as strong as they were early on. I still can't tell which character is which on more than a few pages. A reasonable GOOD.
FLASH SECRET FILES AND ORIGINS 2010 #1: Kinda-sorta "FLASH #0", but I have to say that, especially for $4, I was pretty bored with this. Barry Allen just isn't that compelling, and the continuity implant of his dead mom really isn't compelling at all -- it feels tacked on, and forced. The Flash shouldn't be coming from a point of tragedy, but of joy and continuity (After all, Barry is the one guy in the DCU that we KNOW read comics as a kid, and specifically modeled himself on his predecessor, rather than falling into sideways [GL, The Atom]) On the other hand, I really really like the Rogues, especially the "classic kind", so I'm willing to give the ongoing a chance. I guess I just feel like this is now the 10th issue of Barry, and I can't muster anything better than an EH about the whole affair...
INVINCIBLE RETURNS #1: Don't you have to go away before you return? A decent attempt at giving a jumping on point, but it just seemed like a lot of talk to me "I don't want to kill, so I'll change my costume", but what's going to happen when he walks back into war? I can't see the essential nature of the character moving in any real different direction. Solidly OK, but not amazingly stellar, and I don't think there's much here that would convince a newbie they HAD to jump on the "real" book next month.
NEW AVENGERS LUKE CAGE #1 (OF 3): Pretty ugly I thought, and it didn't seem to fill a point other than taking up a shelf-spot. Maybe too strong, but SC-scale-wise, I'll go with AWFUL.
SHIELD #1 (MARVEL): On the other hand, I really liked this one. I can't see how (at all) it has anything to do with Nick Fury, et. al., but, based on this first issue, I'm willing to give it the six months until they tell us the connections. It is kind of 1602-ish, except that it is actually IN 616 (at least I think so), and I can't really see the "natural Marvel constituency" really getting into all of the 15th century hijinx, and a S.H.I.E.L.D series is a hard sell in the best of times, so this might not make it through the first year, but I really thought it was VERY GOOD.
TURF #1: On the plus side this is one DENSE comic book. There's, what, 13 or 14 named, speaking characters? It took me TWO (different) smoke breaks to get all the way through this, and that's pretty much everything you might want from a $3 entertainment package. The characters are compelling, well-drawn and distinct. The world is interesting and rich, and for a talk-show host, it is clear that Jonathan Ross has, in fact, done his homework and "gets" how to write for comics, bringing a distinct voice, and I very much would like to see more comics work from him, going forward. In fact, from a certain POV, this was probably the very best thing that I read this week, and I'm going to go with a very easy VERY GOOD. On the minus side, I want to say that I think this would have been a better comic if it had had a strong editor reining Ross' obvious enthusiasm in just a tad -- virtually all of the dialogue could have been chopped down by 10% and retained the same meaning and richness, because economy is also a virtue. Also, though we'll see how it plays out, I'm thinking that Vampires vs Gangsters was probably enough for a first series without adding in the additional complication of the space aliens. We'll see though -- either way, I'm enthusiastically recommending that you check out this first issue.
WORLD WAR HULKS #1: This may represent what's wrong with Marvel in a snapshot: trading on the name of a successful crossover, and filling it up with a bunch of completely and totally inconsequential filler. I mean, I guess it is nice to know that Bucky Barnes and Glenn Talbot have a cold war connection... but WTF does that have to do with the Hulk, or even the thrust of this storyline? There was no "World War" here, or even a page of actual "hulk", let alone "(s)", and they are still no closer to resolving any of the various mysteries about the "red" characters than they were before. AND it is $4, AND it leads (badly) into another mini-series that just seems utterly bankrupt in idea AND execution from what they've shown us so far. Gawd, I thought this was complete CRAP on all levels, and cynical and hollow to boot.
That's what I have for you this morning... as always, what did YOU think?
I think the last time I tried to do capsule reviews was in 2008; honestly, I don't think I'm too good at them. But let me type anyways, let me stretch the old "whine about comics, boo-hoo, comics make me :( emoticon" muscles, lest they atrophy. Oh, what a tragedy that would be. If you'll indulge me.
NOT SIMPLE by Natsume Ono: This was the book of the moment briefly in January; it's sort of like Pokemon, but with gay longing instead of adorable monsters.
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What is the Pokemon formula, the shonen formula? A (1) young character goes on a (2) quest that (3) takes him from places to place, a quest to (4) be the very best at something, in order to (5) fulfill a dream that he's had (6) since childhood; his (7) optimism and (8) kind nature (9) shock but (10) ultimately attract others to aid him in his quest. And that's the story of NOT SIMPLE-- it a 10 out of 10. The only difference with NOT SIMPLE is that tragedy upon tragedy is inflicted on the main character, in place of fun, shonen hijinks. I mean-- it's a great formula; I like the formula; but not so much in a serious adult drama. FROST/NIXON/LIGHTSABERS? I would watch that; opening night. Just not so much if it were pretending to be a serious adult drama.
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(Sure-- maybe you could make a reasonable counter-argument that I'm advancing a false and spurious notion that "art" has to, like, defy the industry of its creation in order to be "art." Maybe. Maybe you should stop undressing me with your eyes).
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The story is told sometimes from the viewpoint of a gay Japanese author watching the main character's tragedy from afar, maybe in love with the main character but too depressed to act on his feelings. With that character, I thought Ono was on to something-- that character felt real and his depression seemed interesting. I wanted to read a comic about that character, but I wanted to see the gay Japanese guy interacting with another character in his weight class, instead of Luffy from One Piece. I just couldn't be persuaded to believe in the main character. Was the juxtaposition of the two a sort of genre commentary? I suppose that's one way we can read it, that Ono was suggesting the manga formula is a lie beacuse real life is "not simple"...? I don't know-- do you think that's interesting, comics about comics? Me, not so often.
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Ono can put together an effective scene, but I didn't end NOT SIMPLE feeling like she was making an observation about the world or people in it. It felt instead like she'd built a contraption of misery, and was simply revealing the contraption. Her drawings are striking, very immediate-- I love how her characters consume the page. But it all felt mechanical; Rube Goldberg but with child molestation, instead of dominos (i.e. worst OK GO video ever).
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BLACK BLIZZARD by Yoshihiro Tatsumi: This is basically an EC crime comic, but at 128 manga pages instead of being an 8-page EC comic. I can see how it'd be of interest to, like, comic critics, people smarter than me: if you're intersted in how manga's format allows it to investigate the psychology of a moment, I suppose seeing dull, cliched material like this stretched out to an unnecessary length would be of academic interest. If you're interested in Tatsumi-- this isn't really like the good Tatsumi but I suppose it's... well, more...? And I suppose there's always something interesting about comics that have been quickly made-- some of the drawings are funny, I think on purpose.
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I should probably be more into it, but I'm lazy-- I'd rather have read the 8-page Johnny Craig version and just gotten on with my night. Internet porn's not going to surf itself. A great cartoonist (at least later in his career), improvising a crime comic as he goes...? I can see how that would be of interest. But if that's what you're looking for, I think Gilbert Hernandez's book from JanuaryTHE TROUBLEMAKERS already nailed that vibe perfect-like. Yeah, it's unfair to compare a young Tatsumi with a veteran Gilbert Hernandez. But everything I felt Hernandez did right with THE TROUBLEMAKERS, I didn't feel with Tatsumi. With THE TROUBLMAKERS, I never felt that either Hernandez or I knew what was going to happen next-- anything could and does, in that book-- but whatever happened was going to be dark, cryptic, a little slimy. Fun times; swell book. I never felt that anything could happen with BLACK BLIZZARD-- and not much really does. There are effective stretches of storytelling; the book sustains a nightmare "someone's chasing us" vibe effectively at least until it jams a slab of exposition down your throat at the end; certainly, the book design is swell. But it just stayed very earthbound.
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Plus, I know it's uncool to say; I'm an uncool guy; I'm sorry, but: it kinda really doesn't make any sense at all something this minor's been translated into English, and L'AUTOROUTE DU SOLEIL hasn't been. I know, I know-- uncool.
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THE SNAKE by Eric Kutner and Adam Goldstein: Patton Oswalt mentioned this movie in a GQ interview; it's available on Netflix On Demand. Oh, man, you guys. The movie's not perfect-- some pretty dopey parts run a little long, the second act is a little long in the tooth, the creative team try to mix in some pretty worthless Borat-type antics into the narrative which aren't interesting at all, and there's a slow part in the middle where the movie really fools you into thinking you're watching a Hollywood comedy that's a bit of grind; Margaret Cho has a cameo, and I can't say I'm a fan.
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But Adam Goldstein's performance. Oh, man.
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If you have the stomach to appreciate it, Adam Goldstein plays maybe the worst, most repulsive fucking douchebag maybe in movie history. And he's the star of the movie; he's the main character-- the entire movie is watching this complete piece of shit. There's a kind of piece of shit, if you hang out in a certain neighborhood, or go to a certain kind of bar, you hate that fucking guy on sight, and Goldstein plays the King of Those Fucking Guys; he plays their Emperor; he commits to that character so fucking hard, it's almost like watching some kind of awful Olympics. He so overwhelmingly is that guy, that even the parts of the movie I wasn't that into, I couldn't stop watching, wanting the entire time to suffocate the main character with a pillow. It's not a mumblecore movie, but it has no budget; no big actors; just this performance.
After fifteen minutes you want to murder the bag of human garbage... It’s one of those performances that you cannot believe you’re seeing. Goldstein plays it SO slimy at every single turn. There’s barely a line that comes out of his mouth that doesn’t make you want to punch him. But he’s hilarious - it’s like Chris Elliott’s character as performed by Daniel Day-Lewis. An absolute turn of brilliance... it’s almost like THE SNAKE is a nature film documenting the worst animal on earth, who just happens to be human... Adam Goldstein gives the performance of all of our lives."
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It's not for everyone; the SNAKE is a comedy about fucking eating disorders, which... not everyone finds those funny, maybe. (If you prefer really intensely stupid, juvenile humor, there's a totally-dumb, very-dumb PG-13 kids movie that I'm fond of called the SASQUATCH DUMPLING GANG, also on Netflix on Demand). But if you can handle super-black, cringe humor, I think the SNAKE is worth a look for Goldstein's performance.
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I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BAND by Julie Klausner: .
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Speaking of guys being douchebags-- if you have a lady friend whose having a hard time with the dating, this may be something you might want to get them. It's not a dating manual or anything like that-- Klausner is a comedienne writing about her history of failed relationships with assorted hipsters, rockers, losers and perverts. One chapter is entitled "Star Wars is a Kids' Movie"... I haven't read that one yet, but I'm guessing it hits close to home.
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But it's a funny book-- funny stories. For relationship stories, I guess I like things that hit both "vulgar" and "sweet," which I think Klausner does. A story about a guy Klausner dates who enjoys the taste of his own semen-- that's probably vulgar, I suppose. But there's something so sweet and sad when Klausner describes how it made her feel unnecessary to the relationship: "I mean, what's the point of having a girl in the room if all you want to do is dine on your own jizz? Why not cut out the middleman?"
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Hipsters, rockers, losers and perverts-- I guess I've known a few of those, and I guess I can admit I've had that thought cross my head of... "I like my friend; my friend is a great guy; I should hang out with my friend more; his new girlfriend seems nice and normal-- why is a nice, normal girl like that dating a total scumbag like my friend?!" It's nice getting to hear the other side of those stories (without crying involved)...
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The book's intended audience is plainly women-- a good chunk of the book involves pep talks, for the ladies, or talking about sexism, or what have you. Men versus guys; "nerds who fear women and aren't sensitive despite their marketing; they just dislike women in a new, exciting way"; men are like Kermit and women are like Miss Piggy (it might not sound like it, but that part's actually really good); so on. I don't know that I'm the best audience for those parts; I don't know that I agree with everything there, necessarily. But I just enjoy reading this kind of thing, lately-- it's been a big surprise for me because I always thought of relationship books as being the type of thing I'd never enjoy, until just recently. I don't know what's changed. I guess I just feel like I've read enough from guys; I kind of know what guys think about. They think about robots, on fire, murdering dolphins. There was that one song, in the 80's:
POWERS #3 by Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Avon Oeming, and Co.: I was very, very unhappy with POWERS #2; I didn't like #1 much either, but especially #2. They tried to do a big superhero action spectacle in #2, which is just something too many other books do, which Bendis himself does in too many other books. I don't want POWERS to be like other books; I want it to be special; POWERS is my "thick or thin" book, the comic I'm sticking with until they end it, come what may; man, #2 was a bummer.
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So, Issue #3 was that much more of a relief! Relief! It's as much as I've liked a superhero action piece in a good while, as much as I've liked a comic from everyone involved in years maybe; POWERS doing the kind of action that I think the book excels at, that I want from the book more than anything: superhero comic as survival horror. I think the book's always been at its very best when it's mined that vein, and POWERS #3 is 41 pages of it. The whole issue is three people in a car, trying to get away from a crazed superhero flying after them. Acton spectacle, but something fresh, from a different perspective, from a different point of view.
