The Comic Book Discussion Thread [Archive] - Page 22

sevenarts

01-11-2013, 05:58 PM

Starting a big read-through of some Jack Kirby DC work, to be followed by a trip through DC's crisis history and other related stuff.

The Fourth World (Jack Kirby) - A grand and crazy experiment. Jack Kirby went from Marvel to DC in the early 70s, and for DC immediately created a whole new cosmic epic, consisting of three interlocking new titles, alongside Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, which he took over and used to introduce his new concepts and characters, and to link them to the existing DC universe. The results were wildly inconsistent, and impeded by poor sales and DC's lack of faith in its new star creator, but the "Fourth World" saga, as it's come to be known, is still a marvelous, baffling achievement, a truly special work that's quite unlike anything else in comics. Kirby introduced into DC mythology a whole new universe, consisting of the dual planets New Genesis and Apokolips, homes to good and evil gods locked in a neverending conflict against one another. Kirby's mad genius is continually evident here, with a barrage of new ideas, images and characters coming fast and furious.

In New Gods, he focused on New Genesis' Orion and his struggle against the evil monarch of Apokolips, Darkseid, one of Kirby's finest creations and an amazing villain - amazing because he's often treated with more poignancy and emotion than the blustery heroes, who are often as violent as the evil gods. This is particularly true of Orion, Darkseid's son, who though raised on peaceful New Genesis continually struggles with his violent nature, as reflected in the heavy-browed, scowling visage that he disguises into a more friendly-looking face with his "mother box." Darkseid is such a fascinating villain because, though he's basically pure evil in concept and ideas - he wants total dominance over everyone and everything - in practice he's a noble foe who believes in fair play and rules and boundaries, and who repeatedly spares his worst enemies even when he has the chance to crush them. Over in Forever People, Kirby developed a cast of hippy-like young gods who represent a nearly pacifist kind of hero, engaging in battle only to defend themselves and then only reluctantly. This is obviously Kirby's attempt to engage with the new youth culture in the aftermath of 60s youth revolts and hippy movements, and the clash between Kirby's old-school sensibilities and the self-conscious attempts to modernize make this an especially fascinating piece of the Fourth World puzzle. Mister Miracle was the most human and relatable of Kirby's new books, focusing on an outcast new god who settles on Earth and dons the identity of a daring escape artist, facing death traps of his own devising whenever his many enemies are too slow in concocting new ones - beneath the surface of Scott Free's dazzling adventures always seems to be a submerged death wish, an eagerness to face death.

For a while, these three new titles interweave with the adventures of Superman and Jimmy Olsen in Kirby's fourth DC book, Jimmy Olsen, but that title increasingly diverged from the new gods saga until Kirby dropped it. It was in Jimmy Olsen that Kirby explored most of his worst ideas, including bringing back his old characters of the Newsboy Legion for cringeworthy stabs at humor. In one of the most staggeringly awful stretches of the Fourth World saga, Don Rickles makes a head-scratchingly out-of-nowhere guest appearance alongside an equally annoying lookalike. It's all pretty crazy stuff, and Kirby's restless creativity could just as easily come up with this appalling tripe as it could the moments of genius that proliferate throughout the rest of the series. Sometimes, the genius and the tripe are awfully hard to distinguish, as in the character of the Black Racer, Kirby's personification of death, who for some reason is depicted as a black man wearing a brightly colored red-and-blue outfit and riding across space and time with skis and ski poles.

Eventually, Kirby dropped Jimmy Olsen, and DC cancelled New Gods and Forever People after 11 issues each. Mister Miracle limped on but it was sadly changed, its connection to Darkseid and the new gods mostly dropped in favor of boring, formulaic done-in-one stories of Scott Free's escapes from various villains' pointlessly convoluted death traps. The introduction of former Darkseid soldier Big Barda provided some welcome pleasures throughout this later part of the run, but otherwise the post-issue-11 installments of this book are very disappointing and seemingly have little connection to everything that came before.

Kirby later belatedly tried to tie up the epic, and in the process drastically changed it again. In "Even Gods Must Die" and its follow-up graphic novel The Hunger Dogs, the New Genesis/Apokolips rivalry is recast, and the story becomes one of technology dwarfing the natural achievements of living beings - or gods, as the case may be. In these stories, it's curiously Darkseid who seems to be the protagonist, mourning the decisions that led him to mechanize and depersonalize his planet of Apokolips. It's deeply strange stuff, with Darkseid moping around, ressurrecting old "friends" like the sadistic torturer Desaad, the vicious military general Steppenwolf, and his feral son Kalibak, then feeling even greater sadness when these reanimated monsters are mere shades of their former evil selves. Darkseid also laments the mechanization of cruelty, the ways in which his previous, more personal systems of torment and subjugation have been replaced by machines, technology, long-range weapons with no personality. Meanwhile, much of the action - like Orion plotting with longtime Darkseid foe Himon - occurs in the background and off-panel, resulting in an abrupt ending that leaves Darkseid alone and unfulfilled, a demon deprived of his nemesis, deprived of the glory of a final battle. It's maybe not the most satisfying ending but it's a fitting one for this incomplete, compromised saga, which despite its problems and the obstacles placed in Kirby's path, is full of brilliant ideas, gorgeous and wild images, and a thematic undercurrent about youth, fascism, pacifism and violence, and the very nature of human choice and free will.

dreamdead

01-11-2013, 06:16 PM

Just finished volume six of Chew. The series remains inventive and wonderfully punny, though I do worry that the creators will keep this material going far past a logical endpoint.

number8

01-11-2013, 09:24 PM

They already set an endpoint. It's ending at 60.

slqrick

01-14-2013, 01:48 PM

Sweet Tooth #40...wow. One of the best books I've ever read, shit hit me to the core. After initially keeping up with the series, I'd fallen behind the last couple of years. The payoff for all the arcs was pretty fantastic, and I guess I was caught off guard by how emotionally moving everything ended up being.

number8

01-14-2013, 03:05 PM

Yeah, great final issue. I'm glad it ended when it did because I think it was actually becoming rather stale and shallow for a while towards the climax there. If I didn't know that the end was coming, I'd have dropped it, but I stuck around to see the conclusion, and I'm glad I did. That finale issue is the closest the series ever got to the style Lemire showed in his graphic novels.

number8

01-15-2013, 02:04 PM

Grouchy

01-15-2013, 05:17 PM

I wrote about the Black Comic Book Festival (http://www.artboiled.com/2013/black-comic-book-festival-how-jewish-comics-creators-spoke-to-the-african-american-experience/). Turned out pretty interesting.
What the guy said about Wertham is interesting. I'd love to actually read Seduction of the Innocent, to be honest.

number8

01-15-2013, 05:28 PM

What the guy said about Wertham is interesting. I'd love to actually read Seduction of the Innocent, to be honest.

It's long been on my to-do list, but every time I read an excerpt from it I just lose all interest.

ledfloyd

01-23-2013, 08:47 PM

I finally got Building Stories in the mail. It can only be described as immense. This is going to take awhile.

sevenarts

01-24-2013, 06:08 PM

Have fun with that! One of the most amazing formal accomplishments in recent comics.

Some more recent reading for me:

The Demon (Jack Kirby) - Kirby started this series as some of his initial Fourth World series were winding down at DC, and indeed it feels like a somewhat less ambitious, more conservative series from Kirby, with less of the high-concept craziness and big ideas of the Fourth World saga. Instead, it's just a pretty fun horror/supernatural/magic series that allows Kirby to cut loose with great monster designs and large-scale medieval battles in the periodic flashback scenes, and kind of return to his roots in monster/horror comics. It's a fun read, for the most part, though the Phantom of the Opera pastiche is fairly weak, and Kirby and his editors, following the lessons of the Fourth World, seem so eager to please that the book occasionally seems guided more by a quest for commercial success than a real need to tell this story. At one point, Kirby brings back the character of Klarion the Witch Boy - one of the series' best creations in his first appearance and apparently a big success with readers of the era - but there are diminishing returns the second time, and the spark just isn't there. Still, Kirby's art is great, especially when he's drawing Etrigan the Demon in all his threatening, angry glory, and the book, in its brief run of 16 issues, is a lot of pulpy fun.

NewUniversal (Warren Ellis & Salvador Larocca) - Warren Ellis was brought in to revive and rethink a failed concept from 80s Marvel, the now mostly forgotten New Universe. Ellis changed the concept and characters a lot, but the basic idea is still the same, a world in which a cosmic event triggers superpowers in a handful of people, who now become targets for a government agency as they struggle to understand what happened to them and what they can now do. It's compelling stuff, and it's a shame that the project petered out, because it was really just getting started when the initial series stalled at 6 issues. A year later, Ellis picked it up again but this attempt lasted just 2 issues plus 2 tie-ins written by Kieron Gillen and Si Spurrier. In these few issues, Ellis sketches out a whole complex, compelling world and a core cast of great characters, as well as suggesting an overriding theme about human systems of power frustrating impulses towards utopianism, idealism and human improvement. It's great stuff, and one imagines that if Ellis had been able to write 30 or 40 issues of this, it would today be regarded as one of his defining works, up there with Planetary. As is, it's a fragment of what might have been, and it's also a bit disappointing in the art department, which doesn't help. Larocca's tendency to "cast" his comics with Hollywood actors and actresses - Angelina Jolie, among others, plays a prominent role here - is as distracting and aggravating as ever, and doesn't do any favors to his already stiff, labored art. Of course, when Steve Kurth takes over in the second series, one starts to long for Larocca's baseline level of competence after being confronted by Kurth's sloppy, ugly scrawlings. I can't help but wonder if the art was part of the reason this otherwise very promising series didn't take off. The Gillen-written tie-in, based in 1959 with an earlier generation of superhumans, is also excellent, on the same level as Ellis' work, and the Spurrier issue isn't bad either.

The Order (Matt Fraction & Barry Kitson) - A spin-off of the post-Civil War status quo in the Marvel universe, in which Tony Stark was setting up superhero teams for every state. This series focused on one of those teams, tasked with defending California. Not the most promising setup, but in just 10 issues Matt Fraction really makes something of it and makes me care about this cast of new characters. It's really about psychology as much as anything - most issues are structured around interviews between one of the team members and an off-camera Tony Stark, these interviews probing into the characters' reasons for wanting to become superheroes, their often troubled pasts, and what their choices of superpowers said about them as people. It's a fine formal framework for a very interesting series, one that usually seems more interested in the characters and their mental states than in whatever threat they're facing at any given time. It reminds me a bit of the Peter Milligan/Mike Allred X-Statix - less tongue-in-cheek than that series, and definitely less daring, but still an interesting take on superheroes functioning within a media culture, to the extent that the team has their own PR rep in Kate Kildare. It can be surprisingly affecting, too, and there's a moment in the final issue that's absolutely devastating, but Fraction always treats these moments of emotional catharsis with a light touch, not overplaying it, just letting the emotions naturally arise from what's happening and the choices the characters are making. A very good series. Not sure if it was cancelled or if Fraction just packed it in, but it ends naturally enough, and though it certainly could have gone on longer, as is it's a nice brisk and worthwhile read.

