Our podcast tonight came to you from Susie’s living room in Chicago, recorded on Marty’s iPhone.
We talk about Wizard World extensively (duh), Wonder Woman, Warren Ellis, FreakAngels, Batman: Gotham Knight, Madman, The Filth, Grant Morrison, jason’s love of Image Comics (and Zombies), x-men, Chicago comic book shops: Brain Storm (and the Comic Book Queers Podcast) & Dark Tower (and the Around Comics Podcast), Jason’s green skin fetish (mostly for Hulkling and Changeling), Karate Kid and Ralph Macchio, (but not Ralph Macchio the Marvel Editor, the not the Karate Kid from Legion), and a bouncing zombie jesus f-ing christ.
I absolutely loved these comics. So dense and full of interesting visuals. Each panel (seemingly) had some kind of illustrated punchline, whether it was a superhero caricature, or just hilarious signage in the background, you are never at a loss for some fascinating detail to absorb. So too, the characters are extremely well thought out and detailed, these superhero police officers that make up the 10th precinct in a world populated by extra-humans.
Alan Moore does a great job here, and with such brilliant accompanying artwork, it’s really hard to go wrong reading these. All this gushing having been said, I was actually a bit disappointed at the ending of the first trade. I loved how we were getting there, but I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere. And really, it wasn’t going anywhere special. These are the day-to-day activities of these police. I guess this is the “Cops” of Neopolis (the name of the city in Top 10). We basically just follow these characters around, and sure they solve a crime here or there, catch the criminals, but there is no big revelation, really. Not until the second book.
In the second book, things get even better, I think. I read it faster, anyway. Not necessarily because I was in a hurry, but because it was so good. And this time when I got to the end, I wasn’t disappointed. I liked it just fine. Not necessarily because there was a big conclusion, (although there was), but maybe also because I’d finally got the pacing down. I was finally used to this world, and what we were going to get out of it. (And perhaps not get out of it.)
Notice the girl’s shirt on the front there? I tried to figure out which came first, the tee-shirt, or our local comic shop, but so far I have no idea. Top 10 isn’t all that old, only since 2000, but I don’t know exactly when Big Brain Comics opened it’s doors in downtown Minneapolis. Perhaps before that? Would Alan Moore (or Gene Ha, the artist) really have made a reference to that shop?!? I will find out and report back.
In unrelated news, Jason, Florence, Mike and I are all piling into a car tomorrow to head to Chicago for the big Wizard World comic convention. If you’re going to be there, and you want us to come say hi, leave a comment, or drop us an email at readcomics.org (doesn’t matter what the address is, we should get it).
Maybe I’ll find the Smax trade (next in the Top 10 series) while I’m there!
Faerie comics that use characters from Shakespeare A Midsummer Night’s Dream are apparently all the rage right now. I suppose we did sort of seek out God Save the Queen after Jason mentioned it at some point in a discussion we had about Suburban Glamour, but these two comics were pretty damn similar. They both have Titania as one of the main characters, and they both go into details about how she’s been usurped by another Faerie as queen, and they both have a female “changeling” character, (essentially, a faerie baby who is exchanged for a human baby at birth), and they both involve the changeling finding out who she really is in the course of the comic. Lots of parallels.
God Save the Queen had really amazing artwork. I don’t think I ended up liking the story quite as much as Suburban Glamour. Even though Suburban Glamour had more plot holes and weird leaps of logic, it still felt like the characters were more believable. I guess I wasn’t into the dynamic of the drugged out girl and her childhood buddy who just went along with doing hard drugs just to watch over her. It’s probably realistic, but that guy should have grown some balls and put his foot down and said “I’m not joining you in your descent into drug-addicted stupidity” long before the conclusion of that particular plotline.
God Save the Queen also felt a little disjointed for my tastes. On one hand we had the plot with faerie characters and concepts, and then on the other the plot where there’s a teenage girl getting high and acting out because her father left and her mother is a total wreck. They worked together okay in principal, but I felt differently about the girl in both… liking her in the faerie one, and hating her in the other. It didn’t make for a book that I could empathize with at all, which was sort of the opposite of Suburban Glamour.
All this having been said, it was definitely worth a read for the terrifically beautiful artwork.
