But Before I Kill You...

Catching Up With 2009

2010-05-23T22:47:00.004+08:00

Children of the Sea vol. 1 (Daisuke Igarashi)
In many cases, boring shit drawn beautifully is still boring shit (and this is still all I have to say about Crumb's Genesis). This is one of those annoying little exceptions, where Daisuke Igarashi's uncanny way of capturing certain sublime moments and feelings, and also his ability to draw sea animals really fucking well, is so closely linked to the story (or lack thereof) that you sometimes find yourself not really caring that nothing actually happens. The mystery with the swimming kids and gathering fish only works because we're forced to experience the senses of intimidating wonder and lonely vastness that the sea evokes. But the art by itself, the infinity and eternity of the ocean breathtakingly put together yet ironically composed of linework that possesses an almost child-like energy, wouldn't be able to stand on its own either, not without a literal mystery to anchor the abstract one that's visually presented. That's really all the not-much-of-a-plot accomplishes - being loose and flighty (a book about the magic of the sea was never going to be busy or frantic) while still, you know, existing. You might get a bit bored with this one. Just remember to keep looking at the pictures, yo.

SIDE NOTE: I don't know if you've ever played handball, but fuck me the handball bits in this book were wonderful stuff. Perfectly composed, recreating the flying, the little pause; that's EXACTLY how it feels!

Remake (Lamar Abrams)
So Remake is funny, and it stays funny. God knows that's a lot to ask for, because it's not an easy thing to pull off. It's meta and referential without being unoriginal, without trying too hard to have a laugh at Those Silly Superheroes. It's playfully contrived and fuels itself, running and leaping, ON TO THE NEXT STRIP. But it's arrogant and smarmy enough not to be annoyingly cutesy. Nicely balanced, consistently funny.

One thing, though. Remake is only as funny as the sum of its jokes. There's not much substance. The noncommittal superficiality kills any potential investment you could otherwise make, and the craft on display isn't anything that'll make you sit up, beyond the limited novelty of watching Lamar Abrams slowly become more comfortable as he breaks out of the rigid twelve-panel grid he initially imposes on himself. Even then I'm slightly dubious about whether he uses all that freedom to his advantage; the twelve panel per page thing was an Ain't Broke if I ever saw one.

It's all handily summarised by the final page. Max Guy''s floating head, eyes and mouth agape with the same cocky happiness and self-satisfaction that he gives off throughout the book. He's laughing at you, and he says THANKS FOR READING! Yeah, you've finished reading, it was pretty funny, you can move on now.

You Are There (Jacques Tardi, Jean-Claude Forest)
Something this surreal shouldn't feel this unforced. The setup is quirky enough - a large estate of land divvied up between a bunch of wealthy, inbred families, the territories subdivided by a network of walls and gates, which are themselves owned by Arthur There, our bumbling, expository dialogue-laden, bowler hat-clad protagonist. I suppose the book is supposed to be about the legal issues surrounding There's attempts at reclaiming the land which his precious walls enclose, but it's really not. It's not really about anything; there's some wishy-washy political stuff and a subplot involving a dubious romance with a deadpan sex-crazed girl who bounces around between the hallucinations of different characters, but You Are There is written to be odd for the sake of being odd.

And so I never really dove into it. The dialogue is delightful - long and rambly, idiosyncratic rather than overwrought, and conversations are more like two concurrent circular monologues than any sort of verbal interaction. Takes a bit of getting used to, especially at the beginning, when you're trying to figure out what's going on and how to approach it. It's lovely to read, and at first appears to be a stylistic complement of the main story.

It's not all in the dialogue, though. How do you keep up with a script this absurd? The answer is exactly like this. Tardi is a monster here, catching you off-guard almost as often as the dialogue does, sometimes at the same time. He maximises the surrealism, he complements and improves, but never in an intrusive or loud way. The groundwork is excellent, the imagery fucking rock solid - Tardi's got such a control of not just the page but individual panels that it sticks in your head. Arthur There, hapless, lanky Arthur There, face elongated in slight bemusement, scuttling along the walls, a spider's web of walls that stretches in different directions beyond the panel borders and into forever, and a small flock of birds is invariably flapping apologetically away. It's this, the full realisation of the core concept of the book and the tight pacing which renders it static enough to be plastered onto your brain, that Tardi uses as a springboard to get away with the surreal stuff, yer big-boned, nude women on precariously-balanced beds, yer small-headed scissor-men, yer slowly-sinking grocer ships. The boss foundation on You Are There, the mise-en-scene, if you will, suspends your disbelief effectively by being rigid and controlled. The absurdist stuff on top of that is Tardi stretching that suspension. He's testing your limits.

The whimsy, the stylistic touches, all very well done. And all in service of the story, yes?

It depends how much you want to commit. The way I read it (and like all great comics, you can approach this in whatever fashion you like), You Are There isn't a kind-of-linear narrative with surreal trappings, as much as it pretends to be. It's the other way round. A 163-page excuse to be really fucking odd, with the barest semblance of a story thrown in as a sideways feint. There's an undeniable energy to the absurdist experience, but it's a distant energy. Very measured, very French, and very, very good.

It's Been A While, We Still Cool?

2010-05-05T23:07:00.005+08:00

Hello all. It's been forever! I've got lots of excuses you don't want to hear, and promises I probably won't end up keeping (it's kind of a tradition on this blog that I never write about things I say I'm going to write about - some things sound better in my head than in words). Anyway, a couple of recent comics from Kieron Gillen's Marvel work, hopefully with more of the same to follow (though it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to bring myself to read his Thor - fantastically underwhelmed by the preview art I've seen so far). Or perhaps something completely different. Who knows.

The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange (Kieron Gillen, Frazer Irving)

Sure, there are a couple of other stories in this, but the Gillen-Irving tale is the clear focus. And it's also the least forgettable. The others - Peter Milligan's story is undone by flat characterisation and it quickly stumbles into an ending that's as awkward as it is unearned, and Frank Brunner is stuck in a Englehart-esque style (and an inability to draw people holding chopsticks) that doesn't go beyond the brooding broody people who are sad about stuff and who have jagged flares around them when they get angry; Ted McKeever is a hugely dynamic artist who would really benefit from cleaner scripting and CLARITY (which was what his story was about, yes?); and Mike Carey has, at the end, a Marcos Martin-illustrated prose story, which, well, does anyone actually read these things?

So, anyway. This one-shot is part of Marvel's 70s throwback thing, where they pick a character, commission three stories of descending length and a prose thing at the end, double the page count, and black-and-white the fucker. Also required: consistently shitty cover design. Several different fonts, of varying colours and sizes, plus a text logo that's historically tied to the character concerned, all meant to convey a sense of oldness and nostalgia, and that's fine. The cover art that completely about-faces in terms of tone, though? Not so much. This Doctor Strange one is dark and murky and pretty boring. Strange is posed in kind of an awkward position, like he jumped from a high place and landed and one of his knees kind of gave way suddenly, and he's shooting lightning at the ground, I guess? The combination of the loud, blocky, 60s DOCTOR STRANGE logo and this shadowy, photorealistic stuff is stupid schizo bullshit, like they couldn't decide what to imply about the comic with the cover. That said, there isn't much 70s Marvel pulp in here at all, actually, unless you're defining "pulp" and "black and white".

Fuck, did I get carried away again?

The Cure! The name of the Gillen-Irving story that's ostensibly about saving the world, an open-ended question about whether the standard crutch of the superhero genre - preserving the status quo - is a good thing. It's not a dangerously new concept - since Ellis's Authority (or Watchmen, if you like), creators have toyed with this idea on and off. So of course Gillen presents it all a bit differently. Doctor Strange despairs as he marvels at how sucky the human race remains despite all his actions to protect it. And then there's his foil, the Doktor, who does change the world, but, as we see, means and ends are disparate, and are treated as such. Strange eventually derails the Doktor's plan, of course - the trope is Law - but only when he sees that the changes the Doktor has made couldn't sustain the initially good (um, morally, that is, and relatively, at that) effects that resulted. Doctor Strange only decided to act when he saw that the hippie flower-giving stuff was happening alongside gunned-down civilians. And that's the important thing. Not that he heroically Took Action, but that he considered not doing anything.

Gillen's dealt with this kind of morality struggle thing before in his Marvel work (and I'm mostly thinking of his Beta Ray Bill here). Writers sticking with themes that fascinate them, and continually exploring them from new places, is generally a good thing. In Beta Ray Bill it was an array of contradictory moral absolutes, clashing and space-exploding the fuck out of each other until there was one left. The Cure, though, is more about what-ifs. Doctor Strange demonstrates very normal, very human behaviour, constantly questioning himself and his purpose. But he isn't exactly a creature of hesitation, though, is he? When he decides it's assbusting time, he doesn't fuck around, he doesn't stop short of saving the world because of some minor moral whimsy. Making deals with Mephisto isn't something he likes doing, but that was Strange being efficient, going right for the biggest hitter in the equation, and he only grimaces in a sort of mild shamefulness after the fact. The end confrontation moves so damn fast in contrast to the rest of the story, and that's because Strange has the saving the world thing down. He's got inadequacy issues some of the time, but that's because he can't see that being the Sorcerer Supreme is his adequacy.

Mephisto has a bit of rhetoric at the end about how he and Strange can work together or whatever, and on the surface that's a statement about Doctor Strange's willingness to get his hands dirty to accomplish his heroic ends blah blah something something blah. It's easily dismissable as a standard, snarky villain line, but in this context it's worth considering another way, since the two diverging constructs of morality - the Doktor's forceful idealism and Strange's we-choose-our-own-fucked-uppery - were both achieved with help from like the actual Devil. Which renders any interpretation of right and wrong redundant, and makes the story markedly different from Beta Ray Bill in that it's more an examination of moral relativism than absolutism.
And now: the art, perhaps. Irving's art here has a very subdued, half-remembered feel, as if we're Doctor Strange, flipping through old photographs. It's supposed to be pulpy B&W, being where it is, but there are plenty of greys here, and he's as rich and textured as he was on Seven Soldiers. It's not gimmicky, in other words, not the greyscale equals flashback formula. And for something so unsaturated it's got amazing depth and sharpness to it, of varying degrees. I am in love with the way he does Doctor Strange's magic stuff. It's got personality and colour in it, even though it doesn't. I've got to read this side-by-side with McCarthy's Doctor Strange when it all comes out.

The expressions, of course, are fucking amazing, and they're totally static. Irving's never been a choreographer as far as I can tell - his images stay with you. His characters don't have recycled faces, they have mannerisms. The Doktor, for instance. Completely thin-lipped and in control and the start, and as he loses it towards the end he gets more agitated until that climax where he gets pulled right into hell. You can see in the second half of the story the kind of awkward shapes his open mouth makes, like he's not used to stretching his mouth. Also he can totally pull off the acting. Check out how his Strange is noticeably exaggerating his usual facial expressions in that panel where he's kind of sort of lying to the Doktor.

I like to think this is going to signal the breaking of the Doctor Strange Curse. Loads of creators should have a go at him.

Siege: Loki (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Nathan Fairbairn)

This comic is about sexy immortal people making deals with each other, and Jamie McKelvie is wonderful at drawing sexy, sexy people. His Hela has presence; she's got poise and a haughty dignity about her, and she carries herself the way a goddess should. It's more than the amazing outfit. It's the way she's still and straight, the way she's always looking at the camera, right at you. She's sexy because she engages you.

Sexy sexy Loki. McKelvie draws him better than anyone else. He's got this Bill Kaulitz thing going on, totally androgynous, the thin cheekbones, the carefully-applied eyeliner we can see in the super close-ups, the painted nails. And his clothes! Damn! He's exactly as a god of mischief should be. Not tiresomely diabolical like he is on the cover, but kind of sultry and incubus-ish. He always looks sleek and clean and perfectly held together. His first outfit especially. It looks like it was Viking Week in a fashion magazine, it looks great on him without losing sight of the fact that a big dirty swarthy guy with an axe and a boat might wear something with a similar design.

He's a Thor villain. His archenemy is the alpha male of the Marvel Universe, a big blonde guy with a big chest and an unsubtle lightning hammer and a kickass red cape. He shouldn't feel threatened by a cackling stereotype in a cape. He should feel threatened by this guy. This Loki, who can make him feel insecure by just reeking of sexy. The omega male, self-assured and thin and pale. Loki never really worked as a woman.

McKelvie's Loki is Grant Morrison's glam-Joker realised.

The Reviewer Tried To Kill The Metal, But The Metal Gets Published Anyway

2010-02-21T19:14:00.003+08:00

Because I haven't been as much of a slave of the comics Internet as I used to be, I've missed loads of stuff. The most significant? Andrew Hickey's zinemag thingy, PEP!, featuring articles by the man himself, Sean Witzke, David Allison, Botswana Beast, and a handful of others. I'm about halfway through it, and I have found it balls-awesome so far. Give it a go, bro. It's not to be missed, sis.

Detroit Metal City vol. 1:
So DMC is a pretty easy book, eh? Kiminori Wakasugi draws people well enough that you know at a glance who the sweet indie pop people are and who the rape-obssessed death metal people are. And if you're not offended by the casual stereotyping then I suppose it makes DMC a smooth read. Big, loud interjections of abusive, offensive "adult" humour is dutifully accompanied by the art style adopting jagged edges, while the backgrounds disappear into abstracted, angrily scrawled lines. The guilty pleasure kind of humour's pretty easy too. It's crude, misogynistic, and flagged by lots and lots of naughty-type words.

That's not totally accurate, though. The humour comes more from how sudden and over-the-top the vulgarity happens, and it sometimes works. The occasional satirisation of death metal culture tends to work, too, as do the socially inept Soichi Negishi's inappropriate lapses into his DMC frontman alter ego. Your mileage is going to vary. Your response to at least a couple of scenes is going to be "ooh-kay..." You're playing with your kindly old neighbour's nipples while he's remarking that you're pretty lively with your young friends. Ooh-kay... It's an exclusively humour comic book, so it's hugely hit-or-miss. There are jokes! Some are funny! We laugh!

But for the most part, DMC being really easy also means it's kind of childishly dumb. First you have the recap in every single chapter. "But in my alter ago... I am Krauser II... GOD OF DEATH METAL!" or some variant invariably appears, painfully written and so in-your-face it might as well have been done by Stan Lee. Why? Why the fuck do we need that? I mean, it's a serialised manga, sure, but if twelve-chapter collections are how you're going to publish it, it gets very anal very fast. And it's a biiig problem for DMC. The same jokes in different situations every chapter can be decidedly unfunny, as can the ridiculous idea of tension Wakasugi tries to milk from scenes choked with instances of Soichi trying to prevent his cool indie pop friends from finding out he's secretly a death metal singer. It's like that one episode of every single bad sitcom you've ever seen where one character is keeping a secret from another character and it just builds up and builds up in lame situation after lame situation until THE BIG REVEAL where everyone learns morals about trust and shit. It's an inherently cliched and stupid idea that DMC uses all the time, except there's no reveal! There's no real development in plot beyond the death metal shit that nobody takes seriously anyway.

While the people in DMC look good, they rarely seem comfortable in relation to other people or their surroundings. Poses are awkward and sometimes perspective in inconsistent or a bit off, which would be off-putting in a book with a different tone. But shock-and-revulsion moments are characterised by jarring transitions into panels with odd, stilted staging. It's strangely effective, intentional or not.

What do we got? DMC is a silly little sitcom that isn't totally sure of it's target readership. It's funny and well put together, and it's not. Mostly not, but maybe you like rape jokes more than I do.

Thinking Too Much About A Children's Comic, Possibly About Batman Also

2010-01-26T02:00:00.002+08:00

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #13:
"Gotham City needs a Batman." It's a line that's repeated over and over through this comic like a religious mantra.

The Batman of the Brave and the Bold universe (and I suppose the cartoon as well) is the streamlined, look-out-crime-here-comes-the-Caped-Crusader version of Batman. Uncomplicated, square-jawed, universally respected, always with a smile on his face. The series is basically team-up after team-up with a hero of the week joining forces with Batman to defeat a villain of the week, with a punch, a pun, and Bat-ingenuity. Light and tight kid's comics. This issue is payoff from all those team-ups, with an array of heroes who Bats has presumably aided in the past all deciding to "become" the Batman that Gotham needs when they (and all of the city's criminal types) hear about the Bat's broken leg.

It's especially interesting, though, how the comic turns into a statement about Batman and the way he works. Throughout the issue the recurring theme is how Batman lets his reputation do his work for him. When news spreads among Gotham's criminal underworld about his injury, Batman loses a major psychological battle. The array of screens in the Batcave tell the rest of the story - Gotham's gone totally fucking bananas with criminal opportunity. And you can feel it in the air, too. Everyone knows the crimewave isn't a succession of organised hits. The newspapers everywhere immediately link it to lack-of-Bats. And so the heroes from neighbouring cities hear about this explosion of crime, and, knowing the cause of the problem, rush to help.

But they're all believers. Gotham City doesn't need a protector or a crimefighter. Gotham City needs a Batman. Plastic Man, Aquaman, Captain Marvel, they all know it. With the exception of Green Arrow, all the heroes punch six thousand weight classes higher than Batman, power-wise. But they all dress as him anyway, because holy shit, people are more afraid of Batman then they are of bulletproof superhumans. Notice how this is thematically emphasised in the comic. Individually, dressed as Batman, the four heroes foil crime across Gotham with relative ease. Then the Joker comes along with a big explosion, and all four of them arrive on the scene, and lose. It's implied that the Joker can see through their diguises (he recognises the real Batman right away when he shows up later), and at that moment they all stop being Batman. They're Green Arrow and Plastic Man again. And that's why the Joker beats them. Because the Joker only loses to Batman. And finally - the masterstroke - Batman shows up for real, and defeats the Joker by doing nothing much at all (one punch!). He won by showing up. As soon as the Joker knew he was back, his reputation did the rest.

Batman wields that mega rock star power like a mace. That's his crutch, his way of extending his monolithic shadow across the whole city. And it is a singular shadow. The moral at the end helpfully reminds us that "there can only be one Batman", because the kind of inhuman influence he swings around can't be seen to be shared. It would ruin his mystique, make him seem less of a force of nature, etc. And Sholly Fisch is keen to show that Batman isn't really a regular person. Bruce Wayne never shows up in Brave and the Bold. We're led to believe that Batman built the exo-skeleton for his broken leg by himself. And he spends a weekend in a quaint hillside place away from Gotham, and it's for a meeting of mystery analysts! You can believe that this is the kind of person who a bunch of powerful superhumans honestly believe does what they do better than them, even when he's doing very little at all.

Next week, it's Grant Morrison back on Batman and Robin. With Cameron Stewart. It is going to be great, and a terrific excuse for me to write about Batman even more. Batman! I love writing about Batman.

The Ten Best Comics of 2009

2010-01-14T15:42:00.004+08:00

While you're here I will point you towards the real best of 09 list. Sandy over at I Love Rob Liefeld has put together the always interesting Meta-List for the best comics of the year. He's put an amazing amount of effort into it so go have a look. It's scientific! At the bottom there's also a huge list of other best of 09 lists from loads of comics internet people and that should make for good reading if you like best of the year lists as much as I do. And if you didn't catch it first time, last week I posted my list of the Best Superhero Comics of 2009.

Meanwhile! My list! The Best of the Year!

10) The Squirrel Machine (Hans Rickheit)
Hans Rickheit's story about the inventors and brothers Torpor is packed with the kind of haunting, disturbing imagery that stays with you for ages. It's all in the details, you see. The Squirrel Machine is meticulously rendered. The designs, like those of the complex musical instruments built around animal carcasses, are outlandish enough to be fascinatingly evocative, yet still functional-looking enough to have one foot firmly in the realms of plausibility, of what-ifs, to feel real enough to be horrifying. The mindboggling attention to detail doesn't establish an emotional tether between the work and the reader so much as serve as an invitation for exploration, because that's what the Squirrel Machine is about. The young brothers have permanent expressions of curiosity on their faces; their pursuit of art is really for the sake of pursuit itself. The art, meanwhile, brings no comfort, or perhaps the brothers simply don't let it. There's just exploration, often terrifying and so, so weird, of wherever Edmund finds himself waking, of the secret rooms within the house and the wild mess of stuff therein, of sex, of human relationships in general. Is that it? Does it even matter? The Squirrel Machine is a book that forces you to face it rather than passively observe, so that you can find out for yourself.

9) Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye (Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein)
Them haters'll tell you otherwise, but this was the best Morrison comic of the year. Nothing else had his authorial voice shine through as strongly; his rush of ideas spewing off the page, his deft characterisation, and his uncanny way of wrapping up a narrative, of convincing you, no matter how many hundreds of things are going on, that it all matters. Perfectly balanced, too: the cynicism about the futility of changing the system hits you just as hard as the careless optimism. There are the arguments for Final Crisis and the lovely first three issues of BatRob, of course, but those things all be damned: Seaguy had Cameron Stewart and with this miniseries he's proved that he can stand right next to Frank Quitely as the best thing to happen to Grant Morrison comics. His style is clear, very appealing, carefully detailed, and it makes Seaguy so easy - to understand, to love, to laugh at, to be quietly afraid of. Seaguy has got weird stuff in it, sure, but it's not just "weird". That word is dismissive and chucked around with annoying regularity as an excuse for not having an opinion. But fuck it - it's their loss. This is a fantastic comic.

8) Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Fumi Yoshinaga)
In this comic, seventy-five percent of the male population are killed off within eighty years by an incurable disease and the gender roles have more or less been reversed, with women taking on traditionally masculine roles like farming, and men becoming a valued resource in the babymaking department. But that's not really what the comic's about. It's a behind-the-silk-curtain story of the politics of Edo Palace, an 18th Century Japan costume drama about history, romance, and gender roles. It deals with the gender roles very subtly, weaving its commentary in and out of another plotline. And as you read further you slowly get the sense that despite sweeping changes that appear to have turned everything on its head, gender expectations haven't changed all that much. Yoshinaga's cartooning doesn't draw attention to itself; it's formally not very inventive, but there's a palpable attention to detail, and pacing that's tight enough to get the sometimes exposition-heavy plot across as effectively and unintrusively as possible. And, hey, I quite enjoyed the faux-medieval speech patterns, actually. I found they flowed very nicely and continually functioned as a reminder that the characters were using formal language as part of their upper class upbringing. It's great once you get used to it and there's plenty of room for wit and sharp back-and-forths. And, no, there really isn't any manporn in here.

7) Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter (Darwyn Cooke, assisted slightly by Donald Westlake)
And here we have the baddest, hardest book of the year. Darwyn Cooke's take on the classic crime character is as cold and spartan as the prose that inspired it, his skill with clear, precise storytelling gelling nicely with Richard Stark's succinct style. The book is awash with Cooke's expressive brush strokes, but they're in a sterile, dated, steely blue, and it's through these tinted lenses that we see Parker flicker between being a man and a machine. It's subtle, though - maybe the harsh, metallic streets of Cooke's 60s New York City really is obscuring our vision. When he walks down the bridge and through the city he's a force of nature, an undeniable, mechanical figure fueled by anger and nothing else. Then he looks in the mirror - at you! at me! - and we can see that it's a human anger. And after that it becomes backwards. Now he's got a human goal - revenge - but he himself cleans up and goes about it like an efficient, polished machine. And he sets about severing his emotional connections one by one until his objective becomes something as cold as the manner in which he goes about it. He becomes the objective. No more face in the mirror, just the hands driving the car into the distance. And they know exactly where they're going.

6) The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15 (Jeffrey Brown, C.F., Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, Tim Hensley, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, John Kerschbaum, Ted May, Will Sweeney, Matt Thurber, Jon Vermilyea, Dan Zettwoch, possibly Matt Groening also)
This. It astounds me how this works. And yet it's so simple! You've got a gaggle of dangerously skilled cartoonists doing work-for-hire for a successful commercial property and they're all forced to draw their comics in a generally similar style. In terms of aesthetic design you'll never mistake the flowers in this anthology for anything other than the Simpsons. And despite this restriction (or maybe because of it?) the cartoonists bounce wildly around in the boxes they're given to produce Simpsons stories that are also unmistakeably theirs. It's worth noting that this is helped by the creators here all seeming exceedingly comfortable with the Simpsons not just in aesthetics but also in what we've come to expect from different members of the cast and from the tone of the series in general. But what am I going on about? It's simple, too - this is the real deal, and it's fucking funny.

5) Ball Peen Hammer (Adam Rapp, George O'Connor)

Sharp, brutal, subversive, there was not a look at a post-apocalyptic future this year quite as harsh as this. Post-apocalyptic, now there's a blanket term. This story has got a more specific timeframe. I'd describe it as after the apocalyptic event, long enough that people are used to what's happening, and just before things start to get better. What would that be? Slightly-pre-post-post-apocalyptic? Whatever. It's a very depressing thing to read, mostly because of an almost claustrophobic scale. Most of the book takes place in either of two small rooms, with four characters with interconnected stories, and hints dropped here and there about the world outside through the very smooth dialogue, and we wind up knowing not very much, but enough to be able to fill in the blanks ourselves, enough that we think we do. And these people, they're all there is. They've got no control over the shitstorm outside. They've just got each other, and their art, and they watch their art evolve and harden like it's got a survival instinct of its own and take them to places they would never go, because the post-apocalypticism isn't giving them a choice. That crippling sense of insignificance, that hopeless inevitability, it's slopped generously throughout the whole book, and it builds up. The silent scream gets louder. And the ending is that much more of a crushing blow for it.

4) Phonogram: The Singles Club (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson)

It took till the start of the second series for Phonogram to coalesce, for Gillen to focus his story, for McKelvie's art to look not just superbly competent but effortlessly pretty. And such! Focus! A single night in a club, and seven more or less related people. And it's the people that drive the comic, more so than the music or the magic, and it works because we know these people. The Gillen McKelvie unit tread on a carefully drawn line. The people we're introduced to come across as familiar; not stereotypical but alive - in their tastes in music, speech patterns, body language, fashion senses, decisions, dancing ability, everything. It resonates and engages and reminds us the things music can do to lift us up and fuck with our shit, in ways that make it timeless and dated at the same time. Let it dance with you. It'll be alright.

3) Asterios Polyp (David Mazzuccheli)

Read this any way you like. Mazzuccheli has created an entirely new graphic language in this single work and he's letting everyone in on it. It's extremely accessible. This is a comic that is going to be studied in classrooms and shit for its formal boundary-pushing. The choice of colour, the individual character designs right down to the fonts in their speech bubbles, the cartooning tricks that Mazzuccheli creates and begins to use as a visual shorthand within the covers of the book - it's all amazing. If "tour de force" means what I think it means, then Asterios Polyp qualifies. Probably nothing else this year has been so readable yet so endlessly fascinating, so rereadable, and examination of the art and the formal techniques end up being about how it works, how it appeals on such a broad level. Themes! Visual symbolism! If you want to read this sucker real close it's extremely rewarding, and as I said, you can do it however you wish. Me, I associate Asterios with Asterius, the mythical Greek minotaur, which makes sense since the book is structured similarly to a Greek tragedy. He's stuck in a dark labyrinth, you see, totally blind while pretending to be its master, with nothing to navigate with but the two horns - his ideas about strict universal duality. Of course, it's only by discovering the use of his third horn that he can truly be free. And that, my friends, is what Asterios Polyp is all about.

2) Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka (Naoki Urasawa, with a bit of help from Osamu Tezuka)

This thing is many things. It's a balls-of-steel attempt to reimagine the most popular and beloved creation of manga's most revered creator. It's a science fiction story with touches of horror dancing about the edges, a suspenseful detective mystery with a political subplot about the Iraq War running deep through it. It's social commentary that, not wholly originally, uses robots as a tool, with the old "what it means to be human" thing popping up here and there. It's all of these things and none of them. It's Atom crying in a diner. It's the killer robot playing his song as he explodes in the sky. Urasawa demonstrates why he's a master of suspenseful page-turners, while making use of every tool he can in his not inconsiderable visual vocabulary to make you feel, and all this without feeling like he's simply unloading his arsenal or crossing off cartooning tricks off a checklist. From moving sequences of robots hanging on to a semblance of the idea of family, to the chilling image of a teddy behind the president's shoulder, to the ferociously rendered jagged lines of the villain-without-a-face in the form of a surrealist tornado, nothing else this year hit me in the face this much and in these many ways.

