The two standouts from my pull this week, both featured redheads on the covers.  In fact the covers were so similarly composed, that I kept mistaking one for the other, when flipping through my stack.  I had a brief moment of shock when I realized Fables has been running for over eight years.  I need to give it some props, because in that time it has rarely dipped in quality.  I think people have basically come to expect that it will be excellent, and therefore have stopped writing about when it is.  I am really enjoying the current arc, it is focusing on the relationship between Rose Red and Snow White, and clarifying how Snow White went from the happy young peasant girl, with a loving mother and sister, to the orphaned only child princess, with an evil stepmother.  It also shows what caused the rift between Rose and Snow, something that has been alluded to since issue one.  I’ve seen some complaints, that these issues have drawn the the focus from, (and have very little to do with) the overarching plot of the dark being that has taken over Fabletown.  That is entirely true, but I don’t mind really.  I am just as interested in the dynamics of these two sisters, that are essentially the heart of the series.  I trust that Willingham will take us back to the main plot, in his own time, and perhaps by the conclusion of the interlude, it won’t turn out to be as disconnected as it may now seem.

Scarlet is the new creator owned series by Brian Michael Bendis, and Alex Maleev, who previously teamed up for Daredevil.  I picked it up partially because I had really liked their run on Daredevil (I know I was harsh the last time I wrote about Daredevil, but that was because I felt it had gotten repetitive), but mainly because I really liked Bendis’ last series starring a female protagonist, Alias.  So far the heroine of Scarlet (who is named Scarlet) seems to have almost as much of a messed up past Jessica Jones, but it has put her on a more proactive path, than Jess.  She gets violent, where Jess just got drunk.  Scarlet’s story is told by Scarlet, and she breaks the fourth wall by talking right to the audience.  In fact it is almost unfair to say the fourth wall gets broken, because it never really seems to exist at all.  She is speaking to us nearly the entire issue.  It is an intriguing first issue, the character is instantly compelling, and the art is gorgeous.  I am looking forward to seeing where the story goes.

The Unwritten

Thursday Next

Fables

The Magicians

Harry Potter

Books of Magic

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #041 (37 MB, 120 minutes)

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.

So, I guess my first thought is that I’m glad I had both issues #7 and #8 to read through at once. All of the fighting happens in issue #7, and #8 is reserved for burying the dead sex-slave Thora, abdicating his “title” to Hakkar, the guy who killed everyone he ever loved, and finally emigrating to another island with the witch-woman Enna that he’s come to know and love. Both issues together were a decent conclusion, but if I’d waited for the last issue, I might have found that one to be disappointing by itself.

As we predicted in our book club, Issue #7 starts with Sven uniting the two viking tribes, (it doesn’t show how he does this, though–presumably the Saxon threat is enough). After pages of battle, Sven finally kills Gorm, (feels almost like an afterthought at this point), and then Thora appears, and begs Sven to kill her as he “promised”. We talked briefly in the podcast about the contrast between Thora and Enna. It’s interesting to note that if Enna represents a “modern” or “empowered” woman, she clearly “wins out” in contrast with Thora, whose story is snuffed out abruptly in Issue #7. We speculated about ways that Thora’s character could have been continued and made even more interesting, and unfortunately we were wrong in predicting she wouldn’t just get “killed off”.

Enna, of course, lives on to the final page, where we have the viking version of riding off into the sunset: basically just Sven telling his one-year-old son that he’ll protect him with his life, walking with his arm around Enna over a barren hill through an icy and desolate wasteland.

I can’t help but wonder whether the next story is about Sven’s son, and some part of me does want to read the next part of the series. I think I’ll probably wait though, and pick it up in TPB.

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

I was able to name all the characters but just barely recognized Titania, and only identified correctly Sam Keith, Charles Vess, and Jill Thompson as the artists.

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.

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.

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.