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Plus, Bendis brings back something I haven't seen him really do for a while, too long, where the book's got a second level of tension that arises from the book's main character doing the Wrong Thing. A main character making a morally wrong decision, out of selfishness and stubbornness-- here, Walker has superpowers but he's keeping them a secret from the people around him. He can save the day if he's willing to sacrifice everything in his life, but he refuses to do it. He makes the morally wrong choice; he makes the selfish choice; it's not even mentioned in the comic-- it's all under the surface. The entire 41 pages of action spectacle are all about characer, the main character's integrity being tested, finding out through action who the main character is, the fun of watching a character make decisions. This! Not the other stuff!! THIS!!!
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Bendis, Oeming, the entire POWERS crew, everyone just seemed in their zone on this one. I think volume 3 still hasn't quite explained why the story is continuing past what felt like a very definitive ending at the end of volume 2-- both Walker and Deena had been on very fully journeys by the time the end of #2 rolled around. (Though, I guess it would be cool if volume 1 was act 1, volume 2 was act 2, and volume 3 was the final act in Walker's story, I suppose-- if they could pull that off). And boy, am I ever confused where all the pieces are, anymore, after all the delays and breaks-- the federal government storyline, the Powers-have-been-around-forever storyline, that cosmic-storyline (didn't the Pope die in POWERS at one point??). But it's just so fucking nice to feel glad that the book's back, finally. Sweet, sweet relief!
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GARY PANTER, at the Hammer Museum: I was at that Gary Panter talk a couple months back, at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. As part of the Hammer's big Robert Crumb exhibition, the museum brought Gary Panter in to talk about modern art. At least up until the Q&A session, where it of course almost immediately became question-time from art school kids wanting Gary Panter to talk about drugs. I was sitting next to the stoned art school girls (a.k.a. the entire audience for the speech), all of whom were whispering "yesssssssssssssssss" in unison every time Panter mentioned drugs. I love you so much, stoned art school girls. I love you so much. Yesssssssssssssssss.
2009 IN 6 MINUTES by Dave Seger: Oh, I don't even remember how I found out about these; I found these by accident. In 2009, Seger would film part of his life every single day, and then at the end of every month, cut the footage down into 6 minutes, with each day receiving no more than 15 seconds of screentime, all set to music.
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And so over the course of twelve 6-minute movies, you see every day of a year in this guy's life (with only a couple exceptions that i can recall). You slowly start to recognize faces-- blonde guy, brunette girl, etc., but mostly it's a blur of these tiny moments. A couple seconds of a party, a couple seconds in a car, a couple seconds in a line; Seger started working in some capacity on the NBC show COMMUNITY in 2009, and so that's sometimes in the background, but just in the tiniest of intervals. Sometimes happy moments; usually, quiet moments; everyone seems pretty aware of the camera, Seger and friends pout and make faces to the camera constantly, but that doesn't really ruin it for me anyways.
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I like these videos, I guess, because while I watched them, I did get to thinking what the movie for a year for my life would look like. It wouldn't be much of a movie, really; honestly, it wouldn't be as good as David Seger's probably. But there would be some good parts, I hope. I hope. It was a good thing to think about.
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THE ASSASSINATION OF ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND AND SOPHIE, DUCHESS OF HOHENBERG: I just hope that someday, the guy who letters CAPTAIN AMERICA can be brought to justice.
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SPARTA #1 by Dave Lapham, Johnny Timmons and Co.: It has a pretty cool premise, this comic-- it's about a remote small town, nestled in the mountains, absurdly obsessed with football, controlled by facist forces, where mysteries abound. Lapham goes all-out, as usual.
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But it's got these distracting, Tiger Beat drawings of Colin Farrel. He's the artist's model for the main character. I like the premise, but I don't know if I can get past it, guys. Here's a panel next to the very first image google turns up for Colin Farrell-- feel free to tell me I'm nuts:
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Dude, Colin Farrel's not even an obscure actor; he was almost an A-list actor for a while there. TIGERLAND. IN BRUGES. MINORITY REPORT. MIAMI VICE. He's been in a ton of movies, a ton of them. He's very, very recognizable. I can watch Colin Farrel movies, on the Superstation, movies created by small armies of skilled professionals. And they're free! TBS doesn't charge me $3 to see Colin Farrel have an adventure. Why would you purposefully remind me of that fact? "My comic is called 'There's a Lot of Free Porn Easy to Find on the Internet.'" What?No!That's a horrible title!
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I mean, do you even know how inexpensive cameras are? If an artist wants to use photo-reference, there's cameras everywhere. I have a camera that came with my phone. All you need is either to (a) own a phone, or (b) know someone who will lend you their phone for 5 minutes. That's it. That's all. Take a photo of yourself. Take a photo of your best friend. Take a photo of your dad. Take a photo of your mom. Your mom is about as manly as Colin Farrel. Your mom has stubble. Take a photo of your he-mom. All you need to avoid punk moves in your comics is to just live somewhere where phones exist.
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RANDOM THOUGHT ABOUT COMICS: I was in a suit the other day; pretty often, I have to wear a suit for work. And ... I like suits, but I hate having to wear suits; does that make sense? Anyways, I realized that almost every singly time I'm in a suit, my mind flashes on that opening shot of that movie OUT OF SIGHT. Man, I must think about that shot pretty much every single time I'm in a suit.
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And I have dozens of things like that. I work in an office; if I go outside and the skies are super-blue, there's a moment when I think of playing hooky, and flash on that moment in FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, right at the beginning: Ferris opening up his windows, "How can I can be expected to go to high school on a day like this?" The kid on the Big Wheel riding down the hallway in the SHINING, when I'm in a hotel. Sandler dancing in PUNCHDRUNK LOVE, in certain cereal aisles. That shot of Faye Wong on the escalator in CHUNGKING EXPRESS, on airport escalators. William H. Macy walking into the bar in MAGNOLIA-- which isn't even a movie I like all that much. There's a moment from an episode of KATE AND ALLIE, I shit you not, when I see coins in a fountain, which is especially weird and something I really, really wish wouldn't happen-- why can't I think about LA DOLCE VITA? Nope, fuck you, Fellini: KATE AND fucking ALLIE for the win. I think of FREDDY VERSUS JASON every-time I climax, sexually.
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Do you have those, too? Tiny, tiny bits of business from pop culture that just sort of flash into your head involuntarily? (I sure hope so, otherwise this is a little awkward, you guys.)
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Any of them from comics?
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I can't really think of any, myself. I remember that line "San Fran turned manga" popped into my head the last time I drove into San Francisco, that I laughed at myself for being such a lame, lame nerd. It's a line from one of my favorite comics, THE INVISIBLES, one of the best-est issues of that book maybe, but ... I don't drive into San Francisco often enough to know if that was a regular thing, or just a sad thing that happened once. Maybe-- maybe the kids lying on the hills in BLOOM COUNTY..? But I don't hang out on hills. I don't live anywhere there's winter or snowmen, so no to CALVIN AND HOBBES. I don't go to a psychiatrist, so no to PEANUTS. If I drive through a certain kind of town to get gas, on the way somewhere else, one of those "why is this town even here; why are these people staying here" type places, there are drawings of the town in ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY, maybe. But I don't go on those kinds of drives too often. Anyone, anything?
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CERVICAL CANCER: What? No! I didn't-- how did that--
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Oh, ads for Cervical Cancer-- you're exactly like that movie the WEDDING CRASHERS, only funny.
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FRANKENCASTLE by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, & Co.: This is the only comic of its ilk I'm really getting any kind of charge out of right now. I don't think I've read every issue, but I think they're onto something here. They killed the Punisher and transformed his comic into a monster comic. Tony Moore took a breather the other day, and Dan Brereton filled in. The Brereton fill-in kind of underlined how I enjoy the book as being... Guys on a project that plays perfectly to what I think are their strengths, maybe...? Do I want to read Rick Remender write a crazy, moody monster comic with colorful villains and messed-up heroes? Do I want to see Tony Moore draw a bunch of gross, disgusting weirdos having crazy adventures? Dan Brereton drawing giant Japanese monsters...? Yeah: I think I can be persuaded.
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I'd enjoyed Remender-Moore on things like FEAR AGENT and especially XXXOMBIES, but I'm really very much not in the mood for this particular kind of mainstream comic right now. So, I drag my feet with this comic, more than a little. But, heck: it's a fun comic. If there's anyone else in the mainstream right now who are on a book as well suited for their strengths-- it's gotten by me...
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Anything else going on in the mainstream? I'm partial to that Howard Chaykin DIE HARD: YEAR ONE book-- I really admire how Chaykin used a DIE HARD comic book as an excuse to do his own thing about New York in the 1970's. It still satisfies the basic DIE HARD formula, but the early issues especially, he even gets away with ignoring John McClane for long stretches. In a DIE HARD comic. Which I thought was funny. Beyond that book and the Remender-Moore... Gosh, slim pickings from the mainstream for me. I tried a couple issues of that Jonathan Hickman FANTASTIC FOUR run people seem excited about-- I didn't get much a charge from it. His SECRET WARRIORS book seemed okay, the couple of those I saw; if I were more patient. But FF-- I didn't see what other people apparently are seeing. Maybe I picked the wrong issues; color me envious, I guess. DC... You know, if Cameron Stewart can't get me to enjoy reading Grant Morrison's BATMAN, nothing can; so, so boring! I guess I've been sleeping on a lot of people, but I don't really have the sense that I've been missing anything special. Am I missing anything?
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TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY -- OPENING CREDITS: I'd never heard of this show before, and I really wish I could explain how delighted I was the first time I saw this. "I never heard of this bit of pop culture, and now I know this exists" kind of has its own weird, sad vibrational frequency of happiness.
One value of a good reference is that it can send fans of one pop-culture artifact on little expeditions, tracking the secret history of the shows, music, and movies they like by digging through their footnotes. We become archaeologists of pop, like the heroes of the Warren Ellis/John Cassaday comic-book series Planetary. (How’s that for a reference?) There’s a longstanding tradition of this kind of digging in the arts, often under the loftier guise of creating and studying canons. But the ’90s were more about rewriting the canon, and making sure that all the junk of the past got preserved alongside the classics. Was all that pack-ratting worth it in the long run?
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I'm sure a lot of you remember this show, but I would swear I'd never heard of it until Shout Factory announced they were bringing the show out on DVD last month. After Indiana Jones, after RAIDERS, ABC tried to create its own show in the classic adventure mold, with a premise ripped every which way from Milton Caniff. This was a Donald Bellisario show-- he did Magnum, P.I., Airwolf, Quantum Leap, others. I might not even like the show, if I ever see it, but just that feeling of "This is totally a thing that exists." Hard to believe it's even real, those opening credits-- it looks like something Rob Schrab might have created for Channel 101. There's a dog in an eyepatch in the firstfifteenseconds! But it's real! It's totally a thing that exists! I know it's not discovering King Tut's tomb by any means, but... it's just its own, weird frequency of happiness, the only way I can think to put it.
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THE NERDIST PODCAST by Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray, & Co.: This is a solid podcast, if you do the whole "listen to podcasts while working late hours because your life is grim and gray" thing, if you like hearing funny people interview comedians. There are many such podcast, of late-- Marc Maron's WTF Podcast is also quite good. But this one, in particular, I feel like they've been on such a terrific roll, with consistently excellent interviews so far with Drew Carey, Andy Richter, Adam Corolla, Jim Gaffigan, and more. Hardwick himself is one of my favorite people to see perform; the conversations all range nicely from silly to insightful; and more than anything, more than anything-- John Hamm doing a Brody Stevens impression. If you understand what that means (and you probably do; you're hip people; you're on the internet, you're reading blogs)-- holy shit, goddamn, that made me laugh.
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DRAWINGS FROM 2008 INSPIRED BY HANSEL & GRETEL by Lorenzo Mattotti: In 2008, Mattotti reduced the story of Hansel and Gretel to six drawings, as part of a group of artists creating art based on the classic fairy tale in connection with a production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel opera. They've been on the internet for a couple years now; I don't remember who reminded me of them the other day; the internet just has a pleasant way of re-noticing and re-linking to things past their initial shelf date. Besides just enjoying the drawing on their own terms, I think, moreso than the other artists interpreting Hansel and Gretel, Mattotti gets something essential about the story into his drawings, by focusing on the difference in scale between the children and the dark world around them. Mattotti's Hansel and Gretel seem that much more fragile, being so surrounded by the woods, by Mattotti's thick, slashes of black.
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NEMESIS by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven: With the hype building on KICK-ASS, I thought I'd check up on Millar, his new thing. I'm not a fan, but Millar's The Guy Who Won-- worth paying attention to, for that reason. I suppose I agree with most of the negative criticisms I've heard of this, most of all that it's just a movie pitch masquerading as a comic, most of all that. But, that said, I enjoyed it regardless. It's a comic book about violence, featuring violence, and starring violence, and so I approve of the message that this comic was trying to convey, to the youth, that message being: violence.
