Thanks for those who patiently kept trying to get our podcast on Itunes after I screwed things up. Things should be much better with, you know, people being able to actually download the podcasts and stuff, and now they have their original air dates (kinda) . Man, the hijinks that ensue if you put your Itunes rss identifier on line three instead of line two...
On the plus side, those who have successfully subscribed to the Itunes podcast already have access to parts one and two of Episode Nine! (On the minus side, that's because...I accidentally uploaded the feed with the links before Graeme gave me the go-ahead? Sorry, Graeme!)
Anyhoo, here's installment 9.1 where we talk about Brian Bendis and Scarlet; first trade paperback of Dark Avengers; Daredevil and the current Shadowland story arc, and more:
Then, in installment 9.2, we bust out the old "blind guys feeling different parts of an elephant and thinking we've grasped snake and a palm tree, both of which Hollywood has utterly ruined" approach for this year's San Diego Comic Con. (At the every end we also throw in a little bit of Dr. Who, The Venture Brothers, the Return of Bruce Wayne #4, the artists of Grant Morrison, and what to make of the upcoming movie Sucker Punch.):
Anyway, this is my first time trying to to embed podcast entries in a post, so wouldn't it be amusing if it didn't work? (Yes. So very...god-damned... amusing.)
Crazy week of life for me -- took our one and only week of "vacation" to Tahoe (wow, sunny; and floating down a river is tons of fun), and Ben starts (gulp!) Second grade today... this is way too early to start school, IMO.
I have to write a TILTING this week (after I decide what I'm going to write ABOUT), but, now that I don't have to think about Ben in the mornings any longer, my writing "free" time should shoot straight up, so reviews in a day or three, once I get caught up on everything else (that's the sucky part of vacation -- coming back to all of the work that's built up....)
It's another teeny week of comics, this time -- glad I don't have to pay rent on a comics shop, or anything... Oh. Wait....
AGE OF HEROES #4 (OF 4)
AIR #24
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #640
ANGEL #36
ARCHIE #612
ATLAS #4
AUTHORITY THE LOST YEAR #12 (OF 12)
AVENGERS & INFINITY GAUNTLET #1 (OF 4)
AVENGERS ACADEMY #3
AZRAEL #11
BATMAN BEYOND #3 (OF 6)
BATMAN STREETS OF GOTHAM #15
BOYS HIGHLAND LADDIE #1 (OF 6)
BRIGHTEST DAY #8
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER RILEY ONE SHOT JO CHEN CVR
BULLETPROOF COFFIN #3 (OF 6)
CBGB #2 (OF 4)
CHEW #13
CLASSIC RED SONJA REMASTERED #3
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER JOURNEY BEGINS #4 (OF 5)
DARKWING DUCK #3
DC UNIVERSE LEGACIES #4 (OF 10)
DEADPOOL #26
DEADPOOL CORPS #5
DOCTOR WHO ONGOING #14
DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #357
DV8 GODS AND MONSTERS #5 (OF 8)
EX MACHINA #50
FABLES #97
GI JOE ORIGINS #18
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #51 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
GROTESQUE #4
HELLBLAZER #270
HONEY WEST #1 MCCLINTON CVR A
HOT MOMS #14 (A)
HULK #24
IDES OF BLOOD #1 (OF 6)
IMAGE UNITED #3 (OF 6) CVR A SPAWN
INTERIORAE #4
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #42 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
LAST PHANTOM #1
LIGHT #5 (OF 5)
LONE RANGER #23
MARVEL UNIVERSE VS PUNISHER #2 (OF 4)