This isn’t really a review yet, since I’ve only just sent money to Barry Deutsch for a paper copy of his enchanting comic book Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. However, you can read Hereville page by page (one per week) on his website. Eventually, the whole story will be released on there, although I imagine that by that time, Barry will have another trade paperback to sell, or he’ll have moved on to other projects or something.
It’s such a great marketing ploy to incentivize readers to buy the trade just to finish the story they’re getting slowly in pieces on the website. I don’t think I’ve seen it done before. I would gladly pay extra just to get the TPB all at once rather than waiting for individual comics to come out. Of course, that’s a bit of a catch 22, since a lot of times I probably wouldn’t even know about the TPB without having seen (and flipped through) individual issues in a store. In this case, I’ve got the pages that are already online to give me a sense of whether I want to read the rest of the book. It turns out that, yes! I really do want to read the rest!
This kind of marketing is really aimed directly at impatient people like me.
David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America will be giving a talk and signing copies of his book Tuesday, July 8th at 7:30 p.m.. The press release is as follows:
What: Book talk and signing
Where: Elmer L. Andersen Library (222 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455)
When: Tuesday, July 8, 2008 ? 7:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.
The Friends of the University Minnesota Libraries and the Children’s Literature Research Collections proudly present a Twin Cities appearance by David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America.
Dessert reception follows with books available for sale courtesy of Red Balloon Bookshop. David Hajdu will be signing books during the reception.
Comic books, not rock-and-roll, created the generation gap. They also spawned juvenile delinquency, crime, sexual deviance, and things of unspeakable depravity. Long before Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan from the waist up, long before Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin, long before James Dean yelled, “You’re tearing me apart,” teachers, politicians, priests, and parents were lining up across from comic-book publishers, writers, artists, and children at bonfires and Senate hearings decrying the evil that was the ten-cent plague.
David Hajdu’s “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America” comprises the last book in an informal trilogy about American popular culture at mid-century, and radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between “high” and “low” art.
This special event with David Hajdu is part of an evening celebration honoring John Borger and his gift of almost 40,000 comic books to the Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University Libraries.
Zebraman starts off as an average joe, a schoolteacher who can barely pay attention at staff meetings, and whose children don’t care for him, and whose wife is almost certainly cheating on him. He sews his costume at night, ripping it the first time he tries it on, and daring himself to go across the street for a can of soda. It’s not even an original costume — Zebraman was a failed tv show from decades before.
We watched this Japanese import with english overdub (I didn’t bother trying to figure out whether the disk had english subtitles, and it seemed like it was going to be the kind of movie where it doesn’t mater anyway).
Turns out it’s the schoolteacher’s destiny to be Zebraman. There is an army of little green aliens living in the school gymnasium (I always thought this was true at my school too), and even some secret government agents have taken notice.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this movie was that the computer graphics didn’t suck terribly to go along with everything else that sucked terribly. I guess the director was someone pretty famous, but I don’t honestly know how this movie got made. (Although I suppose mighty morphin’ power rangers also got (gets?) made, so there you go.) The best part of the movie was the first fight scene, with a man wearing a giant crab costume and whose weapons were a pair of scissors in both hands. Also fairly amusing was a dream sequence involving the “Zebra Nurse“.
Oh yeah, and the tagline of the movie: Black and White Ecstasy! Seriously. Avoid at all costs… unless, you just want a movie to laugh along with, in which case, this is pretty amusing.
After purchasing a back issue of Omega: The Unknown that I’d been looking for, and a Usagi Yojimbo comic picked out by my nephew Jake yesterday at The College of Comic Book Knowledge, I ended up talking about ReadComics.org to David Tea, who was manning the shop. Florence was busy in the back room, A.K.A. The Nostalgia Zone, buying some back issues of The Authority she’d only just discovered we were missing. David was incredibly friendly, and I ended up leaving the store with a couple issues of his self-produced comic, “Five Perennial Virtues”.
Five Perennial Virtues is basically just photocopied and stapled, and (as it says on the front “Written, Drawn, & Stapled by David Tea”) the production values remind me a lot of my own old books of poetry produced the same way. Inside, the art is a very cool mixture of different hand-drawn styles. There is some interesting pointillism, but I think my favorite scenes have these really cool tiled backgrounds. Actually, my favorite favorite is a drawing on page 35 of issue #3, where David (he is his own main character) stands among all these falling maple seed “helicopters”.
