Archive for April, 2009

Next Comic Book Book Club: Green Lantern, The Sinestro Corps War

April 28th, 2009 by Martin

green-lantern-sinestro-corps-war-hc-2The next ReadComics book club is planned for Saturday, May 16th, or two weeks from this coming Saturday. We hope to have all the regulars, and some supporting cast for this book club, when we’ll talk about Green Lantern, The Sinestro Corps War, volumes 1, 2, and if you can get your hands on it, Tales of the Sinestro Corps, which collects the final (auxiliary?) bits.

Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War (Vol. 1, 2, etc.)
Saturday, May 16th 3PM
Florence & Marty’s apartment

Grieving behind a plastic lion mask: Mother Come Home

April 25th, 2009 by Susie

mother-come-home1

I picked up Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother Come Home from the library because I vaguely remembered someone somewhere giving it a good review. I found it to be a profoundly sad and beautiful study of how children process loss. The core of the story is about seven or eight year old boy coping with the death of his mother and the resulting mental breakdown of his father. A subject that hits rather close to home for me. The loss of mother of the title has uprooted his father from reality, he loses track of anything other than his overwhelming grief, and the boy, Thomas finds himself in the care taker role. Thomas creates his own myths to explain his altered life, and clings to invented rituals to anchor himself in his now unstable world. The climax of the story involves his need to fix his father’s problem, and therefore fix his own life, which fails utterly. The book is narrated by an older Thomas, and it is his more mature understanding of the events that he is relating that keeps the story from being completely devastating. The art suits the story perfectly. It is straightforward and grim but at the same time innocent and childlike. I would recommend this to anyone who would claim graphic novels can’t have the same emotional impact of prose.

ReadComics Podcast #032

April 17th, 2009 by Martin

Jason, Marty, Mike and Florence are mostly all drunk, talking (slurring) about the following comic-related subjects (and many others less so): twitter and comics and facebook, Scott Pilgrim, Bomb Queen, New Mutants, Dark Avengers, Grant Morrison, Runaways, Frank Miller’s Daredevil, The Webcomic List, piperka.net, Susan Boyle and Marty’s mom. We hope you enjoy this rambling masterpiece.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #032 (17 MB, 37 minutes)

Comic Book Catchup

April 12th, 2009 by Martin

batman_ripForgive me ReadComics, for I have sinned. It has been AGES since my last post.

I’ve read tons of stuff lately. Two TPBs by Grant Morrison, in particular. First was Batman R.I.P., (pictured) which was basically about convincing us that Batman might die, or at least go insane, no maybe even die, no, just loose his mind, no, just die. I think in that order, although it hardly matters. It was only slightly more coherent than Kid Eternity, which was essentially about some folks in hell trying to get mankind to grow up and figure out this whole living on earth thing sucks. At least, I think that’s what the story was about… in the end. Both stories had lots of WTF moments, and neither really ties everything up to any satisfying degree. Both had incredible art, however, that, at least in the case of Kid Eternity, really went a long way toward making the trade worth consuming.

There have also been numerous single issues in the last few weeks. Florence and I have kept up on our pull, and last week in particular there were at least four new comics to read, including Sword, Echo, Doctor Sleepless and a new one by Warren Ellis called Ignition City. I’ll admit that I devoured Sword, (which had a satisfactory, if not overwhelming amount of content again this month) and Echo (which unfortunately didn’t) right away, but have yet to get to the Warren Ellis stuff. I’m behind on Freak Angels too, and in general have a lot of webcomics to catch up on when I get around to it.

I also want to announce that we know what comics we’re going to be reading for our next book club, even if we don’t know when it’s going to take place yet. Jason J has announced that we’ll be reading the Sinestro Corps War stuff. He hasn’t let me know exactly which comics yet, but wikipedia says it’s an “11-part saga was originally published between June and December 2007“. It goes on to say that “in addition to the main storyline, four supplemental “Tales of the Sinestro Corps” one-shot specials and a Blue Beetle tie-in issue were concurrently released.” So there are potentially sixteen comics for us to read. It looks like there are at least two trade paperbacks, and possibly a third with the supplemental stuff. Anyway, we should know soon enough when the Book Club will be, and there’ll probably be another post about what books to read then.