1) Prison Pit Book One (Johnny Ryan)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland filtered through Johnny Ryan's electric brain and turned into a over-the-top drugtripping jizzpunching skullcracking brainmunching cocklicking bloodfest. In the third act our nameless hero utters the magic words, "I'm through fucking around", in the same way that other inhabitants of Wonderland did in the earlier chapters, and he becomes one of them. So did I. Prison Pit sucks you in but it never ever spits you back out. When I'm old and shitty and I look back at my teenage years, I'll be looking at Prison Pit and it'll be looking right back at me because it's gonna live forever.

The Best Superhero Comics of 2009

2010-01-05T01:10:00.002+08:00

You know, Best Of lists are harder to make than I thought. It's fairly easy, I suppose, to objectively say "this comic is better than that comic", but when you've got a list of a dozen that you really liked and you're supposed to rank them in order of best-ness, it becomes a little tougher. Still, I can't complain too much. I was thinking today of other personal Best of 09 stuff - music and movies and things - and I got to thinking about sandwiches. My favourite sandwich of the year is probably the one with tomatoes, cream cheese and crushed Pringles in it. Other sandwiches in the Best Of list, though... god, what a nightmare. Is a steak-and-cheese sandwich better than a sausage-and-fried-egg sandwich? If you dip your sandwich into two different sauces while you're eating, does that make them two different sandwiches? For now, comics will have to do. I'm going to have a different list for comics in general up soonish - once I catch up on several 09 comics I've yet to read. I like superhero comics, obviously, and I suppose it's not really their fault that lots of non-superhero stuff is better, so they get their own list. So, the twelve personal best superhero comics of 2009 that I have read:

12) War of Kings (Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier, others whose names I forget)
Marvel's other event comic ranks lowest on the list because it should be the minimum standard. It's textbook superhero stuff that can be described all around as "solid". From the DnA writing team we get a competent story with a couple of twists here and there, a big space epic with drama and explosions and even a change from the status quo, and from Paul Pelletier we've got flashy visuals with sharp storytelling and generally unexperimental but straightforward page layouts. War of Kings was good. Not spectacular at all, really, but it's a reminder of what other genre fare could and should be like.

11) Strange Tales #1 (Nick Bertozzi, Dash Shaw, Paul Pope, Nicholas Gurewitch, others)

This year Marvel tried the whole "let's get alt-comics creators to tell stories with our characters" thing and it didn't really go anywhere. This first issue was the best of the lot, with Bertozzi's MODOK story and Dash Shaw's Doctor Strange story standing out from the rest. It was an interesting experiment, this project. As an anthology it was bound to be hit-or-miss, and all the cartoonists went the gag route, which got old after a while. Personally it was great as a sampler for the work of cartoonists who I might not have heard of otherwise, and I liked more stories than I hated.

10) Final Crisis (Grant Morrison, J.G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, many others)Hugely divisive event comic that finished up and was collected into a nice hardcover this year. People didn't hate this for nothing. It got really confusing at parts, sometimes stretched itself way too thin, sometimes went all over the place for no real reason. But despite all that it was slowly terrifying in the first half and uplifting in the second and impossibly epic all round. Some people have made the argument that the inconsistent art matches the changing tone of the series as it progresses, but the middle bits of Final Crisis, where you've got like ten artists on a single issue or something, were horribly rushed and downright messy at times, and it's a shaky argument at best. Still, Mahnke and Jones, the two main guys, made it work as best they could, which was immensely helpful at the times when Morrison's ideas seemed overwhelming. A deeply flawed masterwork that's endlessly inventive and demands rereads (note to self: reread). This might have ranked higher if more issues had come out this year, though.

9) Captain Britain and MI:13 (Paul Cornell, Leonard Kirk, a couple of others) A neat little comic, cancelled before its time, quietly subverting your regular loud adventure-superhero team comic as it went with a sort of, well, Britishness, I suppose. I liked this. It reinvented the formulaic superhero monthly, getting better at it with every storyline. Generally believable cast of characters, above average pencils, this thing managed to be really good while still feeling like a conventional superhero story that wasn't trying to draw attention to itself.

8) M.O.D.O.K. Reign Delay (Ryan Dunlavey)

There's really something about MODOK's design, isn't there? Ridiculous enough to make for easy comedy, at the same time being menacing enough that he can at least pretend to be half-serious. But MODOK doesn't carry a joke all by himself. Ryan Dunlavey has got a fantastic ear for dialogue flow and he's a great comedy cartoonist. At thirty pages long I never found this comic unfunny. Not a comic that has much to say, but in this instance the gags stand up by themselves.

7) Batwoman in Detective Comics (Greg Rucka, J.H. Williams III, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein) God, what to say? The story itself is a bit questionable and very very standard. You've got themes of duality and struggles to balance a double life and religious death cults and even a long lost twin. Some of it doesn't make sense all that much if you haven't read 52. Of course, it does get better with the more compressed origin story, and Greg Rucka's never been any real slouch when it comes to character back-and-forths. Still, JHW3 and Dave Stewart are the stars here. It's not just that it's the most beautiful superhero comic art that I have ever seen. The art pair makes the fairly okay story better than it actually is, loads every page with thematic meaning and formally genius layouts, and effortlessly switch styles in direct service to the story, sometimes for wildly dramatic effect on the same single page. I do think that the gorgeous art has prevented people from seeing how average the story really is. But there's no getting round the fact that it is top stuff in terms of art and comics-making in general and if nothing else you should read it just so you can say you did. It's not a perfect superhero comic, but it's very very important.

6) Jonah Hex #50 (Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Darwyn Cooke, the guy who did the letters)This thing got to me. Gray and Palmiotti turned in a streamlined Western story, great genre stuff with emotions tucked into every corner, and Darwyn Cooke slapped us in the face with it. Cooke's skill as a cartoonist stems from his masterful storytelling, and this time he's left his usual heavy inks behind in service of the story given to him. The switches from high-adventure thrills to comedy to elements of horror all culminated in a powerful ending, controlled tightly by Darwyn Cooke's pacing. Maybe I am a sucker for powerful endings. This is very possible.

5) Dark Avengers: Ares (Kieron Gillen, Manuel Garcia, others)This year was the year of Kieron Gillen making fresh character examinations using "the awesome" and bombastic high concepts as a springboard, as he landed Marvel gigs all over the place. This three issue miniseries, though, was the best superhero comic he wrote all year long. The story made Ares a fully realised character in a hugely entertaining fashion, while standing on its own as a strong story with a very rewarding payoff at the end. Ares has always been about the balance of traditional Greek mythological ideas of warfare and big budget action movie military superviolence, and the two worlds were continually brought into thematic conflict here, and though it seemed hidden by the armour of snappy one-liners and excellent monologues, the surface elements more often than not pushed the story forward. Art was moody, dirty and rough, suitably badass. If you're trade-waiting for this it's going to be collected with the not-as-good-at-all Oeming miniseries, more's the pity.

4) Strange Adventures in Wednesday Comics (Paul Pope, Jose Villarrubia, Lovern Kindzierski) Delightfully metaphysical take on Adam Strange and the whole man of two worlds thing. Story and dialogue were very retro, as a sort of homage to comic strips and the pulp heroes of yesteryear. And it had that in common with the Kamandi strip from the same comic, which I was considering for this spot too. Kamandi isn't here, though. Ryan Sook had luscious and grand art on it, but Paul Pope on Strange was electric. The exploration of the man-of-two-worlds thing would be fascinating to read on its own if it also weren't so bloody fun to look at. His line, his designs, his staging on Rann, all crackle with this manic energy that's a fantastic thing to experience at the experimental newspaper size.

3) Dark Reign: Zodiac (Joe Casey, Nathan Fox, Jose Villarrubia)This was the best thing to come out this year with the words "Dark Reign" on it, because it used the same concept that the whole Marvel universe was dicking around with - evil person is now in a position of power as basically head of security for the country - and took it in a fresh direction. A sort of post-Dark Knight comic, in the sense that it features a charismatic, scary new villain who wants to shake up the existing system to create chaos. It's enjoyable reading. A sort of decadent enjoyment though. It's all about "no, see, these are the bad guys" and it's very satisfying to just see the Zodiac gang let loose and rip through shit, totally embracing their supervillainous identity. And Joe Casey has got the chops to nail Zodiac's dialogue, well enough to justify other characters being enamoured by his personality. Artwise, Nathan Fox explodes with energy and make it feel chaotic, in ways that sometimes makes the story difficult to follow, especially if you dislike Paul Pope-style art. Like Pope, Nathan Fox's lines are almost frantic, but he draws his people ugly, always slightly misshapen, even the usually square-jawed heroes, so you know that this is Zodiac's world. This is supervillainy.

2) "3 Jacks" from Daredevil #500 (Ann Nocenti, David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth, Letters Guy)

With this story Nocenti and Aja have exploited just about all the meaning and visual metaphors you can get from the "man dresses up as devil to do good" thing. I mean that in a good way! This 13-pager is dense stuff. Character stuff, too, but not your regular Daredevil "oh noes I am blind however shall I win" stuff. Daredevil doesn't have much of a personality at all in this story, other than his perseverance. It's more about the two side characters watching him fight Bullseye, and we see how they represent two different aspects of his character (and they represent... his parents? Really? I don't know what Daredevil's parents are like). You know what? I'll admit to not really knowing how this story works. On me. It's probably Aja; his panel layouts and compisition are killer. That page with the lie-detector trick was very moving stuff. It's good because it's so tightly scripted and layered with meaning and everything clicks into place by the end of the story. Plus David Aja apes Mazzuccheli a little in terms of style so the story takes on a timeless quality.

1) Batman and Robin #1-3 (Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Alex Sinclair, others)My favourite Batman story ever made. In the main Batman series, before this, Morrison methodically took Batman apart, and these three issues put the Batman concept back together. Remarkably simple - old Robin is new Batman, old Batman's son is new Robin. The handover was an excuse for Morrison to take Bats way into the past. This is Silver Age energy at its most crazy and creative, tinged with forboding nu-hurror. And, for a Morrison comic, really really light. The action scenes are prominent parts of each issue, and they work as prominent parts of each issue because Frank Quitely is unparalleled at executing action and capturing the perfect "pregnant moment" where you can work with it, fill in blanks. And his style does seem really static when you look at individual panels, but with his choice of layout (I'm thinking of that fantastic splash page from issue 2, as a particular example) lets the action flow organically. It's beautiful. And Quitely gets to let loose and just come up with these insane Batmobile designs and iconic new Bat-rogues and - dear God - sound effects as art. Read this how you want - slow, fast, whatever. That Morrison-Quitely magic doesn't discriminate.

Because We All Need A Little Christmas Cheer

2009-12-27T21:19:00.001+08:00

Ball Peen Hammer:"That character on the cover is not holding a Ball-Peen Hammer. Should this book have been called "Lead Pipe" instead?" asks the first commenter on this page, with a smiley emoticon, the smug bastard. I'm pretty sure I Laugh-Out-Louded at the time.

I probably don't really like that guy, because, you know, it's not exactly the Done Thing to hop onto Newsarama, fireworks jammed up your arse, bend over and drop your pants, screaming "LOOK AT MEEEEE EVERYONE", doing a little Gollum-dance. "Ah, you know what? Fuck that guy" is the usual reaction, because nobody likes a smartass, right?.

The smartass is half-right, though, which is always funny, and I mean a more casual, tripped-over-a-suitcase-of-cash kind of right. Ball Peen Hammer ends up being great because of how it's like that, but not really. There's no imagery? What? Your book is called Ball Peen Hammer and yet said resident of the toolbox is not a recurring motif? Not even on the cover? Not scattered subtly into background details? Reactions I've seen towards Ball Peen Hammer stem from expectations, from what people think their art should give them. And lo: Its minimalist approach to staging doesn't means it doesn't need to be a comic. There's no optimism. We're not told everything about the story, which undermines characterisation. We're afraid we've seen this story before. And so on. Those weren't all criticisms, mind, and I'm only using them to illustrate the general trend of how people react to this one thing. What these points have in common is that they're applied based on experience of Something Else.

Ball Peen Hammer is Something Else, but, you know. Different. A post-apocalyptic disease story about survivors and violence, but not really. It's about how art can be simple and perfect inside an escapist underground tunnel and how it can evolve after the world goes to hell, into something mechanical and ritualised. Art in Ball Peen Hammer survives and becomes more brutal as a mirror to surrounding events, the particular details of which, Adam Rapp seems to be telling us, are pretty inconsequential. What happens outside of the two major stage sets of the story is Something Else, and we already know what's happening, don't we? A couple of throwaway lines of dialogue are all we really need. The focus is pulled right onto our survivors, in their respective little corners of disturbed hell. And it's about them, living as they feel the effects of their art changing. The art develops a survival instinct of its own. It's no longer something as spontaneous as careless, unprotected sex. That kind of art has died with the advance of the disease. There are no new songs to play, no new words to type. It's become rigid and cold and systematic, with a bit of child-murdering for good measure. And after a while everything starts to sound the same. "The Fellowship". "The Syndicate". One group is mentioned only in brief flashbacks, but they each represent an idea (once again because we're given casual references to Something Else) and then it's all subverted again because the ideas aren't really that far apart, even though that's what we may like to think.

The people in Ball Peen Hammer are insignificant in the grander scale of events; they're not even trying to find a cure or anything. They meet each other, in pairs, talk a little, and die. Ball Peen Hammer works beyond that because it creates the illusion of significance. By showing us how the two pairs of people are connected in the smallest of ways, we're fooled, on the first read at least, into thinking there's something more, that the story is something bigger than it is. The four characters are intertwined, mostly with help from the looming, mysterious Fellowship, and it's so fucking subtle how it's done. The silent, bald, fat guy with the black shades is such a fantastic plot device. George O'Connor was ace at nailing his posture to emphasise his stealth despite his size, in an almost comical way. It all builds up wonderfully, leading to that crushing revelation at the end. The paper stays blank.

And I can't believe there was no correspondence between the two collaborators. Motherfucker! Isn't that surprising? It's not just me, right? It's great! The rough, wobbly lines work great in creating this sense of hopelessness that hangs over the entire book, and they've got a deceptively fluid feel to them; the motion in the pencils feels as natural as the dialogue. The art lends itself so well to natural character interaction that it's hard to see how the book would work without them. There's great staging, too, but I'm guessing that might have more to do with Rapp's detailed script. The bleak outside world is all O'Connor, though, and the rain lashing out at buildings that seem to be huddled together in fear. We don't see much outside of the building, but when we do, it's enough, and our imagination is allowed to fill in the rest. In the same way, most of the violence is either implied or psychological. We're kept hooked by very strong storytelling.

I really liked Ball Peen Hammer. It skilfully worms its way past your defences and then beats the shit out of you. The last handful of pages were beautiful and heartwrenching and superbly done. Read it. Let go of your expectations and let it take you away. It's worth it.

And The Luggage Is Still Empty

2009-12-15T01:28:00.000+08:00

I'll be on a week-long holiday starting tomorrow, so content will pretty much be dead till Christmas. Meanwhile, reviews of last week's comics, to tide you over. But you guys have better things to do than read strange comics blogs during the best time of the year. You do, right?

Daytripper #1: I dunno, I kind of really liked this. Seems to me like the point was to have a complete story in one issue. It was well-told, with good dialogue, and a smart, wry twist at the end finished everything nicely. I found it intensely satisfying in that sense, and I suppose it's worth more as a full $2.99 comic than the usual Vertigo deal of first-issue-one-buck, because it doesn't have a hook that makes you want to come back for more because of investment in the story. True, there's not a whole lot of depth beyond the already obvious, but that didn't mean it wasn't a single, capable story by itself.

Also, it resonated. Emotionally, I mean. And I suspect this had to do with the brothers Ba and Moon (sorry but I'm really lazy with the little letter-symbols) being capable of very beautiful art. They're ably assisted by Dave Stewart, who's pretty much the best colourist around. So my enjoyment came from the fact that the art made me feel more inclined to emotionally invest in the comic and the world it was presenting to me.

For all I care, Daytripper could be nine other issues of the same mold as this: ordinary person experiences extraordinary revelations, dies. And I would still get it, if it means Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are continuing to deliver with lovely, striking visuals. Top stuff.

Punishermax #2: Steve Dillon is fucking magic with the Kingpin's eyes here. They work incredibly well throughout the issue as a sort of continuity device for the Kingpin. They work by themselves; the almost excited eyes he had as a kid and the terrifically savage ones he's got in the prison gangrape bit are each works of subtle excellence in character work, but it's the perfect contrast that pulls it together. After the scene in prison, his eyes are narrowed almost to slits, cold and dead. Those are our anchors for the next page or so, and it's oddly insightful into the Kingpin's character to reread the comic just looking at his eyes, expressionless in the comic's Now, even while he's having sex. And it's funny how, in the Now, that is, he betrays the most emotion with his eyes when they're closed. On the first page you see him remembering his painful past while he's getting ready for the day ahead. He's steeling himself, you see. That's the human part of the Kingpin. He's got to become coldly superior every single day. And then when he gets back to his son, possibly the only person he's got any actual affection for, he softens again, ever so slightly.

Jason Aaron's doing magnificent things with reinventing the Kingpin, and it's even more rewarding when you realise how he's playing with the regular Marvel U Kingpin's story. But it's all Steve Dillon what makes it work.

S.W.O.R.D. #2: I don't have much to say about this comic since it's general feel is so smoothly consistent with the first issue. Kieron Gillen continues with the witty action-comedy that manages to actually keep being funny without collapsing under the weight of its own effort, as some comics of the same vein seem to invariably do because of the inability to juggle the funny bits and a meaty plot. Kieron Gillen, though, finds a balance, and pretty effectively establishes the seriousness of the situation in a later scene by sucking all the funny out of it. What remains is gravity and a clear sense of This Bidniss Be Serious. The infodump interludes with the alien nabbing panels also help maintain that balance. The computerised exposition is a more feasible counterweight to the banter in the rest of the issue than, say, Gyrich being fed a progress report by a flunky or something. The other thing I really liked this issue was the Noh-Varr scene at the beginning. The internal monologue was honestly the closest thing to Morrison I've ever seen for Noh-Varr. Less than fifty words of captions, perhaps, but his voice was fucking nailed. Also sweet for that scene: Steven Sanders raised his game for the facial expressions on Noh-Varr basically to Jamie McKelvie levels. The combination of expressions and choice angles for said expressions were very well done indeed, from casual determination to cool confidence to sharp alertness to snappy annoyance. That page and a half was great.

Other things. Steven Sanders gets to stretch his design muscles a bit, with the different kinds of new S.W.O.R.D. spacecraft, and old ones that he accurately draws from different angles. The continuity of design is goooood, and I forgot to mention the lovely bulksuits that S.W.O.R.D. guard personnel have last month. Dig those. He also gets to pimp Death's Head out with lots of sci-fi gadgets; the guy is bristling with nasty metal stuff, which makes him much more of a credible threat than someone who we're just told is Not Very Pleasant.

Last thing. Page ten, I think. It's wordless, and occurs just after Beast executes his plan to rile up Death's Head. Beast has a really big gun fired at him, and then the whole of page ten is reactionary, and it's the motherfucker. The sequential storytelling and use of the widescreen form is bloody excellent. First panel, energy beam is fired. Beast is cleverly drawed jumping away from us, into the page and out of our attention. Our eyes are on the beam, right, and then they immediately follow the beam right into the second panel, only things zoom out so we see the whole ship, and a neat shot of open space. Where the hole's been ruptured in the ship by the beam you can see little whitish blobs, but you don't even have to wonder about those because the path of the beam leads the eye right to it. Becuase the beam's already been seen to rip through the ship and continue along the same path, it automatically rips right through the bottom panel border, BAM, and we're in the third panel, abrupt cut to our heroes in the opposite direction, with air currents to demonstrate this. It's an ace example of showing how things happen really really fast, and in terms of single standalone comic book pages this is one of my favourite in recent memory.

The Unwritten #8: The appeal of The Unwritten has usually been in the accessability of its content despite the restrictions of its themes, like a high-horse lit comic about other old books BUT FOR EVERYONE. It lives quite comfortably in the empty corner designated for its own genre - part painfully patient mystery, part metapunk.

This issue is an interlude, and could probably be better described as Potterpunk. It's basically Carey and Gross asking readers if Pottermania is healthy for kids or not, whether it should be encouraged, how far a child's imagination should be nurtured and developed, etc. And while execution is important and Peter Gross is excellent with execution, giving Governor Chadron some of the best facial expressions in the series, boring shit executed well is still boring shit (and that's pretty much my review of Robert Crumb's Genesis right there). The continued attempts to make the Governor more than just a side character distract from the "hard hitting questions" we don't really need.

Also helps: the scene where his kid rams her finger into the eyesocket of another kid. That's the Potterpunk I'm talking about.

Platina Is Always Going To The Science Museum, Because She's Dead, You See

2009-12-09T14:50:00.003+08:00

Roman Dirge's Lenore: Noogies:
This is Roman Dirge's baby, a remastered edition of the first four issues of the original Lenore series, and it's basically a collection of gag strips, heavy on the macabre humour, mostly starring a cute little dead girl, Lenore, and her sadistic tendencies.

Because this is remastered and special and stuff, Roman Dirge has coloured it himself because according to the introduction he originally envisioned Lenore in colour and he didn't want to hire a colourist to do a "half-ass" job.

And I don't know. With an introduction like that you sort of expect something spectacular, you know? Dirge tells us how much effort and time it took to remaster these issues, and I can totally respect that, because I'd recently read a piece somewhere about the monstrous amount of work that went into making Absolute Watchmen look pretty, but maybe the introduction could have been done a bit more prudently. Put simply, I don't mind if an introduction to a book tells me about the effort that went into a book, but I get kind of iffy about it when said pimping is done by the guy who did the entire book. If you have an introduction by someone else, that's cool. Grant Morrison apparently loves the comics of Mark Waid and Geoff Johns and I don't agree with that (and I almost choked on something when I was reading a Johns-Morrison interview during which I'm at least thirty percent sure they were making out) but it's cool, because it's someone else dishing out the love. This introduction, a casual "oh, by the by, I worked really really hard on this because it's my baby" before you even read the first strip, is unfair, really. It makes you feel dirty if you happen to dislike the work. Either that or it makes you expect the work to be very fucking good.

So, yes, I had a point somewhere in there, and I was talking about the colouring, I believe. It does show that Roman Dirge does his own colouring, because there's a visible effort to preserve the original lines. That sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily; in Noogies, the purpose of the colouring is mainly for atmosphere. It's soft and is always secondary to the pencils and the story, but it helps make the tone that much darker than black-and-white because sometimes the content of the strip calls for a more textured atmosphere, and Roman Dirge does that blues-and-purples-y haunted house palette very skilfully.

While the colours can be dead on in select places, they are also just about redundant in other strips. One of my favourite uses of colouring is the Soylent Green strip in the first issue. It's an interlude-type thing, and there's a lot of negative space used for that whimsical, poetic feel. And Roman Dirge's murky colours go very very well with negative space. Unfortunately that strip is just about one-of-a-kind in Noogies. The rest of the colours look like they've been plonked down for the sake of colouring. It's amateurish stuff that can sometimes beef up the comedy value of the odd strip, but for the most part stands in the corner looking sheepish, existing only to draw attention from Dirge's brush strokes. His style isn't consistent and you can literally see him draw better as the book progresses, and sometimes the colours just cover up bits of that experience.

Some of the strips don't call for atmosphere, but the colours are lovingly rendered all over the place nonetheless, and more often than not it doesn't quite work. Lenore, as comic book art, would benefit from moderation in terms of colour. It would have been better served to hang on to the style used in Soylent Green, to bring focus to the figurework, and the wishy-washy colours could then be used for bold, dramatic atmospherics. Less is more, etc. I get that it's a labour of love, but the colouring isn't quite there yet. And I suppose it doesn't help that I'm not the biggest fan of the overtly digital colouring style.

Moving away from the colours, Roman Dirge is a fairly competent humourist and he has a good eye for staging things, and for comedic juxtaposition. He's good at the general, formulaic humour stuff, and it's a formula that works, so he holds the fuck onto it. The slightly surreal Burton-esque drawing style helps immensely to make his sense of humour very tangible and alive. His work has got tons of personality, which keeps things surprisingly light-hearted for a work that's about death and dead things and dark stuff.

It does sort of require you to have the same sense of humour as Roman Dirge to appreciate the book, though. It veers very dangerously towards a series of tasteless sight gags, with Roman Dirge's abilities as an artist reining things in a little. I'm assuming the goal of the gag strips are to have you laugh and then immediately feel guilty for laughing, because of the subject matter, a la Perry Bible Fellowship, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes Dirge's formula feels old and overused, sometimes the jokes are a bit tasteless even while trying not to be tasteless.

It's not for everyone, and it's probably a good comic for kids (I'm slowly starting to believe that all comics are good for kids). To be read slowly, in small doses, for maximum enjoyment, and do yourself a favour and skip the bloody introduction. If you're the sort of person who likes reading old Metal Men comics or Kubert-Kanigher war comics then I suppose that won't be a problem. I won't deny that this thing made me chuckle several times, and while not all the strips worked for me, you're going to find gems here and there. And I do think that Lenore would make an ace webcomic.

Apologery And Pimpery

2009-12-09T00:29:00.004+08:00

Hullo, all. I'm not dead, exactly, but I haven't been active for a combination of reasons, many of which happened one after another and all that time (two whole weeks!) went away faster than anything. I know I'm not really obliged to, but I sort of promised myself that I would update the blog semi-regularly, and I've failed in that regard recently.

Anyway, I promise, promise for real totally that barring any unforseen fuck-ups, I WILL be back, with or without a vengeance. I've got loads of half-written and not-written reviews on hand, so you'll either get them in a furious barrage or a pathetic trickle. We'll see how the rest of December pans out, eh?

In other stuff, because of the aforementioned reasons for Internet absence, I totally deserted the blog email and I missed this one thing in my mailbox from Patrick Wensink (MEGA apologies, Patrick!) that I got over a week ago. Basically, it's a colouring contest in conjunction with his new book, the prize for which is, among other things, an autographed copy of Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed To Thrizzle (I have one of those, of the non-autographed variety, and Jesus on a stick it is brilliant shit so to get a autographed copy for free is in no way anything to sniff at). Quote-fu commences thus:

Patrick Wensink recently decided there’s only one way to celebrate the release of his book, “Sex Dungeon for Sale!”. And that is by holding a coloring contest.

He had a series of illustrations created based on some of the book’s stories, including a Kindergartener who thinks he’s French, a puddle of ketchup shaped like Elvis and something called, “Chicken Soup for the Kidnapper’s Soul.”

While the coloring contest sounded like fun, Wensink added a little excitement by offering an autographed stack of his favorite books from 2009 to the winner.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle – by Michael Kupperman
Fool- By Christopher Moore
AM/PM – By Amelia Gray
Help! A Bear is Eating Me! – By Mykle Hansen

The contest ends December 14.
For all the details visit www.patrickwensink.com/randomness

End quote. I'm pretty much the furthest thing from the right person for this contest, being as I haven't coloured anything since the coloured pencil era of my pre-teen-hood, but I figured it's a cool thing, so I'm pointing any artistic types in that direction.

There are only five days till the end of the contest, which might be a bit too late for some busier people interested, but hopefully a few of you have both the skill and interest for the contest (maybe? I honestly don't know what sort of people read my blog anymore). As I said, it's a neat-o prize, so you have nothing to lose.

Good luck, and see you all very very soon, I hope.

