So, the comics that are coming out this week which are new and you should pay attention to because I say so, then? That's what I thought. I read two DC titles from the preview pack, Gotham Central and Mnemovore, and opted to ignore everything that Marvel was unleashing upon an unsuspecting populace in some sort of effort to ensure that they earned a place in the Biohazard Hall Of Fame.
People that read this blog and know that I have an affinity for Gotham Central will have no surprises at all when I say that issue 30 is a fine comic well worth reading, but I have to include the disclaimer that this is only true if you've never seen Silence of the Lambs or read Batman hissing the line "It ends now!" That's right, Gotham Central has managed to lightly spring over the shark in an amazing show of laziness that only the truly overburdened can manage. Ah, Rucka - I love so much of what you write so very much and I love this particular title as if it sprang from my mother's loins and was raised alongside me - but this is a remarkably tiresome issue with only a few character moments involving Montoya's girlfriend and Allen's fear of flying that make it seem like anything more than a cut-and-paste exercise that gets our Lecterized version of Dr Alchemy over to Gotham from his cell in Keystone. I do hope that the next issue doesn't feature Batman's doing the snake routine over more overwrought lines while a remarkably dapper Dr. Alchemy makes with the destruction through his proxy, but I fear that will be the case. A fairly lousy issue in a normally very good series that I can't recommend enough - a thorny dilemma for an unapologetic fan like me.
Issue 1 of Hans Rodinoff's collaboration with Ray Fawkes, Mnemovore, launches this week with moody art by the always-nice-to-see Mike Huddleston. Amnesia, a beyond-hackneyed plot device, is used to better-than-usual effect to start the reader as well as our lead character, Kaley Markowic, off from ground zero. She's an extreme snowboarder who manages to get her head whacked in a quite-righteous manner and ends up in the hospital. She gets out, of course, and tries to start living her life. The first issue ends as truly horrific stuff happens to the boyfriend she's not sure she's all that fond of and it leaves the reader going "...and then?" That's what you want in a first issue of a six-issue miniseries - introduce your players and start the action up. There was a disturbing jump that gave me a moment's pause: something that looks like a Fearsome Brain-Eating Worm is sliding into Kaley's boyfriend's ear and when you turn the page, you get an ad for this godawful looking videogame called God Of War. I thought that the reader was getting a look into the boyfriend's head until I noticed the sales pitch on the left side of the spread. Other than this little odd moment, I thoroughly enjoyed the start of what looks to be an interesting story.
Onto other comicky things, then. Mark Millar may have earned a good deal of scorn with his mindless and unrelentingly violent tour of the Marvel Universe that culminated in the shocking-to-those-who-get-shocked-by-this-sort-of-thing death of Northstar, a character whose primary attribute as far as most people were concerned was "being The Gay One." Northstar's managed to return, though, in the last few pages of Wolverine #26, which Young Aaron showed me at the shop today. In the penultimate spread of this issue, he's back and leading the recently-resurrected parade characters that Logan's offed in the Millar run against Nick Fury's vehicle of choice. Say what you will about the general awfulness of this book; the image of a Zombie Homosexual Mutant leading a Rocketpack-Utilizing Brigade Of The Undead against a SHIELD Helicarrier is, frankly, the sort of absurd thing I'd like to see more often in my spandex books.
We received a fuckton of backlist and out-of-print graphic novels at the shop that I got to put away - the quite-good Giant Robot Warriors and The Annotated Mantooth came in from AiT/Planet Lar, along with copies of The Golem's Mighty Swing and Jis's Cats Don't Exist, which I took home for perusal. I've read several other things by Sturm, including Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules and his shorter historical works Hundreds Of Feet Below Daylight and The Revival, and am looking forward to finally getting around to The Golem's Mighty Swing as I've been missing my RDA of indie graphic novels centering around Jewish baseball and feel like a bit of a prat for not getting around to it sooner. I'm sure I'll give it and Cats Don't Exist a rattling about on here soonish.
People that read this blog and know that I have an affinity for Gotham Central will have no surprises at all when I say that issue 30 is a fine comic well worth reading, but I have to include the disclaimer that this is only true if you've never seen Silence of the Lambs or read Batman hissing the line "It ends now!" That's right, Gotham Central has managed to lightly spring over the shark in an amazing show of laziness that only the truly overburdened can manage. Ah, Rucka - I love so much of what you write so very much and I love this particular title as if it sprang from my mother's loins and was raised alongside me - but this is a remarkably tiresome issue with only a few character moments involving Montoya's girlfriend and Allen's fear of flying that make it seem like anything more than a cut-and-paste exercise that gets our Lecterized version of Dr Alchemy over to Gotham from his cell in Keystone. I do hope that the next issue doesn't feature Batman's doing the snake routine over more overwrought lines while a remarkably dapper Dr. Alchemy makes with the destruction through his proxy, but I fear that will be the case. A fairly lousy issue in a normally very good series that I can't recommend enough - a thorny dilemma for an unapologetic fan like me.Issue 1 of Hans Rodinoff's collaboration with Ray Fawkes, Mnemovore, launches this week with moody art by the always-nice-to-see Mike Huddleston. Amnesia, a beyond-hackneyed plot device, is used to better-than-usual effect to start the reader as well as our lead character, Kaley Markowic, off from ground zero. She's an extreme snowboarder who manages to get her head whacked in a quite-righteous manner and ends up in the hospital. She gets out, of course, and tries to start living her life. The first issue ends as truly horrific stuff happens to the boyfriend she's not sure she's all that fond of and it leaves the reader going "...and then?" That's what you want in a first issue of a six-issue miniseries - introduce your players and start the action up. There was a disturbing jump that gave me a moment's pause: something that looks like a Fearsome Brain-Eating Worm is sliding into Kaley's boyfriend's ear and when you turn the page, you get an ad for this godawful looking videogame called God Of War. I thought that the reader was getting a look into the boyfriend's head until I noticed the sales pitch on the left side of the spread. Other than this little odd moment, I thoroughly enjoyed the start of what looks to be an interesting story.Onto other comicky things, then. Mark Millar may have earned a good deal of scorn with his mindless and unrelentingly violent tour of the Marvel Universe that culminated in the shocking-to-those-who-get-shocked-by-this-sort-of-thing death of Northstar, a character whose primary attribute as far as most people were concerned was "being The Gay One." Northstar's managed to return, though, in the last few pages of Wolverine #26, which Young Aaron showed me at the shop today. In the penultimate spread of this issue, he's back and leading the recently-resurrected parade characters that Logan's offed in the Millar run against Nick Fury's vehicle of choice. Say what you will about the general awfulness of this book; the image of a Zombie Homosexual Mutant leading a Rocketpack-Utilizing Brigade Of The Undead against a SHIELD Helicarrier is, frankly, the sort of absurd thing I'd like to see more often in my spandex books.
We received a fuckton of backlist and out-of-print graphic novels at the shop that I got to put away - the quite-good Giant Robot Warriors and The Annotated Mantooth came in from AiT/Planet Lar, along with copies of The Golem's Mighty Swing and Jis's Cats Don't Exist, which I took home for perusal. I've read several other things by Sturm, including Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules and his shorter historical works Hundreds Of Feet Below Daylight and The Revival, and am looking forward to finally getting around to The Golem's Mighty Swing as I've been missing my RDA of indie graphic novels centering around Jewish baseball and feel like a bit of a prat for not getting around to it sooner. I'm sure I'll give it and Cats Don't Exist a rattling about on here soonish.
