How to make an excellent graphic novel

When I received the Superman: Earth One graphic novel, I also received a copy of Sarah Glidden's HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS OR LESS. I had just started to write that review when I found out how pissed DC was about the Superman one, so I stopped writing. 2 months later that was just a skeleton, so let me throw it out and start again.

This book is my favorite new graphic novel of 2010, so far.

Graphic novels are tricksy things. You have to understand that most comics (and most entertainment for that matter, but that's a digression) is really meant as disposable material. That doesn't mean that it is inherently throw away, but more that the goal is to make you to go "Whoa, that was fun!" for 15 minutes, until you go to your next chunk of entertainment.

Virtually everything we call "a graphic novel" in this business is just a fancily packaged chunk of disposable entertainment. I love SCOTT PILGRIM, I loved WILSON, but those aren't really (to me) works that are "of lasting value or importance"

I really think that a "graphic novel" should function as a "proper" novel does -- it's meant to expand your mind, your world, to teach you something new, to make you consider something you have never considered before, and, in a best case scenario, actually change the way you view the world.

In this class I'd put, mm, MAUS, PERSEPOLIS, PYONGYANG, things like that -- stories that CAN HAVE very entertaining bits in them, but add up to something past "just" entertainment.

HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS falls into that class for me -- I learned new things while being entertained, I walked in thinking certain things about the region, and had several of those ideas confronted, and, hell, I even have an Israeli for a wife (of 25 years!), and I came out with some brand new insight.

I'd like to say more about the packaging, about the colors in the final version, and so on, but, sadly, Diamond screwed up my order on this one -- I got an equal number of copies of Krause's new color price guide (ugh!) instead of Glidden's new book. They'll be replaced by Friday (well, or they SHOULD be), but having read the b&w galley I can't imagine that color/production could possibly do anything except improve the experience.

This was superb in all the ways that SUPERMAN EARTH ONE was ineffably shitty -- it's actually about something, it makes you think, and it has morality and justice at it's very core. It's the best GN of the year, by far, and I thought it was absolutely EXCELLENT.

What did YOU think?

-B

Crazy crazy crazy nights

It's been a pretty insane week -- between Halloween, the World Series (it's a big deal in SF), Election Day, man it feels like there's 40 billion things to do and see. But I want to keep my hand in, yes I do, so here's a couple of reviews for you...

Couple of "reboots" this week...

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #44:  Marc Guggenheim and Scott Kolins come on to JSA, after the failed reboot with Bill Willingham, and the results are pretty good. I haven't thought a lot of Kolins as a writer (seriously, how do you do a sequel to KINGDOM COME and have *no one* care, pro OR con?), but as an artist, he's fairly effective with layouts that zing, and clear storytelling skills.

Guggenheim's writing is reasonably strong, but there are a few odd plot developments here that don't do a lot for me: the opening page sets up a thread that could conceptually be interesting if it didn't seem completely out of thin air (and then pretty much ignored for the next 21 pages), while the tragedy-building events for Mr. Terrific and GL seem odd -- too "I don't know what to do with a smart guy" in the former case, and too "This isn't reflecting the Just Established New Status Quo" on the latter.

The ending of the issue is kind of horrifying (I think they should have flipped the last two beats, but that's me), but I wonder if it will have a strong enough follow through -- the aftermath of responsibility is one of the major themes that superhero comics haven't really touched in many in depth ways.

All in all, this is a pretty solid start to a run on a title that hasn't really had a solid direction pretty much since the renumbering to #1 (and the fracturing of the team with the JSA ALL-STARS title, and the various recent one shots) -- I thought it was fairly GOOD.

TEEN TITANS #88: I've given JT Krul some shit for some of his writing in the past, but I thought this soft relaunch was fairly solid -- it "felt like" the Titans (it doesn't hurt that it is back to "the core cast", not that I have anything against Static, Bombshell or the Martian chick, but much like JLA the book is usually at its best when it features the sidekicks of the "Big 7"), and that counts for a lot.

The art, by Nicola Scott, is her usual nice stuff -- she's not flashy enough to be a "superstar" artist, but it feels solid and grounded in the real world, which is always a plus.

This isn't going to, dunno, win an Eisner or something, but it is solid enough superhero material, something that has been missing from the Titans comics for a couple of years -- a (weak) GOOD here from me.

(Though I think that both TITANS and JSA would have benefited immensely from canceling the satellite books at the same time as these new creative teams came on...)

ACTION #894: I remember the "Good old days" when we went through cases of SANDMAN each month... soooo many "civilians", gahd, that was wonderful.

So, it was charming to see Gaiman's Death return, even if it is in a mainstream comic book starring Lex Luthor (seriously: what the heck?)

While the story is a BIT of a cheat ("near death" and all that), I was charmed and entertained by the appearance of the perkiest grim reaper, and all of the dialogue rang very true (Gaiman apparently went over it?) -- Paul Cornell has pulled a neat trick with this book where every issue sells a smidge better than the one before (this is, currently a VERY RARE occurance), and this issue has (so far) spiked up about 20% in real sales for me. Hopefully the audience will stick around. I thought it was VERY GOOD.

************

Not comics:

THE WALKING DEAD "Pilot": I loved it.

Seriously, the adaptation bits were pretty note perfect, and virtually all of the bits they added were, I though, good, strong additions. The two bits that didn't work for me were (oddly) the opening, which I thought kind of undercut the start of the story by flashing forward (then not being clear where it fit in the episode), and the glimpse of the "rest" of the cast -- I understand exactly why they did both, but I didn't think either scene "flowed"

I also thought some of the FX work was a bit off (especially "Bicycle Girl"), but it more than made up with that by the crowd scenes and that awesome final tracking shot.  I'm way looking forward to watching this weekly -- but I'm sad we've only got six episodes in the first season (already!) -- I thought it was VERY GOOD.

The best part is it couldn't happen to a more deserving comic -- TWD is consistently one of the best reads on the shelves, and Kirkman has done just about everything right in the last year or two (that evil Image Lateness is just plain gone, yay!), keeping multiple formats in print, being smart and nimble in reaction to retailers and so on. Somewhere Dave Sim is probably smiling wide (if he does that, still)

I also caught "Dead Set" on IFC this weekend, which I guess is a year or two old for America -- nice, creepy mini-series which sets the zombie apocalypse on the set of "Big Brother" and has a few interesting observations on fame and television and voyeurism, but which was slightly marred by the arc being kind of obvious -- nearly everyone died in the exact way I thought they would after the first few minutes. I almost would have preferred it to be recut into a movie rather than as five "episodes", since it is a single story (and ran about the length of a film, anyway, once you deducted the commercials); but I thought it was still solidly GOOD.

"Dead Set" has "fast zombies", which are way more terrifying than "Romero Zombies" -- one sort of can't see how humanity could possibly survive the Fast zombie -- but I'm not sure I bought the way they portrayed them exactly... if they're dumb enough to not be able to climb a fence, or figure out how to get out of a hot tub (hahaha), then I sort of don't think they'd be able to run -- it isn't that they can't use that muscle power, but I see them more as falling over a lot, tripping, not being able to keep their balance, that kind of thing. Sort of like a 4 year old in an adult body.

I actually think about zombie invasions a lot -- it is one of my rare pieces of complete irrationality. I don't have any real weapons at home, but I think I could secure the house just well enough, if we had the proper warning. I take comfort in the fact that we're well up in the hills based on the possibly inane conclusion that given a choice between going downhill and going uphill, the zombie will let gravity dictate their course. Plus, San Francisco has NO cemeteries within the City (our dead are largely buried in Colma), so we go from "no chance" to "maybe a small chance".

Not with fast zombies though!

Anyway, the new comics will be here in a few minutes, so let me end this here...

What did YOU think?

-B

Superman: Earth One

About 2 months ago I received an advance copy of  the SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE original Graphic Novel. This was an uncorrected proof, and was a bit rougher than other galleys I get -- there's only about a dozen pages in color, other pages were inked, but not toned, while there's even a few pencil-only pages. I get a lot of galleys from many different publishers, but this one came under the auspices of a ComicsPRO program, and I made a fatal error of thinking of it while wearing my "Critic" hat, rather than my 'retailer" hat (I wear far too many hats) DC was (and, let's underline this very strongly) justifiably upset that I screwed up my hats, and as soon as I knew of their displeasure, I pulled the review, and apologized abjectly to DC through both official and unofficial channels. I screwed up, it was entirely my singular fault, and I strongly hope that DC will not penalize ComicsPRO retailers for my error (they haven't sent out another preview since -- which may or may not mean anything... or it could also just mean I personally have been removed from DC's advance lists, I'm really not sure)

Either way, I erred deeply by posting the review 2 months ago, and I sincerely apologize for potentially jeopardizing some of DC's promotional plans (among other things: sometimes "big media" are only interested in reviewing projects like this if they're given some sort of "we're first!" privileges. I don't believe that this changed any of those plans, but it COULD have, and it was wrong of me to post the pre-publication review)

However, the book is out now, so it's back to being fair game...

Here's the balance of what I originally wrote, then I'll come back at the end to talk about the final and finished book...

***

Obviously, since I'm reviewing from a galley, it is possible (though not, in my experience, likely) that some things will change about the final version. Take this with a lump of salt (not just a grain)

Also: there will likely be spoilers here. Generally when I review things, I assume you have a copy, so it's more of a conversation than this will be.

So, let's start with the easiest thing: the art. I didn't like it very much. It isn't that Shane Davis is an incompetent artist or anything, but his style is a little too scratchy to my tastes, overly rendered, without a strong enough foundation of story-telling or page layout that I would really want in an OGN series supposedly aimed at new readers. It's like, I don't know, pre-X-Men Jim Lee or something -- you can see he's got enough basic chops to develop somewhere interesting, but he's just not quite "there" yet. There's more than a few sequences where I can only kind of tell what is supposed to be happening, which is kind of a problem, really...

I wonder about the audience/remit for this line -- everything would seem to indicate the idea is to create NEW "Superman" readers, especially ones in bookstores (otherwise why even DO an OGN?), but I don't know that I can see this particular work really hitting with someone who hasn't read comics in a while -- in is, in my opinion, both simultaneously too crowded and hectic and, well, bombastic, while it is also a bit dull in places.

Part of the problem is, I think, that it seems like it is trying to serve too many masters at once -- the emotional heart of the story is really Clark Kent trying to make a decision about whether or not he wants to be a hero and protector (as his parents want), or whether he wants to follow his own desires to "fit in" (which, for some reason, mostly seems to spin around financial renumeration) and become a football player or a research scientist or anything else where he'd be able to excel with his alien powers.

However, this is really kind of a false emotional dilemma, if only because it is about SUPERMAN -- we know that, by hook or crook, he's going to put on the costume and become a hero sooner than later, not just because of the character, but because of the writer and his expressed love of the nobility of Supes.

It isn't that you can't do "Questioning Clark", but you kind of have to do it much earlier in his life, otherwise you sort of undercut the drama. Superman is better than we are -- he HAS to be, or he isn't "Superman". His lessons about strength and power and helping people and the dangers and risks it entails all need to come when he's a kid, or, at latest, as a teenager, not until after he's left college. While I understand that for most normal Earth-humans the timeline of questioning works fine, Clark ISN'T a normal earth-human, he's SUPERMAN, and by the time he enters Metropolis for the first time he might not be wearing the costume, but he needs to be well set on that path. Hell, by the time I was 20 I knew just what I wanted to be and do, and I followed that path the best I could -- Clark should be WAY ahead of dumb ol' me. So the timing really really didn't work for me.

The other "master" here is the need or desire to also have a giant-threat blockbuster summer movie-style action sequences. These are delivered adequately, but, despite a noble attempt to tie it back into Clark's backstory, I don't think it really works at all. I'll probably get back to that in a bit here.

Let's talk a minute about the OGN structure -- the suggestion is often made by many that OGNs are "better" because they can let a story breath, without the need for "artificial" breaks rigidly enforced every 22 pages. I could maybe possibly accept that (especially in light of semi-arbitrary 22 pages thing), except that I think that long stories really do need "Chapters", and the best kind of "chapter", be it in straight-up prose, or the commercial breaks in a TV show give you that same kind of "Wait, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!?!?!?!" feeling. That's a lot harder to sustain over 128 (or whatever) pages, and I'm not certain I can think of any comics projects that have worked that way -- even well-regarded works like, say, ASTERIOS POLYP or WILSON or MAUS have "chapters" that break the pacing up and give you minutes to pause or reflect (or even just barrel ahead).

SUPERMAN EARTH ONE has some really clumsy-ass pacing, and it really doesn't breathlessly sustain itself over its whole length. This is sort of most glaring in a fairly early scene that switches away to the Army having some fragments of Kal's ship, and a lot of blah-blah-blah about the government trying to understand it, and where it came from, and reverse-engineer it or whatever. I can see why these scenes were included (to provide a certain amount of [fairly unnecessary, at the end of the day] exposition, and to set-up a future thread on the Government trying to track Supes and so on), but really all they do is crash the forward momentum of the book to a halt, while not adding anything all that important to the narrative... certainly nothing that pays off in this volume. It might not be so bad if the Army officer or the scientist involved were given some characterization or motivation or something, but they're largely ciphers as presented.

(Also: you don't create a foil in a Superman comic with an "L" last name, and not give them an "L" first name -- she's "Sandra Lee" here -- but that might just be my 60s-influenced mind speaking here!)

So, yeah, I actually and truly think this would have been better if it was written in "22 page chunks" because that forces a kind of economy in plotting and information release. ONE page of "Look, the Government!" might work, but five pages of it just drags on too long, and moves the focus from where it needs to be.

(I actually think that comics, in general, would be helped immeasurably if we had a return of EIGHT PAGE stories to teach people the economy of craft, but that's a piece for a different day)

When the "Big Bad" comes along... well, the first problem is that he looks a bit too much, facially, like Lobo. There's also a lot of shaky motivation going on here, tying in the baddie into Krypton in what just seems a pretty flimsy way to this reader, with the INDIVIDUAL motivation of the INDIVIDUAL badguy being a particularly dopey kind of generic and simple revenge, rather than any kind of a PERSONAL motivation. this is why Lex Luthor works so well as a Superman foil -- he has an identifiable motivation (jealousy) to motivates him. The Baddie in this comic could be a hired gun for as much individual passion/motivation he brings.

There's also the slight problem of an entire alien invading armada, attacking worldwide (they show us at least 6-8 cities under attack, and giant drills that will destroy the world like Krypton), but only a single Alien has a speaking part, and once Superman punches him hard enough, the entire threat dissolves utterly. Ugh!

So, yeah, plot, structure, motivation, virtually none of it worked for me -- and I walked into this really hoping to be in love with it, and all I really got was a fairly bloated and muddy story. The worst thing is that I think that this probably could be "fixed" with 2 or 3 more drafts, and some real editorial oversight, and a general tightening of character and incident.

Did I like any of it? Well, yeah, I liked almost all of the scenes set in the Daily Planet, and I especially liked "Ultimate Jimmy Olson" (though Lois was fairly dull), so there's that -- I'd like to see JMS bring this version of Jimmy into the "real" Superman title... it wouldn't even really need to be a "retcon".

Though, having said that about the Planet, there's a scene where Perry White makes the point that news is meant to be facts and news, and not Editorialized (Kurt Busiek kind of did this scene better in ASTRO CITY, in that story about the Shark God and the Silver Agent), but at the end of the book they run the actual stories that the Planet runs on Superman (Clark's "interview" with Superman that gets him the job, that one), and damn if it isn't as editorial as-all-get-out. Damn it.

Ultimately, I think this OGN goes on too long, tries to be too many things, is is tremendously weak on characterization and motivation, except for the false emotional dilemma of  "should I sell out, or put on the costume?", and doesn't really add do anything to appeal to the theoretical audience that it is shooting for, and, in Savage Critic terms, that, sadly, makes it AWFUL.

Normally I'd ask "What did YOU think?" at this juncture, but you won't be able to for like 5-6 weeks...

*****

Hi, back in the present now!

The final book is pretty handsome, actually -- I like the "European" style (not dustjacketed) hardcover, and the book has good "hand" for the $20 price tag, and I like the embossing on the cover too.

The color "solves" some of the art problems (though, still not on the storytelling front, really), but it adds some new ones -- flashbacks aren't colored distinctively enough to show the time jumps, in my opinion.

There weren't any substantial (or any? I'm not going page-by-page or anything!) changes to the text, and if anything, my opinion on the essential moral weakness of this Clark is now magnified -- I don't like this guy, I don't like his avoidance of being Superman, and I especially found Ma & Pa's scenes to be fairly inexplicable in making him a costume or whatever.

There's a line at the end that I glossed over in my first read that I think encapsulates my problems with this as a Superman comic -- in the (kind of) Fortress of Solitude scene Clark's super-smart metal says to him "Your task is to survive.  To use your powers well and wisely. And to avenge the murder of your homeworld." (emphasis mine)

Buh?

To me, at least, Superman isn't about vengeance -- not even close. In fact, Superman is about exactly the opposite. Superman is the guy who will do anything possible to avoid a fight -- precisely because he knows we're better than that, even the screwed up people. Superman is about HOPE. About making things BETTER, about showing that even the worst situation can be made better if someone reaches out a hand in help and understanding.

In the '78 film my favorite scene might be the tiny little sequence where he stops to save a cat from a tree. Yeah, that's maybe a little cornball, but that's Superman. He's more powerful than anyone, anywhere, but "power" doesn't mean a lot if you're not trying to help people with it.

THAT is a metaphor that we need, that we should embrace -- not this whining, myopic coward who won't step forward until the entire world is being threatened.

DC has already announced a second printing, so I guess this is having some early success in the DM at least (if you have a Baker & Taylor account go look at the velocity of backorders there; this doesn't look so hot in the bookstore market as I'm reading the indicators), and good for them, I guess. But I really disliked this book, and I stand by my AWFUL assessment.

If I were to hand a Superman comic to a "civilian", I'd want them to buy ALL-STAR SUPERMAN instead.

What did YOU think?

-B

Two things that have nothing to do with one another!

What could they be? Find out under the jump!

CHARLES BURNS X ED OUT GN: Well, there's an apostrophe or two in that title, but Diamond's database doesn't play well with those (not that I bought it from Diamond, but there you are)

Charles Burns is, I think, one of our best working cartoonists -- his line is as distinct as it is accomplished, and he knows how to weave suspense and tension in really amazing way. There's nothing else that FEELS like a Charles Burns comic, in a way that exceedingly few of his contemporaries are able to achieve. Disturbing, off-kilter, askew -- and I find that tremendously appealing.

I think that his previous major work, BLACK HOLE, was one of the seminal works of the late 20th century, and much of its strength came from the mining of teenage angst and alienation where I imagine that much of the vibe of that work would translate even if you were culturally distinct from the late 20c North American setting.

This new work tries, I think, to be more "international" in tone -- the Tintin homages couldn't be more clearer, and about a third of the work takes place in an unsettling alien (?) landscape that makes me think of Tunisia or something (or, at least, my perception of Tunisia filtered through Western movies, which I bet is NOTHING like the real Tunisia!). But either way, Burns remains a master of tone, and reading his comics always makes me feel like an unseen spider is scuttling up and down my spine.

If you like Burns' previous work, you'll love this, I have no doubt -- I certainly did. Which is why it bugs me that I have to pan this based on price and format.

The first problem is that this isn't a complete story -- there's a clear "to be continued" at the end of the book, and who knows exactly where or how it is going to continue? There's no volume number on the book anywhere, and I can't find anything on the web (including the B&T website, which has books as much as six months before they'll appear in stores) to indicate that there IS going to be more. Even Pantheon's solicitation copy doesn't give a lot of insight:

"From the creator of Black Hole, the first volume of an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction in brilliant color! Doug is having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky, who died years ago. What's going on? Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Hergé and William Burroughs, Charles Burns has given us a dazzling spectral fever-dream - and a comic-book masterpiece."

Heh, they used "masterpiece" twice!

But this makes it mostly sound like the work is self-contained, and it most assuredly is not. And that makes it an extremely frustrating work. I quite imagine that it will continue/complete at some point somewhere, but for someone picking this up "cold", it isn't anything like a satisfying read thanks to that "to be continued" there.

There's another problem, too: it is 52 pages (albeit in oversized and in color) for twenty bucks. I know the creative costs are the largest expense in creating a new work (which is why Pantheon has mostly published comics work that's been serialized elsewhere, I would imagine), but, ugh, nearly 39 cents a page for something that is a work-in-progress (and, more importantly: not self-contained within itself, or even "self contained"...) seems unforgivably expensive.

Don't get me wrong: I loved what I read, I love his line and his tone and the pervasive sense of...oddness that permeates every page, but this is pretty close to double (or maybe more) of what this should really cost, especially for only a fragment of a story. When this comes out in a cheaper and complete SC format, I'll be all over this, but this format and this pricing means that even I aren't going to buy it for my personal bookshelf -- and I pay wholesale!

For craft it's an easy VERY GOOD; for pricing and format, it is pretty AWFUL.

(First week sales have been fairly solid -- actually even a bit better than I initially expected, but I expect a certain amount of "Buyer's Remorse" happening this week)

******

SUPERIOR #1 (of 6): Mark Millar is one weird cat. He wrote a long run of some of the best Superman stories I've ever read in "Superman Adventures" (wouldn't it be nice if there was a full-sized trade of those out there? Just sayin', DC), where he's shown he can write "all ages" with the best of them, and he's also written some of the filthiest comics of all time (a decade or so later, his "Authority" arc with Quitely still kind of creeps me out... and that was, or so I understand it, extremely toned down from the original intention)

So that makes SUPERIOR even that more jarring to me -- here's a story that would have been an excellent all-ages superhero thing (it even has wish-granting space monkeys!), but the impact and the potential audience is entirely gutted by the rampant and wholly uneeded cursing.

I have no real problem with profanity, in its place -- KICK ASS becomes all the more amusing from the over-the-top swearing from its pubescent cast for instance, but the subject matter (and the specific cast) of SUPERIOR doesn't seem to lend itself to the potty mouthing here. I could give you ONE, right there at the last beat, there's an "Oh SHIT!" moment, sure, but the rest of it seems so completely unnecessary and out of tone from the rest of the comic, I really wonder what the fuck he's thinking?

As I have to say to my newly seven-year old son, Ben, a lot these days, "swearing isn't really big nor clever, little man" (he's reached that wonderful age where the ABSOLUTE height of wit is "ballsack" and "dingleberry" and stuff like that)

What's funny about Ben (if you'll permit me to digress) is despite that he's slightly puritanical when cursing appears in something. We've just finished the final Harry Potter book last night, and while I self edited a few times, when the text really supports it (I try hard to "stay in character", as it were, when I read to him), I'll let a "Hell" slip through (instead of "heck, y'know). "Did they REALLY say the "H" word, Daddy?"

Heh, and last night there's the final battle in Hogwarts, and Molly Weasley screams at Belatrix Lestrange, "STAY AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!", and I rendered it as "B-word", and Ben insisted I stop reading right there: "They said 'B-Word'?" "Well, no, son, not exactly" "Let me see the book!" and he wouldn't let me go on until he took the copy from my hand to see "bitch" spelled out (well, he knows how to SPELL it, already), and we had to delay the final battle to have a 10 minute conversation about the acceptability and context of using a word like that, where I think I left him pretty confused, actually, if I'm being honest.

As long as I'm digressing here, let's go with one longer one: I like reading multi-book series with Ben. Like a whole lot. One of my favorite things to do in the whole wide world. We started with the Lemony Snicket "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books when I had a wild hair as he's-an-older-four-year-old, and we've ventured into Oz [staggeringly archaic in a few of those books; and I totally lost the thread in the one where the Wizard returns to Oz. BOTH of us got completely bored about halfway through that one], and now Harry Potter. We're going to take a break from multi-book series for the next week or two -- I'm going to start "Harriet the Spy" tomorrow night, which I recall from my own childhood as being pretty awesome -- and I might descend into Narnia after that, but I'm not so sure that those have the "acting and readability" I'm looking for. (for example: "The Hobbit"? Completely unreadable outloud -- not enough dialogue driving the narrative, we never even got to a second night of reading it -- which kind of surprised me)

So: anyone have any recommendations for multi-book YA or younger series that has a gripping story, and out-loud-readability and -acting opportunities for us to dive into? Ben likes stuff that's scary, for sure [he does a better and creepier "Voldemort voice" than I do!], and he's totally not into like kissing and stuff (making Harry Potter v6 a hard read for us), and I want something that uses good (and smart!) vocabulary, and trips off the tongue when you read it. You can say what you want about Potter, but JK Rowling writes good reading-out-loud prose.

(I just wish Ron and Hermione had had really ANYthing to do in the last half of the last book, whatsoever)

Anyway, digression done: I liked SUPERIOR pretty well, but I think the blue language cut off 3/4 of the audience that would really REALLY like it, while being too simplistic and silly for the cats who like KICK-ASS and NEMESIS. I'll give it an OKAY, but I would have happily given it a GOOD or better with a little more self-editing on the swearing front. I don't think it needed the @#$% school or the Milestone-Squiggle either; the swearing was just entirely out of place for this reader, in this story.