MGM DRIVE IN THEATER #2 IT TERROR FROM BEYOND STARS
NEW AVENGERS #3
NEW MUTANTS #16
NIGER #3
OFF HANDBOOK MARVEL UNIVERSE A TO Z UPDATE #3
PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #144
PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES #1 (OF 4)
POWER GIRL #15
ROTTEN #7
SAMMY THE MOUSE #3
SECRET AVENGERS #4
SHADOWLAND DAUGHTERS OF SHADOW #1 (OF 3) SL
SHADOWLAND POWER MAN #1 (OF 4) SL
SIMPSONS COMICS #169
SIXTH GUN #3
SPIRIT #5
STAR TREK BURDEN OF KNOWLEDGE #3
STAR WARS LEGACY #50 EXTREMES PART 3 (OF 3)
SUPERGIRL #55
SWEETS #2 (OF 5)
THUNDERBOLTS #147
TINY TITANS #31
TRUE BLOOD #2
TRUE STORY SWEAR TO GOD #13
UNCANNY X-MEN #527
WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #11
WEIRD WORLD OF JACK STAFF #4
WITCHBLADE DUE PROCESS (ONE SHOT)
WOLVERINE WEAPON X #16
X-FILES 30 DAYS OF NIGHT #2 (OF 6)
Books / Mags / Stuff
BAD KIDS GO TO HELL TP (NEW PTG)
DARK RAIN A NEW ORLEANS STORY HC
DC 75TH ANNIVERSARY POSTER BOOK
DEADWORLD CLASSIC TP VOL 01
GIRL PRESENTS BODY HEAT GN NEW PTG (A)
HACK SLASH OMNIBUS TP VOL 01 (IMAGE ED)
HARRY 20 ON THE HIGHROCK GN
JUDGE DREDD MEGACITY MASTERS SC VOL 01
KILLAPALOOZA TP
LITTLE LULU PAL TUBBY VOL 01 CASTAWAY OTHER STORIES
MUPPET SHOW TP VOL 04 FAMILY REUNION
PS238 TP VOL 08 WHEN WORLDS GO SPLAT
READING WITH PICTURES GN
SEEDLESS OGN
SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE DOOM PATROL TP VOL 02
UNSINKABLE WALKER BEAN GN
WALL-E TP VOL 02 OUT THERE
X-FACTOR SECOND COMING PREM HC
After a certain amount of hard work and a tremendous amount of whining (or, "whingeing," as you may prefer), Graeme and I have finally fulfilled our life-long dream of getting our podcast listed on Itunes...one to three years after many of our contemporaries! Now, we can both expire quietly (but happily).
Should you wish to subscribe to Wait, What through Itunes, you can go here:
and do that secret occult thing people do to get podcasts onto their Iquipment. According to Apple, it's going to be another week or so before you find this on the Itunes store via search, so this is your best bet for now. If you like the podcast, would you mind leaving us a review on Itunes saying so?
For those who prefer to subscribe to podcasts through other means, our RSS feed is here:
And there are links to all our episodes to date at both. (Although, I believe you can only see our podcast ID logo on Itunes? The ID was created by Graeme and it is very well done, isn't it?) We've got another episode up our sleeves that we'll try go get to you sooner, rather than later.
Not the largest of weeks... in fact, pretty much the opposite. But I'm still sure you can find one or two pieces of comicy goodness...
ADVENTURE COMICS #517
ARCHIE & FRIENDS #146
ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #211
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #24
BATGIRL #13
BIRDS OF PREY #4 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
BOOSTER GOLD #35
BPRD HELL ON EARTH NEW WORLD #1 (OF 5)
BUZZARD #3 (OF 3)
CALLING CTHULHU CHRONICLES #2
COMIC BOOK GUY THE COMIC BOOK #2 (OF 5)
DAREDEVIL #509 SL
DARK WOLVERINE #89
DAYTRIPPER #9 (OF 10)
DMZ #56
DOC SAVAGE #5
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS #0
DUST WARS #3 (OF 3)
FRINGE TALES FROM THE FRINGE #2 (OF 6)
GEARS OF WAR #13
GEN 13 #37
GI JOE #21
GREEN LANTERN EMERALD WARRIORS #1 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
