Read Comics

I read comics every day. I don’t think a single day goes by any more where I don’t read at least one, and usually, I read a trade’s worth. After all, that seems to be how most comics are packaged these days. While these won’t be complete reviews, I’m going to attempt to share my thoughts on what I read each day. If something I read warrants it, I’ll go into it more thoroughly.

So far I haven’t read much of Secret Invasion, although on the way back from Wizard World Chicago I caught up with The Initiative. Today, I started with an online checklist I found, reading Mighty Avengers #13, New Avengers #40, and Avengers: The Initiative #14. I know I’m a bit behind the times with these, but I wasn’t really interested in starting this until stuff started to be available in trade, or I was able to borrow them from a friend en masse. The stuff I’ve heard so far makes it seem that Secret Invasion itself will be much better read in one sitting…or at least not having to wait month by month.

So far, we just have the paranoia setting in, with no one knowing who is a skrull, except for 3-D Man. It’s kind of awesome how this character is getting a prominent role. I admit that I love it when minor characters are brought to the fore, like in Agents of Atlas and Shadowpact. Reading them in bunches like this, the art and writing tend to give me a bit whiplash, with such different styles as Bendis and Slott, Maleev, Gage, and Cheung.

I started the X-Factor: The Only Game in Town trade, reading issues 28 and 29, and finished off the latest collection of Legion of Super-Heroes, featuring the return of Jim Shooter. Quite a contrast in these two series, X-Factor keeping with the hard-boiled style started in the initial Madrox mini-series, and Legion spanning the galaxy with plenty of giant monsters and sci-fi action. Peter David is a bit more enjoyable to read than Jim Shooter right now, although I admit to a bit of bias against Shooter and his anti-gay edict when he was Editor in Chief of Marvel. I notice that Shooter lays it on a bit thick with Invisible Kid’s attraction to Giselle. I wonder if that has anything to do with the gay relationship between Lyle and Chemical King, and then later with Brainiac 5, in various iterations of the title. I am happy that Shooter ended the Lightning Lad being over his head in charge scenario; it was getting pretty tiresome and repetitive, and a little bit trite that he didn’t have any sort of assistant, computerized or otherwise. Come to think of it, both Lightning Lad and Madrox were feeling the burdens of leadership in these issues, but on different scales. Both of their teams are going up in flames, they both feel like things are out of their control, but they’re being blamed for it all. I’m also happy to see the return of Arcade. I feel I should’ve recognized his touch earlier, but I was surprised to see him appear when I turned the page. The cane is a bit Riddler-esque, but I love his Space Invaders socks. Nice touch with the Vote Saxon stickers as well. Everyone really does watch Doctor Who now, don’t they?

Written by Marc Bernardin & Adam Freeman, art by Lee Garbett

An entertaining action comic, published by DC under the WildStorm imprint, The Highwaymen of the title are secret agents of some sort.  Well, ex-secret agents, now mostly over the hill, but with one more adventure left behind by a former president (now deceased).  As I said, the comic is entertaining, and a quick read, but you do get the feeling that it was written not so much as an homage to action or buddy films, like Lethal Weapon, as something that the creators could sell to Hollywood.  This is Danny “I’m too old for this shit” Glover, paired with Michael Caine as impossible to kill agents, on the run from the sinister head of a government organization, trying to protect and deliver a weapon of mass destruction to the proper authorities.  Did I mention that this weapon of mass destruction is in the shape of a hot college girl?  Put whichever starlet of the year in that role, and you have a summer blockbuster, full of car chases, car crashes, and car explosions.  Again, I want to say that I didn’t dislike this comic, and in fact, it was fun to read, but the sales pitch was pretty blatant.  The five issue series came out in 2007, and I just read the trade from the library.  I can’t imagine that it would work as well in single issue format, since it is, essentially, an action movie.  Reading one issue, having a cliffhanger and waiting for another month would not have worked for me.

I’ve finally caught up on the main Final Crisis books, which shouldn’t have been hard since there are only three out right now, as well as Batman R.I.P., which is still in progress as well. Ah, Grant Morrison. You kooky, wacky Grant Morrison. I love reading you, I really do. But man, I still think you’re leaving out some of the words. Maybe some of the word balloons. Perhaps even some panels or even pages. Grant, when you read the comic, are there extra panels in your mind that we don’t see? Do you write a page, keep a page in your head, and then write another page? I mean, I understand what’s going on–for the most part–but it just seems like the story jumps a few times. Jumps like Batman jumping from rooftop to rooftop. And sometimes those jumps are really long jumps, which Batman is able to clear a lot better than I am.