Friday Night Fights - Sometimes You Gotta Go Out With A Batman

2009-11-27T21:46:00.000+08:00

And now I give you: Bat-kickery, courtesy of the double-footed team of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, from Batman #243:

Textbook stuff, Bats. Textbook.

And while Batman is always ready to teach, Spacebooger and the Furious Foot Crew will SCHOOL you.

Friday Night Fights - You Might Find The Jaw Is Pretty Fragile, Too

2009-11-20T22:13:00.001+08:00

I don't know how often I've mentioned my love for Iron Fist on the blog, but yeah. Soft spot in my heart right there.

Alone against a legion of HYDRA goons with automatic guns, and his only weapons are kicks to the face. Those are odds I can get behind.

This, of course, is the debut, the fresh revitalisation of the character. The Immortal Iron Fist #1, by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, art by the faaaaantastic David Aja.

Of course, in a whole other class, you've got the asskickers of the faaaaantastic (ooh, reference ahoy) like the assorted fighters assembled over at Spacebooger. It's the penultimate round, so check it out!

Addendum: I'll be away for a few days, so content will be slow, even slower than usual. I've got a Pluto review down the line somewhere, and reviews of several other notable releases to follow.

Those Hats With The Square Tops. I Don't Have One, But It's Their Fault

2009-11-18T04:23:00.002+08:00

Late reviews, for the third week in a row. This time the excuse is graduation. I can say with at least thirty percent certainty that it won't happen next week. Honest.

The Authority: The Lost Year Reader:Ah, I've heard about this. Morrison on The Authority always seemed like a good idea to me, and Wildstorm is being extremely cool by printing two comic books for the price of one. The first half is Grant Morrison writing human characters dangerously well, while the second half is Morrison pitching everyone's favourite finer-world superheroes into the world he's set up - ours, that is. And the second half gets the compression treatment. The characters are juggled around quickly and Morrison lets the readers fill in the gaps, in a way more reminescent of his JLA than the hit-or-miss way he did it in Final Crisis. It's a pretty agreeable storytelling technique, considering the subject matter. The Ellis issues aside, The Authority has always been a comic about presenting solutions to a problem and letting the reader decide how right they are. Makes sense that the pacing should likewise emphasise reader participation.

I liked it a bunch, and Gene Ha made it lovely to look at. These are a solid two issues, and while I kind of wish Morrison had continued, it really doesn't make much of a difference, because Morrison tends to recycle some of his ideas. I'm confident that his Authority will pop up sometime. Maybe it already has.

There's a two-page preview of the third issue, by Keith Giffen, who has proved himself to be able to make very good and very bad comics. It's dialogue-less, but I'm going to go ahead and advance review the entire issue anyway: high octane action, unnecessary tuff guy tone, totally missing the point.

Batman and Robin #6:
And here is the bad Morrison. There were funny bits, and it was readable in the most minimalist way, and the worst thing about it was the cover, because it let us see how good the comic could have been, i.e. sans Philip Tan. And Jonathan Glapion, because there in Batrob #6 there was one part where consistency was shot in the nuts and the colours were being put right onto the pencils or something to that effect, and it looked better than the rest of the book in places. It's incredibly lazy of me, but I can't really be bothered to put this comic under the microscope. The shitty art obscures the story, and I don't really know if it was any good.

I was silly for thinking that Grant Morrison would make Philip Tan and his Art of Death bearable. Bring on issue seven, and Cameron Stewart.

Green Lantern Corps #42:

You see this? Look at what this shit is. Hordes of unkillable zombies swarming Green Lantern headquarters and various colour-coded people in tights fight them off with their wishing rings of emotions. And lots of shit happens and there are vague, unexplained character tensions and there is ridiculous dialogue with awkward expressions and stupid, look-at-me-I'm-badass references to last stands and eeek someone dies but it's treated like its a big deal and he kills a bunch of zombies for permanent and aww you guys he wuvs his lantern buddies.

In short, not a GOOD comic, but it basically does all the things that the main Blackest Night series doesn't, and you know what that means? That means this is your fucking Blackest Night right here.

Funny that this issue is the forty-second. I first read Hitchhiker's when I was eleven, I think, and that bit about the universe self-destructing upon the discovery of its purpose always stuck. And the number, of course. That always gets me all existential about the universe. And it strikes me as really fucking pathetic that the universe, that universe, the comic book one, is being boiled down to that one splash page, the one in the centre of the comic, with the legions of dead people swarming robotically and mindlessly towards the light at the centre of the universe like lobotomised bees, and the people standing in their way being the rag-tag assembly of space cops with their bright coloured kiddie rings and their spunky personalities. It seems almost quaint like that, doesn't it, the perpetual cycle of crisis and we-resist-or-we-die reactions that that universe finds itself firmly lodged in. Wait a few issues - Hal fucking Jordan will save the day.

It sucks that that's all there is. Crisis, resolution, bigger crisis, bigger resolution; it's inane and predictable. The stakes are being raised so high it's starting to become laughable. I don't mind the idea of the multi-coloured rainbow-emo warriors, and the fact that the fundamental powers of the universe are categorised by whatever colours Geoff Johns associates his emotions with is quite amusing. But! This comic book, and Blackest Night as a whole, are working based on the idea that bigger threat equals better story. Hey, people liked when we chucked a bunch of yellow people at our heroes, so why not shove five more in there? And it's not like they can stop now; it's all going to get bigger, the snowball is going to keep rolling and one day we're going to have an impossibly huge evil bastard who destroys universes with his flatulence and one man, one man without fear is going to be alone in the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space, clothes ripping, battery depleting, supporting the giant willpower-cork in Evil Bastard's ass, and that man will be Hal Jordan, because the comic books tell me he's the fucking MAN.

And that's all there is.

Punishermax #1:

The only other Punisher story I've read is Welcome Back, Frank which was Garth Ennis's debut, I think. I bring it up because it had Steve Dillon on art, same as this one. Steve Dillon is a master at this stuff: the violence, the black comedy, the body language, the crisp and clear storytelling. It's all there, and I wanted to get out of the way how much I appreciated that.

Jason Aaron's tone seemed pretty similar to something Garth Ennis would write, but that was because of the art, I think. I don't have a good feel for Jason Aaron's narrative voice, so I can't say for certain. Still, when it comes to the Punisher, doing a terribly good Garth Ennis impression is never going to be a bad thing.

S.W.O.R.D. #1:

I wasn't completely sold on Steven Sanders's art, mostly because of his figures. They're sometimes cartoony and sometimes not, and that in itself is a flaw because a cartoony art style tends to demand a consistent feel. The result was some very energetic but slightly confusing art. I couldn't quite work out if Henry Peter Gyrich's head was made comically angular on purpose or not. Consistency aside, if the best criticism you can make of his art is HE BUTCHERED MY BLUE BEASTY BABY, then for shame, Internet. For shame.

Look at the commitment he's making to this project. Kieron Gillen has nailed the snappy, fast-paced storytelling required for a space superspy soft sci-fi story like this one. But Steven Sanders makes it work. Check out Beast's flying car, for example. See how the car is kind of bulky and awkward at first? See how it's got odd gaps to facilitate the eventual transformation? And when it does transform, look at how organic it is. The back of the car, with the boosters and shit, it folds. The parts of the rear bodywork slide over each other and the rocket thingies slide out. Look at how the roof of the car lifts and you can see that the thrusters and the engine that protrude occupy as much space as there is in the boot and you can see how it all fits back together. The wheels swivel around to be replaced with glowy bits, seemingly for no reason. But it looks impressive, and that pretty much what you need for soft sci-fi comics like this - for things to look like they work.

There's a phenomenal amount of work put into the details here and the fanboyish whining I've seen passed off as criticism is just lazy. Personally I'd have a go at the cover, because Beast's design is way different from the rest of the book, bordering on ugly, like the Sentry punched his nose into his face.

The Unwritten #7:

It's really something, this book. It's intriguing how Mike Carey can tell so large a story without telling us anything, and that he can keep the story interesting without telling us anything. The trick, of course, is keeping it down to earth. Lines like "you'll have to use your finger like everyone else" keep The Unwritten from the prissy, literary tone it veers so dangerously towards. The story is set now, and thats why people care. The characters are more or less given as much prominence as the unfolding mystery, and the central concept doesn't pat itself on the back.

So, yeah. The fact that this comic manages to not come across as pretentious high-brow bullshit is a testament to Mike Carey's ability, and the reason I keep getting it.

Friday Night Fights - Metal Is Bad For You, Children

2009-11-13T23:58:00.001+08:00

And we seem to be having a Nazi-kicking theme lately.

Don't forget to head over to Spacebooger, where fights aren't restricted to the nasty Nazis, to check out the other combatants - and vote!

This week's fight, from Atomic Robo: The Dogs of War #3 was by the fantastic one-two punch of Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo is a comic book everyone should be reading. It's so good it's not even funny (I lie - it's VERY funny).

Cannily Condensed Capsules

2009-11-10T22:40:00.000+08:00

Oh god these are so late. Quick, quick reviews, and hopefully I'll get right to the point.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #10: Done-in-one, fun little Bat-story. This series tends to stick close to the cartoon in terms of character design and the simple linework, but hot damn Eric Jones gets his style through all the same. Story's got an interesting hook, and the execution doesn't disappoint. GOOD COMIC AHOY.

Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #1:

"Everyone knows my story" is the line. The storytelling technique used is such it's meaning is turned around and it's true. So true. This is your modern take on the classic fairytale character and if you go for that sort of thing, the "ooh, aren't we terribly clever" touches that have become the hallmark of the Fables universe, then this comic is good material for a sampler, a Fables taste test. It reads like Fables, but with less characters, and less backstory. Easy to follow, and Chris Roberson's dialogue might be better than Willingham's, but I haven't read Fables for a while. If the central concept doesn't grab you immediately, you'll probably hate it. Art and story are both way too reliant on the main series. Shawn McManus has quirky little character designs, but he's trying too hard to ape Mark Buckingham or whoever the regular Fables artist is in terms of panel layouts and figure work. Be nice if he'd let his own style shine through more.

Secret Six #15:

Ostrander on Deadshot, so it's a novelty buy. He does one of those slow character issues he used to do on Suicide Squad, and it's a pretty thorough exploration of Deadshot's origins and character, though it feels pretty clunky in places. It feels like a serious attempt to oversimplify Deadshot's psychology as a killer, and some of the flashback bits fit a little too perfectly in that regard. It was also a bit underwhelming. All that happens is Deadshot telling a priest about his life in less time than it takes him to smoke half a cigarette. And while Ostrander keeps insisting how terribly important Deadshot's past is to his present condition, Deadshot's "cool" distance from his personal experience tends to undermine said importance. And the art was average superhero fare, which means I didn't like it.

Friday Night Fights - Must Have Been The Moustache

2009-11-06T23:21:00.002+08:00

There are few things as simple and pure as someone kicking Hitler in the face.

I think this is something everyone can agree on.

Ryan Choi certainly does, in The All-New Atom #14, by Gail Simone and Mike Norton.

And so, too, does Spacebooger, who knows you can fight fascism with feet in the face. And alliteration.

Jonathan Started It

2009-11-05T02:26:00.001+08:00

He totally did.

I SHOULD BE STUDYING

2009-11-03T20:13:00.003+08:00

A bit of housekeeping. The reviews of the week were delayed by a day because I've been otherwise occupied by the GCE O Levels (yes, I love my exams more than I love you, dear reader). And I'm also going to try and do NaNoWriMo for the first time, so that's going to drain a bit of my precious blogging time. I promise to have the weekly reviews and the Friday Night Fights up every week, though. If I can do more I will.

In the mean time, reviews! This week many authors were writing their pet characters, to varied results.

Blackest Night #4:Oh damn this had lots of weird shit in it. I usually use "weird shit" in the good way, but this time it's the bad way. For realz. It's the most thinly-veiled piece of absurd fan-fiction I have ever read. Not that fan-fiction is bad or anything (SPOILER WARNING: yes, it really is) but not when its shoddily disguised as a company-wide crossover thing that's supposed to matter.

As a story, Blackest Night falls apart. I don't know if I'm being naive when I say this, but I can't properly read a comic that's incapable of standing on its own without tons of fan-wankery about tons of other comics from the past. And the characters! Damn. There's a very strong sense that, dead or alive, whether they're even IN THE BLOODY COMIC or not, Geoff Johns loves every single one of these characters. That isn't always a bad thing, but it does become bad when you lose the ability to maintain your authorial distance from the characters you're writing. FFS, "You're Superman, you're Wonder Woman, he's THE FLASH", "we should all be a little bit more like Hal Jordan". These lines come with slurpy sound effects. Why that's a pretty little cock you have there, Hal. May we, the rest of the DC Universe and all our supporting characters and dead family members, taste it?

I'm persisting in criticising Blackest Night as a story on its own rather than an "event comic" because I probably lack the required nostalgia and PHD in Wikipedia character history pages to read it that way.

I was also disappointed that nothing really happened. Hal Jordan disappears, our heroes, our magnificent, sparkly, luscious heroes, fight zombie versions of their friends and family for a while, and then some guy named Nekron rises from the dead, because the Black Lanterns unlocked him as a playable character after racking up a high enough bodycount or something. And the next issue blurb "WHAT IS NEKRON?" doesn't make me feel like I should be surprised or have an emotional reaction to his appearance being the cliffhanger ending of the comic, other than "oh, look, he's pretty tall".

I always feel a bit uncomfortable wailing on Blackest Night like this, because the art is pretty nice.

Dark Avengers: Ares #1:
This comic is about how not to fuck up Ares. And it was great.

You know how they say the Greek gods and the Roman gods (same thing, innit?) are as cold as the marble they were sculpted from and shit like that? They were right. Which is why the only Greek gods that tend to work in comic books, i.e. Hercules, are the ones who are the least like Greek gods. Hercules is a boorish, hairy brawler. He drinks. He doesn't care. He's a Norse god wearing a Greek manskirt. The Norse gods, you see, are interesting. They're capable of dying, for one, so you can put them in precarious situations without looking like a moron. They're the beer-swilling, axe-forging, fighty-fighty gods. Comic book gods.

Thats what Ares is. Big hairy, grumpy bastard. With a nifty helmet. And a pirate symbol on his chest. And a fuck-off big gun. I don't see why it's taken so long for Marvel to let this guy go for a bit. He was in a miniseries a while back that was good as long as it was about him marching into hell to fuck shit up only because it suited him, or to get his son back or whatever, but it turned into a patricidal sobfest and the war of two god pantheons was literally solved with a can't-we-all-just-get-along.

Anyway, Kieron Gillen took Ares to all the logical places you'd expect in our oft-lauded Comic Book Age of Awesome and then went further. This comic managed to stay entertaining beyond the DUDE HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT factor and Gillen's crafted a neat script that stays right on track. There's talking, lots of it by Ares, but it's excellent dialogue. Kieron Gillen has that supremely arrogant yet distinctly human voice down perfectly for his Ares, and it's the right sort of voice for a god who's the closest thing the Greek pantheon is going to get for bloodthirsty, sinful old humanity and who pretty much relishes every opportunity to remind everyone who the god is around here.

I was a bit concerned about the art at first. I followed the solicits and the names for the art team kept changing, which is never good for comics-buyability in my book. I'm faintly certain that this Manuel Garcia guy is here for the whole three issues, though. He's got a style that's a solid fit. Slightly gritty, but the action flows nicely and the art is soft enough to allow for the character bits. I think the script was on the experimental side in terms of the form and the storytelling, which I appreciate in Big Two comics, and Manuel Garcia kept up pretty competently. And apart from the pretty abysmal final two pages, the figure work was consistent and clear. Garcia's coloured by Jose Villarubia, too, and that guy knows.

Detective Comics #858:Greg Rucka hands in a very very capable script. That's about all the praise I've got, I think. I do like how he juggles the hard, spy bits and the military jargon with the family business. I'm not terribly excited about a superhero origin story, but I do have the advantage of not being really bloody tired of reading them. I know Batman's origin and Spider-Man's origin, I guess. Those were the traumatic ones, the classics. I don't think I know many more beyond those. Superman's origin is pretty sad, I suppose. And oh, hey, I realise I'm not exactly a comic book veteran, but I do know that I don't want to buy a comic book about the origin story of a hero that I already know. The story, I mean. It would be silly if I knew Superman. Silly blog-reader, you!

I don't know what Batwoman's origin is, so I'm assuming this is a good comic book to be reading if I wanted to find out. No, I don't think I do actually want to know Batwoman's origin. I want to see what Batwoman's origin looks like.

Holy God In My Pants it's brilliant, etc, etc. JHW3 hits us with easily the best superhero art I have ever seen, and he makes things nice and Iconic. Yes, with the capital I and everything, because that's what I do. When I'm serious, I Capitalise. If you're going to have an iconic superhero, and I think that's generally the idea of a superhero, you've got to make just about everything iconic. Origins are the same. You need something easy to remember, easy to reference. Morrison and Quitely immortalised Superman's story. Batman is a kid kneeling by his dead parents with a :( on his little face. Batwoman's was always going to be a variant on Batman's, and they've done a good job with the woman in a chair with a hood and a bullet in her head. Simple, easy to reference in one panel in a black-and-white flashback.

That's a reliable trick, isn't it? The B&W panel to indicate the past. Because superheroes can't remember in colour, apparently. But when J. H. Williams III does flashbacks, he doesn't pull out a cheap gimmick like black and white. He pulls out David Mazzuchelli.

And then there's that other story. The Question one. Didn't the Question lead an army of Supermen to kill a multiverse-threatening evil big guy recently? Are we supposed to interpret the jump from lightspeed cosmic adventures to saving little girls and kicking bad men as some kind of very very creepy character development? Only Batman does that. The cosmic thing and the street thing at the same time, I mean.

Holy crap. Now I have the image of Batman running around dressed as Renee Montoya running about in my head. And it's not going away.

Dark Reign: The List: Wolverine:

So Esad Ribic did the cover and the interiors as well. Shit, he should stop doing covers. Jason Aaron can do the comedy as well as he can do straight-up action killing stuff, and it's good to see him go the comedic route with an artist who can keep up.

It's good to see that Noh-Varr left the Avengers. A guy who burned the giant words "FUCK YOU" into the streets of New York isn't the kind of person who'd attend team meetings and sip tea with Jarvis. In the dark. Because, you know. Dark Avengers.

Oh, fuck me. Why is there not a Dark Jarvis? There was a real Jarvis, right, and he beat up the guy dressed like a sock puppet, and there was Skrull Jarvis, who kidnapped babies or summin, so where's DARK JARVIS, the living planet disguised as a cosmic sex butler? The Dark Avengers totally need that, because when you're fighting Nick Fury you gotta have something he doesn't. And Nick Fury doesn't have cosmic butlers because he's not a butler person. And you know Norman Osborn is a butler person.

Ultimate Avengers #3:

Well it's obvious that I'm not the intended audience for this comic, because I don't know who the hell Bob Hope is. Say what you will about Mark Millar, but he's got a talent for writing assholes. In fact probably every single person in Ultimate Avengers is a one-liner spouting asshole. Oh, except for the Nerd Hulk, but he's got an excuse because he was lying face down with his mouth open and his brain hanging out. Then again, his name is Nerd Hulk, and the concepts of "strong as Hulk, smart as Banner" and "asshole" have traditionally never been that far apart.

If Ultimate Avengers is a comic on the forefront of the "new" Ultimate Marvel Universe, it's doing a pretty good job. Now the Ultimate U is starting to accumulate legacies and histories and retcons and things and it's beginning to look like the regular Marvel U, but with different costumes. It's cool how Mark Millar manages to shrug off all the history he's accumulated with his time on the title and take a sort of "hmm, fuck this, let's do something totally different that still looks and sounds totally the same" attitude to the Ultimates.

Bring on the silly action and the ridiculous tough guy dialogue, Mr. Millar. And keep sticking with the kinds of artists you stick with. Carlos Pachedo is on fire with the new War Machine.

X-Factor #50:

Well this wasn't that good at all. Peter David is obviously very good at long-term plotting. It was nice to see him resolve something set up waaaay back in the first issue, and it was nice to see how things came together, but I think he's stretched himself a bit too thin with this arc. I liked it in general, it's just that Peter David isn't as good at pulling his disparate plot threads together as he is at entertainingly laying them out. And though he's usually very adept at juggling the X-Factor noir style with the X-book sci-fi insanity, he doesn't pull it off too well this issue. And it was also less funny, probably because the plot got in the way. It's the short-term plotting that needs a bit of work on X-Factor, I think.

Hey, there's a preview of issue #200 at the back here, because X-Factor is going the relaunched route in the everlasting quest for more sales, and I don't know which artist convinced them to let him do redesigns, but Guido looks like a monkey. A big, dark, hairy monkey. Who, I suppose, is also really quite strong.

Friday Night Fights: By My Tripe, The Man's Got Stripes!

2009-10-30T22:00:00.003+08:00

This week's dosage of fine kickery comes from the always pugnacious Bronze Tiger, and boy, does he have an array of impressive kicks.

Holy hand grenade. He took out eight guys in three attacks. That's Batman-level awesomeness, man.

And it's the type of thing that's spawned in the weird mind of Denny O'Neil, brought to life by Don Newton and Dan Adkins in Detective Comics #485.

It's the kind of thing Spacebooger does in the mornings, before breakfast. A breakfast of nails. Nails made of pain.

He Finally Reads Pluto

2009-10-29T23:54:00.002+08:00

Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka Volume 1: This was my manga instructions manual of sorts. The last time I read a back-to-front picture book was when I was nine, so it took a while to train myself not to look at the top-left corner of every page first. But I think my brain is fixed now.

Pluto surprised me a lot. I've seen what people like Jog, David Uzumeri, Tucker Stone, David Brothers and Matthew Brady had to say about it, so I was expecting it to knock me off my ass, or at least be really good, but I suppose I thought it would be good in a different way.

I was struck by how familiar everything seemed. The detective story part was a lot like I, Robot, the Will Smith one, in the sense that the ideas of the "ideal world" of robots and human beings coexisting and the laws of robotics are shared. Hell, Pluto and I, Robot even begin the same way. The detective protagonist has a nightmare about a car accident, and then wakes up half naked. And then there's a mystery, with robots killing humans and other robots. And both Gesicht and Will Smith have special robotic arms. But it's not a bad familiar. Naoki Urasawa, without making oblique references to robot pop culture, uses our general awareness and familiarity with it as a springboard for his worldbuilding, because he's getting on with the story and he's gently leaving a few references in (detailed as all hell) establishing background shots or in the dialogue and he's letting us catch up on the backstory ourselves. We're reading about the mystery and the emotional moments and sometimes even the social themes and Urasawa doesn't even need to tell us what year it is. We already kinda know.

Which helps. Pluto is a comic that takes its time setting up the atmosphere, the way things feel rather than what things are. Urasawa has balls enough to tell a story about the systematic hunting down of the seven most powerful robots on the planet, and he can tell that story without thrusting the whole steel-nads-ness of it in the reader's face. The focus on atmosphere also helps when the story goes in a different direction from what you'd expect from something based on Astro Boy. It's almost gritty in its themes and the emotional impacts in some scenes can be downright devastating. I expected to get more explosions and mega robo powers shit, but Pluto was better than that. More mature than I imagined it would be.

I talked about Pluto's self-awareness as a story, and it permeates the entire book, taking things further than just the basic premise. Sometimes Urasawa relies on our knowledge of like tropes and shit so that he doesn't really have to explain them, sort of like what Ed Brubaker's doing on Captain America, I guess, but subtler. About half of the book is about an old composer named Paul Duncan and his new robo butler North no. 2. I had an initial distaste for the Cranky Old Bastard stereotype that Paul Duncan neatly fell into, as well the generic Killer Bot Has Feelings, Plays Piano story, but I was undid by the emotions, the bloody things. Once again, we know these characters in some way, and for the most part it's not really a personal connection, really, more of a collective social consciousness sort of connection. We care because we already know who they are. It's Urasawa's masterful use of story pacing and his skill as a cartoonist that move things beyond the shallow, cautious investment we make to a deeper, more personal emotional one. That end bit, with the fireworks behind the clouds and the floating music notes, that was the killer. That was perfectly done and poignantly rendered, rich with the textures and the ominous layers, and it made me feel, just feel, in ways no other story has done all year.

And that Gesicht, eh? How about that for solid character work? I know what he does in this volume isn't that interesting, but what I like is his visual portrayal, the way he carries himself. He's got a typical pose, standing stiffly, arms hanging completely straight down his sides, his fists always light clenched in the same shape, his shoulders hunched, looking down. And his typical close-up shot is a melancholy face with sad eyes and when he does smile it comes across as apologetic. He's a little too average, isn't he? Maybe he's a bit too familiar as a protagonist to be a real human. He says he's a robot because he doesn't make any unnecessary movements. Shit, I kind of dig the idea of a robot designed to fit in, to be a normal, soft-spoken guy. I like how it adds to the implied social awkardness in the narrative, like the fact that the robots take wives and eat and stuff even when they don't have to.

Naoki Urasawa does an excellent job characterising his robots in cartooning terms. He does it with their hands as well. Hands can put across quite a bit of emotion in cartooning, and Urasawa uses them to distinguish his robots, or their programming, at least. Gesicht, the information gatherer, and North no. 2, the killing machine, use their hands in a way that fits their function - that is, not very much at all. In fact, their limited use of their hands further emphasises their specific functions, making their precision and calculated actions stand out. It makes it more engaging when those two robots do pull out their weapons in different bits of the story, and don't you just love how fast North no. 2 and Gesicht decide to act in their respective moments? Then you've got Mont Blanc and Brando, who've been designed to interact with people. Mont Blanc, in the flashback bits, has his hands raised every time the panel he's in has enough space to show more than his face. And he's the children-hugging robot, the universally-beloved one. Brando is the crowd-pleaser, the family man, and look at him. He wipes the sweat from his face, he hugs the kids, he thumps himself on the chest. He's a natural. I also don't like him very much, the smug, I-make-my-own-luck bastard. Funny how I feel more for the robots with less emotions.

I didn't love Pluto to death. I can definitely see how the deliberate pacing might have put some people off, because it sort of lagged in the first three chapters, where Urasawa took his time putting the plot elements together. The overall story for volume one was also a little bit scattered for my tastes, and I'm hoping that everything will fit together in a cohesive whole in future volumes. The dialogue also had far... too many... ellipsis... for my liking.

But yeah, that's what I thought of Pluto, I guess, from an "outsider's point of view", or whatever the hell that means. Maybe it's just a Singaporean thing, but I'll admit to being slightly dissatisfied with some reviews I found online. I got turned onto Pluto because of reviews or Tweets from the people I mentioned above, and I wanted to look for a review for someone picking up Pluto as a newcomer to Naoki Urasawa, or Astro Boy, or manga in general. Any kind of consumer review for newbies, I suppose. I found lots of reviews online, but they generally amounted to "here's what the story was about and it was fantastic and you, good sir, should purchase it, so that you, too, may suck the Tezuka cock!" If I wasn't already confident that it was fantastic, I might have been turned off by people namechecking to show off. End minor rant.

Pluto might have inconvenienced me a little, because all the comics I had on my imaginary "to buy" list have been sidelined.

In Which Tangents Are Followed

2009-10-26T23:24:00.003+08:00

Two entire weeks, and only four comics to show for. I have already reviewed three of them like four times already, and I don't have much interest in reviewing the last, so I'm just going to let myself go a bit, and see where I get. The general prognosis is for you to buy all these comics. Generally. Like you could wear stripes and shit. Okay I'm going to stop talking now. Maybe reviews shouldn't have introductions. Maybe?

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #6: You know when you were a kid, right, and you saw cartoons in which this one character got some mega-sickness and the other characters had to shrink themselves with a machine or get into some kind of oddly designed vehicle and travel around the character's body and fight the evil infection and also fight the character's natural immune system? Remember those? Were you ever irritated that the inside of the human body looked nothing like what you imagined the inside of the human body to look like inside your head? For one thing, there's always a strangely gigantic amount of empty space in your stylised human body. And the bacteria always looked like generic shapeless monster types with like teeth and shit and jesus if you're going to stylise bacteria give them tentacles and chainsaw guns and laser cannons and barbarian outfits or something. If not they're just blobs. Not particularly interesting blobs, either, although you can give a blob a personality if you work hard at it. And I suppose funkily coloured blobs absorbing other funkily coloured blobs would make for some trippy imagery.