Anyway, in case you haven’t been there, and are looking for an awesome shop to buy your comics in south minneapolis, check out The College of Comic Book Knowledge. And if he’s there, say ‘hi’ to David for me.
Along with many of the comics I’m collecting now in individual issues, this one has just sat on the shelf awaiting my inevitable catch-up reading. I don’t know why I chose them tonight, likely it was just because they were the near the top of the stack as issue #5 just came out.
After how good the first one was, I really dreaded reading the rest. You see, I don’t like thrillers. I don’t watch them in the theater, and I don’t read Stephen King. This story is solidly of the “thriller” variety, as my stomach gets all clenched up and knotted while reading it. But it didn’t have to be this way! There was a slim glimmer of hope after that first issue that the worst of it was behind us, and now we were just going to explore this neat old house and find out what it could do. But no. The guy who killed this family’s father is still out there, and there’s other freaky stuff happening besides.
Several of these issues end in cliffhangers (including #5), and even though I didn’t really want to keep reading, I did really have to know what happens. Wish I’d known this before I picked these up today, but apparently issue #6 ends the arc. I have some predictions about what’s going to happen, but I guess I don’t want to spoil it for you by talking too much about the plot.
I did just find out something pretty interesting that I didn’t know when I reviewed the first Locke & Key earlier this year: the author is one “Joe Hill”, a pseudonym used by Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of Stephen King. So this guy pretty much follows in his father’s footsteps, I guess. Apparently he’s already won some awards and had a book on the best seller list and everything.
Unfortunately, knowing that gives me some further expectations about where this story is going… or rather, what the story is not going to get into, and that is details about the supernatural events that take place in this book. I would absolutely love to be pleasantly surprised here, but we’ve got exactly one comic book issue to wrap up a pretty tangled story and conclude this thing. I have little hope that we’re going to find out why the house has a key that can take you anywhere you want, or what gives the youngest son the ability to turn himself into a ghost and float around as a spirit. Instead, we’ll wrap up the “serial killer kid traps the family and has everyone but the youngest son helpless in the basement” plot line, and we might get some details about the evil woman-spirit trapped in the well-house, but chances are good that there is going to be a lot left up to the imagination at the end of next issue.
Not to say that I have anything against imagination, but seriously, I read comics to experience other people’s imaginations, not as a launching ground for my own. And definitely not when it’s a horror comic. I’d just as soon not think about psychotic maniac killers, thankyouverymuch.
We sat down at one of our favorite local comic book shops, The Source Comics and Games to record this, the ninth ReadComics.org Podcast. Unfortunately, the many D&D players around us create quite the background din, but hopefully you can more or less understand us as we wax lethargic about the first six issues of Northlanders, written by Brian Wood.
I picked this up solely for the art. The characters have a very stylized and elongated look. Almost cartoonish, but too realistic to be lumped into that category. The issue starts (and almost ends) with a scene where a minister visiting a house where a daughter is experiencing the stigmata, and she has visions, visions of a boy who is getting wings. The main story is about the boy, whose name is “Warren Worthington the Third”, and he’s clearly going to sprout wings any day now. That’s about all I can say, because that’s about all that happens. There is a disturbing end to this otherwise fairly innocuous comic. There are also lots of religious overtones. The story is clearly incorporating elements from the christian mythos.
So far: Interesting. I’m reserving judgment until I’ve had a chance to read more, but I do really like the art. I’m not terribly familiar with the x-men character, but this is a re-telling of his origin.
To make up for the delay, tonight’s podcast was extra long! We waxed poetic on the topics of: Top 10, Northlanders, True Story Swear To God, 100 Bullets, Trinity, Buffy / Angel, Giant Sized Astonishing X-Men, upcoming superhero movies, Wizard World, Convergence, Gaylaxicon 2009, comic shops in Chicago, the Mall of America, x-men and comic “brand awareness”, serialized fiction in comic books and soap operas, amazon kindle and reading on handheld devices.