As always: What did YOU think?

-B

A few thoughts on BEST AMERICAN + Cover Flow

I quite like the BEST AMERICAN COMICS series. I think that it provides a generally decent overview of what's happening in non-cape comics in any given year, and I like it as an "entry drug" for civilians, as a retailer. This year's installment, guest-edited by Neil Gaiman, is another fine fat package of comic goodness, but I think a few of the flaws of the approach were pretty magnified this year.

Primarily, I was fairly dismayed at the length of some of the excerpts this year. While it was nice to see something capey make the book this year (well, last year they tried to get Batman Year 100 in there, but DC refused), and something from Marvel at that, printing an entire issue's worth of OMEGA THE UNKNOWN seemed a bit much.  Even more so, including almost the  entire second issue of CITIZEN REX seemed over the top. I strongly believe that the length of excerpts should almost certainly be limited to no more than 5% of the final work. With CZ being 120 pages from tip to floor, I'd submit that no more than 6 pages would be a much more appropriate length than 14 pages of it.

Second, as is typical, the "usual suspects" (Los Bros, Ware, Bagge, etc.) get a lot of space. There's no doubt these are creators doing great work, but they just feel a little too ubiquitous to this reader.

What excites me the most about a project like BAC is finding people/works that I "missed" -- this year the clear winner for me as an individual reader was a toss up between Dave Lapp and Michael Cho (who did the cover), both of whom I certainly want to see more from.

Overall, I thought this was a pretty solid package - well worth the $23 asking price, and it was a VERY GOOD package, missing the excellent only because of the length of some of the pieces included.

****

Now here is where it gets weird... I hit the web as I was reading through, looking up Lapp to see if I could find other work.  For some reason, and I can't re-google my results that made me think this, I somehow led myself to a book called POWER OUT, which I then picked off my store's shelf and started reading. POWER OUT is actually by Nathan Schreiber, who isn't in BAC at all, and, so, I haven't got the foggiest notion how I got my signal's crossed so entirely. So, before I picked BAC back up to write this, I thought these two pieces were linked, and it turned out they aren't, even a teeny bit.

Having said that, Nathan Schreiber is also another nice "new talent" -- in his case he was a Xeric winner (and we always rack every Xeric book as a matter of course), and he's a gifted cartoonist, apparently working at Act-i-vate. I dunno, I'm not a webcomics guy myself.

Anyway, what wanted me to write more about POWER OUT isn't actually the work inside (a solid GOOD, though it is), but, rather, about cover design and why we haven't sold one copy of this book, as good as it is.

So, that's a pretty awful cover -- not from rendering or anything, but from how it sits upon the rack.  What are it's mistakes?

1) The image doesn't convey anything whatsoever -- while the premise of the story is two kids adventures when the power goes out over a weekend (when their parents are away), that's not communicated in the image at all. those power lines could mean ANYthing.

2) The cover and credits, and, especially "Xeric award winner" are in wholly the wrong place. The human eye (or, at least, the Western bits of that eye) scans a page left-to-right, top-to-bottom. That means that to the extent possible, you want everything that is important to either be on the left side, or along the top. The top left corner is the single most important bit of your real estate (look at a regular Marvel or DC comic if you don't believe me -- they got that way over years of development) -- putting your title on the bottom of the book is basically "burying the lede"

3) the two-tone color. While the book itself, on the inside, is toned that way, it doesn't "pop" off the shelf whatsoever as a cover.

Interestingly, BAC itself almost has the same problems:

The advantage that BAC has is the red -- that makes things "pop" just fine; without the red, it would die on the shelf.  But look where (what I as a bookseller consider) the most important part is: "Neil Gaiman, editor", ugh, it's down in the bottom right.

Seriously, when designing your covers, put the most important stuff to the left and on the top!

-B

I liked WHAT?!? -- Hibbs on 10/6/10

Before I get into talking about this week’s books, let me say I am fairly happy about Marvel and DC’s announcements on pricing – DC is moving their entire line to $2.99, while Marvel will (at least, it isn’t that clear) not be debuting any new books at $3.99 – that’s a step in the right direction. However (and there’s always a “however”, isn’t there), I’m slightly unconvinced that, in and of itself, this will directly increase sales revenue (and, in fact, in the short term at least this will lower it) because I do tend to suspect that the Big Two have succeeded in Breaking The Habit for a large number of customers unless and until the two publishers fix the other two problems facing the periodicals of their respective universes at the same time. To whit:

1) Cutting back on the unviable line extensions

2) Increasing the density and importance of the books they publish.

The crisis isn’t one solely of “price” – it is really more of “value” – and in order to lure back the lapsed there needs to be a marked increase in the perceived value of the books they publish.

I almost wish they hadn’t decided that January was the month to do this because the first quarter is traditionally a weak one to begin with, and when we couple decreases there with the product-weak fourth quarter I’m still expecting a large number of store closings this winter. We’ll have to see if this is a “too late” move or not…

Meanwhile, big congrats on Bob Wayne being named Senior VP of Sales at DC – Bob is the best friend the DM has, and I count this as a smart and solid move for the marketplace. Yay, Bob!

With that out of the way…

ALAN MOORE NEONOMICON #2 (OF 4) :Yeowch, that’s pretty hardcore, isn’t it? I can’t say I enjoyed it, though the Craft is fine; I was just as disturbed that the comic seemed to just abruptly stop in the middle of a scene. OK, I guess.

BOYS #47: the scene I guess many of us have been waiting for for several years now (well, I was – this bit is more interesting to me than most of the Vought stuff, really), and, man does Hughie take it badly. This comic made me feel worse than even the horrific rapes in NEONOMICON, though this was certainly an honest, human reaction. VERY GOOD, if horrible.

CBLDF LIBERTY ANNUAL 2010: What a swell package of comics! And for a good cause, too – BUBBADUBBADUBBADUBBA, indeed! VERY GOOD.

CHAOS WAR #1 (OF 5): I’ve pretty consistently liked Hercules, but this really struck me as too self-indulgent and plothammery. It’s like “Not enough people are buying the comic about a character I love, so I’ll make him like the most powerful character in the Marvel Universe for a few minutes, and that will show everyone!” Nice art, and it zipped along just fine, but ugh, don’t be so in love with your babies. EH

DC COMICS PRESENTS JACK CROSS #1: I don’t get who or what market niche these DCCP things are meant to fill – are they somehow getting away with reprinting these with no or low royalties because they’re not “trade paperbacks” per se? I dunno. But what I DO know is it is really really stupid to release Warren Ellis work in a “permanent” format, and to not put his name on the cover anywhere, nor to print anything whatsoever on the spine of the book. AWFUL, from a marketing perspective; the comics inside are OK

KLAWS OF PANTHER #1 (OF 4): “Seriously, would someone please buy Black Panther comics? Pretty please?” The dialogue was annoyingly… well, poppy, maybe? Modern? I dunno, but that’s not how a Wakanda Princess should be talking I don’t think, and the weird nature of the “supporting cast” is oddly off putting as well. I liked the art, though I kept thinking it was a mutated Shawn McManus as I was reading it. But this is kind of symptomatic of what I was saying above about too many (& Inessential) books above – literally zero preorders for this, and, so far, zero rack sales too. I’ve FOCed #2 down to zero because of that – there’s (roughly) $2 a copy I’ll never get back, sigh. If a character/take doesn’t work, you really need to give it a year or two break off of the market (EG: ATLAS) before trying again. Also: surely one can write a BP book without resorting to stupid old Klaw as the antagonist? Ugh. Severely EH.

METALOCALYPSE DETHKLOK #1 (OF 3): It loses a certain something by not being animated (and with a soundtrack – the song sequence failed, utterly), but not epically. I do think the Milestone-Scratch-Out would have been better for the profanity (and like the “Metal sound” they use on the show) than the @#$% stuff, but ah well. OK.

ULTIMATE COMICS THOR #1 (OF 4): I was pretty much digging the contemporary scenes, but then it wandered off to Nazi Germany and I got bored. Nazis are pretty passé – especially because Ultimate-Universe Nazis are meant to be pawns of the Skrull… I don’t know, for some reason I pulled ULTIMATES v1 off my bookshelf last week and was reminded just how shockingly powerful those books were, and the current direction of the line seems so lame and tame in comparison. Still, I liked those first 10 or whatever pages… OK

UNCANNY X-FORCE #1: My big shock of the week was just how much I liked this, especially given that I don’t care that much for any of the individual character. Pretty much the first time I’ve EVER liked Deadpool, and the Wolvie/Fantomex scene is nearly worth the price of admission by itself. Nice job, folks – VERY GOOD.

WOLVERINE #2: And a second surprise here – I thought #1 was alright, but I quite liked the second installment here. I don’t think people who like Wolverine are going to like it all that much, for a variety of reasons, and I especially think it’s the wrong direction for a Relaunch, and the Start of a Line of Wolverine Family Titles (ugh), but it is certainly sincere and trying for something different. GOOD.

I’ll have another post if I ever finish BEST AMERICAN COMICS; plus I still haven’t gotten to the new PARKER book yet – too busy with Ben’s bday, re-racking the store and a few other projects, but soon, soon…

As always, what did YOU think?

-B

Hibbs tries, he really does, 9/29

I’m not as insane as Tucker – I’m not going to try and hit every single book for the week, but here’s like almost half of them, at least… (and if you wonder why I’m not writing a lot of comics reviews lately, this week might be a god-damn good reason…. I barely like any of this stuff right now. SOMEONE HELP ME GET MY GROOVE BACK!!!)

ACTION COMICS #893: Part of my problem with this current direction is the semi-unclear of what Luthor is trying to actually DO; it’s all very McGuffin-y, but I don’t see a concrete plan/idea, other than “let’s tour the universe”. Which would be fine, except that it is already starting to repeat itself (which is even commented upon inside the story itself), and there’s a bit about the androids that even repeats itself within this same issue. Comics about “super brains” are generally hard to pull off correctly, and this isn’t much of an exception. I am kinda of curious as to how exactly they pull off the Death (of the Endless) thing next month, however, and will certainly be reading that one. This was OK. There’s also a backup story featuring Jimmy Olsen which I sort of think epitomizes the problem with the superbooks well – it’s solid enough, but it’s like 180 degrees from the last try to revamp Jimmy (which was, what, less than six months ago?) – I don’t know if DC knows who any of these characters really are. Also OK, for the backup.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #644: Solid writing, gorgeous art, though I didn’t really feel any stakes in the events of the issue, but this is kind of the least of mainstream super-hero comic should be. A low GOOD.

AVENGERS PRIME #3 (OF 5): Pure middle (well, it IS #3 of 5), though it has a couple of cuteish “Man, is Tony Stark a douche, or what?” scenes. The real draw is Alan Davis’s art, which is as nice as ever. If this was $2.99 I’d be saying “Wow, GOOD”, but $3.99 creates it’s own weight of expectations, and knocks it down to an OK.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #610: I’m not sure what’s happened here – this used to be one of my absolute favorite Marvel books, but it feels like it is drifting nowadays. In particular to this very issue, there’s a whole lot of moral-choice-ing set up here, but the resolution to those morals are pretty lacking – “I’ll strap you to the missle and you can choose whether it kills you or not” Huh? Pretty EH. A bigger problem is the backup story, which neither matches the themes of the lead, or is even in the same tone or weight – I can’t imagine many people who like Brube’s faux-70s approach to Cap digging on the lightweight adventures of Heroes Reborn Bucky. It isn’t bad or anything, but compared to the lead, it makes me lean to AWFUL.

CASANOVA #3: I think it is fairly sad that the only periodical comic that I genuinely, no hesitation liked this week is effectively a reprint. I’m eager to get to the truly new material of this series. What do we have, like 3 more issues to go, or something? VERY GOOD.

CHEW #14: Too many flashbacks, forwards and whereevers for my tastes – it’s generally a bad idea to set up a dramatic confrontation, then not actually follow it through inside the story itself. Even with that, still highly OK.

CROSSED FAMILY VALUES #4 (OF 7): not enough of the “family” bits the title really demands (and the first three set up so disgustingly). Solidly OK.

DETECTIVE COMICS #869: Nice Scott Daniel art, an alright story with a Joker-a-like. In a world that only had, say, 4 Bat titles a month I might call this a low “Good”, but that’s not our world. OK.

FRANKEN-CASTLE #21: Seriously, the Getting Frank Back To Himself bits take place between panels? Bah! The art by Brereton is great, as usual, but the story plods along, and while it has Else Bloodstone, and the Legion of Monsters and Monster Island all all other kinds of funky 70s stuff, it’s just so…so… humorless, I guess. I wanted to like this, but EH.

GREEN ARROW #4 (BRIGHTEST DAY): I certainly read too many comics to keep all of them straight, but I’m not wrong that pretty much the first half of this comic (including the fight) was already in an issue of BRIGHTEST DAY, am I? The real problem here is there’s nothing here for me to care about why the protagonists are doing what they do – J’onn may be in the story, but there’s no hint of what his relationship to Ollie is, or why he’s doing anything or … well, really anything. I don’t think this comic CAN be understood if you haven’t read other comics outside of this one… and if you did… well, you’ve pretty much already read this one, haven’t you? The other semi-protagonist (Galahad, is it?) is a total cipher, the antagonist (“The Queen”) is pretty clichéd and shallow, and the climactic villain-thing isn’t introduced in any real way, nor is it clear what he or she might be. Als, am I wrong, but wasn’t it just like 4 months ago that Ollie was sentenced to never set foot in Star City again, yet here he is hanging around on rooftops and getting into fights in the streets? It’s really pretty AWFUL.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #43: I dunno “all the magic is on the Dark Side of the Moon” isn’t really that compelling, and, I think, rather than giving Alan Scott a new direction and reason to be, it is more likely to close the character off even more until a future writer rolls through and completely ignores it after all. In this kind of “new direction for B-character” kind of deal, it seems to me that the outgoing writer really needs to put 6-8 story seeds into the story itself for someone else to pick up and run with, and while this ENVIRONMENT might have some story potential (though, as I say, it is far more likely to simply be ignored), it doesn’t do anything good for the CHARACTER of Alan Scott. Similarly, the Obsidian/Jade revelation seems to me to be more limiting and external for the characters than something to get stories out of. Plus Alan is kind of a dick to Todd, ain’t he? Having said all of that “The Moon is full of magic, and GL is the King of the Fairies” does kind of have a 40s JSA feel, doesn’t it? I dunno, I guess this was OK.

POWERS #6: OK, I lied in the CASANOVA note – I liked this one, too. The problem, for me, is I think the bi-monthly schedule – it doesn’t feel like the storyline is getting to the point fast enough, and I sort of miss the “Investigating crimes” portion of the story (which almost makes a return here) – still, solidly GOOD.

TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #64: I might live to be 100 and I’ll never ever ever understand this comic. Page after page of chicks saying how and why and where they fuck other chicks, yet the word “tits” is spelled “t*ts”. It won’t top the “haunted vagina” issue, probably, but there’s at least one howler of a line each issue. This time, we have “You killed my boobie spiders, you jerk!” Man. Clearly AWFUL, but Balent doesn’t give a fuck, he’s partying with Ace Frehley and getting girls to send him half-nekkid pictures.

TEEN TITANS #87: I’ve talked here before about cutting things that sell less than 3 rack copies, and I think next month TITANS (both flavors) will face that cut – I’m only 50/50 on selling the single rack copy we get in (even though it still has plenty of preorders from our sub customers), and I’m not seeing anything either in this issue, or in the previews of the next (running in this month’s DC books) that causes me to question this thinking whatsoever. This is pretty EH stuff, and it seems as directionless as anything that DC is publishing right now…

TIME MASTERS VANISHING POINT #3 (OF 6) Jesus, why the fuck is this being published, and don’t they GET that having low quality not-actually-tie-ins to the “Return of Bruce” storyline (especially when RoB is now epically late and looks like it will have its ending issues come out AFTER B actually Rs) isn’t actually doing them any favors of any kind? I guess they needed a way to keep the Starfire (1970s version) trademark alive, or something? The only thing I liked about this was the notion that Booster is Rip’s dad somehow (or was I reading too much into that scene at the top? Too bad if so, that’s almost clever in a Moebuis-loop kind of a way) Extremely EH

VALKYRIE #1: I like Winslade’s art, but getting through the end of the story was a serious slog for me. EH

WONDER WOMAN #603: I don’t get why they upended continuity and all of that for this – 98% of what happens here could have happened in the “previous version” of Wondy, and the 2% that couldn’t isn’t very interesting. We’re already back to Charon, and Cerberus and all of that? I don’t get the point, and by focusing on the Same Old tropes of Greek Myth, rather than direct motivation of the character, it reads like anything mining the same kinds of Unreal Societies (Anything involving “Atlantis” in Aquaman or Namor, most “magic based” series, and so on) – there is a reason that “Hey, let’s destroy the Amazons” is WW storyline #1… because the Amazons aren’t very interesting in their own right! A costume change can’t make this any less AWFUL

X-MEN LEGACY #240: I really couldn’t follow this at all – it is filled with a bunch of no-name, no-interest villains, and the protagonists are nearly purely passive through everything that happens. A real page-flipper of a book, and not in the “Wow, I can’t wait to see what happens!” sense. AWFUL.

As always, what do YOU think?

-B

Graeme On Daytripper: A Sunday Driver, Yeah

Taken on its own, DAYTRIPPER #10 is a weirdly underwhelming end to what's been one of my favorite series in recent times; it continues with last issue's break from format by not killing Bras at the end of the issue, and offers, instead, something of a happy ending - but it also feels... I don't know, sparer than earlier issues, for some reason, less of a story than a coda, if that makes sense. Thing is, when you read the entire series in one sitting - and I really, really recommend that you do - that calm and space seems more fitting, and has more impact. Like I said, Daytripper has been something that I've really been enjoying on a monthly basis, and up until the second last issue, that's all it'd been - I'd taken each issue on face value, another alternate Bras meeting his end at another point in his life, each issue "done in one" with poignancy and beautiful art and great because of it. But as #9's dream sequences overlapped details from each story with one another, I went back to re-read them all to date, and realized how well they worked together, how important is was that they were read together, or at least considered individual chapters of one long story - of Bras' life; set-ups from the first issue pay off in the fourth, the story from the second leads (in)directly into the opening of the third, and so on. It's left up to the reader to interpret exactly how they all fit together (Is each issue "real" and happening to a different Bras? Does each issue tell a real story with an imagined death? Is each issue one of the dreams that the Bras from the final issue - the one who's come to terms with dying - has had, and are they ways in which he's come to terms with dying? That last one is my take, but whatever way you choose to put them together, what's left is an impressive piece of work that tells the story of the important events in one man's life, from birth until... well, almost death, in the end.

Even if the writing hadn't turned out to be so impressive (And, separately, so peaceful and... I don't know, lyrical, almost? Moon and Ba tend towards sentiment and oversimplicity at times, which can make for mawkish reading if you're not inclined that way - I am, I blush as I admit - but even if you find their dialogue or plots cloying, it's hard to deny the power of their writing, even just based on how different it is from most comic writing; there's a value there, on that alone, I'd argue), it'd still be a series I'd recommend on art alone. I love Fabio Moon's art - he illustrates essentially all the series, with the exception of Gabriel Ba pitching in on some of the dream sequences in #9 - for his brushwork and the way his characters act, understated and exaggerated at the same time. It's only made better by Dave Stewart's amazing color work, which adds depth and texture in such a wonderfully subtle way that shouldn't be overlooked; I hope that Stewart's involved in whatever Moon's next work is (Casanova, maybe?).

Overall, Daytripper was something magical, and beautiful, and unexpected - It's not got the immediate hook of a lot of recent Vertigo launches, and it doesn't fit into the five-issue-opener-and-then-more format, either. But it's all the better for all of that. It's not for everyone, I know, but for me? Daytripperwas Excellent.

A Tale Of Two Avengers: Comparing Bendis' Two Team Books

If nothing else, comparing both of Brian Michael Bendis' relaunched Avengers books - AVENGERS and NEW AVENGERS - is useful in illustrating the importance of artists on his writing. Well, that and the importance of choosing the right characters to write in the first place. See, to me, New Avengers is successful in a way that Avengers just... isn't, and at first read, I couldn't really work out why. Both series have essentially the same plot for their opening arcs - Cosy rebuilding of the team is interrupted by massive disasterous event that forces our heroes onto the defensive - and, let's be honest, Bendis can only write that kind of thing in one way (Lots of characters asking what's going on, double page spreads to demonstrate the scale of the threat before cutting to vignettes cutting between individual characters asking what's wrong and being told to concentrate on what is happening at that very moment while, somewhere, someone figures out the bigger picture). But despite the similarities, Avengers feels so much more scattered and haphazard, so less smooth a reading experience, that it's as if it's been written by someone else to me.

The trick is, I think, that Bendis' voice works far better for the characters in New Avengers, and Stuart Immonen's art is so much easier on the eye than John Romita Jr.'s (I feel like some kind of turncoat for saying that, for some reason; I used to love Romita Jr.'s artwork, and still feel like it's got a lot of charm at times, but it really feels too busy, too blocky, for me in Avengers for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on). Avengers is something that feels like a slog to read - in part because it stutters instead of flows, catching and slowing down with unwieldy dialogue - Bendis' Thor in particular is horrible, it's not just me, right? - while New Avengers speeds by, in comparison. Is it because Bendis' take on Avengers' more iconic characters feels more forced and less natural than the down-to-earth characters in New Avengers? I'm not sure - I'm not sure that the disconnect is there for anyone other that myself, to be honest - but as I catch up on both series, it's something I find kind of wonderful, more than anything else: That the same writer writing what could easily be the same series twice can come up with such different results. While Avengers just feels Okay to me, New Avengers continues to be Good.

Maybe I just want to see Doctor Strange get punched by Iron Fist. It's normally something that simple.

At Least Tucker's Got The Day Of Atonement To Look Forward To: Exactly 10,000 Words On 9/1

What follows is an experiment, never to be repeated, wherein I read as many of the last week's new comic books and graphic novels as I could find, and provided ratings on most of them. Brian suggested splitting it into two posts, but after some consideration, I've decided to publish it all at once, because it was stupid, and stupid shouldn't breed. The act of "reviewing" this many comics--quite a few of which are clearly not designed for drop-in readers, even more of which do not (nor should) include me in the target audience--is a fundamentally hideous idea, one that can in no way benefit me as a human being who wishes to do other things with his time. Whether it can benefit anyone else is beyond me to say, but I would strongly recommend never, ever, doing this.Echo #24, Abstract Studios Impressive how Terry Moore keeps pumping these issues out on a pretty regular schedule. Story isn't one I'm really into--evil corporation, sci/fi stuff, government agencies gone rogue--but after reading a couple of these, the comic does seem to have lots of stuff happening in each issue, and it's always competently put together. (This issue isn't the best example of that first statement, unless you get turned on by people shoving flash drives down shirts and disappearing in parking lots.) It's not in the slightest bit funny though, and there's always lots of what seem to be jokes. OKAY for me.

Tom Strong & The Robots of Doom #4, America's Best Comics Chris Sprouse has this thing he does with Tom Strong's jaw, where he just draws small triangles made out of parallel lines to define the curve--it's really pleasant. That's not a very valuable thing to say, neither Savage nor Critical, useless information, i'm mentioning it only because it stuck out. This comic--i liked it. It has a weird choice of focus in it, one of those comics where there's way more time spent on making up science fiction reasons to explain the A-Team style "make a giant drill we can ride on" portion of the comic than there is the part where Tom Strong meets a subterranean race of people who have evolved to the point where they are on fire all of the time. The colors never pop, it's like watching a television that's missing most of the brighter spectrum. But it's still GOOD, a well drawn comic with a pulse.

Mouse Guard: Legends of the The Guard #3, Archaia Guy Davis doing a story about an art critic who goes out and learns a lesson in real life experiences! Still not enough to push it past OKAY.

Betty And Veronica Digest #207, Archie I think these are just reprints, so I'm skipping this one.

Veronica #202, Archie This actually gets very exciting and uncomfortable in a pretty extreme way, because it really does seem like something sexxxy is going to happen when Kevin (he's the cover's "hot new guy", Archie's first out-gay character) takes Jughead back to his house to meet the folks, as the comic up until then has consistently made clear how perfect the two gentleman are for one another. The uncomfortable part is that there's no way for the reader to forget that they're reading an Archie comic, which means that you know, for sure, that Jughead and Kevin will not make out, no matter how much time is spent strongly implying that's the exact thing that is going to happen. So there you sit, pensively waiting on the moment when something tone-deaf (and gay-panicky) happens to tear the two apart. I was surprised then, as nothing actually did, the story just builds and builds and builds to a moment that should happen, doesn't, and then the comic ends. Arguably, that's probably the best way to handle them not kissing--if they aren't going to hook up, why not never give a reason, thus insuring that the reader immediately knows what the real reason is, which is that a corporate publisher is scared of alienating people who shit their pants whenever same-sex fictional characters kiss.

