1 Comment | Posted: February 12th, 2009 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: adam koford, lolcats
The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out brings together a selection of Adam “Ape Lad” Koford’s take on the crushingly popular online phenom. It takes a hell of a talent to make a combination of internet memes, pop culture references, and outright gleeful idiocy under the premise of collecting a lost comic strip from the early 20th century work, but Koford does it. A lot of the jokes in this volume are ephemeral to be sure, but even something as hackneyed and well-worn as “This! Is! Sparta!” is pulled off with aplomb thanks to fantastic cartooning and an ability to make any reference part of the joke versus serving as a joke on its own.
1 Comment | Posted: January 22nd, 2009 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: denis bajram, soleil, universal war 1
1.
What starts off as a fairly by-the-book tale of a space fighter squadron packed with misfits turns into something more complex and seems to get out of the author’s control by the beginning of its second act. While Denis Bajram’s art is absolutely gorgeous and I appreciate any attempt to get European graphic novels to a winder audience, there’s some flaws in this that are pretty insurmountable for me.
2.
In general, I don’t mind it when science fiction plays fast and loose with science itself, but actually having a character spouting out increasingly convulted theories about what’s happening every ten pages or so grew incredibly tiresome, especially as they made no sense after a certain point and the ultimate resolution didn’t really reflect any of them. It’s technobabble in its purest form, words just piled on top of one another because it seems like they’re supposed to be there to say it’s science fiction. (You know, the spaceships kind of tipped me off there.)
3.
The writing is really
bad in several places. I’m talking “Oh hey, there’s something! Let’s go investigate so the plot can move forward” sort of blatant moments that stick out like a sore thumb. This isn’t Paul Benjamin’s translation at fault here: the plot just rears its head up and bends the story to its will in a completely non-organic and very clumsy manner that reminded me of a video game plot more than anything else.
4.
There’s also a distinctly European machismo that infects the work, one that leaves me cold. There’s a rape scene that’s treated with all the tact of one of the books’ space battles, and while there is comeuppance, the path to it is convoluted and requires a greater-than-usual suspension of disbelief (and a willingness to endure one of the most played-out of dramatic clichés, delivered straight from the
Guiding Light writing room.) I’ve noticed this very ham-fisted handling of sexual assault in other works from creators based on the continent (Hi, Jodorowsky!) but there was something just singularly galling about this incident and how it was treated by the cast.
5.
Plotwise, I’m actually fairly intrigued by what the book offers up: a war between two parallel realities that begins with a misunderstanding, but the way the story is being told is extremely offputting. I’m not given a reason to care about any of the characters, as they’re all razor-thin stereotypes (the brave, headstrong hero; the female commander with an overbearing father figure; the scientist who’s too impressed with himself; the coward who tries to make something of his life) living in a world that’s positively fetishistic about the military. I don’t give a damn what happens to the people in the center of things, a crippling failure on the part of Bajram.
8 Comments | Posted: January 8th, 2009 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: doktor sleepless, garth ennis, no hero, the boys, warren ellis
Ellis and Ennis this week, Ennis and Ellis. Only three books, and I’m not going to divide them out as nicely as I did last week. Chin up, pal, it’s a brave new world where you have to read an interconnected series of overly complicated sentences and notice that I will use italics to indicate the title so you can check and make sure my opinion matches your own.
Hands up if that’s not the primary reason why you read other people’s reviews in blogs.
That’s what I thought. That’s fine; I do it, too, particularly when it’s Spurgeon, because we are so similar and so different and it’s a fun little autopsy process, looking at our foibles and fetishes. There’s also the slow drive by and gawk things that I’d not read in a hundred years but still enjoy watching others kick around, like Caleb’s 30,000 word Weekly Haul posts. If someone could tell me how he puts together so many words yet remains so readable for my addled brain, I’d really appreciate it. Maybe it’s the small words.