But, yeah, in this issue the Super Young Team travel into the bad guy's head to kick a mind control worm from Venus in the face and I suppose I don't really have a problem with that idea. Last month I said that the replacement penciller whats-his-face made for a good replacement for ChrisCross because he was good at the actiony type bits whereas ChrisCross's art might have faltered in the same area. I would like to think that ChrisCross heard about this in his art studio and looked up from his canvas and was all "he said WHAT?" and then rang up Joe Casey and then he was like "motherfucker says I can't draw fight scenes" and Joe Casey was all "the NERVE of the cunt" and that, children, is why there are nicely drawn fight scenes in Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #6.

I love the little jab at the Justice League that's been hanging around for the last few years. Because the Justice League is full of who-the-fuck-cares Z-list morons who talk about their fucking feelings all the time and they need to die. Or have sex with each other.

Liberty Comics #2:Since this was a "for a good cause" comic and none of the creators involved were actually paid for doing this, I can't really review this like a regular comic because that would be unfair and also missing the point. So, yeah, it was like a sampler for pretty art, with some decidedly unfunny stories here and there. I suppose if you're interested in a cause like free speech, go ahead to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund site and, I don't know, give them your money, I guess.

That said, I dug this issue as an anthology, and plenty of the art is stuff that I wouldn't mind going out to buy in the near future, like Ben Templesmith, Jim Rugg, Paul Grist, Cameron Stewart and Jim Lee, and that last one surprised me quite a bit.

Comic book charity work done. I'm a cool person now, huh?

Secret Six #14:

If I can liken Gail Simone's Secret Six to a song for a minute here, this issue would be that bit that takes place in that higher register, the soul part where the diva lets herself go and it's oddly surreal and you kind of get sucked out of the song for a while and you can hear it blur as Sir David Attenborough's voiceover chimes, "and this is the lung capacity of the adult humpback whale". You know the kind I mean.

This is the payoff issue, the one where Gail Simone's foreshadowing and work in the area of the laying-of-foundation and build-up in earlier issues becomes more apparent. The little character revelations and the gratuitous bloodletting wouldn't really work without the prior emotional investment, would it?

But no! Gail Simone's no Whitney Houston. She doesn't take things far enough, you see. In earlier issues we've seen the Six do the depravity jig. The team got split apart, people died, depths were sunk to. That's the name of the story, right? "Depths." So don't be a wimp about it. If you're going to have an edgy, bad-guy comic then take it to edgy bad-guy places. The Amazons give up and get ready to die? Great. Kill the fuckers. Mow them down with that rifle, Artemis. Spray the bullets everywhere and get a couple of good lines in and then Instead, Wonder Woman comes along, solves everything with the power of love, firmly straddling the high horse, minutes after snapping the neck of evil incarnate. Team reunites, happy as chickens, and there's a change to the status quo because nothing says "ruthless mercenary killers" like kicking someone off the team.

Secret Six has got the rumbly bits covered. The verses. The introductory parts. It's gotta go all the way before I will always love it. Pulling out is for teenagers who can't afford protection. Until then, no matter how technically sound it is, no matter how well the art nails the beats of the slightly-too-rigid narrative, this comic is just going to be some diva-type punk on American Idol.

The Unwritten #6:In this issue there was a violent guy with "FUCK YOU" tattooed on his face.

And you know which other comic recently had a violent guy with "FUCK YOU" tattooed onto his face? That's right. Asterios Polyp, that's which. In fact, the overall styles of the two tats are pretty close. I don't currently have my copy of AsPol, but does anyone have a scan of the panel I'm talking about?

Anyway, I kept seeing other things in The Unwritten that remind me of Asterios Polyp. The slightly muted colour palette, the fact that Mike Carey obviously did his homework, the literary allusions, shit like that. Probably also the fact that both comics are pretty good, though this is a slightly unfair comparison.

Chad Nevett did a little post about The Unwritten and a possible overreliance on allusion and you know, Frankenstein would look more credible as a horror staple or literary device or creator-killing golem or whatever if he wasn't wearing fucking striped pyjamas. I'm sorry, it's "the Frankenstein monster", isn't it? It's harder to swear at people wearing striped pyjamas when they don't have a name. Fuck.

It bugs me, though. Let's think about it. Why would Frankenstein's cunt monster be wearing striped pyjamas? Did Victor Frankenstein lovingly slip those tighty-wighty things on himself before the galvanising? Did the monster go out and kill someone wearing striped pyjamas? If so, why take the striped pyjamas, though? Anyone with the fundementally shitty destiny of being fodder for horror monsters who also wears striped pyjamas is not the kind of person you steal clothes from. The only plausible reason is that the monster went up north at the end of Frankenstein, right, and it was so cold that his junk fell off, but because he's a not-dead dead person he can't feel the cold, so he had to kind of plug the gap with the tight striped pants so's his other Franken-bits wouldn't spill out and he probably didn't know what to do with his detached, frozen junk, so he just held it in place with the pants. That'll be it. Yeah, cause looser pants wouldn't function in that situation. Believe me when I say that the sensation of a cold, dead penis wriggling down in the space between your leg and a loose pair of pants isn't all it's cracked up to be.

So, yeah. Unwritten good, Asterios Polyp better, and I know this because if Frankenstein's monster showed up in Asterios Polyp, David Mazzuchelli would have drawn him with a nose. But not a "fuck you" tattoo. What would Frankenstein's monster want with a "fuck you" tattoo? Honestly.

Friday Night Fights - Hulk-size That Junk!

2009-10-23T21:47:00.000+08:00

The issue is The Ultimates #5, by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. The Hulk is angry about something, as usual, and Captain America is pretty darn clear about where the Jolly Green Giant can shove it:

Where even the Hulk would curl into a tight ball of pain, Spacebooger stands undaunted. Head over there and let the rest of the combatants put their best foot forward. Into your face.

Best Comics of 2008 - The Meta-List

2009-10-22T17:32:00.004+08:00

Fellow comics blogger Sandy of I Love Rob Liefeld has compiled the Meta-List of the Best Comics of 2008.

The idea behind it is something like this. At the end of 2008 numerous people put together their individual "Best Of" lists, from the professional TCJ-type critics to the regular bloggers to writers for mainstream media. This meta-list, then, is sort of the List to End All Lists, the dissection of all the other lists using an actual mathematical system. With calculationin' and everything! It's a mammoth effort, and it's definitely well-appreciated. The comics Internet is better for it's existence.

Anyway, apart from the whole critical consensus thing, this Meta-List is worth seeing if you want a shopping list of recent-ish comics, or if you're interested in the calculations that went on behind it, or if you just like seeing things arranged in lists.

Related! Sandy's site also has another list, a decidedly braver one, since this is a general-feel list more than a mathematical one. This one's called The Best Comics of the Decade, and while I agree that many of the comics listed should be there, I've got my fair share of quibbles. There's no such thing as a perfect list, so the question mark is well-deserved.

Still, both lists make for fascinating perusal, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Prison Pit: I Loved It. End of Review.

2009-10-18T01:37:00.004+08:00

Johnny Ryan has made a kid's comic.

I pretty much loved every single page of this, so there goes my objectivity right out of the window. Prison Pit is such a bare, primal force of nature that I haven't quite gotten over the bludgeoning it gave my brain and so it took ages to write more than one sentence for this post. Anyway, if you want the good criticism, Jog's early review of the comic was just about as fun to read as Prison Pit itself (but not quite) and Chris Mautner's piece is well-written and gets to the point nicely.

But yeah, I definitely see Prison Pit as a comic for kids, and that's a statement that admittedly seems pretty negative now that I'm looking at it with my head tilted. I mean it in the best possible way. I keep getting this pervading sense of manic childishness, of unbridled, almost orgasmic fun. This isn't a comic that's been caught with it's hand in the cookie jar; it's a comic with it's dick shoved firmly in the cookie jar and couldn't be arsed to explain why.

Look at the cover! Apart from the megasonic-loud shade of yellow, there's the logo. Written in lightning! Lightning made out of blood! There's a bone shaped like a boner on the ground!

And the inside. Flip open the damn thing, or check out a downloadable preview. There's blood and guts-munching and decapitations and pus blades and thorned penises and drug slugs and exo-power-suits fueled by wank power and the characters don't talk unless it's to swear at each other. It's the dictionary definition of adult, but it's so ballsy and puerile that it could only really be something for kids. Isn't ridiculous adult stuff like this funner when you're a kid? I don't know if I can claim to enjoy something more than someone else, but that I-really-shouldn't thing made Prison Pit rounder and sweeter for me. Hell, I let a few of my friends read this and they universally loved it too, even this one guy who I thought would be majorly offended by it. Rants at the back of Chemistry class about how it blew our fucking minds and holy shit what was that about is the kind of critical discourse something like Prison Pit warrants.

Apparently Johnny Ryan switched from brush to pen with Prison Pit, I suppose because a testicle-hardening fight comic like this needs sharper lines, and man does Prison Pit have lots of lines. With the characterisation nowhere to be found, the characters accumulate scars and cuts and bruises until they stop being two guys kicking the living piss out of each other and start becoming their wounds, sort of like if you were playing a video game and the health bar was as much of a character as the actual fighting guy.

The fights are creative as hell, too, so much that even if I described every page of Prison Pit right here your ass would still be amazed when you read it. They become the focus of the comic in a way I've never seen before, because, as I've mentioned, of the lack of even the hint of plot or character development. It's fantastic how something this raw can sustain genuine interest for all of 120 pages. And it's fantastic how you don't even realise that you've been reading nothing but fights for a hundred pages, because the nature of the creativity obscures the creativity itself. And here we go, aspects of kids comics start to creep in here. The done-in-one, not-too-complex plot, the innovations that feel fresh and new - aren't these the kind of things we're seeing in the Marvel Adventures line with the Avengers as MODOKs and baseball with Galactus?

Check it out. Johnny Ryan's figures look crude and kind of clunky at times, but in the fight bits it's astonishing how fluid the action flows and the advantage changes. Panel one starts the two fighters out on even footing. One punch and one bite. The second panel is very reactionary. Our nameless hero lashes out to pull the teeth away and gets his arm hooked into the elongated neck thing while our friend Rabies teeters backwards slightly. The third panel is the backlash. Rabies pulls himself forwards with our hero's arm as a support. Our hero, from panel two, has got both his arms on the same side of his body, which is never a good idea in a fight, and so Rabies can dish out a fair bit of punishment. It seems a little odd to have a series of such rapid motions take place over four entire panels, but it tends to work in Prison Pit because of Johnny Ryan's sense of pacing, and also because most of the fighting can be enjoyed no matter how fast or slow you're reading.

I've talked about how Prison Pit is a comic that's for kids in the sense that it's something that kids are going to enjoy (and Johnny Ryan's eye for action fits in there somewhere as well) but was Prison Pit actually made with kids in mind?

I keep seeing Prison Pit as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland forced though the Johnny Ryan filter. Like what if Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was totally fucking psychotic? The same weirdness, the same trippy atmosphere, just with more guts. You have Alice, a sweet enough little girl, and then you have, according to this interview, a guy named Cannibal Fuckface. The fall down the rabbit hole in the beginning of both works is the most obvious similarity. I like that for both characters the fall is long enough that they've got time to do what they do best - questions about cats and bats and rats for Alice, punching and choking for CF. The guy CF follows is the White Rabbit, of course, except in the world of Prison Pit rabbits don't run away, they get fucked over and cannibalised.

The second act is the Mad Tea Party. The drug everyone's high on might as well be tea. Skull-helmet-dude is the Mad Hatter and of course he's nuts. What the hell do you need a Swastika for in a world where nothing exists except violence? Our friend Rabies has the animal bit in his name. He's the March Hare. He's got the sticking out ears on his head. His hands look vaguely like rabbit's feet. He even multiplies like a rabbit. And the last guy, the silent, sleepy stoner is a dead ringer for the Dormouse. His name is even Assrat, for crying out loud!

And then there's the end bit, in which CF becomes alternately stronger and weaker than his enemy, like how Alice changes sizes throughout the book, and most decisively in the final chapter.

I could be coming down with a case of Bat-apophenia here. There's a fair chance that I'm completely wrong, but I do enjoy the notion that Prison Pit is a comic for kids. It's an idea that makes the comic feel like something forbidden, something to be relished. And then shoved up the arse of the guy next to you.

Friday Night Fights: Face the Foot to the Face

2009-10-16T22:54:00.004+08:00

If there's one thing I've learned about the Question, it's that all incarnations of the character are good for face jokes and face kicks.
And a more touching tribute to Dennis O'Neil's Question series I have not seen.

In other news, Spacebooger still brings the jam, and Greg Rucka and Jesus Saiz bring the Question (and the colons) in 52 Aftermath: Crime Bible: Five Lessons in Blood #2.

A Break For My Birthday? The Very Idea!

2009-10-12T22:58:00.000+08:00

Oh, look, way too many thoughts about comics.

Batman and Robin #5:The dialogue Morrison injects into this tired clusterfuck of a cliche mosh pit manages to keep the boat pretty much afloat. That and the general impliedness of everything. That's the main reason that I love reading Morrison. I get to connect dots, even the faintest ones, the ones that might not even exist, and that's the fun bit for me.

In this issue, for example, Morrison's obviously playing with the new hero old hero trope. It's an interesting thought, though, that Batman, and by Batman I mean old Brucey, might have been a good Batman because he was a businessman, a natural trait which Junior seems to have inherited, though that last bit is sketchy because it rests on a couple of lines of dialogue, and it's the sort of obnoxious bullshit only Damian Wayne gets away with. I mention its possible relevance because of Damian's use of his daddy's trademark "tt" just before, which always helps to draw attention to the father-son parallels. The Batman legacy as a monolithic corporate machine programmed to punch cowardly and superstitious sorts with the fear of the unknown is fascinating. The last time I saw Batman solve a problem as a businessman was in Morrison's Rock of Ages and it would have been awesome if there was a full Batman story which were to lean on that idea for creative juice. As a detective, a tech guy and an all-around interllectual it stands to reason that the old Batman would recognise the importance of branding and of brand recognition. You can't own the streets of Gotham without being a brand.

And its an idea that works better in our current situation, with Dick Grayson, who's a person rather than a businessman. Nightwing was never a brand by itself, was it, no matter how independent Dick tried to make himself with Bludhaven and the Teen Titans and whatever the hell he did in his solo book because the Bat-shadow is one hell of a shadow. He seems to be surviving off the remnants of the Bat legacy, riding its wave by keeping the idea of the Batman alive. That circus tent line was a brilliant of dialogue, but maybe there's something else that Dick Grayson isn't letting on. He's reinventing the Bat brand, as is Jason Todd, in his twisted little way. But Dick Graysons approach to Batmanning hearkens to the psychedelic day-glo of the sixties. Jason Todd, meanwhile, has his crimefighting ideology firmly cemented in the nineties, regardless of how much he tries to disguise it with his modernist corporate slogans and phone polls and his own style of branding. So the two contenders for the Bat throne (or has Jason Todd really given up?) are reinventing by reflecting the past. It's all different, it's all cutting edge, and yet we've seen it before. That's why the Bat brand works as an intriguing idea in this context. It's something that can be properly examined as a ponderous, untouchable ideal while it's being played with by the newcomers. And then again, Jason and Dick aren't exactly newcomers, are they? It's all on backwards!

Other stuff. I was pretty interested in the annotations over at Funnybook Babylon by the always on-the-money David Uzumeri, pointing to the face-mask motif as well as the fuck-you to Alan Moore that Morrison squeezes in. There's a lot more to be found in rereads of every new Batrob issue, but the corporate one grabbed me the most this time.

The FBB annotations (correctly) fault Philip Tan's art, which has become horrendous enough for objectivity to shrivel up and die, and for reviewers on the net to actually start to feel bad for picking on him. Alex Sinclair returns on colours this month and the comic does look slightly better in that regard. He coloured Quitely pretty fine, but Sinclair's basically trying to dry up a tidal wave with a tea towel. He's doing what he can, I suppose, but I don't really see how you can colour shit with Jonathan Glapion doing what he calls inking. It's all black all over the place and it's very fucking ugly and thankfully there's one scene, the face-eating one, in which the black ink thankfully fucks off for the psychedelic weirdness to pop up playfully like if the monstrous sea of ink was allowing Frank Quitely to stick a middle finger in from the past.

I can't be completely sure about the inks, though. It's entirely possible that Glapion is an ink avatar of Vishnu the Preserver and he's just doing the best he can with Philip Tan's pencils. I haven't been able to pick up the skills to identify the mistakes of the penciller and the mistakes of the inker. It's also entirely possible that it's everybody's fault and it's just sad bloody art hiding beneath a seductive cover image and it hey it comes out on time whoop-dee-fucking-do.

Criminal: The Sinners #1:
The first thing I noticed about this, being my first Criminal comic and all, happened when I got home from the shop and dropped all my comics, being the coordinated teenager that I am. When I picked up Criminal I noticed how robust it was. It's a pretty heavy comic. Tough, too. It's got a slightly higher page count but the pages are all different from my other comics. Heftier. It's tough paper. The paper of noir. It even SMELLS more noir than other comics. Pulpy shit, man.

But yeah. I enjoyed the art a lot. It's well deserving of praise. It's gritty, but oddly optimistic, in the sense that the sea of pulp doesn't wash over the comic through the art. It's nice, worldbuildnig stuff, not crackling with energy, exactly, but suggesting it. You can feel the world throb gently with life. Things hang around the corner in the world of Criminal, and it comes across with the art. Sean Phillips makes everything look easy with an almost cool style, and it's one that meshes pretty much perfectly with Val Staples' colours. These two people have been making comics look good for a long time, and it shows.

I got the feeling that this issue was trying too hard to ease new readers like me into the world (or maybe there was too much of the references to previous stories. I'm not totally sure) and the buildup went slowly. It took it's time, which is definitely appropriate for a noir thing like this, but maybe a little too much? I love the narrative voice Ed Brubaker uses, especially next to his skill with the dialogue. It's way different from anything I've seen him write before and it's very cool to see this side of him as a writer. Criminal is his sandbox, and the Bru marks his territory satisfactorily.

The backup material was a surprise, and quite welcome, but it made me wish I hadn't already read the Darwyn Cooke interview online.

Dark Reign: Zodiac #3:
And here I bid farewell to a different kind of criminal. This is the supervillain, in all his naked glory. This issue is the masterstroke, the prestige, the here-I-reveal-my-evil-scheme bit, revisiting classic supervillainy while staying new and dangerous. The idea is deliciously pure and beautiful and the execution goes in the complete opposite direction with Nathan Fox's art. It's scritchy scratchy stuff that can get cluttered and difficult to follow in places, so it's definitely not for everyone. I happen to love it, and it's one of the things that made this comic my favourite of the week.

I think I've said pretty much all I want to about this comic, but it's mos def the bestest ever to have Dark Reign on the cover, which, now that Dark Reign is ending with a pathetic post-rape whimper, isn't that much of a ringing endorsement. It's the charm of the premise that makes it superior to everything else Dark Reign. Instead of your average rehash of Warren Ellis Thunderbolts EXCEPT BIGGER AND BADDER YOU GUYS, Zodiac is the comic that has the alternative viewpoint, the awesomer one. The one that goes "fuck you, bad guys who pretend to be good guys are pussies".

What can I say? It's a feisty little comic.

Strange Tales #2:

Ah, I didn't review the first issue. It was that week when I decided to be a lazy bastard, if you remember.

This, of course, is the comic for the cool kids, the indie Marvel anthology of the year, the sort of comic you wave in front of your friends like a giant penis while your issues of Teen Titans lie securely in a locked box under your bed. It's all fun, of course. The humour isn't all that subtle and it makes for light reading. I liked the first issue a bunch, my absolute favourite being Dash Shaw's Doctor Strange story, which still makes me smile. This second issue I liked slightly less, probably because a couple of the stories fell flat for me.

Flicking through the stories here. The only two that stood out were Jhonen Vasquez's MODOK bit and Matt Kindt's Black Widow story. The MODOK one was excellent in its black humour, rendered in such an exaggerated style that it was executed pretty much perfectly. And Matt Kindt played his story totally straight and it turned into a wicked awesome superspy story. The rest of the stories settled into the merely alright category. And unlike the first issue, two stories, R. Kikuo Johnson's one and Max Cannon's Fantastic Four parody, were, well, wow. Really not very funny at all. They found a single joke and raped it flat until it could be spread nicely to fit over a few pages.

I get the general feeling that there isn't much point to this anthology when it all comes down to it. The creators don't really get to stretch their muscles because of editorial anal rententiveness, so it's not a creator showcase. The stories are basically all oh look superheroes are dumb and also funny haw haw cmon guys laff with me and so it's not a character showcase either. Hell, it's not even a proper fucking humour anthology. Weren't those supposed to make you laugh a bit more?

So this was a weak issue, I guess, falling way short of the first, and here's hoping the third not be the cataclysmic fuck up to end it all. Hey, it's got a Stan Sakai cover, right?

TODAY.

2009-10-11T22:06:00.001+08:00

BURFDAY.

Friday Night Fights: Now With More Batman

2009-10-09T21:37:00.000+08:00

Batman is always good to have in a fight. And if you haven't heard much of Batman's smack-talking, I've got some good news for you. Click to Bat-size!

These panels are from Frank Miller and Jim Lee's All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #7, which, depending on your personal opinion, is either a horrific rape of the Bat-mythos or a work of satirical genius.

Taken objectively, these panels are neither of those. To me they look more like Jim Lee drawing Batman hitting people, which is far more agreeable.

Spacebooger is all about two objects colliding. More specifically, his foot and your face.

24 Hour Comic Day LEEEENKS

2009-10-06T21:05:00.006+08:00

On Saturday artists all over the world extended the finger at food, sleep and personal hygiene for 24 Hour Comic Day!

It's been fun browsing the Internet for the results. Some of the comics were actually really impressive for something cobbled together in a single day.

Here's Perfecting Loneliness, one of my favourites, by Emi Lenox.

And Mike Norton's The Curse was good enough to be featured on Newsarama, even.

Both very funny, and well worth your time.

And since we're talking about things that are funny, someone over in the comments at The Factual Opinion pointed out that the Wolverine: Old Man Logan Giant-Size had a goatse cover.

Continuing the mighty Marvel tradition of comics with "Giant-Sized" in the title being loaded with nudgenudgewinkwinks!

This! A Week of Firsts

2009-10-05T23:00:00.003+08:00

Last week was a brilliant, brilliant comics week. And just about all of it was pretty unexpected. I was prepared for a quiet review post, but man was I knocked on my ass. Also, going to the comic shop and not taking away an issue of Wednesday Comics was the dawning of a cold, cold reality.

There's a gap, man. A gap. And it's shaped like a newspaper. With Paul Pope drawing in it.

The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15:I got this a week late, and I also found it completely by accident.

And it came literally out of nowhere and became probably my favourite single issue of the year.

It ain't yer daddy's Simpsons' comic. This thing is an annual anthology featuring the absolute tippy-top in small press comics talent doing Simpsons stories. Sammy Harkham is guest-editing, and since he's more famous for editing Kramer's Ergot (it's this sort of MEGA ART COMIX GIANT SIZE COST A HUNNERT BUCKS anthology thing), he's brought along all his Kramer's Ergot buddies for the ride. So I get to finally read stories by these alt-comics guys whose stuff I have never read before because of my unfortunate location on the ass cheek of the planet. Hullo, Kevin Huizenga, Ben Jones, C.F., Jon Vermilyea, Dan Zettwoch and others!

I feel way out of my depth talking at any length about the more artsy independent comics that I read every now and then. I enjoy them, mos def, but I find them difficult to talk about. For now, Jog and Tucker Stone cover this way better than I ever will.

I think the general agreement is that for other licensed anthologies like Marvel's Strange Tales, the creators are going about as far as pointing a finger and going harr harr harr (not in an entirely bad way, you understand), while this takes it further by already being a comedy property. So the creators have more to play with, better stories to tell.

It's magnificent and I love it and you should too and it's unprofessional of me but I don't know what else to say.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #9:

Probably the only Batman comic in which Batman saves the entire universe in the three-page introduction story.

The creative team changes for this issue. I don't know who Landry Walker and Eric Jones are, or I've never come across their work, at least, but they do a hell of an all-ages comic. I'm pretty sure the eight year old me would have loved this as much as I do now. The action bits were very well done indeed, with some choice panel placement keeping things nicely chaotic, though the artwork was obviously clean enough to avoid any of that hella-things-goin-on?-stuff you find your "grown up" comics.

And the sound effects this issue were really fun to read. If you do not smile when Batman hits the Penguin in the face with a mind controlled seal with the sound SEAL then you, sir, are a sad little mook, yes you are.

The best part of the comic was the end, where the art delivered in every panel. There was a noticeable shift in the tone of the art and the frantic energy stood out and Catman's facial expressions were spot on. It built up to an ending which I'm admitting being moved by, and it sold it for me. Definitely my favourite in the series so far, and that's saying something.

G.I. Joe Cobra Special #1: And another first. I've never read a G.I. Joe comic, never read anything by either Mike Costa or Antonio Fuso. But when someone compared this to the fifth issue of Watchmen my curiosity got the better of me.

I suppose you could make the Watchmen comparison because the comic is basically a mirror image of itself. The Watchmen issue in question, of course, is Fearful Symmetry, which is altogether more subtle. It's got a layered element of duality to it that doesn't get in the way of the main story and it's pretty rewarding to find the hidden similarities and mirror images and the other recurring motifs.

This comic, though, is divided neatly into two, with narration by two different characters and the layouts and panel compositions, and even the words in the narrative captions, are pretty much mirrored. The first page mirrors the last one and so on until the centre of the book. It's a similar technique to Watchmen, the difference being that the story of this comic is flimsy enough that it depends entirely on this technique to pull off it's desired emotional impact.

It takes the whole element of duality and beats you over the head with it. Over and over again. I mean for fuck's sake the two characters are even twins. It's about as nuanced as something Mark Millar would write and there isn't much reward in reading the comic other than slowly reading it from the centre outwards in both directions at the same time.

That said, it's a fine use of the medium and I'll bet a heck of a lot of work went into making this, so I can appreciate that.

But, seriously? Fuck that. This was no Watchmen. This was a diversion, or possibly an excuse for Alan Moore to snootily survey mainstream comic books from his bearded pedestal and claim that everything was his idea, even the panel with the security guards in orange uniforms with large nipples where their mouth holes should be. He'd probably have been right, especially about that bit. If I were Alan Moore I would totally claim to have a monopoly on mouth nipples. It was a pretty cool diversion, I suppose, but sadly it wasn't cool in the "I just found this wicked sick arrowhead from Ming Dynasty France" way. It was more of the "check it out someone just smashed a big hammer in my face! DUDE!" sort of way.

Actually, now that I think about it, this is going to be a great comic to accompany the phrase SO THIS IS PRETTY COOL HUH when I feel like waving comics in people's faces.

Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu #1:

Why, yes, this is my first Shang-Chi comic! However did you guess?

Forty-eight pages in glorious black-and-white, with only one ad, but even that one was fake. I enjoyed this an awful lot. The main feature was by Jonathan Hickman (and hey this is my first Hickman comic) and it's basically a bromance story with Shang-Chi and Deadpool as they take part in a motorbike race of death. It's about as awesome as it sounds, with the Hitler Twins and a bunch of Luchadores also part of the race. Nice and fun all around, and whoever picked Kody Chamberlin for the art duties did quite well.