Ezee E

01-24-2013, 07:23 PM

I liked the pulpy look of Black Beetle, even if the story leaves a little to be desired.

ledfloyd

01-25-2013, 08:20 PM

So, everything you've heard about Building Stories is true. It's such a staggeringly unique reading experience that I'm still kind of in awe.

number8

01-26-2013, 10:09 PM

I finally started reading Habibi.

ledfloyd

01-26-2013, 11:03 PM

I finally started reading Habibi.
That book snuck up on me. The ending ended up affecting me a lot more than I thought it was going to.

sevenarts

01-28-2013, 01:20 PM

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (Warren Ellis & Stuart Immonen) - Short review: this is brilliant and EVERYONE SHOULD READ IT NOW!!

Longer review: Seriously, I can't believe I hadn't read this before. As far as satirical, irreverent takes on superheroes go, it's right up there with X-Statix as one of the best. Ellis is at the top of his game, bringing together a group of C-list Marvel heroes (Monica Rambeau, Elsa Bloodstone, Boom Boom, Machine Man, and a new character whose superhero name is so foul that Captain America once beat him up and washed his mouth out with soap) for a hilarious, ridiculous farce in which they fight a series of outrageous threats in the funniest, hyperviolent fashion. I can't stress enough how funny it is; my wife kept asking me what the hell I was giggling about and it's kind of hard to explain that I was laughing at jokes about Fin Fang Foom's underpants or at the mere sight of a dinosaur in a Hugh Hefner robe sipping wine and holding a pistol. The penultimate issue climaxes with an epic fight scene that had me poring over every detail, constantly finding new and funny images in every corner. Immonen, who pencilled every issue, is a perfect complement to Ellis' quick-witted style here, contributing a cartoony style that's vibrant and packed with memorable images and designs. Just amazing. Go read it, you'll love it, and though it's definitely meta, it's not written only for insiders at all, so you don't need a big knowledge of the Marvel U or comics in general to get its jokes. It's just funny as hell and a ton of fun.

Young Avengers (Allan Heinberg & Jim Cheung) - I had read this once back when it was new, but I loved the first issue of the new Kieron Gillen series so much that I had to re-read the original run, especially since I barely remembered it. It's pretty good, a solid teen superhero story that's all about these kids struggling to define themselves. There's a very clever metaphor for teenage anxiety about identity in that, for the first few issues, the kids all define themselves as young copies of various older Avengers heroes, then gradually reveal that there's more to each of them than these borrowed costumes and identities, and they soon redefine themselves, for the most part, in terms of their own abilities and powers. It's a fun, breezy series that nevertheless establishes some high stakes drama and does a good job of introducing and exploring all these young new characters. It could maybe be a little longer, as the original series ends with a lot left hanging and a feeling that a lot more could be done with these characters - there are some subsequent miniseries that explore them further, though, and the new Marvel Now series is thankfully picking up their story yet again.

Vengeance (Joe Casey & Nick Dragotta) - Another book that I read because of the new Young Avengers, and though the connection is tangential in this case - one character created for this book shows up in the new series - I'm glad I read this fun, witty mini. Casey reportedly structured the story around a series of premade covers depicting various iconic Marvel villains (Dr. Doom, Red Skull, Bullseye, etc.) but the story is really about generations, about the new versus the old, order versus chaos, youth and excitement versus experience and tradition. The villains on the covers are the old guard, but the story within the pages is mostly about a cast of younger characters, some newly created (the brash, gunslinging Ultimate Nullifier and the powerful Ms. America Chavez) and some younger, nearly forgotten castoffs from other series, like some depowered mutants from Grant Morrison's New X-Men. The story is a bit of a mess, honestly, and it's seldom clear what's going on from moment to moment, but Casey communicates such a sense of movement and energy that it hardly matters, and in the end everything does sort of come together and cohere. It's briskly paced and exhilarating even when the story is confounding, and Dragotta's art is gorgeous - not quite up to the peaks he'd reach in his work on Hickman's FF, but with the same ability to communicate the wonder and beauty in cosmic adventures and small intimate moments alike. This is sexy, silly, quite often funny, and also broadly dramatic and exciting, a great superhero yarn that often feels more like a philosophical treatise or a near-abstract avant-garde piece. Really good.

Sven

01-29-2013, 07:48 PM

...and Dragotta's art is ...not quite up to the peaks he'd reach in his work on Hickman's FF...

Kind of surprised you think this. Book is bananas, visually.

Speaking of Casey, I'm reading his & Phillips's WildCATS, pre-3.0, and it's a good deal better than 3.0. I think Casey is really good at navigating transitional states, and this WildCATS, pitched between identities, asking what happens when you survive your purpose, is a perfect playing field for Casey to do his deconstructionist thing.

sevenarts

01-30-2013, 01:23 PM

Kind of surprised you think this. Book is bananas, visually.

Like I said, it looks great - I just think Dragotta's done even better work. Barely even a quibble, really, just a testament to how great Dragotta is in general.

Anyway, more recent reading:

Dark Reign: Zodiac (Joe Casey & Nathan Fox) - Having enjoyed Vengeance (and, long ago, Automatic Kafka), I'm going to be tracking down a few more Joe Casey bits and pieces. This one is a tie-in to Marvel's big Dark Reign event, though really it just gives Casey a small playground in which to unfurl the tale of a deranged new villain messing with both superheroes and with uber-villain Norman Osborn. Like Vengeance, it's all about the new and the old, about challenging the status quo, whatever form it takes. Casey's Zodiac is a force of pure chaos, screwing with everyone for his own shadowy purposes, which remain vague until the very end of this three-issue miniseries. It's pretty fun in a grisly, manic way, and Fox's idiosyncratic art is a real treat, especially when he tackles major characters like the Fantastic Four and renders them odd and offbeat through his gritty, off-kilter style, which looks like a cross between Tony Moore and Paul Pope. The thematic focus isn't as intense or as thought-provoking as it is in Vengeance, though this mini again finds Casey measuring established characters against his own looney creations, essentially setting loose his deranged and kooky surrogates within the rigid boundaries of a major-company superhero universe. It's an experiment that works much better in Vengeance, which does far more with the throughlines about tradition and youth and generational torch-passing, but the same themes are evident here in nascent form, and it's a pretty good, quick read.

Avengers: The Children's Crusade (Allan Heinberg & Jim Cheung) - This was Heinberg and Cheung's long-awaited follow-up to their Young Avengers, at last a continuation of that acclaimed work and those beloved new characters. On top of that, it's a kind of epilogue to the House of M crossover, bringing back the Scarlet Witch and re-examining (and in some ways retconning) the big events that had shaken up a lot of Marvel titles surrounding that crossover. So there are a lot of expectations here, and this miniseries, which came out in dribs and drabs through multiple delays over the course of nearly 2 years, kind of staggers under the weight of so much expectation and pressure. The original Young Avengers was appealing for its vibrant, real-feeling teen characters and their struggles to find a place for themselves; this mini often seems more concerned with rehabilitating the Scarlet Witch, or setting up the big Avengers/X-Men conflict to come, or watching massive battles with Dr. Doom and Magneto. The Young Avengers often seem lost, or pushed to the side, in their own story. It still has its moments, but much of the fun and heart of the original series is sacrificed for clumsy exposition and tortured explanations (delivered with increasingly clunky and non-naturalistic dialogue) that seek to probe the history of recent Marvel events. In the end, the whole series seems like a way to make it palatable for Scarlet Witch to be a functioning hero character again after House of M - by introducing just enough doubt about how much she's actually responsible for what happened - and to set up the next big crossover, which turned out to be the mostly lousy Avengers vs. X-Men, which in some ways continued the story started here regarding the Witch, the depowered mutants, and so on. Anyway, when he's not indulging in lengthy and convoluted exposition, Heinberg still has a lot of fun with these characters and their teen dramas, and Cheung is still a flashy, slick artist, though his big battle scenes are ridiculously crowded and frequently suffer from some very odd perspective choices. It just tries to be too many things to too many different audiences, trying to function simultaneously as a return to cult favorite young characters and a big world-changing event comic, and in the end neither role is wholly satisfying.

The Ultimates 1 & 2 (Mark Millar & Bryan Hitch) - So this is great and classic for a very good reason, and it's about time I read it. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with it already. Millar brings a dark, cynical style to this reimagination of the Avengers, positioning the heroes within a world of espionage and international intrigue, making them a government-backed outgrowth of the military-industrial complex, with all the problems that entails for the supposed heroes. It's dark and compelling and works at an epic scale, which Hitch's realistic, potent art is very well-suited to - with its widescreen aesthetic and bold style, it feels very cinematic, and this series both feeds off the Marvel movies that had been made already and serves as a primary inspiration for the Avengers/Cap/Thor/etc. movies that have been made since. It's lots of fun, taking its time to introduce these reimagined characters but also barrelling along through constant action set pieces, always with huge stakes and a constant sense that, unlike in the more established and solidified Marvel U, anything can happen. It's easy to see why books like this made the Ultimate universe such a successful experiment back when it first came out, even if that initial excitement seems to have long since worn off. I doubt I'll be moving on to the widely reviled later Ultimates work spearheaded by Jeph Loeb, but I'll definitely be exploring some more of the early series in the line.

number8

01-30-2013, 10:22 PM

Vertigo planning a Fables/Unwritten crossover event.

:|

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/4356/1359563327.jpg

number8

01-30-2013, 10:23 PM

Vertigo is dead.

EyesWideOpen

01-30-2013, 11:34 PM

I haven't read either of those books in a couple years (due to dropping the big 2) but I used to love both and those two make sense for a crossover more then any other Vertigo titles I can think of.

number8

02-01-2013, 10:01 PM

Holy christ.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/wolverine-adamantium-edition2.jpg

Weighing in at a whopping 16 pounds, the foot-tall collection is big enough to kill a fully grown man or, when stood open, to serve as shelter for a child. It apparently marks the debut of the “all-new Mighty Marvel Format,” which suggests completists may want to invest now in larger, reinforced shelves. Preferably, adamantium.