Grant Morrison gets spoken about on a lot of podcasts, he gets a lot of press, and feelings about him run pretty strong. There are videos of him, including one of him speaking at Disinfocon, available to view on YouTube. I think the man is a great writer, but I have to be honest. Sometimes I’m unsure about his “storytelling” ability. I also think there’s a bit of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” going on with him. I really do think that there are a lot of people who have a difficult time following Morrison’s writing, but are afraid of admitting it for fear that they’ll be considered dumb, or at the very least, not discerning readers. And some of his stuff is easier to follow than other things. His run on X-Men seemed a bit more straight forward. I haven’t read his Animal Man or Doom Patrol in years, but I know he got a bit out there in those titles.

For Final Crisis and Batman RIP, we now live in the age of the Internet, and fortunately we have resources. Douglas Wolk and Gary Greenwood, who both have sites up annotating Final Crisis, and Timothy Callahan, who is annotating Batman RIP, do a lot of the legwork for us. All three sites go page by page and panel by panel, noting who characters are, what their historical significance is, what their relevance is to the current plotline. Readers guides for these somewhat convoluted stories, if you will. These guys have all gone above and beyond, helping us, the gentle reader, keep from pulling our hair out trying to keep track of everything, especially through delays in releases. Maybe that’s Grant’s diabolical plan–to induce baldness among comics readers around the world, and thus make his audience over in his own image. One of these days, someone is going to collect all of these annotations together into a comprehensive tome: The Annotated Grant Morrison. It’ll be a bestseller.

Because my library has them in trade, I started reading the 1980s relaunches of Superman and Wonder Woman.  The Superman trades collect John Byrne’s Man of Steel mini-series in Volume 1, and in subsequent volumes include his ongoing Superman and Action comics, along with Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway’s Adventures of Superman, along with some cross-overs with Legion of Super-Heroes and Booster Gold along the way.  The Wonder Woman collections are from the George Perez and Len Wein reintroduction of Diana to Man’s World.  Our heroes re-meet their iconic villains for the first time in these post-Crisis on Infinite Earth stories, which is a little weird, particularly now when you have continuity being turned end over end, and three different sets of Legions meeting each other.  But they’re so much fun to read, and particularly fun to look at how Byrne, Ordway and Perez are drawing everything.  Their clothes, their hair, their computers, everything is so very ’80s.  Is that Lois Lane or a slimmer version of Brigitte Nielson?

The stories seem a little quaint after so many years of darkness that we’ve been seeing recently.  There seems to be less risk, even though these take place before death’s revolving door.  Byrne even makes a point of telling everyone that all these super-villain attacks in downtown Metropolis are taking place on Sunday when no one is any of the office buildings being smashed.  How considerate of the bad guys.  There are some casualties, in the form of the recently introduced minor characters.  But you really don’t feel anything really bad is going to happen to our heroes any time soon.

There is something about these relaunches that makes me wonder, though:  Superman and Wonder Woman got restarted, but what about the third member of the Trinity?  Why didn’t Batman get reset at the time?  Were his books just selling that much more?  Was there some reset that I’m just not remembering?

I’m reading the recently published first trade paperback from the Geoff Johns series, his first comic work, according to the introduction. Collecting the first 8 issues from 1999 and 2000, it introduces the character of Courtney Whitmore, the new Star-Spangled Kid, who went on to be a member of the Justice Society, in the relaunch of JSA, also written by Johns.

My introduction to the character was in trades of JSA, and I didn’t know too much about the character, or her stepfather, the man in a tin can, Pat Dugan. DC really likes their legacy characters, at least within the last 10 to 15 years, and really likes pairing them up with younger, newer versions of their legacy characters. Pat used to be Stripesy, the sidekick to the original Star-Spangled Kid back in the Golden Age. In this series, he plays the begrudging mentor to young Courtney as she develops her super-hero persona and skills, thanks to the cosmic converter belt formerly owned by the original Kid. I say begrudgingly because he claims to not want her adventuring and that he’s doing his best to prevent it. If that’s his best, I’m surprised she didn’t start going to JSA meetings right off the bat.

I’ve only read the first few issues in the trade so far, but they’re fun. You can tell that Johns is hitting his stride, and setting things up for some wacky happening ahead. So far this is written very much in what I remember Young Justice to be like, and in fact they appear in a one-page cameo, where Robin discusses possibly recruiting her to be on the team. This, along with Young Justice and Impulse, seems to be courting a teen comic reader, and most probably teen girls. It was launched when Buffy was in full stride, and Veronica Mars was still a few years off. It’s very light-hearted, and Lee Moder and Dan Davis’s art is cartoony without seeming childish. Along with fighting super-villains, she’s dealing with being the new girl at school, getting braces, and handling her mother marrying her step-father (the latter, handling poorly).