My favourite was the second story, though. It's called Once Upon A Time In Wan Chai, which should give you a pretty decent idea of the atmosphere it has. Mark Benson has opted to put Chinese words in all the narrative captions and speech bubbles, with the English "subtitles" below each panel, which brings across the old-school Chinese movie thing reasonably well. The photorealistic-faux-noir style of Tomm Coker "with C.P. Smith" also helps significantly. It's stark and harsh and heavy on the inks and so the obvious gritty mood comes across, but the art style surprisingly lends itself pretty well to the fighty bits, with the rain being used to emphasise certain moments of physical contact in somewhat the same way that David Aja did in the Brubaker-Fraction Immortal Iron Fist, but a little bit subtler.

My only complaint, I suppose, is that after checking all the Chinese words to make sure they were all correct and with proper grammar and everything (yes, I'm the weirdest nerd ever) I noticed that the translation, though pretty much faultless, was kind of bland. In fact it's exactly how lots of Chinese classics are translated into English books and then lose all their meaning because they suddenly become inexplicably boring because on one hand you have a Chinese person who knows how to tell a story and then you have a bilingual person who doesn't and so you get translated stuff that's like a rigid, insert-finger-up-arse report, plus stupid dialogue. This was like that, but sort of the opposite, because I was reading the Chinese and honestly speaking, if those motherfuckers were as hardcore as their fight moves suggested there is no way they would be talking like that.

Hey, if it was an English translation we were talking about here then I wouldn't be the only one complaining, would I?

The end of the story is this kind of cliched Chinese cinema moment with a slight twist that worked well for me. I suppose it wasn't the sort of ending I was expecting, but it's the same way that you don't expect your local axe murderer to suddenly pull out a big shotgun instead and then turn around and shoot this dude who passed you on the street a week ago and spat on your shoes. It's that sorta surprise.

The last two (mercifully) shorter pieces were a sort of nostalgic seventies bullshit story that I was happy to see the end of, and a two page all-text thing called The Tao of the Warrior, which is basically exactly how you want to explain kung fu and the theory behind it to a small child if you also want them to not know what you are talking about at all.

X-Factor #49:

Shit. I can't remember exactly when X-Factor got good again. It was some time in the last several issues, but this is a comic that has definitely seen worse times.

I just realised, though, that Peter David might have forgotten to tie up a teensy little plot subthread and so he basically explained it in the recap page last issue and this issue as well. Well, better that than clumsily shove it into the expository dialogue. He even pretended like it was a really obvious connection to make, and that was more entertaining to read.

The fight bits this issue were rubbish, but then again you could argue that X-Factor has never really been about the fight bits, or possibly that Valentine De Landro can't really draw good fighty bits and so Peter David is writing to his strengths. Or away from his weaknesses, more like. De Landro is alright in my book, but he's not really good at drawing any one thing in particular.

Good news, though. Fiftieth issue coming soon, and that means no more future subplot, I hope. Which will sort of be a relief, because everyone in the future wears a fucking trenchcoat and that gets on my nerves because you'd think that by eighty years in the future there would be a new look-at-me-I'm-edgy clothing.

Except future Doctor Doom. He don't need no trenchcoat. He's got a wheelchair and senility, which I enjoy a bit more.

FACT:

2009-10-04T21:39:00.001+08:00

I CAN STOP A CAR BY KICKING IT IN THE FACE.
YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID.

Look, It's Sound!

2009-10-03T23:55:00.002+08:00

*So the Small Press Expo, or SPX, was about a week ago, I think. It's like a comic-con for small press or independent comics companies and creators, one that I would very much like to attend in the future if possible. Anyway, there was a panel during the SPX called the Critics Roundtable, a pretty interesting discussion involving a table full of prominent comics critics, most of them on the Internet, including some of my favourites whose opinions I respect highly, like Joe "Jog" McCulloch, Tucker Stone, Douglas Wolk, Sean T. Collins, Chris Mautner, and a few others.

You can listen to it for free, if you'd like, as it's available for download right here.

*The second sound bite (oooh, a theme!) for today is from a cool band called The Motion Sick who've taken the old nerd joke about Aquaman's useless powers and made it into a song.

And it's a song that manages to be funny as well as totally awesome, with a nifty video to go along with it. These guys are the best.

I don't talk a lot about music on this blog, but I found several of their other songs pretty listenable, and you can find most of their music for listen or download via their website, if you're interested.

Let it never be said that I don't provide the proper linkage and things.

*I also want to plug my main man Spacebooger this week, in place of Friday Night Fights. This week is my break week, so it would be cool if you guys could head over to where the fight is at, look at the entries, and vote for your favourite. There were way too many awesome entries this week.

Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted - A Review

2009-10-01T21:52:00.001+08:00

This trade came out in the June-July sort of region, so I'm a little bit late with the review. I bought it because it's thirteen American dollars for ten issues, which is a killer deal, and also because of Matt Wagner. He's one of those writers I keep hearing about who is very good, and I've been meaning to check out some of his work, especially, Grendel, which he's famous for, but Grendel is such an expanse of work that it's way too bloody confusing to figure out where to start with it. So this was a "hey I heard this was pretty good and I hear this guy's generally pretty good" sort of buy.

I never got down to reading it until very recently, because it's Madame Xanadu, and I'm all for reimaginations of old characters and all that, but the last time I saw Madame Xanadu was in that magic sub-event of Infinite Crisis, the one with the Spectre and the Shadowpact and Shazam, the one where Bill Willingham decided to write badly for a little while, possibly on purpose. And it was awful, awful stuff and Madame Xanadu was in it and so of course I had this reluctance to read it because I was afraid it would be shit.

Yes, even after the Eisner nominations. One for the series itself for Best New Series, one for Matt Wagner for Best Writer, one for Amy Reeder Hadley and Richard Friend for Best Penciller/Inker Team, and one for Hadley again for Best Cover Artist. It turns out Disenchanted was a very good comic and deserved all the nominations even if it sadly didn't win anything. So yes, I am a penis for not reading it despite the wave of "it's really quite good"slaps to the face from the Internet.

Obviously, the Eisner committee really digs Amy Reeder Hadley's art. It's manga-influenced sensibilities are readily apparent, and some reviews I've read go on to say that the manga style "isn't overwhelming" or something along those lines and imply that the art is better for it, which is funny, really. These are people who dislike manga and yet find themselves inexplicably enjoying a similar art style and the reviews in that regard sort of flounder. It's manga art that appeals to non-manga fans, if you want to be all general about it. Like I said, Hadley's art has definite manga influences, in the clean linework and slightly stylised faces. It's effective in many moments in the book, where the first things you notice about Madame Xanadu are her distinctive eyes. Since Disenchanted leaps through history with all the subtlety of a hyperactive monkey mashing every single button in the time machine, this is important.

The ten issues are broken up into five two-issue arcs, each taking place in a different time period. Each time, the atmosphere is slightly different and Madame Xanadu changes her outfit to suit the times. With a lesser artist or with an artist with a less clean art style we might have to flip back and forth several pages to figure out which fancily-dressed lady our plucky protagonist was. From a strictly narrative standpoint, random jumps in time can be understandably jarring for readers with so little content in between, mostly due to the lack of character consistency, among others. Hadley softens this harsh effect of constant change by keeping a distinct visual feel throughout the series. The redesigns of Madame Xanadu's surroundings, distinct and versatile as they are, feel pleasantly different, not foreign, and Guy Major's colour palette is wisely kept clean and crisp and bright. This does more than just help Madame Xanadu stand out from the depressing "Vertigo house style" colouring, with the dirty, dusty, earthy colours. Generally the average Vertigo book has a consistent setting, and so you never need to wade through the murky colours to figure out where the fuck everyone is.

The other thing that Madame Xanadu does to help with the history thing is repetition. Each two issue arc follows the basic story structure of setting up Madame Xanadu's status quo so that we know where she is in history, having the Phantom Stranger show up to establish the impending event of historical importance, and then showing the actions or inactions of the more passionate Madame Xanadu and the aloof, I-cannot-change-the-course-of-fate Phantom Stranger with regards to said event. The advantage to this is that the comic feels more focused and easier to read, in the sense that the settings and supporting characters keep changing, but we always have the same two leads for emotional development and a roughly similar plot structure to anchor us in the overarching narrative. It does, however, sound very fucking boring on paper. The good news is that Matt Wagner pulls it off very well. If you're just reading the story rather than looking at the big picture, nothing feels repeated or boring or even forced.

Probably more important than the various historical events is the growth of Madame Xanadu as a character and her complex relationship with the Phantom Stranger. Her progression from naive wood nymph to canny, determined fortune teller is logical and takes its time, though one would expect someone to experience life-altering events more than once every couple of hundred years. Somewhere in the first half of the story I thought the comic was going to turn into a sort of history-spanning love story or some kind of mushy bullshit in a similar vein and thank god it didn't. It became something much better, with characters changing and evolving logically, coming into logical conflicts with each other, in the sense that both Madame Xanadu and the Phantom Stranger could both be right and it's difficult to agree with just one of them.

I think it could have been incredibly easy for the characterisation to fail or fizzle out towards the end, with Madame Xanadu becoming a prissy, obnoxious asshat and the Phantom Stranger becoming a know-it-all dickhead, and it comes dangerously close near the end, but that Matt Wagner is a careful one.

Of course, the trouble with having immortal characters is that in order to have them maintain a consistent voice, they're obligated to sound like idiots when in a comtemporary setting. It's all very well for "Your ways are abhorrant to me" and "resolve the differences that plague our association" to pop up in Ye Olden Dayes, but to have those lines said in post-Depression New York City is a bit much, and is especially hilarious considering that the same period was the time for dark, gritty noir stuff. The sometimes-ridiculous high fantasy dialogue gets a bit much, as it does in parts of the Victorian London story. For someone who's lived in many different civilisations, Madame Xanadu doesn't really adapt to the times all that well. Maybe that's her thing. But the Phantom Stranger! He calls Marco Polo "signori", so why can't he have a similarly local voice in the later stories? That would have been cool.

The last thing I'd like to talk about is continuity, and I can't believe I just bloody said that about a Vertigo book. For the fans, there are a few nods to the DC Universe in this story. Not enough to get in the way of a new comics reader, but enough for, I dunno, a fan giggle or two. There's the presence of Madame Xanadu, of course, and the Phantom Stranger, who are both sort of in the actual DC Universe. And then there's a clunky reference to Doctor Fate, and also the appearance of Jim Corrigan, the Golden Age Spectre, and Giovanni Zatara, who is Zatanna's dad. Oh, and Death from Neil Gaiman's Sandman shows up as well, which was kind of bizarre, because the term "Vertigo universe continuity" springs to mind, which makes me intensely uncomfortable. It's not a terribly fun-sounding idea.

And then, when we come to the last page of the book, we see that it's basically the origin story of Madame Xanadu. The last page establishes what she is as a current DC character, with the entire comic preceding it being her secret origin, which I suppose is a kind of fan service. Upon reflection it seems like each point in history represented in each of the two-issue stories is put into the comic to explain some parts of Madame Xanadu's character history, and Matt Wagner sort of wrote around that premise. The Arthurian England bit was to explain that the reason the character was based on the nymph Nimue was because she was Nimue, the Kublai Khan-Marco Polo bit was to explain the Xanadu in her name, the French Revolution bit was to explain the Madame, the 1930s New York bit was to have her interact with some of DC's Golden Age magic superheroes, and the Victorian London bit was, I dunno, it was the only historical event Matt Wagner could find between the French Revolution and the Great Depression. Or maybe he's got a Jack the Ripper fetish or something. I don't know. Or it could be one of those things where people write fan fiction about punching Hitler except this time it's not fan fiction, it's real fiction (you see what I just did there) and it's not Hitler it's Jack the Ripper.

I think the review's about done at this point. I was about to put on the nerd hat and talk for a great length about the ensuring-history-proceeds-as-it-was-supposed-to part of the story, but you guys don't need to hear that. To summarise, it's a pretty darn good comic with the only flaw being the overwritten dialogue and captions, but it's an error that's inherent in the premise. Being as it was a Vertigo book, I wasn't all too pleased with the acknowledgement of continuity that the comic had, but it's a solid read that stands alone just fine.

Art's pretty awesome as well.

Comics And Farewells

2009-09-28T20:17:00.005+08:00

I'm saying goodbye to a couple of comics this week. Can you guess which ones?

Detective Comics #857: I think we can all agree that the art on this book from J H Williams III and Dave Stewart is the best and should win awards in large quantities. It's definitely the most beautiful comic I have ever had the pleasure of reading. The story, though, is less angelic-chorus-perfect and so that's what I'm going to pick at a little bit, as is my wont.

So there's obviously a heavy element of duality being emphasised in the Batwoman-Alice dynamic, which is fine and is pulled off very nicely indeed. And I kind of get that. Alice is the head of the Religion of Crime that's got kind of a manpower shortage and wants to kill Batwoman because a book said they should, and Batwoman is slightly confused and punches people in the Religion of Crime. It's a very easy line to draw. Thing is, with making the duality motif appear in a Bat book, is that it will always feel like some kind of reference to the Batman-Joker thing, the two-sides-of-the-same-coin creepy sort of you complete me thing. And so the mind draws parallels. Which seems logical, seeing as it's Detective Comics we're talking about. It's Batman's book.

Having Alice and Batwoman be sisters or something makes the Batman-Joker relationship seem slightly weirder. Not necessarily in a bad way, just an interesting way. It depends. Whenever I think of the Batman-Joker relationship I always always think of that panel in Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum where the Joker grabs Batman's ass. So this new development might be a bit disturbing in that hey you're my brother now hands off the ass way.

But Alice is dead, so I suppose this is going to dredge up some feelings of random superguilt because for the next arc we have an origin story, oh wonder of wonders. Is that going to cause a stir, by the way, that Alice essentially commited suicide? Does it not matter because she's not a lesbian? Or because there isn't a fridge involved? I don't know what kind of thing warrants Internet backlash anymore. I guess people didn't mind Alice falling out of the plane because she kept going around quoting that fucking children's book all the time like she just read it for the first time and she was very bloody smug about it and kept smiling and god it was nice of her to fall out of the plane wasn't it?

And I suppose I'll be back for the origin story arc. Because J H Williams III and Dave Stewart, that's why.

Oh hell I forgot to talk about the Question feature. Well it's the same general formula of Renee Montoya beating up random goons in creative ways and then she gets into trouble and then cliffhanger ending with nothing much happening in between.

And it is oddly satisfying. But not very good. Not really.

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #5:
Hey, so it looks like ChrisCross decided to take a break from drawing this comic again. The good news, though, is that Snakebite is still on colours, Joe Casey is still writing a damn fine story and the replacement artist Eduardo Pansica is actually pretty competent with handling the story. He's no ChrisCross, but he's got an undeniable energy to his pencils. Was he one of the replacements in issue two? If he was he's gotten a hell of a lot better.

Actually on hindsight he might be a better choice than ChrisCross considering the content of the issue. It's second-to-last and we're starting to see the fighty fight bits and he's probably better at the big action choreography.

Other than that the story rolls along nicely. The Super Young Team reunites in their own crazy way. And the dialogue and the captions continue making me smile. I was prepared to drop this comic (especially after issue two) if it started to slip, but it hasn't. This might be the best issue yet and, needless to say, I'm coming back for the final one.

Guardians of the Galaxy #18: I'm not sure how much of the fact that I didn't really enjoy this issue had to do with Wesley Craig's art. With half the Guardians trapped in the future we get one month of Craig and one month of Brad Walker and then this month it's Craig again and I suppose he isn't terrible but I dislike the way he draws things. The fight bits were clunky and lame and not really very exciting and looked more like random posing next to things instead of destroying the things.

You know what? It wasn't a good story either. Completely unnecessary. It's almost a bloody repeat of issue sixteen, in that the Guardians end up in the future (again), meet the Guardians of the future (again), fight their way to a time machine (again), end of issue. It was more of an excuse to drop the Jack Flag as the Chosen One reveal but they couldn't fit more of Starhawk into #16 so they cobbled this issue together with a bit of Killraven in it as a disguise. What was that about, anyways? Jack Flag as a chosen one? You are not fooling me he was getting his ass kicked by Bullseye a couple of years ago. I remain unconvinced on his situation.

Guardians, for one hell of a comic book series this was a pretty shitty issue. I think I might switch to trades for this series. We'll see how it goes.

Wednesday Comics #12:
This is it. The last issue of Wednesday Comics. It's gonna be weird not reading this every week at the end of the day. And this last issue was really really weird, like reading fifteen endings to fifteen different stories, one after the other, like you're listening to several eulogies all at once. It was strangely uplifting and I think all the stories ended appropriately given the nature of their strip. Except Sgt. Rock, which, as Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett said, should honestly have ended with Rock digging the bullets out of his body, loading them into his gun and then killing every single Nazi.

But it didn't, and I can live with that. It's been a fun experiment, and some strips were obviously better than others. It'll be sad to see it go. There's been talk of a second Wednesday Comics in the works, and I'm pretty sure whatever Mark Chiarello cooks up next is going to be great.

Friday Night Fights: You Can't Have Your Cake And Kick It In The Face

2009-09-25T23:30:00.005+08:00

Poor Daredevil. Really.

Let's say there was this nutjob who got hired to kill your girlfriend. Nothing personal. And then he starts to take an interest in you. You fight. A lot. Play Russian Roulette, even. He kills like nine more of your girlfriends (and you can't seem to stay away from them, all the same). Then he gets an upgrade, works for the government now, nothing you can do. Fine. And then a female version of this guy shows up and announces that hey she's going to ruin your life surprise surprise but this time there's a twist she wants you to join the evil organisation she's in what a shocker eh and wasn't that a long sentence that could have used a few commas.

And then she kicks you in the face.

Of course, Spacebooger won't be feeling like Daredevil is, because he'll be doing the kicking, along with baby Oliver and the other strappin' fighters.

The issue is Daredevil #115, by Ed Brubaker, with art credited to Michael Lark, Tonci Zonjic and Stefano Gaudiano. And I have to say that Ed Brubaker is the first person who has ever made me feel sorry for a superhero's sucky luck since Stan Lee's Peter Parker.

Then again, I haven't read too much Daredevil, so maybe the angst is kind of his thing.

FACT:

2009-09-24T22:40:00.004+08:00

I CAN KICK TWO PEOPLE IN THE FACE AT THE SAME TIME. YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID.

My First

2009-09-22T21:40:00.001+08:00

So I recently read my first manga, as some friends of mine will no doubt be pleased to hear. I've been "the comic book guy" for a while now, and it's in the local culture to gravitate towards manga rather than Western comic books for a fix of sequential art.

There's a post up on The Hooded Utilitarian, part of a roundtable series of posts called Manga - What Is The Point. This particular one is by Tom Crippen (who has sadly left The Hooded Utilitarian this week), explaining why he doesn't like manga.

I've looked at quite a bit of manga in the past, but I've never actually read one, because, like Tom Crippen, I wasn't the biggest fan of the art style. The stylised big eyes and triangular mouths and faces which all looked sort of the same to me were my biggest problems. My somewhat irrational aversion is probably because of the anime stuff I watched on the television when I was younger. Much younger, I daresay. But even then I recognised that Beyblade and Dragonball Z and One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh! and Gundam Seed and their general ilk were unwatchable bullshit. And the thing that pissed me off the most, second only to the needlessly complicated and exposition heavy-storis, was what I see as sloppy animating in the sense of the triangles that were the characters mouths basically expanding and contracting to the sound of the words but they could have been saying just about anything, couldn't they?

Maybe it's not lazy animation. Maybe it's a different kind of art that I don't get. But those little moving triangles annoyed the fuck out of me. And I suppose it's extended to a reluctance to see the same triangles annoy me on a printed page.

In addition, until recently I've been more of a story guy. As a comics reader, I mean. I never saw comic book art as actual art to be admired as much as the story behind the it. It was just a means of the telling of the story, basically. I knew if art was bad, of course. Avengers: Disassembled and The Ultimates were among the first handful of comics I read when I got into comics last year, and I knew that David Finch was drawing in a way that I disliked, and Bryan Hitch wasn't. Not that I took much notice of the names of the artists, of course. It was more sort of "well this looks like shit but this other thing not so much". Bad art never really got in the way of my enjoyment of a comic book. I was fine so long as it looked like comic book art.

And manga didn't, to me. I could never get past the general equation of black-and-white to stark and dull. The lack of colour made everything seem kind of dead and I wasn't able to get interested in the story at all. Not just manga, either. Until recently I avoided black and white comics like the plague, for pretty much the same reasons. The first comic I read rendered completely in glorious B&W was one of those Showcase phone book-sized things from the library, about the Metal Men, and it was awesome. I've since read other black and white stuff, most of which I then went on to enjoy immensely. Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten's Wasteland springs to mind.

Still, that frantic, almost furious energy infused in the pages of your average manga-for-teenagers (shonen? shounen?) hasn't quite made me a believer. But there's always Sturgeon's Law, which states that ninety percent of anything is bullshit. So, armed with the mindset that every manga I've ever come across was bullshit, I decided to get into those Japanese comics.

My main obstacles this time were firstly that there's a website on which many of my friends read manga scans for free (illegally, I might add, guys) and it hurts my eyes reading black and white art on a computer screen. Second I get my eyes crossed adapting to the right-to-left way of reading. I naturally read left-to-right even when I know I'm not supposed to and it completely fucks up the composition of the page, not because the art's bad or anything, just that I can't bloody look at it properly.

My father has quite a large comic book collection, which I've been poking around recently. He's got a fair bit of manga in there too, but I've been a bit reluctant to slog through something like twenty volumes of Vagabond or Samurai Executioner or Lone Wolf and Cub. Luckily, I found a standalone work that I could play around with.

It's a huge monster of a book. Eight hundred pages (eight hundred!) making a single complete work, which pleased me more than twenty or so individual volumes. It's very well made. I've read it twice now, and there's not so much as a crease on the spine, so it's held up smartly. And best of all, aside from being translated into English, they've given every single page of art the mirror-inversion treatment, so people can read it in the good old left-to-right style.

It's like someone really wants me to read manga.

Anyway, Ode to Kirihito is the name of the book, by Osamu Tezuka, who is apparently called titles ranging from "the god of manga" to "the father of manga" to "the Walt Disney of anime", which is some serious praise, man. A cursory inspection of Wikipedia reveals that the guy had a ridiculously large output of highly acclaimed work and was a Will Eisner-type pioneer of his field. This particular book, Ode to Kirihito, was serialised in the 1970s, I think, but the reprint I have next to me is a 2006 thing.

As you would probably expect, it was pretty damn good.

Expect a review to pop up soonish, but for now this post is my official statement. My assorted reasons for not reading manga before, and a signal of better and brighter things to come. Maybe me and manga will have a beautiful relationship. Maybe it will be a shitty relationship in which my eyeballs are violently raped over and over again. Who knows?

One thing I do know. I'm still not reading from right to left. Bugger that very much.

Quite Frankly, Discussion Alert!

2009-09-22T18:26:00.000+08:00

Philip Tan is the new big Bat-Artist, and he didn't exactly do a fantastic job, as I mentioned in my roundup of the weekly comics. In relation to Frank Quitely, that is. There's been a really fascinating series of discussions going on around the assorted Internets about this that I found earlier today. I thought I'd put everything together in one place, as a central linkpoint, if you like.

Funnybook Babylon: David Uzumeri has some concise, factual annotations for this fourth issue that manage to approach the issue from a strictly analytical angle. Some nice, thought-provoking theories pop and here and there in the comments.

Comics Should Be Good: Greg Burgas, in his own reviews of the comics of last week, explains why he didn't think Philip Tan's art was that big of a disaster. The expected outrage ensues in the comments section, some of it unnecessary and fruitless. But!

GraphiContent: Chad Nevett gives a decent counter-post to Greg Burgas and in his turn points out some serious flaws in Tan's storytelling techniques. Nevett and Burgas both make astute comments that are backed up with evidence from the comic, for the most part. They're two sort of extreme viewpoints, though, both of which I didn't agree with a hundred percent.

Jog - The Blog: In something I totally did not see coming, Jog says in a little lookback at BatRob so far, that he didn't really care for Frank Quitely's art on Batman and Robin all that much. It's something I disagree with, obviously. In the ensuing (and pretty long) comments section, which is the more fascinating bit, the discussion opens up a little bit, with Jog providing solid arguments for his case (which I disagree with once again, but they're excellent arguments all the same).

Mindless Ones: And the Ones themselves link to both the Funnybook Babylon annotations and Jog's controversial post. It's the comments here that shine. More discussion ensues, mostly in Quitely's defense, and Jog shows up eventually to say his piece. It's all connected, people!

Maybe Frank Quitely should not draw Batman more often. It gives me some excellent things to read on the Internet. And I'm marvelling at the civility of it all. This level of discussion on the Internet should be encouraged everywhere. All in all a decent set of links.

Aw Yeah Comics of the Week!

2009-09-21T21:26:00.004+08:00

Oh, look. Here are some comics. And here are some thoughts and generally knee-jerk reactions to said comics.

Batman and Robin #4:The man tried. He truly did.

Don't be fooled by the pretty cover, my pretties. The interiors march firmly in the opposite direction of the entire visual style of the first three issues. In fact, the cover suggests a more playful spin on the tired cliche that the new story arc appears to be built on, with a meta sort of awareness dancing around the edges. Holy giant billboard! Red Hood and Scarlett are more like fashion models than villains, redesigns and all. Batman and Robin, meanwhile, are tucked away in that corner, confronted by the larger-than-life wave of the Red Hood's style of "postmodern crimefighting", for want of a better term, forced to adapt. Same old costumes. Same old Batman and Robin. Notice how in the first arc the new BatRob duo were the new guys in Gotham and had their own way of fighting crime that was markedly dissimilar to Bruce Wayne. The Gotham police force certainly took notice. This arc, it seems, is going to be about the even newer, the cutting edge.

It also seems that however Grant Morrison is going to help us reach the end of the arc, by God it's going to be painful. Gone are the deft, playful strokes of characterisation, the bright colours that seemed to define the word of BatRob 2.0.

Instead we've got Philip Tan. And Pete Pantazis on colours, and those are some bloody dull colours. And we have Jonathan Glapion, who has proudly shit black ink all over the place. Just look at the damn thing.

You might be able to argue that Morrison is writing to Philip Tan's strengths in the sense that the darker tone is like a herald for the new Red Hood and his decidedly more violent methods, that the ugly, muscular art effectively inspires an instinctive resistance to the whole thing.

Whatever the case, it was an incredibly dick move on the part of DC Comics. Or DC Entertainment. Whatever. To Philip Tan, especially, the poor guy. I've seen his art on Final Crisis: Revelations and on Green Lantern and admittedly he's turning in some of his best work here, but that's not saying much, obviously. The general feeling of what-the-fuck-is-going-on while reading, the slipups in anatomy, in perspective, in piss poor storytelling, especially in the party scene, or even later on, in the cabal-ish mob meeting.

But as I said, he tries. I barely got through the comic on my first read, I was so preoccupied with thinking how great it would be if Frank Quitely were drawing it instead of poor, wrong-place-wrong-time Philip Tan. Second time, two days later, I found it slightly more readable. It wasn't all godawful bullshit. I thought the second-and-third page spread, the chase sequence, was quite well done in terms of storytelling. It's good evidence of Tan experimenting and possibly even growing in his craft. Maybe it's the Morrison wearing off on him. But yeah, that splash page was probably his best bit of art in the issue. Nicely frantic and fast-moving and darkly claustrophobic. Forboding and with a dreadful inevitability about it, I thought.

I'm clenching my teeth and sucking it up for the next two issues. Happy thoughts. Cameron Stewart's coming along for the third arc, so that at least will be ace.

Blackest Night #3:
Ho! What have we here? The second comic of the week which I expected to like but ended up pretty much hating.

This, contrariwise, was a severe case of I Don't Care. Batman and Robin was more of frustration at an otherwise delightful comic book having its arm ripped off and being beaten to death with it, in black.

More than anything else, issue three brought to light most of the problems with Blackest Night.