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I can't stand the character design for the main character, though. Does McNiven have no talent whatsoever for character design, or was something this dull requested of him? Setting aside the character design, the idea of reviving the old French character Fantomas for the modern age? I think there's a cleverness to that. (Fantomas's character design had panache, but...) Looking at the U.S. market, and saying, "The U.S. audience hates itself enough now to root for Super-Bin-Laden"-- that takes a mix of total stupidity and market savvy that Millar arguably is the best at; that mix is arguably his specialty.
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My gut say he's right-- the time does feel perfect for a Fantomas revival. If nothing else, it was pretty obvious to a lot of people that last BATMAN movie would have been a much better movie without Batman, so Millar being fast enough to profit from that observation-- you know, what else can you say but well done.
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I hope future issues of NEMESIS feature Super-Bin-Laden wreaking total havoc upon decadent Western civilization. Violence; explosions; kaboom! This sounds like I'm joking, but I very sincerely enjoy seeing violence in a comic book-- I really am not a very sophisticated human being. As long as the comic is violent, and I don't have to deal with Millar writing about race, or sex, or ... really, any kind of attempt whatsoever to write about real human people or real human concerns. If he can avoid those three things, please, please, we should be good to go here.
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CALIFORNIA ROLL by John Vorhaus: My life's been pretty hectic this year, so I've downshifted lately from serious books back to crime comedies. I just finished CALIFORNIA ROLL; headed into the sequel to the SPELLMAN FILES. This book, CALIFORNIA ROLL, I don't know if it was very good or not. It's about Con Artists, and I have a huge blind spot when it comes to con artists. I really think con artists are the very best thing a story can be about. Since I was a kid, with the STING; anything Mamet; DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS; I didn't really like that movie the BROTHERS BLOOM very much at all, as a movie, and even then, I still walked out of it completely happy just because... You know, people got conned in it. (Everything but MATCHSTICK MEN, basically-- that movie was the exception to the rule-- it was all stinky).
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It's about a half-dozen con artists colliding in Los Angeles. What I like about it is ... You know, a movie about con artists, you're always sitting there the whole time thinking "Oh, I know what's going on-- the con artist is being conned. I went to college." You're always playing that game of trying to outsmart the characters. With this book, the main character is doing the same thing: he realizes he can't trust a single thing anyone is telling him, and so most of the book is his internal process of trying to figure out if he's being outsmarted or if he's overthinking the situation he's in, getting paralyzed by a fundamental uncertainty as to what the hell the plot of the book even is.
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That was enough fun for me. If the rest of the book was terrible, I wasn't really paying close attention. The book walks through a half-dozen cons along the way, big and small. That said, a con artist story does kinda live or die by its ending, and I thought CALIFORNIA ROLL fell apart near its end with (a) a contrivance concerning the main character that I really didn't care for, and (b) some physical action, which is not what I want from this particular genre: I want to see characters win because they've outsmarted other characters, not worked out harder at a gym. But I need frothy right now; I don't have the energy for anything besides frothy? On that level, this did okay enough by me.
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RANDOM ANIMATED GIF: I love this animated gif so, so much, but I don't want to know anything about it. Did you see that last Coen Brothers movie, A SERIOUS MAN? I think they made the point in that movie that applies equally to this animated-gif: sometimes, you just have to embrace the mystery.
There were times, while reading the Derby Dugan trilogy of novels, when I wondered if author Tom DeHaven really, really hated Michael Chabon. Or, at least, was jealous of the success and praise he'd received for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon's 2000 novel that in many ways does the same trick of mixing comic industry and social history as the Dugan books, but to much louder acclaim. Maybe DeHaven felt like he should've written about superheroes instead, which'd explain why he went on to write the wonderful It's Superman!, who knows?
The trilogy - FUNNY PAPERS, DERBY DUGAN'S DEPRESSION FUNNIES and DERBY UNDER GROUND - span more than a century, beginning with the dawn of newspaper cartoons, then jumping to the creation of comic books, before an ambitious final book about Underground Comix and the beginning of the 21st century. The ambition of the final book is actually its undoing: It bites off more than it can chew, and comes off as scattered, obvious (There's a chapter that feels too much like a character is possessed by an apologetic DeHaven, explaining himself and his choices, and the book ends with a fictional letters column deflecting imaginary criticism) and, ironically considering it features a comic called Misanthrope, bitter and hateful towards its characters. It's a sad, frustrating ending for what, until that point, had been an enjoyable series, one that feels like DeHaven lost his balance in an attempt to make a Grand Statement about creativity and creators.
The best of the books is Depression Funnies; self-assured, tight and given swagger through the narration of well-meaning heel Al Bready, ghost-writer for the Derby Dugan newspaper strip who's fallen in love with the character (A running theme throughout all three books: Protagonists who feel protective about Dugan even though they have no control over him - Funny Papers' Walt Geebus steals the character from his true creator, and Under Ground's Roy Looby is an underground comix creator who makes his name ripping off the character decades after Dugan has disappeared from newspapers), and there's a knowing pulpyness to the book that keeps it from the sprawl of the other two, with an ending that feels both anti-climactic and perfectly fitting everything that'd come before.
Funny Papers, the first of the books - and one written a decade and a half earlier than the others - is rough and, at times, self-indulgent, but more rewardingly so than Under Ground; it's a novel that I always found entertaining, but not really compelling, if that makes sense - I would manage to be easily distracted into reading other books in between bouts of it, even though everytime I picked it up, I felt hooked. I'm not sure how to describe that feeling, properly: Good, but not great, maybe...?
Comparing this trilogy to Kavalier and Clay may be unfair - Both share an interest in legitimizing comic culture, yes, as well as providing an overview of American history, but the Dugan books are less grandiose and mainstream than Chabon's book, and ultimately more self-destructively true to their subject matter. Even with the mess that Under Ground becomes, there's something honest about the journey of the fictional-even-within-the-fiction character of Derby Dugan that keeps you reading all the way through to the end, hoping despite everything that there's a happy ending for everyone.
Hey, remember when I promised I'd have the next installment of this up before February? Funny story... Or, you know, not really. That's the last time I promise a post by a specific date on here. Anyway: The John Romita Jr. years! It's when Uncanny X-Men got really good!
I'm entirely biased by the fact that the comic I started "collecting" comics with was UNCANNY X-MEN #185, but that doesn't necessarily make me wrong when I say that the run between Uncanny #173 and #200 - Yes, I'm stretching my previous two-year-at-a-time rule here - are the best the series ever managed. Claremont's writing was bold and getting more and more idiosyncratic each issue (Look at some of the titles! "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" "He'll Never Make Me Cry" "Lifedeath" "Wraithkill!" These are not titles that someone both unconfident and with a sense of embarrassment could come up with), and he finally manages to pull the series out of the somewhat directionless slump it'd been in, to varying degrees, since Jean Grey's editorially mandated death in #137. Yes, it took a fake Jean Grey resurrection in order to exorcize that particular ghost, but whatever works, right?
It's also the period where the X-Men stopped being part of the Marvel Universe and a thing unto itself; aside from a couple of Secret Wars II crossovers a few issues later - although, even those crossovers are more like Beyonder guest-shots, as opposed to really "crossing over" with any MU books - things like the Dire Wraith storyline, Secret Wars aftermath and Kulan Gath (and, to an extent, Asgard) storyline here is pretty much the last time that Claremont really acknowledges the non-mutant rest of the contemporary Marvel Universe in the book. I'm not quite sure why it happens - Ego? Having finally grown sick of Jim Shooter? Somewhere between the two? - but it coincides with the period where New Mutants started really being a second X-Men series instead of just a spin-off: Storylines and characters crossed over between the two with increasing regularity, leading to the still-surprising "return" of the de-powered Storm happening outside of the book she'd called home for the last decade or so, and a period where it looked as if she's stay with New Mutants for awhile, instead of rejoining the X-Men. By the time #200 had rolled around, ending months of cross-continuity between Uncanny and New Mutants that included annuals, "special editions" and Alpha Flight-co-starring mini-serieses, there really was a sense that Claremont had created a fiefdom as much as a franchise, and was happily walling himself off from outside forces.
(That plot, of course, had Loki fall in love with Storm the same way Dracula had earlier. Between that, and the sincere-yet-preposterous "LifeDeath" stories that followed Storm losing her powers, the weird fetishization of Storm as more Beautiful Black-And-Therefore-Exotic Goddess than character was in full-strength during this period, Claremont eagerly working out his kinks - literally? - with the character in front of his audience.)
Part of the groove that Claremont got back during all this time comes, I'm sure, from the stability and versatility of John Romita Jr.'s artwork (taking over from Paul Smith with #175), which seems at once "classic" Marvel and something more contemporary; unlike any artist on the book since Byrne, he can handle the melodramatic soap opera and superheroic action scenes equally easily, and make the combination of the two natural, and that pushes Claremont to become more grandiose in his scheming - For the first time in years, he starts long-term planning, putting subplots into motion that he'll come back to later (In some cases, probably later than he intended: Nimrod's appearance in #191 doesn't really lead to anything for, what, fifty issues or so?) - but also, more successful in his execution: the whole "mutants are hated and feared and hunted" status quo is finally brought to the foreground with surprising subtlety, and through a combination of A-plot (Storm's depowering) and B- (The appearance of Rachel, who finds this world too close to her own).
The climax of #200 - the X-Men left without their mentor and guiding light, who may or may not be dead, and their former enemy now, seemingly, reformed in charge despite his own misgivings, having to earn everyone's trust - feels, in many ways, like a ballsy conclusion to the series, from a man with full confidence in his abilities. Claremont certainly had plans for how to continue, but within a couple of months, he was about to watch as his own success started to be his undoing.
The good thing about not posting here for... uh... months, is that there's no limit of things to write about. The bad thing is that you all might have forgotten what I'm talking about. But please! Put on your memory-jogging devices and think back to the days of CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN and THE FLASH: REBIRTH. I feel like it's time to explain to you why they're the same series.
Okay, that might be a bit unfair to both books. Flash had more of a story than Cap, for one thing, although it wasn't necessarily a story that made the most amount of sense (In a Wait, What? that we have, I swear, recorded but haven't got around to posting yet, Jeff points out that Barry doesn't go back in time and save his mother even though he knows the Reverse-Flash murdered her, saying that history can't be changed. Even though he says so while going back to prevent the Reverse-Flash murdering Iris. So history can be kind of changing, if it's not already been changed? Maybe?), and Cap had the benefit of having a reason to exist beyond "Why don't we bring Barry back, oh, Geoff did a great job with Green Lantern: Rebirth, he can do this as well," but I can't quite get past the final issues of either series, and the way they mirror each other.
For one thing, there's the fact that both series started life as five issue mini-series, before adding a sixth midway through the run because the story needed more pages. And for another, there's the fact that neither sixth issue really earned the extra pages and money we spent getting them. In both cases, the cliffhanger from the previous issue - and, let's face it, the actual story of the entire series - is wrapped up in the first half of the book, leaving the second half to be filled with scenes of "Hey! Everything's okay after all!" and "Or is it?!?" foreboding (I tend to lean towards Flash's treatment of this idea, if only because it seems less on-the-nose than Cap's, which is pretty much him literally saying "I saw this future plot oh here it is oh it looks scary, I should probably do something about that but, hey, end of the series!" Also, Flash's will probably be resolved much faster, and no, that wasn't a pun), which... just kind of pisses me off. Neither issue actually works as an issue of a comic book. Maybe they'll work in the trade, where it's all one reading experience, but as single issues? They were both disjointed, each issue reading like two separate stories, with the last one made up entirely of filler (Teases and flashforwards and hints of what to come are nice, but they're not really part of the story. When they take up more than a couple of pages? They're filler) and unnecessary filler: in both Cap and Flash's case, there were issues left unresolved that could've been dealt with in that space - but then, of course, there wouldn't have been Who Will Wield The Shield for Marvel to sell in the month off that Reborn had to take to finish.
This isn't a rant against poor planning, or poor editing - although I genuinely think that Reborn could've been trimmed enough to fit it into five issues, as I complained about back in November - because, hey. The creators wanted some extra pages, and felt it would make the book better. That's fine. Weirdly, what pisses me off is that those extra pages because extra issues, and those extra issues felt, for the most part, like afterthoughts stretched past their necessary length. Would it have killed either DC or Marvel to hold the (already late) books a little later to fold in extra pages into what would've been the original final issues as initially promised, even if it meant a higher price tag? At least then, I wouldn't have felt so ripped off by the end of two series I'd been following for months.
My secret shame: I have been buying all of the Superman books since Superman left Earth for Krypton. No, wait, that's not actually shameful in and of itself. The shame part is this: I'm not sure I've actually been enjoying them for awhile.
I did, for sure. I thought the first six or so months of the new status quo was really interesting, and clearly building towards something in a 52-esque manner, with hints being dropped in one book and picked up in another, and there was a sense of foreboding and, more importantly, momentum that seeded through the series at least through the terribly-named "Codename: Patriot" crossover storyline. But then... something happened.