Anyway. It’s the third issue of Ellis’s No Hero and while there’s eight pages devoted to double-paged spreads and Carrick actually points out that he’s using a cellphone at one point, bits like the Very Bad Thing that happens and the point of the double-page spreads is a pretty good one. I wanted to type a a bit about Ellis’s pacing on this, but honestly, it’s the end of the first act, and it feels just about right for a 9-issue series, but I’m still fretting a bit. Ellis, as much as I love a lot of the man’s writing, seems to have a consistent problems with his third acts – there’s a reversal missing and the protagonists just go and do what they wanted to do without any complications. For every Black Summer, where things happen on a fairly linear path but you had the benefit of a decimated cast list so that you were playing mental Survivor, there’s an Orbiter where they solve the mystery and go into space. (For the record, it was a very neat mystery, but I wanted more.)
Mind you, I’m beginning to think that Doktor Sleepless may turn out to be his magnum opus as it’s evolving into something a lot more than the Transmetropolitan Redux that it looked like at first blush, so my opinions when it comes to Ellis and his writing may be suspect, especially as I was about to type out a comparison to the first season of The Wire, a show I’m just now getting into. Mind you, a bit of editing and tightening up things on Doktor Sleepless so the individual dose feels stronger would not hurt at all, he said presumptuously about a writer who could have him gutted by Japanese suicide waitresses at any given time.
Oh, and if you were wondering when I’d get to Ennis: The Boys continues to make me fiercely happy, despite the mitigating factor of a replacement artist on the book this month; a sequence in which a Professor X analog went on and on about the importance of brunch as a respite against a world that hates and fears them has a good deal to do with my overall enjoyment. John Higgins tries (and fails) to draw The Boys, succeeding in some things and then going way off-model with others, particularly when it comes to drawing one character’s breasts. I feel like a lech for even noticing, but when a woman of modest proportions suddenly looks like she’s been cast from the Rock Of Love: Gonorrhea Fuckbus rejects, it’s more distracting than it should be.
Next week, I’ll be more coherent, I promise.
1 Comment | Posted: January 2nd, 2009 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: final crisis, garth ennis, grant morrison, incognito, punisher, steve dillon, winter men
Incognito #1
As with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip’s Sleeper, a familiar noir trope is getting a superpowered rerub: the former supercriminal Zack Overkill, now drugged into normalcy and on parole, is struggling with his government-enforced rehabilitation and longs for the power he once possessed. As with Criminal, the plot and story are onlyhalf of the pleasure I get from reading Brubaker’s script; the construction is frequently elegant in its simplicity and the way he manages to surprise even when tinkering with the hoariest of clichés is envious. Phillips and Staples, again, serve as the perfect counterpart to Brubaker’s script, deceptively minimal, reinforcing the point that less is more: murky swaths of digital watercolor underpins Phillips’s strong composition to help tell the story better than any amount of Photoshop gradient ever could.
The Winter Men Winter Special
It’s been two damn years, people.  I’m going to have to find my back issues before I even think about reading this thing I brought home. I’m frankly a bit surprised that Wildstorm even bothered to put this out; I can’t imagine it’s sold enough to pay for its print run at this late date, but I’m sure they’d rather placate the few thousand buyers who’d whine about a collection containing a conclusion they weren’t able to buy off the stands. (In other words, expect to see an unread copy show up at Goodwill or the like during my next big purge.)
Final Crisis: Secret Files
If I’d looked beyond the very nice cover by Frank Quitely and realized that the majority of this special revolved around Len Wein giving a proper origin to Libra (who I think was used by Morrison because he was a blank slate, serving his story needs as required while giving the instigator of Final Crisis the sort of tie to the universe at large that a lot of DC fans expect,) I wouldn’t have purchased it. It’s a great deal of “What went on before” for a character that really didn’t need it. There’s also two text pieces (Grant Morrison “explains” the Anti-Life equation in a very ugly page that’s facing a page from the Crime Bible) and some sketches by J.G. Jones and Morrison.
Punisher War Zone #4
Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon could burn my home down and as long as it formed the shape of the Punisher’s skull emblem, I’d be OK with it.