The gay aspect is handled pretty much the same way that previous Archie comics handled interracial dating--they just present it as fact, with little to no comment. Kevin's just gay, that's all, there's no reason for the characters to react to this in any specific dramatic way. It's surprisingly mature, considering it being, you know a fucking Archie comic. If Kevin had a gigantic knife sticking out of his head, it would be aggravating that no one ever says "we should probably take you to the hospital" or at least, "aieeee", but producing a gay character and not making a big deal out of it, choosing instead to immediately incorporate that trait into a classic Archie story--Jughead fucks with Veronica--is my 800th reminder that these comics are successful things because they're produced by professionals, no matter how gross their history is in terms of creator relationships or, of course, how banal I find every single one of them to be. As a comic, these are almost always CRAP, but as an Archie comic, it's probably GOOD.

The Amory Wars: In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth 3 #4, Boom! Studios Didn't realize how popular this was until a few weeks ago, when a bunch of stores were beating the drums to find more copies of one of the collections. Also somebody crying, Beatles in the 60's style, at a Coheed & Cambria signing? The nasty thing to do would be to call this unreadable, but it probably makes a lot of sense to somebody who has read previous issues or listened to the album it's based off of/tied into/in some relationship with. No matter what it is about--i'm still not sure, space and beards is my best guess--I hate it when there's long scenes in a comic where somebody talks to themselves at length to explain the plot. Chris Burnham's art is fine, but this struck me as a total EH.

Cars Adventures of Tow Mater #2, Boom Studios This comic's plot is taken from a storybook for young children. One part is about a tow truck (from the title) involved in a competition to see who can catch the most tires, and the other part is about a fire truck on trial for thievery. At the end of the comic, the fire truck breaks down in tears while on the witness stand. EH.

Disney's Hero Squad #8, Boom Studios Couldn't find this, not sure if its an American comic or another English translation of Italian stuff, which is what most of the Disney books seem to be.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep #something, Boom Studios Couldn't find a copy, never been able to make it through an issue.

Dracula: The Company of Monsters #1, Boom Studios Kurt Busiek is behind this one in some kind of Alan Moore Doing The Courtyard kind of fashion, and the comic reads like it has a little more professional thought to it than Boom's Hunter's Fortune or Calling Cthulhu Chronicles, which seem pretty thin on the story front while being overstuffed with lots of sass. But when it comes down to it, ancient vampire lore stuff is better done in short paragraphs in Mignola comics, and crazy corporate uncle types unaware they're Waking Ancient Evil is an old hat full of grandma's ashes. Art's rushed, but it's Boom and that's the case with all their stuff. Another EH.

Incorruptible #9, Boom Studios Horacio Domingues art seems like a weird choice for the book; it's so reminscient of storyboards for an 80's cartoon that it actively works against Waid's dour, super-serious tone. I haven't read enough of this series to be totally confident in any criticism of it, but I'll admit to never buying what seems to its primary engine--an evil supervillain who used to torture innocent women decides to flip sides, cuz, "evil"--but Waid is able to deliver the thing that seems to evade lots of other super-hero writers, which is a real sense of "well, what next?" In a way, it reminds me of Fables--something that I enjoy rarely, and then only for the sense of completion that's attained when certain B-plots resolve themselves. EH, I can't work up a lot of steam for Boom in either direction.

Muppet Show Snow White #4, Boom Studios Real quick, because I'm almost done. (I'm not reading/writing about these comics in order, which I probably should've done, so that you can follow the mental collapse that occurred Friday afternoon when it dawned on me what a monumental asshole I am for even thinking this was a good idea--if you care, this is the last issue I read.) Muppet Snow White: everybody loves the Langridge stuff, and they should, because its really well put together and very unique in its utilization of the variety show format. This isn't by him, but it's funnier than I expected, and it ends with a bunch of gigantic explosions that kill all of the Muppet characters, except for Miss Piggy and a small prawn character I don't remember from when I was a child. She marries the prawn, because Kermit is dead. Also, so is everyone else. I thought this comic was pretty GOOD, and it's definitely one of those things where the context of the massive death I just described should be examined before one assumes that the extinction of all the Muppet Show characters is in any way connected to the death/dismemberment plan style of comics that's been under such frenzied attack as of late.

The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects, Dark Horse Probably would've rated the opening story VERY GOOD or EXCELLENT if I'd been not-writing about comics on Savage back when it came out. I think I'll write more about this later. Pretty EXCELLENT though. The black and white art pages in Mignola collections are more interesting than a lot of full length comics, and the new material here (of which there is quite a bit) is all pretty amazing, especially "Prisoner of Mars", which is even funnier than Screw-On Head.

Baltimore: The Plague Ships # 2, Dark Horse Really gorgeous cover on this one. Mignola is a master of big, looming figures, but it's always a reward when he draws something as simple as a bat. (Okay, it's a big bat.) Ben Stenbeck handles the interiors, and the war story pages are probably the best thing he's ever done, the sort of art that makes you cringe when you remember how rushed and cheap Dynamite has gotten on some of those Battlefields issues. Not a lot happens, story wise--at least half the comic is a background story, delivered in mostly silent panels after the main character snaps at a busty girl and says "You want a STORY? I'll TELL you a story." She actually seemed to just want a chit-chat. This was GOOD.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer #36, Dark Horse Hey, a Lost joke. I never made it past the second season of that show. Can I understand this comic anyway? And isn't "vampire rights" from True Blood? Wait This is ridiculous. I've watched less than 15 minutes of this television show. I don't get this, couldn't begin to tell you if it's a good version of whatever that thing is or not. I rate this NOT APPLICABLE.

Conan something #23, Dark Horse Couldn't find a copy. Probably like the rest of the Conan comics.

Giant Size Little Lulu #2, Dark Horse What seems like an odd delivery system for Little Lulu--gigantic, Tolstoy-sized tomes--starts to make sense when I remember that its not intended for the line-culture clubhouse, but the voracious adolescent reader. Taken in small doses, this stuff is GOOD to VERY, taken all at once, it's an arduous journey into madness I recommend you never take. my favorite part is when lulu tells a story to the little girl or the time she tricked tubby into doing something he doesn't want to aghghghga so many pages

Hellboy The Storm #3, Dark Horse No question here--this is some of the best stuff Duncan Fegredo has ever done, and his panels of ravenous hordes of evil is fighting for pantheon status in the Best Mobs of Anything category. Story wise, this is one of those comics where so many specific story points from previous series--the Baba Yaga, various prophecies, the seven-in-one, and of course, Gruagach, who is breaking hearts on the daily--take some gigantic 90 degree twists, putting the Hellboy series back on the track of being the most exciting version of serialized comics that is currently available. (Fantastically enough, it's only competition was the BPRD.) Visually, Hellboy never slowed down. This was EXCELLENT, for the hell of it, I read it seven times. It was my cookie.

Star Wars Clone Wars Digest Volume 7 Hero Of The Confederacy, Dark Horse Couldn't find it, pretty happy about that.

Batman Cacophony, DC This fucking life... oh, it's so fucking hard. So long. Life ain't short, it's long. It's long, goddamn it. Goddamn. What did I do? What did I do? What did I do? What did I do? CRAP.

Batman Confidential #48, DC Batman Confidential is the dump ground book, my understanding is that DC went a bit too far buying pitches for the series a while ago, so being "all over the place" is part of its DNA. If you remember how bad Legends of the Dark Knight got--which was pretty bad, especially considering how truly great that series once was--Batman Confidential has been even worse. The current storyline, which this is the conclusion of, is actually a sequel to last year's (?) Batman & Superman Versus Aliens & Werewolves. It includes all the characters, the same creative team, plus zombies and voodoo characters. There's a page in the comic that blows the panel construction apart, something wrong on the actual layout level, not the printing. Lots of "you done got the Superman" and "child" from a voodoo priestess stand-in. Batman does kick off a dude's head. Enough. This is CRAP.

Brightest Day #9, DC (Includes mention of current real world environmental problem, should be disregarded as entertainment by those in the "i read comics to escape" demographic.) Some of this is engaging to look at, with the horrible horrors and Green Arrow throwing-arrows-around action. But for the most part, it's like reading an issue of Countdown, or half of one of those Blackest Night one-shots. Pieces of plot are moved incrementally forward, lots of blood is shed, and then it ends, with the promise of more. But nothing is "revealed", it's just bloodletting and doom-saying, laced with some sub-Moore/Claremont/yer favorite purple writer, like this one, which is my favorite or least, depending on what point I'm trying to make: "Holes in souls, souls in holes, Climb Out, Take Hold, Let Go, Wake up, Dream the Dream, Love is Vengeance, Vengeance is Love". Yeah, that's exciting. Maybe next time it'll be a sonnet. AWFUL.

Freedom Fighters #1, DC This is a really violent comic book that opens with some group called the Aryan Brigade killing Native Americans in a casino while talking smack about the Jews (in Arizona, where they believe what they're doing is now legal), and from a purely intellectual viewpoint, I suppose they deserve credit for making actual anti-semitic remarks, because that's something that neo-Nazi's do all the time, unless they're the Red Skull or other comic book characters, whose hate always seems more abstract. It's still a bit strange though. No matter what criticism is made regarding super-hero decadence, and no matter how little impact the bloodshed in Brightest Day has on me, I find myself stiffening up a bit when I read "win the race war against you injuns, the jews and all the other mongrels" and the stiffening doesn't really go away until the comic book gets to a part where the President admits that the Confederacy (from the original Civil War) probably had a weapon of mass destruction that they never used and could Uncle Sam, the Ray, Phantom Lady and some more D-level super-heroes go find it please? Yeah, sorry. This is a comic about Uncle Sam leading a super-hero team on a mission to find the Secret Weapon Of Mass Destruction of the Civil War. Why does it need serious Neo-Nazi villains? EH.

Jonah Hex #59, DC So gorgeous, like all the Bernet issues. Honestly, some of this Hex stuff stands alongside Torpedo and Solo. Bernet just knows when he's got the simple stuff nailed, when he can just leave a panel empty, when he can indicate a mountain range with a single line and leave it at that. The sound effects are the best sound effects any DC comic has had in recent memory, and the set-up for the fight page (where Bernet lays out where everyone is) is actually more powerful than the bloody axe takedown that concludes it. Art alone, this is VERY GOOD.

JSA All-Stars #10, DC This is a serviceable super-hero team comic that stood out to me mostly because the art seems devoid of traced drawings, and although it's buried in some really "shiny" color work (somebody else used that word to describe it, not sure what it means, but it does seem to fit), it's kind of impressive. I didn't really like reading it, but I did think it was funny how a bunch of non-flying super-heroes are abandoned to get-to-the-fight on their own, which means that they had to ride there in the bed of a pick-up truck. That's pretty funny. GOOD, I'm sure, for some, I can't muster up more than an EH.

Our Army At War Sgt Rock # 1, DC Welp, here's your dose of 9/11 porn. This is AWFUL, but not because it opens with 9/11, not because it hinges on a really cheap final twist that goes back to 9/11 from the POV of jumpers, but because its one of those war comics that flat out refuses to spend more than a couple of panels on the actual violence.

R.E.B.E.L.S. #20, DC Pretty much the defacto king of "not that bad" DC comics, this is one long fight issue. Because half of it features Lobo, artist Claude St. Aubin gets to show off, and the other fight--a three way between Braniacs--has a pretty decent twist at the end. You wouldn't rely on something like this as an industry foundation, but it's still GOOD.

Red Hood, Lost Days #4, DC Couldn't find it, can't stop crying about that. How will I find out what happened in between issues of other comics I didn't enjoy reading the first time through? Answer me that, America.

Secret Six #25, DC They spelled the artist's name correctly this time, that seemed to be a problem last month. Otherwise, this is more of the same, which isn't a complaint. Secret Six has gone on longer than anybody probably expected it would, it's more deviant than anyone probably thought it would be (this issue features a lubed-with-sunscreen handy), and while it's never the kind of funny you actually laugh at, there's some okay smirks throughout. Probably GOOD, I'd lean more towards OKAY.

Superman The Last Family of Krypton # 2, DC Sometimes the little kids look like elderly people in little bodies. So cute. Superman gets his name for a central casting ex-hippy. This was supposed to be a graphic novel, right? The art is strange, the comic is long, and it's weird how writers always get the opportunity to do a New Take on Superman and still end up doing the exact same story beats, no matter what. AWFUL.

Tiny Titans The First Rule of Pet Club, DC Some kids really like these, some kids really hate them. Kids are great, they're absolutely nothing like adults, and that's awesome. There's just No Bullshit with kids and comics. Dumb, smart, cute, horrible--they're all the same in one aspect, which is that they look at a comic and immediately know whether they're into it or not. If they're into it, they're all in, as deep as it gets. If they aren't--and they have no filter, they figure it out in a split second--they don't even attempt to tolerate. It's not an argument, it's a choice. Now, I can't stand reading the Tiny Titans, but I respect the choices made in creating them, there's obvious craft in their construction. But they have no value to me beyond that, making them CRAP. But for their intended audience, I think these are probably on the GOOD side to VERY and I'm sure their fans think they're EXCELLENT.

The Wild Kingdom, Drawn & Quarterly Yeah, this is the stuff. It's a hardcover reprint of Or Else #4 with a few color sections, a few new pages and a bit of rearrangement of the original order. Or Else #4 was VERY GOOD/EXCELLENT, this is no different.

The Boys #46, Dynamite Russ Braun certainly seems to have slid right in and done a nice amalgamation of Robertson while getting a chance to draw some prize-winners all on his own. Although the main thrust of the current arc is Hughie discovering that his girlfriend is one of the "supes" his job it is to police, the most interesting portions of late have been the collapsing friendship between Mother's Milk and Butcher--no surprise there, Ennis really puts his heart into platonic friendships between men, even more so when they go south. GOOD.

Green Hornet #7, Dynamite Scripty, one weird portion that concludes an argument (will you keep this a secret? yes i will) only to repeat the argument on the next page (will you keep this a secret? yes, i will). Same rushed art as all these Dynamite books have, but maybe this pencil-to-colors style is some new wave thing. Still pretty AWFUL.

Green Hornet Annual #1, Dynamite Actually worse than the other one, although it is readable. There's some very Warriors-esque character designs, that never fails to make me cringe. AWFUL.

Blackbeard Legend of the Pyrate King #5, Dean Koontz's Frankenstein Prodigal Son #1, Queen Sonja #9, Stargate Vala Mal Doran #3, Dynamite Couldn't find any of these, put the titles down purely because they're a good indication of the taste level at Dynamite.

Amulet Volume 3, the Cloud Searchers, Graphix While I haven't finished this yet, this is probably (in the neighborhood of 99%) the most "important" thing released this week, month, in the contender for year, simply because there's nothing on this list that's got as voracious an audience as Amulet does, and the people waiting for this volume are going to re-read this book to the tune of 20-30 times at least, which is something that almost none of the other books on here are going to experience. (That repetition doesn't make them better, I definitely think Huizenga and Mignola released "better" comics this week on a qualitative scale, but the impact the Amulet series has on "the next generation" of readers vastly outstrips almost everything else--like Bone, this series is crazy fucking popular, and the wait for it has increased the anticipation to a fever pitch. If you think of comics like a cultural organism, Amulet is the blue dye that's going to color entire portions of the body, while something like Brightest Day only captures a finger. My line started at Batman, their line is starting right here, these comics.)

One thing--and this is more political than it is anything else, but you can skip reading it, so I'm not sorry--that I've been thinking about after reading comments section like this, and posts like this, is that the positive side of no-super-heroes-for-young-readers is that the comics that young readers do have are, occasionally and frequently, a lot better than the super-hero comics that I read as a child. Bone, Amulet, those Little Lulu reprints, the Olympians series, Mouse Guard...those are off the top of my head, all easily available (and recognizable) to children, they're much-loved, shared, passed around and ingested, and that's in part because children don't have to bother with the output of super-hero comics publishers. Maybe kids are being deprived of new super-hero comics they can pick up on a regular basis, but they certainly aren't missing out on "great comics" by the loss. The first things I read in this medium that weren't in the newspaper--I love them, still, I read a bunch of them a few weeks back--but they aren't, and weren't, very good comics in the way that Bone and Amulet are very, very good comics. The new kid's comics, these non-superhero things that are so explosively popular, are well made and meaningful in a way that what I read simply wasn't, and they also happen to be the sort of simple on-message positive stories that shine a spotlight on how super-hero comics aren't really about Being A Better Person or Helping Your Friends or Not Judging Books By Their Cover, but mostly about Being Cool and Being Crazy and Being Awesome. (And Being Gross, that too.) Which is fine, I'm not qualified for armchair dictation of creative purpose, those things all work on me at times, I like Awesome, whatever. But I'm not going to pretend that the idea of "more monthly single issues of Batman for 8 year olds" is my dream for a healthy industry, because, honestly, that would just be in the way of them reading something that is on a qualitatively higher plain. There's no new Spider-Man title a child could enjoy? That's not a bad deal! Hell, the only thing a kids super-hero comic would offer a Bone/Amulet fan, at this point, is the chance to master that phrase "If the story's good, I don't care how bad the art is..."

Scarlet #2, Icon If this turns into an actual revolution, which causes an apocalypse, and the book turns into a study of the post- of that apocalypse, I would totally be into that, even with this art, which begs the question why it's so hard to "break into comics", when you can google image this kind of stuff in about 9 seconds. Here I go:

That took less than five! Thank god for 2010's dedication to exhibitionism.

I still like the Daredevil stuff Maleev did, but c'mon. This is getting old. AWFUL.

5 Days To Die #1, IDW Couldn't find it, Brian has it covered though.

Angel Barbary Coast, IDW Hey, I remember when this came out. Really hideous covers. Now that IDW lost the Angel stuff, I wonder what television show they'll use to publish six-to-eight one-shot comics almost nobody wants next.  (I couldn't find this trade.)

Bram Stoker's Death Ship The Last Voyage Of The Demeter #4, IDW Conclusion of a four part horror story adaptation: not the best place to start. I liked the linework, there's some real life to it, but the coloring in this comic is so dark that it takes work to find the art underneath. Story is old school vampire on a boat stuff. OKAY.

Classic GI Joe Volume 9, IDW I own a copy of Volume 2, and I refuse to spoil whatever it contains just to twist some more knots into the noose I've created for myself here. I'm want this to be OKAY at least.

GI Joe A Real American Hero #158, IDW Thanks to the success of X-Men Forever, no cancelled comic has to ever really end, hence the existence of this, GI Joe The Real American Hero, which picks up after the conclusion of the old series. The Joe's are rogues, Cobra work for the gub'ment, Snake Eyes gets stabbed in the leg. It's AWFUL, really cheap looking and lacking in the specificity of character that the old Joe stuff delivered. Ignore the outfits, forget the names, and there's no distinction between any of these characters.

GI Joe Hearts & Minds #4, IDW This comic is split into two sections, both of which end with whatever character being focused on saying "My name is ___. I am ___." (The second blank is either "Cobra" or "G.I. Joe".) Basically, you're dealing with two back-up stories mashed together to make a comic. This issue focuses on Dr. Mindbender (by Chaykin) and Doc (by Antonio Fuso). They're OKAY back-up origins, but they seem like the sort of thing that could've stayed on a computer screen, or, you know, as back-ups.

Spike The Devil You Know #3, IDW Pretty standard buddy story set mostly in a casino and a casino parking deck, with Spike acting like somebody who bases their personality off of John Constantine comics, as opposed to someboy who basing theirs off of Andy Capp, which is how I roll. I know even less about Spike than I do Buffy, but this made enough sense to be comprehensible. AWFUL.

Strange Science Fantasy #3, IDW Odd little comic that was supposed to be online and ended up in print first. The style--three rectangular panel pages, with giant captions--ends up separating the action and panel-to-panel plotting so much that the comic is a lot more like a children's picture book than it is a comic. This issue is a one-shot noir story set in a world where some people have film cameras as heads. OKAY.

Transformers Last Stand of the Wreckers, IDW I read an issue of this the first time I tried to do one of these "everything I can find" pieces. (I never finished it.) It was pretty weird.

We Will Bury You, IDW This was sold out when I went looking. I've talked to Zane Grant some, he was part of the reason I finally got a bike. I should've done that when I first moved to New York, but I'm a stupid, stubborn child. He's a good guy, great taste. I'll try to find this. (You have to use the word "try" when you're talking about IDW.)

Wire Hangers #4, IDW Couldn't find it. Title reminded me of Mommie Dearest, but Google says this is a horror comic.

Robert Bloch's Yours Truly Jack The Ripper #4, IDW Huh. Not sure if anything happened in the first three issues, because this seems to make perfect sense even without reading them. Jack the Ripper is some kind of demon tied into a human familiar, the traitor-is-revealed, tragedy strikes, bad guy both wins and loses at the end. CRAP, but I couldn't be the wrong-er audience for this without cameos by Glee characters.

Choker #4, Image Not as Warren Ellis-y as the initial issues. This chapter moves more into large scale slaughter comics, which gives Templesmith the chance to do that thing he does so well, which is large panels of gruesome violence. Cops taking slobberjaw steroids seems like a not-so-unrealistic possibility in our contemporary world, credit for that. OKAY!

Cowboy Ninja Viking #8 I wonder if they'll someday do a director's cut of this comic that removes all the extraneous lines and digital ink splashes that are layered onto all these drawings. Rarely does a comic try so hard to achieve some weird idealization of indie comic authenticity. As with every issue of Cowboy Ninja Viking I've ever read, the story (lets find an atom bomb) takes a back seat to some of the most egregious affectation you can find outside of Seth's innumerable hats. AWFUL.

Hack Slash Vol 3 Friday The 31st, Image Couldn't find, never read this series.

Haunt #9, Image From a letter in the back: "Will we see Haunt ever use any weapons like a rocket propelled grenade, an uzi, or a sniper rifle? That would look so sweet!"

I'm not going to pretend i'm the right guy for this comic, but I'm glad they've found him. Not as bad as the first issue (which was CRAP), but this is still an AWFUL comic.

King City #11, Image VERY GOOD. I've really enjoyed King City, but ever since the eighth issue, I've kind of wanted the comic to abandon all of its characters so it could focus on the ex-soldier suffering from chalk addiction and PTSD. That's some pathos, that guy broke my heart. Great comic though, very violent in the same languid, cool-dude way that the characters eat sandwiches. Cat masters slicing henchmen (and their threats) in two, leaving halved carcasses in causeways. Going to be a heartbreaker when this series ends.

Murderland #2, Image This is about a mercenary team with a super-powered shape-shifting Rapunzel, it has some nice art from David Hahn (although the settings are almost universally kind of bland, another comic where almost all of the panels take place against color backgrounds). It's not the easiest story to understand--the character's behavior and relationships make sense, their purpose for acting like vigilantes and being overly-sensitive about death doesn't--but there's one pretty striking line of dialog during the Afghanistan part near the end that'll stick with me more than some of these comics. OKAY!

Nancy In Hell #2, Image Huge plot dump and a lot fewer panels where the main character points her crotch at the reader. (There were six of those on the first page of the prior issue.) Assuming this is supposed to be a mix of exploitation/black humor/gross-out horror, it pretty much fails on all accounts, is therefore CRAP.

Noble Causes Volume 10 Ever After, Image There's ten volumes of this? I've never seen one. Couldn't find.

Savage Dragon United We Stand, Image Is the next one called Divided We Fall? I would've read this if I had found it.

Amazing Spider-Man Presents Black Cat #3, Marvel Thanks to a printing or lettering error that wasn't caught, this comic doesn't credit the first ten pages as having an artist. There's quite a bit that happens in it plotwise, some of which seemed kind of funny. (Apparently the Kraven family hates noise? Except for drums, one assumes.) This moved along at a brisk pace, and after those IDW & Dynamite books, I was definitely glad for that. GOOD.

Avengers Childrens Crusade #2, Marvel Wolverine really wants to kill one of the members of the Young Avengers as well as the Scarlet Witch. I don't have any feelings for the Scarlet Witch other than being mildly confused by her, but I wouldn't mind seeing a story where Captain America stops and says "wait, are you saying you're down for killing children? We might need to rethink why we keep teaming up with you." This was also GOOD for what it was, although I don't think I'll read future issues.

Avengers Thor & Captain America Official Index To The Marvel Universe #5, Marvel This was one of the two things I completely put my foot down to. I refuse to read these things, and I refuse to believe that they contain any information that isn't easily available in far more depth on a thousand different websites.

Captain America Forever Allies #4, Marvel To steal a word my wife sometimes uses for comics, I though this was pretty charming. It's a set-in-the-old-days story lacking in those contemporary jokes about the future, or at least lacking ones I recognize, and Nick Dragotta draws a pretty great straight-from-Caniff female villain. It's not far removed from those Brubaker Captain America stories that jump back and forth between WW2 and now, but not in an irritating way. I wouldn't have read it if I wasn't trying to do this, but I'm OKAY with having done so.

Deadpool Pulp #1, Marvel This is Deadpool as a Canadian spec ops soldier who went crazy after being tortured for a really long time in a prison camp. It's not funny in the way that Deadpool comics sometimes are--in fact, it's pretty much cover-to-cover nasty--and the art seems purposely off-putting at times, with interchangeable bodies and an addiction to overly shadowed faces that obscure every character's emotional reaction. Pretty EH.

Deadpool Wade Wilson's War #4, Marvel I heard this was good, and maybe it was, but I couldn't find it.