I'm tempted to say that it's not the comics, but me, but... I don't think it is. In various ways, and for different reasons, each of the series (with the exception, surprisingly, of Supergirl) stalled somehow. SUPERMAN: WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON felt it the most, seemingly sidetracked by, and getting bogged down in, a murder mystery that seemed to come from nowhere despite the attempts to tie it into the larger Kryptonian political storyline. Suddenly, the Zod/Kal-El relationship seemed to disappear from the series in favor of a procedural with Adam Strange, bizarrely, as co-star, and the series ended with a cliffhanger for the new SUPERMAN: LAST DAYS OF NEW KRYPTON series instead of, you know, any sense of closure or real dramatic weight by itself (Pete Woods' diminishing presence - due to illness, I think? - didn't help matters, although Ron Randall did a spectacular job filling in; he seems to have become a DC fill-in MVP, and really doesn't get the credit he deserves) - WONK fell from a promising start to an ending that was entirely Eh, and I can't help but feel that Last Days should've been/may have started out as the original ending for the earlier series (At the very least, the "I give up trying to fit it, I'm Superman" moment from Last Days #1 could have happened at the end of WONK, giving the "Can Kal-El change Kryptonian society from within" theme a climax; happening as it does, it felt rushed and unearned).
ACTION COMICS, too, found itself losing its identity slightly, which is a shame; there's an interesting backstory to the new Nightwing and Flamebird, but between artist changes and odd pacing choices, it started to drag. It's frustrating, because there was a lot to like - Not least of all Greg Rucka's take on Lois Lane, perhaps unsurprisingly - but ultimately, it's also turned to only Okay for me.
The worst letdown may have been SUPERMAN, if only because I was really, really warming to the book. Both James Robinson's take on Mon-El learning to enjoy life on his own terms and Renato Guedes' wonderful artwork were becoming highpoints of the month, but again, odd writing choices (I'm still uncertain what the "Mon is captured, oh, no he's not" plot actually contributed, beyond a new and not-as-interesting-as-the-original costume, and the Legion reveal felt surprisingly rushed; maybe things were moved up because of Levitz taking over Adventure and getting a new Legion book?) and losing Guedes (and without comment! He's apparently still doing work for DC, going by the current solicits, which is surprising; I would've sworn he'd turn up on some low-selling X-Book over at Marvel any minute now) derailed things, and although Bernard Chang has brought some energy back, it's still just a high Okay for me right now.
As I said before, SUPERGIRL is the one book that's weathered the storm successfully. It's also the book with a (relatively) stable creative team and the one that seems the least dependent on the New Krypton storyline, which may suggest a reason why... But to do so would be to ignore the fact that Sterling Gates and Jamal Igle have, more than a little surprisingly, turned the series around from bad joke to pretty Good YA superhero book, mostly by playing it straight and just telling good superhero stories without wondering how to make the character "cool" or whatever.
The worst part of the whole thing is the feeling that I already know how the whole thing is going to end; not just that the whole thing is leading to an Earth/New Krypton war (That much has been clear for a long time), but that, with new creative teams on both Superman and Action Comics immediately afterwards, how the war ends is going to pretty much be an immediate return to the status quo. It's frustrating, I guess, that after such a long build-up, the aftermath will be pretty non-existent... but I can always hope I'm wrong about that, just in case JMS wants to write about a Man of Steel dealing with emotional fallout from losing two home planets in different ways. But am I alone in following the Superbooks, and if not, am I the only one who's not too thrilled with the way it's all turned out?
Here's an idea that may seem like a ridiculously bad one in, oh, two seconds or so. But when has that stopped me before? I'm a big fan of the Multnomah County Library, here in Portland. It's a great library set-up, with an amazing selection of books, zines and comics to choose from (Something that I like to make Jeff Lester jealous of whenever possible) and, through the library, I've managed to catch up on all manner of comics I'd never quite gotten around to reading first time out.
So, there I was this morning, looking to order some new books, and I thought: What would Savage Critic readers want me to review? Hence, this potentially bad idea: Go look at the selection the Multnomah library has, then tell me what you'd like me to read and write about here at SavCritics. You can leave suggestions in comments below, or if you're more shy, email me at Graeme at Savage Critic dot com. Who says this isn't the era of interactive comic review websiting?
James Robinson has just blown my mind. I was reading the STARMAN OMNIBUS VOL. 1 (Good, for those who want an old-school SavCritic take on it; I haven't read the series before, so the material manages to be both fresh and dated in that 1990s comic kind of a way, but more than anything, it reminds me of the first Sandman collection in its uncertain first steps with a writer too eager to impress and art that isn't bad, but isn't perfect just yet. I've already moved on through the second and into the third volume, and it's steadily getting better, even if the collections make the book look as if it has ADD, what with all the fill-ins), and there's a bit in the afterword where Robinson talks about writing the series not because he was in love with the character, but because he wanted to write a particular kind of comic that he loved. I read that, and I thought, huh.
(First off, it's easy to see what kind of comic he's talking about. The first Starman issues have the same practiced, "casual aside" tone of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol or Alan Moore's Swamp Thing; the book only really comes into its own, in my opinion, when Robinson settles into his own voice, instead of trying to write a Smart DC Superhero Book.)
(Secondly, and this is a complete aside, but it's my first time back here in a long time for reasons both in- and out of- my control and I'm feeling chatty, so tough: Yeah, I get that CRY FOR JUSTICE was kind of shitty, but I can't quite bring myself to feel as morally outraged at it as the rest of the internet; for me, it's an Eh, a soulless book that melodramatically tried to move characters around to desired locations like chess pieces. It was telling, though, to see James Robinson say at Emerald City Con that he should be given credit for not killing Speedy as "they" also wanted. It reinforced my - perhaps naive - belief that Robinson was pretty much filling in editorially-mandated blanks instead of actually writing the story on the series, and/or that there was a fairly significant rewrite to the finale. To return to the theme for a second, the longer the series went on, the more it felt like Robinson had been given the job of writing Identity Crisis all over again, and his heart wasn't really in it.)
The thing is, I read that, that Robinson wrote Starman because he wanted to write a particular kind of comic, and I thought, Wait. Aren't all the superhero comics I like these days like that? The vast majority of Grant Morrison's Batman, for example, are his takes on various Batman tropes of yore (Something that's really brought home by the backmatter in the Very Good BATMAN AND ROBIN: DELUXE EDITION VOL. 1 HC, especially when you see the rejected costume designs and why the cover to #2 looked like it did. For those who're curious, by the way, the hardcover makes re-reading the stories more fun, and the stories, despite their pop pizazz really benefit from re-reading; "Revenge Of The Red Hood" went from a disappointing follow-up to the first arc to maybe my second-favorite story from Morrison's run so far, behind "The Black Glove"). What I love from Ed Brubaker's Captain America are the moments when it seems like he's attempting to write Steve Englehart's Cap, and Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man is his attempt to write Brube's Cap (That sound you heard was Fraction punching a wall and imagining it was my head, but come on: Am I the only one who enjoyed "World's Most Wanted" but spent a lot of it thinking "Isn't this like Iron Man's 'The Death of Captain America'?").
This isn't new, of course, nor all-encompassing (Rucka/Williams' Detective run with Batwoman feels like something more original; Williams bringing so much to the table that his presence is missed on the current storyline considerably), but the more I think about it, the more Superhero Comics As Cover Versions sticks in my head. Maybe that's why something like Siege doesn't work for me - It's a cover of the kind of Mighty Marvel Epic Slugfest that I like, but done in such a disconnected, distracted way that it feels tossed off, careless (The latest issue of the main series felt like the final issue of Secret Invasion in all the worst ways possible. Show, not tell, for the love of God) - while Bendis' Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (or whatever it's called these days) does; it's not the singer, or the song, but all in the way they handle what I don't even realize I find familiar and worth loving in the original. Sometimes you get Mark Ronson doing "Stop Me," and sometimes you get Mark Ronson doing "The Only One I Know."
(And here's where I hope you all have heard Ronson's Version album, or at least know your British pop music.)
That's not even to write off the good attempts at recreating former glories. The Beatles, after all, got their start trying to be rock and rollers, and look what happened to them (Who's the nearest comic equivalent...? Morrison's Doom Patrol, maybe? Gaiman's Sandman?). But now, whenever I go to read the latest exciting episode of some superhero series, there's this vocal part of my brain that's wondering who did it first, and what comic this is trying to be. I can't work out if that adds to the fun, or not.
I've never been a massive fan of St. Patrick's Day -- it is one of those days where I want to get the hell off the streets before the sun goes down to avoid "Amateur Night", where all of the people who really don't know how to drink large amounts of alcohol get to, in fact, prove that.
I do like how Ben's school does it though. In Kindergarten and First Grade (at least) they have the kids build and design "leprechaun traps", which is a fun project that really exercises both the kid's creativity as well as their engineering skills. Ben built an awesome "bank" for the "Leps" to "rob", with ladders to climb, and a collapsing rug over this neat net trap. He covered it in shiny paper and chocolate coins and (ha ha!) Lucky Charms cereal. It probably isn't very culturally sensitive (though the Irish-as-in-actually-FROM-Ireland parents in the class thought it was a hoot), but these little 6 and 7 year olds really went all out in coming up with non-lethal ways to catch the Leps. Mechanically, some of them were really cleverly designed.
In Kinder, I did most of the construction for Ben (he didn't have the manual dexterity then), but I left it mostly to him this year -- about the only thing *I* did was show him how to to cut a hole in the "rug" so it would "collapse" into the actual trap area, but not show the trap (I cut an "x" in the center of the rug) -- and his trap was the most popular one with the kids, which made me deathly proud.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon the kids carefully set their traps up all over the room (they called them "L.T.s", in case any of the Leps were listening in [Sneaky bastards!]), and went home.
This morning they came in, and the classroom was totally wrecked! Desks turned sideways, chairs thrown around, "Lep dust" on everything... and all of their traps wrecked, in a giant pile, with parts tacked up to the wall, whatever. There was even a clear line of "Lep dust" that lead out a window, that some of the clever little detective girls found. It was chaos, it was madness, and it was an enjoyable of a morning as I've ever spent in class as the kids all screamed (in joy!) at the disaster the Leps left.
The Lep even left a note, and a sack of potatoes (!) for the kids. Apparently, they're going to do a science lesson today with turning those solids into liquids (soup)
This has nothing to do with comics, I know, but I was entertained...
What I wasn't really at all entertained by was last weeks JUSTICE LEAGUE RISE AND FALL SPECIAL and this week's GREEN ARROW #31...
...which both made me think of other things I had read on the net this week. One of those was this interview with Steve Englehart on Newsarama, where Steve says, in response to "do you want to do more comics?":
The last stuff I did for Marvel and DC had way too much editorial back-and-forth. Once upon a time, editorial said, “These are your books, do whatever you want to do.” The story I’ve told a zillion times is that Roy Thomas said, “We’re giving you Captain America – if you can make it sell, we’ll keep you on, if not, we’ll fire you and we’ll get somebody who can.”
That was the sum total of the editorial influence! What I did and what Steve Gerber and those other guys did came from that. Now, editorial says “Here’s what we’re going to do with the line and the major books, and we’ll just get people to fill in the blanks.”
Then, as now, I disagreed with a number of Buddy's points -- especially with his seeming insistence that comics are, would continue to be, and should be anything other than a juvenile medium for juveniles (that's a dramatic oversimplification of his point)
Now, despite the perhaps foolish nature of some of his complaints, a tremendous amount of what he said ended up coming reasonably true -- "mainstream" superhero comics are really unacceptable for kids these days; I literally can't have my son look at this week's new books until I fully vet them first, and that's a pretty drastic sea change from 1980-something, and probably not one for the better.
I've been thinking of this all this week anyway, as I decided Ben was probably old enough for James Bond films. He saw the box for Live and Let Die at the library, and wanted to know what was up with the skull-faced guy. So we borrowed that, and quickly went through The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me, and since they didn't have Moonraker in stock, we went backwards to Goldfinger, and we'll do the rest of the Connery pictures soon.
These are, of course, violent films, and there's a smattering of salty language ("Daddy, he said the 's' word!") -- but the violence is generally cartoony. When Bond mows down a line of Faceless Minions with a machine gun, they all just kind of fall over, bloodlessly, y'know? The character Jaws is scary to Ben, but it isn't gross or anything, even when he bites people.
But Ben also saw Goldeneye and wanted to see that one, and I hesitated, because my memory says that by the Dalton era the violence starts getting ramped up with blood flying around, and that I am less than cool with. I don't know, maybe I'm being silly, but I want Ben to be able to enjoy things I enjoyed when I was his age-ish, but we hit a point culturally where violence is portrayed harshly, and I don't trust his instincts that those things aren't "Cool!", and maybe desensitizing him.
So, when I read comics like those Green Arrow ones, I wonder: "who is this really aimed at?" and "why are they doing this?" -- on screen graphic murder and dismemberment, with blood spraying everywhere... clearly "Justice League"-branded material is no longer suitable for kids, but I don't know any adults who are saying that this is what they want or need to see.