Comments Off | Posted: December 21st, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: guardians of the galaxy, legion of superheroes
I can see why the stories in Legion Of Superheroes: The More Things Change are revered by a lot of DC Comics fans in my age group, as they’re sort of emblematic of the company’s take on superhero teams circa 1986: a great deal of time is spent with Levitz having the team sitting around being bitchy at each other, dealing with the beaucratic grinding that passed as “drama,” or doing things that seem very exciting to a 14-year-old with no experience of the opposite sex. (Shrinking Violet put her hand down Sun Boy’s shirt! There’s a chilly silence between two members that fooled around a few issues ago! OMG!) Still, there’s a ineffable charm to the too-serious-to-be-taken-seriously issues collected here and I’m glad that DC’s making some sort of effort to put more Legion stories into print, even if I’m one of the relative few buying the paperbacks.
The first collection of Marvel’s new Guardians of the Galaxy series is more of the Marvel Comics version of science-fiction that I enjoyed well enough with both of the Annihilation series, written by the same team of Abnett and Lanning. This isn’t great, certainly, more Space: Above And Beyond than Battlestar Galactica, but again, there’s a sort of goofy zip that makes it a perfectly good use of your leisure time. (That said, it certainly didn’t need a “Premiere Hardcover,” but Marvel must be making enough additional bank off those editions versus the paperbacks that they’ve been following the model for a few years now.)
3 Comments | Posted: December 1st, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: ed piskor, fantagraphics, petey and pussy, uncanny x-men, wizzywig, x-men, x-men legacy
Sort of a dogpile here, since I’ve been neglecting these for the past couple of weeks.
The second installment of Ed Piskor’s Wizzywig series of graphic novels, Hacker, is just as entertaining as the first volume. Piskor’s cartooning gets sharper every time I see it and he manages to ride a fine line with the script, giving readers enough information to understand the finer points of what his protagonist is doing without ever making the book feel like a series of lectures. In addition to the material itself, I quite like the formalist four-panel grid approach he’s taken in this work; it suits the faux-documentary style very well. As with the first book, Piskor provides an extended preview to get readers interested.
John Kerchbaum’s Petey & Pussy features a foul-mouthed dog and cat duo (you can probably figure who gets what moniker,) both of whom have heads belonging to middle-aged white men. No explanation is given for this, nor do you really need one, as it seems to perfectly fit the world they inhabit, where ZAP!-style grotesqueness collides with a polished, midcentury illustration style. Between snake attacks, a suicidal parrot, visits to the bar, bottles of “twat-ka,” and an argument over who gets a shit-covered cigar, there’s something for everyone in the family, sort of a Chuck Jones retelling of The Aristocrats.
Ed Brubaker seems to be on autopilot for a large part of Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand, a very by-the-numbers duo of parallel stories about one part of the multi-titled team in the wake of Messiah Complex‘s over-the-top crossover and subsequent disappearance of Charles Xavier’s gravely-wounded body. It’s mutant-suffering-as-comfort-food, with Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler getting captured in Russia while Cyclops and Emma Frost shake down some dirty hippies in San Francisco. The character work is strong, but it’s very much an extended version of those “vignette” issues that Claremont would do between storylines in which the sum totality of someone’s psychic powers would need to be used and there was a lot of fretting and angst. Mike Choi’s art may be one reason I’m a bit blase about this comic: it’s a touch too clean and when combined with computer coloring, it makes the entire affair look more like a model shoot than a comic where people, you know, get persecuted for their genetic code.
Setting aside the clunky title and a silly number of panels featuring people standing around an incapacitated Chuck X lying on a slab with big bullet hole in his forehead in the first two chapters of X-Men Legacy: Divided He Stands (oh, I get it, trust me,) there’s a few really nicely-handled bits here, mostly involving Professor X recovering from his wounds and beginning to deal with his legacy of being kind of a shithead to the people who looked up to him. Sure, it’s melodramatic and handles its themes will all the subtlety of an Axewulf solo, but X-Men comics have never been nuanced examinations of mutant versus mankind, no matter how many times really dodgy MLK vs Malcolm X metaphors tumbled out of characters’ mouths. The art’s a bit of a mixed bag: Scot Eaton handles the main story while the flashbacks are covered by Romita Jr, Greg Land, and others. Again, coloring plays heavily into my perception of the title, creating a too-rendered dullness makes the book’s “present day” look nearly exactly like Captain America and about a dozen other Marvel titles, all Vertigo browns and greens. Brandon Peterson did draw the heck out of a naked Jean Grey, but that goofy high was quickly destroyed thanks to the re-appearance of the Worst Character in Comics in the final chapter.
