1 Comment | Posted: December 28th, 2010 | Filed under: Not A Best Of, Thinking About Comics | Tags: elmer, felipe smith, gerry alanguilan, john cassaday, kathryn immonen, moving pictures, peepo choo, planetary, stuart immonen, warren ellis
Again, this is not a definitive “best of” sort of thing, just me talking about things I quite liked in 2010 while trying to avoid what I’d consider obvious contenders (Acme Novelty Library and the final volume of Pluto, this means you.)
Yes, there’s a few comics I own but haven’t read yet (X’ed Out) or have been meaning to catch up with (King City) and a few superhero comics I’ll kick myself for not mentioning (Batman and Robin and Batman: Incorporated, Thor: The Mighty Avenger and Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman’s Hulk and Atlas work,) but here’s some things that really jumped out at me and grabbed my attention.
Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen
At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, while standing about six feet from them, I declared that Kathryn and Stuart Immonen were the Jackie and John Kennedy of comics. The thing is, the person I was speaking with got it immediately: the restraining order level enthusiasm I have for the pair and their work is earned in spades and while both is a noteworthy creator on their own, together, their collaborative works are just plain sublime.
Moving Pictures uses the art world’s underground railroad during World War II as a backdrop, but the real story lies between two people on opposite sides of the effort. Ila and Rolf’s interactions may recall a hundred other fictional opposites, but the Immonens’ unique ability to pull emotion from spare scripts and deceptively minimal art, along with their trust in one another and their belief in the audience demands a level of engagement from the audience that is bracing and welcome.
Love and Rockets New Stories Volume 3 by Los Bros Hernandez
I’ll just add my voice to the chorus: “Browntown” is likely the best comic that Jaime Hernandez has done, period. The fact that it’s bookended by Gilbert’s masterfully bleak sociosexual sci-fi story of first contact, “The Love Bunglers” makes this possibly the highest-potency dosage of quality comics that came out this year. Like the Coen Brothers are for film, I am pretty convinced that I could read just comics by Los Bros Hernandez and feel immensely satisfied.
Absolute Planetary
I wanted to avoid mentioning reprints, particularly expensive large-format volumes that are already out of print, but reading all of Planetary in one dose reminds us that Ellis believes in people despite his curmudgeonly reputation. While Jakita Wagner kicking the shit out of anything that hoves into her view is my primary fetish when it comes to the title, getting an oversized look at John Cassaday’s development as a sequential artist free of the occasionally-year-long delays between issues is a genuine pleasure.
Peepo Choo by Felipe Smith
Felipe Smith’s three-volume manga from Vertical is insane and sexist, culturally obnoxious, and is likely be the work of a mad genius. Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: an otaku obsessed with a bizarre anime, a wannabe gangster comic shop manager and his boss, who happens to be a bondage-clad murderer for hire, go to Japan and find out something about themselves as they engage in adventures that involve a buxom teenage model, a criminal syndicate and lots and lots of violence. Originally published in Japan by Kodansha but with barbs aimed at both sides of the Pacific, Peepo Choo is gross, cruel, smart and generally in exquisitely poor taste, even as it displays a surprising amount of heart.
It’s the sort of book that pushes the edge of commercially-viable manga and while I don’t want every comic to follow in its footsteps, I do think that the medium needs need more message-laden slaps to the face.
Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan
It’s a story of a twenty-something’s panic and journey of self-discovery after the death of his father, except that the lead character and most of the cast are sentient chickens. It’s terrific.
1 Comment | Posted: June 4th, 2009 | Filed under: The Rundown | Tags: batman and robin, becky cloonan, cameron stewart, frank quitely, grant morrison, ignition city, jeff parker, seaguy, vasilis lolos, warren ellis
1.
Grant Morrison had two DC comics today that couldn’t be further apart in tone even as they both bear the hallmarks of Morrison’s approach to the superhero meme, expanding upon the metacommentary he’s slipped into various comics over the last two decades. Batman and Robin‘s debut and the final issue of Seaguy: The Slaves Of Mickey Eye invoke common themes of DC’s superhero comics without any of the pastiche that marks the usual superhero comic book treatment of such material. As much as I enjoy comics like the original Squadron Supreme and Astro City, I really appreciate it when people use the past as a springboard to something new, and Morrison does that in style with Batman and Robin.