Priced at $200, the 772-page edition collects Wolverine: Origin by Paul Jenkins and Adam Kubert, Wolverine: Weapon X by Barry Windsor Smith, Wolverine by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, Wolverine: Not Dead Yet by Warren Ellis and Leinil Yu, Wolverine & The X-Men by Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo, and single-issue stories by the likes of Dave Cockrum, Larry Hama, Jim Lee, Mark Millar and Kaare Andrews. Plus, there’s the cover by Billy Tan and the slipcase by Gabriele Dell’Otto.

number8

02-05-2013, 03:56 PM

Ennis' new book with Dynamite, Red Team, reads like a The Shield ripoff. Hrm. Also, one of the characters is clearly meant to be Idris Elba. It's weird.

Sven

02-07-2013, 06:35 PM

I've never seen The Shield, but I'm sure it didn't originate the idea of a group of badass cops who are renegades for justice. Also, the black guy doesn't look anything like Elba.

It wasn't a great issue. Static. But it does offer a decent set-up, if for something kinda generic. Hopefully it gets wild.

number8

02-07-2013, 07:15 PM

I've never seen The Shield, but I'm sure it didn't originate the idea of a group of badass cops who are renegades for justice.

No, it's just about a special taskforce of four plainsclothes detectives who are assigned to break up drug gangs that have a penchant for sitting around a circular table in the leader's backyard drinking beer while they plot to commit crimes themselves, including murder.

Sven

02-08-2013, 12:28 AM

Sounds like a fairly innocuous nod. Ennis has made a career out of derivation.

On a similar note, New Avengers 3 didn't hesitate to pull out the Identity Crisis card. Wonder what the long game is being played with this touchy cabal of humorless, colorfully-outfitted, super-powerful adults with histories of making regrettable decisions.

Ezee E

02-08-2013, 05:40 AM

Walking Dead vol. 7 was a great read, but I have to imagine it lost a ton of readers during that run as single issues.

number8

02-08-2013, 12:25 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iFV1HdO2pQ

Sven

02-08-2013, 02:45 PM

I'm going through Hellblazer, so I'm all about Delano these days. Started reading Outlaw Nation, via picking up the next issue every Wednesday. (The colors and covers are too good to get the Image collection.) Anyone read this? Thing's inexplicable.

number8

02-08-2013, 02:57 PM

Where are you getting the colored issues? Are you just having your LCS order back issues from somewhere?

Sven

02-08-2013, 03:08 PM

Oh, my LCS has a trove of attic treasures: books that haven't sold, have been donated, etc. Including the entire run of this. Lost a lot of time up there.

number8

02-08-2013, 03:14 PM

Heh, I just found the entire run for under $25. That's actually not bad.

Sven

02-08-2013, 07:18 PM

Nice. I'll end up paying about ten bucks more. You should check it out. Funky stuff.

megladon8

02-08-2013, 07:28 PM

I'm wanting to read some work from a company I've really never ventured into at all: 2000AD.

There are some beautiful trades coming out from them now and in the coming months. I may pick a few up. Any recommendations?

I just added Alan Moore's "The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones" and Dave Gibbons' "War Machine" to my wish list.

number8

02-11-2013, 02:12 AM

So glad Scarlet is back. Best work Bendis has done since leaving Daredevil.

Real creepy though that the issue came out the day before the whole Dorner thing blew up.

number8

02-13-2013, 05:48 PM

Is it just me or is Bryan Hitch's celebrity photoreferencing is getting to be as bad as Larocca and Land?

slqrick

02-16-2013, 04:44 PM

Scarlet Spider is surprisingly awesome. Never cared for Kaine minus that epic Joe Kelly Grim Hunter arc, but this is really good stuff. Much better than Slott's crap, and actually funny without trying too hard.

EyesWideOpen

02-16-2013, 10:37 PM

Just had a guy come pick up my 19 short boxes worth of DC/Marvel comics. It was a little over 2600 comics. Feels good to finally be rid of them. I'm now down to just my one short box of stuff I'm currently reading.

Sven

02-16-2013, 10:38 PM

EyesWideOpen

02-17-2013, 01:09 AM

Is it TMI to ask how much you got for them?

$1300. I had already sold off all my valuable stuff and good runs. I did it through Craigslist which due to the amount of comics was a lot easier then trying to sell online, ship and deal with paypal fees.

Ezee E

02-17-2013, 03:32 AM

$1300 is nice and I doubt you'll even miss those comics.

I came across a sweet story in Snapshot. An Image miniseries. Totally the type of story I want more of.

EyesWideOpen

02-17-2013, 03:41 PM

$1300 is nice and I doubt you'll even miss those comics.

I came across a sweet story in Snapshot. An Image miniseries. Totally the type of story I want more of.

Yeah I definitely won't miss them. I haven't touched them in 2 years.

I have Snapshot coming from DCBS can't wait to read it.

megladon8

02-17-2013, 06:47 PM

Congrats, EWO! Great sale!

sevenarts

02-19-2013, 05:23 PM

I've been catching up on the Ultimate universe, since before reading Millar's Ultimates 1 & 2 recently, I hadn't explored it at all. Now I've read the 3 main ongoing series (Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four) up to the time immediately preceding the big Ultimatum event. Jeph Loeb's Ultimates and Ultimatum, which are notoriously terrible, are next, after which I'll be continuing with Bendis' Spider-Man. Here are my thoughts so far.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Brian Michael Bendis & Mark Bagley) - The title that started the Ultimate line, and the title that's been the most consistent out of the whole line - nobody but Bendis has ever written it, and for its first 110 issues, nobody but Bagley drew it. It's really good stuff, pretty much exactly what the Ultimate line should be, a playful and readable condensation of the essence of Spider-Man without the baggage of decades of continuity or multiple writers constantly pushing the character in different directions. Bendis retells Spider-Man's origins at a leisurely pace, then reimagines the character's early years, when he was still a teenager living with his Aunt May and struggling through high school, all while swinging around the city fighting crime and facing an increasingly threatening horde of villains. There's a sense of fun and humor in this book that's perfect for Spider-Man, and Bendis' Peter Parker is clumsy, awkward, somewhat goofy, and, as befits a nerdy teen suddenly endowed with great powers, often a pretty lousy superhero. He's very much a kid, which is especially apparent in the always-delightful scenes where Bendis throws him up against Daredevil, a grown-up hero who is contemptuous of the teen's clumsiness and noisiness. Peter's always being defeated and unmasked, and the list of people who know he's Spider-Man quickly grows and grows, which is sometimes played as a joke but often looms over his life as a threat. It's just a blast to read, and Bendis does such a good job of mining what's always been appealing about this character and his world: the teenage insecurity, the wisecracking wit, the romance (here made especially compelling by Bendis' decision to let MJ into Peter's superhero secret early on), and especially the colorful, potent villains. Bendis is particularly great at reimagining Norman and Harry Osborn, as well as Doc Ock, and versions of Venom and Carnage without all the baggage of their usual silly origins. Bendis even makes the clone saga, one of the most often reviled aspects of Spider-Man lore, into a compelling and inventive story bursting with pathos. There's lots of pathos here, actually, surrounding Gwen Stacey especially, and also in Peter's relationship with Kitty Pryde, who transitions into this book after one of several crossovers with the Ultimate version of the X-Men. Just a fantastic series and one of the best distillations of what makes Spider-Man so enduring. I've read up to issue 128 of the initial volume so far, so haven't yet gotten into Ultimatum or the stuff that happens afterwards, but I will definitely be continuing once I've read Ultimatum.

Ultimate X-Men (various) - In contrast, this title is mostly just not that satisfying. Mark Millar helmed the title (the second Ultimate series after USM) for its first 33 issues (excepting 2 awful Chuck Austen fill-ins about Gambit). Millar just doesn't seem to have as good a grasp on these characters as Bendis does on Spider-Man, or for that matter as Millar himself would on the Avengers when it came time to write The Ultimates. Millar reportedly based the series mainly on the X-Men movies, which is fine, but his approach mostly seems like shallow repetitions of stories and ideas from those movies and the original X-Men comics they were based on, whereas the best Ultimate material imaginatively reconfigures and rethinks these stories and characters for new readers. Some of his stuff is OK - notably his final storyline, an epic showdown with Magneto, which brings his run to a satisfying conclusion - but a lot of it is kind of a slog, and he doesn't do enough to really justify why any of this couldn't just be regular-universe X-Men stories. The slightly darker, manipulative edge that he gives to Xavier seems like a preparation for the full-on cynical tone of his Ultimates, though, and it would have been interesting if he'd done more with that here. Instead, Bendis took over with issue 34 for a short year-long run, which is pretty good even if lasts just 2 arcs. His first arc is a Wolverine/Spider-Man/Daredevil team-up that would fit equally well in his USM, so he's kind of easing into the series, and though his stuff is good, he's not there too long so he doesn't really settle in. Then, Brian K. Vaughan took over with issue 46, and turns in a nice, low-key run of ~20 issues. After the boredom of Millar's run and the quickness of Bendis' decent handful of issues, Vaughan makes this book finally as lively and fun as it always should have been. He's got a great feel for the rotating relationship melodramas of the teenage X-Men, as well as their impetuous leaps into action, and he just tells a bunch of solid stories that, for one of the first times, really make this feel like a true X-Men book rather than a pale copy. Shame he didn't stick around longer, but he goes out on a high note with a final arc that revisits Magneto. After this, Robert Kirkman took over but I don't think I'll be reading his lengthy run; if I were more invested in what came before I might continue, but as it is I've read enough.

Ultimate Fantastic Four (various) - The third big Ultimate ongoing, and the last to premiere. The initial arc, written by Millar and Bendis together, reconfigures the FF's origin, and it's a quite good intro, taking its time over 6 issues to really establish these characters and their relationships - Reed especially is quite poignant right from the start, with his unhappy childhood and nasty father looming over him as he tries to prove himself as a genius scientist, and instead triggers an accident that's especially devastating for his old friend Ben. After the origin story, Warren Ellis takes over for a great run, in which the author is very careful to ground these stories in science, to explain everything, to really think about the logistics of this team and their new powers - like, where DO Mr. Fantastic's internal organs go when he stretches? Why doesn't the Human Torch burn himself? And how does the Thing poop, anyway? Ellis' witty high-concept approach is married to a brisk pace for a really exciting book, one perfectly tailored to his interests and style, and one wishes that he stayed around longer. Instead, Millar took over for the next big run, unfortunately joined by Greg Land, whose slick photo-referenced style is quite a comedown considering most of the earlier issues were drawn by either Adam Kubert or Stuart Immonen. Millar can't match the brainy energy of Ellis' run, but neither does he flounder about directionlessly as he did on UXM. His UFF is a fun, frenetic series and a good read, despite the presence of Land. Notably, Millar introduced a zombie version of the FF that launched the very lucrative but not very good line of Marvel Zombies books, but their appearances here are genuinely creepy and compelling and provide a lot of dark humor. Millar's run is split into 3-issue arcs, so the action is very condensed and everything moves along really quickly - it seems obvious that he's experimenting with the opposite of his peer Bendis' decompression style. It's a fine run. His successor Mike Carey abandons the 3-issue arcs but otherwise takes a similar approach with lots of action, cosmic threats, alternate dimensions and so on. It's not the most memorable stuff in the world, but it's fun enough, and the first few arcs are drawn by Pasqual Ferry, who brings an appropriately glossy, vibrant style to Carey's alien worlds. Other than Ellis' run, nothing in UFF is real ground-shaking or a must-read, but it's a consistently enjoyable series that didn't have any really terrible patches in its 60 issues.