I might, maybe, be able to justify it in my mind if it lead to giant sales, or massive interest in Green Arrow -- DC seems to be trying to manufacture a "Big Year!" for GA, but after week 1, our sales on JL:R&F are barely a third of JL:CFJ #7, and while, sure, that's 50% above "normal" GA sales, that's still that sales level where it is barely profitable for me to even rack the book in the first place, and I suspect all of that "bounce" will be gone by this time next month anyway.
Dubious editorial direction leading to no long term sales benefit, and putting a somewhat viable character in a position that doesn't appear to have a lot of real long-term storytelling potential... I dunno, this doesn't seem to me to be a smart plan?
I probably wouldn't mind as much if there was stunning craft on display, but these comics just simply felt mechanical to me -- like the editorial flow chart says this beat must happen here and that one there, so get to it, Mr. Writer Cog. And I know story-logic goes out of the window when you're talking about superpowers, but I have a hard time believing that the guy with the Magic Wishing Ring (which can find ONE person "without fear" in a population of billions in a split second), or the other guy who can run from here to Africa between heartbeats is going to have ANY problem dealing with a guy and a bow, even IF he's "hiding in the sewers".
Plus the less said about Conner renouncing Buddhism, the better.
I don't know, I found these comics to be mechanical, souless, repellent, and very very AWFUL.
All-Star Superman Vols. 1 & 2Grant Morrison, writer
Frank Quitely, artist
DC, 2008-2010, believe it or not
160 pages each
$12.99 each
The cheeky thing to say about the brand-new out-of-continuity world Grant Morrison constructed to house his idea of the ideal Superman story is that it's very much like the DC Universe we already know, but without backgrounds. Like John Cassaday, another all-time great superhero artist currently working, Frank Quitely isn't one for filling in what's going on behind the action. One wonders what he'd do with a manga-style studio set-up, with a team of young, hungry Glaswegians diligently constructing a photo-ref Metropolis for his brawny, beady-eyed men and leggy, lippy women to inhabit.
But, y'know, whatever. So walls and skyscrapers tend to be flat, featureless rectangles. Why not give colorist/digital inker Jamie Grant big, wide-open canvases for his sullen sunset-reds and bubblegum neon-purples and beatific sky-blues? We're not quite in Lynn Varley Dark Knight Strikes Again territory here, but the luminous, futuristic rainbow sheen Grant gives so much of the space of each page--not to mention the outfits of Superman, Leo Quintum, Lex Luthor, Samson & Atlas, Krull, the Kryptonians and Kandorians, Super-Lois, and so on--ends up being a huge part of the book's visual appeal. And thematically resonant to boot! Morrison's Superman all but radiates positivity and peace, from the covers' Buddha smiles on down; a glance at the colors on any given page indicates that whatever else is in store, it's gonna be bright.
Moreover, why not focus on bringing to life the physical business that carries so much of the weight of Morrison's writing? The relative strengths and deficiencies of his various collaborators in this regard (or, if you prefer, of Morrison, in terms of accommodating said collaborators) has been much discussed, so we can probably take it as read. But when I think of this series, I think of those little physical beats first and foremost. Samson's little hop-step as he tosses a killer dino-person into space while saying "Yo-ho, Superman!"...Jimmy Olsen's girlfriend Lucy's bent leg as she sits on the floor watching TV just before propositioning him...clumsy, oafish Clark Kent bumping into an angry dude just to get him out of the way of falling debris...the Black-K-corrupted Superman quietly crunching the corner of his desk with his bare hands...Doomsday-Jimmy literally lifting himself up off the ground to better pound Evil Superman's head into the concrete...the way super-powered Lex Luthor shoulders up against a crunching truck as it crashes into him...the sidelong look on Leo Quintum's face as he warns Superman he could be "the Devil himself"...that wonderful sequence where Superman takes a break to rescue a suicidal goth...Lois Lane's hair at pretty much every instant...You could go whole runs, good runs, of other superhero comics and be sustained only by only one or two such magical moments. (In Superman terms, I'm a big fan of that climactic "I hate you" in the Johns/Busiek/Woods/Guedes Up, Up & Away!) This series has several per issue.
And the story is a fine one. Again, it's common knowledge that rather than retelling Superman's origin (a task it relegates to a single page) or frog-marching us through a souped-up celebration of the Man of Steel's underrated rogues gallery (the weapon of choice for Geoff Johns's equally underrated Action Comics run), All-Star Superman pits its title character, directly or indirectly, against an array of Superman manques. The key is that Superman alternately trounces the bad ones and betters the good ones not through his superior but morally neutral brains or brawn, though he has both in spades, but through his noblest qualities: Creativity, cooperation, kindness, selflessness, optimism, love for his family and friends. I suppose it's no secret that for Morrison, the ultimate superpower of his superheroes is "awesomeness," but Superman's awesomeness here is much different than that of, say, Morrison's Batman. Batman's the guy you wanna be; Superman's the guy you know you ought to be, if only you could. The decency fantasy writ large.
Meanwhile, bubbling along in the background are the usual Morrisonian mysteries. Pick this thing apart (mostly by focusing on, again, Quitely's work with character design and body language) and you can maybe tease out the secret identity of Leo Quintum, the future of both Superman and Lex Luthor, assorted connections to Morrison's other DC work, and so on. But the nice thing is that you don't have to do any of that. Morrison's work tends to reward repeat readings because it doesn't beat you about the head and neck with everything it has to offer the first time around. You can tune in for the upbeat, exciting adventure comic--a clever, contemporary update on the old puzzle/game/make-believe '60s mode of Superman storytelling in lieu of today's ultraviolence, but with enough punching to keep it entertaining (sorry, Bryan Singer). But you can come back to peer at the meticulous construction of the thing, or Morrison's deft pointillist scripting, or the clues, or any other single element, like the way that when I listen to "Once in a Lifetime" I'll focus on just the rhythm guitar, or just the drums. Pretty much no matter what you choose to concentrate on, it's just a wonderfully pleasurable comic to read.
One more bit of housekeeping: when we switch, sometime later this week, to our new hosting provider, the site will go black again. Kate says “about 3 hours”, but I’m going to say “up to 24 hours”, just to be safe. Once that passes, however, we should be good to go for the long run (he said, his fingers crossed)
Plinking out things I’ve missed over the last two weeks…
FALL OF HULKS RED HULK #2: Maybe it is me (it often is!), but if I were buying a book called “Red Hulk”, I’d expect to read a story about, oh, dunno, the Red Hulk maybe? I might even hope that it would tell me something (anything!) about the character. But it doesn’t. this comic is instead about Thundra. Which, like, fair enough, calling it “Fall of the Hulks: Thundra” might have not sold at all. The entire FOH storyline makes me think of LOST, season 2 — where they really didn’t have any idea what they were doing, and they just kept piling on mysteries hoping that the mystery itself would keep you interested. In my case, it sure ain’t, and I thought this was pretty AWFUL
THOR #607 SIEGE: Huh. Did, like, they tell Gillen to write this, and then not tell him anything about the story that was going on, whatsoever? I mean, it is bad enough that there’s a bunch of stuff about Tubby that directly contradicts what is happening in SIEGE EMBEDDED (not that, in and of itself, that’s a horrible thing, but you’d think that some editor, somewhere would say “Hey, hold on…!”), but I have dire and epic problems with the portrayal of Loki here — Loki is shown DIRECTLY killing and imprisoning his fellow Asgardians. Uh, yeah, no. That’s not Loki — Loki always works through catspaws, leaving himself completely blameless. Assuming that anything of Asgard comes out at the end of this storyline (and I imagine that it must if only because there is a movie coming out soonish), how is Loki not going to be executed for his actions here? Also: the title character doesn’t appear in his own comic, hurrah! I also thought this was pretty AWFUL.
Flash forward a week…
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #33: I find it fairly funny that Brad Meltzer, who is reasonably reviled in certain circles, is turning in the best scripts that anyone has managed so far on BUFFY. I’ve been, for the most part, enjoying BUFFY, but it has been fairly clear to me that the TV writers bounce around from “Only sorta getting” the rhythm of a comics page to outright “not getting it”. Meltzer DOES clearly “get it”, and the emotional beats and humor here is all really aces. VERY GOOD.
CROSSED #9: In which Garth Ennis proves, once again, despite being able to see into the sick heart of mankind’s limitless darkness towards itself, is actually a big ol’ sugar-bear softie in the inside. Aw, a happy ending, with walking off into the sunset and holding hands and everything. AWWWWWWWWWWW. I’ll go with GOOD.
FIRST WAVE #1: Just looking at the book itself, I thought this was a fairly solid and straight ahead creation of “Earth-Pulp” that worked very well — I’ll give it a GOOD; but I’m dumbfounded that DC isn’t giving the audience a chance to decide whether or not they like this approach before also launching DOC SAVAGE and SPIRIT *monthly ongoings* that both start next month. Really? Isn’t that basically what completely cut the legs out from under the Red Circle titles? When a series title has shown multiple times over the last decades that it has a hard time finding and attracting and keeping an audience, the solution is to bundle them together as a “line”? Even though the basic qaulity here seems a lot stronger than the Red Circle stuff, I can’t for the life of me imagine any of these books now taking off or doing better than, say, 5k-ish by month #6; nor do I think these will have legs in collected formats either. Too bad, this is a fine start, but you can’t over-saturate the audience before they’ve even decided the like the original product…
KEVIN SMITH GREEN HORNET #1: Same basic problem here. Launching a new GH, by Kevin Smith would seem like a rational move — but it’s deeply irrational to launch like FOUR more series from the premise before the ink is even dry on the first one. This issue sold better than I had thought that it would (I even had to reorder), but the expansion plans for the title already have me reconsidering my orders for the next issues — people might want one GH book… they don’t want five. I thought this first issue was fairly EH.
GIRL COMICS #1: Maybe it is just me (and, again, it probably is), but this really read to me like Marvel had commissioned too much material for STRANGE TALES, realized it, then commissioned even more work to fill out a second mini-series. That’s probably NOT what happened, but it is how it read to me — STRANGE TALES frontloaded most of the really terrific stuff in issue #1, and the quality dropped precipitously after that. This is ST #4, and except for the AWESOME Collen Coover introduction, just felt like a waste of talent and pages to me. I left it feeling extremely EH, and I’m not really looking forward at all to issue #2 (or 5, heh!)
JUSTICE LEAGUE CRY FOR JUSTICE #7: I’ve several problems here. The first is that, structurally, this thing is a mess — we start the story with Congorilla and Mik-Star seeking vengeance, and then maybe coming to the conclusion in the middle that “vengeance” isn’t at all the same thing as “justice”, and we end the series with Ollie throwing that all away with an act of murder. You can debate the value-or-not of that act (but I’ll pass), but thematically, this is just a muddled mess.
Then we can take issue with the “women in refrigerators”-style killing of innocents to simply deliver shock in the lowest-common-denominator kind of way, but David and Tucker covered that ground pretty damn well. I can’t add much other than “a city dead and his arm bloweded off ain’t enough, you got kill the guy’s daughter, too?”
But I honestly think my biggest problem is that you have a majorly Gardner Fox-style problem (your specific powers set off the bomb), and they didn’t go for the Fox-ian solution? SWITCH BOMBS, DUMBASSES. That’s JL 101, damn it.
There’s also let’s-make-Prometheus-a-non-joke-again, then-kill-him-off-on-the-last-page, or The “Wait, how’d Ollie defeat the guy who can shoot faster than the FUCKING FLASH can run?” or the “Wait, where’s Diana’s magic truth-telling lasso?” or… well, color me frustrated.
As I’ve said, now that Robinson is past this and the BLACKEST NIGHT tie ins, I’m really liking his “main” JL run so far, so maybe we can collectively write this off as some sort of editorially-mandated bad dream or something, but, damn, this was really CRAP.
ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS #5
ULTIMATE COMICS NEW ULTIMATES #1: I honestly don’t understand how these two books relate to one another… or why they’d publish two books that seem to if not contradict one another, at least not support the other… or why they’d try high profile launches with good-artists-who-can’t-keep-rational-deadlines… or, to top it all off, TO SHIP THEM IN THE SAME DAMN WEEK.
What the FUCK is wrong with you people?
I thought “Avengers” was pretty EH and “New Ultimates” was reasonably OK, but when they invariably miss their next shipping dates, and the audience decides that they’ve had enough and they can’t figure out the continuity and, hell, what did we see in the “Ultimate” line in the first place? well, don’t come crying to me, chums.
I mean the majority of the books that I talked about this week are prime examples of Why Is The Audience Shrinking? and don’t the publishers see that? Don’t they GET it? I’m not very smart, but I can watch, in my own store, as the audience slowly leaks away, skulking off in the night, because they’re just sick of the behavior of the publishers… and it JUST DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, HONESTLY.
This is Deathlok, part of a squadron. Along with some Deathlok pals, he/it has come back in time to kill various superpowered types before they can grow up and do all those various things that Deathloks don’t like. They don’t like babies, cops, wanna-be super-heroes, people on first dates, and, according to the end of the comic, they don’t like Steve Rogers either.