While Morrison’s run on the mainline Batman title let him indulge in some good old-fashioned silver age fetishism, this tite’s mandate seems to be “You know the basics, what can we do now?’ Batman and Robin #1 is extremely new-reader friendly (throwaway lines explain pretty much everything to a neophyte,) but the way that Morrison plays with the myth of Bruce Wayne’s Batman and what that means to Gotham is very satisfying in this meaty-yet-fast-paced first installment. Special note, of course, should be made to Frank Quitely’s art. It’s very rare that Morrison’s collaborators are able to keep up with him, but Quitely manages to kill in each and every panel, just as he did in his rightly-lauded Flex Mentallo and All-Star Superman.
Just as Batman and Robin manages to do something new with a 70+ year-old icon, Seaguy’s second adventure’s climax features our hero teaming up with others of his ilk, a quest for true love, an imaginary friend, and a villain who gets his comeuppance because that’s what happens to bad guys. Taken on their own, these events aren’t anything significant, but the way that Morrison layers them one on top of the other, letting the reader absorb them as matter-of-fact moments in the narrative, is close to masterful. Cameron Stewart is the perfect artist for this sort of project, able to be just cartoonish enough to sell you on Seaguy’s technicolor world but with a solid hold on anatomy and keen storytelling abilities. I’d love to see a collection of his concept work for the two Seaguy stories so far; while Morrison’s imagination is clearly at work, it Stewart’s ability to sell the ridiculous and sublime that makes me appreciate the title that much more.
2.
I read a comic with Buffy in the title, but it had nothing to do with Joss Whedon’s world (outside of one reference to a stalker) and everything to do with Becky Cloonan’s uncannily easy scripting and Vasilis Lolos’s art. This story of teenage boredom and vampires would fit very nicely alongside any of Becky Cloonan’s minicomics, where it’s apparent that she’s had a solid grasp of dialogue and storytelling that has gone underappreciated, particularly in lieu of her high-profile creative partnerships with writers like Brian Wood. Maybe this, alongside the forthcoming Pixu will get more exposure for her writing talents. (If you’re at MoCCA, you should see if she has her Minis book in stock. It’s a solid collection of her very early work that I found surprisingly good.)
3.
I have bought three comics by Jeff Parker in the last two weeks. It’s just my way of repaying him for his pinup in The Rack: Year One (Mostly). It doesn’t hurt that they’re all really readable, particularly Agents Of Atlas, which I feel like I should write more about sometime. It’s a dense comic with some pretty inventive writing in unusual places.
4.
Oh, oh, oh, I remember. I forgot to mention how much I enjoyed Warren Ellis’s Bastard Cop With A Jetpack in Ignition City. There’s a very casually-used bit in there about how he uses people’s first names when speaking to them, a cheap salesmen/law enforcement trick that I pick up on every time it’s used against me and hate. I love that it went unnoted by other characters, but if you were there, it would have rankled something fierce.
5.
That’s kinda it. I’ve not even opened my copy of Side B or that DC Comics Classics Library: Roots Of The Swamp Thing collection that Danny Levitz was going on about in last week’s picks. In fact, outside of Design Fetish and the usual self-promotion hijinks, this blog’s going to be pretty silent until Tuesday. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the rest, really.
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: July 31st, 2008 | Filed under: Reviews | Tags: black summer, DMZ, fantastic four, gillen, newuniversal, paul cornell, super friends, warren ellis
Black Summer #7
Well,
that was nasty.
DMZ #33
My, how time has flown on this title. Matty Roth’s recent brattiness could certainly be seen has having some kind of analogue to the more enthusiastic Obama supporters, and the way he’s crossing any number of ethical lines provides for great story fodder. It feels like Wood’s definitely very aware of what he’s doing with the character, and Riccardo Burchielli makes this title one of the most dynamic-looking Vertigo titles in a long, long time.