HACK SLASH MY FIRST MANIAC #3 (OF 4) CVR A
INCREDIBLE HULK #611
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #29
JUSTICE LEAGUE GENERATION LOST #7 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
KATO ORIGINS WAY O/T NINJA #3
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #165
LOCKE & KEY KEYS TO THE KINGDOM #1
MIGHTY CRUSADERS #2 (OF 6)
MORNING GLORIES #1
NORTHLANDERS #31
ONE #1 (OF 5)
RAWHIDE KID #3 (OF 4)
ROBERT E HOWARD HAWKS OF OUTREMER #3 (OF 4)
ROBERT JORDAN WHEEL OF TIME EYE O/T WORLD #4
ROUTE DES MAISONS ROUGES #1 (OF 4)
SCOOBY DOO #159
SHADOWLAND BLOOD ON STREET #1 (OF 4) SL
SIXSMITHS #1
SKY DOLL LACRIMA CHRISTI #1 (OF 2)
SONIC UNIVERSE #19
SPECTACULAR SPIDER-GIRL #4 (OF 4)
STEVE ROGERS SUPER-SOLDIER #2 (OF 4)
STRANGE SCIENCE FANTASY #2
SUPER HERO SQUAD #8
SUPER HEROES #5
SUPERMAN #702
THANOS IMPERATIVE #3 (OF 6)
THOR MIGHTY AVENGER #3
TITANS #26 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
TRANSFORMERS ONGOING #10
ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS 3 #1 (OF 6)
ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #13
UNCLE SCROOGE #394
UNWRITTEN #16
WALKING DEAD #76
WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY ONE FOOT GRAVE #2 (OF 6)
WITCHBLADE #137
X-FORCE SEX AND VIOLENCE #2 (OF 3)
X-MEN #2
X-MEN FOREVER 2 #5
ZATANNA #4
Books / Mags / Stuff
AL WILLIAMSON ARCHIVES SC VOL 01
ARCHIE & FRIENDS TP VOL 05 ARCHIES HAUNTED HOUSE
BIG BOOK O DITKO SC
BROMS CHILD THIEF SC
CHEW OMNIVORE ED HC VOL 01
COMET IN MOOMINLAND SC
DAREDEVIL THE DEVILS HAND TP
EXCALIBUR VISIONARIES WARREN ELLIS TP VOL 02
FINAL CRISIS REVELATIONS TP
FINN FAMILY MOOMINTROLL SC
GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS TP VOL 05 THE FIREFLY & HIS MAJESTY
GOSSIP GIRL MANGA GN VOL 01 FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
HELLCITY THE WHOLE DAMN THING TP
LOCKE & KEY HC VOL 03 CROWN OF SHADOWS
LOST OFFICIAL MAGAZINE FINALE SOUVENIR
MAD MAGAZINE #505
MARVELMAN CLASSIC PREM HC VOL 01 QUESADA CVR
MICE TEMPLAR TP VOL 02 .1 DESTINY PT 1
MOOMINPAPAS MEMOIRS SC
MOOMINSUMMER MADNESS SC
NAOKI URASAWA 20TH CENTURY BOYS GN VOL 10
SKYSCRAPERS O/T MIDWEST HC (O/A)
STAR TREK ORIGINAL SERIES OMNIBUS TP
TOYFARE #158 LEGION OF SUPER HEROES
ULTIMATES II ULTIMATE COLLECTION TP
UNWRITTEN TP VOL 02 INSIDE MAN
WOLVERINE DARK WOLVERINE TP VOL 02 MY HERO
"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."
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.
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.
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...?).
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 twopart 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.
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.
Comics. Comics! COMICS!
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #639
AUTHORITY #25
AVENGERS ORIGIN #5 (OF 5)
AVENGERS PRIME #2 (OF 5)
BALTIMORE PLAGUE SHIPS #1
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #47
BATMAN ODYSSEY #2 (OF 6)
BETTY #187 (NOTE PRICE)
BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #183
BLACK TERROR #11
BOYS #45
BRIGHTEST DAY #7
CAPTAIN AMERICA #608
CAPTAIN AMERICA FOREVER ALLIES #1 (OF 4)
CASANOVA #2
CONAN LEGACY FRAZETTA COVER #5 (OF 8)
CROSSED FAMILY VALUES #3 (OF 6)
DAREDEVIL BLACK AND WHITE #1
DARKSTAR AND WINTER GUARD #3 (OF 3)
DEADPOOL #1000
DEADPOOL WADE WILSONS WAR #3 (OF 4)