Franken-Castle #20, Marvel I couldn't find this comic in time, but I did get an email last week regarding the monologue that Daken (the Dark Wolverine!!!!) gives about why he hates cops and enjoys killing them. It was a lot more intense then that song by Body Count, but not as catchy.

Gorilla Man #3, Marvel Missed my window, couldn't find a copy.

Hawkeye & Mockingbird #4, Marvel It seems like the line "WCA Assemble" should be a bigger deal, but maybe I'm just confused in assuming that "WCA" means "West Coast Avengers", maybe it means something else. I wouldn't say that I liked this very much, but...I don't know. There's a full page of the two main characters kissing, which I think is something that's been put off for a little while, and there's something sort of pleasant about that, that a kiss between two characters is the most important thing in the comic. There's a lot of excitement in the letters page--"how awesome was it to see Hamilton Slade transform"--you know, that kind of thing. From the way Abhay described the series, I suppose this is a total fan-service comic, but it lacks the cynical manipulation that DC's fan-service comics have. Again: OKAY.

Hercules Twilight of a God #4, Marvel I consider myself to be a pretty dumb person whose most marketable skill is remembering useless trivia information, and therefore it upsets me to say that I was horribly confused by this comic. It seems to be about Hercules fighting Galactus or a black hole, or a black hole that ate Galactus, and Hercules has a kid who is older than he is, and his horses bite off people's arms, and he feels a lot of pain when he walks. I'm not even sure if this comic is bad or not, it confused me that much. It's the second to last one I read, after trying to start it three other times and giving up two pages in. I'm going to rate it as I'm Sorry.

Heroic Age 1Month2Live #1, Marvel This feels a lot like it's trying way too hard to be A Grown-Up Comic With Spider-Man and Mr. Fantastic, mostly because the main character and his family are so similar in terms of basic attributes to every "suburban middle-aged white guy who hateshateshates the choices" story ever told. This just strikes me as something that fundamentally misunderstands the reasons why people choose to read a Marvel comic, like--this story, these characters--what could adding super-powers to the mix possibly bring to it? What audience is there for this beyond the curiosity seeker? Maybe it's just the influence of certain comics critics, but I no longer think it's that beneficial to bring the spotlight onto Marvel's civilian characters, because, honestly, why would anyone choose to live in Marvel's New York? Why would anyone be happy to see the Avengers, the X-Men, after all the death and destruction their presence brings in its wake? It would be one thing for them to be treated with some fantastic license, but they aren't, it's just this bludgeoning REALISM, this thing that incorporates the depressions of everyday life (CANCER!) and (SACRIFICE!) into stories where everyday life doesn't fit in the first place.

Oh god, shut up, me. EH. This thing's EH.

I Am An Avenger #1, Marvel Pretty insane art line-up here--Chris Samnee, Jason Latour, Tom Fowler--that's crazy, I like all those guys. The first story is about people walking across a front yard and how that proves they are heroes, the second story is about how break ups suck, even if you're the Iron Fist or The Misty Knight, and the last story is two pages long and is about how nice it is to come home. OKAY? Yeah, that works.

Incredible Hulks #612, Marvel Did that World War Hulks thing work for people? I feel like I've never heard anyone mention these comics, excepting those occasional "Jeph Loeb sux" monologues that show up from time to time in comments sections. I didn't read most of them, but I read a couple of the "key issues". Looks like I didn't need to even do that, because the recap page covers pretty much everything. Basically, all of the Hulk's supporting characters are some kind of Gamma-related monster now, but they all seem to have control over themselves when in their monster form. This issue is an aftermath/new storyline issue, so the only real new step it takes is to explain what a loveless marriage Betty and Bruce Banner had (which doesn't gel with what I remember from those old Peter David comics, but that's fine, she's been dead for awhile, people change), and how she's going to run around and do Hulk things like break shit with her Hulk powers. Bruce Banner is basically a cheap Iron Man without a costume when he isn't Hulk-ed out, everybody lives together in a trailer park and has a bar-b-que, it's very sit-comy, this comic. I call it EH.

Iron Man 2 Agents of S.H.I.E.D. #1, Marvel Three stories here, one of them the scintillating tale of how Scarlet Johannson maneuvered herself into the position of delivering papers to Robert Downey Jr when he was boxing with Jon Favreau. This feels like a DVD extra, the kind you'd skip, and no amount of decent art (which it has for 2 of its 3 stories) is going to change that. AWFUL.

Iron Man Legacy #6, Marvel Pretty ugly stuff here, Tony Stark is presented as an arrogant wino who doesn't drink, likes to show up at people's houses and criticize them for how they treat their homeless, mentally unstable relations within seconds of meeting them. This is just too middle road, really: it's either a super-hero comic or it's a humiliation comic, pick one. AWFUL.

Marvel Universe Vs. The Punisher #3, Marvel The nice thing about this Punisher comic is that this is pretty much what he's designed to do: kill things, lots of things. Sure, he's also supposed to occasionally show up in other comics (like Spider-Man, Daredevil, cross-over bullshit) and act as the foil for basement dwelling arguments on the ethics of violence, but those are conversations best reserved for college, amongst people who can't break themselves from the fantasy (instilled by their parents) that they should do something at college besides what you're supposed to do at college, which is to learn about what kind of sex you like. Otherwise, this (tying a buck knife to an arrow and shooting the Hulk in the eye) is what you want the Punisher to do, and if you don't want the Punisher to do them, then you either A) don't like the Punisher or B) don't understand the Punisher. The first response is totally acceptable, the second is too, as long as you don't combine that lack of understanding with reading Punisher comic books, egg on your face and all that. In a nice little twist, this comic's plot also gets to totally tie itself to that Cooke/Kirkman/fingerfuck "controversy" (that's in quotes because I have to live with myself and can't care enough about the subject to pretend it's one worth me having an opinion on), because it's about a bunch of Marvel Zombied type super-heroes getting killed by the Punisher, because he is not sick, and they are, so sick that Mary Jane is pregnant (oh shit, you read REIGN, right?) and Spider-Man ripped out some people's throats at a baseball game. (AMERICA)

It's Goran Parlov though, so who cares? Goran Parlov wasn't put on this Earth so that he could draw the Tiny goddamned Titans. He was put on this Earth because the man was born to draw a knife going into the Hulk's eyeball. And sure, he was probably born to do other things too, people should follow their muse, even if their muse is twittering about bagels and fucking people over, because this is America, and you can build a mosque wherever you want, as long as it isn't on Garth Ennis's nutsack, because that thing is a tongue only zone. GOOD.

Marvelman Family's Finest #3, Marvel Jesus, this is hard to read. There's a vague similarity to CC Beck, but Beck's stuff goes down so damn easy, so readable and funny and interspersed with this brilliant singular images, panels that you want to just yank out and blow up and frame. This is just half-assed and un-fun, it requires such a massive level of commitment just to remember what's happened in one panel so that the next one makes sense. AWFUL.

New Mutants Forever #2, Marvel Seems to be less fetish-y stuff in this one than the X-Men Forever, but that doesn't unset the basic "whywhywhy" factor. "I've returned to the New Mutants to tell the stories I never got to tell, like the one about when a middle-aged woman ran around in the tenements of Brazil while Cannonball got his flesh burned down to the Red Skull core and Warlock accidently burned someone to ash". This is CRAP, dude.

Origins of Marvel Comics X-Men #1, Marvel This is the other thing I'm not reading, no way. When I was a kid and couldn't afford the comics I wanted, I bought Who's Who and whatever else to learn about them, but now: there's no point in something like this unless your job blocks Wikipedia.

Shadowland #3, Marvel Marketed as a street level team-up book, it turns out this is about demonic possession and corny lines like "I can no longer call myself the Master of Kung Fu", (yes you can, Dopey Smurf). It's bad comics, if that makes a difference. There's some old timey tricks that still have bulges left in their muscles--really, the only good thing that comes out of Marvel's heavy-handed Bring Back The Punisher trick is whenever he shows up in the middle of a fight and just shoots people instead of dicking around, Peter Parker style--but if this story isn't desperation, it should stop wearing desperation's mini-dress and rubbing its hand on please-care-about-me's inner thigh. Still, if the goal was to go way off the reservation in terms of "things that Daredevil does" stories, this is sort of that. AWFUL.

Shadowland Elektra #1, Marvel I wouldn't say that this read-em-all project was worthwhile because of this comic, but if I hadn't have done it, I wouldn't have seen it, and it's worth looking at. Not having the anime/manga background of some of my peers, I can only tell you what this reminds me of (Blade of the Immortal and the first Golgo 13 movie) without making clear why that is. It's just a weird, un-Marvel, un-super-hero fight scene that I liked quite a bit, and that's totally in credit to an artist I don't remember seeing before. The comic has a really cheesy ending, but that's the way it usually goes with tie-ins--the part that "matters" always reads like a waste. OKAY.

Sky Doll Lacrima Christi #2, Marvel Yeah, I don't get this comic. I still remember the first time I read an issue--a six dollar comic with 12 pages of actual content shoved in front of 30-odd black and white sketch pages of the same 12 pages, and on the cover, a girl with giant eggs where her breasts should be. EH, because the people involved seem to know what they're doing in terms of drawing eggs-breast-girls.

Taskmaster #1, Marvel Jefte Palo on art, that's usually nice, Fred Van Lente doing his best imitation of Jason Aaron on Ghost Rider, that's okay too. I'm not a huge fan of comics that call out memorable movie lines, but if you're going in that direction, that scene where Gary Oldman screams Ev-eRY-Onnnnnnne is a good choice. This is OKAY.

Thor For Asgard #1, Marvel When this is set or where or whether it "counts", I don't know. It's the comic where Thor pulls the Asgardian version of "we don't negotiate with terrorists", which translates to "we have to kill these innocent women and their children because the Frost Giants are using them as human shields". Then the dude goes home and gets laid. Weird comic, I guess it's OKAY. I'd be able to tell "that doesn't seem right" if Daredevil started punching homeless women or Batman stuck a needle into somebody's eye, but I don't know Thor that way, so maybe this is exactly what Thor comics are supposed to be like.

Wolverine Road To Hell #1, Marvel I heard you're supposed to read this before you read the other Wolverine comic, but I heard that too late in the game and ended up reading it second. Really doesn't seem to matter, as far as I can tell. Giuseppe Camuncoli and Marjorie Liu continue to double the fuck down on making Daken into the most ridiculous caricature of an American Apparel-loving young man--someday, people are going to look at these drawings and react the way we do to Bob Haney's Hep Cat dialog now. The Aaron part is Wolverine falling for a bunch of pages, it's very boring. This was EH.

Wolverine #1, Marvel I didn't read those Supergirl comics that Renato Guedes drew, but I remember thinking that his character designs for her were more interesting than I thought that character deserved. I think that ended badly, and that thought (accurate or no) left me predisposed towards liking what Guedes had to bring here. Unfortunately, this just doesn't seem to work, and Aaron seems to be focused on doing the exact opposite of what he did in Ghost Rider and Weapon X, which is take everything really, really seriously. EH.

X-Men Curse of the Mutants Smoke And Blood #1, Marvel Wow, this is some really unusual art for a Marvel comic, even more so a tie-in event comic. Here:

See what I mean? That's pretty cool. The story is an overlong trapped-with-monsters shindig, seems like mercenary work, a tie-in comic where the writer wasn't given a huge amount of freedom or information. It ends with an argument about magic versus science, one has to hope that wasn't the only thing the reader was supposed to get out of it. Maybe it'll come up later in the main arc that this is tied into, but it seems doubtful. There's so many of these things, and it would be really nice to know if this model (lots of one-shot tie-ins, four issue mini's, the model used for World War Hulks, Shadowland) is actually working. It's great that they're giving so many non-stock artists/writers the work, but it would be a hell of a lot better if it was on something that had a real future to it, and that just doesn't seem likely.

Young Allies #4, Marvel This is very reminiscent of Teen Titans, and I seem to remember that's how it was marketed when it began. Not sure which characters are in love with each other, but that's certainly going to be in the cards. Two non-powered characters seems like one too many, especially since neither have a bow and arrow, but maybe they can make a trade for a hero to be named later.

What a horrible joke. This comic is OKAY.

Stumptown #4, Oni Greg Rucka gets a lot of credit for what he doesn't do--porny shit with girls--and that's deserved, but only to a point. At the end of that line of praise, it always reminds me of that Chris Rock routine where he lambasts people who want credit for not beating their kids or paying the light bill. Like--good job not being gross, but not-being-gross isn't that hard to do, because "not doing something" is an action absolutely every single human being is capable to taking.

Anyway: the issue itself. It's GOOD, a nice, classic conclusion to the Rockford Files/straight genre story that this series has consisted of since the beginning. And yet, no matter how much work Matthew Southworth put into it, and he put in quite a bit, I can't help wondering why this is a comic and not a television show. It's plotted like one, with plenty of build-up-to-break moments, it rarely utilizes anything that's very specifically comic-y about it (the first issue had some moments, but the part in this issue where the main character is knocked unconsious is visually no different than every single time Jim Rockford got knocked out)--there's just not a lot of evidence that this needs the paper and staples, or that there needs to be three months in between the commercial breaks.

Last Days of American Crime #3, Radical Really surprised by this. It's one of the last ones I read, I was kind of putting it off after not having enjoyed much of Radical's output. And while I think the faces in this comic could use some work, the characters and linework in this comic is really, really fluid. I think this is one of those comics that is probably being acknowledged mostly for its crime-y plot--which, to be honest, is a bit generic, futuristic setting or no--when what's actually special about it is what the artist is doing. GOOD, definitely.

Torchwood #2, Titan This is a couple of stories originally published in a Torchwood magazine, one by Paul Grist, the other by Brian Minchin and Steve Yeowell. The Yeowell art seems really rushed, but maybe I'm just remembering Sebastian O too fondly.  The Grist story is well drawn, especially the part where the "Ianto" beats a skeleton to death (?) with a fire extinguisher, but it's the second of a five part story and isn't very interesting. EH, I don't know who these people are or what it is they're supposed to be doing, and I've actually seen an episode of this show.

Angelus #5, Top Cow And then there's this. I try to be as open about liking women, naked women especially, as possible without being all gross about it. I'm into women, let's leave it at that. But this--this reminds me of when I was a kid, and the neighbor had a copy of Juggs magazine, and I saw the reviews for some porno movie that involved thirty or so guys having sex with a pregnant woman in a Florida backyard. Nothing's as creepy as a fetish you don't share, and this--a cornball soft-core sex scene that goes on for multiple pages--isn't in me. CRAP.

Darkness # 84 Lance Briggs C2E2 Variant Cover, Top Cow Not reading this, because the content it contains came out over two months ago. However, I do give the cover--which is a picture of a Chicago Bears linebacker wearing a Darkness t-shirt--an official EXCELLENT, as it will help me the next time I get in an imaginary one-sided argument after reading something about integrity and hard work on a corporate comic executive's twitter feed. If you ever need evidence of how quickly comics are willing to sell themselves out at the first whiff of celebrity endorsement, a variant cover featuring a football player's picture on a back issue is definitely going to be the one to beat.

Magdalena #3, Top Cow Nelson Blake, the artist for this comic, has been known to say "comics is a meritocracy". And hey, maybe he's onto something. EH.

House of Mystery #29, Vertigo Part of this is about three people traveling from Hell to New York City and arriving naked, another part is about some women escaping from a dungeon when an old stuffed bunny arrives and shoots the guard, and those parts seem to be the main story. There is another part, about a goblin army led by a homophobic goblin, and during that part, the comic takes a break to tell a story, which I think they do in every issue of this comic. The story is about a goblin that eats babies. For some reason, they have a Clayton Crain-y type draw that part--since the story is supposed to be funny, it seems like it would've worked better if somebody like Johnny Ryan had drawn it. Instead, it relies on the dialog to make the story funny, which doesn't work out that well. I'm thinking AWFUL on this one.

I Zombie #5, Vertigo I'd stopped giving this a chance after finding the first two issues dull, so it's pleasant to find out that I've missed nothing, as that seems to be the main ambition here. In this issue, the zombie girl makes a possible love connection with a white-suited monster hunter. As this will probably be the conclusion of the first trade paperback, I'd be curious to see if anyone is going to want to read beyond what's on display here. EH, because at least Allred's getting paid.

Sweet Tooth #13, Vertigo This series keeps trucking along, with the big hunter guy slowly making his way towards the redemption that the initial story arcs advertised in the brightest lights that "foreshadowing" would allow. Although I appreciated the brevity it requires to read Sweet Tooth due to the nature of this little assignment I've given myself, I can't imagine this being a very satisfying comic in monthly installments. EH, Vertigo sure can guarantee mediocrity these days.

Astro City Special Silver Agent #2, Wildstorm The word that best describes this is "sincere", and while that's fine and all, it's a little too much. The opening pages barely make any sense--visually or verbally--but after that, its an easy comic to follow. It's similar to that Jack the Ripper comic, in that it's hard to imagine what the first issue of this was about, as the entire story seems to be on display here, even if you skip the recap page. EH, although I do kind of want to push higher just because it's so goddamn passionate.

The Authority #26, Wildstorm Always a surprise this is still being published. No copy available.

Kane & Lynch #2, Wildstorm Okay, let's try writing this before I use google to figure it out. 1) this is a video game comic? yes? 2) this is about two guys with facial hair. 3) kind of like the way that christopher mitten draws the first car wreck. second one isn't as nice, but some of the faces start to fall apart around that part too, so maybe it was rushed. [google break] Jesus, i'm completely blind. Of course it's a video game, there's advertisements on the back of all of these DC comics for it. How embarrassing! This is EH, because of the car crash. Without that, AWFUL.

Jack of Fables #47, Vertigo Jack doesn't seem to be the star of his own comic, but that leaves space for lines like "sheath those udders" in reference to a breastfeeding woman, so...I don't know. Sometimes I stop a take a look at my life for a second and realize: this is kind of my fault, not me specifically, but me as a type of person, because I just don't even have a response to those kinds of lines anymore and don't immediately grasp whether they're offensive or not to women or mothers or comic book characters. Like, who fucking cares about what happens in consumer entertainment, which is all this is, really, but it bugs me, this lack of caring I have, makes me realize I'm part of the problem, because I'm disinterested in other people's feelings. I see people online get heated up about stuff and its just--I should be making up something to care about, shouldn't I? And yet I'm more offended by something like Shuddertown #3, because it was just so blatantly cheap and sleazy, page after page of photoshopped pictures of James Gandolfini talking to photoshopped pictures of Giovanni Ribisi, ending with photoshopped pictures of Julianne Moore. But even that really didn't "offend" me, not as much as that fucking Eat, Pray, Love trailer, which struck me as the most shallow, racist bullshit that Julia Roberts had ever participated in, and she's kind of responsible for a lot of that kind of crap. You have to go to the poorest parts of the world to pray? Really? Because your shitty boyfriend is a shitty boyfriend? Why not skin a Somalian baby and use the interior musculature of its genitals as a wrinkle-reducing pore cleanser, you know, hell, they could make it a law that you have to give the Somalian baby a really good life for six months before you skin it, and since that's six more months of good-eating that the baby wouldn't get in Somalia, it all evens out in the wash, sort of.

Jack of Fables-the cliffhanger with the dragon was okay, the comic itself was EH.

IN CONCLUSION

Yeah, nevermind what I said before, I'm sorry about this. I rate me CRAP.

Tom's fault

I haven't been writing lately for maybe a million reasons: been lazy; Ben's started school again, throwing my schedule back into adjustment; Mercury is in retrograde; I fucked up in posting something, and have been gunshy since; trying to focus on my actual business (the one that makes me money); I'm just not feeling oh so much of the current output of my biggest partners; I'm just a very very bad man -- take your pick, they're all part of it. I've actually mused on "shutting down" this site -- well, I wouldn't get rid of it altogether, but maybe it's time to admit that hoping that people will write for free (since advertising pays about $20/year to each contributor) doesn't really fit the internet in 2010. I dunno.

(though, Jeff and Graeme's podcasts are pretty awesome, damn it)

But Spurgeon "called us out" today, and made me feel bad enough about it that I thought I should at least post SOME kind of review while I try and figure out how to get my groove back, so here is a trio of books from this week...

5 DAYS TO DIE #1 (OF 5)

HEROIC AGE ONE MONTH TO LIVE #1 (OF 5)

Ah, here's to synchronicity: two weekly five issue mini-series that share a common theme spelled out in the titles, arriving exactly the same week (in a five Wednesday month)

Before I talk about content, let me note that weekly almost-anythings are not the greatest sales idea in the current climate -- absent some sort of retailer protection (like partial returnability or the like), such things are utterly and completely doomed to have insignificant orders and support, and almost certainly aren't going to make them up in reorders because of the mechanical realities for most retailers in restocking. Because of how we do reorders, there's basically no chance of me getting restock on a (theoretical) sellout of #1 before #3 arrives, and FOC (in the case of the Marvel series) doesn't work either because we're currently FOCing #4 this week... and #1 has been on sale for (as I type this) 41 minutes now.

Plus, most retailers really don't like or want mini-series, especially short short ones like 5 issues -- we have every expectation that the collection on these is going to come much sooner than later, so why stock any inventory on the periodical? There's no real way to make any money of it, especially on a weekly series (see previous para)

In the case of Marvel's, specifically, I also want to call out how the book was solicited -- as "HEROIC AGE ONE MONTH TO LIVE #1 (OF 5)". The actual object that shipped? No HA branding anywhere to be seen, and it is suddenly called "1 Month 2 Live" (thanks, Twitter!), which really scans as a Long-I "live", and sounds more like a popstar live tour than anything else. When checking in the books yesterday afternoon, I couldn't figure out why I couldn't find the book on the invoice (alphabetically "1" comes before the letter "o"... let alone the letter "h") -- it took me a couple of minutes to puzzle out what the original title should have been.

Anyway, yeah, same basic premise involved in these two books -- a guy living an unhappy life finds out he's terminal, must figure out a way to deal with that.

In the IDW version, we've got a pulpy crime take -- Writer Andy Schmidt gives us the hardboiled stuff, and Artist Chee goes all monochrome with it (though, really, the book is in color, just seldom more than one per page), but I found my credibility strained from post-diagnosis moment one -- the protagonist is told he has five days to live, IF he stays in bedrest; otherwise he's likely to die faster. Plus, if that wasn't enough he has whiplash too. So of course he gets into a physical altercation in under 5 minutes, and is shown in a violent shootout later that day... but to no ill effects.

More generally, I wonder how often someone is told they have a month or under to live when they have no symptoms otherwise -- the IDW take at least gives a somewhat plausible explanation of a car accident, but we're meant to beleive in the Marvel take that he's had terminal cancer for a while, just didn't know it. That doesn't actually happen, does it?

The Marvel version, which will, strangely, have five different creative teams over the five issues (say goodbye to a satisfying TP read, then!) is, this issue, by Rick Remender and Andrea Mutti. Remender's script is unremarkable, but moves things along briskly, and Mutti's art is very "Marvel house style": reminding me of, mm, Paul Ryan, maybe. Because it is a Marvel comic, in the Marvel Universe, of course the protagonist gets superpowers (from, ahem, being force-fed medical waste by central-casting junkie/robbers) -- though, in a pretty uncanny bit of plothammering, one of the robbers turns out to be working for the "big bad", and doesn't realize he's hunting for the protagonist...

Both comics were competant, if uninspiring, but I think I liked the marvel one a smidge more -- in the IDW one I just couldn't get past the in-an-accident-gets-up-and-is-fine staging, while that's a fairly natural superhero trope. Plus the Marvel one was a bit denser of a read. But they're both, essentially, OK stories.

NAMOR, THE FIRST MUTANT #1: So, here's the thing: if you want a monthly ongoing regular comic series to work (and this is billed as a monthly, ongoing book, not a mini), then you need to introduce your protagonist clearly, establish a goal (or goals) for them, and show us thier supporting cast and world so that we have a reason to want to come back for the next issue (and the next FIFTY after that!)

What you kind of don't want it to do is start off in the middle of another crossover, and spend all of your time dealing with what appear to be unimportant plot points from that crossover while not really establishing anything about your protagonist whatsoever.

Like: what's all that (in the title) about Namor being "the first mutant"? That's not mentioned or referenced especially in the text, nor does it seem to be particularly relevent to anything that's going on in the actual plot. I mean, you and I know what they mean by that, because we've been reading comics forever, but I can't imagine what a theoretical "new" reader would make of the supposed setup here at all.

If you haven't read X-Men comics in the last few weeks, I'm not sure that you'd get what Namor's doing, or why it would be important -- he's trying to get Dracula's severed head? Why? THIS comic doesn't tell you.

The "supporting cast", such as it is here (I can't name one character involved, less than 8 hours after reading it) are generally unlikable, and don't like/respect Namor at all, who is portrayed, as usual, as a complete asshole, anyway.

While the art by Ariel Olivetti is terrific (as usual), I can not, for the life of me, understand who this book might be aimed at, other than absolute X-completists who will feel compelled to buy it because of the word "mutant" in the title.

