There’s also a sound effect. Go, read, enjoy if this is your sort of thing.
The forum is open, because I wanted to make a forum that I enjoyed visiting and reading.
Read the four basic rules before you join.
That’s it. Go, play.
We’re going brassy with this week’s eMusic picks, OK?
(And if you don’t know, here’s how it works. If you’ve not, go sign up for eMusic and get 25 free songs. Not sure you want to check out eMusic? Then read this, along with the comments.)
Albums
Single Tracks
ZOMBIE
The Story: Cash stolen from the botched bank job: $125,000. Two loaded shotguns keeping the hostages quiet: $675.00. A half-tank of gas in the getaway car: $27.50. Smashing through a police roadblock and fighting for your life against hundreds of flesh eating zombies: Priceless. Welcome to zombie action, MAX-style. The dead roam the Earth, a small town in New York state is under siege, and human flesh is what’s for dinner! And humanity’s last hope is hiding out in a little rest-stop on Interstate 90. Barricade your doors and windows and get the guns loaded — hell is on Earth, and it just might be up to a man named Simon Garth to stop it… Collecting ZOMBIE #1-4.
104 PGS. | Explicit Content | $13.99
What a stinker of a solicitation. The MasterCard ads they’re parodying went off the air a couple of years ago (apparently not!) and, really, after the first or second animated .gif that goofed on them, it stopped being funny.
See also: zombies?!? Really, Marvel, zombies?!? Unless you’re offering me the insanity of seeing your most valuable properties done up in the undead style, I can’t believe you’ve got anything to add to the genre.
Adam Warren’s Empowered is sexist and hilarious. It’s also simultaneously misogynistic and touching while covering “creepy” and “intelligent” just as easily. The result of a bit too much thought concerning a series of commissions that Warren took to supplement his (apparently meager) income from comics, Empowered takes the clichés and titillation of bondage and women-in-distress fiction, slaps them in the back of the head, and manages to create something geniunely compelling. The fact that Empowered is a superhero manga title isn’t especially shocking, considering that Adam Warren made Gen 13 readable by taking that approach and gave Marvel fans the ecstatic, low-selling rush that was Livewires.
The pinup origins of Empowered‘s title character are plainly on display in the first third of this book: the early material’s repetitive, weak, and most of the humor is cheap bondage gags. However, once Warren starts to introduce the supporting cast and world-building, everything gels quite nicely. He plainly likes these characters. The love interest, “Thugboy” is quick-thinking, charming, and witty despite being a minion, and Empowered’s best friend Ninjette (unsurprisingly, a female ninja) is adorable despite, you know, being all deadly and stuff. My favorite, though, may be the Caged Demonwolf, a demigod trapped in a piece of alien technology that manages to combine the nose-in-other-people’s-business attitude of Mr. Furley with the bombast and hatred of Darkseid. After everything’s put into place, the story builds very nicely, with possible future threats hinted at and plenty of character action.
It’s nice to have Warren the artist back. Outside of short gags on the last page of PSM, I’ve not seen any comics art from him in ages. Shot directly from his pencils (he claims that inks just slow him down), the cartooning in Empowered excels. Warren uses manga’s tropes effectively while managing to avoid feeling derivative at all and brings in a great deal of humor and warmth to the proceedings.
The most surprising element for me was how casually sexy the book is, especially in the later portions. There’s frank discussion of several issues I hesitate to bring up outside of using vagaries like “landscaping,” but suffice it to say this comic earns its little round “Mature Readers” sticker handily and without feeling exploitative. Frankly, it’s refreshing to read something that isn’t pornography that manages to use sex as a positive, both as a character point and plot device.
Related:
Warren talks up Empowered at Newsarama, offering previews.
Related Links:
“Temptation / Star Guitar” Live In Japan on YouTube | Michel Gondry’s “Star Guitar” video on YouTube | The Making of Gondry’s Promotional Video on YouTube
(OK, not really nothing more: that new Fantastic Four omnibus inspires some serious booklust in me, especially as the first was just such a spectacular presentation, plus there’s another Essential Marvel Two-In-One collection, the third hardcover volume of Annihilation, and Parker’s X-Men First Class hardcover that collects all eight issues for a mere buck more than the originals. Shame about Planet Hulk costing $40. I’m interested, but not that interested.)
While I’m talking about BOOM!, I recommend that you check out this article in the LA Times, in which my Cover Girl co-conspirator appears to have made a pet of our publisher.
Welcome to 1997, in a world much different from our own. The rise of the steam age prevented the industrial revolution as we know it from ever having occurred at all. As the world’s only steam powered juggernaut, Great Britain spread out and assimilated the rest of Europe into the Anglo-centric super power The Union of European Allies. The cultures and languages of these occupied countries were eventually forgotten or pushed far underground, as the Victorian way was cultivated and held onto as the dominant and accepted culture.As the Union of European Allies celebrates its 100th anniversary the classes have never been further apart. The “Gentlemen Class” …royalty, government officials and people of influence and affluence are the privileged few who have been “socketed”. Steam powered identification sockets have been implanted into there arms giving them an unforgeable passport to cross international borders and travel freely within all union territories. The majority of the population however, the unsocketed masses, either vie for Gentlemanship by serving the state, or work in huge prison-like factory camps producing goods and services to sustain the self- sufficient Union.
Genocide in Central Asia, and civil war spreading throughout the Americas are only a few of the UEA’s concerns. Their own workers have begun to organize, and the UEA Government (or “Central Gov”) has begun to fear domestic terrorist attacks and possibly even a mass worker revolution. Security has never been more stringent as they tighten their grip on the populace.