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP #13 (OF 24)
DOOM PATROL #13
DOOMWAR #6 (OF 6)
ELECTRIC ANT #5 (OF 5)
GFT INFERNO #2 (OF 5) A CVR BENITEZ
GI JOE A REAL AMERICAN HERO #157
GORILLA MAN #2 (OF 3)
GREEK STREET #14
GREEN HORNET PARALLEL LIVES #2
HAWKEYE & MOCKINGBIRD #3
HELLBOY THE STORM #2 (OF 3)
HERCULES TWILIGHT OF A GOD #3 (OF 4)
HIT-MONKEY #2 (OF 3)
HOUSE OF MYSTERY #28
IRON MAN LEGACY #5
IRREDEEMABLE #16
IZOMBIE #4
JAMES PATTERSONS MURDER OF KING TUT #3
JONAH HEX #58
JSA ALL STARS #9
JUGHEAD #202 (NOTE PRICE)
JURASSIC PARK REDEMPTION #2
KILL SHAKESPEARE #4
LOONEY TUNES #189
MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER #1 (OF 4) RAYMOND SWANLAND CVR
MAGOG #12
MARVEL UNIVERSE VS PUNISHER #1 (OF 4)
MARVELMAN FAMILYS FINEST #2 (OF 6)
MURDERLAND #1
NANCY IN HELL #1 (OF 4)
NEW MUTANTS FOREVER #1 (OF 5)
ORSON SCOTT CARDS ENDER IN EXILE #3 (OF 5)
REBELS #19
RED HOOD LOST DAYS #3 (OF 6)
RED ROBIN #15
SECRET SIX #24
SECRET WARRIORS #18
SHADOWLAND #2 (OF 5) SL
SHADOWLAND BULLSEYE #1 SL
SHIELD #3
SHUDDERTOWN #4
SPARTA USA #6 (OF 6)
SPIDER-MAN FANTASTIC FOUR #2 (OF 4)
SPITFIRE #1
STAND HARDCASES #3 (OF 5)
STAR WARS OLD REPUBLIC #2 (OF 6)
STARSTRUCK #12
SUPERGOD #4 (OF 5)
SUPERMAN THE LAST FAMILY OF KRYPTON #1 (OF 3)
SWEET TOOTH #12
TALES FROM RIVERDALE DIGEST #39
THOR RAGE OF THOR #1
TOM STRONG AND THE ROBOTS OF DOOM #3 (OF 6)
TOY STORY #5
ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS 2 #6 (OF 6)
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #709
WARRIORS OFFICIAL MOVIE ADAPTATION #3 (OF 5) (RES)
WHISPERS IN WALLS #1 (OF 6)
YOUNG ALLIES #3
Books / Mags / Stuff
ADVENTURES IN CARTOONING ACTIVITY BOOK
ANGEL HOLE IN THE WORLD TP
ARTIST HIMSELF RAND HOLMES RETROSPECTIVE SC (RES)
AVENGERS INVADERS TP
BATMAN ARKHAM REBORN TP
BLACK COMIX AFRICAN AMER INDY COMICS HC
BONE TALL TALES HC
BONE TALL TALES TP
BRAIN CAMP GN
CAPTAIN AMERICA THEATER OF WAR TP
CHLOE GN (A)
CINDERELLA FROM FABLETOWN WITH LOVE TP
COMPLETE DRACULA TP
CREATURE TECH GN (IMAGE ED)
CYBERFORCE HUNTER KILLER TP VOL 01
DARK TOWER PREM HC BATTLE OF JERICHO HILL
ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN AMERICA TP NEW PTG VOL 01
FOGTOWN HC
GIRL GENIUS TP VOL 01 AGATHA & BEETLEBURG CLANK COLOR ED
HEAVY METAL SEPTEMBER 2010
HELLSPAWN COMPLETE COLL HC
HULK FALL OF HULKS TP SAVAGE SHE-HULKS
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #300
LEGENDS OF THE DARK CRYSTAL GN VOL 02 (OF 2)
LOSERS TP BOOK 02
METABARONS TP VOL 01 OTHON & HONORATA (NEW PTG)
METABARONS TP VOL 04 AGHORA & LAST METABARON
PENNY ARCADE TP VOL 06 HALLS BELOW
PUNISHER MAX NAKED KILLS TP
SET TO SEA HC
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG ARCHIVES TP VOL 13
THIEF OF ALWAYS TP
UNCLE SCROOGE AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BUCKS TP
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.
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.
There's also a bunch of photos that Jim Flood took up on Facebook, linked to the CE page -- I'm working on getting copies of those to we can ungate those...
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 firedinto 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.
Reviews soon -- order form and ONONMATOPOEIA first...
By the number of comics shipping this week one might guess there was some sort of, dunno, major comic book convention or something? Next week, I suppose, for the flood of TPs and GNs...