Sven

02-19-2013, 05:30 PM

Hickman/Ribic/White's 9-issue Ultimates run is beautiful Humanoids-level insanity. Evil Reed Richards FTW. Everything else Ultimates I've read has been either incomprehensible or abhorrent.

sevenarts

02-19-2013, 06:14 PM

What else have you read? I thought Millar's first 2 Ultimates series were great - a dark, cynical twist on the Avengers and SHIELD with an epic feel. And Bendis' Spider-Man is consistently lots of fun with a pretty much perfect tone. To a slightly lesser extent, the first 18 issues of Ultimate Fantastic Four (encompassing the Bendis/Millar origin and the Ellis run) are also quite good.

I am looking forward to getting to the Hickman stuff, though.

Sven

02-19-2013, 07:58 PM

What else have you read?

At length, only UX-Men and the first Ultimates, neither of which I would feel fine recommending.

Scratch that, I did like Ellis's Ultimate Galactus trilogy and Iron Wars.

ledfloyd

02-19-2013, 09:38 PM

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/570044257/symbiosis-a-creative-commons-art-book

This is a really cool idea. I'm not too familiar with Steven Sanders, so I'm probably not going to drop $85 to get an actual copy of the book. I don't trust his goatee. I might however pitch in $10 for an ebook.

slqrick

02-20-2013, 01:50 AM

The Manhattan Projects is straight bonkers.

EyesWideOpen

02-20-2013, 03:53 AM

sevenarts

02-20-2013, 08:44 PM

More Ultimate Marvel reading:

Ultimates 3/Ultimatum (Jeph Loeb & Joe Madureira/Bryan Hitch) - Jeph Loeb's Ultimate Universe work has a reputation as some of the worst comics ever - a reputation, it turns out, that's VERY well earned. These are some of the worst, sloppiest, ugliest, nastiest, stupidest comics I've ever read. The story, such as it is, is full of holes and nonsensical character motivations. No thought seems to have been given to why anybody is doing anything. The art is hideous in Ultimates 3, and full of ridiculously sexualized women in ultimatum. The sole rationale behind this whole project seems to have been getting cheap shocks by randomly and pointlessly killing off as many characters as possible. Loeb was brought in to shake up the Ultimate Universe, but instead he's acting like a kid determined to break everyone else's toys. None of the deaths even mean anything or are given any consideration or impact. At one point, Mystique wanders in, rattles off a long list of names, and says they're all dead. The on-panel deaths don't make much more of an impact, except perhaps for the hideous one-two punch of the Blob eating the Wasp, and then Hank Pym biting off the Blob's head. It would take an essay to enumerate all the things wrong with these comics. It's all just garish, ridiculous nonsense, utterly juvenile and without a single worthwhile moment in the whole thing. Also, Ultimates 3 in particular is by some distance THE ugliest comics I've ever seen: it's hard even to blame Madureira's art, since I can't really say what that art looks like beneath the nauseating digital coloring job by Christian Lichtner. Just awful, awful shit, the worst kind of trash.

As a sidebar, I also read the Ultimatum tie-ins for Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate Fantastic Four. The former are actually quite good, with Bendis managing to weave some compelling drama around the edges of Loeb's shitshow, developing some nice moments for the Spidey supporting cast. The UFF tie-ins, written by Joe Pokaksi - I guess Mike Carey wanted no part of this disaster - are just innocuous and sort of boring, with lots of flashbacks, though there seems to be an interesting story hidden between the lines here.

Ultimate Galactus Trilogy (Warren Ellis & various) - Three miniseries - Nightmare, Secret, Extinction - that together form one great big cosmic epic. And it's really good. Ellis approaches this story with his usual flair for applying hard science to outrageous comic concepts, and the results are really clever, reimagining Galactus with the assumption that if a world-devouring alien being were really to exist, it wouldn't be some giant humanoid in a purple supervillain costume, but something truly alien to human imagination, a totally different form of intelligence. The threat's name is only revealed at the end of the first miniseries - a nice little surprise that's been ruined by retroactively collecting the whole saga as Ultimate Galactus - and its nature doesn't become apparent until still later, so Ellis mainly relies on atmosphere in the early going. The appropriately named Ultimate Nightmare is dripping with menace and mystery, as the Ultimates and the X-Men explore an abandoned Soviet bunker that houses a staggering array of deformed would-be super-soldiers, all of them derived from an alien technology that had crashed to Earth early in the 20th Century. The art, by Trevor Hairsine and Steve Epting, is dark and realistic, perfectly capturing the sinister mood of this story, the sense of horror and the knowledge that something even worse is lurking at the end of this nightmarish maze. Ellis then lightens the tone for the second miniseries, with bold, bright superhero art by Steve McNiven and Tom Raney, and more of a pulpy action feel, as the heroes do battle with the Kree to uncover the secrets of the approaching threat. Finally, in Ultimate Extinction, Ellis churns it all together into a frenetic stew as apocalypse approaches and everyone struggles to figure out a way to stop the end of the world. It's a great series, bursting with big ideas, a brilliant combination of pulp fiction, sci-fi, and superhero adventure, a saga that has equal room for big cosmic characters like the Silver Surfer (radically reimagined here) or Captain Marvel, alongside the usual cast of superheroes and street-level pulp figures like Misty Knight, who plays a surprisingly big role here. It's fun and visceral and bold, and it climaxes with a masterful sequence in which Ellis' optimism about human possibility and his cynicism about human actuality collide: Gah Lak Tus is driven off, in the end, by a combination of human thinking at its best and human technological violence at its most extreme.

slqrick

02-21-2013, 12:17 AM

Saga.

So damn good.

ledfloyd

02-21-2013, 12:48 AM

Saga.

So damn good.
What an ending. And that splash page of the planet hatching, man... I wish all comics were this good.

number8

02-21-2013, 05:24 PM

I bought Hellblazer 300 yesterday. Don't even have the heart to read it yet.

sevenarts

02-21-2013, 05:50 PM

I'm so upset about Hellblazer ending. I like Milligan's ending though, if it had to go out at least it did so with style, still irreverent and weird right up to the final page.

Still, RIP Vertigo pretty much. DC seems eager to trim the line away until there's nothing left.

number8

02-21-2013, 06:28 PM

Apparently DC got chewed out by Time Warner a couple of years back about Vertigo. Something like "Why are we publishing books we don't own the movie adaptation rights to?"

number8

02-21-2013, 06:50 PM

Here is why nobody wants to release creator-owned book with Vertigo anymore, other than people like Snyder and Lemire who have to do it because they're afraid that if they release creator owned books on Image or elsewhere, DC won't give them the high-paying superhero books anymore. Vertigo contracts underwent significant changes in 2010, because of the Time Warner thing I mentioned.

The most recent model saw creators working on a relatively lower page rate than work for hire (though the highest page rate in creator owned circles) and it was treated as an advance against monthly royalties – even if those royalties never paid out.

...

But now, if your book doesn’t make enough money as a monthly, they’ll won’t pay trade paperback royalties until it’s made enough money for the publisher.

But rather than affecting the lower selling books, it will probably affect all of them. The trade paperback clawback will kick in if monthly sales don’t reach 50,000 – which Vertigo books haven;t really seen since the Sandman days. It’s also possible that sales of trade paperbacks will never make enough to pay our royalties. And there are some current creators who depend on those royalties.

For example, the current configuration of the contract, which has changed in relatively recent years, stipulates that the copyright is owned entirely by the creators; there's a fair division of money that comes in, both from sales of the book and from any exploitation in different media, television, film, things like that. But the way it's constructed, DC has the right of negotiation to sell those things.

...

With the specific example of "iZombie," DC simply refused to sell the rights; there were at least four instances that I know of where people have wanted to make "iZombie" a TV show and were told the rights were not available for sale because DC was thinking about doing something with them. So how it works in actual practice is, DC gets the option on those things without spending any money for it because they're the ones who sell it, and the creators are left with no remuneration for that because they have no say in whether or not their thing is sold.

It's a fucking scam.

sevenarts

02-21-2013, 07:31 PM

This kind of thing is why I'm happy to give most of my weekly comics dollar to Image and other smaller publishers, a few Marvel titles, and nothing from DC.

Sven

02-21-2013, 07:54 PM

This kind of thing is why I'm happy to give most of my weekly comics dollar to Image and other smaller publishers, a few Marvel titles, and nothing from DC.

Stealing, reading, and talking about it online are still very strong forms of support.

sevenarts

02-21-2013, 08:39 PM

I guess that could be true, but even then there's very few DC titles I still like/read. I liked a lot of the New 52 early on but they quickly squandered any good will generated by that. Now I'm down to (in order of decreasing interest) Batman Inc., Dial H, Wonder Woman, Batwoman (and we'll see how long that lasts with Williams off art), Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Earth 2. I like these books and buy at least that first four in collected form, so it's not like I'm boycotting DC or advocating boycotting DC. It basically comes down to having a limited budget for weekly purchases and wanting to put those dollars towards smaller books that need my support more at that moment. Same reason that among my few Marvel purchases I count Captain Marvel.

Grouchy

02-22-2013, 06:14 PM

Started reading From Hell last night. Fell asleep, woke up and read two hours in a row before I had to leave it to go to work.

I love you, Alan Moore.

number8

02-23-2013, 05:07 PM

I'll say it.

Happy was terrible. That ending was a whole lot of nothing. Why the hell did you write this, Grant?

sevenarts

02-25-2013, 07:12 PM

More Ultimate (and related-ish) reading. To get caught up on the whole universe, basically all I have left is the post-Ultimatum Ultimates/Avengers, USM, and a few miniseries.