I hadn’t read any 100 Bullets before this, and wasn’t even familiar with the premise before I picked it up from the library. Let me begin by saying that I’m not a huge fan of the “noir” genre, and this is definitely heralded as a “crime thriller”, something that holds little appeal to me. I had heard this was great though, and it’s won some eisner awards, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
The premise is thus: A shady (but so far benevolent) cop (or something more?) gives people who have been wronged a briefcase with a gun and 100 “untraceable” bullets to right their injustice. The first story of the series (I have no idea if these characters recur), is about Isabelle “Dizzy” Cordova, a former teenage gangbanger, whose husband and child were killed in a drive by. Until this shadowy guy gives her the hundred bullets, she’d thought it was by a rival gang that did it, but he also puts “proof” in the briefcase about how it was two crooked cops who did it.
This brings me to the over-arching disbelief suspension for me about this. The recipients of the 100 bullets can’t show this proof to anyone or the whole deal is off. (What about… maybe… showing it to the cops?) In the first story, this makes a bit of sense, because the killers / bad guys were also cops, so you show this “proof” to the wrong people and you’d probably just end up dead. But we never actually see the proof, so there’s really no way for us to judge whether it would have been compelling to someone outside the system– say a federal court, or a judge. We do get glimpses of our shady 100 bullets guy in the police station, which seems to imply that this is a localized phenomenon, but at this point, he could be anyone or anything.
The second story in this trade is shorter, and less compelling than the first. I’ll probably pick up the next couple of trade paperbacks, because I’d like to read the eisner award winning series in issues 15-18, but whether I continue reading after that depends a lot on how much of the over-arching story I’m getting/enjoying. It does seem that this has an actual conclusion, after nine TPBs, but at this point I’m not sure whether I’m ready for that long of a commitment.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I picked up Batman: Snow because it is another book drawn by Seth Fisher, but this was almost entirely without the abstract style that I loved so much about Will World and Big in Japan. The art is still distinctively Fisher, but without the weirdness, it didn’t feel terribly special to me. There are some images with a lot of detail that I feel are particularly great, but overall the art is just good, but not especially noteworthy.
The story telling was pretty straight forward, and it’s a good story, so it was a quick and easy read. This basically just re-tells the Mr Freeze origin story, with some minor details twisted and changed around, and the added dimension of Batman trying to put together a crime fighting “team” of his own. At the end of the book, the team and batman part ways, but there is mention of how some members of the team want to continue working together, just not for batman… I haven’t yet found any reference to what or who they might have become.
I noticed that this book isn’t (yet) added to the wikipedia entry on Mr. Freeze, but I’m really too sleepy to do anything about it right now.
Overall, this is well worth a read, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to find it unless you’re really into Batman or Mr. Freeze.
I just finished the Wanted TPB. Honestly, I’m not sure how I felt about it. Bloody? yes. Violent? yes. Fucked up story that I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be satire or a philosophical statement on the futility and stupidity of empathy with your fellow mankind? Yes.
I’m looking forward to the movie, of course. I’d wanted to read this before that comes out, and it was coincidence that my co-worker Ben brought this in for me to borrow. There are a number of interesting plot twists and surprises that I’m looking forward to in the movie. It clearly won’t have the same impact as if I hadn’t read the comic, but I think that’s ok.
Almost as interesting as the comic was Brian K. Vaughn’s introduction, where he says Wanted has “the bravest, most interesting finale to a comic book ever”. Above that he says “Those of you who refuse to see what the conclusion is really saying will probably want to burn this beautiful collection the second you put it down.” I’d love to have a conversation with Vaughn about what he thinks those final pages were saying. I don’t think I agree with him, but neither did I want to burn the book the second I put it down. I can imagine what he thinks it’s supposed to be saying, but I don’t know if I’m right. I think I’ll probably bring this up in the next podcast.
Anyway, Wanted is a well produced (written, drawn, colored) comic, with a very interesting premise. The super villains teamed up (in the 60s, I think), and they won. They beat all the superheroes, and wiped them off the face of the planet. They’ve been in charge ever since. Go read it! Or, wait for the movie, watch that, then read it! Your choice, asshole.
This was absolutely brilliant. I loved how much humor there was in this, both in the artwork (giant monkey peeling a subway car like a banana!?) and in the fabulous writing. The overall plot was totally captivating and hysterical; the premise being that Japan’s giant monster problem has pretty much been eliminated by the proliferation of super heroes in the 20th century, so they’ve created a “Tokyo Giant Monster Museum and Expo Center” to commemorate. The Fantastic Four and Iron Man have been invited to the opening ceremonies, but wouldn’t you know it, their tour is interrupted by… you guessed it! …an attack by more giant monsters!