This is the Red Skull, chucking a baby boy out of a window. He’d given the kids mother a choice: she kills her husband “with a pair of old scissors”, or Skull kills the baby. The line, “the Skull is hardly a man of his word”, refers to the fact that the lady went ahead and killed her husband, but the kid still went out the window.
Although it has nothing to do with Brian Azzarello, these story points are part of Marvel’s secret “First Wave” initiative, which was accidently announced at one of Gareb Shamus’ Wizard conventions, either the Topeka one or Chesapeake Mountain. As Ed Brubaker described “First Wave” at that convention, during a video interview with the lovely ladies of the Samoan Pop Culture Explosion, “Let’s be honest, all of us at Marvel were caught a bit flat footed when DC revealed that they were going to follow up slaughtering homosexual characters in Cry For Justice with the death of an eight-year-old girl, also in Cry For Justice”, he said. “So we scrambled a team, and we gave them an assignment,” he added. Mopping his brow, he continued, “And that assignment was to kill some fucking babies.” Rubbing his lips with a copy of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, he then screamed, “We’ve assembled a fantastic teeeeeeeeem!”
As of this writing, it’s still unclear how soon DC got wind of their competitor’s plans–Brubaker’s interview disappeared within a scant few hours–but DC found out somehow, which is what pushed them to demand J.T. Krul insert a malicious baby slaughter into his script for the Blackest Night Titans miniseries. (Krul’s embarrassment over having to include a scene where Donna Troy pops her zombie son’s skull with her palms is well known across the industry, he’s turned it into a veritable barroom drama. As Heidi Macdonald so aptly described it to Dirk Deppey in last month’s three hour “Blogging: You’ll Need A Computer?” livechat, “No convention is complete until you’ve seen J.T. act out his Moment of Shame at the after-party. He has a whole box of props, you might even call it his second career.”)
It’s not difficult to understand why this explosive information hasn’t circulated before–both Marvel and DC have long embraced the strategy of burying their most controversial decisions in a sea of superfluous information, relying on their audiences natural tendency toward human exhaustion to hide the dirty laundry. (The Brubaker quotes came from Matt Fraction’s audio interview with the Comics Buyer’s Guide, but only after Fraction had spent four hours describing his preferred strategies for beating Desktop Tower Defense, and Macdonald’s remarks don’t appear until Deppey’s finished reading the names of every single professional wrestler he believes is a closeted homosexual, which, because it’s Deppey, is all of them.)
Of course, following yesterday’s release of the three comics, New York’s corporate comics scene exploded into a sea of tautly wrought terrorscapes. It’s a well-known fact that Dan Didio took a morning gig working the bagel cart outside of Joe Quesada’s apartment building sometime in 2008, after it was revealed that Quesada is incapable of walking by a bagel cart without stopping to purchase a Mountain Dew and six packs of sugar. "Pappy calls this my medicine!" This morning’s Marvel Vs. DCmeet-up was expected to be more of the same, plucky disagreements over how many people really care about Arsenal, but things have taking a horrible turn for the baroque. When Joe decided to show up for his morning fix carrying a plastic doll made up to appear like the dead body of Liam, the eight year old girl who died in yesterday’s Cry For Justice, he undoubtedly expected Didio to take it in good fun–after all, Blackest Night is still outselling Siege, and if the internet’s reaction was any indication, Marvel’s attempt to steal the spotlight from Cry For Justice by painting cartoon x's over the eyes of nature's greatest miracles haven’t worked.
Initial police reports, leaked to CNN by a policeman who kept calling CNN on his first generation iPhone while videotaping the crime with his second generation iPhone, which are both totally unlocked because only lame-o’s that don’t matter still use locked iPhones, describe a tableau of grindhouse carnage. Didio was enraged, failing to realize that Quesada was carrying a plastic doll. Grabbing a sixty cup coffee urn, he ran out into the early morning New York traffic and grabbed the first pansexual Canadian infant he could find, screaming “I’ll fucking show you decadence, you goddamned immigrant.” Apparently perplexed as to how to remove the top of the coffee urn–”You have to unscrew the top part, and that thing can get pretty hot”, Geoff Johns goofily explained–Didio began trying to situate the child underneath the urn’s spigot, planning to show up Quesada’s jibe by scalding a baby with hot coffee. Luckily, Dwayne McDuffie was there, and utilizing his well known forearm strength, beat Didio into the pavement with that stack of unpublished Justice League scripts he’s always carrying around with him. At the time of this publication, Didio’s bail hearing has reached its sixth ridiculous hour, following the man’s bizarrely inappropriate decision to hire Grant Morrison to represent him. (While not a trained lawyer, Morrison’s claims towards having a “spectral understanding of the law” whenever he overdoses on muscle relaxants have always impressed Dan.)
While Quesada has refused all direct questions regarding the incident, he did release the following statement, represented in full:
“We at Marvel have always worked to support the trend towards ultraviolence–our readers like it, we like it, and you’d have to be fucking terrified of money to put a leash on Mark Millar. But we’ve always tried to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re making a product, a bit of fun, and that if we take it too seriously, if we try to make some kind of philosophical statement about justice or heroism, we’re going to end up with a dour, boring slice of poorly written shit. You’re going to see plenty more children die in Marvel comics over the next few years, right up until it stops being a financially successful thing to do, but I can promise you this: unlike James Robinson, we’re never going to do it so we can teach you a moral lesson. We’ll leave that shit to the Huffington Post.”
[This is a reconstructed post from Google Cache; originally posted by David!]
“Cry for Justice is a singular work,” said James Robinson in the backup prose section of the sixth issue. I can only hope this will forever be the case.
This series has been getting negative reviews from the beginning, for a bunch of reasons – stiff art, stiff dialogue, a somewhat cliched premise – all of which made for a fairly silly comic that could be accurately titled Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen’s Act Like Jack Bauer Day. Still, it was buoyed by Robinson’s enthusiasm for its self-aware campiness, and while it wasn’t anything I’d call high art it was at least entertaining.
And then, the conclusion came out this morning. SPOILERS behind the jump.
From a pure technical standpoint, there’s a lot wrong with “Cry for Justice” #7. It’s got three inconsistent artists – up and coming DC/Marvel artist Ibraim Roberson (who’s got the Second Coming issues of “New Mutants” coming up), regular miniseries artist/painter Mauro Cascioli and the rather awful Scott Clark, who combines an incongruous chickenscratch style alongside a complete inability to write a comprehensible double-page spread (check out these pages from the preview to see an example). And on top of that, a character says “we’re loosing” instead of “we’re losing,” once again demonstrating DC’s mystifying inability to properly spell-, grammar- and logic-check a title’s lettering. Or at least, if they do, I’d hate to see the first pass before their corrections.
The real problem here, though, is a story. This continues the Identity Crisis paradigm of cheerfully sacrificing civilians and supporting characters on the pyre of cheap, maudlin drama. For those of you who haven’t read this comic, and I don’t blame you: the villain Prometheus, from Grant Morrison’s JLA run, has basically tricked Ira “I.Q.” Quimby into building a machine that’ll ostensibly transport the area around it (in Prometheus’s design, a city) to an unknown location in spacetime. His big master plan is that he’s going to send all the heroes’ cities to these unknown locations, and therefore TORTURE THEIR SOULS by forcing them to forever comb space and time for their loved ones! MUA HA HA! This was revealed around issue #6, and while it’s still throwing civilians onto the sacrificial pyre, it’s at least comic book supervillain ridiculous rather than real world mass murderer ridiculous, and it leaves the option open for them to come back.
And then I read #7.
You see, the device malfunctions, and a few panels later we end up with people carrying Lian Harper – the, like, eight-year-old, adorable daughter of Red Arrow/Arsenal -’s bloody corpse out of the ruins of Ollie’s house. We end up with tons of panels of people carrying bloody bodies out of wreckage, and once again a cityload of civilians are mercilessly slaughtered just to send two characters down the tired, boring, cliched THEY’RE TURNING INTO DARK KILLERS path.
Robinson then goes on to render the heroes in this story completely ineffectual, if not downright accomplices to Prometheus, by having them completely give in and let Prometheus go in exchange for not blowing up the similar devices he has in every other city. This allows Prometheus to… I don’t know what, make a point that the Justice League won’t sacrifice people over a grudge? They don’t foil him, they aren’t useful in any way, they’re just a reason for Prometheus to commit an epic case of domestic terrorism.
In the end, the only person who does anything proactive is Green Arrow, who, in the last few pages, just straight-up murders Prometheus in his Phantom Zone crib. FOR JUSTICE. (Which he says, after shooting an arrow through his head.)
Now, I don’t know whether to throw all the blame on James Robinson for this. It was long ago referenced that the book would have a shocking ending, one suggested by Dan DiDio and Eddie Berganza. But the fact remains that this comic destroyed a city, cynically slaughtered a young girl, maimed a hero and ruined the moral track record of another just to… I don’t know, to turn Ollie back into the ruthless street vigilante of the Mike Grell run, maybe? To break up the “Arrow Family”? To… God, I don’t know.
I guess all of this comes back to a question: why does THIS bother me? I didn’t really have a problem with the mass murder in Siege, or in Civil War, or with Superboy-Prime ripping peoples’ arms off, or the Sentry opening Ares up like a kid with no hand-eye coordination getting frustrated with a pinata. Those were casualties in stories that could only be told in a superhero universe; they were instigating elements, not finales, and the heroes had some sort of win at the end.
Cry for Justice, though? It’s just a really shitty season of 24. Let me rephrase the entire series’ plot this way:
Some terrorist makes a call to the President, saying he’s going to blow up six different cities. One blows up in the first two-hour premiere episode, just to make his point that the bombs are real. The President calls on CTU to save America – but it turns out the terrorist has actually already infiltrated that organization! When he’s finally found out, he says he’ll give them the deactivation codes for the other bombs if they let him go, which they do. Then, in the last episode, Jack finds him at his house and shoots him in the head.
Does that sound like a superhero comic you want to read?
According to the advertisements all over the side over there (---->) Stan is, apparently, back. Wouldn't it be cool if it was some sort of zombie-related thing with Stan feasting on the hearts of the wicked? "Face Front, True Believer.... so I can reach your braaaaaaaain!"
No? Maybe it is just me...
Well, I thank them for the ad dollars, anyway!
So, some quick reviews (yeah yeah, I missed the goal of one-a-week-for-the-quarter -- I had a hectic fortnight!)
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #42: Yeah, liking this. This is really how I want a JLA comic to be -- taking place in, and mining the DC Universe. I also quite liked the (Earth-3? Well or whatever they're calling it today) New Gods appearance. My only real quibble is what Plas is doing in the WW2 era, that's a continuity change, ennit? Anyway, I like the scope, the byplay, the whole thing -- I'll say VERY GOOD.
JOE THE BARBARIAN #2: I didn't love this as much as issue #1 -- and I think it is down to the "real world" scenes. I didn't feel like there was any stakes or peril there, though it appears we're supposed to think the kid is dying, but that didn't really come across very well for me, and felt very disconnected to the Fantasy world stuff. Still, the art is faboo, and the book is a fair amount of fun. I'll go with GOOD.
SUPERGIRL #50: It's not that I have anything especial to say about this issue, but I was deeply, massively, profoundly amused by the screaming headline on the cover: "Featuring a tale by HELEN SLATER!". Yeah, there's maybe 17 people in the entire world who get why that might be even vaguely interesting (it isn't), and that's COUNTING Slater's immediate family. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the actress in an awful movie can get a byline in a comic... but it is like 25 years too late for that to be meaningful to anything remotely resembling today's audience.
In the main story, I was a bit bugged by the (at least) three instances of swearing -- even if two of them were in "Kryptonese". I'd kind of prefer a Suprema-esque use of language, really. But then, my Supergirl doesn't wear a belly-shirt either, so I guess I'm not going to win that one any time soon... Anyway, I thought the entire issue was a bit EH.
GREEN LANTERN #51: I really liked the deftness of having this be a (fairly integral) crossover into the main BN story-line, but that if you didn't read BN, or, conversely, read BN, but not GL, you're probably just fine in reading along. I thought this was pretty GOOD.
DARK AVENGERS #14: I'm fairly uncertain how this is a "Siege" crossover, really, except for the one little sentence about it, and I remain unsure about the value of jerking Sentry around like that. Despite the fact that it is a manufactured and inserted character, it would appear to me that this gives the character even less possible places to go -- except, maybe? becoming the Marvel version of Superboy-Prime, which would be a fairly tragic mistake, IMO. Overall, this was only OK.
ZOMBIE VERSUS ROBOT AVENTURE: I still don't really "get" the missing "D" in the title (wiki says that it is a noun: aventure (plural aventures)
1. (obsolete) Accident; chance; adventure.
2. (obsolete) A mischance causing a person's death without felony, as by drowning, or falling into the fire.
and none of those really seem to fit much?