When I started reading comics seriously at age 12 or 13, I remember my favourites being Power Pack, New Mutants and New Teen Titans, and I think that might’ve been because the characters were closer to my age. I like that Marvel and DC are trying to find younger readers with their Marvel Adventures and Johnny DC lines, but I didn’t feel like the three comics I mentioned were written for me because I was a kid. They were part of the same universes, they interconnected with big named characters, were part of crossovers, and fit into the bigger picture. I think Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. is a great comic to get younger readers, probably of the middle school age introduced to comics. It’s fun, the writing so far is great, the art is accessible, and there are cameos by other characters, without it feeling like you have to know right away who they are. It’s a taste of other corners of the DCU, kind of a sign at the amusement park telling you there are more rides in Adventureland over this way. All fourteen issues have been collected in two trades, which I found at my local library.

The first issue of the next Northlanders arc came out today, and I decided not to get it.

As those of you who have been paying attention will already know, we chose Northlanders for our very first Comic Book Book Club. This was several months ago now, and just after the sixth issue of Northlanders had been released. I had somehow neglected to add Northlanders to our pull list, so it wasn’t until today that I finally had issues #7 and #8 to finish up the story.

Read on for a spoiler-filled analysis of the series so far, and especially the last two issues of the first story arc. (more…)

Unfortunately, I have to say, the jury is still out on Casey Blue for me.

Issue #4 came out last week, and before last night I had basically been collecting these without reading them. I liked the art, and had been hooked by the first couple of pages of the first issue (labeled “Now”) where it’s revealed that Casey is watching her own funeral. Then we jump presumably before the funeral (for a single page labeled “Then”), and then jump again to the main story line where Casey is a normal high school girl who plays volleyball. (This story line is labeled “In-Between”.)

Interesting enough premise, but in four issues, we have yet to return to that “present day” when Casey watches her funeral. We’ve figured out a bunch about who she is and why she’s a violent killer, although most of that is hearsay from a woman who tells her to “trust her instincts”. Let it suffice to say that we still really don’t know what’s going on.

At first after reading them, I was happy with these purchases, but in retrospect, while I was totally engrossed, not enough is actually happening, and I think my satisfaction with Issue #5 may determine whether I drop the series from my pull list.

Townscapes was fantastic. Its four stories (although the first is only a few pages, and serves more as an introduction than anything else) share this in common: They all feature a white haired man with mystical powers who does something fantastic. Actually, the man may not even be white haired in all the stories. Regardless, something fantastic happens, and most of the time you think he did it.

I think my favorite of these was the one about the city that just starts to float. One morning everyone wakes up and the town is just floating six feet (or so) off the ground. There is a military base relatively near by, and everyone (at least partly correctly) blames it.

This is another comic translated from the french, and it solidifies my opinion that there should be more of them in general. It almost makes me want to brush up on my french to the point of understanding, so I can import everything else these two have ever created (and the rest of the Sky-Doll series, and the rest of Valerian).

The art, while gritty and sometimes quite drab, is also absolutely beautiful. I think it is the first full length thing that Enki Bilal fully illustrated. (Do you say illustrated when it’s a comic?) Regardless, it doesn’t look like your average comic, it feels more like a horror comic to me somehow. But the subject matter, while sometimes borderline horror, is really more fantastic.

As an aside, I’m also reading Reading Comics, by Douglas Wolk, right now, and suddenly I’m all self-conscious about the language I’m using to describe comics. Am I describing things in the context of comics, or in another context? I think I tend to skew toward literary depictions of the comics, and tack on something about the art as an afterthought. Perhaps this is because I was an English major in college, or perhaps because I’m more of a reader than an art connoisseur. After all, this is ReadComics.org, so maybe that’s ok.

First, here is a cute fanart comic of Captain Hammer fighting Captain Tightpants.  I wonder when we will see a Captain Hammerpants?

And here is the twentieth anniversary of Sandman (Neil Gaiman version) poster that debuted at comic con last week

33 artists from the comic’s run contributed.  Geek pop quiz!  Can you identify by name all the characters shown? Bonus points for identifying the artist.  The prize?  Pride in a well trained memory.

Poster legend after the jump
(more…)

Planetary: Crossing Worlds is good, universe-expanding stuff.

Basic premise here is that there are 196,833 parallel universes. (How do they know the exact number, exactly?) Planetary and the Authority both deal with these universes on a fairly regular basis. The first story here is a Planetary/Authority crossover, where they deal with some other universe’s bad guys who look suspiciously like other versions of some of the Authority characters. The second story takes place entirely in another parallel universe, one in which the Planetary folks are the bad guys (and also “control” the world), and Batman, Superman and Wonderwoman are little more than two-bit vigilantes. Elijah Snow also looks suspiciously like Lex Luthor. The final story is a Planetary/Batman crossover, but the interesting thing about it is that we visit a bunch of (3 or 4) different Batman Universes, with a different version of Batman in each one. Totally fascinating.