Supreme Power/Squadron Supreme (J. Michael Straczynski & Gary Frank) - JMS takes a MAX approach to an old group of Marvel heroes, many of them derived from famous DC heroes. It's somewhat familiar stuff, as a result, because deconstructing some version of the Superman mythos is a pretty common idea in modern comics. JMS's take on it definitely recalls, say, Alan Moore's various Superman deconstructions, and it also has some DNA in common with Millar's Ultimates. It's a typical "gritty" take on superhero concepts, focusing on the Superman-like Hyperion, whose origin story is a dark mirror of Kal El's, the baby alien being adopted by the government and raised in isolation to serve US interests. Like The Ultimates, it's all about imagining how superheroes might function if they were absorbed into the military-industrial complex and used for nationalist purposes. It's entertaining enough, even if the story and characters are continually recalling other works. There's some very good stuff along the way, too, particularly the cleverly structured one-issue story "Ominous Tidings Expressed as Four-Part Harmony," in which 4 separate stories play out with one panel of each of them on each page. In between the original 18-issue Supreme Power series and the prematurely cancelled follow-up Squadron Supreme, there was a break in which JMS wrote a fairly boring Hyperion miniseries (with Dan Jurgens/Klaus Janson art that's pretty awkward-looking in comparison to main artist Gary Frank's slick stylings) and Daniel Way wrote a lame Nighthawk series (with nice Steve Dillon art) that just continually belabors the character's origins as a black version of Batman. There's nothing earth-shattering here even at the peak of the original series, but as a whole it's not bad.

Ultimate Power (Bendis/JMS/Loeb & Greg Land) - A crossover between JMS's Supreme Power universe and the Ultimate universe, a 9-issue miniseries with 3 issues each written by Bendis, JMS, and Jeph Loeb. And it's really lousy. Not quite Ultimates 3/Ultimatum lousy - though this series is partly lead-up to that event - but definitely not good. It has a promising idea, and there are some sparks in the early issues (written by Bendis), but it quickly goes off the rails. Reed Richards, trying once again to cure his friend Ben Grimm, sends off probes into parallel dimensions, and this seemingly causes widespread destruction in the Supreme Power universe when one of these probes brings along an interdimensional parasite. This triggers much dimension-hopping and fighting between the Squadron Supreme and, well, most of the Ultimate heroes. So far so good. Except that after this set-up, virtually nothing happens for 9 issues except one ludcrious fight scene after another. It's the most content-free book imaginable, with just page after page of battles, and virtually no characterization or real plotting or anything of substance whatsoever. Total squandered potential. And Land's art is just abysmal, some of his worst ever: all the women look like they've been traced from the same porno shoot, distinguishable only by their particular color of fetish wear, and the proportions of the ubiquitous battle scenes are frequently off because Land is clearly just mashing together tracings and "references" from incompatible sources and not bothering to adjust the scales. It's hideous and stupid, and even Loeb's arrival for the last 3 issues doesn't dumb down the book TOO much because it was pretty damn dumb before that point.

Ultimate Doomsday Trilogy (Brian Michael Bendis & Rafa Sandoval) - The next big Ultimate event in the chain after Ultimate Power and Ultimatum, but unlike those, this doesn't suck. Like Ellis' Galactus saga, this is split into 3 separate miniseries, though there's less rationale for it here, as this is really just one big 12-issue story with little decisive break between the installments. Questions of format aside, it's good stuff, fun and splashy and, crucially, full of both interesting character moments and some actual honest-to-goodness shocks and thrills. It's basically the continuation of the Fantastic Four's storyline after Ultimatum, with a healthy dose of Spider-Man and Spider-Woman as well. Sandoval's art is really nice, bright and cartoony, perfectly suited for both the big action showpieces and the quieter, melancholy character moments in between - and the nature of this story, which I won't spoil, dictates a certain amount of sadness threaded in between the quippy Bendis dialogue and the epic fight scenes. My one quibble is that I wish there were more meat on the back end - once the villain is revealed, not enough time is given over to really unfurling the motivations and mysteries at work here. If, say, the reveal had been shifted earlier in the story, or if the last miniseries had a couple of extra issues to explore things in greater depth, this could have been fleshed out into something truly fantastic. As is, it's still quite good, and in many ways a refreshing change after a bunch of lackluster Ultimate stories.

Grouchy

02-25-2013, 11:53 PM

Jesus Fucking Christ, From Hell.

I think this is my favorite thing Alan Moore has ever done.

ledfloyd

02-26-2013, 12:03 AM

Jesus Fucking Christ, From Hell.

I think this is my favorite thing Alan Moore has ever done.
I felt that way until I read Promethea, but From Hell is still a super close second.

number8

02-27-2013, 03:32 PM

Cannot wait.

http://i.imgur.com/p75py1F.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Az3UyzH.jpg http://i.imgur.com/QUtttle.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7eputpL.jpg

ledfloyd

02-28-2013, 12:40 AM

I'll say it.

Happy was terrible. That ending was a whole lot of nothing. Why the hell did you write this, Grant?
Yeah, what the fuck?

It began reading like Garth Ennis pastiche and just devolved from there.

number8

02-28-2013, 01:46 AM

Speaking of Alan Moore... Nemo Heart of Ice!

Sven

02-28-2013, 04:29 AM

Speaking of Alan Moore... Nemo Heart of Ice!

Two minutes ago, shoved this book in wife's face and said "look!"

She doesn't care as much as I do.

number8

02-28-2013, 02:33 PM

Two minutes ago, shoved this book in wife's face and said "look!"

She doesn't care as much as I do.

I loved Century and its pop culture madness, but it's really nice going back to obscure Victorian references that I'm excited to google and read more about. I love finding the in-jokes that you only get after you know the context, like that crack about the Steam Men of the Prairies.

Sven

02-28-2013, 02:40 PM

I loved Century and its pop culture madness, but it's really nice going back to obscure Victorian references that I'm excited to google and read more about.

For sure. As a reader most thrilled by Century: 1910, I can't wait to engage.

Sven

02-28-2013, 05:01 PM

Box full of Delano comics was supposed to arrive. It didn't. I'm dying. I need.

Sven

03-01-2013, 02:39 AM

Nemo Heart of Ice!

This was amazing, by the way.

number8

03-01-2013, 12:32 PM

Yes.

sevenarts

03-01-2013, 05:36 PM

My Ultimate Universe readthrough continues...

Ultimate Avengers/New Ultimates (Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, & various artists) - Following Ultimatum, Millar returned to the franchise he'd started with Ultimate Avengers, a set of 3 miniseries about a black-ops version of the Ultimates. Meanwhile, Loeb picked up the thread of his story, such as it is, in New Ultimates. Millar tries desperately to ignore everything Loeb was doing - at no point does this ever feel like the world has been devastated by the events of Loeb's recent books - but the spark of Millar's initial Ultimates run just isn't there. His first miniseries is pretty good, with Cap squaring off against the Red Skull, with a nice twist that makes this version of the Skull an especially great nemesis. Unfortunately, the ending sabotages the story a bit by giving the Skull a poignant motivation for his actions that frankly makes no sense with anything else that happened. It's a sign of things to come, because the next 2 miniseries Millar wrote are shallow and hollow, simple exercises in superhero action with none of the deeper shadings that Millar, for all his bombast, brought to the earlier Ultimates books. The art throughout is great, especially Leinil Francis Yu's eye-popping work on the Ghost Rider-centric second miniseries, but Yu (and Carlos Pacheco and Steve Dillon) can't distract from the sense that this is Ultimates-by-numbers, a huge leap in quality from Loeb's lame stuff but still nothing special in its own right. Of course, Loeb still makes Millar look good by comparison since his New Ultimates is a continuation of the stupidity of his previous Ultimates work; it's a whole lot of effort expended to bring Thor back to life, and that's about the only thing that sticks here. Frank Cho's art is typically a pleasure to look at, with its particular cheesecakey charms, but it's not enough, especially since the coloring, which is nowhere near as bad as Ultimates 3 but still looks ugly, robs Cho of some of his charm. After all this stuff wrapped, Millar pitted the 2 teams against one another in a final miniseries, which is OK (and ties in to Bendis' "Death of Spider-Man") but nothing too special. Some nice twisty Fury stuff in there, though, and it's better than the vampires arc of Ultimate Avengers, and I like that Millar continues to utterly ignore Loeb's work even when drawing on a team assembled only in Loeb's previous series. Whatever, it's big dumb superhero action and it's fine if unexceptional at that.

Ultimate Spider-Man (Brian Michael Bendis & various artists) - So I returned to Bendis' USM after Ultimatum and it's still the most consistently entertaining Ultimate book. Especially in the all-too-brief period of ~20 issues in between Ultimatum and the "Death of Spider-Man" storyline. In those issues, Bendis crafts a dazzlingly fun new status quo in which Peter's supporting cast grows closer and denser, with Peter sharing his house with Gwen, Aunt May, Iceman and the Human Torch, with MJ and Kitty still revolving around them all. It's such a blast, really fresh and original and exciting. It's kind of a shame that this status quo had to be shaken up so quickly, because I for one could've kept reading this particular incarnation of this series for another 100+ issues, easily. Nevertheless, Bendis does a good job with the death arc, and it's exceedingly emotional to see Peter getting his life together only to have it cut short in a devastating fashion - there are quite a few moments in this arc that actually brought me to tears, something that happens all too seldom with any kind of art, but Bendis had done such a good job of getting me invested in this character, in this particular version of Spidey, that it hits really hard. He then introduces a new character as a new Spidey, and to his credit quickly makes Miles Morales nearly as interesting and fun to watch as Peter was, and so far I'm enjoying the new USM very much. Throughout all these later arcs, Bendis switches artists a lot in comparison to the stability of Bagley (who returns for the death arc, appropriately enough) earlier in the run, but for the most part the art is great, and arguably most of these artists are better than Bagley anyway. Certainly I love Sara Pichelli, who came on during some of Peter's last issues and draws a lot of Miles' adventures, and who has a great realistic style well-suited to this new Spidey's grounding in a somewhat realistic urban environment. Chris Samnee draws a few issues, always a treat, and David Lafuente, who has a manga-esque style, is probably the least of the bunch but still not bad. It seems like no matter what happens, USM is always a pleasure to read, and in around 200+ issues of Ultimate Spidey that Bendis has written so far, there are very few clunkers, very few moments or stretches where this book is anything other than compelling or packed with great characters and great stories.

number8

03-01-2013, 08:02 PM

I thought Millar's return was almost as bad as Loeb's, although not as haphazard. Instead of the broad political satire that was the germ of the series, he turned it into the standard "Villain will literally rape you for hours and then kill your baby" Mark Millar story. What was even the point of the Nick Fury backstory where he systematically sleeps with his wife's entire family and close friends?

sevenarts

03-04-2013, 12:40 PM

Nothing's anywhere near as bad as Loeb's Ultimates, but Millar's return is definitely a pale shadow of his original run on the title. Ultimate Avengers is very shallow, but at least provides some pleasurable and well-drawn action, even if one expects way more out of Millar's Ultimates. Anyway, here's a bit more Ultimate reading. Almost done now...