There's some nice art in here, but it all feels... well, it feels a bit like HEAVY METAL where it is like the story isn't supposed to matter, really, because the art is so nice. Which, in premise, is fine, but then, where are the titties? It seems to me that the value in the "ZvR brand" is really all about Ashley Wood, but none of the styles involved here are really anything like Wood, so, yeah, I Don't Get It. My customers don't seem to, either -- sales on this were very poor, and much lower than the Wood-driven issues. Overall, I thought it was pretty EH.
Been away from the Savage longer than I expected to be, and that's how it goes when you can't see your keyboard through a veil of tears. I'm not the political type, so don't expect any side-taking in the whole Communist America controversy, but I will remind you of this one fact, learnt from my pappy's knee: any sort of testicular manipulation (including "teabagging") is a 100% fantastic way to spend one's time, and a little summer fun with the Lord's satchel never hurt a soul. Stealing the term for usage in the latest re-re-remix of party over here/party over there may not be an actual crime, but no matter which side you take on the Bookscan debate, we've all lost a bit of our innocence.
Let's ask the mainstream to bring it back to the center, and let the groaning commence. (These came out last week.)
Hit-Monkey # 1: Let's Make This Perfunctory
The "monkey with guns" idea works best when you're Mike Mignola and the beast only gets a couple of panels, but it's obvious from Marvel's "Heroic Age" banner that some people won't let the sun go down on an idea until that idea's corpse is ejaculating maggots with last names. Hell, this comic isn't even about that Agents of Atlas gorilla with the wisecracks, it's about some other monkey, who has other guns. So what is Hit Monkey? Some kind of weird bet amongst creative types? A convention sketch come to life? On the plus side, there's one joke in here that hits the mark (that one being where the assassin chooses to wear his suit throughout months of recuperation, including all the time he spends pruning up in a hot springs), but this is otherwise AWFUL fare. That's not really a shocker. At least it's only a one-shot, and all the people involved can get back to whatever it is they do with the rest of their time. Deadpool? Being legitimized by Giuseppe Camuncoli?
Batman & Robin # 8: Let's Make This Personal
I gather I'm just not the audience for this. I came to the idea of Grant Morrison-doing-Batman with a level of anticipation that no actual comic could have ever met unless it magically teleported into my bathroom and started bench-pressing victory. Honestly, the last few years have been a lesson in how little I really do want to read super-hero comics that "take post-modern chances" or whatever histrionically worded expectation I've placed on this writer's output. The things that I loved about his "mainstream" work on Doom Patrol, Animal Man, JLA Earth 2, New X-Men--they weren't the Invisibles style idea exercises, the "at play in the fields of symbolism" Seaguy-ish bits, they were how well that Morrison handled the perfunctory moments of kitchen sink standards. I liked when the Beast would get to jump around and hit shit in X-Men, the long-form friendship drama between Cliff Steele and Crazy Jane, the desperate sadness when Batman got to team up with the father he still keenly missed. I'm a sucker for it when it works, and all that Buddy Baker crying and wanting his wife back kind of stuff, all those moments of simple, easy drama worked so goddamned well whenever Morrison felt like throwing it in.
These Batman stories haven't had a lot of that. There's been a good bit of Morrison's Justice League kind of lines, where Batman says threatening stuff, scenes where he's presented as the be-all, end-all of the Being One's Best bootstraps fantasy, but there's so little sweetness in between. Damian is the main exception--under Morrison, he's a genuinely funny character--and the art has had some considerable moments of grace and beauty. (Cameron Stewart's bleeding headlights in issue 7, or the way this issue presented Damian as a sweatervest-wearing Bruce in miniature, complete with pomade slicked hair.) Domesticity and Batman can go well together--there's still a lot of pleasure in the moments that force Bruce out on dates--but everything here is set at the Final Crisis interpretations of super-heroism, frenetic depictions of guy-fights-evil that never take a second to look around. It's still a GOOD comic, and I can imagine a genuine appreciation for its style that would push it higher, but it would be a lie to say I shared it.
Adventure Comics # 7: Let's Make This Punditry
This is a Valentine's Day Special in everything but name, throwing a heart on the cover just to make it clear. Expanding on the portion of Blackest Night where resurrected super-heroes became short-term Black Lanterns, it's up to writer Tony Bedard (and a five man art squad?) to get Superboy from point A (is Black Lantern) to point B (is not Black Lantern). It's a job, not a story. Page limitations lock the guy into treatment writing, the ensuing battle between Superboy and his sorta girlfriend Wonder Girl is as paint-by-numbers as it gets, which means it's easiest just to focus on a piece of spiky dialog to test the comic's pulse. That piece of dialog is where the mind-controlled Superboy tries to scare/humiliate/upset his sorta girlfriend by strongly implying that he masturbates to fantasies involving his cousin Supergirl. That--yup--makes sense within the story, as the Black Lanterns have been consistently shown to be interested in arousing a lot of emotion in their super-powered victims, and telling your girlfriend you'd rather jerk off to thoughts of incest than have sex with her is probably something that would result in a bit of a tiff. (Wonder Girl is occasionally portrayed as having a self-esteem problem, so it's also wholly possible that she considers herself less attractive than Supergirl. Which might be true? It would seem impossible to tell the difference between the two characters if they were wearing street clothes.)
It's besides the point whether this is "gross" or "decadent" or not. Again: this isn't really a story, it's a task. Adventure Comics was going to be handled by Paul Levitz by this point, that changed because DC's going to move to the West Coast and everybody's going to get fired so the companies intellectual properties can become digital avatars that are transmitted for free through radio waves, all so that You Too Can Write Blue Beetle At Home, or whatever the latest explanation via Mad Libs is. This is a filler story, something that could've gone anywhere, that could've been handled in a couple of panels in the Blackest Night series, or it could've just never been told at all. Point B--Superboy not being a Black Lantern--was all that "had" to be reached, Adventure # 7 exists because the 22 page solution was the one picked out of the editorial hat. Is it an AWFUL comic because a bunch of random good soldiers collected a paycheck to get the pencils inked and its writer delivered the geriatric plot that editorial selected? Is it an EH book from a "is this product worth your time or money" standpoint? Is it CRAP because some people find its dialog offensive? Or is it VERY GOOD, maybe even EXCELLENT, all because it doesn't resort to the cliche of having the mind-controlled person hammer their friend's face into the pavement over and over again, until their friend's face is a bloody pulp, and then, right before the final killing blow is thrown, the mind-control wears off and the pummled meat of the friend's face mumbles "it wasn't your fault" through broken teeth shards?
God only knows. There's a bunch of new stuff waiting already, but if you can find it, you can make the call on this one yourself. Last time I checked, report cards already had plenty of grades. And if Adventure Comics # 7 is anything, it's that: a memo with notes in the margin, passed on down from one hand to another.
It's the 31st century and a virus from Mars is transforming everyone into mutant zombies; a synthetic human dressed in a black uniform and a black helmet rides his talking motorcycle at 666 km/h into a walled city on a mission to find a teenage girl, whom he almost immediately runs over as she crosses his path, tearing her leg most of the way off, only to have it heal herself in a manner perhaps expected of an Accommodator of the virus from Mars - the dazed girl, however, is also the ward of a talking bear with a rifle who shows up and whisks her away to a tall castle, wherein she is disguised in a bear costume which fails to bamboozle a Cenobite-looking villain with a bloody smock draped over a black cloak who defeats the talking bear and the synthetic human in combat and then stands on a ledge, the girl hoisted over his/her shoulder, shooting the castle with his gun until it explodes, albeit as the synthetic human rescues the talking bear, Kozlov L. Grebnev, who retreats to a submarine while Zoichi, the synthetic human, rides on his talking motorcycle, Fuyu, her AI materialized holographically as a woman in white, through a whole crowd of zombies, whacking at them with an axe en route to shooting the Cenobite-looking bloody smock villain in the head from a distance away while another Cenobite-looking villain in a gown of bandages loads the girl onto a shuttle, leaving her compatriot to mutate into a less human form and lecture Zoichi, who cuts him to pieces, on the villains' terrible plan to purge humanity forever and start a new race with the Accommodators, as emphasized by the sudden launch of thirteen intercontinental ballistic missiles -- while the talking bear watches television in a submarine and a newscaster shoots himself in the head because he cannot abide the baptism of the new society -- upon which Zoichi assembles a very long cannon from out the back of his talking motorcycle, somewhat in the manner of that very long gun the Joker pulls out of his pants in Tim Burton's Batman, and shoots all the missiles out of the air, a la the Batwing, as told to another black-uniformed rider, elsewhere, who fires his own wounded talking motorcycle's AI away in a rocket before confronting another Cenobite-looking villain in a trench coat with a gigantic sword who whacks him on his head, smooshing it all the way down between his shoulders, as the rocket evocatively clears the Earth's poisoned atmosphere into the dead silence of cool outer space. Comics.
Biomega is a big, loud, ridiculous heavy metal tractor pull of a comic, a nakedly derivative blood-on-black-leather action/sci-fi jamboree aimed squarely at 14-year old boys prone to drawing ninjas in class and 14-year old boys prone to drawing ninjas in class at heart. It's the kind of manga that mother (Studio Proteus) used to make (localize to English), and highly OKAY on that level, even if most of us can name a lot of recent zombie-dotted action/horror comics from out of North America; I've often found that manga iterations of such familiar material tend approach things with a notable lack of inhibition (see: talking bear w' rifle), and that's pretty much the prevailing virtue here.
Also, of course, there's the art of creator Tsutomu Nihei, whose 10-volume magnum opus Blame! (pronounced "BLAM" like a gunshot) was released by Tokyopop a few years back, along with an odds 'n ends 'prequel' book NOiSE, although he actually enjoyed the unique honor of a North American-specific color comics introduction prior to any of his Japanese manga seeing release, courtesy of the late Jemas Era out-of-print Marvel curio Wolverine: Snickt!, continuing the onomatopoeia theme.
You might therefore conclude that Nihei is a man of lean, sleek action, but that's not quite right; a former architecture student and studio assistant to seinen suspense artist Tsutomu Takahashi (whose Ice Blade was among Tokyopop's early, unfinished translations), he's more 'François Schuiten reborn as an Image founder,' which isn't to say that his work looks like any of those artists' on the surface -- his settings owe more to the late Zdzisław Beksiński while his character art somewhat evokes Hiroaki Samura of Blade of the Immortal, comparisons which frankly do him no favors -- but that he practices a funnybook monumentalist approach reliant on the stillness of figures, be they looming man-made spires or detailed humanoid forms tense in action poses and thereby as awesome as skyscrapers.
So, yeah, it's more Cyberforce than Les Cités Obscures, despite Nihei drawing much influence from European sources; while Schuiten might reinforce the vulnerability of humans against massive mortar metaphors, Nihei explores the similarities of the two by rendering them both as cold structures -- with a few fuzzy talking anomalies -- coherent only in that they look as awesome as possible on every page, fully appropriate for his scenarios of humankind caught mid-transition into something new and less emotive, a theme sometimes attributed to other Japanese action stylists, like dubious anime legend Koichi Ohata of M.D. Geist and other bloody messes spattered over winning steel and augmented bones. Unlike many North American comics, which you can easily imagine spinning Biomega's man-against-many story as a fable of enduring individuality, this one explicitly casts its hero and villains as representatives of unseen organizations, literally built to order. The sociologists might have more to say on that.
This points to Nihei's faults as well. His plots tend to be exceedingly basic, elaborated upon mainly to throw obstacles in front of characters prone to coughing expository matter into each other's faces when they open their mouths, which is not often. Nihei demonstrates little command of body language, and seems disinterested in the niceties of facial expression. Moreover, he's largely inapt at conveying physical contactbetween panel elements, which, all visual-thematic analysis notwithstanding, is kind of a problem for an action comic that boils down to Kamen Rider Vs. the Zombies; that early bit with the talking motorcycle running down the heroine is so lacking in visceral impact its huge overcompensating WHUMP sound effect -- admittedly a publisher's addition, but I tend to presume these things roughly match the Japanese sfx elements -- comes off as simply funny.
What makes this more worrisome is that Biomega is a newer work (serialized 2004-09), and seemingly intended as a more directly engaging piece; say what you will about Jim Lee, but when, say, All Star Batman kicks All Star Corrupt Police Officer in the face, you can fucking feel it. Little of that comes through in Nihei's art, and I do get the impression he's keenly aware of it - a later bit with the Cenobite smock villain winging a punch off of Zoichi's helmet sees the entire point of impact covered by a helpful shower of sparks. Likewise, virtually all of the big action sequences are powered by fairly clever shifts in perspective, like a close-up panel of a character firing a rocket -- and speaking of stillness, Nihei is extremely fond of stroboscope-like images of projectiles frozen in mid-air having juuuust exited the barrel of a weapon -- followed by an over-the-shoulder glimpse of the target with the prior character now in the background, the rocket halfway between them. All posed, all tense.