I really liked this TPB, and thought each story got progressively better as the book went on. You don’t really have to know anything about the plots of Planetary or the Authority to “get” these stories, but knowing the characters is probably a pre-req for total enjoyment. And enjoy it you will.

This was every bit as good as the original Top Ten, maybe even better.

I absolutely loved this book. At heart, it is a story about outsiders and racism, about culture clash, and a melting-pot society. It’s maybe also about coming of age and coming out. At face value, it’s the story of how the city of Neopolis is formed. Neopolis is the main setting for Top 10, and this is a prequel that takes place in the city’s early days.

I’m finding it hard to say anything because I don’t want to give anything away. It’s such a great story, and of course Gene Ha’s artwork is phenomenal as well. The whole thing is given a sort of sepia toned color pallet–subdued, which lends a sort of old-timey feel to the whole thing, like watching an old black and white movie or something. But the art is no less spectacular for it.

Read this book! Read the original Top 10 first, but don’t stop there, or you’ll be missing out.

Astro City holds a lot of responsibility for my getting “into” comics. That having been said, The Dark Age has not really been my favorite plot line. There are certainly aspects of it that I’ve enjoyed, but the two brothers, the main lenses through which we are viewing Astro City this time around, they are not really protagonists. They are not really characters that I can empathize with. They have less of the “every day people” quality than many of the other Astro City main characters have had.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still quite enjoying the story, and it doesn’t even feel like I’m slogging through this, it’s just that I sort of wish Busiek would focus his efforts a bit differently. He’s made it clear (in the letters columns) that there are two more Dark Age books still to come out. Probably with one-off issues to be released between them. He also plugs the Astro City website (which is probably not so new anymore), but which does seem to have all kinds of interesting stuff on it.

Astro City is still one of my favorite comics. But if you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you start at the beginning. There is a lot of Astro City to love.

Originally a three-issue miniseries, this TPB was a bit more dark and foreboding than what I normally think of as a Superman comic.

The premise is simple: let’s assume Superman’s cradle/spaceship landed in Russia rather than the U.S.A., and that he was raised on a Russian farming commune. The concept that he would also embrace and adopt the principals of communism is not terribly difficult to accept. After all, it doesn’t seem like that far a leap from saving humanity to giving everyone basic human needs and treating everyone as equals. But, like communism, the implementation doesn’t quite match up with the theory, and in the end of this book, Superman’s ideals are twisted and corrupted.

Read on for more analysis and discussion, along with some pretty major spoilers. (more…)

So, I must reiterate that I really dug Top 10. It blew me away, and I couldn’t wait to get more of them. And while I didn’t dislike this, it didn’t grab me in the same way. I liked the art, and the story was ok, but it didn’t have the same hugeness factor. It didn’t feel like it was just brimming with possibility and promise the way Top 10 did.

In my post about Top 10 vol. 1 and 2, I suggested that I’d have to try and find Smax at Wizard World because it was the next in the series. I did end up finding it, in the artist alley, on Zander Cannon’s table. He was in the middle of a conversation, but I interrupted him long enough to buy a copy and have him sign it. He suggested I go tell Gene Ha how much I’d liked Top 10, and told me I really didn’t need to read the other parts of the series in order, as they were all pretty disconnected. He also said they’re starting up another Top 10 series that’s going to take place just after the first two TPBs. He seemed to think it was going to be out pretty soon. (I never did end up finding Gene Ha.)

Also in that last post, I sort of blamed Alan Moore for how great those first two TPBs were, giving the artwork second fiddle. I think I’d like to retract that statement now. It really was the art in Top 10 that made the comic, it was absolutely fantastic, and the writing was only just a cut above passable, balancing out somehow into a really great comic for me. Smax, on the other hand, had a very different artistic style. A lot more cartoony and, unfortunately, without all the crazy detail in every panel that really endeared me to Top 10. Don’t get me wrong, the art was totally good, and interesting, just not as interesting as Top 10.

It was also pretty different in terms of scope and scale, setting, everything, really. The character of Smax had always seemed so cynical in the first comic, just a loner, without any real social skills, but I guess he just never seemed dumb to me, and they really made him out to be a bit daft in this comic. Although maybe he wasn’t, and just had friends (relatives, really) who made him out to be. Either way, I didn’t particularly like that direction.