Ultimate Thor (Jonathan Hickman & Carlos Pacheco) - Hickman takes on an origin story for the Ultimate version of Thor, one that takes place before Millar's original Ultimates and fills in some gaps about the character and the nature of his ambiguous status as a god/human. The thematic throughline (and there's almost always one in Hickman's work) is faith - it's all about a god starting to believe in himself. It's pretty good, and as usual Hickman stirs up a lot of intrigue and layered mysteries, but it seems like a bit of a waste of his talents. It feels like to have much impact, it really needs to be the intro to something longer and more substantial about the character - and Hickman does pick up that thread a little in his Ultimates series with some echoes of the Balder/Thor relationship seen here - but on its own it's nice but not too meaty. Some cool stuff along the way though, like having Loki allied with the Nazis and storming Asgard with frost giants dressed in military uniforms, and Pacheco is a fine choice to illustrate Hickman's epic imagery.

Ultimate Captain America (Jason Aaron & Ron Garney) - Aaron is a perfect choice to tackle the hard-edged, meaner Ultimate version of Cap, and he clearly has a lot of fun with this gritty, punchy little miniseries. Cap is abducted by a Vietnam-era super-soldier, a Captain America who comes from a much more morally confused and ambiguous time in America's history, a man who cannot depend on Steve Rogers' moral certainty and faith, who is instead shaken to his core by the evils perpetuated in his country's name. It's an interesting set-up that pits different visions of America against one another. Probably the most interesting thing about it is the ending, in which Aaron confronts Cap's spirituality and religious convictions - it's rare for comics to treat religion so seriously and without a trace of mockery but at the same time to introduce substantial criticism, to deal with an earnestly religious character and wrestle with his faith without entirely dismissing it or endorsing it. It's good stuff, with a dark sense of humor and a strangely serious examination of patriotism and faith beneath its violence.

Ultimate Hawkeye (Hickman & Rafa Sandoval) - Hickman's usually dependable, but this series and this character are clearly not well-suited to his strengths. The first 3 issues are surprisingly generic, with lots of fighting and some perfunctory bits and pieces of Hawkeye's history as he leads a SHIELD team into a superhuman battle in Southeast Asia. There's just not much there, and Hickman seems to have nothing to say about Hawkeye himself, no real insight to provide about the character. He's just there, shooting things. The fourth and final issue abruptly becomes more of a typical Hickman comic, crammed with big ideas, remaking the Celestials, the Eternals, and Xorn in a grand way, but again, Hawkeye is just kind of there for no more compelling reason than that his name's on the cover. Like Hickman's Thor but to an even greater degree, all of this is basically prologue to a bigger story, which was in fact running concurrently in his Ultimates. This is basically an expanded backstory for some of the things that happen in the early issues of that book, where the resonances of the fourth issue's revelations have far greater reverberations. Here, it just ends, and despite the frenzied, weirdly compelling final issue, this is one of Hickman's weaker works.

Sven

03-04-2013, 01:07 PM

Anybody read Delano/Pugh's two part story in Legends of the DC Universe? It's about a punkish young kid on Apokolips who tags Darkseid statues and it's like poetry.

sevenarts

03-05-2013, 12:52 PM

And here's the last of my Ultimate updates. It was pretty fun catching up on all this stuff. A surprising amount of it was quite good. I know people are very down on the Ultimate Universe these days but I had a good time with it all, and I hope USM at least continues for a good long time with Bendis at the helm.

Ultimate Comics: Ultimates (Jonathan Hickman, Sam Humphries & various artists) - Hickman's brief run on this series (12 issues, the last few co-written with Humphries) is simply the best this book has been since Millar's first two series. It's the first time since then that The Ultimates has crackled with this much energy, that a writer has totally nailed the high-octane/high-concept thrill of this book when it's firing on all cylinders as it's meant to be. In this brief span, Hickman entirely shakes up the foundations of the Ultimate universe, and does so in a way that totally puts to shame Loeb's clumsy devastation; the scale of the destruction and chaos far exceeds anything that happened in Ultimatum, but here it's never cheap or unearned. Instead, there's a dazzling sense that anything can happen in these pages, that the world is being turned on its end and thrilling concepts are coming face to face with one another for the first time. It's vital, action-packed, and has just enough human-scale moments to ground the big science-fiction thrills. The characters and concepts set up in Hickman's otherwise lackluster Ultimate Hawkeye come together in a big way here, clashing with the equally audacious concept of Reed Richards' "City". And it's all drawn with massive drama and beauty by Esad Ribic. Just great stuff, and it's too bad that Hickman didn't stick around, though now he's applying some similar ideas over in his current Avengers run. Without Hickman and Ribic around, the book immediately loses that sense of vitality and propulsion; seriously, there are very few writers in comics today who can match Hickman's energy when he's fully engaged in something high-concept like this. Humphries tries his best, and introduces a bold new storytelling choice of his own, but the pacing, fast as it is, feels downright sluggish in comparison to Hickman's stuff, and the excitement seriously dies down. And while anyone would struggle to follow Ribic, for the most part the constantly changing art teams on Humphries' issues are a big disappointment.

Ultimate Human (Warren Ellis & Cary Nord) - A neat little miniseries that I procrastinated on because the premise, as I'd seen it described, seemed so unpromising, a mere confrontation between Iron Man and the Hulk. I should have known better with Ellis at the helm; this is no dumb action-fest, but a rather thoughtful and interesting examination of the drive to expand humanity beyond its natural limitations and capabilities. This idea is embodied in three men: Bruce Banner, whose drive to be better turned him into a monster, all brute force and no intelligence; Pete Wisdom, who makes himself into an opposite sort of monster, massively expanding his mind while crippling his body; and Tony Stark, who represents a sort of ideal form, his body and mind tweaked and expanded in subtle ways, his intelligence and strength married to technology, a real embodiment of the future, but still haunted and stifled by his very human weaknesses. Ellis plays off the echoes between these three very different men, all of them unified by the desire to be better, by their dissatisfaction with the vanilla human form and the lengths they've gone to transcend it. Genetic engineering and science-gone-mad are driving forces in the Ultimate Universe, even more than in mainstream Marvel books, and this is arguably the Ultimate U's most substantial and sustained consideration of science's desire to expand humanity. There's a surprising amount of poignancy in between the action, with Banner and Wisdom (AKA the Leader) set up as opposites joined by their self-destruction, their ambition warping and corrupting both their bodies and their minds.

number8

03-05-2013, 01:00 PM

Ah, I didn't know they introduced Ultimate Pete Wisdom and made him The Leader. That's a pretty interesting twist. I wonder why Ellis decided to do that. My guess is he wanted The Leader as a contrast to Hulk, but wanted to write his pet wiseass British guy instead of Sam Sterns, heh.

Pete Wisdom should really get more play in the Marvel U.

sevenarts

03-05-2013, 01:19 PM

Yeah, he's only in that series though. Ellis uses him not only to contrast/mirror the Hulk but also as a way into talking about US/British relations, the European union, and nationalism versus internationalism in general.

It's a good mini.

number8

03-05-2013, 02:34 PM

If I had $140 to spare...

http://www.goshlondon.com/heart-of-ice-exclusive-gosh-print/

Acapelli

03-05-2013, 05:38 PM

Pete Wisdom should really get more play in the Marvel U.
really hoping cornell's return to marvel leads him back to working with captain britain, pete wisdom and the gang

slqrick

03-06-2013, 02:05 AM

sevenarts

03-06-2013, 12:34 PM

I'm a bit baffled by the story and what the deal is after a few issues, but the art on Prophet is truly amazing. Spectacularly drawn, and definitely a book where the colorist earns his money. I'm enjoying.

Really an amazing book. Graham throws the reader into the deep end without regard for whether they can follow along, and he's always bringing up new concepts and characters as though we should be familiar with them already when in fact he's just mentioned them for the first time. It doesn't exactly get less dense or baffling, but gradually at least some of what he's up to here becomes clearer.

Dukefrukem

03-06-2013, 12:55 PM

Anyone else think the Walking Dead is really dragging with this Negan guy and the Saviors?

Ezee E

03-06-2013, 02:36 PM

Anyone else think the Walking Dead is really dragging with this Negan guy and the Saviors?

I haven't read a monthly issue since #101. After going from volume to volume, I feel that's the much better option for Walking Dead. As mentioned in another thread, there's an entire volume that I'm sure would've been horrible to read month to month for the lack of action that happens, but as a volume, it reads very well as each character basically changes throughout, despite "feeling safe."

I wonder if they'll implement Negan into the show.

Dukefrukem

03-06-2013, 02:40 PM

Well they gotta get to Alexandria first before they do a Negan /Savior saga.

sevenarts

03-06-2013, 05:26 PM

number8

03-06-2013, 05:54 PM

Anybody have $1,000 to spare? Rafael Grampa is accepting commissions.

number8

03-06-2013, 07:08 PM

This should be bigger news than it is. The fact that there's no mainstream coverage on this is shameful.

ComiXology just introduced a Submit feature. Any of you amateur comic creators can now just as easily get your digital comic sold and distributed by arguably the second biggest comic book distributor in America after Diamond. This is a real gamechanger for indie comics.

http://blog.comixology.com/2013/03/06/comixologys-submit-self-publishing-platform-for-independent-comics-creators-poised-to-transform-the-comic-book-industry/

EyesWideOpen

03-07-2013, 12:52 AM

Now that I'm done with the Ultimate Universe, my next big reading project is going to be a big DC read, covering all the Crisis books alongside some crucial 2000s DC runs. I've never read a ton of DC stuff, tending to focus on Marvel and indie books, but I want to explore the key DC material of the last decade or so. Any recommendations? Here's what I'm planning on tackling so far:

Crisis on Infinite Earths
Identity Crisis
Infinite Crisis
52
a re-read of Morrison's Batman and Final Crisis
lots of Geoff Johns (The Flash, JSA, Action Comics, Green Lantern)
Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman, Superman and Checkmate
Mark Waid's JLA
Jeph Loeb's Superman/Batman
Batman - Hush, Under the Hood, Death and the Maidens

If you're planning on reading 52 I highly recommend reading the trades. Great positive and negative comments/thoughts on every issue by the creators. Stuff they admitted they screwed up on, characters they couldn't use so had to put someone else in, etc. You pretty much never see extras like that in comics.

Other rec's:
The OMAC Project needs to be in with your Rucka reading.
I highly recommend the Villains United miniseries, special, and the Secret Six series it turned into. Great Gail Simone stuff.
Gotham Central - One of my favorite comic series ever.

sevenarts

03-07-2013, 12:36 PM

Thanks for the recs, EWO. I'm right there with you on Gotham Central, it's the best. I've read that a few times over. DC should court Rucka back to do a New 52 version now that he's left Marvel. (Brubaker too, but he seems better off doing Fatale and whatever other Image stuff he's got in the works.)