I have one other comic collection drawn by Seth Fisher (Green Lantern: Will World), and Big In Japan has now solidified my love for his cartoony surrealist style. I was extremely saddened to learn in the beginning pages of this comic that he died near the beginning of 2006. Apparently this was the last comic that he worked on. Look for my review of another of Seth Fisher’s creations, Batman: Snow in the near future.
I strongly recommend Big In Japan, as it more than transcends its silly superhero origins, and becomes a story of cosmic comic importance. The back of this trade paperback has like fifteen pages of artist notes, and a bunch of sketches and other cool stuff. (Including an entire issue of another Seth Fisher drawn comic called Fanboyz, which is sort of like Jackass meets spider man.) Good stuff.
Tonight’s recording was a spur of the moment decision, where we decided hey, why don’t we record a podcast two days before moving? We weren’t too sure of what we were going to talk about, but as always, we ended up having a lot to say…about a whole lot of different things. Some of them even about comics.
Topics included Starman, Wizard World, Marty and Florence’s impending apartment move, getting autographs at conventions, The Sword, Northlanders, God Save the Queen, Neverwhere, Suburban Glamour, Seth Fisher, Will World, Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big in Japan, Wanted, and a band more horrifying than anything Lovecraft ever wrote.
I enjoyed this, the first Starman TPB penciled by Tony Harris who also penciled Ex Machina, but not nearly as much as I enjoy Ex Machina. I’ll admit it, that’s secretly what I was hoping for. There are certain parallels, you’ve got to admit. Both heroes don leather jackets, and have a sort of “bad boy” look about them; but in Ex Machina, there is this rich and undiscovered back-story. In starman, we have a long (and to me also undiscovered) back-story, but it seems anything but rich. In fact, it seems rather cliché and possibly quite lame. At first I was intrigued by Opal city, until I realized it was just like every other city with superheroes protecting it. Sure, they went on about how it had been cleaner than the cities Batman and Superman protect (thus landing it square in the DC universe), but I didn’t really buy it. After all, I’m guessing the old Starman had to fight someone back in the day. And of course we find out at least one person he fought in the course of reading this book.
We also get the whole “the good son who doesn’t live up to his father’s expectations because he doesn’t follow in his footsteps” story, with an added bonus “other son who tries to follow in those footsteps but ultimately fails because he has no originality” side story.
Worth reading, but only just. I might pick up more of the trade paperbacks, if only because I found the last story reprinted here to be ever-so-slightly more interesting than the rest.
It can be difficult to figure out what exactly this comic is about. Even after reading the back and pawing through the first few pages, I still had no idea. But the art, especially the cover art from individual issues, had me intrigued enough to pick this up when it came out. Let it suffice to say that it’s about some college kids who have some messed up stuff happen to them. About the first half of this trade paperback takes place around campus, and introduces you to the characters. Then the setting changes abruptly to a secret government-funded military-research facility. At first, I didn’t even know whether there would be science fiction elements to the story, but let me assure you that yes, there are!
There are also themes of childhood abuse; they are upsetting, but not sympathetic to the abuser. You have been warned.
The art and story were above average, and I’d count this as a first-rate comic. I don’t know if they’re planning on making more, but this first TPB really ties itself up, without a clear expectation for any continuation of the story. If anything, there are now a whole set of interesting (surviving) characters, some of whom may have been permanently changed by the events that transpire. It’s tough to say more without spoiling it, so go read it for yourself!
This is a grim take on the superhero universe. After hearing Florence say she loved this series, and others agree (re: our last podcast #006), I was excited to read this and put it at the top of my stack. After having read it, I’m honestly not sure what I thought.
Oh, it was good, no doubt about that! Just opening to random pages, every story was gripping and totally engaging. Things happen in Noble Causes that definitely wouldn’t be seen between the covers of a regular comic book. I mean, heroes get beat up, often by other heroes (if you can even really call them that, we really only have their reputations to go on), there is lots of sex, including infidelity, murder, betrayal. Interestingly, the one big piece of connective tissue throughout the entire trade (It’s a ton of little stories with different plots.) is the Icarus plot.
The natural comparison is to Astro City, but this is way darker, and, oddly enough, feels a bit less realistic as a result to me. (Perhaps that is my own sunny outlook on life influencing my opinion.) Anyway, if you haven’t read this, I’d recommend it. I’ll definitely be seeking out more of it in the future. On the other hand, if you haven’t yet read Astro City, it’s better.