My only other quibble was the incest factor. For those who haven’t read the comic, I’ll try not to spoil it for you, but incest is suddenly acceptable by the end of the comic. I think it’s an interesting question, the concept of whether, maybe, in a fairy tale universe with different rules and all that, maybe incest would be acceptable. But in this comic, it was really just a minor sub-plot. I don’t really feel like the comic sold us on that concept. So it just ended up feeling jarring. Maybe that was the point, but in an otherwise pretty fluff-filled, humorous comic about a dragon slaying, it was a sub-plot that just felt out of place, and maybe didn’t need to be there. But then again, I’m not Alan Moore.

I guess Wizard World wasn’t as good for ReadComics.org posting as I’d imagined. I did read a ton of comics in the last three days, including The Filth, written by Grant Morrison, which I finished yesterday in the car ride home.

The Filth is as interesting as it is incomprehensible. I’d probably have to read this again to fully understand it. I was left wondering, at the end, whether a second read would clue me in to what had actually happened. Did 9th gear take you into another dimension, or just shrink you to the level of germs? Was “the Hand” actually Slade’s hand? Was any of that stuff even real? (And these are the “easy” questions.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book (for me) was speculation about whether the end, in which microscopic man-made creatures (with the ability to cure cancer) take over the world, was optimistic, or pessimistic. They were set to turn everything into a land of flowers and happiness… is that a good thing?

This book felt a bit like a pornographic daydream, perhaps something I would have imagined in my teenage years. (Forcing the president to get breast implants and dance for his crack pipe? Sick and brilliant.) I probably wouldn’t recommend it unless you: a) love Grant Morrison so much that you’re wiling to invest some heavy time into reading and re-reading for full understanding, or b) you’re just in it for the journey, and not going to care that large swaths of pages seem entirely pointless by the end of the book.

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.

I picked up Chuck #1 on a whim…I’d been looking for something different from the usual Marvel superhero fare I’m used to. The art looked kinda cool and the pages I skimmed through looked intriguing enough. Then I read it and I had to admit, I was a little confused. There’s this guy named Chuck who daydreams at work about Gilligan’s island inhabited by his coworkers at a Best Buy knockoff that gets blown up. Apparently he’s some spy type of person in some agency that employs psychics and there’s some sort of “intersection” in his head. Whatever that means.

Admitting defeat, I sheepishly turned to the internet to find out more about this comic. That’s when I found out that this was a comic adaptation of a TV series…one I don’t watch. The comic was obviously written for fans of the show (which makes me wonder how successful they hope the comic will be? Is there a huge market for comic versions of somewhat obscure TV shows?), and was thus lost on me. I was more intrigued by what I at first thought the story was about…some poor geek at the “Buy More superstore” who dreams these fantastic situations he puts himself and his friends in…and makes this his reality. But since I’m not a fan of the show and they didn’t really make the comic that accessible to a new audience, I most likely won’t be picking up any more. Which is unfortunate, because there is some genuinely witty dialogue and storytelling here. If anyone else watches the show, though, I’d be interested in what they thought.

Chuck is Written by Peter Johnson and Zev Barow with art by Jeremy Haun and Phil Noto

While shelving comics at our new place, I came across a stack of Authority comics in Marty’s ‘to read’ pile. I started reading and couldn’t stop with just one arc. I read Volume 2 issues #5-14 which contained the arcs ‘Behemoth’, ‘Godhead’, ‘Fractured Universe’, and a one-off called ‘Street Life.’ Then I found a miniseries called ‘Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority’ and devoured it, as well.

I have to admit that a past boyfriend introduced me to the Authority (my first Warren Ellis comic), and between him and later searches, I made it through all ~29 issues of volume 1. It looks like we’re still missing vol.2 issue 1-4, a bunch of miniseries, and vol. 3. They don’t make it easy to track down the entire series, but it has been worth it so far.

‘Godhead’ was an irreverent arc taking on the idea of religion as a drug/ virus. A new religion, led by a charismatic former movie star, takes hold of the nation and quickly spreads to a large percentage of the population, including world leaders. It bears some resemblance to Scientology, but this leader makes sure that his devoted disciples declare him ‘better than Tom Cruise’ while in the heat of the passion. The Authority doesn’t take notice until other religious sites and communities start coming under violent attack. They attack right back, until the Doctor becomes a convert and the others are captured or wounded enough to retreat. Midnighter is one of the captured, but manages to resist the attempts to brainwash away his love for Apollo. Very sweet, but very bloody. In the end, the rush of being a Godhead, and the mulititude of willing, unthinking followers, is acknowledged and somewhat coopted by the Authority.