4 Comments | Posted: November 16th, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: ghost rider
Ghost Rider: Hell Bent and Heaven Bound
Marvel Comics • $16.99 ($11.55 on Amazon)
Jason Aaron writes an enjoyably loud, stupidly entertaining pair of stories that treats Ghost Rider with the reverence to the source material he so obviously deserves. It’s hard to figure out if my favorite part of the first 2/3rds of the book is the cannibalism, the haunted highway, or the army of psychopathic nurses serving a rogue angel. Frequently very funny, Aaron’s script thunders along nicely (even if I wonder why Ghost Rider doesn’t just explodo the bad guys on the first encounter like he does in subsequent conflicts) and the art by Roland Boschi in the main arc is some of the most interesting I’ve seen in a “Big Two” book of late, joining a small group of Europeans (like Goran Parlov) in making books from Marvel easier on my eyes. Dan Brown’s colors also deserve some mention, as they’ve a painterly quality that ads tone and augments Boschi’s art instead of burying it under too many gradients. I can’t be the only one who’s growing weary of overcolored, too-”detailed” sequentials that lack any sort of soul while ensuring that a majority of books from a publisher look nearly-identical.
After Boschi’s work, the combination of Tang Eng Huat and colorist Jose Villarubia in the second storyline, “God Don’t Live In Cell Block D” takes a bit of getting used to, but thanks to lines like “You may have beaten our master, litte whore of heaven, but rest assured, hell will rise again,” and “And on that day, you will be nothing but a fleck of excrement on the boot heal of the great red dragon. Hail Satan!,” the transition was downright painless. A bit more focused than the first story, this two-parter ups the blasphemy stakes quite a bit, particularly in the conflict with the main villain of the piece and is a fun romp despite the Double Dragon / Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja plot of small-fights-leading-to-a-boss-battle. Aaron’s definitely onto something with one of those characters I’ve never thought much of, so I’ll be checking out future installments.
1 Comment | Posted: November 7th, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: spider-man, x-men
X-Men: Messiah Complex is a highly uneven mess with four writers, a dozen artists between pencillers and inkers, and four or five issues of plot spread over thirteen different comics in four different titles (plus a special), but I found myself enjoying it anyway, mostly because it has extreme amounts of the dunderheaded sturm und drang that I like in my X-Men comics. There’s time-travel, a child with a mysterious destiny, the fate of mutantkind in peril, and Cable sporting a set of shoulderpads that make his costumes in the 90s look positively restrained. It’s not worth the $30 cover price, but Amazon’s got it for $19.79, making it a much more appealing slice of modern junk culture.
Spider-Man: A New Goblin collects five issues of what many fans consider to be “prime” Len Wein/Ross Andru material. The mystery’s about as obvious as they come and it’s positively drenched in melodrama, but it’s hard to deny the appeal if you have any fondness for the character. It’s archetypical Spider-Man, complete with Aunt May in the hospital and Mary Jane serving as a calculated combination of harridan and super-hot lust object for the fans.
5 Comments | Posted: November 3rd, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: heavy liquid, paul pope
1.
Heavy Liquid is an ink-splattered, lush remix of the archetypical Raymond Chandler mystery, set in the latter quarter of the 21st century, half-familiar to comics readers with its street gangs, criminals in gaudy masks, and echoes of present-day New York while gloriously alien in other ways.
2.
Heavy Liquid is the sort of comic that should have a soundtrack that’s half Merzbow and half Coltrane, produced by Mouse On Mars and available only in a limited edition, packaged beautifully and with copious liner notes about process.
3.
Heavy Liquid serves as a treatise on craft as storytelling as rhythm as theme as motivation as engagement, using conventional dramatic narrative as a springboard into Paul Pope’s worldview and the visual language of the medium with a deliberate efficacy.