I already had OMAC Project in with Infinite Crisis but will definitely add Villains United as well.

number8

03-07-2013, 02:28 PM

Sex was a pretty good setup. Apparently every issue will say "Collector's Item" on the cover. Ah, Joe Casey.

sevenarts

03-08-2013, 01:25 PM

Finished up my overview of Kirby's 70s DC work, and then started my big DC read-through with the 1985 book that started DC's endless succession of crises.

Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth (Jack Kirby) - DC asked Jack Kirby to make something to capitalize on the success of Planet of the Apes, and Kirby obliged with a shameless rip-off with a few wrinkles of his own. With Kirby's own series getting cancelled left and right, his schedule was suddenly clear for a new project, so he decided to write and draw it himself, and did so for 37 issues (plus 3 he only drew), a far longer and more successful run than any of the more original ideas that Kirby had developed during his 70s tenure at DC. It's pretty slow to get started, and the early issues are rather repetitious, introducing Kamandi, one of the few intelligent humans left on an Earth ravaged by disaster and now run by competing tribes of intelligent bears, gorillas, lions, tigers, etc. Kirby sticks close to formula early on, having Kamandi continually trapped by these animals, only to escape or get rescued from danger by an ally. Issues #9-10 are early highlights, introducing a barrage of crazy concepts on every page, with Kamandi and his pals besieged by giant killer bats, a large-headed mutant (looking rather like Marvel's MODOK, another Kirby creation) with mental powers, and a curiously anthropomorphized giant germ bluntly called morticoccus. The story climaxes with some scenes of bone-chilling horror that recall Kirby's origins in the old pulpy horror/monster mags.

It's the weird details emanating from Kirby's imagination that makes this series worth reading. Issue #15, which for some reason opens with a tiger prince sipping a juice box, concerns Kamandi and his animal friends searching for, no kidding, the legendary Watergate tapes, only to be tripped up by gorillas armed with surveillance equipment, who then subject them to "hearings" held in the ruins of the US Capitol Building. Kirby has plenty of surprises up his sleeve: one story, which starts off as a typically goofy Kirby premise featuring throwback 20s gangsters, ends with a devastatingly melancholy few pages in which Kamandi's loneliness is driven home with brutal finality. Issue #29 is another strong one, with Kamandi finding the remnants of a certain legendary DC superhero, the only time when the mainstream DC universe intrudes (in the best possible way) during Kirby's tenure on the title. There are good moments like this right along, and Kirby's art is generally as ever strong as ever, with a few panels here and there especially standing out as great examples of his particular warped genius. On the whole, though, the Kirby genius is sprinkled amidst a lot of mediocre and repetitive plotting, and towards the end of Kirby's run, before he left DC and turned the reins of Kamandi over to Gerry Conway, it was starting to get pretty stale, with a rambling multi-issue plot about a fire-based alien and her UFO. It's by some distance the weakest of Kirby's 70s DC projects, which makes it ironic that it was the most successful, but it still has lots to recommend it.

Crisis On Infinite Earths (Marv Wolfman & George Perez) - This was the start of DC's modern era, a huge crossover event that completely remade the DC universe and inspired many of the big events that would take place in the company's comics for the next 25+ years. DC's history and continuity, far more than their competitor Marvel's, was always incredibly complex and convoluted, with multiple versions of various characters and parallel universes that represented the many smaller companies that had gradually been absorbed into the shared DC continuity. Crisis sought to fix all this, to streamline and simplify DC continuity, to consolidate or eliminate the multiple versions of characters and worlds, to bring it all together into one, presumably simpler continuity. To do so, they concocted, of course, a ridiculously complex and mind-bending 12-issue event that stars nearly every character DC owned at the time, and that spans all the alternate universes that the event was dedicated to eliminating. It's dense and at times utterly baffling to a DC newbie, and its massive cast is full of faces that are likely to be familiar only to hardcore DC fans. But it's also really compelling, much to my surprise, and it's a much more entertaining read than I expected it to be. Wolfman's story is sprawling and ambitious, but despite the huge cast and cosmic stakes, there are great human-scale character beats spread throughout the epic, especially at the midway point, when an entire issue is dedicated to the Flash and the curiously pitiful villain Psycho Pirate.

Perez's artwork is really nice too, slick and suitably epic. The cramped, dense layouts sometimes do an effective job of conveying the story's manic pace and sprawl, but at other times they're just cluttered and difficult to follow, an inelegant jumble of panels. At his best, Perez can cram a page with details, and uses all those tiny reaction panels and small insets to convey the multitude of perspectives and layers that epitomizes this saga - it's probably best in the first issue, with Pariah hopping around from universe to universe as they're each destroyed in turn, but Perez displays flashes of brilliance throughout. That he just as often verges into incoherence is perhaps unavoidable given the scope of this tale and the sheer amount of stuff he has to cram into every page. The story itself is over-long, too. There's no way this needed to be 12 issues long - after the Anti-Monitor is defeated the first time, there's a lag and a few issues dedicated to more-or-less unrelated fights between heroes and villains before everybody gets back to the main threat again, and all of that is pretty dull and pointless. Wolfman's not the most subtle writer, either, and when he aims for pathos - as in Supergirl's grand sacrifice or Uncle Sam's speech to prepare the heroes for battle - he often goes overboard with the sappy melodrama. Most of the time, though, his purple prose is well-suited to this story's overblown action.

This is far from a perfect book, to say the least. It's often silly, and at times it grinds to a halt in order to deliver some obvious editorial rejiggering, since after all one of the stated aims of the whole project was to remake and smooth over certain characters and parts of the DC Universe. This becomes especially obvious towards the end, as some of the more problematic characters are killed off or shunted off into alternate realities - after all, it was pretty obvious DC wouldn't want a universe with 2 Supermen or Wonder Women running around at the same time, in the same universe. Still, for all its problems, there's a real sense of energy and feeling in this book, which prevents it from feeling like a mere exercise in corporate restructuring. It's weird and epic and full of good moments. For its impact and influence on the future of DC's comics, it would be an important book no matter what, but I was happy to learn that it's also a pretty good book.

Sven

03-08-2013, 04:37 PM

Latest Crossed collection elevates survival horror even more dramatically than the last. Lapham researches the flight impulse with goosebumpy implications and Hine mirrors bloodlust with moral oppression and artistic hedonism. These stories are so fascinating.

Sven

03-08-2013, 04:37 PM

Sex was a pretty good setup. Apparently every issue will say "Collector's Item" on the cover. Ah, Joe Casey.

Decided to forgo this one. Flipped through it and found myself combative to its pleasures.

number8

03-08-2013, 05:32 PM

Decided to forgo this one. Flipped through it and found myself combative to its pleasures.

I don't know what that means.

Sven

03-08-2013, 06:02 PM

I don't know what that means.

Me neither, really. Despite the decent Casey script, the neat lettering, flashy colors, and slick illustration, I found myself perusing the book with a sour dissatisfaction.

Neclord

03-08-2013, 06:40 PM

http://instagram.com/p/Wm0pkbLzbt/

ledfloyd

03-08-2013, 06:43 PM

http://instagram.com/p/Wm0pkbLzbt/
Seaguy!?

number8

03-08-2013, 08:22 PM

Mike and Laura Allred's house has been broken into. All computers stolen, and it seems like they didn't do much backing up of a lot of files and will have to start from scratch on a lot of projects. He's tweeting updates from the police station right now:

https://twitter.com/AllredMD

number8

03-08-2013, 08:23 PM

Wow this is sad:

310119043367596032

Sven

03-08-2013, 08:49 PM

The Bling Ring is downgrading.

Acapelli

03-08-2013, 09:55 PM

dang that really sucks. dude is my favorite comic book artist hands down

slqrick

03-09-2013, 01:00 AM

Wow that's really shitty. I haven't seen a lot of his stuff, but his FF art is pure joy in book form.

sevenarts

03-09-2013, 01:13 AM

Wow that's really shitty. I haven't seen a lot of his stuff, but his FF art is pure joy in book form.

Get everything Madman you can possibly find. He's a genius.

sevenarts

03-14-2013, 01:06 PM

Read through a whole bunch of JLA stuff:

Justice League: A Midsummer's Nightmare (Mark Waid/Fabian Nicieza & Jeff Johnson/Darick Robertson) - A 3-issue miniseries designed as an intro to Grant Morrison's new JLA series, bringing together the most iconic Justice League lineup to face the threat of a world that's been drastically redesigned, where all the established heroes are powerless while nearly everyone else on Earth has been given powers. This kind of stuff would be a recurring throughline in Morrison's subsequent series, which often had the JLA facing threats that remade the world in various ways or submerged the JLA in dreams or visions or alternate realities. It would all be handled much more interestingly by Morrison, of course. This series, with its dual creators on both the writing and art side, is a bit of a jumble, and the villain, when he's finally revealed, is a typically silly 90s-style character who, tellingly, has never appeared again outside this mini, though Morrison does make a few references to this story in his own run. Still, there are nice moments along the way, most notably a great little scene where Superman gently, almost romantically, wakes Wonder Woman out of her dream state by inviting her to fly with him. Waid would go on to do some really fun JLA stuff himself, and there are frequent flashes of his humor and heart in this story, but it's pretty slight and not even close to being as good as the Morrison and Waid JLA material that would follow it.

JLA v1 #1-41 (Grant Morrison & various artists) - I read Morrison's JLA many years ago, when I was first getting into comics, but I'm glad I decided to revisit it now. At the time, I thought it was fun but not up there with Morrison's best work. It's more straightforward, in some ways, and more conventional: Morrison was set loose to do his thing on fringe characters like Animal Man or Doom Patrol, but the JLA, especially this configuration, are the big guns of the DC universe, and Morrison can't get quite as out there as he did on the smaller books he'd previously tackled. This was his big step-up at DC, certainly the biggest property he'd yet handled for DC, and here he proved that he could tell big stories with Superman, Batman and the rest of the icons, that he could be trusted to steward more than minor, forgotten C-listers. In retrospect, though, this is still very much stamped with Morrison's vision and personality, and the seeds are planted here, already, for a lot of the stories he'd be telling in the next decade as he ascended to be one of DC's top creative minds. Particularly in the epic "Rock of Ages" arc, with its mind-bending time travel narrative and its focus on Darkseid, the stage is set for Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis. Moreover, far more than his previous Arkham Asylum graphic novel, this run establishes the personality of Morrison's Batman and foreshadows his eventual and still-running Batman saga. It's not all top-level work - the Prometheus and Ultramarine Corps arcs stand out as rather uninspired - but at its best it's some great comics. "Rock of Ages" especially is just jaw-dropping, an utterly unpredictable narrative that, in 6 densely packed issues, shifts from a typical heroes vs. villains set-up into a crazed, reality-warping cosmic epic with the heroes hurtling across time and space, plunging into alternate realities and then leaping back into the present for a final battle that's as much slapstick as fisticuffs (thanks in large part to Plastic Man, who Morrison uses really well throughout his run). It's one of Morrison's very best stories, and worth reading this run for those 6 issues alone. My one big complaint is Howard Porter, who drew most of Morrison's issues, and whose style is way too conventional and boring to really do justice to the writer's work. Porter's Wonder Woman, especially, is a distorted Barbie-esque piece of cheesecake, while his muscled supermen bear a lot of unfortunate influence from the 90s Image aesthetic. Still, the boring art doesn't ruin an otherwise very fun series, and the best stuff here, like "Rock of Ages" and the equally bonkers final story, "World War III," has all the energy and propulsion that always characterizes Morrison's best superhero work.