The ‘Fractured World’ arc starts with the next issue, but it felt like I was being thrust into the middle of a story. I looked it up, and apparently it is connected to a larger crossover event within Wildstorm comics which includes an Authority miniseries called ‘Coup d’État.’ By the time this issue starts, the Authority has undertaken a coup and ousted the president of the United States. Jack Hawksmoor has taken on that role, swearing at press conferences and showing no patience for the bureaucracy that comes with the job. He explains that he will not bullshit the American people, but then refuses to comment on questions about the sudden emergence of Jenny Sparks’s alleged birth mother in China. I don’t want to spoil the outcome of that storyline, but I do find it interesting that the Authority just continues to expand the scope of its power to include head of state as well as leading a new religion, despite its original identity as ‘an anarchist cell.’ I wonder where it can possibly go next- empire-building in alternate dimensions or future centuries? Was this the original vision, or is their power expanding to find new stories as the years go on and new writers take on the characters? Is it a commentary on the difference between the political landscape of the 20th century vs. the 21st, the age of growing global conglomerates?

This miniseries visits Jenny Sparks throughout her 100 year lifespan. Apparently she has always been cute, hard-drinking, and of questionable taste in men. This expands on some of the storylines that have been touched on in the Authority title (her acquaintance with Hitler as a struggling young artist in Vienna, her marriage in Sliding Albion), and add some new twists (Einstein as a loving godfather/ time-traveling spy). It includes her deep friendship with Angie, her dalliance with an incredibly hot Shen, and her introduction to Jack as a boy tortured into his powers.

It also introduces the idea that perhaps Angie, the Engineer, is the true founder of the Authority. Her intelligence and force of will drove her to create her own powers. Did she also find a way to give direction and hope to Jenny and start the chain of events that led to the formation of a team that would provide her with home and family and an unprecedented combined power? I hope that later issues explore her ambition and her goals in more depth. There have been hints that her relationship with Jack is disappointing- in issue #14 ‘Street Life,’ Jack refers to a past lover as ‘the closest thing he’s ever had to a relationship,’ and confirms that he never wants kids of his own (partly because he has no idea what his manipulated body would produce). Will Angie settle for what she can get with him? Will she move on with someone new? Or will the drive that is hinted at in this miniseries reemerge to create the relationship she wants? Will her means be benevolent? I can’t wait to read more and find out.

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 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.

I love comic books, that is pretty obvious, but I think I may like these things even more.

1) Marvel/DC  

No I am not talking about the rival comic publishers, or their occasional cross company crossovers.  I am talking about the youtube webseries starring action figures of both companies most popular characters.  It started as a parody of, the hi I am a mac and I am a PC comercials.  And it was funny.  Superman played the uptight PC role and Spiderman was the laid back Mac. It worked as a parody of the comercial as well as poking fun at the characters and their respective companies. Observe

Marvel/DC#1

It is clear that the creator Some Random Guy, has a deep affection for the characters he has borrowed. As the series progressed more characters were worked in and the format shifted from the mac ads formula to a narrative.  The Universe threatening crisis that concluded the first season was far more exciting and engaging to me than anything being published by either company right now.  The second season Marvel/DC: Happy Hour has just started.  I must admit I was more giddy about this than about the upcoming release of the Dark Knight.

2) Year One 

This webcomic strip is currently on a long term hiatus, presumably so Matt Parkinson the creator can find work that will pay.  The archive is definitely worth taking a look at.  The first month or two of strips can be skipped unless you want to see how far his skill as a stripist(?) stripper(?) progressed.  The premise is simple, all the marvel characters are children that go to school together. The charecthers are pretty adorable my favorite being the hyper and a bit dimwitted Speedball

Sometimes the strips are simple gags like Beast from X-Men morphing into Cookie Monster at the sight of a plate cookies.  Other times they are dissections of the often ridiculously complicated Marvel continuity.  Here is a strip featuring  the kids from the school across the road.

3) Cat Tales.  This a long runing series of fanfiction.  There are currently 5 books and at least 2 spinoff projects.  So far I have only read the first seven chapters of book one.  It centers around a relationship between Batman and Catwoman, but whole batcast is featured.  It is very well written and a pretty funny and compelling look into their heads.  IUt also is conveniently available to download in PDF, making it easy to transfer to portable devices.

So that is it, my favorite comic related stuff.  Ooooh!  One more.  Larry Niven’s essay Man Of Steel, Women of Kleenex.  It was written in the seventies and deals with the problematic realities of procreation for Superman and Lois Lane. It’s funny y’all.  It was collected in his short story collection All the Myriad Ways.

This is just about as good as it gets.

I have liked every bit of Ex Machina that I’ve read so far. I remember after the first TPB I wasn’t so hooked that I had to go read the next one right away, but I liked it well enough. I think I needed some time to digest it, either that, or I just had a ton of other stuff to read at the time. (This is likely, as I always have a ton of stuff on my “to read” shelf.) I waited for almost a year to read this book, and I clearly didn’t know what I was missing!