For those who aren’t familiar, Noble Causes is about the Noble family. They are your average superhero family, very wealthy, extremely powerful. But they are also totally fucked up and dysfunctional. Icarus is the robot built by the family’s genius father. The robot is sentient, and very jealous of all the children. I’ll just leave it at that.
I also read (before this first TPB, actually) Noble Causes: Extended Family (Vol. 2). It too is full of unconnected short stories, this time without so much as an imagined connective tissue. (At least, I didn’t notice one.) Didn’t matter though, since these stories were also totally engaging, and without my even knowing any of the character backstories! But all of these stories felt like backstories to me. Actually much of the first TPB also felt that way. I think it’s part of the style they’re written in… there are lots of flashbacks and jumping around in continuity is the norm.
I really only mentioned Extended Family because it was a bit darker and more extreme than the first TPB, and actually may have influenced the tone at which I read the first Comic. So it all ended up feeling really dark to me. Good, but very, very dark.
Mike bought the new Secret Invasion #2 this week, and I read his copy while we recorded the podcast tonight. Neither of us thought very much of it.
First of all, whoever drew the sentry’s butt in that first standoff page should be shot. There are other “bad butts” in the issue also, including Emma Frost’s and a very shadowy Wolverine. On the other hand, Sentry was drawn with quite a large “package”.
This is a big ‘ole review full of spoilers. Go get your copy of Secret Invasion #2, then come back here and finish reading this post.
Topics for this issue: Batman’s Death (we know nothing about this), Secret Invasion (similarities between Black Canary and Mockingbird), Gambit’s accent, Indiana Jones, Spider Man Loves Mary Jane, Joss Whedon, Southland Tales, sex in comics (Cherry Poptart), Iron Man, Starfox, and which superhero gets the most play.
For this podcast we had Martin, Florence, Jason, Mike and Susie.
This comic was awesome for many reasons. First of all, it is an interesting story that ties into an interesting movie. Don’t confuse interesting with comprehensible though, because it’s not.
Florence and I rented and watched Southland Tales (the movie, directed by Richard Kelly, who wrote this comic) a couple of weeks ago from Amazon Unbox (direct to tivo, baby!), and watched it without great expectation. We’d both read mixed reviews of the movie, but I especially had secretly hoped that it would be one of those masterpieces that defies critical acclaim and rises above the popular mass market appeal. I would say that the movie failed in this regard, but that, having finished the comic book Prequel this afternoon/evening, the comic and movie together actually do make up a fantastic and epic story that, while not terribly genius, is completely worthy of the time investment required.
Since I more or less enjoyed this, I’m going to focus on the good aspects, figuring the bad aspects have probably been covered elsewhere. (You can just go read the reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, where Southland Tales has a 34% freshness rating.) I think what I enjoyed the most about both comic and movie is that they give you a lot to examine and think about. They both operate on many levels at once, which is, now that I think about it, also one of the things that I most liked Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly’s other “cult classic” film). Incidentally, I keep wanting to abbreviate Richard Kelly as R. Kelly, which is wrong on almost as many levels.
The comic is interjected with excerpts from a script to a movie called “The Power”, which was supposed to have been written by one of the main characters, Krista Now. Krista is a porn star, and (in the comic, at least), supposedly has telepathic powers that she attained while everyone else on board her airplane went insane. She wrote the script while under hypnosis, as a response to the book of revelations.
The plot is totally convoluted and involves time travel (or the fourth dimension); a futuristic company named Treer that claims to have developed a technology they call fluid karma that uses quantum entanglement to broadcast electricity; a stupidly violent liberal terrorist group that called itself Marxist, but really did not resemble any kind of thought-out political philosophy whatsoever; the 2008 political election; a recent history that includes two nuclear terrorist attacks in Texas; and a government agency called USIDent that forces you to register before using the internet. These are all related, and culminate in an end-of-the-world type scenario that I won’t go into details about so I don’t give anything away.
I also wanted to give credit to Brett Weldele, whose awesome artwork was really inspiring. This is not your average length trade paperback. This thing is pretty hefty with over 300 pages. Sure, some of those are straight-up text and script, but there is a fantastic amount of really interesting artwork here, and it never gets repetitive or dull, in fact it feels quite the opposite.