2000 AD PACK JUN 2010
28 DAYS LATER #13
7 PSYCHOPATHS #3
ABE SAPIEN ABYSSAL PLAIN #2 (OF 2)
ACTION COMICS #891
AFTER DARK #1 (OF 3)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PRESENTS BLACK CAT #2 (OF 4)
AMERICAN VAMPIRE #5
AMORY WARS KEEPING SECRETS OF SILENT EARTH 3 #3
ANGEL #35
ANITA BLAKE CIRCUS OF DAMNED CHARMER #3 (OF 5)
ARCHIE DIGEST #266
ARTIFACTS #1 (OF 13) JAM CVR A
AUTHORITY THE LOST YEAR #11 (OF 12)
AVATAR OF THE FUTURIANS #1 (OF 4)
AVP THREE WORLD WAR #5 (OF 6)
BATMAN RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE #4 (OF 6)
BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #19
BATMAN WIDENING GYRE #6 (OF 6) (RES)
BILLY BATSON AND THE MAGIC OF SHAZAM #18
BUZZARD #2 (OF 3)
CAPTAIN AMERICA 1940S NEWSPAPER STRIP #2 (OF 3)
COWBOY NINJA VIKING #7
DEADPOOL TEAM-UP #891
DETECTIVE COMICS #867
DISNEYS HERO SQUAD #7
DO ANDROIDS DREAM DUST TO DUST #3 (OF 8)
DRIVER FOR THE DEAD #1 (OF 3)
FANTASTIC FOUR #581
FEAR AGENT #28 OUT OF STEP (PT 1 OF 6)
FIRST WAVE #3 (OF 6)
FLASH #4 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
FLASH #4 VAR ED (BRIGHTEST DAY)
FRANKEN-CASTLE #19
GARRISON #4 (OF 6)
GI JOE HEARTS AND MINDS #3
GLAMOURPUSS #14
GOTHAM CITY SIRENS #14
GREEN ARROW #2 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
GREEN HORNET STRIKES #2
GREEN LANTERN #56 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #50 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
HAUNT #8
HOTWIRE DEEP CUT #1 (OF 3)
INCORRUPTIBLE #8
JACK OF FABLES #46
JUSTICE LEAGUE GENERATION LOST #6 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #47 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
KEVIN SMITH KATO #3
LIFE WITH ARCHIE MARRIED LIFE #1
MADAME XANADU #25
MUPPET SHOW #8
NORTHLANDERS #30
OUTSIDERS #31 (RES)
PETER PARKER #5 (OF 5)
PHANTOM GHOST WHO WALKS #11
PILOT SEASON STELLAR #1
PUNISHERMAX #9
RASL #8
SECRET AVENGERS #3
SENSE & SENSIBILITY #3 (OF 5)
SINBAD #11 A CVR CALDWELL (RES)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #215
SPAWN #198
SPIDER-MAN #4
STAR TREK BURDEN OF KNOWLEDGE #2
STAR TREK MCCOY #4
STAR WARS INVASION RESCUES #3 (OF 6)
STARGATE VALA MAL DORAN #2
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #63
TEEN TITANS #85
THE RISING #0
THOR #612
THOR MIGHTY AVENGER #2
TIME BOMB #1 (OF 3)
TIME LINCOLN FISTS OF FUHRER #1
TORCHWOOD #1
ULTIMATE COMICS MYSTERY #1 (OF 4)
UNCANNY X-MEN #526
UNKNOWN SOLDIER #22
USAGI YOJIMBO #130
VAMPIRE PA #1 (OF 3)
WARLORD #16
WILDCATS #25
WIZARDS OF MICKEY #7
WOLVERINE ORIGINS #50
WOLVERINE WEAPON X #15
WONDER WOMAN #601
WORLD WAR HULKS SPIDER-MAN VS THOR #2 (OF 2)
WORLD WAR HULKS WOLVERINE VS CAPTAIN AMERICA #2 (OF 2)
X-CAMPUS #2 (OF 4)
X-FACTOR FOREVER #5 (OF 5)
X-MEN FOREVER 2 #4
X-MEN LEGACY #238
YOURS TRULY JACK THE RIPPER #2
Books / Mags / Stuff
ANDROID KARENINA SC
ARCHIE PUREHEART THE POWERFUL TP VOL 01
BAKUMAN TP VOL 01
BATMAN WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER TP
BEN TEN ALIEN FORCE DOOM DIMENSION GN VOL 02
CANDIE LAND MAGAZINE #1
COMPLETE JON SABLE FREELANCE OMNIBUS TP VOL 01
DRINK & DRAW HC VOL 02
ESSENTIAL CLASSIC X-MEN TP VOL 02 NEW PTG
FRANKENSTEIN CAMPFIRE GN
FRIENDLY GAME GN
HOGANS ALLEY #17
HULK FALL OF HULKS TP RED HULK
JOJOS BIZARRE ADVENTURE TP VOL 15
JSA VS KOBRA TP
JUXTAPOZ VOL 17 #8 AUG 2010
LEES TOY REVIEW #212 JUL 2010
MARVELS PROJECT HC BIRTH OF SUPER HEROES
PREVIEWS #263 AUGUST 2010 (NET)
ROBINSON CRUSOE CAMPFIRE GN
SECRET WARRIORS PREM HC VOL 03 WAKE BEAST
SHOWCASE PRESENTS SGT ROCK TP VOL 03
STAR TREK DS9 FOOLS GOLD TP
STREET ANGEL TP VOL 01 (O/A)
SUPERMAN WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MAN OF TOMORROW TP
TANK GIRL TP SKIDMARKS
TEZUKA BLACK JACK TP VOL 12
TREASURE ISLAND CAMPFIRE GN
USAGI YOJIMBO TP VOL 24 RETURN OF BLACK SOUL
VAMPIRE TALES TP VOL 01 GN
WIZARD MAGAZINE #229 FINCH BATMAN
WOMEN OF MARVEL TP CELEBRATING SEVEN DECADES
X-MEN DARK PHOENIX SAGA HC
X-MEN POWERLESS TP
X-MEN WE ARE X-MEN TP
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.