Now I see that there are six trades out already. I have one more on the shelf downstairs, but assuming that one is as good as this one was, I’m going to have to go get the others sometime in the near future. (Looks like the library has them, so I might just take advantage of that. Yay!)

Anyway, what was it about? This guy, the mayor of NYC, he can talk to machines. I’m not really sure if they talk back to him. We don’t really know. But some fucked up shit happens. And some funny shit happens! It’s all a bit complicated, and I don’t want to spoil it, so just read it, it’s GOOD.

(more…)

I didn’t like this as much as the previous DMZ I’d read. I think it was because (I’m a bit surprised to say) it was less about the characters than the previous stories. Interesting and varied characters have been a big part of what I liked most about this comic. Even in the end, when I minded it less, (and read three issues on the bus to work this morning in quick succession), I still didn’t like it as much as early DMZ, though I liked it better than the beginning of the book.

For those who aren’t familiar, DMZ is about a post-succession United States. Or maybe a mid-succession. Basically, a bunch of people didn’t like the way the war was going, and they didn’t like the way their country was being run, and they decided to take over. But really, all that is just background painting for the stories that have been lovingly rendered in the foreground, that is, the lives of people living on manhattan island… or as it’s known in the book, the DMZ.

So yeah, interesting premise. Political, but it (refreshingly) doesn’t seem to beat you over the head with it. (Usually this means the book more or less agrees with my leanings, or I’d have noticed and gotten pissed about it. Either that, or I’m just a numbscull.) But it’s not the premise that keeps you entertained. It’s not even the setting, which, while it’s totally interesting to see what they do with a war torn New York, takes a distant second to the fascinating characters that have chosen to stay and live in the DMZ.

This book–not so much about the characters. There are only something like three new characters, and they are clearly only present to further this particular story, and none of them seem interesting enough to bring back in future issues. There is one development that happens toward the end of the book that I won’t spoil just in case there are DMZ readers reading this. Otherwise, the story is pretty much all about our hero, Matty Roth, doing what he’s allegedly been doing from the beginning, that is, tracking down a story. This mostly means he’s interviewing witnesses to a tragic event that happened in the beginning of the revolution. These witnesses are either not all that interesting, or they are characters we’ve met in previous issues, (and were more interesting then).

I don’t know, DMZ: Friendly Fire is still worth reading, especially if you’ve already been fascinated by the earlier DMZ, but I think these issues definitely represent a slump in the franchise.

Have you read it? What do you think?

This, the second arc in the Welcome to Tranquility series was, I felt, easier to read than the first arc. Probably this was just some amount of familiarity with the milieu and characters. We return, of course, to the town of tranquility, a sort of retirement home for old superheros and supervillians.

The arc did a decent job of turning my expectations about which characters were bad and which were good head-over-heels, which I remember being true of the first arc also. Each individual comic told a piece of the overall plot, and I think each one also had a story at the end that was basically tangential or semi-related. The thing is, I doubt I would have liked these nearly as much if I hadn’t had the whole arc sitting in front of me to burn through in one sitting. The story that is dolled out is meager from issue to issue, and unfortunately, there are too many characters to really get attached to anybody in particular. Maybe the main sheriff girl, but even her I wasn’t super fond of or anything.

All in all, it was a satisfying conclusion, and worth a read. The first set were released in TPB, so I’d assume these will also be eventually.

There are quite a few movies coming out in the next year that have been produced from our beloved comics. Some will rock; some will suck. But here’s a list of the upcoming releases that I’m looking forward to:

Battlestar Galactica: April 4
Iron Man: May 2
Indiana Jones: May 22
Incredible Hulk: June 13
Wanted: June 27
Hellboy 2: July 11
Batman: The Dark Knight: July 18
The Punisher: September 12
Star Trek: December 25 (this may have been pushed back to 2009)
The Spirit: January 16, 2009
Watchmen: March 5, 2009
Wolverine: May 1, 2009

Unknown dates 2009:
Green Hornet
Superman

Written and laid out by David Lapham, pencils by Ramon Bachs, inks by Nathan Massengill, colours by Jason Wright, letters by Jared K Fletcher

Collecting Detective Comics 800-808, 811-814, this 287 page tome is something to really sink your teeth into. I read this not too long after reading the War Games epic which ran across all the Bat Universe titles, and found a world of difference between the two. Lapham’s thriller is much more cohesive than the sprawling chaos of War Games, perhaps rightly so, considering it’s coming from a single writer of a single comic. While appearing in the issues shortly after Ed Brubaker’s epic, the chronological time for this story is unknown. There are no cues saying whether it took place before or after, but the previous event is never mentioned that I could find. Robin is definitely Tim Drake, Akins is the police commissioner. Beyond that, it could really take place any time.

