A long, rambling post with some reviews.
Comments Off | Posted: April 27th, 2006 | Filed under: UncategorizedThis latest installment of Kevin Hacks Away At This Week’s Comic Books is brought to you by: A Triple Iced Americano and a Blueberry Scone. Further promotional consideration provided by Arvo P�rt’s Te Deum.
So, as I said during the rundown, I didn’t have much in the way of comics coming my way this week. Of course, I’ve come to realize my version of “much” and others are often worlds apart. This is why I am a world-famous, globetrotting (OK, so I went to Canada that one time a couple of years ago) tastemaker and everyone else lies in relative blogspot.com obscurity.
I’ve come to the realization that caffeine really does make me a bit of an asshole.
So, here we have a stack of comics, some of which have been read. I’ll talk about those, glance at the others, and then go to work like a good helper monkey.
First up, I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed at the presentation and format chosen for Dan Clowes’s Art School Confidential. The original solicitation gave me the idea that this would be a decent, if not exactly lavish presentation with full-size art integrated into the screenplay. Instead, the reader picks up the 6″x6″ book, gets two pages of cramped character designs and two and a half pages of stills from the movie before the screenplay, which is annoyingly hard to read when you have to turn pages every two or three lines of dialogue, the original four-page strip (now in color, but near-impossible to read, even with my glasses) and three pages of “student art.” The quality of the goods presented is quite high, but it’s akin to stuffing a deconstructed Aston Martin into a Chinatown vegetable stand.
Tron is the first of the Slave Labor-Disney books I have any sort of interest in (and most likely the last, unless they do a Condorman series) and while I adore the source material to a truly stupid degree, the comic ends up feeling a little lackluster. A plot cribbing a few bits from The Matrix (yes, irony, let’s move on) and art that reminded me of that awful Neuromancer comics adaptation in the early 90s, combined with the authors expecting me to have played the Tron 2.0 video game or to feel like I am up to speed with an ugly, cramped black-on-lime green text page, left me very cold.
John Rogers, pal of mine? You owe me a mouthful of Diet Coke that found its way into my nose after I read the phrase “Hypno-Crotch” in your remixed tale from What Where They Thinking?!: Some People Never Learn. Everyone else, of course, performed admirably in this puerile, infantile, and juvenile collection of old horror and science-fiction comics with changed word balloons.
The second issue of the retitled Hawkgirl is more of the same from the first: an understated mystery with supernatural elements that happens to feature a woman with breasts that grow by two cup sizes when she’s in costume. This is the sort of comic: I really enjoy despite my knowing that it’s a complete throwback in a couple of ways: no narration from the protagonist, instead using. thought balloons (which I really do love), and Kendra talking aloud about her situation during a fight with a mysterious beheading sort. There’s panache to the whole thing, thought, and despite Chaykin’s occasionally slight sloppiness in faces, it’s put together very, very well. Mike at the shop offered a brilliant spin on the current formula, thought: have Chaykin and Simonson alternate roles. If such a thing were to ever occur, I would most likely need to buy several new pairs of underwear.
The final issue of the Seven Soldiers miniseries, Frankenstein #4 makes me wanting more, now. More Frankenstein, more Seven Soldiers, more Doug Mahnke drawing giant, improbable deadly things, more Morrison captions like “One Billion Years Later!”, just plain more from my comics centered around punching and absurdity. Tying the entire series into the first JLA Classified arc neatly and setting up the final, time-spanning confrontation while still entertaining? This is why I love Morrison’s writing so much -when he’s on-target and has a goal in mind, there’s nobody (outside of Moore, but let’s not go there) that can keep up with his tightly orchestrated plotting and dead-on dialogue.
Paris #4 made me a little choked up. Just a little. Maybe like a slight cough before a stiff upper lip and a “well-played” to Mssrs. Watson and Gane. There’s one plot piece that’s just a little contrived, even if I called it in the second issue, but those last pages, rushing towards the payoff, couldn’t possibly last long enough. Beautifully executed.
The second issue of Giffen and Rogers’s Blue Beetle is a distinct improvement over the first, with the story starting to come together much better and the flow of time sorting itself out with a nice reveal at the en. Hamner’s art is, as always, a delight and it’s nice to see superpowered characters who owe no debt to previous continuity that still manage to capture my interest. Solid work by all involved and I’m eager to read the third issue now, which is rather the goal, I think.
Is there any point in reviewing an individual issue of Godland? People who know of it are kind of aware of how it works and readers open to the experience are, in general, converted to raving loons over characters like Freidrich Nickelhead and Maxim and the metatextual Kirby influence that is draped over the whole thing. Brill called it “Kirby as genre” and that’s, like, why I totally love him.
Time to hoof it to work and upload this. You cats and kits take care of yourself, OK?
Artists who submitted queries to me about the strip thing: you should have received an email from me on Tuesday about it. If you did not, check your Junk mail because it was sent to a BCC list and included an .rtf file.