Well, we didn't have 2000 (!) people like The Beguiling did, but I'm going to go ahead and call our SP6 Midnight Release a pretty epic success. From the moment we opened the doors back up at 10 PM, we were literally wall-to-wall people, which utterly shocked me. I was sort of thinking we might have 20-30 people show up (It's a Monday night, fer cryin' out loud!), and we somewhere between 3 and 4 times that, instead.
SP6 leaped to the #1 best-selling book of 2010 so far, in 25 minutes of selling it -- crazy!!
If I had known there would be THAT many people showing, I would have done things a little differently -- like I would have "pre sold" the book, so people could have just picked up their copy at 12:01, instead of having to wait to buy it... but virtually everyone was amazingly cool about the line, so I guess we didn't suck too hard.
All of my pictures came out way blurry (Drinking and shooting doesn't seem to work), so I've shamelessly ganked this pic from Awesome UbiSoft point-person Claudia Ng's Twitter (thanks Claudia for giving up her night to demo the SP game, shipping next month -- sweet sweet game!)
I want to thank everyone who showed up to join in the fun, everyone who brought beer and drinks to share, and our partners -- the Cardboard Tube Fighting League, Alliance Media for the Scott Pilgrim movie tickets (we're hoping to have another round of them later in the week), Ubisoft for bringing the Scott Pilgrim Video Game, Jesse Spencer for the loan of his television, and my amazing staff, Matt and Carissa, for all of their help.
And thank YOU for coming, if you did, because you're teh awesome!!!
Remember: TONIGHT is the SCOTT PILGRIM v6 Midnight Release Party -- 10 pm to 1 am -- 20% off everything (except new comics), SP movie tickets, the SP Video Game, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Come early, come often!!
Here's what's shipping THIS week...
AGE OF HEROES #3 (OF 4)
AIR #23
ALAN MOORE NEONOMICON #1 (OF 4)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #638
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PRESENTS AMERICAN SON #3 (OF 4)
ARCHIE #611
ATLAS #3
AVENGERS #3
AZRAEL #10
BATMAN BEYOND #2 (OF 6)
BATMAN STREETS OF GOTHAM #14
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #206
BLACK WIDOW #4
BRIGHTEST DAY #6
BULLET TO THE HEAD #2
CBGB #1 (OF 4)
CLASSIC RED SONJA REMASTERED #2
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER JOURNEY BEGINS #3 (OF 5)
DARK WOLVERINE #88
DARKWING DUCK #2
DC UNIVERSE LEGACIES #3 (OF 10)
DEADPOOL #25
DEADPOOL MERC WITH A MOUTH #13 (OF 13)
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP #11 (OF 24)
DOCTOR WHO ONGOING #13
DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #356
DV8 GODS AND MONSTERS #4 (OF 8)
DYNAMO 5 SINS OF THE FATHER #2 (OF 5)
FADE TO BLACK #5 (OF 5)
FEVRE DREAM #4 (OF 10)
FUTURAMA COMICS #50
GANGES #1 (O/A)
GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS #8 (OF 9)
GI JOE A REAL AMERICAN HERO #156
GOD OF WAR #3 (OF 6) (RES)
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #49 A CVR ROPER
HELLBLAZER #269
HER-OES #4