As our tale begins, fabled explorer, scientist, adventurer and Gentleman Dr. Elezear Zednik is sent to Union Territory #617-03 to investigate a rash of mysterious disappearances among the city’s factory workers.
As he arrives he is met with hostility and mistrust by the local constabulary…
As with everything Lemire’s done, I think this new venture is fantastic – moody, ink-washed art with lean, mean writing, just as I like it.
Related:
The Pernicious Punishment | Batman, as written by Chuck Palahniuk
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! GO WEST YOUNG MAN #1: This comic is fun. I spent all last week peering very carefully at old issues of Marvel Spectacular trying to figger out if I could erase the purple prose of Mister Stan Lee and put in a Lindsay Lohan joke. Then I read What Were They Thinking?! That’s how the guys who get paid for it—the professionals—do it. I’ve spoken before about what a big little fan I am of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I’m also fond of a much-overlooked and earlier TV project sorta in the same vein: Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection. This half-hour TV show (syndicated and then re-run on Nick at Nick in the early 1990s) took old public domain films, chopped ‘em up and rearranged ‘em, and replaced the soundtrack with new dialogue and music. (If you haven’t seen the show, you may have seen similar shorter improv bits of Whose Line is It Anyway?.) Mad Movies was an often-hilarious show (a bit hampered by some very amateur host segments), but as there seems to be no sign of it ever coming out on DVD I’m quite pleased I taped a buncha them on VHS. The What Were They Thinking?! series takes the same approach: cheesy comics of yesteryear redialogued with brand-new comedy jokes. Now, like those panelists on To Tell the Truth that would occasionally excuse themselves because they knew the mystery person, I must in fairness to little stuffed reviewing admit I know Kevin Church, writer of half this issue, guru of BeaucoupKevin(dot)com, co-creator of webcomics The Rack and Nitroglycerin, and a personal friend o’ the Blog of Bull, but honestly, because of my remix-love I woulda picked this up even if Kevin hadn’t contributed to it, because when I sat down with my tacos and chips to read this, I was snorting sour cream through my nose by page two. And I think we all know how painful that can be. There’s four funny remixes in here: my favorite was “Savage Steel,” the dramatic love story of an Indian for a Viking or something like that…geez, I dunno, there were a lot of Ikea jokes and words with that o with the slash through it that there isn’t a proper HTML symbol for. In the end, this is good silly fun that’s great value for money, with a lot of laughs packed on each page: it took me a good half hour to read it rather than the five minutes to read a normal comic. If you like your comics oh-so-serious, then walk away, bub, walk away. But if rappin’ cowboys and Indians spouting chronologically-improbable non-sequiturs about iPods tickles your funny bone, well then, like me you’ll find WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!: GO WEST YOUNG MAN the most fun comic of the week.
I swear, I did not pay him for that. Not in money, anyway. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that remembers Mad Movies – their version of Cyrano haunts the giant echoplex that is my brainpan to this day.
Hannibal Tabu writes:
What Were They Thinking? Go West Young Man #1 (Boom! Studios)
There are four stories here, and the two by Chris Ward will have your face scrunched up like Robert Deniro asking, “what just happened?” Kevin Church’s pointedly political short stories are clearly indicting the people and ideas behind manifest destiny (even in its modern forms) and if you can keep count of all of the pop culture references (the “Eye-Kee-Ah” tribe bit is a classic) you’re surely holding on to a lot of spare time. Remix comics can be hit or miss, and this set is strange and wonderful but (in Ward’s case) sometimes a bit hard to follow and in Church’s case a bit heavy handed. Still, darned entertaining.
Heavy handed? Moi?!? Never.
If’n you spot any other reviews or have one of your own, drop it in the dang ol’ comment space below.
After much harassment by Birdie, I’ve decided to stop using Diamond’s shipping list and switched to Midtown Comics, who I presume are smart enough to order pretty much one (1) of anything.
So, let’s do this thing.
Dark Horse
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol 3
The second in this series finally shook a bit of the creepy “Let’s go corpsefucking!” vibe the first seemed to be offering up, but I’m still bothered by the use (even if it’s non-gratuitous) of naked women that have been mutilated.
DC Comics
Army At Love #1
Rick Veitch writing and drawing a wartime satire? Why yes, I do need to read that, thank you.
Brave And The Bold Vol 3 #2
I actually quite enjoyed the first issue of this series, but decided to wait for the trade because, hey, I need another superhero monthly like I need scabies. Then I saw the preview pages here. A Supergirl that actually acts like a teenager? Golly, color me impressed, even with the worst joke ever on the second page presented.
Showcase Presents Hawkman Vol 1
Yes, another damned Showcase. I love the Silver Age Hawkman stories, though. Love them. Not least of all for moments like this.
The Spirit #4
Of course you’re all buying this anyway, but I wanted to make sure to link to this.
Image Comics
After The Cape #1
While there’s a heavy early Bendis influence to the art in this story about a former superhero who finds himself at a crossroads, but I’m probably going to give this a shot anyway. While I’m kind of done with the meta-superhero thing, I’m curious to see if Wong and Rudy can pull it off.
Marvel Comics
…gets no love from me, unless I am drunk and decide that I need to pick up the Weapon X hardcover for some reason.
Oni Press
Leading Man Vol 1
Is this any good? It seemed like something I’d like, but I avoid buying singles from Oni for whatever reason.
That’s it for me, really. Now, if you didn’t go to your shop last week, make sure you swing by and ask for What Were They Thinking?!?: Go West Young Man.
At yesterday’s brand-new (I think!) Boston Comic Book Convention I picked up:
I did not get to purchase:
I did notice a few things that made me happy:
On the train in, I finished reading:
There is also a very,very small sound effect that I love. So, go read it.