Fantastic Four: True Story #1
After hearing the good buzz Paul Cornell has received with his MI-13 related books, I thought I’d check this out, without knowing the premise. While “The Fantastic Four travel into the realm of fiction” sounds like an awfully good time, I was left pretty cold by the entire thing. The dialogue (particularly Sue’s, who was the focus of the issue) is clumsy when it’s not being a bit too-cute and even if I like the idea of
Of Mice And Men being Ben Grimm’s favorite book, I don’t think I’ll bother with further issues. However, Horacio Domingues’s art is very, very attractive, reminding me a bit of Seth Fisher mixed in with a bit of Linda Medley, and I am certainly going to look out for his work in the future.
Justice League Unlimited #46
I’m going to miss this tie-in comic that was frequently better than it needed to be. The last issue sees John Stewart leading a group of recent Green Lantern recruits (including G’nort)(!!!) against the weaponeers of Qward, who are working with Sinestro to break the universe. So, yeah, that was a lot of fun thanks to Matt Wayne and Carlo Barberi, even if it didn’t feel quite like a JLU comic, instead coming off like a test for an in-universe
Green Lantern ongoing.
Liberty Comics
While it’s generally a good idea to pick up these CBLDF books, this one’s a really solid reader value for $4.
The Boys, Darwyn Cooke telling the story of a cursed book, a short
Criminal story, and some Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier? Everything else here is gravy. Tasty, tasty gravy.
newuniversal 1959
As I posted on my Twitter feed while reading it, I may have to use my hate rays to murder Kieron Gillen in his sleep. His script is tight and blackly funny in the same way that Ellroy frequently is and while it builds nicely on what Ellis has laid down before, I think this stands up as a nice little slice of a differently paranoid time. I was glad to see that Greg Scott and Kody Chamberlain worked on this – they’ve both done some nice work for BOOM! and I was hoping they’d get a wide audience soon.
Super Friends #5
So, Gorilla Grodd turned every human on the planet into some form of ape or monkey and the Super Friends have to undo the damage he’s done without punching or anything like that because this is a
kid’s comic, goddammit. Put in my box by Mike, who knows how I feel about simians, this was one of the better surprises I’ve had from DC in some time. It didn’t feel dumbed down, just a bit “safer” than the usual titles and the restrictions on the creators means that they have to be a bit more creative. While this isn’t going to replace
JLU in my pull, I’d not be adverse to reading any further issues.
2 Comments | Posted: July 3rd, 2008 | Filed under: Reviews | Tags: simone bianchi, warren ellis
Astonishing X-Men #25
Ellis’s first issue as the new writer of
Astonishing is, as these things now have to be, a bit of a “Lights, Please.” While the elements for this storyline – someone who hid themselves during the Scarlet Witch’s “No more mutants,” whozit is offing other members of
homo superior – are laid out very nicely, a lot of the issue is devoted to who’s who, what’s what, and oh yeah, they’re not wearing costumes all the time anymore because Ellis doesn’t like them as much as Whedon did. I like that Ellis is using this to tell a different kind of story than the norm for the team, and Simone Biachi’s art, despite a muddy color pallet obscuring details that i think would have
had to have been in in the original pencils, does the trick nicely, both as a contrast to John Cassaday’s work on the title previous to this issue, and as the pictorial half of the comics storytelling equation on its own. I’m not sure if I’m sticking around for the singles, but this looks to be something I’ll very much enjoy in trade paperback.
Batman #678
Morrison’s love of old Silver Age stories means that we get the Bat-Radia from “Batman: The Superman Of Planet X” on top of a drug-addled, amnesiac Bruce Wayne wandering the streets of Gotham while the Black Glove systematically destroys his life. It’s so weird and itchy that I can’t help but love it a bit and will even give a little love to Tony Daniel’s art, which actually manages to tell the story well this time around. It’s so weird: sometimes, he’s on-point and then three issues in a row will pass where it looks like he’s copying poses from
Wildguard. (I hope that someone at DC thinks to come up with a
Batman: RIP companion trade paperback with all these stories Morrison’s referencing. It’d be a really nice way to make sure the readers appreciate his
dedication to being bugfuck mental.)
The Boys #20
If there’s ever a course at the community college entitled “How To Make Entertaining Comics Information Dumps (Even If You Shouldn’t Do That),” Garth Ennis would certainly be the professor handling it.