HEROIC AGE PRINCE OF POWER #3 (OF 4)
INCREDIBLES #11
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #162
JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #41 (BRIGHTEST DAY)
KEVIN SMITH GREEN HORNET #6
LADY DEADPOOL #1
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #3
MARVEL ZOMBIES 5 #5 (OF 5)
MARVELMAN CLASSIC PRIMER #1
MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ #8 (OF 8)
META 4 #2 (OF 5)
MGM DRIVE IN THEATER #1 IT TERROR FROM BEYOND STARS
MODERN WARFARE 2 GHOST #6 (OF 6)
NEW AVENGERS #2
NEW MUTANTS #15
POWER GIRL #14
PS238 #45
RED MASS FOR MARS #4 (OF 4)
RESURRECTION VOL 2 #13
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY ILLUSTRATED #2
SCOOBY DOO #158
SHADOWHAWK #3
SIMPSONS COMICS #168
SPIKE THE DEVIL YOU KNOW #2
SPIRIT #4
SUPERGIRL #54
SUPERMAN BATMAN #74
THUNDERBOLTS #146
TIME MASTERS VANISHING POINT #1 (OF 6)
TINY TITANS #30
TRUE BLOOD #1
ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS 2 #5 (OF 6)
ULTIMATE COMICS NEW ULTIMATES #3 (OF 5)
WALKING DEAD #75
WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #10
WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY ONE FOOT GRAVE #1 (OF 6)
X-FACTOR #207
X-MEN PHOENIX FORCE HANDBOOK
ZATANNA #3
Books / Mags / Stuff
ALTER EGO #95
BACK ISSUE #42
BLACKEST NIGHT RISE OF THE BLACK LANTERNS HC
BLACKEST NIGHT TALES OF THE CORPS HC
CEREBUS GUIDE TO SELF PUBLISHING EXPANDED REG ED
CLASSIC MARVEL FIG COLL MAG #123 ENCHANTRESS
DARK AVENGERS TP VOL 02 MOLECULE MAN
DC SUPERHERO FIG COLL MAG #56 MR MIRACLE
DC SUPERHERO FIG COLL MAG SPECIAL LOBO
ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS TP VOL 05
FANTASTIC FOUR BY JONATHAN HICKMAN TP VOL 01
FINAL CRISIS ROGUES REVENGE TP
FROM SHADOW OF NORTHERN LIGHTS TP VOL 02
GREEN LANTERN RAGE OF THE RED LANTERNS TP
GROO HOGS OF HORDER TP
ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #30
JANET EVANOVICH TROUBLEMAKER HC BOOK 01
KRISTINA QUEEN OF VAMPIRES GN VOL 03 (A)
MONDO URBANO GN
NEW AVENGERS TP VOL 12 POWERLOSS
OVERSTREET COMIC BK PG SC VOL 40 BATMAN
PUG GN (RES)
RASL POCKET ED TP VOL 01
REALM OF KINGS HC
ROLLING THUNDER ART OF DAVE DORMAN HC
SHADOWEYES GN VOL 01
STAR WARS ADV TP VOL 04 WILL OF DARTH VADER
SUPER PRO KO GN VOL 01
TREASURY 20TH CENTURY MURDER HC VOL 03 TERRIBLE AXE MAN
TROLL KING GN
WALKING DEAD TP VOL 12 LIFE AMONG THEM
WARLORD OF IO TP VOL 01
WEEKLY WORLD NEWS TP VOL 01
WORLD OF WARCRAFT TP VOL 02
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE AUDIO GN
ZERO KILLER TP
I hate airports.
I’m off for a day trip for an Important Business Meeting in Burbank, and there’s all of this time to kill. SuperShuttle wanted to pick me up at 4:30 for a 7 AM flight. I told them 5 AM would be more than fine, even allowing for, say, an earthquake. I still got here more than an hour before I really needed to.
Anyway, time to kill, so I type to you, my friends, and I write some reviews (though I’m not certain I’ll POST this until later tonight….) [Which of course you now know I didn’t]– but because I’m in an airport, I don’t have actual access to the comics, so this is from memory.