(which, by the way, even Marvel doesn't seem sure what the book is called -- the indicia and cover agree on "Namor: the First Mutant", but the "next issue" page seems to believe it is called "X-Men: Curse of the Mutants -- Namor")

Either way, as a discrete unit of entertainment, this was, well, EH, I guess, since I'm not hot on utterly unlikable protagonists; as the first issue of a monthly, ongoing series? AWFUL.

VERONICA #202: There's a new cute boy in town... and he's GAY! That's pretty much all there is to this, other than lots of characters trying to trick/punish Ronnie for her vapid selfishness. Which is fine.

There's really not much in the comic about being gay... which is really probably fine, given the target audience of Archie comics. Really, I am more interested in the possible socialogical ramifications of "America's Most Wholesome Teen" comics having a gay character WHERE IT IS NO BIG DEAL.

It shouldn't BE a big deal, duh, obviously, but if I had to point to one thing in the whole universe that makes me think that all fifty states will recognize Gay Marraige in my lifetime, I might offer this as Exhibit One -- the absolute and complete casualness that everyone (well, except Ronnie, but that's because she's frustrated she can't get at Archie through the new kid) accepts and welcomes the gay character suggests to me that the cultural shift already happened, and it is just a matter of time before the laws of our land catch up to it.

The problem with the comic, to me, is that the New Gay Kid, Kevin Keller, really doesn't seem to have much going for him characterwise. In fact, they make the really really weird decision to have his most notable characteristic to be precisely that of Jughead -- he can eat a whole lot (but, I guess, not get fat) -- in fact, he has several eating contests with Juggie to really underline that. Oh, and I guess he likes texting (presumably to his boyfriend, but it is underplayed) Ultimately, I don't see where this character goes next, or what role he plays that Jughead couldn't handle just fine.

I'm so not the target audience for this -- I'd personally call it pretty EH -- but I have to admit that Archie has got me looking at more Archie comics in the last year than I've read in the prvious decade, combined, so they must be doing something right Mamoroneck...

That's what I have for you today, Tom -- as always, what did YOU think?

-B

Marvel Comics of 8/4/2010, A to H, with Abhay (Part 3 of 3)

"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world." -- Edmond de Goncourt.

Let's prove Edmond de Goncourt wrong, everybody! HYAH!

DEADPOOL: WADE WILSON'S WAR #3 of 4 by Duane Swierczynski, Jason Pearson, Dexter Vines, Paul Mounts, VC's Clayton Cowles, Sebastian Girner, Axel Alonso, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, Alan Fine, and also Dan Carr is the Executive Director of Publishing Technology, and Where Would We Be Without Publishing Technology, Really: This is another issue in the middle of a limited series, so I can only guess what I think is happening here. Here's my guess: a guy in a baseball cap is telling a story to a government agent about Deadpool telling a story to Congress about an adventure he never had with a group of characters named Team X. Am I... Am I close...? Having read one of Duane Swiercynski's novels before, I remember his novel having that kind of untrustworthy, shifting point-of-view. There's not a lot of color cues distinguishing the scene-- Paul Mounts doesn't do that Soderbergh Traffic thing of color-coding the different layers of reality. Has that become hacky in recent years? (Well, wait-- maybe it's slightly there-- reality layer #3 is sometimes a little more orange, #2 a little more green, #1... maybe brown...? Maybe?)

It doesn't matter-- the plot here's just an excuse for action; violence; some large breasts. You know: I personally like this kind of thing, in the proper time and place.  One guy gets his brains blown out in the first couple pages-- I liked that part. I've tuned into issues of artist Jason Pearson's creator-owned work, the BODY BAGS comics, that have had far less story than this, and never had any qualm. This Deadpool thing isn't quite as nihilistic or blood-soaked as any random page of BODY BAGS, but it's only published under the Marvel Knights imprint and not the Marvel Max imprint, which means... means something, I think. Something to someone...?

There's this page near the end, though. It's this page of a comparatively "dramatic" scene of Neena (is that the old Domino character?) silently debating whether or not to kill some dude. I really liked what Pearson, Vines and Mounts did on that page, which is really too bad.  I hate when there's a page like that, one of those that make you stop and go, "Imagine if that page were telling a story worth reading, instead!" That is the worst.

Do the mainstream companies do prestige limited series with any regularity? WATCHMEN, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, DARK KNIGHT STRIKES BACK, MARVELS, KINGDOM COME, NEW FRONTIER, OMEGA THE UNKNOWN-- I don't even like KINGDOM COME at all, but... The big fancypants limited series, instead of this fly-by-night Deadpool shit. The Marvel/DC equivalent of the Oscar pic-- how often does that happen? There was that Brubaker limited series-- what was that, about the old characters? Or there was some Chris Weston comic about old characters? Or... was there another comic about old characters I'm forgetting? I don't even know-- I really don't. Maybe those happen all the time, and I don't pay attention. There's that SHIELD thing...? Anytime I hear about news coming out of San Diego or Wondercon or wherever, I always expect to hear "We've got this incredibly special project-- see you at the Eisner awards, bitches" ... And instead, all I ever end up hearing about-- "We stole a guy from our competitor to write one of our books instead. There's a new person writing Hulk because the last person writing the Hulk stopped writing the Hulk. ZOMG!"

Oh, there were those Neal Gaiman series, but... I only read some his ETERNALS revamp... which actually probably constituted a good explanation why those series don't happen more often, come to think of it. Still, if a big chunk of their audience is shifting to buying books in bookstores, you think there'd be more of those projects, "let's make a special book that people have to have, people who go into bookstores, and drink iced coffee" projects. Instead, both companies doubled-down on the poorly plotted crossovers. Or it seems that way. Is it that way? Maybe it's not that way, and I haven't been paying attention. I don't know. I guess what I'm asking is: What are comic books like? Are they nice? Do they still make Cherry Poptarts? How much is this comic going to be worth? Do you collect them?

***

DOOMWAR #6 OF 6 by Jonathan Maberry, Scott Eaton, Robert Campanella, Jaime Mendoza, David Meikis, Jean-Francois Beaulieu, VC's Joe Caramagna, "Romita, Janson & White" (not sure which Romita-- guessing Jr.), Sebastian Girner, Axel Alonso, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, Alan Fine, and David Gabriel, SVP of Publishing, Sales & Circulation: You know what's making a big difference for me? Marvel comics come with these recap pages-- some people write them in the voice of one of the characters (Darkstar and Avengers the Origin). I don't think that's a very good idea-- I was in a much better position with DOOMWAR because the Recap page just presented a big lump of exposition that caught me up on the key points. It didn't hit everything, but I could get the Big Picture, at least. It's less creative, but maybe more effective...

So: this is another comic with Deadpool in it. How did that character get so popular? I was reading New Mutants when that character was introduced-- here's the thing: Rob Liefeld had 4 new characters just about every issue. Just from memory, there was Cable, the MILF (Mutant Liberation Front That I'd Like to Fuck), Stryfe, Gideon and the X-Ternals, Shatterstar, Domino, and Madame Bovary. They were all bad-asses with knives-- how did just one of them get popular? Is that character's success more a tribute to Joe Kelly? That... is not a sentence I ever expected to type. How long did Lobo last, though? Maybe... 5-6 years? I don't remember Lobo lasting very long. I would guess it's that cycle of "Oh, I love superheros. Oh wait, I'm old enough to realize superheros are stupid-- great, here is a character that lets me laugh at them." And then either "Why am I reading this at all?" or "Oh wait, now I'm old enough not to care that they're stupid." Maybe every generation gets that character...? So, really, if you look at Deadpool and you're my age, does it feel like you just saw the numbers turn over on the odometer?  Damn, Deadpool reminds me of my own mortality, you guys...

So, this comic-- it's a comic about an African country heroically destroying its mineral resources in order to remove any interest a Western intruder might have in them. Doctor Doom has festooned himself with vibranium, so Wakanda blows up the vibranium. Which-- it seems like the book's built on a valid argument that mineral wealth has been a disaster for African countries. One paper on the Internet: "This paper finds that after controlling for initial income, a state’s dependence on mineral exports in 1970 is robustly associated with worsened conditions for the poor in the late 1990s." Robustly associated. Oh, also: the comic ends with the new Black Panther repudiating the Bush Doctrine, and asserting that countries don't have the right to depose despots pre-emptively in "illegal wars."

So, that's fun...? 10 Medical workers were just found slain in Afghanistan. Or did you read about how terrorists blew up a Japanese oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz...? They drove another boat filled with homemade explosives into it. Mudslides killed 125 people in Kashmir on Friday. Did you read Robert Fisk's article on the lynching in Ketermaya?  Robert Fisk-- always worth reading.  I wonder what-- I wonder what the Mighty Thor's position is on how Lebanon's police forces have operated. Has The Mighty Thor issued a position paper yet?

Did I miss a comic about Wakanda's AIDS epidemic? That... See, maybe this makes me a ghoul, but I think would be a pretty fucking funny comic book, but at the same time, it's ENTIRELY possible someone's already written that comic. I wouldn't be too surprised if that was a comic that existed. But I guess they had to do something-- the whole 1960's thing the Black Panther character was built on is an African King of a country built on its mineral wealth. I guess even kids can't believe that anymore. Maybe they should do that with all the characters. "The Fantastic Four didn't get their powers from going into space-- our country has no viable space program anymore. They got it from cosmically-tainted meat-- the Fantastic Four are living victims of our failure to adequately regulate our meat industry." Wait: that comics fucking already exists-- great, I just invented SKRULL KILL KREW. Fucking fantastic...

Now, I'm all sad. The next comic is GORILLA MAN -- the cover has "Crackin' Craniums in the Congo" on it.  Did you know that fighting in the Congo in the last month has uprooted 90,000 civilians? I really hope that the Gorilla-Man isn't murdered by the Allied Democratic Forces-National Army for the Liberation of Uganda. Fingers crossed, you guys.

***

GORILLA-MAN #2 OF 3 by JEFF PARKER, GIANCARLO CARACUZZO, JIM CHARALAMPIDIS, ED DUKESHIRE, LEONARD KIRK, DAVE MCCAIG, IRENE Y. LEE, MICHAEL HORWITZ, NATHAN COSBY, MARK PANICCIA, JOE QUESADA, DAN BUCKLEY, ALAN FINE, AND JERRY MATHERS AS THE BEAVER: I'd read a couple of Jeff Parker's AGENTS OF ATLAS comics-- two of the most recent series; Comics Alliance had done a nice article that had gotten me interested. They were pleasant-- Elizabeth Breitweiser did a damn terrific job on the colors, I thought; she's great.

This is a spin-off from those, I guess-- this is good for what it is. Parker's been working that Steve Canyon / Johnny Hazard territory of comics for-- was Interman about 10-11 years ago now? He seems comfortable with that material-- Gorilla Man spends most of the comic as a man, running hither-dither, having old-fashioned jungle adventures. Good-looking book. Lambiek provides background for  Giancarlo Caracuzzo-- veteran artist from Italy. So many great comic artists coming out of Italy right now... It makes sense, though. I remember being in Italy in high school-- Latin class trip; comics were everywhere. Magazine racks were stuffed with comics and porn, and there were beautiful women everywhere.  It was like getting a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, for teenage me.  Oh, also: historically important stuff. There was some of that. But-- it's nice to think it could be as simple as, "Italian artists grow up with pretty comics and so they make pretty comics." It's nice to believe the world works like that. Maybe that's not true and it has something to do with how Italy subsidizes its art schools or some shit, but I think I'd prefer my illusions.

This kind of thing isn't catching on with the fans, though? I want to say they just cancelled those ATLAS titles. That "international man of action" character-- there hasn't been a big one of those since... Well, I guess Indiana Jones dominates that character type, even though he came later. Tough shadow to be in-- remember that scene early on in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Marion is angry at Indiana Jones for having had sex with her when she was underage. And he's still one of the greatest movie heroes of all time! That's how great Indiana Jones has-- he beats a statutory rape charge with the audience. There isn't a jury that wouldn't acquit after he says "It's not the years-- it's the mileage." Though that "international man of action" character-- well, it's not a character I'm altogether comfortable with. That character's all about the uber-competent American abroad, which... World history would not necessarily be on that character's side, especially not in the last few decades or so. (I want to say the jungle pulps got popular post--WWII since the end of the war did away with the Nazi villain Secret Empire type stories, but what do I know? I'm not Jess Nevins over here-- I can only wish.)

But anyways, who cares about world history when we could be looking at Frank Robbins drawings?

***

HAWKEYE & MOCKINGBIRD #3 by Jim McCann, David Lopez, Alvaro lopez, Nathan Fairbairn, VC's Cory Petit, Paul Renaud, Rachel Pinnelas, Bill Rosemann, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, Alan Fine, and The Nation's Hopes and Dreams That Go With Them: Oh, dude.

This comic is about a group of characters who apparently hate one another. None of these characters seem to want to hang out with another; I can't blame them-- I don't want to hang out with them either. They spend the entire 22 pages screaming at each other, until the end when Hawkeye says "I love you, Mockingbird." Is that sarcasm? I'm not sure. Every other line out of Mockingbird's mouth is "If you don't like it, Hawkeye, you can leave." Leave! LEAVE! TAKE ME WITH YOU, HAWKEYE!!

The rest of the comic is a videogame. The good guys work their way through the level-- at first they fight robots, but then the robots level-up. Level 2 robots need to be chopped in half! There's a boss fight, but it's the kind the heroes lose so that the later boss fight is more dramatic. I suppose the MODERN WARFARE videogame series is to action entertainment what the MATRIX used to be; that which must be ripped off. I hear "hostiles incoming" or-- actual dialogue: "Cover our flank. Flashrounds, no frags! Careful of friendly fire!", and I get the itch to play the No Russian level, again. (Well, No Russian's not great, actually, but I think that level where you're running through the upper-class suburbs was pretty sweet...)

This entire comic hinges on a plot from WEST COAST AVENGERS, circa ... Well, I was in junior high or high school. This was definitely before I could drive-- I don't think Jim Lee had even broken in at Marvel yet...? Maybe he was doing Punisher. But they keep bringing the plot of this comic up, over and over.

It's sad. It's sad that's how people write comics. It really doesn't have to be that way. I'm a big nerd who watches Doctor Who-- that show has been going for decades and decades, but when you watch the new episode with the Master-- it's not like the Master stops and starts talking about, "Remember when we were on Castrovalva together, Doctor? I was having a freaky friends-with-benefit thing with a Dalek. Let me introduce you to my half-Dalek love-baby." Some people haven't seen that one episode Douglas Adams wrote where the Doctor and Romana go to Paris and meet John Cleese-- but they aren't punished for that. Those creators don't have enough time to punish fans-- they're busy writing new stories. Granted, that Daleks in World War 2 episode was pretty crap, but... Comics like these, though-- the creators seem so without hope, that there are any new stories left to be written.

But if the audience rewards them for it, the game is the game...

The West Coast Avengers are called the WCA now. Deal with that.

***

HERCULES: TWILIGHT GOD #3 of 4-- A MARVEL COMICS LIMITED SERIES by Bob Layton, Ron Lim, Deep G, Dave Sharpe, Charles Beckerman, Mark Paniccia, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, Alan Fine: First, Deep G-- can you do me a favor and introduce me to Grandmaster B? Thanks a million!

At first I was all upset about the recap page. Here's the text from the recap page: "Hercules: Concussed! Skyppi: Hospitalized! Galactus: Black-holified! Alien Silver Surfer: P.O'd! Ursus: Granulated! Hercules: Enraged! Silver Surfer: Decapitated! Universe: Still Doomed!"

That got me kind of upset because: What was the point of the recap page? Why not just put a giant photo of Bill Clinton going to a REO Speedwagon concert? That would have been more helpful to me in my life than this recap page.

Man, I wish I could travel back in time, and buy some pot from that guy...

Anyways, then I read the comic. I don't know you would go about recapping this comic. It's... a comedy...? Galactus has gotten so "fat" that he's imploding, and this implosion is threatening the lives of these space opera characters, including Hercules for some reason. There's old-timey comic book jokes, like a two-three page gag parody on Superman's origins. One of the gags is space aliens demanding no-bid contracts to save other aliens from Galactus. Uhm.

So... Yeah. I just don't want to be mean to this comic. It'd be like pissing on Mr. Saturday Night's face.

Do I understand how or why this was published by Marvel? Me, personally, I have... I have questions. I'm not sure what audience this was designed to service, exactly. But... They must be out there because this got published. I guess Marvel wanted to work with veterans like Bob Layton and Ron Lim...? That's nice. That's a nice thing to do-- god knows that Marvel's reaping rewards from Bob Layton's Iron Man comics right now.

Uhmmm... so yeah. This one will just makes me not feel good about myself, if I keep going.

***

Last one...

HIT-MONKEY #2 of 3 by Daniel Way, Dalibor Talijic, Jose Villarubia, VC's Joe Sabino, Sebastian Girner, Axel Alonso, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, and Alan Fine, but if you want to advertise in Marvel comics contact Ron Stern, VP of Business Development:

This was about a monkey that kills people.

... This was seriously about a monkey that kills people. Not a talking monkey, or a comic book monkey. Just a regular old monkey.

This was about a monkey that kills people.

... I'm done. I think I'm done.

Marvel Comics of 8/4/2010, A to H, with Abhay (Part 2 of 3)

Previously... On the Savage Critics Blog...

And now... the thrilling continuation to ... some  reviews of comic books or something.

Daredevil Black & White #1 by Peter Milligan, Jason Latour, Rick Spears, Mick Bertilorenzi, Ann Nocenti, David Aja, VC's Joe Caramagna, Jody Leheup, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley and Alan Fine, manufactured between 7/14/2010 and 7/23/2010 by Worldcolor Press, Inc. of Lebanon, Ohio:  I think I mentioned last night-- even if not for this silly review-a-thon, I'd probably have bought this comic.  This is an anthology of short, black & white comics.

I like the people involved:  Peter Milligan is sometimes a gamble, but I've liked Jason Latour's work for what feels like a long time now (though he's really only just getting into gear, this year-- he's had a terrific blog though, for years); plus, Rick Spears always gets a look from me, on account of my affection for TEENAGERS FROM MARS.  Nocenti & Aja, though-- it turns out that they weren't re-teaming (after last year's "3 Jacks") for a comic, but an illustrated short story instead.  Uhm, sorry: I just don't read those-- I buy comic books for the comics.  Did anyone read the short story?  Am I missing out?

How are the stories?  Decent-- two 10 page stories.  The first story is about how Daredevil would rather be blind than for the world to have one less stripper in it.  Which-- well, it's in character. You know what I think you could never have, though, is a story where the hero saves the guy who works the PA system at a strip club. "Cinnamon to the main stage!  Cinnamon to the main stage!" Who would root for that guy? Power Pack would push that guy down a flight of stairs.

The other story takes place in the distant, murky, long-forgotten past, when the public  cares at all about newspapers.  It's this big story about Kingpin's diabolical plan ... to sell newspapers.  Kingpin's deliciously evil plan to sell telegraph equipment.  Newspapers used to be this fixture of adventure comics, but... So did aviation.  Connie Kurridge, Tailspin Tommy, Brick Bradford... The glamour dried up; adventure heroes moved on.  What shitty jobs are left in this country, for our fictional adventure heroes to work in?   "Spider-Man: Crime-fighter by night, Geriatric Nurse by day."  Geriatric nurse; prison guard; adult education instructor...?  Green Lantern was a test pilot.  Do we even build anything to test anymore...?  Look at this list of hot jobs for the future:  respiratory therapist, internet marketing specialist, Anti-Terrorists Specialists...?  Put that all together: in the future, the smart money is that we have trouble breathing after a terrorist attack, and also maybe we need more spam in our inboxes...?  Maybe helping wheezy cure his erectile dysfunction, maybe that would help.  Future so bright, I have to wear shades...

What were we talking about?  Oh, right-- Daredevil.  Anyways, it's an anthology.  The stories are pleasant, at least pleasant enough: Rick Spears's Kingpin is entertainingly theatrical and impressed with himself;  if you really like that character, Spears probably got what you like about him into that story, I'd figure.

Milligan-- it's not the most exciting story (keeping in mind the maybe unfairly high standards I hold Milligan to), but it gave Jason Latour enough to show off.  For an anthology of short comics, I'm usually sated if the comics are cool to look at.  Latour uses old zipatone effects aggressively, but I'm a big sucker for how he uses white here.  Maybe that's an old trick with the character, but I just like how for Daredevil, for a blind guy, everything is inverted and the color white becomes the color of intense emotion, action, whatever.  White sound effects, white splatters of ink showing impact of hits, white speed lines.  You know-- maybe it's an old trick, I don't know-- but if it works... I don't have as much to say about Mick Bertilorenzi-- stuck between what Latour's doing and a couple pages of David Aja... That's a tough place to be stuck.  If I wasn't as enthused, you know-- he hardly embarrassed himself.  (He seems like he'd do a good Dylan Dog comic.  Did you ever see that book Dark Horse put out, the Dylan Dog Case Files?  I enjoyed that one-- especially Angela Stano's work.  Sorry; digressing).  Other people, I could see Bertilorenzi being more their kind of thing, really... Different strokes, though.

I just like black and white comics, though.  I know most people prefer color, but... What I like most about comics, more than anything, is that feeling that there was at some point, someone sitting behind a piece of paper, a monitor, an inkwell, a WACOM, whatever, and actually drawing a thing with their own two hands, maybe writing it too.  Each line was a physical movement at some point, a flick of wrist, a movement of the arm, something.  And for me, I think color gets in the way of feeling that, but... You know, which isn't to say sometimes the colorist can't be an artist, too, and they can't add to it.  It just... The black and white's so immediate.  I don't know-- I'm digging a hole here; this is all bullshit.  Too much time on this review.  Moving on.

Also, very important: that song, the Future's So Bright I Have to Wear Shades, or whatever it was called...?  Was there an episode of the Head of the Class where they sang that song together, or made a music video of that song?  And Howard Hessman wore shades?  How is it even possible someone as funny as Billy Connolly was on that piece of shit show... Sorry, but I have flashbacks to that piece of shit fucking show just way too often, of all the pieces of crap-- fucking Arvid, and everything...

***

Darkstar & the Winter Guard #3 of 3 by David Gallaher, Steve Ellis, Scott Hanna, Val Staples, Clayton Henry & Guru eFx, Scott D. Brown, Irene Y. Lee, Jordan D. White, Mark Paniccia, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley and Alan Fine, "manufactured" between 6/16/2010 and 6/24/2010 in Beauceville, Quebec, Canada:  I remember complaining last night that I didn't understand how they turned a very simple story into a 5 issue miniseries.  This one, though-- I don't understand how this could possibly be the third issue.  There is so much crazy going on in this comic.

So, yeah, I didn't really understand anything about this, much at all, but to be fair-- it's the third issue of a 3 issue series.

It's got a really excellent supervillain in it, possibly one of my favorite new supervillains.  The supervillain is this shitty guy whose name I never learned-- I don't know if they said it in the comic, but I don't... I don't know what his name is.  Red Guy.  Anyways, Red Guy loves the word "awkward" and spends the entire comic wanting to fuck this long-tongued girl on a pile of dragon eggs, I think...?  Is that what's going on?  The very first panel you see him on, he's clutching Linda Lovelace over a pile of the eggs they made together, and he says "What madness threatens  the completion of our intimate congress?"  Kind of grim pillow-talk.

But then he just keeps describing the heroes arriving as "awkward," which I really do love.  "Ah ... yes... my powers of awareness have detected the awkward yet inevitable arrival of the Winter Guard."  And then later in the comic, when the heroes show up:  "Aah... once again your arrival proves awkward."

I really hope in the sequel, he keeps getting into awkward situations.  "I have come to the White House to murder you, Mr. President.  Please ignore the fact that my zipper is down and my penis is hanging out of the zipper.  Focus on my above-the-waist evil!"  I really respond to this character.  "I'm going to murder the Planet Earth.  But first: I have a date with a divorcee that I met on eHarmony, so... Maybe we make a connection.  There's no guarantees-- I just hope that she doesn't mind that I used Doctor Doom for my profile photos."  This is character is a find.

As for the rest-- Jesus. The art-- none of this is grounded in any kind of reality, so it's hard to judge, but... It seems like they're aiming for a Ed McGuinness vibe...?  That style is all about projecting "Fun, good time comics."  But this comic-- well, it's just ... kind of weird and a lot of characters die these creepy, what-just-happened deaths.  Or, wait: did I mention that an alien frenches kisses Darkstar to death half-way through the comic...?

It's not even a big deal when that character dies, any character dies, because there are SO MANY characters in this comic.  But then Darkstar comes back to life and... But it's not her anymore...??  There's this fat, redheaded bearded guy in a dress-- Darkstar is reincarnated as his sister, or something...?  Eric Stoltz's butler is the son somehow of the Red Guy...?

But then at the end, this random girl named Ultra-Dynamo pops up and delivers this epilogue in front of the severed head of one of the superheros who died earlier in the comic about how... "One person's personal unhappiness shouldn't mean the corruption of a nation's well-being.  But, that's just what happened to the Winter Guard." ... Really?  I thought this was a comic about how you shouldn't fuck a girl on top of dragon eggs, no matter how awesome her tongue is because then Rupert Grint's roadie and his sister will get one of their friends to explode you by turning into a skeleton or...?  I can't even joke about it-- I'm completely confused by this.