Patsy Walker: Hellcat #1
Kathryn Immonen’s Hellcat feature was the only reason I read the first few issues of the recently-revived (and anemically selling, at least at my retailer)
Marvel Comics Presents. While it’d be easy to grouse that the art chores on this aren’t being handled by her talented husband this time around, David Lafuente’s art and John Rauch’s colors make the switch away more than bearable. This may be the most exuberant Marvel book of the last few years: Patsy loves being a superheroine and accepts her Initiative assignment to Alaska with aplomb and humor – her interaction with Tony Stark made me laugh aloud, like you hear about on the internet – while the art practically bounces off the page with funky angles, streamlined shapes, and high-octane colors. Add in dialogue like “I’d like to see your angriest ursines, please,” and you’ve got a comic book I want to read more of.
Squadron Supreme #1
I got no damn idea what’s going on in this. Apparently Ultimate Nick Fury is over in the
Squadron Supreme universe because Greg Land got hired to trace a bunch of Victoria’s Secret Models while Bendis and Strazcyznski scripted a crossover last year. I don’t know; I don’t give a damn, not even with Chaykin writing.
1 Comment | Posted: July 2nd, 2008 | Filed under: Outbound Linkage | Tags: warren ellis
Warren Ellis takes Pal Linda’s 5-question quiz:
Pretend you’re 15. Name three songs you’d put on a mix tape for your girlfriend.
God, 15… that makes it 1983. What did we have in 1983 that’d go on a romantic mixtape? Especially, you know, when you’re 15, it’s dark and cold all the time. “Blue Monday,” New Order. “Never Never,” The Assembly. And… hell, this is tough, actually. “Red Red Wine”? The Banshees covering “Dear Prudence”? No: Dexy’s Midnight Runners doing “Come On Eileen.”
2 Comments | Posted: June 25th, 2008 | Filed under: Reviews | Tags: final crisis, grant morrison, no hero, warren ellis
Final Crisis #2
Morrison continues slapping idea after idea onto the mound that’s piling up and starts using them to move his multi-headed beast of a plot forward. It’s interesting to compare the “let’s tell one story as a whole” approach that this title is using versus the crossover-dependent
Secret Invasion. The current audience’s demand for slam-bang action in their mainline superhero epics may make them impatient for Morrison’s holistic approach to the complete story unit, especially if the “competition” (really, does it have to be one?) is dropping helicarriers out of the sky and showing your favorite heroes punching Skrulls for plot beats in the main title and letting all of the character change and
story take place elsewhere. I know which one I prefer.
No Hero #0
Another metafictional superhero series by Warren Ellis, this time focusing on the toll that getting powers can take on someone? Really? Surprisingly, this one feels fresh. With Avatar, Ellis seems to be applying a more refined approach than previously, honing his clipped, precise scripting on a single target.
Black Summer asked “What happens when a superman who wants to make the world better takes it one step too far?”
No Hero‘s question is right in its tagline – “How much do you want to be a superhuman?” – with a brutal eight-page visit to the world that counterculture icon Carrick Masterson’s created and some backup material that, typeface aside, manages to fire a few new cylinders and opens up quite a few storytelling possibilities. For a buck, you could do much, much worse.
4 Comments | Posted: June 19th, 2008 | Filed under: Pandering to the Demographic, Reviews | Tags: anna mercury, avengers, jeff parker, Reviews, warren ellis
This week was one of the textbook examples of “Not Much Goin’ On For Ol’ Kevin” in the singles. Only three titles found their way into my bag, and I’m not going to talk about one of them because what can someone say about the middle chapter of a DMZ storyline other than “Brian Wood seems to know what he’s doing with this”? So, here’s…
Anna Mercury #2
There’s a very good bit in this issue that shows how Ellis manages to nail characters in ways that are almost subliminal. The director of Anna Mercury’s agency explains what’s going on to the new governmental leader. It involves parallel worlds, strange physics, and Anna Mercury’s role in making sure the status quo is kept. He’s impatient, unable to explain everything in soundbites, and leaves the poor man flummoxed as hell, much like the readers, and that’s good enough. We sort of have a vague idea what’s going on, now let’s get back to Anna shooting the hell out of people. Yes, it’s got bits of Planetary in its DNA, particularly when you compare Anna to Jakita Wagner, but it’s got just enough new stuff to convince me to pick up the eventual trade.