I will say that the movie makes a lot more sense in retrospect, so given a choice, I’d try and go with chronological order and read the comic book first. Oddly enough, however, I think the comic book made a lot more sense having already seen the movie, so it’s possible this is just one of those things that requires multiple viewings to fully appreciate. Unfortunately, fully appreciate does not mean fully understand. It’s just not that kind of story. Understanding is secondary to experience, in this case.
OK, let me just say right off the bat: This was, for me, a bit disappointing.
Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me count the ways. First of all, seemingly nothing happens here. We’re interviewing venture capitalists, which, while it may be interesting for someone who knows absolutely nothing about business whatsoever, I found incredibly spoon-fed and dry as a desert bone. Even the subtitle, IPO, didn’t actually happen. There was no exciting IPO, instead it was blah blah blah about who did or didn’t loan money to these companies. As if we care! These characters better come back in the next two issues, or I’m going to consider this whole issue a write-off. The only mildly amusing part of the comic was the two page spread of the VC getting eaten by monkeys. (Monkeys were also the most amusing part of the first comic, so I’m especially glad they made a return here.)
Secondly, the art was unfortunate. Not to say that it was badly drawn, or not my style, but I found it especially repetitive, and frankly, downright boring. Honestly, if I see another page with four panels, each one with just the face of the documentary’s narrator, I’m going to be a bit pissed off. The most interesting art in the whole book was a panel about 2/3 toward the end with a mechanical dog and cat in it. A clearly drawn reference to WE3, and a decent attempt at making this book interesting by association. The second best art was the panel showing the character Dave Apple’s art. It was meant to be pathetically unskilled looking, but it was funny and interesting, two things most of the rest of this comic were not.
The thing is, this is supposed to be halfway through the series; this is issue 2 of 4! And we got about as much story out of this issue as you generally get reading a postage stamp. I had high hopes, and I really wanted to like this comic, but unfortunately, it’s just not working for me.
At first, this seemed like a win-win read for me. It’s Orson Scott Card, who I genuinely think is a good writer (although I have less and less respect for him as a person), and it’s in one of those parallel universes so I don’t really have to know anything about Iron Man cannon to enjoy it. I also (mistakenly) assumed that a relatively thick, hardcover collection would contain a whole story… but no, this ends with a cliffhanger.
I did really enjoy about the first half of the book, as I dug the blue armor stuff, and got into seeing the young Tony Stark interact with a young James Rhodes at prep school, but I couldn’t believe how dark the story got when Obadiah was introduced. Right off the bat he’s killing other children and plotting against Tony. It was relatively disturbing. So by the time I got to the end of the book, I was ready to be done with it. But then the story doesn’t end. I haven’t decided if I’ll read the rest of the series. I’ve seen Ultimate Iron Man II on the shelves, and I’ll admit if this had been better, I’d be tempted, but based my level of enjoyment here, I’ll probably hold out for library copies of the whole series.
While at first appearing to be a cheap ploy to capitalize on the success of the critically acclaimed Mouse Guard, The Mice Templar has actually turned out to have a relatively rich and interesting story. It all still feels a bit thrown together, like there are a few too many diverse elements, but I guess that’s at least part of how they get that “rich” feel. You just stir in enough stuff, and of course you’re going to have a complex story.
So what does Mice Templar have in its plot pot? Other than quite a lot? (Ahem. Sorry.) There are ghosts that bleed, (at least in issues 3 & 4), Fish Gods who bestow our likely hero Karic with a waterskin that never empties, hordes of evil rat baddies who overrun a mouse village and take down a buck whenever they feel like it for food, black “death magic”, a clearly chaotic history muddled with some kind of templar war, some seer mice who possibly tell the future (or the present) by watching grain sway in the wind of swooping owls, and of course a prophesy of some kind.
Issue #1 was great, drawing me in with compelling art by creator Michael Avon Oeming (who apparently draws Powers, among other famous things), but after I read issue #2 (back when it came out) I wasn’t left terribly excited about the series. I felt the story was really quite predictable, and didn’t seem to be going anywhere in the least bit new. I kept it on my pull though (whether out of laziness or a genuine but waning interest), and now that I’ve read issues 3 and 4, I’m glad that I did. I am left wondering what is going to happen to those poor captive village mice. And what waits for us at the tree in the middle of the field (ocean) of grain? Only time and comics will tell!