Did I mention that the first page of the comic is a little girl ripping a teddy bear's head off?  I don't ... I don't know why that happened.  Is that a symbol?  Maybe Teddy Roosevelt let his personal unhappiness  mean the corruption of the nation's well-being...?  According to Wikipedia, Teddy Roosevelt lost all of his cattle in the severe WINTERS (get it?) of 1886 and 1887.  So... He didn't have a WINTER GUARD, and therefore was... decapitated...?  I don't ... Let me have this; let me have Teddy Roosevelt; this is the closest I've come to understanding this comic book.  Don't take this away from me, internet.

But maybe the people who read the other two issues did, and had a great time.  You know: maybe...?  I just... I just don't know.  I just don't know.

***

Deadpool #1000 by, oh god, this'll take a while to type, Adam Glass, Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco, Edgar Delgado, David Lapham, Lee Loughridge, Rick Remender, Jerome Opena, Fred Van Lente, Denys Cowan, Sandu Florea, Dan Brown, Peter Bagge, Howard Chaykin, Tim Hamilton, Rob Williams, Phil Bond, Tomislav Tikulin, Cullen Bunn, Matteo Scalera, Matt Wilson, Michael Kuppermann, Dean Haspiel, Joe Infunari, Dave Johnson, Jeff Eckleberry, Taylor Esposito, Sebastian Girner, Axel Alonso, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, Alan Fine, manufactured between 7/14/2010 and 7/23/2010 by R.R. Donnelly, Inc., in Glasgow, Kentucky:  Well, I don't really have a lot to say about this one.  I think ... I mean, if you want to get into philosophy of comedy... I don't know that I have a coherent philosophy of "what makes good comedy."  I like comedy that's built around a solid comedic observation about the world-- I love the Broadcast News, Albert Brooks end of comedy.  But I've also enjoyed things that goes to a place of pure absurdity, pure joke-driven comedy-- the Adult Swim end of the spectrum, the Tayne end of the spectrum.

So, for this comic, the two comics I responded to were by the two guys who went the most towards those two opposite poles, Michael Kuppermann and Howard Chaykin.

I'm curious whether the other people in this book  were told they'd be in the same book as Michael Kuppermann because... A lot of people tried to do absurdity-driven humor.  I'd be embarrassed to try to do that with Kuppermann in the same book.  You're just not going to out-absurd that guy; he's going to make you look bad.

Chaykin goes the other way more than the rest of them, and builds his comics more than anyone else around something resembling observation.  Chaykin does a comic about bar mitzvahs; you know, Chaykin does a Chaykin comic, which is to say, a comic about Jews and sexual perversions.  The kids are ugly and obnoxious; the adults are perverts and crooks.  Has Chaykin done a bar mitzvah comic before?  It seems impossible that he hasn't, but... I can't think of one at the moment...

So, everyone else kind of looked bad in comparison, though there were, you know, nice moments-- Dave Lapham's comic wasn't funny, but he can do a parade of grotesques so well now-- it's fun, fun to watch him work, fun if not funny, necessarily.  Most of the rest-- I didn't connect with.

One thing, though: after reading this, I feel like I read a "I just vomited in my mask" joke, like, 2 or 3 times.  Chaykin did one; I feel like at least a couple other people did, too.  Is that the joke everybody makes with this character?  It's not a very good one.  And I love vomit jokes.  When people vomit in Coen Bros. movies?  Or the vomit scene in Team America?  That's a pretty excellent vomit scene right there.  I love vomit in comedies, dramas, softcore films preferably about carwashes being saved from greedy land developers or that one about those two creepy old people who throw swinger parties and invite a lot of sad people that they don't really know.  But the vomit-jokes in a  Deadpool comic... I vote hacky.

***

I think that does it for tonight, so... Next installment, maybe the last, hopefully the last, probably not the last-- what will we have left?  Deadpool Wade Wilson’s War Massacre in Mexico: The Terrible Truth of Team X (I'm really okay if I don't read any more Deadpool comics, but... I was never really waiting for Lobo to come back, you know?), Doomwar (I don't see how this can be that bad), Gorilla-Man (I wonder if talking gorillas will become a big thing in the movies someday; every other crappy thing I liked too much because I sucked when I was 13 has become a big movie franchise; why not talking monkeys and shit?), Hawkeye & Mockingbird (it really should be more weird to all of us how many superheros there are whose powers are owning a bow & arrow; I mean, how is there more than ONE...?), Hercules Twilight God (seriously: why did I do this?), and Hit-Monkey (... if I had to get killed by an animal, I'd want to get killed by a giraffe; at the zoo; give kids a story that they can tell their friends for the rest of their lives, at least; better that than being that guy who got killed having sex with that horse; remember that guy, that horse guy?  The guy they made a movie about; yeah, that's not for me; I vote Death by Giraffe...). And we're out.

Marvel Comics of 8/4/2010, A to H, with Abhay (Part 1 of 3)

I have a fantasy that I'm sure is shared by many of you, and that fantasy is to walk into a comic book store and say, "I will have one of all of the comic books, sir."  And in my fantasy, like in yours, I have red lipstick on, and I'm wearing Marilyn Monroe's dress from The Seven Year Itch.  I think we're all on the same page. So, I've had a bit of a day at work, and I thought to myself at its conclusion:  Today is the day for all my easiest-to-achieve, most unimpressive dreams to come true!

I'd go to a comic book store, and buy one copy of every Marvel comic released that week so I could write radical, awesome reviews of them.  People all around the world would hold hands and read them, in perfect harmony.  Then, a madman would rise in the East, and no one would be able to buy or sell anything, except those that had the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name on them-- the original number of the beast of course being 616, the same number as the Marvel Universe.  So, you know, it was a very carefully thought-out dream.

Reality sunk in about three minutes in, at an area comic shop: Holy shit, Marvel releases a lot of goddamn comics in a given week.  A LOT.  More than I can read in a single evening.  More than I can afford in a month, let alone week.  I'm only a lawyer in Beverly Hills-- I'm not wealthy enough to afford comic books.  Maybe someday I'll be an oil tycoon, a captain of industry, and I'll be able to afford numerous Marvel comics, but until then... this week, I only made it from A to H-- not even halfway through the alphabet.  Specifically, AVENGERS: THE ORIGIN to something called HIT-MONKEY (?).

Oh, with two exceptions: CASANOVA #2-- I bought those comics the first time around.  If you didn't-- you probably can't do better this week.  Essential comics.  And also, there was some Orson Scott Card comic in the E's, but Orson Scott Card is an offensive bigot to me; I'm not interested in giving him any of my money, however indirectly-- in general, and especially not on the day with such good news finally about Prop 8.

I've got-- let's see-- 13 comic books here.  So, the way comics are written now, that'll take, what, 6 minutes to read?  For anyone who wants to play along at home, I'll post in small chunks as the night proceeds.  If anyone bought anything from I-Z in the alphabet, you're welcome to chime in on the comments.  Probably this'll be really, really boring, but... Oh well! One, I sometimes notice complaints that this site doesn't do  "what came out this week" reviews often enough, so I thought I'd give those a shot (though I really don't think I'm any good at that kind of thing).  And two, I haven't written anything about mainstream comics in a while, and I like to try to do that every so often.

Oh, I should mention-- I haven't really read that many Marvel comics this year, so i don't really know what's going on in any of these books.  Will that matter?  Uhm... let's find out....?

***

Avengers The Origin #5 of 5 by Joe Casey, Phil Noto, S & Comicraft's Albert Deschesne, Mayela Gutierrez, Lauren Sankovitch, Tom Brevoort, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley, and Alan Fine:   Okay, so I've obvously made a horrible mistake.

So, this seems to be a retelling of a single issue of the old Lee-Kirby Avengers from 1963, but instead of being 12 cents for a story that fit a single issue, this cost $4 and... What's scary is this is labelled #5 of 5.  I don't really understand how that could conceivably be possible.  You know how the Avengers teamed up because Loki screwed with them?  That somehow took modern comics, what, 110 pages to tell that story.  It took me one sentence:  "You know how the Avengers teamed up because Loki screwed with them?"

My guess is that this is for people in bookstores, people who haven't read a lot of comic books and want things severely dumbed down for them.  I suppose those people need comics, too. I would guess somewhere between 90 to 95% of the panels in this book are "widescreen" panels (which is to say, rectangular panels that go from one vertical edge of a piece of paper to the other).  That term "widescreen" was first adopted because the actual drawings in the panels were purposely done in a way to remind the reader of a movie.  Here, on the other hand-- it just seems like Joe Casey and Phil Noto are afraid they might tell a story in an exciting way, by accident.  Look at this panel (sorry-- my scanner finally died on me):

Why is such a boring drawing taking up so much space on the page?  I mean, in a perfect world, it's nice if the size and shape of a panel somehow reflects the contents of the panel, the emotion of the panel, but ... You know: I'm sure they were trying...?

Does Phil Noto work a day job?  Maybe he has a day job.  Or... well, it's been five issues for him, so maybe he's very, very tired.  One action scene takes place on the "Isle of Silence", which is a nice way to explain why there are no backgrounds in those panels; I don't know what the rest of this comic's excuse is.  Dull compositions; boring panel layouts; I don't want to sound mean here, but this drawing of the Kree-Skrull war looks like a particularly languid game of Galaga.  Cough Syrup Galaga.  Lil Wayne and MC Frontalot should totally team-up for an album called Cough Syrup Galaga-- that should 100% be a thing, that exists in the world. But, yeah-- geez, it sure looks like Phil Noto could be having more fun...

But ... why is this what Phil Noto's drawing, to begin with?  Setting aside the question of, you know, why does this comic exist, which ... you know-- I really love Lee-Kirby Avengers, so I'm maybe too biased to answer that.  But setting that aside-- Phil Noto re-doing a Kirby comic, of all things...?  He seems more influenced by, I don't know, Robert McGinnis than Jack Kirby.  Here's a panel from the book of IRON MAN, THOR, the HULK and ANT-MAN, i.e. there of the most powerful characters in the "Marvel Universe":

Maybe it was on purpose, that they wanted to go 180 degrees in the other direction as Jack Kirby.  Which... mission accomplished.  But-- it just seems like there are other things he'd be better at-- has he done a bunch of detective comics already that I haven't noticed?  Single women renting out Apartment 3-G's for sexy lady-adventures type comics...?  Do they make those anymore?  Sleazy pulp comics.

As for the story, the bad guy in the story is Loki.  As Loki is threatening to destroy all of Earth's heroes, he falls through a floor that ants have eaten, into a metal tube.  When they open the metal tube, Loki has disappeared, off-panel, never to be seen in this comic again.  The end.  It took them five issues to get there...?  Okay.  For people who were following this for all 100+ pages-- was that a satisfying ending for you?  Which part was the good part for you: the part where ants eat the floor off-panel, or the part with the very inexplicable metal tube...?  I really liked the metal tube in Woody Allen's SLEEPER, but the metal tube in that movie was a machine that gave Woody Allen orgasms.  The tube in this comic book didn't give anyone orgasms.  Or maybe it did-- maybe that's the Secret Origin of why Loki disappeared: he's in Asgard, having orgasms. The Orgasms Cosmic.  Maybe now you know the rest of the story.  I hope Woody Allen orgasms in at least four of these comics.  If I have 16 comic books, and there's a, what, 25% chance that Woody Allen will orgasm in any given comic book ever made, then statistics say that he should have an orgasm in at least 4 of the comic books.  All those years of math, paying off.

If you want a Joe Casey comic, you might possibly be better off with that OFFICER DOWNE one-shot he did for Image.  It's this violence-gore thing.  I haven't dug into that yet, but it's sitting on my desk-- sure looks like more fun than this thing.

***

Okay, well, that first review stunk, plus it took me an hour.  Oh man, I'm really going to have to go faster if I'm going to get this done tonight.  Probably, I won't.  Probably this is part one of two or three or twelve or maybe that's enough, just judging by my speed here.  I'm not just boring tonight, but SLOW.  Next up is AVENGERS: PRIME.  Oh, right, this is that Bendis and Alan Davis thing-- okay...

Avengers Prime #2 of 5 by Brian Michael Bendis, Alan Davis, Mark Farmer, Javier Rodriguez, Chris Eliopoulos, Lauren Sankovitch, Tom Brevoort, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley and Alan Fine:  This seemed like a reasonable Marvel comic, though not the kind of thing I'm that into.  Iron Man, Thor and Captain America go to a fantasy kingdom-- one of the Norse ones, but none of them are together.  Iron Man and Thor get into adventuers; meanwhile, Captain America tries to have sex with some random blue-skinned woman.

Captain America: Sex Tourist...? I'd read that.  Captain America's near-death experience causes him to retire from a life of adventure, in order to travel the Marvel Universe, indulging in bizarre sexual fantasies...?  Captain America's no Woody Allen but close enough...? One down, three more to go. Suspense. Though, you know, speaking-of, while we're on a tangent, did you ever look at the website for International Boar Semen? What really fascinated me about that page is you can buy more than just boar semen and boar semen accessories-- they have a Cafe Press t-shirt page. Is that real? I don't even know if that's real. You know: google. I don't even know what to tell you.

Anyways: Alan Davis, everybody.  He's not the worst thing to ever happen. I'm just not that into fantasy, sword-sorcery stuff, so this comic isn't really for me. But there's a couple cute-ish comedic bits, at least-- most intentional; none as funny as Bendis writing magical spell gibberish, though, which I just find really funny for some reason. Just the image of any grown man coming up with wacky nonsense words... That just makes me laugh.

I'm a little confused that-- I thought the whole idea of this comic was to see these three characters team up and have an adventure together...? That doesn't really happen this issue. But it's only #2 of 5, so maybe that happens in some other issue. Or maybe I was mistaken. Beats me. That matter to anyone?

***

Captain America #608 by Ed Brubaker, Butch Guice, Rick Magyar w/ Mark Pennington, Dean White with Elizabeth Dismang & Frank Martin, VC's Joe Caramagna, Marko Djurdjevic, Lauren Sankovitch, Tom Brevoort, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley & Alan Fine:  This comic is some kind of-- I don't  even know.  Captain America, having problems, and what have you...?

This was a very well-received book, back before it got sucked into one damn crossover after another.  People don't seem excited about it as vocally anymore, but maybe I just go to the wrong websites-- I couldn't guess.  The first page recap for this storyline, though, sure has a lot going on in it.  It really wore me out just reading the recap.

Basically, according to the recap, the new Captain America, who replaced the old Captain America, after the old Captain America died, even though the old Captain America is no longer dead, has angered the son of the man who killed the new Captain America, back when the new Captain America had been dead, before he was Captain America. And so, the son drugs Captain America, and the drugs make Captain America violent, so  Captain America has no choice but to track down the female bartender who slipped him a mickey on behalf of the son, only to discover that she is also a supervillain who...

No.

Plus, I'm pretty sure it's describing a plot that was in an Ed Brubaker issue of Daredevil, like, two years ago.  "Bad guy gives good guys drugs that make them violent"-- wasn't that a Daredevil plot?  I think it was because I remember that being the last issue of the Brubaker Daredevil I ended up reading (not counting some ninja story in the Nocenti-Aja issue...)

Anyways, the comic is mostly just boring besides the recap. There's a decent fight scene, actually, though Captain America doesn't have his shield or use that fancy gun, either. I wasn't very interested by what was going on, but you know-- I'm not the best audience for this kind of thing; plus: I haven't been following the book... Do people care if Captain America dies if the Marvel Universe has a spare? Maybe; I don't know-- maybe that's the fun of the book for people, having to find a reason to care instead of just relying on the assumption of caring. I don't know. [Edited this paragraph a little since all I had in me last night was "I was bored by this", which is especially crappy work on my part].

Except halfway in, one of the book's three colorists becomes noticeable.  Most of the book's nothing much to look at, but about halfway in, Bucky and his girlfriend are on a barge at sunset, and the colors suddenly jerk into a different style altogether.  It starts to rain, and I guess the way rain smears light interests the colorists in a way nothing in the book had previously.  Probably it's only one of the three people, who hadn't had time to do the rest...?  That's my wild guess.  It only lasts, oh, two-three pages, but... That was the only thing that was interesting.  It still catches me surprise, how much colors have changed in comics; are still changing.  Of all the different areas of comics, the color is the ones that's changed the most and changed the most often since I started reading comics...

I really like this panel on the right, though.  I like that expression-- it's one you'd see pretty often in old Marvel comics.  "I'm so surprised that I'm going to let flies go in and out of my mouth."  The acting in this comic is not great, but it's not great in a way that I like, at least.

After the comic, they jammed in another comic, an 8-page comic, NOMAD by Sean Mckeever, Filipe Andrae, Chris Sotomayor, VC's Joe Sabino, Lauren Sankovitch, Tom Brevoort, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley and Alan Fine.  I guess the idea is to make people feel like they weren't getting ripped off by how much this book cost, but I think that might have worked better if anything in the NOMAD comic had been even slightly fun.  Instead, Nomad fights a gang of homicidal gay-bashers, until retiring to a diner for a talking head scene that lasts 4 of the story's 8 pages...? I didn't understand what either of them were talking about, at all, though; maybe it'd have been fun if I had...?

***

Captain America: Forever Allies by Roger Stern, Nick Dragotta, Marco Santucci, Patric Piazzalunga, Chris Sotomayor, Jared Fletcher, Lee Weeks, Matt Hollingsworth, Damien Lucchese, Thomas Brennan, Joe Quesada, Dan Buckley and Alan Fine: Oh, I liked this one! I'm getting sleepy, so this one played off of my "I should really, really go to sleep" mood well.

Plus:  Roger Stern, you know?  Roger Stern was always welcome name to me, growing up.  I don't know if he ever had his own series, made up his own thing, but his stuff always seemed a little more thoughtful to me than other people who worked for those companies.  This one...

It's a comic book about race...?  I did not see that coming.

The comic begins with Bucky reminiscing about how he was part of a team of heroes in the 1940's, the Young Allies, which had its own comic book series in the Marvel Universe, a racist series of propaganda comics put out during the war...?  That's a pretty odd detail, the first of several.  (I'd never seen any of the old Jack Kirby - Joe Simon comics featuring the Young Allies, so these were all new Jack Kirby characters for me.  That never hurts. They're the kind of Child Heroes "celebrated" by Grant Morrison in his Manhattan Guardian series, the high-point of the SEVEN SOLDIERS series for me, "Sex Secrets of the Newsboy Army")...

Anyways, Bucky then starts investigating the mystery of some Asian dragon lady character, and in order to do so hops onto a plane with Jack Muldoon and Brenda Sue, two Texan cowboy billionaire stereotypes.  The comic then flashes back to a reference to the 1943 Zoot Suit riots, an incident involving violence perpetrated by white soldiers mostly on Latino youths, which... The comic doesn't delve into the history, but... One of the big climactic moments is Bucky realizes that the Asian villain escaped from jail by fooling prison guards who couldn't tell the difference between an Asian lady and a black lady...??

I have no earthly idea what the HELL this comic is trying to say, if anything, but I'm at least a little delighted that one of the 16 comics ended up at least seeming to be about "Race in America," I guess. About ANYTHING. Roger Stern, tackling the big questions-- I could see myself getting another one of these.  I probably really need to sleep, though.

***

So, let's pause it here, and resume later in a separate post, or this post, or whatever.  Tomorrow, or whenever I get this going again, what do we have to look forward to?  Daredevil Black & White #1 (I'd have bought that one any which way; that is one great line-up of creators), something called Darkstar & the Winter Guard (which is apparently a comic book that has been published for the last three months-- who knew?  No one.  No one knew), Deadpool #1000 (which is scary thick..? I think Michael Kupperman might be involved), Deadpool Wade Wilson's War Massacre in Mexico: The Terrible Truth of Team X (I don't know what words on this cover are the title), Doomwar (there's been an entire Doomwar going on that I missed apparently), Gorilla-Man (something to do with those Atlas comics...?), Hawkeye & Mockingbird (someone at comic-book-resources-dot-com apparently likes it, according to a quote on the cover), Hercules Twilight God (the cover to this comic makes it look likes it was designed for a quarter bin), and this Hit-Monkey thing ( I really don't even know what I'm looking at...?).

Away from the Shop #3: Jeff Talks Inception, Golgo 13, and (Mostly) Non-Comics

Here's another post from me about stuff I have not picked up at the comic book shop recently: a movie, an album, a dvd, and a TV series.  (Man, there's got to be a way I can wrangle a video game review in here, too.)  Since I recently spent over two thousand words writing about two comic books, I tried to make this quick, but...well, blabbity-blab happens, you know? (Blabbity-blab behind the cut.)

INCEPTION:  I'm from the icy formalist school myself, so it's not surprising I dug this. (Though I'm both surprised and pleased so many other audience members at my screening did as well.) Rather than bore you with any of my theories about the flick--I have a lot of 'em but I think they're well-covered pretty much everywhere else on the Net--I'll just mention how it's kind of a drag it took eleven years for someone to make a movie that feels like a legitimate response to The Matrix.  While everyone and their smaller-budgeted brother ripped off the bullet time, the tag lines, the soundtrack, and the fight scenes, this and Aaronofsky's The Fountain are the only movies I can think of that feel like they're engaging in a discussion with the Wachowski Brothers flick, or using that movie's underlying thematic concerns as a departure point for their own.

By contrast, I feel like I can sit down and watch Solaris, Silent Running, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Dark Star, good ol' apeshit Zardoz, Alien, and even Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and see where the filmmakers are using the ideas of 2001 as a touching-off point for their own speculations about human nature and how it will fit into the larger pattern of the cosmos.  And all of these films came out in the same span of time--eleven years--as that between The Matrix and Inception.

Maybe I'm leaving out tons of examples and god knows, it's not like The Matrix didn't leak, like a canister of toxic waste buried in somebody's backyard, into every corner of pop culture. But clearly, Nolan took up the challenge of an action-movie-that-continually-points-outside-its-own-frame and I don't think it's just because he was the only one who wanted to do so--it was because he'd just made Warner Brothers a stupendous shitload of money and he had a highly bankable star that wanted to be in it...and the number of people in that particular position are very, very small.  Hollywood is now the kind of place where dozens of iterations can be squeezed out but none of those iterations can really comment on one another and I don't know why.  Is it because they're not so much variations on a theme as they are a bunch of people trying to rip off the same tune, and I guess commenting on a theme would be tacky?

Or maybe I'm old and really unable to think of good examples. I dunno. Anyway, I quite liked the flick:  seeing it and reading Scott Pilgrim v6 within 48 hours of each other gave me a very optimistic feeling about the state of nerd culture 2010 overall.

GOLGO 13 v1 DVD: You might remember me going on and on about each of Viz's "best of" collection that gave us a handful of adventures of Taiko Saito's tight-lipped assassin.  So it's not surprising that once I found out about this thirteen episode collection of a 2008 series by animation company Tokyo TV, I was all over it.

What is surprising is that I found out about it at all:  if I hadn't added the RSS feed for Japanator on an impulse two weeks before the press release, I never would've known. And once I did find out, that didn't help me much: the distributor Section23 films has had this as their incredibly unhelpful website for some time now. (Sometimes I think we should classify entertainment media the way we classify stars--anime is teetering right on the edge of brown dwarf status in this country, capable of keeping objects in its orbit but not emitting anything like visible light.) Instead of just forgetting about the DVD set after getting nothing but the same press releases over and over, I eventually realized I could pre-order a copy from Amazon.

So. This DVD set.  It's two bare-bone discs, the animation is cheap-bordering-on-shoddy, and the voice cast is decent but overworked. (Here's a tip for voiceover directors: if in the course of thirteen episodes, you let a voice actor do his Jimmy Stewart imitation for two entirely different characters? They are being overworked.) It's a little pricey, considering what you get.

And yet, that said, you'd have to hire an emotionless Japanese sniper to shoot this collection out of my hands. Each episode is brief, between 22 to 25 minutes tops, but from what  I can tell the stories are compact, faithful adaptations of classic Golgo 13 manga stories.  In fact, the very second episode in the set, Room No. 909, is an adaptation of "The Impossible Hit," the very first Golgo 13 story I ever read, hot on the heels of playing the awesome Nintendo game.

(And Jesus, if either of those two links ring a bell and you haven't read it already, check out Jog's amazing two part look at the character and his infiltration of America that the big J wrote back Two Thousand and fucking Five. As always, Jog is on the money, to the point where his idle speculations as to what stories might be adapted for this series are, if the coming attractions at the end of this set are anything to go by, very likely dead-on.)

Golgo 13 stories can go several different ways, and the time limitations on each episode here keep them away from the densely researched, ultra-wonk political stories (that ended up in the print collection) and keep them focused on more basic "who's Golgo got to kill now/how's he gonna do it" with a special emphasis on the "...and how is he gonna get away with it?" episodes.  I'm a big fan of the latter, probably because "The Impossible Hit" is just such a story--a savvy investigator realizes G-13 is the assassin he's after but he has only has so much time to prove it.  Three of the thirteen episodes on this disc are variations of this story and I found each one utterly satisfying. Golgo 13 is less like James Bond (although that's clearly a huge piece of his inspiration) and more like Batman--he's always prepared and he always wins--and the satisfaction of the story comes from seeing how, exactly, he's going to win even as the odds pile up against him.