AVENGERS: CHILDREN’S CRUSADE #1: Here’s what I don’t get: they had a perfectly working franchise going on here a bunch of years ago when this was called “Young Avengers”. There were a bunch of fans for that, and this is the actual continuation of that series, by the same creative team – this is, in effect YA #13. So where’s the sense in ditching the name? Meh, well doesn’t matter – if you liked that, you’ll like this. Drawn well, competently written, and a set of reasonably compelling characters new characters (well, new then, not so much new now, but you know what I mean) – if I didn’t read another issue ever, I wouldn’t die, but I’d rather read this then, say, get a poke in the eye, so that’s like competently GOOD.
BATMAN & ROBIN #13: Words fail me of just how awesome this issue was. But I’m with Gotham’s cops – I like Dick better as Batman, too. EXCELLENT
BATMAN ODYSSEY #1: Uhm… What? Over-rendered finishes, hard to decipher page layouts, oddly out-of-character pieces, and clunky, chunky, crunky exposition. Yeah, didn’t care for this even one tiny bit. AWFUL.
BRIGHTEST DAY THE ATOM SPECIAL: Writing super-hero comics is its own special little trick. Not everyone can do it, and I think that, with a couple of pretty rare examples, that most people who excel at doing “Alternative” comics just don’t have the right muscles or tone to do it. I wish I could tell you this was one of those exceptions, but it really isn’t – too much time and space is devoted to things that don’t matter in a superhero comic, the threat was flaccid, and it doesn’t resolve in anything even slightly approaching an exciting To Be Continued manner that would want me to read the upcoming backups in ADVENTURE. In fact, after reading this, I felt pretty ripped off for my time – I didn’t read to read a retconned origin, there wasn’t a moment’s sympathy for Ryan Choi, and the comic didn’t end, it stopped. Sadly: AWFUL
SCARLET #1: No, no, not THIS one
(though, really, with all the vampire shit going on these days, that might have a chance at selling…)
The way I’d describe the 2010 version is Seattle G20 Protest: The Comic, and while that’s not strictly right, it’s pretty close in tone and spirit. It looks dead-fabulous, and while I’m not really sure I care for the protagonist, there’s definitely a huh-what-happens-next? Thing going on here. I thought it was very nearly VERY GOOD, though #2 will probably more tell the actual tale.
SHADOWLAND #1: There’s a pretty cool Reversal in this, though I’m not really all that sure that the ground had been properly set for THAT in the regular DD issues leading into this. I also wonder how the heck Frank Castle is in this comic, given the events in his own book. Still, it is nice to have a “street level” event, after all of the Everything Changes Forever! comics that event books tend to be…. GOOD.
THOR MIGHTY AVENGER #1: I sold out before I had a chance to read this (more copies on their way this week), but I do have to say that on the flip test it looked GREAT. I strongly don’t think, however, movie or not, that the market can support all of the Thor comics (or Iron Man, for that matter) that Marvel keeps trying to cram out. INCOMPLETE
VENGEANCE OF MOON KNIGHT #10: WTF? Ryp? Drawing Marvel comics? Wow, that’s a big poach from Avatar…! This isn’t much what I want to see him drawing (it is kind of the opposite of subversive), but MK hasn’t looked THIS distinct since the Sienkiewicz days. VERY GOOD for the art; EH for the story… average it out to a high OK?
X-MEN #1: Oh, vampires! How we love you! Well, no, not really, and I really don’t think the market needs Yet Another Ongoing x-title, especially one launching into Yet Another Event (when the previous one hasn’t even quite ended yet); my customers have sort of rejected this – I only had 4 preorders for this new title (even lowly X-Force has like 17), and the rack sales weren’t even close to what I wanted them to be for week #1. Thank god for FOC! I thought this was no more than OK, and that not what the market needs right now…
X-WOMEN #1: I love how every woman that Milo Manara draws looks constantly like they’re orgasming, all the time. No, I actually do. But, honestly, he’s wasted on softcore like this – everytime I turned the page I wanted to see Kitty jam her tongue down Storm’s throat while Psylocke stuffed something up her own ass. What? Stop looking at me like that! It’s not that I want to see that, but when it’s Manara, what else can you expect? This is probably going to fuck up a whole lot of kids who stumble across it… and maybe even a few adults. EXCELLENT art, AWFUL story… but it looks so good, I have to call it GOOD.
Well, that’s what I thought at least; what did YOU think?
Thanks for those who patiently kept trying to get our podcast on Itunes after I screwed things up. Things should be much better with, you know, people being able to actually download the podcasts and stuff, and now they have their original air dates (kinda) . Man, the hijinks that ensue if you put your Itunes rss identifier on line three instead of line two...
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