The title is apt: this is as much a story about Gotham as it is about Batman, maybe moreso. A beautiful gothic Gotham, beautiful like the wings of insect seen close up, a stinging, poisonous insect. Ever since Tim Burton’s film, Gotham has been almost universially represented like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, ironically enough, whereas Ramon Bachs give his Gotham a warmer feel. It’s the warmth of fresh blood, however, oozing from a slit throat. The first issue in the collection sets this tone, taking you on a journey through Gotham at night, a madman’s tour, pointing out the garishly painted masterpiece of a city. The price of admission is just a small bit of your soul. This is very much a prelude to the rest of the collection, lasting only 8 pages. This was originally a back up story, with the bulk of the issue having a War Games epilogue, but this collection only reprints this one.

Lapham has set the stage, and issue 811 contains the overture. Batman is seen sparingly, more hinted at, while Gotham’s residents go about their violent, unpleasant lives. Even the routine takes on a sinister cast when it occurs in Gotham. And the passing shadow in the gloom, preventing a domestic altercation with a thrown batarang, shows that Batman is there, even when not seen. He is an offspring of this city, but this parent does its best to reject its child, in much the same way as creatures in the wild attempt to consume their young. The characters start coming into play as the issue continues, lining up like a length of fuse, waiting for the spark to set them off, consuming each in turn just before the explosion that you know is coming.

The successive issues extend the plot, bringing in a few classic Batman villains, and hinting at a mastermind. There is much that is gruesome in this arc, and Lapham doesn’t shy away from the adult themes. Batman’s prime motivation in this story stems from an encounter with a Lolita-esque girl and his rejection of her advances. A run-of-the-mill tragedy in Gotham explodes into an atrocity to shake the city apart. We have an interlude in the action in issue 807 as a new act begins, and we focus on a specific neighbourhood. A magnifying glass is held up to a map of Gotham and we see this stretch of streets in detail, from the decaying dog in the gutter to the decaying crones gossiping on the stoop. Bachs’s art is glorious in its grotesquery, where we literally see all the warts. We also get to see Batman in a role that he seems so rarely used for anymore: being a detective. We see him almost as much out of costume as in it. The action ramps back up again for the rest of the arc, until the concluding battle royale.

This story worked in so many ways, compelling to me to keep reading far after I should’ve put it down for the night. It was nearly a compulsion to see what happened next, something that I haven’t found in comics as much lately. I can see where some might be frustrated with some of the convolutions that the story goes through, but it kept me riveted. I want to seek out Lapham’s other works to compare, see what he does with his own stories. The detail of the art kept me looking at panels over and over, picking up new things and little easter eggs with each new look. The muted colour palette fit in well with the noir revival setting, although it may have appeared differently in the single issues, as the trade used newsprint. I assume the single issues used the standard glossier paper, but the pulpiness of this story almost cries out for newsprint. The panels are on a black background, but a yellowing of aged newsprint wouldn’t feel out of place with these comics.

As I said, the chronology of this story isn’t pinned down, but in a real world context, Infinite Crisis is in swing, Jason Todd has reappeared as the Red Hood in the Batman comics, and One Year Later will start in just a few issues. The self-contained aspect of this story lets it exist on its own, outside of all of the continuity laden events going on in the rest of the DC Universe. No special knowledge, no real history lessons are needed here.

Astro City floors me. It’s one of those rare comic books that actually reaches the level of high art. A comic that actually means something when you get done with it. It’s a title that I am not even slightly hesitant to call literature. It consistently tells stories that are powerfully meaningful, even when taken out of the context of superpowers and costumes and cosmic space battles. Astro City has all that, but the story is so good that you get to the end of an arc, and you realize that it didn’t even need all that stuff. The part that sticks with you is that human story. But of course the point is that these stories are in that context. It uses that backdrop all the more powerfully to illustrate and punctuate the nature of what it means to be human by contrasting it with the inhuman elements present in the superhero genre. It’s a story telling formula with seemingly limitless possibilities, because the series continues to impress me with new and impressively compelling stories.

This issue in particular, did a good job of telling a very heart-warming story in the context of a relatively feeling-less robot character. We are hearing the story of a girl robot who is modeled after a Barbie doll. (I’m sure Barbie was changed to Beauty to avoid trademark infringement.) She has super strength and can fly, but she is also curt and tactless when it comes to human interaction. She’s made of plastic, and she saves the world on a regular basis, so most people give her a break. But we learn that she doesn’t know where she came from, or who she is, and that question nags at her, troubles and bothers her, making her far more human than external appearances would have us believe.

I’m not going to say anything more, for fear of ruining it for you. But let it suffice to say that finding out about her past is as deliciously fun as it is meaningful and thought provoking.

All in all, another home run for Astro City. You should read it now!