Unlike Batman, you never, ever get inside Golgo-13's head, even when you follow the character in a story from beginning to end.  He gives up nothing, has no affiliations other than professional. Since the Golgo 13 series was created for, and avidly read by, Japanese salarymen, it's not hard to see G-13 as a specific idealized fantasy of the Japanese businessman--in this set, the template for each episode usually has the character fly somewhere (jumbo jets are to Golgo-13 what rain-slickened gargoyles are to Batman), get offered millions of dollars and begged for his services, dispatch his job with calm detachment, and then fly away after sticking it to the dudes at customs. (Because the episodes run a little tight, there's not always time to have him meet a woman and immediately bed her, but the producers are sensible enough to put that scenario in both the opening and ending credit scenarios.)  When put like that, it's pretty easy to see why Golgo 13 is so appealing to his target demographic. It's also pretty hard to see why any of the rest of us wouldn't find his stories unbelievably dull.

But they're not dull, for two reasons: first, the amount of research and funky technical twists give each story little surprises for the reader outside of the fomula. Second--and maybe this is really why Golgo 13 works for me, as opposed to Jog or Tim Leong or somebody--Golgo 13 is so devoid of personality, it's easier to see him as a force of nature or, more precisely, as the personification of death.  G-13 is like Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men--a hit man, a foreigner, a bit odd, and a few steps ahead of everyone.  If a half-hour TV show where you'd watch Anton Chigurh bump off somebody new each week sounds pleasingly perverse to you, then you get a fraction of the appeal this set holds for me.

Golgo also reminds me a bit of Michael Myers from John Carpenter's Halloween, which was refreshingly free of the teen morality of slasher films that followed in its wake. In Halloween, Michael Myers becomes obsessed with Laurie Strode just because he sees her at his old house.  All that shit that goes on to happen to her happens only because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  (That's also the reason for everything that happens in Assault on Precinct 13, which I also love.)  A few episodes on this disc pick another standard direction for a G-13 story--the person who hires Golgo 13 for a hit but tries to cheat him in some way--but that's as close as the stories get to a traditional "poetic justice" angle.  Really, the "point" of a G-13 story, again and again, is that Golgo 13 always kills somebody, whether they deserve it or not, and then gets away with it. Part of the stories' dramatic tension come from their continual bucking of the traditional "and in the end, the good guys win or at least justice is served" arc common in most of our pop culture.

In this way, good ol' Golgo 13 embodies the Nietzschean conception of the übermensch in a lot of different ways--he really is beyond good and evil--and so is a certain kind of boogie man for middle-aged guys like me (and maybe those Japanese salarymen) who've spent the majority of our lives coloring within the lines. Just as horny teens find some relief in having a masked figurant uphold and avenge their childish puritanism and sexual squeamishness by jamming a pitchfork through a couple rutting in a tool shed, so too does Golgo 13 offer guys like me a world outside morality without the accompanying terror of total nihilism

Anyway, if that's the kind of thing you like to think about while people get neat little bullet holes right in the center of their forehead, this is the anime set for you. The Anime Network has the first episode up for non-subscribers to watch (probably U.S. only), although I should warn you it's not my favorite. (In fact, it's probably my least favorite, after the one with the mafia mistress.) But it'll give you a little bit of the flavor.  Believe me though, the one where Golgo 13 has to commit the hit in a crowded stadium filled with police and somehow get away, or the one where a counter-sniper is hired to prevent his hit, or the violin string episode, are much, much better.  GOOD stuff.

WEEDS, SEASONS 1-4: Edi and I had the first two seasons lent to us and figured, ehh, why not?  (I've already resigned myself to going to my grave before she gives the thumb's-up on Deadwood.) This show drives me crazy because it is madly uneven--I don't think ever watched a show that could deliver so many interesting little bits of character and nuance and then just flush it all away with a flat bit of stupid shtick--and kinda crazily ambitious:  there are eight core characters, jammed into episodes that run under half an hour.  (The first season, in fact, has episodes that average 22 minutes, which is just insane with a cast like that.)

What I thought was cool about the first half of the first season is how its set-up mirrors the superhero template perfectly:  newly widowed mom Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) turns to dealing pot as a way to keep her and her kids in the expensive sheltered community of Agrestic, and her attempts to balance her secret identity as a pot dealer and her life as a full-time mom/member of the community is very much in the Peter Parker/Clark Kent vein. Fortunately, we don't get an origin story for *how* Nancy gets into pot dealing, so the show starts at a spry clip. And underneath all the light quick-moving scenes is a really terrific performance from Parker, who manages to make the contradictions of the character work--the first season is at its best when it seems to be a portrait of someone processing grief in very odd ways, someone more likely to laugh in shock rather than cry and possibly driven by guilt to manufacture her own self-destruction.

Spider-Man as a middle-aged drug dealing mom?  I'd watch the shit out of that.  Unfortunately, the show not only burns through the secret identity thing pretty quickly--I think nearly everyone knows what she's up to two-thirds of the way through the first season--it also ditches any of the ideas it sets up about the suffocating existence of life in a suburban community where everyone needs to have a private life, whether they want one or not. The rest of the season spends as much if not more time with Elizabeth Perkins' character  and her plight (she's a controlling ultra-bitch who gets cancer) that feels like Jenji Kohan, the show's creator, never expected to get her pilot approved and had to recycle material from her old ultra-bitch-mom-gets-cancer  screenplay.

Additionally, as the seasons go on, the creators decide toy with darker and darker comedy with shakier and shakier results--rather than using Weeds as a light empowerment fantasy, the show insists on having Nancy come up against harsher and harsher realities of the drug trade which would be fine if: (a) those realities didn't always end up turning into goofy fantasies themselves; and (b) if Nancy had more to bring to the game than her beauty and sexuality. I'm a little disturbed and bummed that a show created by a woman with a female protagonist has that protagonist get out of most of her problems by turning most of her enemies into gooey, protective doofuses if she just gets the chance to blink her big doe eyes at them for long enough.  (And I won't spoil the fourth season finale for you, but let's just say it takes that concept one unfortunate step further.)  It reminds me of the problem I'm having with the Buffy Season Eight Twilight story (the last time I checked in on it) where the fate of humanity appears to hinge on who Buffy chooses as a mate.  We have more genuine opportunities for female heroes and protagonists than ever before, but for some reason their ultimate destinies keep leading right back to their ovaries.  It bums me out.

PLASTIC BEACH: I only downloaded this recently so admittedly I'm at the height of my love affair with this album--not only is it a concept album, it's a concept album that's a sequel to another concept album, the Gorillaz' previous release, Demon Days.  Maybe there's someone else who's done that and succeeded (I'm sure someone will try to tell me either The Kinks or The Who in which case I should just say now:  No.) but it's news to me.

The thing I appreciate is Demon Days, also a fave of mine, did a pretty good job in its fabular, conceptual way, of pointing out what an amazingly good job our culture has done of flushing the world down the toilet.  Plastic Beach actually has the courage to not let that be the last word on the subject, and return to a trash-filled, culture-strangled world and see what's left--unsurprisingly, the first third of the album is mostly hip-hop and frontman/producer Damon Albarn crooning about how his love's eyes are like "factories far away." The plastic beach is both literal--all the trash and detritus threatening to choke the world--and figurative, pop culture itself, of which Albarn & Co. are aware of themselves as  producers and consumers ("Superfast Jellyfish" is this stellar song about the crap passed off as instant food but also about the crap of instant culture.)

But the most amazing thing about Plastic Beach--well, right after "Some Kind of Nature," that somehow works as both a terrific Lou Reed song and a terrific Gorillaz song--is that Albarn doesn't leave things bleak.  The album ends on a note that has faith in nature to evolve and process all the plastic, to find a new way to live and grow.  Unlike Demon Days, where I'd finish each listen of the album nodding my head to the music and depressed as hell, Plastic Beach gives me something like hope, and not in the pre-packaged easy-to-unwrap way.  It feels like something that's been earned, by both the people making the music and the people listening to it, and that's an achievement that feels way too rare these days.

Hibbs is a slack bitch, but tries, gamely, to catch up

Here's a the-last-three-weeks omnibus of Shit I Thought about 8 things (sorry, I suck so bad): BATMAN WIDENING GYRE #6 (OF 6) (RES): Chris Sims already did a pretty good beatdown on this on Comics Alliance, but let me add a few thoughts to this as well, but like with my retailer hat on, too.

I don't know exactly where the failure of communication came in, but how is this a "to be continued" story, and no one thought that might be a sensible thing to note in solicitation?

Here's the original solicit:

Kevin Smith and Walt Flanagan's Batman tale comes to its startling end! Thanks to Silver St. Cloud, Bruce is trying to learn how to trust people. But Batman is an integral part of who he is, so how can he really trust anyone? Batman even has a run-in with Catwoman because of his relationship with Silver. And when he decides to put all of his trust into someone, will he be rewarded...or punished?

That first line is kind of a lie, isn't it?

I mean, not like anyone is going to live or die from any of this, but, man, solicitation in a non-returnable market really should be entirely sacrosanct. And an "end" is a conclusion -- not a "to be continued"!

I mean, it specifically says "1 of 6" on it, and it doesn't actually end. That's pretty screwed up.

Second: when asked directly about it at one retailer event or another (they all blur), some Official DC Voice (honestly, it all blurs!), given Smith's storied reputation with lateness, absolutely 100% assured us that all issues would be shipping on time. Note the [res] in the pulled-from-my-invoice listing. Not on time, in other words.

Third: as a reader, I could actually get past Mr. pee-pants (even though it really shouldn't have used a shot from "Year One" to sell it), but I have a pretty difficult time believing that Batman, especially a Batman whom smith has shown attacking his to-be-wife just in case she was, y'know, a robot (hey! It happens!), would just pass through a super-villain (Ack! Thbt!) into the Batcave without a background check.

Fourth: I'm fairly certain Silver appeared somewhat recently in something or another, which makes the continuity of this one someone suspect.

The funny thing is, I'm not really that against the frat-boy vulgarisms -- Batman having an "I peed!" moment early in his career is really kind of funny; why wouldn't you assume Bruce Wayne's hairy-chested love-god status would resolve in double-digits, and so on... it is just they don't belong IN a Batman comic, really -- that's for the Robot Chicken version, right?

I love Robot Chicken, but if it becomes the Mainstream, isn't that just a little absurd?

I guess I couldn't see this comic being published if Paul Levitz was still publisher -- you decide if that was good or bad.

I'd probably give this comic an EH; it made me giggle, then made me feel ashamed about that, and not just for me.

REVOLVER HC: I'm, generally, a pro-serialization guy, which is another way of saying that most OGNs really are just long comic books, and would often be better coming out in cheaper formats. Its relatively rare that I put down an OGN and think "Man, that was worth my $x!" My brain might be locked in old paradigms, I dunno.

But, anyway, I really liked this one -- I thought it had an interesting core idea, and it followed through on that consequence in a manner that fairly surprised me (most fiction is more likely to try and save the "shiny" version, than to improve the "dark" one)

I think Kindt is a very good writer, and his pacing and layouts and tone choices are all really really good -- he knows how to do COMICS; the problem is he's really not all that much of a craftsman when it comes to the finished art, and while the basically mediocre figure-and-background work has a certain immediacy, I'm not a member of the "craft is the enemy" camp.

I mean, this is flip, but, damn wouldn't I love to see this same exact book finished by, dunno, P. Craig Russell or someone else who has mastered craft. Then this would be a "holy shit, you have to buy this now" kind of book, instead of a "Well, I really liked it, and I think you should give it a chance", y'know?

A strong VERY GOOD, but-you-might-have-to-work-to-get-there, for you, personally.

SCOTT PILGRIM GN VOL 06 FINEST HOUR:  I think that the single hardest thing to do in long-form fiction is The Ending. Long-form is like: a single main-story over 3+ years (intentionally), and sold in some sort of chunks -- TV, movies, prose, comics, there's still only a relative few stories that made the ENDING work. I can think of 20 times the number that had great BEGINNINGS, but the end is really hard to get right.

Now, I'm only kind-of sort-of SP's "target audience" -- while I'm as much of a nerd as vous, this is nerds-20-(ugh)-years-younger-than-me kind of thing, isn't it, and I was late to the party of understanding it's awesome-ness. He'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was Jeff Lester who twigged me on this at what I want to say was v3.

I have to say for the series as a whole that I think there's a bit of a lull (not that's not the right word, but I can't think of the right one now) somewhere there in the middle where there just feels like there's too much that isn't really, directly, about Scott (or Romona, for that matter) -- it's the drama of the friend of the girlfriend of Scott's roomate or something, which, yeah, is way how I remember my 20s going, but isn't really all that compelling as narrative.

That is to say: six books almost certainly could have been five books, and you wouldn't lose a single beat or thought worth recording.

But then, I think the it-had-no-flab-whatsoever, AND began-and-ended-perfectly club is... well, it's pretty darn narrow. I can count those on the hands and fingers that I own, so yeah: triumph!

Anyway, endings, yeah, this was pretty perfect, and wise, and I think it really kind of captures going from your "20s" to your "30s" (though, those numbers are stupid and arbitrary because we're talking about people, not Psychohistory) in a really perfect way.

Bryan Lee O'Malley has leveled up!

EXCELLENT.

SUPERMAN #701: Yeah, so, "You Will Believe A Man Can Walk", and all that, and man, does it just Not Work in certain places (like, seriously, if this was real life, there'd be 500 people, press, the insane, the desperate, the fame whores, the Whoooooos!, and whoever else all following his every step, 24/7, broadcast live, just because it could be.)

And, ugh, there's a few places it stands perilously close to preachy... but you know what, I don't mind it all that much.  It's SINCERE, which is nice, and it's very much what Superman means to JMS and should probably mean to us, and I think it's very good to have these kind of comics occasionally. However, I have to say it sounds kinda dull for a multi-issue narrative.

The "super" part of the name is important, too.

I basically liked it, I'll read another, I don't know if I want to read 6 more in this vein, call it OK. UNCANNY X-MEN HEROIC AGE #1: I don't suppose it matters, but I am curious from a craft point of view if Fraction wrote this as three threads he wove together, or of one shifting voice, and I hope it is the latter, because I thought it was a really clever little technique that worked amazingly well for what should really merely be a throwaway "colon" comic set to fill a publishing schedule -- three clear beginning-middle-end vignettes, each told with a fairly different voice, each that worked well with the others, and advanced both character stories as well as individual stories. This might even be an X-Men comic that might get me back, as a lapsed reader, to reading the X-Men. Well, except that they're fighting vampires in the new title, *shudder* Anyway, I thought this was surprisingly VERY GOOD.

WALKING DEAD #75: I used to rag Kirkman unmercifully for not shipping the book on time, so let me applaud, highly, for all of the effort to keep it on schedule, and, when slipping, rather than acting like McFarlane and ignoring it, shifts into overdrive to get back on schedule in a good-for-the-book-way (hint, everyone else: every 3 weeks is WAY better than every 2), so yeah. And it doesn't hurt that the book is pretty much the most consistently good monthly comic being produced (Usagi Yojimbo aside, probably) -- it is consistently VERY GOOD, and this issue is even better with a special issue #75 treat which is hilarious and awesome and completely awful and wonderful all at once, and, really, I can't ever see it being reprinted in the trade, and certainly not in color, and, yeah that was a great end to an EXCELLENT comic.

WONDER WOMAN #601: You know what's weird? I think that the teaser thingy in #600 really told me everything I needed to know, and this issue was mostly expansion... and it worked better in shorthand, I think. #600 sold a BUNCH more copies... this one not so much, just slightly ahead of the last Simone issue. EH. ZATANNA #3:  Ugh, I had hoped that we'd get more than 3 issues before the book fell, slain by Zatanna's utmost trap: the she's-totally-perfect-and-her-magic-can-do-anything-whatsoever thing. Way to suck all of the drama from a story when she utterly swats away any opposition to her, basically without raising a sweat. Why do I think Paul Dini would be a Monty Haul DM? EH.

OK, what did YOU think?

-B

Away From The Shop #2: Jeff Talks About Digital Releases, Infinity Gauntlet & Sonic Universe #5

Hey, Jeff again.  So, sooner or later, I'm going to end up talking about actual comics, purchased from an actual comic book shop.  (Considering this blog is run by a comic shop owner, I'm sure Hibbs would really appreciate that.)  But I kinda figured I'd take a few minutes to talk about some of my recent experiences with digital comics and like-that.  Should you be interested, reviews and context for Infinity Gauntlet and Sonic Universe are behind the cut. First thing's first: I'm reading my digital comics on my iPhone 3GS. I've only had the 3GS for just under six months (I used a first gen iPod Touch for years before that) and, as everyone says, it's clearly not the ideal way to read your comics.  In fact, it's pretty hard to talk about the experience with friends as they tend to fall mostly into two groups--the "Ugh, I would never read digital comics" group and the "Ugh, I would never read digital comics on an iPhone group" who then go on to get all dreamy-eyed while they talk about their iPads--neither of whom ever really let me get past their respective rants.

So, yeah:  reading comics on your iPhone is not ideal. On the other hand, as a child of the '70s, some of my fondest memories  are reading comics in less than ideal conditions. Remember those trade paperbacks that reprinted the Roy Thomas/Barry Smith Conan stories in black & white, with approximately two panels per page?  I read those.  Remember that Don Martin Captain Klutz paperback where the stories were reprinted at a single *panel* per page?  I read that.   Remember going into the used bookstore and finding the first thirty pages of a Savage Sword of Conan with the cover torn off jammed between a bunch of old National Geographics?  I read that too, and it was pretty god-damned awesome.

I admit it, I had the Comixology app on my iPod Touch and I used it sparingly, mainly to collect free issues of books I thought I'd try out (and review here) but then never got around to reading 'em.  The turning point was a recent vacation to Vegas where I figured I'd grab something to read on the iPhone.  And just as I decided I'd do so, what would end up getting released on the Comixology app but...

INFINITY GAUNTLET #1-6: I had fond memories of the first issue or two of Infinity Gauntlet although it was something I'd never bought in the store for some reason (probably it came out during one of those times I was taking  a time-out from the Big Two) and the idea of reading it on my phone really cracked me up: all those double-page spreads of universes being destroyed, jammed onto a screen almost the size of an american cheese slice!  But something about seeing that near-classic cover of Thanos holding up the Infinity Gauntlet, the glove that gives the wielder the power of a god, twanged some primal chord within me and I figured it was worth ponying up  $1.99 twice to give the first two issues a whirl.

Since the first few issues are by George Pérez, inked by Ron Lim (a situation that reverses in the later issues, by the way, which is an interesting way to solve the problem of shipping on time while keeping the book looking consistent), [EDIT: eagle-eyed reader BobH points out that, in fact, it was Joe Rubenstein doing the inking over first Pérez and then Lim.  Thanks, Bob!]  the art in Infinity Gauntlet makes it seem like something from the recent past instead of nearly two decades gone by, thanks to the strong Pérez influence on Infinite Crisis.  Like it or not, George Pérez is the go-to man for superhero apocalypses and the early issues of Infinity Gauntlet make it clear why--not only is he game to drawing dozens of characters and working in little in-jokes and nods to classic continuity at the same time (I'm assuming it was Pérez who took the time to list all the names of the Sons of the Tiger, one of  his first professional gigs, on a handbill in a street scene), he has a dynamic sense of layout and panel rhythm that keeps the start of Infinity Gauntlet from being a turgid slog of exposition.

Interestingly, one of Pérez's big weakness for me--jamming so much detail into a page that it can't breathe--was mitigated by reading the issues on the iPhone: the guided-panel practice keeps the eye from getting overwhelmed. Although there's a good case to be made that a reader picks up an event book by Jim Starlin and George Pérez precisely with the intention of being overwhelmed, I still found myself charmed by how Infinity Gauntlet on the iPhone ends up being a slide show of Starlin's greatest hits--Thanos, Warlock and Pip The Troll all appear, and I believe reality gets entirely wiped out at least twice.  The story is pretty easy to pick apart and doesn't really have the snap that Starlin had in his early period, but I found it a GOOD read, even on an iPhone, although perhaps you should factor in my Marvel/Starlin fanboy nature, and the fact that I was on a plane with a few drinks in me.

(By the way, I admit that because this was the first comic I really *read* on the iPhone, I was stubborn enough to push through on my conversations with my respective groups of friends, allowing me to pass on this tidbit to anyone at Marvel who might be reading:  everyone I talked to remembers Infinity Gauntlet with lesser and greater degrees of fondness, but everyone adored* The Thanos Quest, the preceding two issue miniseries where Thanos tricks, cajoles and forces the gems out of the hands of the Elders of the Universe who possess them.  Those two issues on an iPad?  That would put some money in your pocket, Marvel. )

SONIC UNIVERSE #5:  This comic book is a kick in the slats to anyone who insists that the reason why more kids don't read comics is that superhero books are too insular.  Sonic Universe #5, after all, is a book where Sonic the Hedgehog, twenty-five years later after, uh, something,  has been made king of a city of hedgehogs, I guess, and has two kids and spends most of his time looking mopey and vaguely constipated while this female hedgehog (I...think?) in granny glasses alternately babysits his kids and beats up extremists attempting a coup. And Tails has a wife (who's a...rock star?) and two kids, and there's talk about "The Chaotix," and at the end an assassination attempt is foiled (spoiler!) by the sudden appearance of Silver The Hedgehog, who has "come back to your present to save my future."

Honestly, it's just as tall a cup of "what the fuck" as anything DC or Marvel have been serving up, and all of the characters and situations had to be already familiar to the reader of the book in order to have any emotional resonance whatsoever.   Without that familiarity, it's twenty-nine pages of "U R A NOOB LOL".

I'll be honest: I picked up Sonic Universe #5 in no small part because I wanted to be thrown into the deep end of the pool (and also, "King Sonic" reminded me of "King Conan," and the idea of this videogame character having a similarly storied history tickled me) and that's certainly what I got, though it took no more than two or three visits to Wikipedia to get everything I needed to make enough sense of stuff.  (Although, thanks to haphazard story input from different teams of game developers every time there's a new Sonic game--including taking existing elements put forth in the comics and twisting it--the Sonicverse would give the DCU a run for its money in sheer palimpsestry, so frequently have certain characters been introduced and re-introduced with purposes and origins utterly at odds with their previous appearance.)

So I'm actually quite pleased I had to put in some effort, even if I felt the results weren't necessarily worth it. In a way, what Sonic Universe #5 reminded me of most was Superman's silver age Imaginary Stories, where you get to see characters married and mopey and vaguely constipated, and the calamities that inevitably arise from that that...except those stories didn't run for six issues at a dollar a pop.  I wonder, though,  if that problem is as much one of the state of our medium as much as it is the industry.  Although the art in Sonic Universe isn't going to be mistaken for George Perez anytime soon, the panel layout, story progression, and verbal-visual blend are modern, essentially the same as what you'd see in a DC or non-Bendis Marvel comic.

Now, one of the things that fucking sucks about being 44 is that you find yourself having to qualify everything with--"okay, this may just be empty nostalgia on my part"--but, well, okay, while this may just be empty nostalgia on my part, I'm starting to think that although DC's silver-age six panel grid and Marvel's hyper-talky panels were technically bad comics, they were highly efficient deliverers of story, particularly within the limitations of their given page count: you got the set-up, you got the action, *and* you got a deluge of information, chatter, exposition, until you got something that clicked with you.

Actually, as long as I'm chasing myself down this theoretical hidey-hole, let's talk about a crucial theory in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, that of cartooning's iconic nature.  McCloud's theory--that the abstract nature of a cartooned face, for example, becomes "an empty shell that we inhabit"--is a really efficient way of talking about what happens when we look at comics, and he notes the way in which cartooning and photorealism are used in various ways to give a visual sense of "self" and "otherness" in a narrative. What I'm wondering about, looking at Sonic Universe #5 and the beloved Marvel comics of my youth, is the way in which story detail mirrors these purposes. As kids, the first stories we hear and see are very simple, fairy tales, fables--stories that, like cartoons, are empty enough that we fill them with our nature.  But as we age, there comes a point as a reader where a child desires the other; not so much from the story's characters--those are pretty much the same old heroic seeker/lost innocent figures from the fairy tales--but from the story itself.  It has to be baroque, filled with dozens of characters, side-characters, references to previous and past events.  The world of the fiction is a simulacrum of the real world as the child has begun to become aware of it--filled with people and history and tumult. And the thing that is most important to the child is that the milieu and the plot be sufficiently complex to the point of, well, badness.

Tolkien's Ring Trilogy; Howard's Conan books; Stan Lee's speech balloons; Superman Red and Superman Blue:  all of those things can be appreciated by most critics as having some kind of value--"better than most of their ilk" is the way they get described by the literary-minded critic--but the reason why they were popular isn't what makes them "better." It's precisely their worst tendencies--characters barely able to scrape together two-dimensions set loose in a florid rococo universe where everyone's mouths spill out endless exposition--that made them popular, and what led to Robert Jordan books and Gor novels and Infinity Gauntlet and Blackest Night and enough fucking volumes of Harry Potter to stone someone at the town square.  I submit there is a point in the development of the reader, the viewer, the audience, where their needs and desires are directly in opposition to good storytelling and good art.