Right, so all the Black Lanterns are coming back from the dead to elicit an emotional response from their still-living loved ones. That's a fine idea, and traditionally it's an effective device in your general zombie fiction piece. But! Having zombies come back for the sole purpose of being humongous undead dickheads is not the way to go. By now all the Black Lanterns are beginning to sound like the same pretentious asshole, showing up to behave totally different from their real life selves and say things like "Yes, your wife was totally a murderer and shit she was EVIL FOR REALZ trust us because we're like dead, man!"

The worst part, of course, is the reveal of this issue, showing that the zombies might not actually be the actual dead loved ones, which makes the above problem even worse. Now that our heroes know this, they can just avoid any complicated emotional bullshit by going "fuck you, you're not my dead friend and who needs to listen to you and how the fuck are you talking anyway you zombie fuckers have your mouths open all the damn time that doesn't even make any sense".

And here we come to the next reveal of the issue. The Indigo Lanterns showing up and telling our assembled heroes that basically all of them other than Hal Jordan can't really help fight the Black Lanterns and we're sorry if you thought you would actually be important in this event comic. It's admittedly a little bit of bad marketing. This was supposed to be a DC Universe event, but it's sort of pissed itself back into a Green Lantern thing.

Why does Geoff Johns keep hanging on to Hal Jordan, anyway? Man is a penis.

And also in this comic GOLLY YOU GUYS someone dies and I don't care about her and one page of her talking to another guy is totally not enough to make me care. I'm guessing Firestorm fans will be devasated? Firestorm message boards will be like YES FINALLY SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT. Seriously. Another chick dies to "encourage character development" on the part of the male counterpart. This is nothing new.

Yeah, so the art. More of the same. It does the job.

M.O.D.O.K. Reign Delay:
If you don't love this comic then you're stupid and you're wrong and I hate you.

Ryan Dunlavey has written and drawn what might be one of my favourite single comic book issues of the year. There. I said it.

Tiny Titans #20:
I'm not sure what else I can say to get you to read Tiny Titans. It's cute and funny and oh yeah it won an Eisner Award didn't it?

You know what else won an Eisner? WATCHMEN. I rest my fucking case.

X-Factor #48:

This is a tricky one. If you haven't already been reading X-Factor you will not have any idea what in the hell is going on. In that respect I think I buy X-Factor for me. It's a personal comic. It's decent enough, but probably, just probably, not good enough to warrant such regular buyage, you know?

So it's always a nice surprise when an issue of X-Factor does end up being above average.

There is ONE penciller, ONE inker, and ONE colourist this issue, which by X-Factor standards in recent months is a miraculous sonuvabitch on a silver plate. As a result, apart from some characters looking like pigs because of rushed artwork on the nose regions, this was a solid art thingy. Valentine DeLandro is starting to get with Peter David's comedic timing, and it's paying off big time. Plenty of funny moments this issue, especially with Doctor Doom. And Siryn gets a fair chunk of well-deserved action.

Hey, I just noticed that little Superhero Squad icon in the corner of the cover. There's a cartoon Hulk trying to eat his feet or something.

Wednesday Comics THE PENULTIMATE:

Batman: Looks seriously constipated in that first panel.

Kamandi: Everyone's favourite Last Boy on Earth is also a crack sniper. Go figure.

Superman: There are two ass shots of Superman this week. What am I supposed to make of that, Lee Bermejo?

Deadman: Is a dick to a ghost chick.

Green Lantern: Man, if GL was this awesome for all twelve weeks it would be fucking sweet.

Metamorpho: Oh God "THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE" you did not just go there Neil Gaiman.

Teen Titans: A thoughtful look at the complex relationship between Deathstroke and the Titans, or another shitty edition of a very bad strip? You decide.

Strange Adventures: This week the strip is in a museum and nothing actually happens and it is still great stuff.

Supergirl: Even the energy beams the aliens are shooting at Supergirl are cute.

Metal Men: As always, look at this strip. Don't read it.

Wonder Woman: Ben Caldwell has made you cool again.

Sgt. Rock: Is one tough motherfucker.

The Flash: Very, very moving. I can't believe how good this is.

The Demon and Catwoman: And on the other end of the Good Spectrum...

Hawkman: Aquaman! You showed up!

Friday Night Fights - Now With Less SNIKT

2009-09-19T02:16:00.005+08:00

Sometimes it seems that being a man with an indestructible skeleton and claws that can cut through anything and the power to basically heal from anything less than being blown to bits by ten nuclear bombs on steroids with chainsaws attached while having his head cut off and fed to a robot dinosaur made of lasers, Wolverine is a bit imbalanced, power-wise, despite the down-to-earth Canuck he's always portrayed as.

Which has always puzzled me. I've never been able to relate to this midget amnesiac with a weird haircut who, y'know, also happens to be an immortal killing machine. Oh, and he's great with the women, and he's a samurai, too, did I mention that?

I always find it more satisfying to see Wolverine throw down the regular way. And by "regular" I mean "less stabbing with pointy knuckle extensions and more kicks to the face".

Ergo:

Which suits Spacebooger just fine, because the man is all about the feet. The first round started with a fantastic kickfest of awesome, and you should all seriously check out all the combatants.

Today's kicks come from the criminally under-the-radar Wolverine: Saudade one-shot, which surprised almost everyone who read it by being very good. It's written by Jean-David Morvan and artistified by Phillipe Bouchet, two top names in European comics. And if you like things that are good you will like what they did with Wolverine.

Here's an afterthought. More people who aren't American should write Wolverine, who also isn't American. It makes little sense that he's basically American in every comic he's in until someone calls him American, then he gets pissed because apparently they were supposed to guess that he was Canadian because, I dunno, of the hair or something.

Another thought. Why don't people throw Wolverine into space. That would get rid of the bugger if you wanted to kill him. More economical, less chance of death by SNIKT.

SNIKT. There's a sound effect that makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm going to stop talking now. Scroll back up and look at the kicking.

Behold The Meme

2009-09-15T19:53:00.005+08:00

And a new meme is born from the bowels of Internet idiocy!

Click, people, for the information.

And now, mine:

Grab on to the meme and grab on to yer hats! This is a good'un.

The Non-Examinable Reviews

2009-09-14T21:08:00.001+08:00

No reviews lasts week because I was a lazy asshole!

Harumph. People tell me I shouldn't be writing these reviews at all, cause I've got exams, doncha know. But I like comics more than I like exams, and I think it shows. I'm also tired, and the comics came in a day later this week, so I haven't had the time I usually do to read them like nine times or something. Less focused reviews ahoy!

Secret Six #13:Secret Six is kind of like Heroes. The one on TV. Everyone keeps getting eviller, right? And then the BAD guys come along and then they're evil too. And then the good guys become evil, bad guys become good but not really and only cause people threaten their siblings and then the money comes into the equation and then people switch sides like its a giant schizophrenic football match. And then, you know, random shit happens. Sure, Ragdoll tries on Wonder Woman's boots. Sure, a nine-year old girl gets beaten with sticks. Sure, we can have lots of violence for everyone and blades going through skulls like a bored teenager goes through unfunny Youtube videos but no we can't show a woman's nipple, can we? It's for the good of the kids, after all. You know what? Cover it up with a bloodstained axe, that's the ticket.

Secret Six is kind of like that. Except I like Secret Six. And I like watching Nicola Scott's drawings.

The Unwritten #5:
Story about stories! What basically happens here is the Storybook Mafia or something fucks with Rudyard Wrote-the-Jungle-Book Kipling's life. And then he writes about it!

God, that would be boring shit if Peter Gross weren't drawing it. And Chris Chuckry is the man with the colours this issue. Slightly old, faded, like we're reading out of a book. I mean that in the meta way. So we're like reading a book in which someone's reading an old book. Which they are, but that's another story. Or the same story. I don't know. But yes The Unwritten is like that.

So this month The Unwritten went sort of all the way in the opposite direction. Sucks to you, Generic Vetigo Art Style! Sucks to you, Many Repeated Swears! And we're still creepy as shit!

You need to read this, if nothing else. Read it, or you won't get it. Or you could read it AND not get it. Probably both.

Thunderbolts #135: Miguel Sepulveda just lost my trust. I get that his sort of claustrophobic style works in Thunderbolts HQ and shit, but out in the open, with the fast-moving stuff? Not so much. It's sluggish-looking art that tells the story in the most straightforward way possible, and that's not the way you want to go with a comic like Thunderbolts.

In other news, Andy Diggle is still weaving a deception type spy action thingummy that's almost epileptic with reveals and aha-moments. That's mostly a good thing, but it slows down towards the end. I suspect, though, that it was on purpose, so that Diggle could punch my brain in the face with that last page.

The man does a killer last page.

Ultimate Avengers #2:
So according to the Internet and the solicitations and shit this was Ultimate Comics Avengers #2, but the outside of the comic book says Ultimate Avengers #2 and the inside of the comic says Ultimate Avengers #2 so I'm assuming somebody actually sat up and said "why the fuck is there the word comics in the title they know it's a comic for fuck's sake".

I haven't seen much of Carlos Pachedo's art before this, but I'm pretty sure it didn't look anything like what he's doing here. I mean that in a good way. This thing feels like an Ultimate comic. Clean art, clean story.

And Mark Millar is staying away from politics this time, which will probably make people happy.

War of Kings: Who Will Rule?
Man, I love me some good cosmic Marvel. This whole War of Kings thing ends with this one-shot, and it's been a hell of a thing for me. The quibble I have, though, is with the fucking digital covers. Hate those ugly things. And this one in particular bugs me. Why does Gorgon have a glowing energy turd in his hand? He doesn't have energy powers, damn it. And Havok. His chest is glowing. I'm not so much of a Havok guy, but I thought his powers came from his hands? I dunno, maybe he got Starjammer steroids or something. I mean really. Starjammers, they sound like drug traffickers more than pirates.

I can't believe Black Bolt is dead for realz. That blows.

Wednesday Comics #10: Double digits time!

Batman: Punches a dog.

Kamandi: Shoots a monkey.

Superman: Punches an alien.

Deadman: Stabs a demon.

Green Lantern: Does nothing, as usual.

Metamorpho: Speaks Latin and shit now, y'all.

Teen Titans: Continues to be ignored by like everyone.

Strange Adventures: Written and drawn by Paul Pope. Rad.

Supergirl: Waves to a bunch of aliens.

Metal Men: Are taking a long fucking time to die.

Wonder Woman: Kicks a terrorist.

Sgt. Rock: Kills a Nazi FUCK YES.

The Flash: Runs around, is written well.

The Demon and Catwoman: "And I am become your nemesis" - this line is seriously in the comic.
Hawkman: Hits a dinosaur in the face with a mace AND THEN SMACK TALKS IT.

Friday Night Fights - Fuzzy Feet of Fury

2009-09-11T23:31:00.002+08:00

Friday Night Fights returns! Spacebooger's got a new theme going, and the man says furious foot attack, three panels or less.

Done.
For more Beastly acrobatics, you're going to want to check out Astonishing X-Men #2, by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday.

Make sure you head over to check out the rest of the combatants!

BATMAN...

2009-09-09T22:27:00.001+08:00

... IS FEELING PRETTY GAY TODAY.

And Speaking Of The Big G-Mozz...

2009-09-08T23:54:00.000+08:00

Grant Morrison's embarking on a multimedia adaptation of the Hindu mega-epic, the Mahbharata, which, as some of you know, is a poem that's really fucking long, like something that makes the Bible and the Lord of the Rings look like snotty little kids crawling clumsily in a sandbox by comparison. That stuff defined "epic".

You'll want to take a gander at Morrison's notes here, and the teaser trailer for the project here. Oh, and treat yerself to some tasty concept art while you're at it, won't you?

Some choice quotes from the notes (oh, this is gonna be AWESOME):

"This is like a psychedelic The Lord of the Rings with Star Wars
technology."

"Use familiar historical styles and fashions that we associate with
traditional depictions of the Mahabharata and then mutate those traditional
influences into a much more shiny, reflective, decorative look. Like Jack Kirby
doing the Hindu gods. I see this as sleek and sexy."

"I’ve taken literally some of the descriptions of vimanas and especially
the effects of divine astras, or god-weapons.

"…a single projectileCharged with the power of the universe
An incandescent column of smoke and flame
As bright as a thousand suns
Rose in all its splendour…

"…an unknown weapon,
An iron thunderbolt,
A gigantic messenger of death…

"Some of these descriptions are so convincingly reminiscent of the precise
effects of tactical atomic weapons and laser beams it seems a shame not to take
them at face value and imagine a culture with access to its own versions of such
weaponry."

Faceless Minions, Now With More Relevance

2009-09-06T23:24:00.003+08:00

More Batrob thoughts, churned out as I think of them. I apologise if these posts aren't as well-planned as they could, and should, be.

This time I'm trying to figure out how the Dollatrons work and how they're being used in Morrison's Batman stuff. It sometimes comes as I write, so stick around to see the thought process, eh?

The first time the Dollatrons ever appear, it's at the death of Professor Pyg in Batman #666. Damian Wayne, all grown up and nestled comfortably in a pre-apocalyptic alternate future, is the one doing the Dollatron-fightin', possibly for the last time. The Dollatron we see here is different, probably improved, from the cruder prototypes in Batman and Robin, and yet it manages to retain several defining traits.

A few things. The Dollatron's acting independently of Pyg, since said crimeboss has been crucified. It attacks with confidence, with grace, with sharpness, with decisiveness. And, most importantly, it attacks alone. I'm not entirely sure how the Dollatrons of the future work. Mind control's probably out since Pyg's dead, and the "tron" bit seems to imply cybernetic augmentation. Not a complete robot, mind. A police officer in the same issue notes how the Dollatron "was a human being once", and it's been established in Batman and Robin that Pyg was going for perfection. The perfection of conformity, perhaps. The irony, of course, is that the Dollatron in 666 is sleeker, closer to perfection, but is flying solo, less human than Batman or the little girl, and it therefore becomes an individual. It's moved away from the faceless conformity that Pyg was going for. And that's Pyg. He dies, apparently unfulfilled.

I've said a few times how the Dollatrons' efficiency helps with the scary bits. And in both 666 and BatRob, the minions of Pyg are frightfully fast. When the smiling little girl pounces on future Damian, it's lightning quick and it's telling that it manages to injure him even after he's presumably spent much of his career as Batman fighting them.

In 666, fast as an arrow. In BatRob, fast like locusts. It's all in the swarming, baby. Here's the first time we see the Dollatrons Mark One in Batman and Robin #1.

They're filing out of the Pig Pen in a neat line. Look at the arms and legs. Perfect synchronisation. And they're in the middle of a motion. But it's Frank Quitely drawing, and in his art, even the fast-paced action stuff, he draws static pictures, not motions. Freeze-frame shots capturing a particular moment, not a fluid motion. He generates fluidity in his artwork by his panel placements, his choice of moments, and how they can illustrate motion even when motion isn't actually there, if that makes sense. That's how he does the Dollatrons as well. Look at the future Dollatron attacking Damian Wayne. There's plenty of implied motion going on there, with the Dollatron both pouncing and landing and spitting as well. In the Quitely panel, the Dollatrons are moving, sure, but it's all the same movement, and there's nothing before or after it. It's a panel in the middle of the page, with unrelated panels above and below it because there are lots of cuts and scene-switching.

The Dollatrons don't move. They appear.

Check this scene out. The Dollatrons, with Pyg presumably somewhere behind (he turns up in the scene eventually), assault a house. The guy inside opens the door, expecting his partner Lev.

And look at that. The Dollatrons appear. And then everything goes black. The only motion in this bit, on the part of the Dollatrons, is implied. We can imagine it, of course, and that's the best part.

In the second issue, in which Damian arrives at the fairground to do his solo investigation, he's completely alone.

He is alone, right? He walks up to the wooden galloper, and Sasha, tied to it, only has time for a "behind you". And then, immediately:

Good God, that's fast. And Damian knows it, too. Look at his eyes in the first panel. We can't see where the Dollatrons swarmed from, or how fast they did it, exactly, but Damian Wayne, hard motherfucker that he is, does not get taken completely unawares very often, so it's a very telling expression. Do the Dollatrons move faster than the ninjas that Damian Wayne is used to training with?

At first I assumed they'd move in a sort of jerky lurch, like zombies. It's the impression I got from their identical, bulbous faces. But now I've all but discarded that notion. They might be closer to the Dollatrons of the future than we realise. They might look like bulkier, more oafish versions, but they probably move in pretty much the same way. And fast enough to surprise Damian, both now and in the future.

Of course, the problems come when the Dollatrons aren't in control. When Robin does break free, in issue three, the Dollatrons are standing around, not expecting his escape in the least. And it shows, too. Damian takes out something like ten Dollatrons in three pages. Not so slow after all, hmm?

The Dollatrons, out of their element, stumble around helplessly, but they manage to get their shit together as Pyg makes his escape, and quickly direct the swarm towards the nearest victim.

And therein lies the flaw of the beta-test versions of the Dollatrons. They've been created with an "identity-destroying drug", according to Dick Grayson. Now they're all the same, but what are they conforming to? Are they absorbed by some ever-growing Dollatron hivemind? Has Pyg found a way to create the human robot? I assume they react to Pyg's verbal commands, mostly, as they did in issue three, but when chaos descends they lapse into older, more familiar actions. In issue three, Batman and Robin beat the Dollatrons by moving faster than they think, by using human initiative. A different kind of speed.

Another scene. The action is hitting the reader non-stop, and as it climaxes with the fancy co-op, kick, it seems that Batman and Robin have won.

But, lagging ever so slightly behind the instinctive reflexes of the Dynamic Duo, the Dollatrons ineffectually swarm, fast as ever. Their tactics have failed to evolve as quickly as they move, though, and Batman and Robin dispatch the rest of them comically fast.

The weird Dollatron threat seems to be seamlessly diffused by this fight bit. Or it would have been, if not for one other page. Specifically, the one in which the new Batman interacts with regular old Gotham City for the first time in BatRob.

The Mindless Ones mentioned being disappointed at not seeing the Dollatrons swarming over the city, which would definitely have been awesome and worthy of a holy-shit or two. I think this scene gives something very important to the Dollatron continuity (a term I never imagined using ever). It shows, for one, that the Dollatrons are able to operate independently of Professor Pyg, without verbal stimulation. They probably received prior instructions, but had to work out the logistical details on their own. And they had a purpose, other than just cannon fodder for Damian Wayne or laboratory assistants for Pyg. It's a reveal that bridges the divide between the Dollatrons of today and of tomorrow. The Dollatrons, while still following Pyg's orders, could execute a mass terrorist movement rather effectively, one involving explosions and germs and switcharoos between the two. Of course, how much the Dollatrons themselves influenced these elements depends on how much credit you'd like to accord Professor Pyg. But it's something to think about.

What fascinates me is how Morrison has crafted the end point for the Dollatrons and then he's gone and done a story about their infant stages, which becomes even more interesting because we already know how it's going to end. And that probably applies to Damian Wayne as well. I prefer both the Dollatrons and the new Robin in their fresh and raw incarnations. They're more interesting this way.

Cross-dressing henchmen who come about because of acid that changes their faces and hair colour. They even wear makeup in Batman 666. As the Mindless Ones pointed out, the Joker is definitely all over this comic book, and here's definitely another way. It's probably not a coincidence that the Joker-faced cover has Dollatrons all over it, either. I could probably twist this into an argument for the Red Hood actually being the Joker, explaining his interest in Sasha the Dollatron Who Wasn't. I can't say I'm terribly interested in that particular area of speculation, though.

This is the new generation of faceless cannon fodder.

And twenty years from now the Dollatrons will number among Batman's nightly punching bags. I don't know how to feel about that.

Disorganised BatRob Thoughts, In Which I Quibble At Length About A Single Panel

2009-09-05T23:01:00.003+08:00

So the first story arc, the Quitely one, on Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin, finished up last week. I've been spending way more time than is healthy on rereads of the arc. I mean to get a really meaty essay or something up sooner or later, but that kind of thing is going to be pretty daunting, because it's Morrison and Quitely we're talking about here, and I'll be the first to admit I'm not the cream of the crop in terms of Internet comics criticism.

Either way, the Mindless Ones have annocommentations up on the third issue, which were insanely delightful to read. They in turn linked to another blog with a post about the cover for the third issue, which definitely creeped me the fuck out.

In the meanwhile, I noticed a couple of things that may be worth pointing out over the next few days.

I remember talking about being amazed at how fast Morrison and Quitely made the switch from goofy, colourful, Adam West-type fun stuff to the haunting last couple of pages, and how the sense of dread ramped up at a terrific pace.

I'm still trying to figure out how they achieved the effect. Anyway, the scene culminates in Sasha's silent, futile scream, helpless before Professor Pyg's grand entrance into the comic book. He wastes no time in launching into his up-in-the-sky villain claims.

But where have we seen that closeup before?

Morrison and Quitely again, but they were on All-Star Superman then, stripping the character down to his essential elements, much like they're arguably doing with Batman and Robin now.

It's issue two, the one in which Lois Lane deals with Superman revealing his secret identity. She goes into a sort of paranoid mental crisis about her relationship with Superman. It reveals a lot, how she's in love with Superman rather than Clark Kent, and this closeup of her mouth is, like the other scene, the pivotal moment, in which she realises that she can't handle a Superman that's also Kent, a Kent that wasn't a clumsy mask for Superman.

I'm pretty sure that's the common effect here. Realisation, that is. I've done a bit more looking, and I'm pretty sure Quitely doesn't do mouths very often, even in closeup shots. Is there a significance of the mouth to that critical dawning moment of sudden realisation? In Lois Lane's case it's probably the clenching of the jaw, the sort of thing that often leads to a rash decision. It ultimately did, of course, as we see later in the issue.

It's also worth noting that it's an uncommon display of emotion from Lois that may or may not have been actual. Superman's explanation of her paranoid behaviour only serves to raise more questions. That panel is the first time we see rational, investigative-journalist Lois Lane lose it. The shot of her mouth pulls demands focus, maybe because it's not a wholly pleasant picture. It's the first time we're seeing a part of Lois Lane that's physically unattractive, and it occurs at the same time that the ugly bits of her subconscious rear their head.

Could be slightly different in Sasha's case. I'd like to talk about the colouring. Everything gets a bit blurry in that Superman panel, as if Lois Lane is woozily losing her grip on her general perception, as if she's descending into the uncertain territory of doubt and what-ifs. The BatRob panel, meanwhile, pulls everything into sharp focus. Note how the colouring differs in the two Sasha panels. The background likewise fades away, but now we see Sasha's mouth more vividly. I'm guessing it has to do with how visceral Sasha's situation is compared to Lois's, and possibly with how Sasha is being tugged unforgivingly into the sharp, harsh reality of her predicament. That moment is her point of clarity, when the initial shock of the scene wears off and her dad's face gets rearranged and there's the oh-fuck-I'm-next thing which would help anyone focus, I'd imagine. Lois, on the other hand, slips further out of reality and her train of thought is veering into the realm of possibilities.

Isn't it strange how much more pretty Sasha looks than Lois in the two panels? I love how the line "Pyg is here to make everything perfect" is right next to Sasha's notably perfect teeth. Look at them. White, clearly defined, nice and straight. It could be foreshadowing Sasha's eventual fate in issue three. Within the confines of that one panel she's perfect, yet Pyg's made her into his perfect, which of course fucks with her head.

And that's Pyg as he's given to us in issue one. I have no idea what the fuck he turns into by issue three, but it's scary as hell, that's for sure.

That's all I got for now. I must confess the blog's been in a sorry state in terms of content. But I've got a theme now, bitches, and I'm rolling with it. Expect more BatRob to follow.

Disney Now Owns Stan Lee Cameos

2009-09-01T17:13:00.005+08:00

By now any card-carrying comics fan will probably know about Disney buying Marvel for $4 billion.

That sound you hear is Steve Gerber turning in his grave.

And it seems from initial reactions that Disney fans are rather less pleased than Marvel fans, which is both amusing and understanding.

However, it's more than likely that Marvel comics won't feel the influence of the parent company. Don't forget that Disney owned Miramax when Pulp Fiction was released. So we're unfortunately not going to see a a movie entitled THE PUNISHER VERSUS THE JONAS BROTHERS or Doctor Doom joining the cast in HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 5: EVERYONE DIES.

It's also slightly a shame about the whole thing. Because THAT would be awesome.

These Reviews Were Written On The FUEL OF DEPRESSION

2009-08-31T19:15:00.010+08:00

I should stop promising more content, because whenever I do I inevitably fail to deliver. Thank God for Monday night reviews, eh?

This time it's because Oasis split up, and I've become unaccountably sad and unproductive. I honestly have no idea why. Maybe it's a teenager thing.

I was actually considering writing the reviews while role-playing as a manic depressive, but those just amounted to "so something happens in this comic. life sucks. bwraoor phwaarrharr." Being depressed and staying depressed is HARD.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #8:
An all-ages comic about Batman punching out ninjas and fighting the Yeti in Tibet, which also acknowledges, or possibly pokes fun at, the inherently contradictory nature of China's "super functionary" group, the Great Ten. They call themselves "functionaries" rather than "heroes", to "sound humble", yet have names like Accomplished Perfect Physician. Come to think of it, I'm not terribly sure if Grant Morrison intended the contradiction or not. I don't know if something like that is what he'd go for. Worth thinking about. And all this from a kid's comic, eh?

J. Bone isn't illustrating this month, alas, but you can certainly do a lot worse than Carlo Barberi and Terry Beatty. The fight bits are choreographed nicely and you can always tell who's hitting who and so forth. I also love how August General in Iron's energy staff is way too small for his bulked up metal body.

My monthly fix for clean, fun comics featuring Batman.

Detective Comics #856:

Let's be perfectly honest about why everyone loves this comic. If J.H. Williams were not making this the amazing work of art it is, it would be just another facet of the recent mega-Batrelaunch, most of which is pretty mediocre. Greg Rucka tells two not-very-exciting-at-all stories this issue, and one suspects that the main feature is only more interesting, script-wise, because it's got a higher page count, the better for more plot elements.

I'll say this, though. Rucka's writing to Williams' strengths. It looks like that, anyway, and Rucka said as much in interviews. This is definitely far beyond what anyone expected. Greg Rucka has the same grasp of dialogue I've seen in his previous comics, leading to some pretty deft characterisation in places.

But of course the main attraction is the art. To describe it would require some sort of scene-by-scene breakdown, which would be long and boring. The best I can do is an analogy. Reading it is like having your eyes gently sexed to death with gorgeous art and colour that makes you want to call Dave Stewart a "colour artist" rather than just a "colourist".

And it is GOOD metaphorical sex.

Batman and Robin #3:

The weird is ramped right up here. This issue, Professor Pyg performs a disco striptease for a tied up Robin while delivering his villainous monologue, I truly, deeply shit you not at all.

Then everything clacks into action mode. Robin casually looses himself, easy as you like, and assaults a bunch of Dollatrons with Pyg's drill-bit face-alteration equipment. And then Professor Pyg is set on fire and Robin beats the living crap out of him and then Batman shows up and OF COURSE there's a simulkick to the face. Brilliant, brilliant comics.

Oh, and Le Bossu, the evil pseudo-hunchback, and with a single line (Compris, m'sieu le cop?) I know exactly what he sounds like in my head. And he sets up Batman and Robin perfectly and crashthroughtheglass, if you read Batman #676 and #681 you'll see how RIP has come around and that bit is magic too.

If you haven't already figured out, I love this comic book to bits. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely could probably team up and turn my Social Studies textbook into comics and I would dig it.

Tiny Titans #19:This issue has a mechanical brain in a jar and a talking French gorilla going on a date and I cannot think of anything sweeter than that.

Guardians of the Galaxy #17:

Has this already become a "classic" Guardians of the Galaxy issue, in which the Guardians have to close a reality-threatening rift, with plenty of snappy dialogue and cosmic technobabble in between? I think so. It's an old formula (though it feels weird to say that after only seventeen issues), but Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are getting better at the execution. It's a smooth, clean issue that's beginning to break away from any continuity issues associated with crossing over with War of Kings, and it's in general quite typical of their run so far.