An interesting effect sometimes results, circumstantial evidence of the artist thinking his limitations through. Zoichi is a very fast character, even without his talking motorcycle, much faster than most of his opponents. Nihei will sometimes use good ol' speed lines to convey this, but other times, without warning, he'll lay out a series of panels depicting Zoichi performing some activity grossly out of synch with everyone else around him, so that he'll nonchalantly draw his gun and calmly point and fire at everyone's head while other characters spend every panel in either exactly the same pose or some barely-along variant of such, save for their heads erupting. Their bodies will still be in mid-fall as Zoichi prepares to leave, and then the in-panel action will snap back into synch. A very cool effect, and I mean 'cool' as in disaffected, and neatly facilitated by stiff, posey characters.
He can't do that all the time, so, despite his rough, scratchy lines, some pages replicate the detached feel of slick, heavy realist superhero artists, though Nihei is closer to Jae Lee's intense reliance on mise-en-scène then overt ships-passing-in-broad-daylight chaos. From this, the artist taps his greatest effect - the sense of place that admirers tend to cite. That's not just in background drawings; David Welsh recently compared Biomega's overall style to that of a first-person shooter -- and indeed, Nihei is supposedly an avid Halo player, preceding his contribution to The Halo Graphic Novel -- but it struck me as more of a 3D action platformer, where the fighting is often secondary to exploring landscapes, just being there, although you can't really advance without fights.
In this way, the key problem with this first volume is that it's an awfully event-heavy play-through, a straight shot, I guess more of a 'proper' crazy uninhibited action manga, from an artist that's defined by his visual/tonal departures from the norm.
But the oddest clash in this book isn't so visual. Keep in mind: when I say the story is "uninhibited," I don't mean it's something like Hiroya Oku's Gantz, which is so po-faced skintight sleazy it borders on camp; in fact, Nihei's body of work is notable in being almost totally without overt sexuality, to the point where I was surprised to learn that his official art book has 'erotic' pages. To my eyes, Nihei's depiction of bodies implies reproduction as a mechanical operation, an act of necessity in appropriate circumstances, as suggested by Blame!'s particular transhuman blend.
Even though I look at the villains in this book and think "Cenobites," Clive Barker's creations tend to be very specifically sexual beings; with Nihei, the surface is adapted into a larger asexual aesthetic. H.R. Giger is another popular point of visual reference, but his fetishistic aspect is diluted into people-as-buildings-as-society totality. Certainly there's no superhero mega-cleavage or male manga fanservice, although the perpetually dazed, childlike 17-year old at the heart of Zoichi's quest showcases several prominenttraits of the helpless, hapless, tragic moe girl, which makes for a hilarious, brilliant, and almost certainly unintentional illustration of exactly how little this character type differs from the damsel-in-distress stock of the most clichéd, retrograde macho man heroic fantasies imaginable in genre fiction.
I wonder if that kind of stuff was added to this book to make it more 'appealing' to a wider audience? The back cover and the color front section are decorated with the image of a zombie woman in low-riding bikini bottoms. My problem isn't these images on their own, or Nihei's sexless style, but how badly they jar, like a (possibly editorial) grandmother sitting down with a boy who'd rather play video games than talk about girls and awkwardly inquiring as to his favorite actresses. "I think Kevin Costner is very attractive." Hence: bottoms.
Yet Nihei's true fascination manifests. When a zombie woman shows up, lean and mostly unmutated in a little black dress, her cheekbones are good mostly for detailing how her teeth come out when Zoichi blows open her skinny head. When the girl Zoichi seeks appears, walking in a skirt, it's mainly much the better for tracing the luxurious stretching and splitting of a nude leg torn open by a (talking) motorcycle's tires, and then the recombination of its bloody strips and dancing tendons into a filmy new whole. Better hop into that bear suit, kid - it's a short life for the old flesh.
***
All My Darling Daughters: So, this girl walks into her teacher's office and starts taking off her clothes. She keeps repeating "It's all right" as the flummoxed lecturer urges her to stop, eventually trying to run away when she lifts up her bra. Despite this, he concedes that he likes the girl's breasts, causing her to tear up. She pins him against a bookshelf and demands that he let her go down on him or else she'll yell. He relents -- even though the girl is weird and her hair is oily and sticky -- much to the chagrin of his circle of acquaintances at dinner later on. Yet the girl is among the only ones in his class that seems to listen to him at all; even he considers some of his lectures to be boring. After a subsequent encounter, he offers the girl coffee, which she frantically insists he cannot do, although she tells him he's kind. The teacher idly imagines that he'd accept a more beautiful student's advances anytime. The girl, however, insists that the two of them should not have sex, because it's too good for her; and sex is for the female partner's benefit, while blowjobs are what a man likes best. He smiles when he sees her dutifully copying his words in class. She tells him later that she'd die if he only looked at her face when they're together, and that she used to be embarrassed by her big breasts but accepted them after she learned guys like them; her ex-boyfriends told her that her breasts were her only asset, though she insists they were great guys, because they came to her apartment and ate her food and accepted her presents. She says she likes him better. He admits he's starting to like her, and a friend tells him to return to where it started to go wrong. The next time they're together, he tells her not to go down on him; she cried, but her offers her tickets for them to see a movie. They embrace, and she tells him he's too good for her. In class, he reprimands her for coming in late, and the boy sitting next to her calls her a slowpoke and an ugly bitch. She grins at him as he looks away. "I hope she finds a guy who's a little better than I am." The teacher smiles. Comics?
Well shit, of course it's comics. Not long ago, folks would've called it 'literary' comics, and while that might have raised annoying qualms about imposing prose publishing's literary-genre dichotomy on a different art form -- in that a literary comic could simply be like 'literature' in the sense of being like prose writing itself -- it would nonetheless signal some form of thematic or formalist ambition on the part of various North American comics, albeit at a time when possibly any departure from genre apparatus could be construed as just that.
But comics have grown a lot in the past decade, and the old labels don't stick so well. Case in point: Fumi Yoshinaga, doujinshi-making fan turned pro, the widely-admired creator of the workplace dramedy Antique Bakery and the ongoing alternate history serial Ōoku: The Inner Chambers. This is her newest English release, hailing from 2003 in Japan, a suite of five interconnected stories, one of which I've synopsized above in a way that doesn't leave it too dissimilar to something out of, say, Optic Nerve, Adrian Tomine's quintessential literary comic, which, particularly in its later issues, always struck me as far more cinematographic in its ice-carved observational visuals than anything else. Er, should I mention Raymond Carver?
Prose is not always to be trusted, though, particularly when the prose writer's chief qualification is his blogspot account. What quickly leaps out from Yoshinaga's story is something a plot synopsis cannot capture: how the artist's handling of such potentially risible subject matter is inseparable from her use of the most time-honored aspects of manga iconography. Sweatdrops, booming sound effects, wacky cartoon faces, tiny balloonless dialogue asides - the gang's all here, if not as blatantly so as in youth manga. Still, they are the operations of a mangaka working in a relaxed idiom, a detailed comics language so fully hammered into place by decades of usage in a mass medium that they needn't be questioned. The purpose of Chibi-like cartoon faces are easy to understand (someone is losing their cool), so why not use them in a painful story about a teacher and his student? Because people won't take you seriously? Because you need to look like something else?
Manga may not be the most seriously considered art form in Japan, but it's understood enough that its toolbox doesn't need to be emptied to meet some threshold burden for adult consideration. It's like this: when Jaime Hernandez uses zany cartoon effects dating back to before Dan Decarlo, it's Jaime Hernandez being Jaime Hernandez; when Fumi Yoshinaga does it, it's manga being manga.
Another crucial difference: North American comics don't have a tradition of perfectly GOOD dramas like this to draw from. Currently, they have a small niche capable of selling drama as literature, without the distinctions that mark prose literature, or a limited means of presenting drama as an accessory to genre mechanics.
The beauty of manga is that drama can be simply drama, which, oddly enough, allows for less fussy access to certain literary qualities -- psychological depth, social inquiry, etc. -- though some might claim a more direct comparison to television drama; indeed, Yoshinaga is no stranger to that terrain, in that Antique Bakery was adapted into both live-action and animated television series in Japan, in addition to a feature film in South Korea. This might be a product of comparative serialization, though; certainly most of the television comparisons I hear regarding North American works surround superhero comics, the last big holdout of monthly or weekly chapters around here.
What Yoshinaga's work lacks is interaction with the comics form beyond that of the relaxed idiom. I doubt most non-devotees could even pick her artwork out of a lineup, it's so placidly observant of developed manga values, although a likable blockiness to certain obstinate characters' faces becomes noticeable over the course of the book; certainly she can put together attractive page designs, as evidenced above by the interplay between tones and blocking and those narration-only panels for... special... emphasis.
All of this is directly communicative, however - Yoshinaga is just not a fancy storyteller, rarely attempting even basic dissonance between words and pictures, except for comedic effect. It could be the tide of critical thought is turning, and that as drama becomes more commonplace in North American comics -- hardly guaranteed, given the precarious state of the market -- formalism might yet emerge as the new easy-reading shorthand for 'ambitious' funnies; last year's darling, Asterios Polyp, would obviously fit that bill. I haven't read every manga in the world, but I can't imagine a work like Mazzucchelli's coming out of Japan; maybe my imagination is limited, but it could be that the conditions necessary to conceive of such an obsessive metaphorical outlay just don't exist with manga, where even 'art' comics tend to study movement, like Yuichi Yokoyama's, or play with perspectives or drawing styles, a la Shintaro Kago or the heta-uma artists, or swing a hard fist at societal conditions, as did some of the older gekiga.
You don't need to fulfill any of these criteria to make an effective comic, much in the way you don't need to appear on critics' Top 10 lists to be good. The point I'm getting at is that the transformation of North American comics' makeup will probably cause a shift in how comics are analyzed qualitatively, and it's unassuming books like this that'll raise the biggest questions for readers disinclined to let nationality serve as their co-pilot. Yoshinaga remains upfront, like literature also can. As a writer, she typically has her characters flatly state their minds, confessing to or confiding in one another to move the plot, laughing and crying. She draws superb tears; there's these two pages with a little kid waking up sick, crying and spitting and puking, and there's a world of pain in that, one of the simplest ways comics can charge you up by being what they are.
The stories of All My Darling Daughters aren't very tightly connected -- the characters are all somehow friends or relations of each other, if sometimes tenuously -- although the last one does circle around to compliment the first, and the passage of time is duly conveyed as characters build relationships or get married. All of them concern women struggling with a deterministic world that ensures their relationships are connected to events of the past. Schoolroom slights create lasting tension between a mother and daughter, understandings between friends are informed by teenage vows for the future; probably the most complex aspect of the book is its title, indicating a particular parental concern, a love that Yoshinaga's manga reveals as potentially stifling.
"She said I was too good for her," says the teacher to his friends. That's a recurring sentiment throughout the book, a summary of the neuroses bedeviling Yoshinaga's characters. From this union of aching, across the book as a whole, we can understand the student in that story, even while the artist maintains the male's perspective (the only one of the book) throughout. She is young, and she might find her way out of the trap, although the only characters to really take control of their lives are prompted by one mother's life-threatening disease, thereby signalling a daughter to do the same.
Well, there is another character that undergoes a big change: a young woman who seems to care for everyone, yet never manages a romantic relationship. She's the star of the book's longest and most troublesome story, illustrative of Yoshinaga reaching too far, working with the fairly sophomoric notion of falling in love as potentially cruel discrimination between people as its thematic axis, then ungainly dressing it with allusions to the early 20th century struggles of Japanese leftists and the teachings of Christ, after which a perfectly logical and still faintly silly conclusion is reached.
This character is the counterpoint to Yoshinaga's mother and daughter, a person that can't stand the vagaries of romantic love and thus cuts herself off entirely from mainstream society. It's tempting to read this as revealing of the artist's own position, more adept with smartly observing domestic interactions than grappling with headier stuff; she does seem to want after something different, given this false start's inclusion, and the vastly expanded scope of Ōoku. We may be coming into a time where the new critical biases will demand more, and maybe in a way that Yoshinaga's straight-shot art cannot provide.
Yet maybe the nurturing of calm drama will spark its own nuanced appreciation, and readings will spread outward. Just having a book like this glide across bookstore shelves like it's just manga shows how much the years can change comics, more pliable than Yoshinaga's drawn families and nervous lovers for sure.
According to the advertisements all over the side over there (---->) Stan is, apparently, back. Wouldn't it be cool if it was some sort of zombie-related thing with Stan feasting on the hearts of the wicked? "Face Front, True Believer.... so I can reach your braaaaaaaain!"
Been away from the Savage longer than I expected to be, and that's how it goes when you can't see your keyboard through a veil of tears. I'm not the political type, so don't expect any side-taking in the whole Communist America controversy, but I will remind you of this one fact, learnt from my pappy's knee: any sort of testicular manipulation (including "teabagging") is a 100% fantastic way to spend one's time, and a little summer fun with the Lord's satchel never hurt a soul. Stealing the term for usage in the latest re-re-remix of party over here/party over there may not be an actual crime, but no matter which side you take on the Bookscan debate, we've all lost a bit of our innocence.