Interestingly, when indulged to its extreme, this way in which a maturing reader tries to engage with the world, when endlessly indulged, results in works so complex and so impenetrable (to others) that the work ends up operating contrary to its initial purpose: it isolates the reader from the real world, rather than introducing them to it.  The work ends up swaddling the reader like a papoose, making them comfortable, but still separate and even more isolated than before. Or at least so it was until the Internet, such that lovers of "bad" fiction from all over the world were able to come together and connect and swap the kind of fanart that makes SafeSearch such a blessing.

Now if I was of a more David Foster Wallaceian bent, I'd walk you through the ramifications of that idea--of how the Internet seems to triumph over that isolationism and join like-minded lovers of imaginary worlds but in fact is itself something of an isolating swaddle, a thing that binds us and keeps us from fully participating in the real world. If I was of this bent, I would point to the number of people who end up disappearing down their own hidey-hole of WoW and catassery, the growing numbers of 'hikikomori' worldwide, or just the times in your own life you've felt chained to your computer, to the Internet, aware that you should be walking away from it and spending time with your loved ones or just going for a quick motherfucking walk outside, rather than continuing to tumble through the branches of the Internet, half-falling, half-seeking, the line between heroic seeker and lost innocent almost savagely blurred. The Internet is a bad work of genre fiction in a way, something that indulges us to our detriment, giving us far too many opportunities to look for what we want and not nearly enough chances to find what we need, connecting us in non-space at the sacrifice of how we live in real space.

But, as much as I love David Foster Wallace, the guy could be a bit of a prig. The tightrope act we walk, balancing between the lives we live in our heads (or in our books) and out in the real world, must be a routine literally as old as human consciousness. Comic books, genre fiction, and the Internet are just the bowling balls, fiery pins, and chainsaws we've introduced into to keep the juggling act interesting. (Also, maybe that first stone should be cast at the Internet by someone who didn't just spend more than two thousand words writing about two comic books.)

In the end, if I have a complaint about Sonic Universe #5, it's not that it's bad. I guess my complaint would be that it isn't bad enough: if you're not going to have the clarity and elegance of Carl Barks going for you, at least get your hands dirty and overpower my attention span such that I *needed* to hunt up those back issues, rather than feeling obligated to hit Wikipedia for the sake of a balanced review.

That said, whoever the heck that hedgehog with the granny glasses is, it's a safe bet she's not going to end up in a refrigerator any time soon--nor will any of the Sonic characters--so that alone makes it highly OK or better if you're looking for a book to get your kid interested in...though you might rate it higher or lower, depending on how good you want your bad to be. This may just be empty nostalgia on my part but I think I almost prefer the days when the bad was better than it is now, because it made it that much harder to confuse the good for the great.

Away from the shop #1: Jeff Talks About X-Men Forever

Hey, whattup? I have somewhere between three to six deadlines barreling down at me but I've been itching to write a post since forever. And I've got a couple of books under my belt, so.... why not, right? What's a few posts going to hurt? Doesn't matter that some of what's being reviewed is, between a year and four decades old, does it? First up, behind the cut, the first trade of Chris Claremont and Tom Grummett's X-Men Forever.

X-MEN FOREVER V1 TPB:  So I followed Graeme's advice and have started checking books out of the local branch of my library.  I'm finding I'm absolute crap when it comes to logging on to the system and trying to think of stuff I want to read and requesting it, but if I just visit my nearby library, there's usually a few items on the shelves I wouldn't mind taking the time to read. (Actually, I have to *make* the time to read 'em--which isn't the same thing at all--but there's enough of a surreptitious thrill to getting a big ol' comic book for free(!) that I make a point to read it, even though I've got plenty of other fine stuff lining my own shelves I haven't checked out. The deadline and the late fees probably help.)

I also followed Graeme's advice in that one of my library choices was the first trade of X-Men Forever, which collects the first five issues of Chris Claremont's surprisingly fiscally viable "what if we just let the guy do what he wants and pretend that he didn't leave the title back in 1991?) reboot/retcon/whatever-it-is series.

As you probably remember, Graeme found it weirdly readable and recommended it (both on our podcast and here on the pages), and I gotta say, I pretty much agree.   I won't waste your time with all the crazy plot twists that happen in these pages since you can use Wikipedia or a million other sources on the web to find out for yourself (if you don't already know about it), but what I will mention  is that it has a whole bunch of stuff I like about Claremont and none of the stuff that skeeves me out.

For example, on the first page of the second issue, there's a page with a couple of cops chewing the fat--they only exist to both kill time until the splash page on the turn and to be the discoverers of the revelation on that splash, but Claremont gives you their names (Ahmet and Gary), the fact that one of them has a kid who loves Latin, and the other is Muslim (hint on the latter: it's not Gary).

Now while there are people who might roll their eyes at both Claremont's political bias, to say nothing of all the unnecessary verbiage spent on two characters I feel comfortable saying we will not see again...that's precisely what's great about that page for me. Coming as it does after a panel talking about the joys of Central Park after dark, the page with Gary and Ahmet does a great job of underscoring the melting pot nature of New York.  And New York, in the Marvel comics I grew up on, is probably the best character Marvel comics ever had, as valuable to the line-up as Spider-Man or Doctor Doom.

There are times when having something like Gotham, your own imaginary city to destroy and rebuild, has its appeal--and in these days, where you can just sit down at your computer and virtually scroll through a 3-D representation of NYC whenever you get the urge, having an imaginary city may  well be preferable--but back in the day, having imaginary characters move in and out of real locations aided in the delight that blurring of what's real and what isn't. I'm sure you've seen those comments by Grant Morrison at his SDCC panel dismissing Batman's real age, and I'm definitely not the guy who's playing for Team Internal Consistency but I do think part of the hook of superhero books with the Big Two is the idea of this vast collective universe and the way all the pieces of that universe fit together.  And what I think Marvel Comics brought to the table wasn't slotting in the pieces of their current mythos with its previous mythos (the way DC did with its Earth-1 and Earth-2 mythology) but the way the pieces of Marvel Comics seemed to fit with the real world. For those of a more literal mindset, this led people to start thinking that the appeal of a good superhero book was how "real" it was. And for people like me, it was a ball of string in the labyrinth, something I could follow out of the maze of superheroes and into the real world, even as sketchy a representation as it might be...like two cops you never see again talking about their kids before discovering the shocking reveal on page two.

Beyond that, there were a few things that felt like "classic" Claremont X-Men for me in this book, stuff I won't enumerate to the point of exhaustion.  But when the X-Men's Blackbird Jet gets shot out of the sky in the first few pages of the first issue/chapter, I realized there's something awesome about a superteam that continues to insist on flying around in a jet, even though no more than a third of its team can fly at any given  time.  It's a good two+ page action scene gimme (and always a nice way to have everyone sum up who can do what) that Claremont goes to so often, I'm kinda bummed Morrison's run didn't have the characters build the Blackbird train or an armored humvee or something.  Why the X-Men seemed so tied to a simultaneous reliance on, and underlying fear of, air travel is something I can't wrap my brain around fully.  (Was it those damn Airport movies from the '70s, when the team first came into its own?  All those stories Claremont wrote on a plane, flying from one con to the next?)

And, finally, despite all the good characters turning evil, and evil characters turning good, and secret love affairs, and shockign revelations, what was great about this first volume of X-Men Forever is how refreshingly free of psychic rape and all the mental BDSM stuff Claremont dumps into his work.  (Although weirdly, what struck me as off about the Claremont/Manara issue of X-Women that just came out here was how it dodged what the two old pervs most have in common--an obsession with submission--and went with a half-baked adventure caper with Manara drawing upskirt shots and panting mouths of rapture on the women whether it suited the action or not. The whole thing was annoyingly coy and kind of chickenshit, especially given how long Mr. C has been sticking our collective comic book bar of chocolate into his personal peanut butter jar of fetishes.)  X-Men Forever feels free, not just of the baggage of continuity of other X-books and the Marvel universe as a whole, but free of Claremont's own sexual fetishes, and the feeling really is like re-reading the comics of my childhood--except while they were already there way back then but I was too young to notice, here they just seem gone.  And I'm glad, because they were--like any unshared fetish--dull and predictable.

So yeah--I'm going to be hunting down more.  And although I can't really say, whether it's worth it to shell out $16.99 for the trade ($16.99? Yowch), I will say it's surprisingly GOOD work.  A person looking at library shelves could certainly do worse.

Reaching For Toast Like TV Remotes: Tucker on 7/21

I have nothing to add to your comics news cycle, but I still happen to like comic books enough to purchase them in the face of a fearsome unemployment rate. Here are some of the ones that will someday make a family member of mine hate me for having, because they will have to deal with getting rid of them after I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Hellblazer # 269 (or Shade The Changing Man # 73)

I’m still enjoying this, although the news that John Constantine is going to get married (?) strikes me as a particularly cruel twist in Peter Milligan’s ongoing delivery in the John-Can’t-Win saga he’s constructed. Without going too far into guessing the future, Milligan has consistently depicted the character’s relationship with Epiphany as one that doesn’t feel quite “real”, which isn’t dissimilar to the way Mike Carey ended his run on the title, and it seems unlikely that he’d return to that oft-repeated Hellblazer twist where John does something nice for someone, only to discover that his friend has been replaced by some sort of trickster plotting against him. But the alternative--that Epiphany’s feelings towards John are truthful--is one that just seems mean, considering how much time has been spent showcasing how little John cares about the girl when he doesn’t have something to apologize for. Maybe he’s going to learn to love her? That sounds like a painful thing to read. Out of everything Vertigo currently serializes, Hellblazer has the most history with telling problematic romance stories, and if Milligan is really shooting to cover every aspect of John's abysmal failings as a human being, he has to respond to the Heartland/Kit relationship that Garth Ennis came up with. But if that's the plan here, he's only got a few issues to turn Epiphany from the stock punker girl with a crush into someone a lot more meaningful, and that isn't a whole lot of time.

Artwise, I continue to think that Giuseppe Camuncoli is a good fit for this book, and I mourn the day when he signs an exclusive to DC and they stop using him, as that seems to be part of their business model. Either way, he's not going to get a lot of opportunities to draw weird shit like this on that Daken ongoing, unless they do one of those Character-Takes-Hallucinogen stories. Nothing much to add, other than this still being GOOD.

Thunderbolts # 144-146

I was looking forward to reading this when I first read about the line-up that Jeff Parker had planned for the book, but after reading the first issue, which closed on a cliffhanger ending that seemed to call back to earlier Thunderbolts stories I know nothing about, I assumed that it wasn’t going to be the sort of experience I was after. I liked the fact that Kev Walker drew the Ghost character with a bunch of Pigpen-style flies circling him at all times, and I really liked the part where Marv showed up wearing Juggernaut’s costume, but that last page of Baron Zemo saying “I’m back, bitches” rang like an alarm bell: it's another Marvel comic written in that "getcher long box" fashion, where there’s an expectation of nostalgic familiarity with previous stories. Like Guardians of the Galaxy/Nova/most DC Comics, one can understand what’s going on in the stories just fine, but if you really want to get your buttons pushed, you need to be able to respond to the return of the Sphinx on an emotional level. (If I could go back and tell my younger self to read the “right” super-hero comics, the one’s that guys like Johns and Morrison and Slott remember...well, I wouldn’t, I’d actually just tell my younger self to invest in Apple and then I'd go ahead and cheat on Mandy because she was already way ahead of me on that front. Okay, maybe I'd find the time to swap Legend of the Shield out for Mutant Massacre.)

I came around to Thunderbolts though, in part because it turned out that I was wrong (Baron Zemo’s appearance was a fake-out), in part because I wanted to see Marv-ernaut again, but mostly because it just seems like Jeff Parker is one of those writers who still likes writing comic books, which is really the only way I enjoy reading super-hero stories. I like them to be beaten into a brief experience, one that vomits out abbreviated portions of story while striving for the tempo of a damn good song before cutting out like a disconnected radio. I get that most people prefer trade collections these days, the writers seem to like them as well: I don’t have a complaint with that. My preferred delivery system for the super-hero genre is the snapshot, that’s all. You want them on a shelf, with a spine, I say god bless. You’ve won, I’m already looking into dying sooner.

The most recent issue of Thunderbolts has all of the same nuts and bolts that made up the previous two issues, but it puts them into play in way that’s a lot more satisfying. Having dispensed with the mildly unnecessary team-building issue (don't explain! just do it!) as well as their first adventure (which provided them with what one assumes will be their first created-by-Parker teammate, whenever she wakes up and recovers from the dart that Crossbones fired into her ear canal), 146 gets to be mission-focused stuff. The team--Juggernaut, Crossbones, Mach V, Moonstone, Man-Thing and Luke Cage--are sent to go check out one of those dark caves that non-descript spec-ops teams always disappear into, there’s a big fight with Hellboy/Dune style worm-monsters, and there’s very little attempts at that quippy dialog that entertains no one but Marvel editors. The team is stuck in the cave, the two people with a moral compass have been taken off the drawing board, and there, on the last page, you get this little squadron of the characters that are now shoved into the position of saving the day:

Man-Thing's presence on the team has been described as "Transport", and his willingness to participate in a knuckles up role is a new twist that Parker may or may not explain. That's part of the entertainment with the character, actually: there's been no attempt to get into why Man-Thing is helping out at all, he's still a cipher. During their first big fight, he just stood around and watched everybody get the shit beaten out of them. He doesn't talk, his facial design doesn't allow for much emotional storytelling, and his behavior has yet to showcase any discernible patterns. While it isn't unique for a team-up comic to have a mystery man, his participation in the comic doesn't feel at all like Parker's gearing up for some impossible-to-satisfy "What's Up With Man-Thing" one-shot. It's the Man-Thing. He's just there. Eventually, he'll probably wander off and do something else for awhile, he might burn somebody who knows some fear, or the book will just get rebooted into another Warren Ellis redux and he'll get abandoned back at the Marvel MAX offices.

That last page also goes a long way towards a visual explanation of what’s interesting about this comic (to me, at least.) Walker’s art is a groovy callback to his 2000AD roots whenever he’s doing facial close-ups, but when it’s time for people to stand around and proclaim shit, it’s most reminiscent of Joe Quesada’s I Made These People Out Of Boxes style from the Sword of Azarel. There’s always somebody (usually Luke Cage) that serves like a giant anchor for the other members of the team to squat their fat little bodies around. When they move, they cluster like a walking set of bowling pins, seen from angles. Glorious. Walker’s lucked out too -- Frank Martin is the man responsible for coloring these issues, and yet Martin seems unaware that the general rule of thumb with super-hero coloring these days is to overdo everything, to fill every portion of the backgrounds with hideous gradations of glaring, contradictory colors. His simple choices work well for Walker heavy-on-the-negative-space layouts that surround his character drawings. There’s no pretense towards realism in the art, and Martin doesn’t attempt to force one in with his choices. This panel isn't a great example of the guy's subtlety or curiousness (it being a story set mostly in a cave, after all) but these three issues alone showcase a guy with a much larger range than any of what was on display in Frank D'Armata's three-options-only run on Captain America. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect -- about half of the Luke Cage close-ups appear to be that of a 70 year old man’s face -- but it’s the most visually engaging of any of Marvel's current shelf of team-books. I’m not about to join in on this whole “Read Awesome Comics” meme, as it’s already become the 900th iteration of the “why don’t you like the shit I like” nonsense, but from out here on Sensitive Princess Island, I’m naming this one GOOD.

ABHAY'S QUICKIE ESSAY ON WHY WALLY GROPIUS IS HIS FAVORITE BOOK THIS YEAR (SO FAR)

I don't think I have anything particularly novel to say about Tim Hensely's WALLY GROPIUS-- if you read Blog Flume or Comics Comics, as I imagine you must, I wouldn't suggest to you that I have much to add to what those fine gentlemen have already deduced.  My Mickey-Mouse "WALLY GROPIUS for Idiots" reading of the book offered below is probably more for my benefit, as a way for me to find a way to have that book stop nagging at the back of my head. As a value-adding proposition for you...?  I can't make much by way of promises.  With that caveat: essay, ahoy. Also: SPOILERS.  For reals.  Though-- look, if you haven't read WALLY GROPIUS, this isn't a "Why You Should Buy It" piece so much as me babbling incoherently about the book after having read it and let it fester for a few weeks.  So, yeah: this one maybe isn't for you, and by you, I mean the entire internet, basically.  Basically.

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One of the poorer ideas I've ever had-- and one reason I don't believe kids or possibly even young adults should indulge in any kind of "fun", of any kind but especially of any sort of chemical variety-- was my decision to temporarily loose my grip on a sober view of reality prior to the 2008 Superbowl.

The 2008 Superbowl was broadcast by the FOX Network, and prior to the broadcast, rather than talk about football or sell beer or exploit women, or make you feel sorrow about your favorite classic Rock musicians (i.e. what you'd expect from a Superbowl telecast), FOX instead opened with what for me was a surprise: an out-of-fuck-nowhere recreation of the signing and intensely solemn recitation of the Declaration of Independence.

When you're sober, you experience the world as a place that makes sense.  But that world is a lie-- none of that is true.  Your brain is forced to lie to itself constantly, because it's busy processing data, winnowing memories, coordinating your autonomic nervous system, supervising synaptic doo-dads and whats-its-- it does not have time to sit around while you freak the fuck out about the world. Because the world is not that place-- the world does not make a lick of fucking sense.  The world is a place where Don Shula will come onto your television and recite a centuries-old communication between men in powdered wigs and some long-dead King (which communication if anything represents an indictment of U.S. foreign policy circa 2003-present), in a production guest-starring the widow of a soldier murdered by friendly fire; Don Shula will do that unannounced, at fucking random, without any warning, prior to a four/five/six-hour mega-event in which the entire country unites to watch unbelievably large men who've spent their lives perfecting the art of running directly into each other, skull first, as violently as is humanly possible.

There is no end to the absurdity of things.  But your brain recognizes that you should not spend too much time dwelling on the senselessness of things, and so as a default creates lies for you, constantly, so constant that you don't usually even pay any attention at all to the lies.  It's a survival mechanism-- your odds of transmitting your genetic information to future generations is lower if you spend too much dwelling on the fact that you're just a barely-intelligent monkey on a rock hurtling through space, designed only to die. And if you're smart, you accept the lies, except only on limited, celebratory occasions indulged only in moderation.

This seems germane to the pleasure I took in WALLY GROPIUS.  GROPIUS is a book that's constantly lying to the reader, with a terrifying chaos roiling just immediately below its surface.  The book is a flood of visual and textual information, but the information itself is near constantly false.  A hippie journalist is a concerned father is a rapist, except is none of those things.  A girl is happy and innocent and a victim, except is none of those things.  According to the cover of the book, Wally Gropius is an umpteen millionaire-- but ultimately, his vault is empty. The very first image in the book suggests that material wealth would aid in the survival of the "Destitoot"; the very final image suggests that material wealth is irrelevant to survival.

The reader is thus thrust by the way the comic is told into the same shoes as the lead character Wally Gropius.  Gropius wants The Girl, but based on the image she presents to him and not the truth of things.  But Gropius and the reader, we're both inundated with evidence that images are not to be trusted.  The art of WALLY GROPIUS visually is very insistent upon that point:  objects float in space; perspective is nonsensical; shadows skew willy-nilly; even the sound effects are false, wrong, off.  The book is constantly presenting images but divorced from their "proper" context, their so-called "true" meaning. Gropius believes in the image of The Girl anyways, and is undone by it.  Our senses are not to be trusted; our senses feed us falsehoods. The culture tells Gropius he wants Huey Lewis, he believes he wants Huey Lewis, he wants Huey Lewis, but when Huey Lewis arrives– he is very much not what Gropius wants.

Our senses are not to be trusted...?

I'm no expert on spiritual matters, but this sounds like the basics of your Eastern philosophical systems.  There is the sense object, but the sense object is just an illusion.  According to Buddhism (at least according to Wikipedia), the origin of suffering is craving, and craving arises from sensations that result from contact  at the six sense bases. Therefore, to overcome craving and its resultant suffering, one has to develop restraint of and insight into the sense bases.  Similarly, your neighborhood-friendly Bhagavad Gita might tell you that by constantly thinking of sense objects, a person becomes attached to them, and thus develops desires, from which arises anger, from which anger arises delusion, and from delusion confusion of memory, and from confusion of memory, loss of intelligence, and when intelligence is lost, the breath of life is also lost.  Similarly, according to Jackie Chan, if you perceive that there is a wall and there is no ladder, you can just run up the wall-- the wall itself is a ladder!  But if you instead become too attached to money, you will end up making a movie with Will Smith’s fucking kid, and that too will cause a loss of intelligence.

(Some will say Jackie Chan movies have nothing to do with transcendence, but those people have never seen Drunken Master 2 and deserve only our pity, as such).

Even if we see something true, we may not have the sense to understand it.  The reader is even told at one point that Jillian Banks is the "Debutante of the Underworld"-- I saw the words.  I just didn't think they meant anything, when in fact they were the only words on the page that did.

(If I can ask you about one page, especially: the page near the end, CITIZEN'S BAND.  When you read it-- is the Butler telling the truth?  Everytime I've looked at it, I've thought to myself, "He's lying.  He's a cop, she is Queen Midas, so named for her golden hair, he has lured her into a car marked Diplomatic Immunity, but he intends to drive her back to a shoulder pool where Francis Bacon (i.e. Bacon = Pigs = Police Officers) wait to arrest her."  Is any of that true? GROPIUS doesn't explain the scene.  There are no answers.  Maybe the butler lies.  Maybe the butler tells the truth.  There's no knowing what the truth is because there's no such thing as the truth here.  It's just marks on paper; none of it's real).

Speaking of Wikipedia, consider Mr. Gropius's namesake, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus architect.  Gropius Sr. fun-fact: "Walter Gropius, like his father and his great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, became an architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career."  Gropius was an architect who couldn't draw, an architect whose work was all, in a way, second-hand, translations. Consider the following excerpt from GROPIUS author Tim Hensley's interview with the Los Angeles Times: "I worked on it for five years. It took me a long time. I worked on it after work. At the time I was doing closed captioning all day."

Hensley himself engaged in a sort of translation for the sense-impaired, while creating a book sort-of about the untrustworthiness of our senses, named after an architect who could not create his own visuals. Do you see a connection between all of those facts?  I want to see a connection, but there isn't one.  It's just my mind trying to impose an order onto things-- I don't know, because that's what brains do.  Hell, Wikipedia itself is a fan-run encyclopedia-- none of what it says about Gropius, Sr. might be even remotely true. But Wikipedia rhymes with encyclopedia-- so, fuck it, close enough...?

GROPIUS works not only because it lies constantly but because I want to believe the lies, because of the great comfort of lies.  I want to believe the world makes sense, and things happen for a reason, neither of which is true.  The New York Times had a terrific article after BP murdered the Gulf of Mexico called "Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill":  "Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced."  As I write this, San Diego is filled with our fellow comic nerds, obsessed with lies from 1960's cartoonists about America's glorious cosmic, wonder-filled future; meanwhile, just a couple hours away is proof that 50 years later, the United States can't figure out how to keep from mother-fucking poisoning ourselves.

Similarly, the very genre that WALLY GROPIUS tenuously exists in is one built on lies concocted decades earlier: the teen comic genre.  If I have a favorite thing about the book, it might be how WALLY GROPIUS capitalized upon me having read those comics and their repetitive stories.  If you've read one ARCHIE comic, you've read every ARCHIE comic.  GROPIUS has layers of discordant dialogue, discordant visuals, but I was never lost because I always felt... I always felt, "Oh, I've read this one before-- this is the one where Gropius starts a band."

GROPIUS functions as a teen comic.  I liked that Gropius, Jr. is expected to be an adult, wedding and all, at the time he is most completely addled-- that seems like a fairly reasonable observation on being a teenager. But what I liked more is how with one panel, everything about the genre we would want to categorize GROPIUS in is sort of revealed to be a lie.  I refer of course to the panel of Jillian Banks having sex.  That panel stopped me pretty cold-- besides the "kind-of" incest themes in the particular panel at issue, it's the last thing I expected to see in a comic drawn like this.  But it's the truest thing you could see in a teen comic-- that's really the crucial part of what the teen years are all about:  it’s the age when the "human animal" matures to the point where it’s interested in and capable of reproduction.  The panel belongs completely in a teen comic and yet is never in the sort of teen comic GROPIUS nods to stylistically.  The panel doesn't belong in the story the art is telling; or the panel belongs in the story the story is telling, but the art doesn't belong to the story; or... or...  Hell, I'm not even sure how this sentence should go...?

There's more to say here, about any number of things-- the finance imagery, say.  But focusing on anything else seems ... Well, it doesn't interest me for a book as much as the... I don't know... the aphasiastic qualities of WALLY GROPIUS.  For me, it's a book that lies constantly, that lies at its very core, but that nevertheless ends up getting at a greater truth of things.  And so, yeah: I thought that was pretty neat.