Brad Walker is getting better too. He's drawing a pretty neat Rocket Raccoon now, so that's something I'm enjoying a whole lot more.

Plus, the revelation that Groot is actually a super genius was both superb idea-wise and in the handling with regards to the dialogue. I want to see DnA write the Inhumans more. And Groot. They should not be taken away from Groot.

Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter #3: I don't know if everyone's heard the news, but Kieron Gillen, come November, is going to be writing both the new S.W.O.R.D. ongoing AND taking over the reigns of Thor. That is a huge gig right there, and one that he fully deserves after this fantastic baptism-by-thunder miniseries.

There's nothing to say that I haven't already. This is huge cosmic action, epic with some chilling moral decisions being put to our favourite Last Son of Korbin. And more than one powerful scene featuring your friendly neighbourhood Devourer of Worlds. It's telling how Gillen's given Beta Ray Bill, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Voidian and even the I'Than people different character voices, while a lesser writer might just apply a generic high fantasy space opera dialogue to every one of those. It's even more telling when Agent Brand of SWORD comes along at the end of the issue, and her attitude and matching dialogue remind you of how easily Kieron Gillen nails character voice.

Kano's art has become looser over the three issues, allowing for the greater expanses of space made use of in each issue by the script. And he manages to keep things tight and gripping for the more tense moments. He draws explosions and big space action and the huge I'Than fleet in breathtaking, sweeping panels that hammer home the already heavy impact the script has.

I'm expecting big things from both these guys. And if Marvel wants to let Kieron Gillen into the Marvel Universe to play around a bit, well, that's fine by me. Clever move, in my opinion.

Wednesday Comics #8:

Probably the most solid issue so far.

Batman: Vertical cityscapes are what Eduardo Risso should draw. And Commisioner Gordon littering while talking to Batman was pretty damn funny.

Kamandi: And if you thought the tiger legion was awesome, THIS WEEK THERE ARE FOOKIN' LIONS, MATE!

Superman: Those aliens are actually the LGMs from Toy Story, right? Hence the unrevealed psychic abilities. Fictional crossovers explain everything.

Deadman: So Deadman has... decided to become more muscular this week.

Green Lantern: FINALLY! Is Green Lantern actually seeing some action or what, huh?

Metamorpho: PERIODIC TABLE OF MIKE ALLRED. Neil Gaiman, I take back anything I've said about Metamorpho so far.

Teen Titans: Eh. Colouring has improved. That's about it, really.

Strange Adventures: It honestly still astonishes me, even after eight weeks, how far ahead this strip is from everything else.

Supergirl: Doctor Mid-Nite has a book called "Idiot's Guide to Brain Surgery" on his bookshelf. Amanda Conner draws this for the win.

Metal Men: Have I read this story before? Could it be exactly the same as every other Metal Men story with Chemo as the villain? No!

Wonder Woman: Fenris EXPLODES onto the bloody page and Ben Caldwell has honestly done something very different and very interesting to read.

Sgt. Rock: Ok. Maybe next issue. Rock has to start killing Nazis next issue. Right?

The Flash: Fading into Benday dots... That's gotta mean something. I'll understand when I read all the Flash strips at once. Science hurts.

The Demon and Catwoman: "When I strike with the Spellsword of Lust" might be the horniest line in comics ever.

Hawkman: This is like Sgt. Rock. The suspense for Hawkman hitting dinosaurs with his mace is killing me here.

Review: Unknown Soldier: Haunted House

2009-08-26T18:59:00.004+08:00

Let me come out and say this right at the beginning. This is not a comic book for everyone.

I like how the story arc is named "Haunted House". It's a fiction trope, innit? A convention of storytelling, a sort of medium which you can tweak and play with (the writer, I mean) to create a story, to put characters in certain situations. The thing about Unknown Soldier is that the haunted house, the jail cell of horrific brutality, the claustrophobic, inexorable walls of violence, it's all happening in the real world. If you like your comics escapist and light-hearted, you aren't going to like this.

The Unknown Soldier isn't a new creation. The original soldier was one of those Kanigher-Kubert things, like Sgt. Rock. He was in war comics and fought Nazis and things. Grant Morrison likes to reference him, for some reason, in All-Star Superman and Flex Mentallo, two very candyfloss horizon-type comics that are really quite different from anything about the Unknown Soldier. Worth thinking about, but decidedly odd. Anyway, I believe the character has been reinvented a couple of times recently, becoming progressively darker each time.

This series is the latest reinvention. Set in 2002, this is the story of Dr. Lwanga Moses, an American-educated pacifist doctor with a Catholic wife, also a doctor. He travels to his home country of Northern Uganda to help in his own way, setting up a medical clinic to help the injured and hopefully help build a ladder for the shithole his country has dug for itself. And shit happens, leading to him becoming the bandaged Unknown Soldier.

"Shit happens" is putting it lightly. What happens in Northern Uganda is a perverted nightmare given tangible form. A violent civil war, with child soldiers on both sides, twelve years old or even younger, fighting with knifes and AK-47s. It's been ignored by the global media. The term "haunted house" becomes more real, more visceral. And it's all happening. Yes. In real life. Right now. In Northern Uganda young girls are being taken from convents as sex slaves and nine year old boys are being beaten to death with sticks. It's reality, and it's shitty and cruel and ruthless and all the worse because people don't know.

That's how I would describe the book. It's raw with emotion and the passion that Joshua Dysart pumps into the work. The guy spent a month in Northern Uganda (it's referred to as such because even in the south bit of Uganda people don't know shit about what's happening and the violence happens closer to the Sudanese border, a country whose violence DOES appear on the news on and off). He lived with the Acholi people, who were the most affected by the war. He took a thousand photographs. He's done more research about the conflict than even some journalists and researchers. His blog is one of the best news update places on the web for the conflict, thanks to his connections with friends in Uganda. That's sort of what Joshua Dysart brings to the table with Unknown Soldier.

Of course, we can't forget that this is in fact a comic book, and one about a guy with bandages around his head who's waging a one-man war against a group of rebel extremists. It's about as historically accurate as you can get for that sort of thing. But then again, if this was going to be a hundred percent accurate, it would be a piece of journalism. It's not. It's a story, but set in the real world, and it balances that fact, slightly awkwardly sometimes, but very effectively at other times. There are bits in the comic that feel a bit heavy handed in terms of the political themes and the infodumping, but mostly Dysart lets the characters and the story take centrestage.

It's a good war story, I should add. There's violence and good, sharp action scenes, and even a healthy dose of mystery, both psychological in the case of the Unknown Soldier's mental state, and political intrigue-style, in the case of the strange CIA agent Jack Lee Howl (candidate for best name ever?). A solid story on its own, in other words, though the dialogue isn't as tight as it could be. That could be attributed to the difficulty in accurately mimicking Ugandan-English speech patterns, especially in the more intense scenes. A minor quibble, I think, that doesn't detract much from the story. And did I mention the violence? Maybe not enough - it's vivid stuff that's got a lot of bloody scenes. Bloody bloody scenes with bloody bloody blood.

All illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, who's sort of got a generic Vertigo style that's hard to nail with words. It's well-suited to the subject matter of stark, frank depictions of war. And he nails the action sequences and the gun battles that come in short, sharp bursts. He gets the atmosphere right. This is a comic that feels angry, an emotion that comes across in the artwork. It's stirring and it can make you feel angry as well. Not just from the shock value of the violence, neither. The quieter, more reflective moments are some of the best bits, emotionally, in the comic. Alberto Ponticelli has it all down. And his depiction of the bleak Ugandan background (photoreferenced from Joshua Dysart's research material) is, according to Ugandans online, pretty realistic. It's nice to see that Ponticelli knows to sacrifice real photorealism for his sense of style. This is a comic, after all. And it's a comic that gives you everything it promises.

Ultimately, Unknown Soldier is a comic about the real world. It's unforgiving in its portrayal of a conflict that's uncomfortably close. It's a vicious read, not something you read lightly. It takes commitment to the story, to the history, to the conflict. It's a comic book that will challenge the way you look at the world, at Africa, at politics, at your own moral shortcomings and your willingness to ignore the brutal reality, the reality that this horrific life-and-death struggle is something typical, something that happens all the time in some parts of the world, where it's not just food and water and shelter that's scarce. It's safety, too. The constant fear that people can get their arms cut off for something as silly as riding a bicycle.

The moral questions it asks are not easily answered. Dirty, gritty truth is layed out in the pages of a comic book, not directly posing questions or taking any sort of moral high ground, but pointing out little things about a certain corner of our world, and how the rest of the world deals with it. It's fascinating. It's disconcerting and dark, dark shit. It fully deserves the Eisner Award Nomination for Best New Series.

Unknown Soldier Vol. 1: Haunted House went on sale last week, with a cover price of only $9.99 of the American dollars. Vertigo pimps a new series, as usual, and, as usual, it's something worthy of all the praise it receives.

Once again, definitely not a comic for everyone. It's all serious up in this biz, and so admirably fully-formed in its conception. Joshua Dysart, for making this project real, has done something extremely courageous. It's something else, let me tell you that, and it's something I want to be a part of.

I Got (Not Very Many) Comics!

2009-08-24T18:35:00.004+08:00

This will hopefully be a busy content week. In the meantime, not-very-many reviews of comics I bought last week!

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #4: This seems to be the Right-Let's-Shake-Things-Up-A-Bit-Shall-We? issue. Rising Sun seems to have snapped and taken over the mysterious board. The Super Young Team has officially split up, but that's never a good idea, is it? I like the idea of an updated Big Science Action team, which sort of spins out of the Final Crisis Sketchbook. It's nice if you catch all the little changes.

Most Excellent Superbat is the focus of this issue, and that's probably a good idea. Joe Casey's bringing on the serious weird now and Mosexbat is probably the best sort of anchor. And he's an amusingly unreliable narrator. The Twitteresque captions continue to be fun to read.

As does the rest of the comic. It seems to be chaotic this issue, but Joe Casey's got everything plotted quite tightly. And he keeps up the weird cultural parody-exploration atmosphere going. I bloody love the Super Young Team. Well Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash appears in just one scene this issue, without any dialogue, but it was ace. And pretty funny.

Artwise, Chriscross still proves he's the one for this miniseries, aided by Eduardo Pansica, but I can't tell their art apart much. Overall it's still visually apt for a comic of this tone, but some bits could be better served with more insane colours. Very insane colours. Total apeshit-ly flashy and unfazed by goddamn everything, just like the writing is. That would be awesome.

X-Factor #47:
After reading this issue it struck me that Peter David and Brian Michael Bendis have a similar sense of humour. Their jokes tend to be hit-or-miss with me, but I can appreciate the Bendisical (you see the word I just made up right there?) comedic timing because sometimes it does make me smile.

So of course I read the issue again and realised that I still have no idea why I love X-Factor more than, say, anything Bendis writes. Off the top of my head I don't think I own many Bendis titles, though I've read lots of his stuff.

Don't know what I've just established there. But anyway! I think my point was that this issue was pretty funny. All the bits with future nutso Doctor Doom and his hallucinations of grandeur were wonderful, and the bit about whinging, and there was a fantastic scene involving one of Madrox's duplicates, the Reverand John Maddox. It's nice to see that they kept him around. Oh, and there's one bit where Cortex almost almost reveals something big about Longshot and Shatterstar which was snatched away. For some reason I really wanted to know what it was.

Speaking of Longshot, there was a bit where he fights Cortex, and there's a demonstration of his luck powers that doesn't quite work because of a poorly timed change of scene, and the suspension of disbelief is quite frankly ruined. That's one bit that bugged me.

I've noticed over the course of this story arc that X-Factor is beginning to come together as a team again, minus Madrox, who's skipping about in the future. I'd like to think that it's something Peter David's trying to accomplish beyond the whole time travel thing (which he says he will be staying away from after this story, thank God).

There's only one artist this issue, and it shows, it bloody shows. Everything is nice and consistent and slightly realistic-noirish. So that made me happy. People have complained that Monet looked pretty damn ugly on the second-to-last page, but I like to think that she does look like that when she loses it.

I've just read the issue again, and yes, I do believe Siryn spends the entire issue screaming at Sentinels. Girl is hardcore.

Wednesday Comics #7:
Batman: Ahh, you gotta love how Batman improvises.

Kamandi: I DID NOT KNOW THERE WAS A WHOLE LEGION OF ROMAN-CENTURIAN-TIGER-WARRIORS THIS IS NOW AT A NEW LEVEL OF AWESOME.

Superman: I am unabashedly rooting for the ugly-ass aliens.

Deadman: Blood... It's... All over this inventive layout... And all over your mout- OM NOM NOM

Green Lantern: Everything here should have happened like four issues ago. We do not need to know who this goddamn monster is just have Hal Jordan fight him already and let Joe Quinones draw it. Job bloody done.

Metamorpho: Java the Caveman Manservant, oh you are comedy gold.

Teen Titans: Did you seriously reference Countdown to Final Crisis? Eddie Berganza you're doing this on purpose I KNEW IT.

Strange Adventures: God in sweet grenadastic heaven it's dreamscape Doctor Fate I have already fainted.

Supergirl: See, I can accept Aquaman being ineffectual when you also write him as a prick. It's easier to deal with.

Metal Men: Isn't it obligatory for Tin to die in every single Metal Men fight ANYWAY? 'Sides, everyone wants that irritating bugger to die in various creative chemical ways. Up high, Chemo.

Wonder Woman: If you told me six weeks ago this would be one of my favourite strips I would prolly do some disembowelling. Or just laugh. I can't remember my state of mind six weeks ago.

Sgt. Rock: At this point I am dearly hoping that the next five weeks is just Sgt. Rock beating the living shit out of Nazis.

The Flash: Time travel is too scientific for me. I fail comic book physics.

The Demon and Catwoman: I still have nothing to say about this strip. Is this the same Walter Simonson? As in Skurge-machine-guns and Beta Ray Bill? That Walter Simonson?

Hawkman: The next issue blurb might as well read: "NEXT WEEK: HAWKMAN HITS DINOSAURS WITH HIS MACE. YOU ARE NOW FREAKING OUT."

Plug For A Good Cause, Y'All

2009-08-23T17:01:00.003+08:00

You all need to head over to GraphiContent, to check out Chad Nevett's Blogathon 2009.

For 24 hours, from 9 in the PM last night, every half an hour, he will post. About comics! More specifically, about the "Bendis era" of Marvel Comics, the succession of major events and related works by certain other writers.

AND it's all for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, so head over, donate if you can, read the posts if you can't.

Links and Things, Because I Love You All

2009-08-20T20:20:00.006+08:00

*First up is something I've never seen before, that's frankly quite innovative. An interactive Youtube video, or series of videos, anyway. It's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type deal that's way fun to check out. The fact that it's a breakdancing contest between Batman and the Joker is just, you know, extra radness. This vid is where it begins. But you won't be able to see it full sized on the blog, so may I please present the link. Only you can decide your fate!

*You might have heard that Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog has begun a new podcast project. The first episode went live a couple of days ago, and the first guest was the fantastic Matt Fraction, who, I found out, is as awesome a person as he is a writer. Go listen to War Rocket Ajax! It's interesting stuff.

*And in other podcast news, over at the Mindless Ones, the latest Gary Lactus' Vault of Tymbus is about Wednesday Comics, and also contains the genius line "Say your fucking catchphrase!"

*Finally, rounding up the links and the week full of awesome Aquaman stuff, here is a really fabulous five-page comic featuring Batman and Aquaman by a Brazilian illustrator, Eduardo Medeiros. It's cute and funny and masterfully done, totally without dialogue. Best thing I've seen all week.

I Wrote These Reviews While Headbanging

2009-08-17T18:36:00.005+08:00

So Comic-Con sort of ate my weekend, so I was sort of hard pressed to get these reviews out. Content will be sporadic for the next coupla days.

Blackest Night #2: I said before how the first issue confused me and I didn't really know what to think of it. It probably had to do with the fact that it took itself way too seriously. For a commentary about death in comics and the rainbow warriors of the emotional spectrum, Blackest Night #1 was a hell of a heavy-handed, full-of-itself mess, writing-wise.

I liked this issue much much more. It's like the Geoff Johns who's JSA I loved and Green Lantern and Flash I mostly liked came back to me. The biggest plus was probably the complete lack of expository captions, which I suppose were necessary in the first issue to bring people up to speed with the four-one-one of the DCU. This issue was smoother, easier to read, ever so slightly more fun, and had nice action bits. It was more superheroey than the first issue.

Mm. I don't know how Geoff Johns manages to have such an epic-ly large cast in Blackest Night, while providing emotional resonance between each character and the reader. In other words, there's a reason for each character to be there. And you never feel shortchanged in terms of screen time. Sort of different from the character cameo clusterfuck we saw in Final Crisis last year, hey? This is Geoff Johns, who's not the crazy idea man, but the calmer, maestro of the DCU. He waves and shit happens. And this issue it was good stuff, mostly. Some bits still feel like setup, lacking the spacey, colossal scale and huge-ass moments that made the Sinestro Corps War a classic Green Lantern event. Also, what happened to all the colourful lantern people? No rainbow fights in space? Cause that would be awesome.

The art remains difficult to praise. I'm not the biggest fan of the colouring. Alex Sinclair is turning in the same quality of stuff we see in Batman and Robin, but it doesn't quite take the cake for me. What Ivan Reis and Oclair Albert are producing, though, is artwork beyond anything I've seen from them. And I've done a bit of homework in the past month, checking Green Lantern art from the past couple of years. It's good. Excellently good, I daresay. And I'll leave it at that once again.

Something else noteworthy happens this issue. The Aquaman family shows up. And the resulting action sequence basically justifies my entire defense for the case of Aquaman's awesomeness.
Yes, you are seeing a zombie Aquaman summoning sharks to kill a bunch of people. To death.

I know. It put a smile on my face too.

Dark Reign: Zodiac #2:
I stand by what I said a month ago. This is the best comic book with the words DARK REIGN on the cover. It's an idea that's simple enough. The plot, too. There's not much that actually happens. Plans come together and that's about it. It's quite easy to mess up a premise like this one. But Joe Casey does not. He adds his nifty little characterisation and snappy dialogue and the touches of insanity and he magicks and hypnotises around this bitch.

This is a comic about chaos. The parallels with Heath Ledger's Joker are very hard to miss, but it seems more like Joe Casey's teasing you with the idea, because everything's really firmly placed in the Marvel Universe, where the craziness is treated with "Marvel realism". It's probably even more inherently ridiculous than the alternative, and therein lies the essense of the comic. Zodiac is a genre-savvy kind of villain, who knows exactly what's going on, and all he really wants is to introduce the element of chaos to Norman Osborn's status quo, warped though it already may be. There's a little sequence where "new" versus "old" villainy is talked about. Zodiac seems to be perpetually five minutes ahead of everyone else on the playing field. And maybe that's what he is. A representation of the man of the so-near-you-can-smell-it future.

I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there's something about Dark Reign: Zodiac that fascinates me. I also appreciate how Joe Casey has believably put Norman Osborn way out of his depth. This is a well-realised superhero - nay! - supervillain book.

And the art's as chaotic and lovely as the story is, matching the script pace for pace with the scratchy, frenzied energy that zigzags right off the damn page. Nathan Fox has a distinct visual style that definitely isn't for everyone, but I love it, and it happens to be a perfect fit for the comic. It realises the irrational madness of our team of villains with furious lines and explosions that are as crazy as the characters are. It's the only way Galactus and Red Ronin could have shown up in Marvel's "This Is A Serious Event, No Joke" Dark Reign.

Man, I love this.

Ultimate Comics Avengers #1: Most of the Mark Millar stuff I've read tends to start out strong, then sort of weakly peter out towards the end. Maybe he can't sustain interest in a single project for long enough to write with the manic energy he sometimes taps into. But I've always been a fan of The Ultimates, pre-Jeph Loeb, of course, so I thought I'd give this comic half a shot. Bloody $3.99 cover price pisses me the hell off, though.

Anyway, this issue, Mark Millar jumps right into the story, with Ultimate Nick Fury, he who is Samuel L. Jackson, empathetically enquiring, "What the fuck?" And that pretty much sums up the events of Ultimatum, the storyline from which this storyline is spawned. Don't worry if you haven't read Ultimatum. I haven't either. There is no reason to read it, anyway. From what I read on the various comic Internets, Ultimatum seems to be Jeph Loeb writing the worst comic ever, possibly on purpose. People even bought it every month to see how bad it could get.

Ultimate Captain America is still a dick, UltiFury is still so cool that SHIELD had to invite him back after they fired him, and Ultimate Hawkeye, despite the needless costume change, is still badass. He also gets the best line in the issue, which his comeback to being called insane: "I believe you mean AWESOME."

Tony Stark (I don't have to keep adding Ultimate in front of everyone's names right?) and the rest of the Ultimates are all absent. Most of them probably died during Ultimatum or something. Tony Stark is drunk in a strip joint. I haven't read any Ultimate Universe comics in ages, but it seems from the dialogue that Tony Stark's had sex with Wolverine or something and is recovering from the trauma.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is the comic book I remember. The Ultimates are back. This is entertainment comics, bitches. Everyone knows Mark Millar is about as subtle as Godzilla, but who the hell cares? This comic is about having political pseudo-commentary shoved in your face (well, not exactly in this issue, but it'll come in time). It's about Earth's Mightiest Heroes turned slick and hyperreal. Not realistic, mind. Hyperreal, as in randomly irreverant one-liners and catchphrases and their ridiculously dysfunctional relationships and old-school idealism turned on its head and equipped with big guns.

Hell, this is TEENAGE comics.

And Carlos Pachedo draws a very very nicely acceptable comic. He's no Bryan Hitch, but he's got a good eye for action. Most of the issue takes place in a couple of helicopters, with characters fighting in and out of the things, and the execution is all good, without the cluttered panels Bryan Hitch sometimes finds himself restrained by when it comes to action. And we need action in our Ultimates comics.

Stupid title for a comic book, but I digs.

The Unwritten #4:
So if we take Tommy Taylor of The Unwritten as the metaphor for Harry Potter, it means that on the first page of this comic, Harry stabs Ron Weasley in the eye with his wand, which is, and trust me on this, something that you really want to see. I also chuckled aloud when I saw it. Does that make me a bad person?

The Tommy Taylor slashfic is indicative of the issue as a whole. The metafiction assassin scythes the fuck out of everyone in the Frankenhouse, or just gets plain creative. Crucified to a grandfather clock, anyone? That creepy lightning splash page at the end of the last issue? Yeah, this issue has atmosphere exactly like that. Peter Gross ramps the darkness and the shadowy horror up to nineteen thousand. The use of composition and shadows here is bloody excellent, is what it is. Not just the kind of thing from a serial killer film, either. Real, classic horror, layered with the sort of mystery you can only find in comic books. And whatever the hell goes on in Mike Carey's head.

Those last few pages are especially astounding. I had to pause for several "holy shit"s before rereading. Pullman's hand-of-fiction effect was oddly unnerving, which seems strange next to the rest of the issue. And then the final couple of pages just pull the rug way out from under our feet. The line between truth and fiction, as it often is in The Unwritten, is once again assaulted by layered metafiction. God, you gotta love that stuff.

War of Kings #6:
The thing that gets me about War of Kings is how logically the whole event's played out, while still remaining highly bloody enjoyable. It has to do, mostly, with the fact that Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are playing around with the more obscure characters here. Over at DC, Blackest Night can afford to throw twists around using the histories of the popular, beloved characters. I think War of Kings is like the safe route. We don't enter this event with much emotional connection to these characters. But DnA have been playing in Marvel's cosmic sandbox for a while now, and this is the glorious lovechild of their writing partnership.

There's going to be a one-shot in September to fully conclude War of Kings, a sort of epilogue, which is good. Means that they didn't have to wrap everything up in this single issue. So we get huge cosmic action of the hell-yes variety. Which Paul Pelletier is drawing quite well indeed. He's got this shit down. It's probably one of the more artistically consistent event comics I've read in a while. By my count, about two-thirds of the pages in this issue have some form of explosion or energy blast in it. This sucker goes out with a bang.

And Black Bolt finally, finally, finally fucks Vulcan up. We all knew it was coming, but that somehow, like the rest of this event, made it sweeter. To all involved in War of Kings, very well played indeed.

Except for the covers. Wasn't fond of those.

Wednesday Comics #6:
Batman: I love it whenever Batman smiles. He's either high as hell, or about to beat the living shit out of someone. Both instances are awesome.

Kamandi: You know what's better than gorillas with guns? People killing gorillas with guns.

Superman: I am dearly hoping that the aliens will kill Superman. Or at least shut him up for a few weeks.

Deadman: Hey! The story's back! Lost it for a few weeks, but it all connects! Epic hell battle was not for nothing.

Green Lantern: What the bloody hell was that flashback for, then?

Metamorpho: Goddamit, Mike Allred. I can't hate this strip with this beautiful snakes and ladders thing you've done!

Teen Titans: Oh God that was painful. Eddie Berganza you're doing this on purpose, aren't you?

Strange Adventures: Paul Pope gets all Zhuang Zi on your ass. Win.

Supergirl: This is an awesome week for Aquaman. Good on you, DC.

Metal Men: Chemo, bitches! CHEMO!

Wonder Woman: With verticality comes readability. Which helps.

Sgt. Rock: Could it- Mayb- Is it just me? Did something actually happen in this strip this week?

The Flash: With a Gorilla Grodd ministrip we have now entered a higher plane of awesomeness, of course.

The Demon and Catwoman: Uhm. Well. I like the art.

Hawkman: Jumping away from explosions! BadabadabadaBOOM!

Friday Night Fights - "When Titans Collide!"

2009-08-14T21:59:00.002+08:00

It's the final week of Spacebooger's heaven-sunderin' Fight Music! And so I'm going out with as big a bang as I can. And who creates a bigger bang than the Incredible Hulk?

Well, that would be the Incredible Hercules, because that guy has his own song, a song that is like a hymn of awesomeness.

Bless my soul

Herc was on a roll

Person of the week in every Greek opinion poll

What a pro

Herc could stop a show

Point him at a monster and you're talking SRO

He was a no one

A zero, zero

Now he's a honcho

He's a hero

Here was a kid with his act down pat

From zero to hero in no time flat

Zero to hero just like that

Say amen

There he goes again

Sweet and undefeated

And an awesome 10 for 10

Folks lined up

Just to watch him flex

And this perfect package

Packed a pair of pretty pecs

Hercie, he comes

He sees, he conquers

Honey, the crowds were

Going bonkers

He showed the moxie brains, and spunk

From zero to hero a major hunk

Zero to hero and who'da thunk

This epic smackdown is from the Hulk Vs Hercules one-shot, by Greg Pak and Frank van Lente, and art by Reilly Brown, Carlos Cuevas, Terry Pallot, and Chris Sotomayor. Evidently they couldn't leave the distilled awesome in this comic to just one artist. Or even one writer.

So I Guess This Is A Regular Thing Now?

2009-08-12T22:06:00.002+08:00

*First, the third part of Abhay Khosla's Bram Stoker's Dracula is live and still kicking ass. Or not kicking ass, rather, which is better.

*A link to Grant Morrison's column from way back in the nineties, Drivel, in which he totally disses Alan Moore.

*And the big news of the week is that the Great Ten, Grant Morrison's team of "super-functionsaries" from China, are getting their own miniseries. Which is complete awesomesauce. I have been looking forward to this for ages, since it was promised what, two years ago?

Anyway, this is by Tony Bedard, who's writing R.E.B.E.L.S., a series that's supposed to be really good. I have to say that I'm not a fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes at all, so I haven't picked up REBELS or any other Legion book because of that. But this'll be cool to check out, to see how good Tony Bedard really is. And also it's Asian superheroes in an Asian setting, facing Asian problems, so it's relevant to me and the concept sounds neat. Ancient Chinese gods return to knock off the commies. Heh.

Oooh, and covers by Stanley Lau, or Artgerm, as he calls hisself. Pretty.