Blu, who is, I believe from Bologna, created this absolutely amazing stop animated video that you just have to see to believe. Are animated videos comics? If so, this definitely qualifies as a live-action comic. (Hmmm. This may take more thinking to categorize.) But anyway, it’s well worth a watch!
Tonight we recorded a shorter podcast than usual, weighing in at around 25 minutes. We discussed The Pro, Weight Watchers, XXXombies, the living dead in general (and Jason’s phobia), The Chronicles of Narnia, Love and Capes, and how garage band has the metronome setting on by default. Yes, you can hear it. Hopefully it’s not too bad. I did remember to turn it off somewhere around minute twenty. If you can stand it, this is (hopefully) still a decent episode.
I’ll admit that the movie made me do it. I decided I wanted to read some Iron Man. I never have before, and I didn’t know if it made sense to start at the beginning, so I just decided to see what was at the library, and read some of that. There I found the collection The Many Armors of Iron Man, which starts with this comic, Iron Man #47.
Much to my surprise, when I cracked open the TPB, I discovered that this is the comic that tells the first part of the story from the movie! I looked for some sign that the trade was simply a movie tie in, but I didn’t see any. I’m sure I could probably dig online here and find some indication of whether this book was published before or after the script for the movie, but it probably doesn’t matter. It tells Iron Man’s “origin story”, so it’s a natural choice to base a movie after.
I quickly finished the comic, and now I’ll give you my impressions. (Note: SPOILERS AHEAD!)
This comic took a simple premise and ran with it: what if a run-down street prostitute and mother suddenly got superpowers! I love anything that parodies the ridiculous superhero comic genre well, and this definitely did that. But surprisingly, it did more than just that. By the end of the comic, I felt like there was actually a meaning to all the swearing and gratuity. A statement about what it means to be a hero (and by extension what it means to be human, since all hero stories are really meant to be about everyone).
Florence thought: boobies. She likes ’em. She also notes that there was certainly a callback to Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex (by Larry Niven, which Susie just mentioned in her recent post). She thought the green lantern parody was amusing, but got old fast. I actually found that to be one of the more tactless parts of the book, but she rightly argues that it’s a satire of some of the poorer depictions of token black characters in comics. I guess I thought it was a bit more offensive than some of the other offensive parts of the book.
Perhaps the main thrust of the book was to poke holes in the righteous nature of superheroes (mainly DC characters), belittling the big story lines that don’t adequately capture the sordid day to day struggles that regular people want help with. The characters in this book only fight supervillians. It’s almost like Americans declaring themselves “world” champions at the superbowl, even though none of the other countries are participating. These superheros are really only fighting battles in a certain arena, yet declaring themselves the saviors of all humanity.
Entirely worth reading just for the scenes with “The Viewer” (aka “Voyeur”), who was a not so subtle take on the Monitor. Overall: awesome and recommended.
In this, the fourth ReadComics.org podcast, we talk about Starman, Brian K Vaughan (Ex Machina and Y, The Last Man, Runaways), Suburban Glamour, free comic book day, Sandman, starting a comic book library, and the Hi, I’m a Marvel… and I’m a DC parody on youtube.
Marty, Florence and Jason are joined by Susie via Skype.
Our podcast tonight came to you from Susie’s living room in Chicago, recorded on Marty’s iPhone.
This isn’t really a review yet, since I’ve only just sent money to Barry Deutsch for a paper copy of his enchanting comic book 
David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America will be giving a talk and signing copies of his book Tuesday, July 8th at 7:30 p.m.. The press release is as follows:
The comic is interjected with excerpts from a script to a movie called “The Power”, which was supposed to have been written by one of the main characters, Krista Now. Krista is a porn star, and (in the comic, at least), supposedly has telepathic powers that she attained while everyone else on board her airplane went insane. She wrote the script while under hypnosis, as a response to the book of revelations. 
At first, this seemed like a win-win read for me. It’s Orson Scott Card, who I genuinely think is a good writer (although I have less and less respect for him as a person), and it’s in one of those parallel universes so I don’t really have to know anything about Iron Man cannon to enjoy it. I also (mistakenly) assumed that a relatively thick, hardcover collection would contain a whole story… but no, this ends with a cliffhanger.