Marvel Adventures Avengers #25
Jeff Parker + Arnim Zola = Love. Yes, it’s just that simple. Ig Guara’s art has a few moments where it just shines, particularly around the comedic beats, even if his action storytelling needs just a bit of work. This single issue perfect example of light superhero entertainment that is very comfortable with what it is and manages to engage readers at just about any possible age group. Here’s a preview so you can figure out if you want to pick it up next week.
Wow, this is short this week. I better come up with something that’ll earn those links.
Oh! I know!
A Picture Of Nerd Heaven
Comments Off | Posted: January 19th, 2007 | Filed under: Thinking About Comics, Uncategorized | Tags: iron man, tony stark, warren ellis
[Warning: this gets pretty nerdy. I mean, like, more than the usual amount.]
So, Tony Stark, then. Before Crank started the other night, I was forced to sit through a series of previews for films of dubious merit. There was a loud, overlong trailer Saw III, of course, which I hope is the last, definitive statement in films that involve 90+ minutes of slow torture of various cast members, along with a preview for Employee Of The Month, a Dane Cook vehicle that seemed to involve 90+ minutes of slow torture of the audience. What caught my eye and happened to stop the fast-forward process was a glimpse of the direct-to-DVD animated feature, The Invincible Iron Man.
I’m not really a purist about these things, but it appears that instead of following a tried and true origin story that’s been updated with only the most modest of tweaks, writer Greg Johnson and director Frank Paur have gutted a major theme for the character and instead have Tony Stark creating armor for the purpose of kicking around some spooky Chinese ghosts. That’s not right in the slightest, people. This change, pretty much ruins the appeal of Iron Man for me in a very specific way.
Iron Man, as a comic or film or novel or video game or whatever, should be about more than a guy in a fancy suit of armor that beats up other (generally also armor-suited) guys. It should be about one man – Tony Stark – having his eyes opened wide and spending the rest of his life making up for years of unethical business practices. There’s more to the character of Tony Stark than being a rich drunk who likes to tinker with gadgets. Some people – Warren Ellis and, shockingly, John Byrne (whose origin story for Iron Man was folded into Ellis’s Extremis), to name two – get this. Tony Stark, as a character, should be a driven combination of Bill Gates and George Clooney: a handsome, charismatic, socially-minded technocrat determined to leave the world a better place than he found it.
The most acclaimed stories featuring the character have always featured Tony Stark battling some aspect of himself, be it his creations (Armor Wars) or alcoholism (Demon in a Bottle) and this proves that there’s more to the character than simpleminded slugfests, if only for a few issues at a time. There’s been a sporadic uptick in quality of late – I think Ellis’s Extremis, as a collected work, nicely encapsulates a great deal about the character in a continuity-void sort of way. Joe Casey and Frazier Irving’s The Inevitable carried some of the old-school Marvel flavor and a sense of history while managing to show Tony Stark as a more mature, well-rounded man who finds the parade of supervillains in his life inconvenient. I also found the first issue of Adam Warren’s Hypervelocity miniseries to be great fun and feel that he’s more than up to the task, especially as he’s a premiere technofetishist.
It makes sense that, hand in hand with the technocratic/futurist thing, there should be a liberatarian bent to the character that opens up multiple story possibilities for the character. He’s consistently seen that governments misuse technology and probably wouldn’t trust them. Of course, this would nullify things like the questionable decision to become Secretary of Defense as well as his entry into the horribly mismanaged Civil War event. In fact, I think it’d be much more interesting to portray a conflicted Iron Man siding with Reed Richards (who actually managed to justify some of his actions in the latest Fantastic Four) out of immediate concern for human life and then raising his voice when things like “Negative Zone Prisons” and “Cybernetic/Clone Thor” got brought up in the conversation.
Somebody (and I can’t find who – Paul O’Brien, maybe?) described Iron Man as “Batman with Bluetooth,” and I can see some similarity there, even in such a pithy phrasing. That’s the sort of workable direction I could see the character going in without the extremes that we’ve had of late. What do you want out of Iron Man? Some people say the character is beyond saving at this point thanks to the latest Marvel crossover, others hold out hope that it’s all about Loki or a Skrull or The Hatemonger or whatever. What could Marvel do to make you want to care about the character (again, or for the first time)?