4.
I very much enjoyed Heavy Liquid.
5 Comments | Posted: October 30th, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: brian michael bendis, frank cho, mark bagley, mighty avengers
Both of the Mighty Avengers trades I read were kind of a mess: Bendis depending too much on the flashback-heavy storytelling that valiantly tries to bulk up paper-thin plots, everyone sounding pretty much the same (except for the hilarious machismo of Ares,) and the goofiest take on Dr. Doom since Star Jaws. Pretty art by Frank Cho in the first book, mind, and the second story’s jaunt into the Marvel Universe circa 1982 is handled very nicely, with Mark Bagley doing a more-than-passable John Byrne when drawing The Thing, yellowed pages, coloring dots, and text ads for period titles on the bottom of the page.
I know I’m not really the target audience for these titles, but it seems to be so much more about flash than story at this point. Bendis and Marvel’s concerted efforts to build to their events – Secret Invasion, Dark Reign – seems to take priority over making a superhero comic that’s fun to read on its own.
11 Comments | Posted: October 23rd, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: mike allred, red rocket 7
Despite being a fan of “music” and “comics,” I’d not picked up Mike Allred’s Red Rocket 7 over the years because it looked like an ill-conceived mishmash of Forest Gump and the crappier end of new-age “science fiction” like The Phoenix, but a 10th anniversary edition with a competitive price point made it a “what the hell” purchase.
Annoyingly, my initial instincts were correct. While it’s hard to find an artist whose work I enjoy more than Mike Allred, this comic about an alien clone and his place in rock and roll is ill-conceived, trite (the Allrods?), and comes very close to out-and-out whitewashing a significant chunk of music history despite lip service being paid in a few places to Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jimi Hendrix. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be better learned by watching the 10-hour History of Rock And Roll series, as it lacks a dopey Mormon metaphor disguised as Science Fiction. Disappointing, if very easy on the eyes.
Comments Off | Posted: October 21st, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: green arrow, green arrow year one
It took me a while to get around to reading Green Arrow: Year One, despite the creative team that made one of my favorite recent-ish Vertigo titles being associated with it. While I could say that it was a general disinterest in the character or the overall poor quality of DC’s other “Year One” projects in the past year and change (if you ask me about Two Face: Year One, I’ll start ranting like a crazy man on the subway,) I’ll confess to laziness in the matter – the book has been part of the ever-growing stack of things I’m “going to get to” and every time I’ve thought about picking it up, something like the last Ennis Punisher Max trade (Oh my god, so good) or Tezuka’s Black Jack manages to hove into my view, distracting me.
Anyway.
I read Green Arrow: Year One yesterday and it’s a well-done, pulp-oriented take on the origin of the DC Universe’s most annoying liberal. The script takes about twice as long as it needs to, but it’s an easy enough ride thanks to Jock’s sumptuous, technicolor visuals and clear storytelling that allows Diggle to forego exposition. I particularly liked how Diggle set up a lot of Oliver Queen’s skills in the first act, making his abilities with a bow and arrow that much more plausible by the end of the book. As is typical for these things, I can’t imagine that a monthly dose would be remotely satisfying, but as a bound-together work, it’s worth a look.
Comments Off | Posted: October 15th, 2008 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: black jack, tezuka
The collision between the cartoonish and the grotesque that informs and defines the first volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack is one of the most…interesting reading experiences I’ve had in some time. It’s obvious that Tezuka was unafraid of making the audience uncomfortable with detailed medical procedures amidst his usual round-faced characters with their exaggerated gestures and screwball physiques and it’s this bravura that helps sell the stories, which are full of dodgy science and slightly-stereotypical situations.
I found myself rooting for the mysterious, superhuman doctor that charges a fortune for his procedures, despite the character only being given the barest framework to exist within, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the gentleness shown when he helped Pinoko find a body or the story of the love of his life and why he’s not with her. The usual Vertical design sensibilities make this an attractive package and your local shop can get you a Previews-exclusive hardcover if you feel like splashing a bit, while Amazon has it for $11.53.