Douchebaggery, Thy Colour Is Yellow

2009-08-11T21:03:00.004+08:00

So recently what happened is that this dude pranked Rob Liefeld at a comic-con. Which is probably not that big a deal for you. And it shouldn't be. But I feel I should explain why it is a big deal to people who get worked up about it.

Like just about everyone who reads comics, I'm not the biggest fan of Rob Liefeld's art. For you who need a bit of a reference, here is the image that most people use to ridicule Rob Liefeld, because this is what he thinks a human being looks like:

And there is a way old link to more of Liefeld's eye-gouging art here, though some of the images may not show up.

So he's definitely not the most talented guy around. But here's the deal. Rob Liefeld and his style of art were icons of the nineties. Representative of the popular comic book culture of the entire decade. He created Cable, Deadpool, Shatterstar. Big, muscled guys with guns and gritted teeth and, God forbid, pouches. He's one of the founders of Image Comics, which was a company basically founded on the raw star power of artists of the time like Rob Liefeld. He was literally the most popular figure in the comic book industry of the entire world in his time. He sold millions and millions of comics and he is rich. Rich like choirs of angels shat money all over him.

I have no idea what he does these days, but I hear he's still rolling in money.

Anyway, if you haven't already followed the link, what happened is this dude, Yellow Hat Guy (yes, that's supposed to be funny or something), goes up to Liefeld and demands an apology for Heroes Reborn, which Liefeld drew thirteen years ago.

And then he buys a copy of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way and gives it to Liefeld.

I sort of skimmed over the post, and at this point I thought it was a pretty funny idea, and Yellow Hat Guy gets props for that. (Don't kill me, Internet!)

That is, until I bothered to watch the shitty videos in the post, only to realise that things didn't quite happen like Yellow Hat Guy likes to think they did. The guy almost pissed in his pants while doing it, for one thing. And he didn't have the balls to actually give Liefeld the book. He sort of left it on Liefeld's table, and ran away, presumably to hide and have a nerdgasm or something.

And the worst bit was that Rob Liefeld was nice about the whole thing. He was completely civil. When YHG asked for an apology for Heroes Reborn, Liefeld said "nice meeting you" or something along those lines and YHG ran off (yeah, I think he makes a habit of this), shocked that he couldn't get a reaction out of his least favourite artist that he waited thirteen years to get his revenge on. Man, that sentence up there is pathetic.

As always, the Internet is all about people trying to ram their opinions down everyone's throat like piles of steaming dogshit, so I'd recommend reading a couple dozen of the comments on that post to see what people think about the whole deal. I'm leaning towards the "fuck you, you yellow-hatted bastard" camp, but I also fail to see why people are treating it as a Grave Matter Indeed.

Now, many professionals in comics know of our friend in yellow, and will probably disembowel him on sight or something. Rob Liefeld will still have more money than you. He will continue to draw badly, probably.

And that's all there is, frankly. So there's a comic book fanboy who thinks a creator is a punching bag for him to be a dick to. So he wants to firmly cement the stereotype people have of fanboys as the whole lives-with-mother thing. So people are hurling the full goddamn range of swear words at him. There's honestly nothing to see here.

The only thing I know for sure is that Rob Liefeld is alright in my book. He probably has to deal with people telling him they hate his work all the time, and to face that kind of monumental shitstorm every time he goes to a comic-con or something and still do it smiling and with the kind of civil politeness that totally opposes the dickery on display here, that takes some real human character.

Who cares that he can't draw feet worth a damn? Neither can I. He's still got my respect.

This Week's Reviews Brought To You By Snark

2009-08-10T21:59:00.006+08:00

Warning: I was not feeling very happy at all when reviewing these comics. Don't worry, I still like Secret Six.

Doom Patrol #1:Niles Caulder, super genius. In a wheelchair. On and island full of mad scientists. Why the hell does it look like he bought it from a hospital and put in bigger wheels and a more comfortable seat? Why does it not have a jetpack or levitation thingies or laser cannons? You know what? The Beard Hunter can HAVE you.

Severely displeased that Keith Giffen added a four-armed gorilla to the Doom Patrol and then named it Grunt. And also a chick who's power is, I dunno, to talk to the gorilla or something. Her name is Nudge. Come on. If you wanted to put a big "NOT REALLY THAT IMPORTANT" stamp on a couple characters, you could do a lot better than naming them while playing Scrabble.

Greek Street #2:"But we've cleaned it up and put and adhesive agent on the wound."

So that actually means "Yeah, we just glued your dick back on." Also, is it a good idea to vomit on genital adhesives?

Secret Six #12:
"Why, hello, Wonder Woman! How nice of you to decide today to beat the shit out of me to get the information you want! Hey, that right there wouldn't happen to be a Lasso of Truth that would make me tell you whatever you want, now, would it?"

Wednesday Comics #5: Batman: Does Alfred look exactly like The Penguin, or is it just me?

Kamandi: Is it not very sad that there are badass talking animals all over the places but everyone still rides horses?

Superman: Why do Superman's real mother and Superman's adopted mother look exactly the same?

Deadman: Kirby dots! My God, man! This is genius!

Green Lantern: So this strip is one page of Hal Jordan going, "That's right, I used to be a huge dick."

Metamorpho: You know, for a roast buffalo haunch, that sure looks like a goddamn chicken.

Teen Titans: Oho! "Villain of the Week" is in inverted commas and that makes it funny! I understand now.

Strange Adventures: Right, so the trees in Rann seem to sweat or something. And also grow out of pools of their sweat. Neat.

Supergirl: Last panel. Far right. There is a silhouette of someone flipping the middle finger at Supergirl, I swear to God.

Metal Men: Anything good that I said about Dan DiDio's writing before, especially anything about "potential", I take it all the fuck back.

Wonder Woman: Oh my sainted aunts! A new, fresh, inventive take on a classic DC character! Nooooooooooooooooooooo.

Sgt. Rock: Direct quote: "Stay here and do it. Take your pictures. But, do not touch him. My men and I will gather our toys with which to amuse the prisoner." Yes. I think I found gay fan fiction with Nazis in it.

The Flash: "C... c... c... can't... f... f... f... uh... uh...... uh...... uh......" SAY IT, FLASH! IT'S EASY! FffffffffUCK!

The Demon and Catwoman: Old witches from Camelot. They talk like Yoda.

Hawkman: Straddling a giant phallic object... Isn't that Wonder Woman's job?

Because I'm Just Assuming You're Not Sick Of All These Links

2009-08-09T00:41:00.002+08:00

*The second chapter of Chris Sims's action epic of the ages, Woman of A.C.T.I.O.N. is live now at the Action Age. It's got a villain called Baron Heinrich von Killswitch in it and zat vill make for your head exschplode, mein bongelschnitzels.

*Aaaaand Tucker Stone, who writes for The Factual Opinion, has released the newest episode of his comics webshow, Advanced Common Sense, as part of his column on comiXology. It's pretty funny, and the previous episodes are well worth checking out, too.

Friday Night Fights - Who Needs Your Animal Rights?

2009-08-07T23:58:00.002+08:00

In this week's Friday Night Fights, Irish freedom fighter and passionate Viking murderer Magnus, and his daughter Brigid, are beset by a pack of really really pissed off doggies. It's a dire situation indeed. Gotta feel sorry for the dogs.

Oh, the music for the fight? Well, I'll give you three guesses.

The canine carnage cannot cease! Spacebooger has more! And if you want to see more of Magnus laying down the killing, the second Northlanders trade, The Cross and the Hammer, by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, is a good place to start.

BATMAN...

2009-08-05T20:19:00.001+08:00

... HATES YOUR GODDAMN REALITY TV.

SUPERMAN...

2009-08-05T17:43:00.002+08:00

... HE OF THE COFFIN DICK.

More Free Comics! MOAR!

2009-08-04T20:39:00.002+08:00

*If you aren't already following this funny little webcomic, you should. Let's Be Friends Again by Curt Franklin and Chris Haley is good stuff.

*And here's a four page comic, from way back in 2006, by Phonogram writer Kieron Gillen, illustrated by Paul J. Holden. It's called "Horror", and it's awesomely chilling, rendered in glorious black and white.

What would you do without me, Comic-Starved Lurkers?

Northlanders vol 2: The Cross and the Hammer Review

2009-08-04T19:01:00.003+08:00

The second Northlanders trade, The Cross and the Hammer, was released last week, and it was a perfect end to my comics July. And it's been an awesome month for comics, what with reading Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter and Asterios Polyp within a week of each other and the related benefits.

July was also the month I discovered Northlanders. I honestly don't know what took me so long. It's a comic book about Vikings, after all, and that premise alone makes me feel warm inside. And the first trade, Sven the Returned, which I got two-ish weeks ago, was eight issues for $9.99. So there really wasn't an excuse not to get it.

I remember being disappointed as hell when I was about eleven, upon discovering that Vikings did not, in fact, have horned helmets. I became somewhat disillusioned with the bearded buggers because of that. They fell sharply in my rankings of cool. It helped that they were still big dudes with fuck-off beards and large axes killing the shit out of each other from their longboats. But only a little. Oh, and they worshipped Thor the god of thunder as well, which is pretty cool. And yet my horned helmet-shaped rift remained void!

I went to Iceland once some time after, discovering that there were some batshit Vikings who would eat bears and shit just to get stronger and rip people apart with their bare hands and munch their eyeballs and drink their blood while heavy metal guitar riffs blared loudly in the background and the berserkers probably had entourages make mosh pits around the fight arenas while the butchering and shit went on.

And they had names that meant Bear or Wolf or Giant Fucking Squid or some other badass animal like that.

Right. Northlanders. I may talk about the first trade some other time. Meanwhile, The Cross and the Hammer is about Ireland, occupied by the Vikings just after the turn of the first millenium. It's actually at the arse end of the Viking occupation, though the Vikings don't seem to think so.

Anyways, the basic premise is a that series of Viking murders in the countryside northwest by an Irish freedom fighter of sorts, Magnus, Dog Decapitator Extraordinaire, has garnered the attention of the Gus Grissom of Occupied Ireland, a fella named Ragnar Ragnarsson. So this arc is about the manhunt. And at the same time, occasionally appearing in between scenes, is the Battle of Clontarf between the forces of Brian Boru and King Sigtrygg, which seems to me like an epic Viking-versus-Irish battle. But I can't be completely certain about the historical facts. Gaelic-Viking culture was slightly more complex than I make it out to be. And Brian Wood has obviously done way more research than I have.

But don't let the historical shit turn you off. This is quite accessible. And it's just a bloody story, after all. The thing about Northlanders is that Brian Wood, he of the scribular tendencies, keeps it quite contemporary. The themes of the struggle for freedom and the morals of oppression are things that are easy to relate to. Plus, the dialogue is all modern up in here, and if you ever wanted to hear a Viking say "fuck", this is the comic for you. It's a logical choice, really. It helps keep the story tighter, and makes it easier to read, to bring the attention to the overarching story as a whole, as well as the underlying themes, the sneaky little bastards. It also means that nobody gets to say awesome Shakespearesque one-liners like "We would have words with thee", but you can't win them all.

All manner of ironies abound in this story and they make for excellent reread experiences. Magnus himself, for one, the Irish Viking-stabber who bears a name that would later in history bleed across the two cultures and become a prominent Germanic Viking name. And something about his daughter, Brigid, too, but to say more would be to spoilerify, wouldn't it. There's also the question of who owns the land that the story is set in, the not-so-simple tension between conqueror and conquered. Especially as the hunting down of an Irish insurgent by Viking law enforcement is juxtaposed with the Battle of Clontarf, which marked the beginning of the end of the Viking occupation. It's truly compelling stuff. Magnus, the native, is at the end of it really just trapped in a land that might not even belong to him any more. And so the ethics behind his bloodthirsty attacks are called into question, and the social commentary behind it blurs the lines of moral certainty.

The twist at the end was typical of the entire story. It wasn't really anything groundbreaking, but it worked all the same with Brian Wood's fantastic plot and rock-solid characterisation. The snappy dialogue, especially in the last couple of issues, helped it all along. I like how the inxorable conclusion of how everything is going to turn out, the inherent unavoidability present in all historical fiction, is used quite effectively in Northlanders to craft an ending that's pretty fucking tragic.

I should talk about the art, because it was really very good. Ryan Kelly, the artistical half of The Cross and the Hammer. Yes, it's a beautiful thing. Nothing really specific about it. Ryan Kelly just turns in great art for the entire six issues, which is consistently nice to look at. I flipped through the trade a while ago, trying to decide what Ryan Kelly is best at drawing, but I couldn't come up with anything in particular, because everything was equally pretty. I think it's appropriate for the setting. Davide Gianfelice did the first story arc and the atmosphere was cold and unforgiving and horizenish. The art matched that by being large scale, with generous camera angles and nice wide shots. Here it's closer. The Irish countryside is so much more visceral when Ryan Kelly renders it. And it's tighter and faster, not as epic as Sven the Returned was. It's packed with frantic energy, as befits a comic about a manhunt, and the vibrant colours top it off wonderfully.

And there is lots of nice art in which people kill each other, so that's pretty awesome too.

So, to finish off, Northlanders is a terrific comic that I wish I had started reading earlier. It's a comic that takes a well-used story idea, executes it well, and adds Vikings. Genius.

Links To Free Comics

2009-08-03T23:05:00.002+08:00

*So Chris Sims, he of the Invincible Super-Blog, has produced, with Chris Piers and Steve Downer, the first issue of Woman of A.C.T.I.O.N. over at the Action Age. The first ten pages are up, with more to follow weekly.

*And if you want something simpler, like your mind blown by something that's just really fucking funny, here's Abhay Khosla's Bram Stoker's Dracula, part one, and part two.

You are welcome, People Who Read My Blog But Dislike Spending Money On Comics.

I Buy Comics And Then Talk About Them - The Great Johnny DC Experiment

2009-08-03T22:20:00.002+08:00

Another week, another round of the Internet's most kid-friendly comic book reviews. I jest. Don't read in the vicinity of small children. I hear prepubescent awesomeness is bad for the bones and stuff. This week, I decided, having not actually read a Johnny DC comic before, to buy the ones that came out in the past two weeks, to see how they compare to the Marvel Adventures stuff that I do buy.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #7:

I think J. Bone does lots of covers for the Johnny DC line. I see his fabulous covers for Super Friends in previews all the time, and they are each great pieces of cartooning. Because they tell you about what's going on in the comic in a fun, dynamic way, with the linework being done well enough to give every character a distinct personality. J. Bone's Super Friends covers make it to many many Best Of cover lists.

This comic was like that, multiplied by twenty and stapled together. It was hugely fun to read and I enjoyed every panel. Incidentally, it took me as much time for me to read as it did for me to sit on the toilet. I walked out of the bathroom feeling rather like Jimmy Olsen.

It's a nice, laid back thing. Which seems sort of appropriate. This month's guests are the Doom Patrol, the World's Strangest Heroes, and it's quite fitting that both the story and the art appear kind of train-of-thought and weird. Batman and Beast Boy punching various appendages off mannequins looked about as weirdly cool as it sounds.

The Beast Boy in this issue is essentially the same as the one in the Teen Titans cartoon, and so is the surprise villain, who gets a lovely well-look-who-it-is entrance that's actually really bizarre but of course fits the comic perfectly. So everything was quite familiar for me. Yeah, one of my favourite things about this week's experiment was that everything was pretty much done in one, so I didn't have to work my attention span or stretch my continuity muscles.

And the last panel of the story had the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man in it, which awesomed my face off. Even if the rest of this comic was shite it would have been one of the highlights of the week for that alone. J. Bone and the writer J. Torres gave me an issue of exactly what a comic book based on the Batman: Brave and the Bold cartoon should be like. Yes, it should be exactly like this comic. Suck it, adult comics. Suck it hard.

Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam #6:

This one I enjoyed slightly less, because story-wise it wasn't as pure and distilled as the Batman one was. For example, the TO BE CONTINUED blurb at the end of the issue was pretty damn frown-worthy. There's more of a sense of a continuing story arc in this one and I felt like I was missing some stuff. I suppose it turned me off a bit because it differed a bit from my expectations.

I read it a second time, though, this time without the minor quibbles. And it has a lot going for it. For one, it's basically an issue in which Captain Marvel fights a smack-talking caveman with a techno-transformo-blaster thing. Those are some major rad points right there.

Yeah, this comic got better the more I looked at it. The art, for instance, is really scary good. Stephen deStefano - his name is like mine but like DOUBLE - is hitting it right in the nether regions with this issue and he does it hard and fast. His art seems, I dunno, really appropriate for a comic for kids, but at the same time inappropriate for a comic that kids would read, if you know what I mean. I don't know if kids actually read all-ages comics, but I suppose they'd dig his art. But they wouldn't appreciate it for the very very neat linework. It's masterful storytelling.

Hear that, kids? Yeah, we teenagers are better at reading your comics than you are.

Tiny Titans #18:

This is a week late, for the purposes of the Experiment. But where to begin with this? I am settling for a one-panel review this time, because that is all that needs to be said about Tiny Titans:

This is a criminally unappreciated comic.

Thunderbolts #134:

This was pretty much the only Marvel comic last week costing less than $3.99, so it gets my appreciation for that. Also, old-school Thunderbolts reappear this issue. It also made my day when there was a brief mention of the possibility of Radioactive Man coming back, because he's Radioactive Man. He has an awesome name, which is sorely lacking in today's superhero comics. He is also Radioactive Man.

Roberto de la Torre has apparently fucked off to late art hell or whatever thing he's convinced Marvel he'll be regular penciller on next, so Miguel Sepulveda is picking up the slack these past few issues, on the heels of Bong Dazo, I think. Anyway, Sepulveda's art has a nice murky feel to it that neatly keeps up with Diggle's script. It's not outstanding much but it gives the comic a consistent visual feel which makes it easy to picture in my head when I'm thinking about it, like in school and stuff. Whatever.

Oh, the last page reveal was about the same as the one last issue: brain-gnashingly HOLYSHIT-worthy. Andy Diggle's leaving Thunderbolts with issue 137, which is a goddamn shame. This is starting to get good.

Detective Comics #855:

This comic is a two-part thing. Batwoman and the Question both written by Greg Rucka, both in the same company-naming comic, which is unprecedented and pretty neat on the part of DC.

Anyway, the Batwoman story was extremely ordinary, which is kind of a shame. I was kind of expecting the same genre-pushing stuff as last issue. This one was wholly unremarkable. Which is a crying bastard of a damn shame because it's illustrated by J. H. Fucking Williams III, who's given art that's transcended this plane of existance to loop around hell and melt the eyes of demons and shit. "Borderline orgasmic" is the best phrase I've seen so far to describe the art. This art is very similar to this person you know, who's the biggest arrogant dickhead you've ever seen who goes around pointing a neon finger of attention at himself while turning people into piles of steaming dogshit by standing next to them. And yet that person is exactly as good as he says he is and you don't know whether you should be thankful to your local snake deity for giving you the chance to stand around him and breathe his air or if you should hate his guts and mace-attack him as soon as you save up to buy a mace.

Yes. The art is exactly like that. It is what all superhero art wants to look like when it grows up. J.H. Williams III plus Dave Stewart plus Laura Martin. God, what a lineup. Shame about the story, though.

The backup feature with the Question was much better written, and in it had the Question hitting people with nunchucks drawn by Cully Hamner. Which is not quite J. H. Williams III but I loved it anyway.

Wednesday Comics #4:

This week let's try story recaps, eh?

Batman: Bruce Wayne gets it on. Did not know this was possible.

Kamandi: MONKEY-BAZOOKA

Superman: iwannalivehereinkansaswithyoumommyCRACKALACKAMETALARTBITCHES

Deadman: Our hero fights the drooling demon host of Pimp My Axe.

Green Lantern: My ex-space-buddy is sick with murderinsect flu! This looks like a job for Flashback!

Metamorpho: Update - Neil Gaiman still able to write.

Teen Titans: Okay, Trident. One more time. Are you COMPLETELY sure you hate the Teen Titans?

Strange Adventures: Alanna is like Adam Strange minus techno gear. Equally badass.

Supergirl: I think someone should nuke the cat. Oh, yeah.

Metal Men: "Yes, and I'll blow up this nice hat, too!"

Wonder Woman: Something about something or another but like in small - Oh, another dream!

Sgt. Rock: I like how this isn't even pretending to have a story anymore.

The Flash: How come Captain Cold hasn't teamed up with Gorilla Grodd yet? I would like that very much.

The Demon and Catowoman: You are shitting me. So is Etrigan going to be rhyming or what? Or was that an accident there?

Hawkman: Oh, man, this is Kyle Baker rubbing fucksticks together to make fires of awesome. And is that the promise of an Aquaman cameo I see?

Friday Night Fights - Can't See This

2009-07-31T20:14:00.002+08:00

It's Friday again, and it's time to rumble with the 'Booger. Tonight's Fight Music is, very fittingly, The Invisible Man, by Queen. Take it away, Mr. Griffin.

When you hear a sound
That you just cant place

Feel somethin' move
That you just cant trace,

When something sits
On the end of your bed

Don't turn around

When you hear me tread.

I'm the invisible man

Incredible how you can

See right through me

I'm the invisible man

Its criminal how I can

See right through you.

This ever so slightly graphic fight is from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill.

These Reviews Are Sick!

2009-07-28T23:58:00.005+08:00

It's time once again for the Internets most H1N1-free comic book reviews, slightly later than usual, because I hate pillowcases.

Guardians of the Galaxy #16: So the old-school Guardians from the future (man, that can get confusing) show up this issue. They get a bit of a visual upgrade courtesy of Wes Craig, who's, well, he's no Paul Pelletier, but he does an alright job and he draws a good Cosmo, which is always comforting to see next to lines like "Out of Cosmo's way, stupid Badoon!"

Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are dangerously fucking good with this epic crossover thing. Speaking as someone who buys both this and the main War of Kings comic, of course. I would talk about how readers who only buy one might be somewhat alienated by the two books' mutual dependency, plotwise, but then again I don't just buy one of them, so that would be silly of me. And silly of the aforementioned reader, for not buying both books. If you were looking for a comic that's cosmically good, doesn't really tie in to War of Kings, and is written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, then I would recommend Nova, which I hear is pretty awesome. It's not something I can afford, alas-ly.

Anyways, Guardians sometimes ties in heavily with War of Kings, but it's still very much its own comic. This issue finally addresses a plot point from way back in the early issues of the series, the Starhawk thing. It's all very satisfactory. I expected the build-up with regards to the destruction of the fabric of reality sort of thing to sort of fizzle out, but this issue deals with it in a thoroughly enjoyable way, and it moves the plot forward even more, towards the temporal mindrapefest that I mentioned yesterday.

Solid cosmic action-comedy, as usual. The only thing this comic is missing is Paul Pelletier.

Marvel Adventures The Avengers #38: Got this a week late, but all you need to know is that this comic has the words "Marvel Adventures" in its title, and that it's written by Paul Tobin. Anything that satisfies the above criteria deserves to be bought and read expediciously, because more often than not it can and will make your day.

Also in this issue: The Mandarin defeats the Hulk with birthday cake!

All-Select Comics #1:This is a two-parter deal. It's part of Marvel's money-sucking 70th Anniversary thingy, and only half the comic is worth buying, which kind of sucks, because the people at the comic shop wouldn't let me pay half the price even when I promised to rip the front half off and leave it on the rack.

Bah. The first story is a horribly average murder mystery starring the Blonde Phantom, written by the wholly unremarkable Marc Guggenheim. Quite apart from being boringly mediocre and ever so slightly predictable, it's a completely bloody pointless thing. Why the hell does it take place in a modern day setting? What, then, is the point of the Homage Cover That Wasn't? The consolation, of course, is that the art from Javier Pulido looks pretty, and they had the delightful idea of not putting the captions over the art, so you can kind of ignore them if you just want to look at the comic instead of reading it.

Second half is about Marvex the Super Robot, whose name alone is a cheer-upper. The actual story is written and drawn by Michael Kupperman, who did Tales Designed To Thrizzle, which I hear was really good, like Best-Of-2008 kind of really good. And it's delightful. And funny as hell.

It becomes even better on the reread, after you read the reprints at the end of the comic of Marvex's first two appearances in 1940. Michael Kupperman's story isn't just written in his own quirky style. It's a logical extension of the original, crazy, train-of-thought Golden Age stories, in which crazy shit happens, like Marvex swiftly stripping all the time to prove his robotness.

Kupperman plus reprints are sooo worth it. The Tales Designed To Thrizzle hardcover is now on my to-buy list.

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance #3:Having this comic come out at the same time as the San Diego Comic-Con is quite a nifty touch. This issue is about the Super Young Team basically getting their own Con in Dubai. More colourful explorations of pop culture ensue! This time it's stuff like cosplaying and even some comics meta stuff, especially at the end when the big development happens. I suppose I should keep spoilers to a minimum. I dunno. Is that some sort of Comic Blogger Moral Code or something?

Anyway, the end of this issue is when the whimsical adventures of the Super Young Team and the darker, behind-the-scenes villainy start to get closer together, and it's a reassurance that there's actually a story going on in addition to this fun little thing (TENNIS NAZIS).

But! The biggest thing I enjoyed about this issue was the return of penciller ChrisCross and colourist Snakebite. Yes, they are back and now the art is awesome again. So I read the entire issue with a large smile on my face, because it all matches Joe Casey's writing perfectly now. LOUD colours and motion blurs and heavy selective pixelation are all very lovely. Along with Joe Casey's incredibly barrage of immensely quotable lines, in both the dialogue and the Twitter-caps.

And the cover! Look at the wonderful thing. It's by Stanley "Artgerm" Lau, who's from Singapore (I type this with pride) and it sums up the entire issue very well indeed. The background billboard is a perfect touch. I loves it very much and find myself wanting to use the word "oodles".

Wednesday Comics #3:
I suppose this is going to be a regular thing now, closing with shortish reviews of the weekly Wednesday Comics.

AzzBats: You know, this is getting really quite good. Ethereally distant and something quite unexpected, but it works, especially as a weekly page thing. A friendly reminder that, as always, Batman is watching you... UPSIDE DOWN.

Kamandi: A talking dog with air goggles and a zeppelin! Anthropomorphic rats plagued by marksmanship skills direct from the Stormtrooper Academy! Oh, could this strip get any more wonderful?

Superman: Still managing to find it hilarious that Lee Bermejo is drawing a page full of Superman whining, looking at his girlfriend through a window with pouty lips and literally running to his mummy.

The Psychedelic Adventures of Deadman: I am loving Dave Bullock's inventive layout. This is fun to stare at for a long long time.

Green Lantern: Ok, so turning into a giant, mandibled, carapaced insectoid because of exposure to a fungus is suitably Jet Agey, but you can do better than fungus, Busiek.

Metamorpho: The only thing that happens in this comic is that Mike Allred draws stuff. Which is alright for now. My short attention span might not be able to take it if this happens like every week, though.

Teen Titans: There's a word I'm looking for here. It's "meh".

Strange Adventures: Paul Pope wins the award for, I dunno, Best Use of Paul Pope in a Comic. I could read this forever.

Supergirl and Superpets: Cat with thunderbolt tattoo is HARDCORE.

Metal Men: You can't listen to metal music with this comic, like you're supposed to (METAL Men, right? Needs more explosions and more mind-numbingly stupid metal puns. At the same time.

Wonderin' if I can read this Woman: This gets compared to "Little Nemo in Slumberland". If I don't know what the hell that is, does that make it an old-people reference or me a dumbass?

Sgt. Rock: This has an undeniable attitude about it, like a "bugger off, I'm nine giant panels of Joe Kubert drawing Nazis hitting Sgt. Rock" kind of thing. I like it. The elegant simplicity floats my boat.

Flash Comics: The only Flash story you will ever need to read.

Just Catwoman: You know what this week's strip don't have? Etrigan the Demon. And that sucks. Even the sabre-toothed cat (beautiful though it is) can't make up for it.

Hawkman: Ah. Hawkman hitting something with his mace. Blood dripping from said mace. Kyle Baker understands what comic book readers need from the character.