DC One Million (Grant Morrison & Val Semeiks) - A big crossover event that impacted most of DC's titles, which all had issues numbered 1,000,000 to celebrate the occasion. But the core of it all is Morrison's 4-issue miniseries plus the issue of his JLA that tied in to it - it's basically a JLA story at heart, an extension of his run on that book. And it's really good, a time-bending narrative on the level of "Rock of Ages." Morrison's great at stirring up a feeling of chaos and impending doom, then solving it all at the last moment with a combination of cosmic feats and good old human wit. The Justice Legion of the 853rd Century travels back in time, sending the JLA to the future to celebrate Superman's emergence from the sun after 15,000 years spent hibernating in its flames. And it all goes crazy from there, as an evil mechanical sun unleashes a virus on the past while multiple versions of Vandal Savage assemble evil plots. The fourth and final issue of the miniseries builds to a crescendo of insanity and then Morrison unleashes one thrill after another, leaving the reader tingly and happy - Morrison's action climaxes tend to be as emotional as they are visceral, and that's especially true here. He'd revisit a lot of this stuff in All-Star Superman, to even more heartwarming effect, but the seeds are already planted here, and multiple images from this issue's climax will stick with me for some time, like a sun overlaid with a Green Lantern symbol or a silver woman being assembled from a strand of DNA to be reunited with her golden man. It's a blast, a typically convoluted and frenzied Morrisonian event comic, with an intentionally fragmentary feeling that, I suspect, would not be entirely erased by picking up all the tie-ins not written by Morrison. It's also beautifully illustrated by Val Semeiks, who's a major step up from Howard Porter's work on JLA - he's got a great grasp for the cosmic, explosive beauty of Morrison's imagery, and his style melds well with the computer graphics of the issue design and the constant barrage of text (from multiple viewpoints) through which Morrison tells this story.

JLA: Year One (Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn & Barry Kitson) - Published during Morrison's run on the main JLA title, this 12-issue series looks at the group's origins and early years, with a different, somewhat less iconic version of the team - no Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman, with Black Canary subbed in instead. It's a total blast, just fantastic superhero comics with a real Silver Age vibe. Waid and Augustyn pack each issue with plenty of humor, and place the emphasis squarely on the characters and their interactions, developing each one in relation to the others, giving each a distinct voice and personality. It's a model for what basic, fun superhero comics should be - nothing flashy, nothing deconstructionist or "grim and gritty," just a series of colorful threats providing an action context for these characters to crack wise and spar and air their personal troubles. Kitson's art is excellent, as well, detailed and realistic but with enough flair to sell the more ridiculous moments, particularly during the Doom Patrol arc, with its outlandish villains and their sinister plan to steal the JLA's limbs.

JLA: Earth 2 (Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely) - A final capstone to Morrison's JLA, a graphic novel that reintroduces, with surprisingly little fuss or fanfare, the concept of alternate realities that had been eliminated back in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Indeed, the book focuses on the Crime Syndicate, who had been killed off in the opening pages of Crisis - an alternate version of the Justice League from a universe where everything is the opposite of the heroes' universe, where good is bad and bad is good. In this world, Lex Luthor is the only hero, bravely opposing the evil of the Crime Syndicate's twisted analogues for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash and Green Lantern. It's a fun little story, brisk and relatively straightforward compared to Morrison's super-dense JLA epics. The appeal here is mainly in seeing Quitely's crisp, iconic depictions of the Justice League and their opposites, and in Morrison's graceful examination of the idea behind these opposing worlds. It's a neat twist that the Justice League can't win in a world where good is bad, while the Crime Syndicate equally can't function in the "real" DC universe, where their evil doesn't function or fit in nearly as well as it did in their own world. It's obvious that Morrison misses the multiverse and its unique alternate realities, and the message of this book is a rebuttal to Crisis, which collapsed the multiverse and brought characters from different universes together into a shared reality. Morrison seems to be saying that this shouldn't happen, that these characters only make sense in their own realities, their own spaces, and that trying to force all these different characters together into a single world only robs them of some of what made them unique in the first place.

JLA v1 #43-60 (Mark Waid & various artists) - It couldn't have been easy to follow Morrison's run on this title, but Waid does a fine job, expanding on both the weirdness of Morrison's run and the bright, bold tone of Waid's own earlier JLA stories. Not only had Waid done the Year One series, but he'd filled in for Morrison a few times and done a pretty good job - most notably in a great issue that brings back the White Martians, teasing his own eventual work with them, and has probably the best naughty use of Plastic Man ever. The opening story of Waid's own run is a particular highlight, the "Tower of Babel" arc in which Ra's Al Ghul steals Batman's files on the rest of the Justice League, including detailed plans for taking down every member of the team. This is the start of a theme that runs all through these issues - the seeds for which were first planted in one of Waid's fine fill-in issues during Morrison's run - with the JLA constantly being divided and split apart. At times this division is literal, as one arc finds most of the League members split into two, with their secret identities and their superhero selves both taking on separate physical forms. Despite the paranoid themes, this is fun and freaky superhero action, all about body transformation and warped realities, like a lot of the Silver Age stories that inform both Morrison's and Waid's work on this series. It's good stuff, and a substantial portion of Waid's run is illustrated by Bryan Hitch, which is an added pleasure, his richly textured art and realistic figures providing some heft to the craziness going on in these stories.

Acapelli

03-14-2013, 04:06 PM

sevenarts, just wanna say that i really appreciate your writeups, even though i may not have anything to add

reading them makes me realize there's a surprising amount of comics that i haven't read

Sven

03-14-2013, 04:31 PM

It's not all top-level work - ...Ultramarine Corps arcs stand out as rather uninspired

Madness. In a series defined by zaniness, interconnectivity, and staggered scope, the JLU mini is exemplar. Great characters, terrific McGuinness pencils, surreal fluxing of micro and macro planes... classic Morrison.

Did you read the JLA/WildC.A.T.S crossover? Also illustrated by Semeiks and is one of my favorite early Morrison issues.

sevenarts

03-14-2013, 05:05 PM

I haven't actually read the McGuiness stuff, which was published years later, yet - I was referring to the original Ultramarine arc from JLA, with the Shaggy Man and the introduction of those super-powered marines, it was mostly pretty mundane punch-em-up action. I like that even the arcs I wasn't crazy about paid off in the end, with General Eiling and Prometheus returning for the final story, but those initial stories weren't up to the level of everything surrounding them.

I didn't read the WildC.A.T.S. crossover either, I'll have to check that out. Can't remember if I read that back when I originally read this series, either, that one might be new to me.

Sven

03-14-2013, 05:41 PM

Sven

03-15-2013, 06:37 PM

Just realized, 24 hours later, that I was calling it "JLU" not "JLC". I forfeit my fancard.

number8

03-15-2013, 06:49 PM

Neither is correct. The series was called JLA Classified. Abbreviation should be JLAC.

Sven

03-15-2013, 07:13 PM

Neither is correct. The series was called JLA Classified. Abbreviation should be JLAC.

Boom. Cue number8 wit' da brainz.

slqrick

03-16-2013, 02:45 PM

JLA v1 #1-41 (Grant Morrison & various artists) - I read Morrison's JLA many years ago, when I was first getting into comics, but I'm glad I decided to revisit it now. At the time, I thought it was fun but not up there with Morrison's best work. It's more straightforward, in some ways, and more conventional: Morrison was set loose to do his thing on fringe characters like Animal Man or Doom Patrol, but the JLA, especially this configuration, are the big guns of the DC universe, and Morrison can't get quite as out there as he did on the smaller books he'd previously tackled. This was his big step-up at DC, certainly the biggest property he'd yet handled for DC, and here he proved that he could tell big stories with Superman, Batman and the rest of the icons, that he could be trusted to steward more than minor, forgotten C-listers. In retrospect, though, this is still very much stamped with Morrison's vision and personality, and the seeds are planted here, already, for a lot of the stories he'd be telling in the next decade as he ascended to be one of DC's top creative minds. Particularly in the epic "Rock of Ages" arc, with its mind-bending time travel narrative and its focus on Darkseid, the stage is set for Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis. Moreover, far more than his previous Arkham Asylum graphic novel, this run establishes the personality of Morrison's Batman and foreshadows his eventual and still-running Batman saga. It's not all top-level work - the Prometheus and Ultramarine Corps arcs stand out as rather uninspired - but at its best it's some great comics. "Rock of Ages" especially is just jaw-dropping, an utterly unpredictable narrative that, in 6 densely packed issues, shifts from a typical heroes vs. villains set-up into a crazed, reality-warping cosmic epic with the heroes hurtling across time and space, plunging into alternate realities and then leaping back into the present for a final battle that's as much slapstick as fisticuffs (thanks in large part to Plastic Man, who Morrison uses really well throughout his run). It's one of Morrison's very best stories, and worth reading this run for those 6 issues alone. My one big complaint is Howard Porter, who drew most of Morrison's issues, and whose style is way too conventional and boring to really do justice to the writer's work. Porter's Wonder Woman, especially, is a distorted Barbie-esque piece of cheesecake, while his muscled supermen bear a lot of unfortunate influence from the 90s Image aesthetic. Still, the boring art doesn't ruin an otherwise very fun series, and the best stuff here, like "Rock of Ages" and the equally bonkers final story, "World War III," has all the energy and propulsion that always characterizes Morrison's best superhero work.

I actually just read the first few arcs of JLA myself...just finished Rock of Ages. It really did live up to the hype. I was expecting a conventional, but cool, face off between the JLA and the Injustice League, and once all the time travel/Metron/Darkseid stuff kicked in, my mind was thoroughly blown. I kinda wanna read Final Crisis and stuff over now. What's really cool about Morrison's Batman is that, like you said, he planted a lot of seeds for his future run. Even small stuff like the Matches Malone alias that he brings out again in Batman Inc. is fun to recall.

I agree with you about the art though, that's what initially turned me off because of how utterly dated and ordinary superhero-y it looks. I think Morrison's best qualities on the book are being able to justify why every member is there, and how they would interact with the others. Green Lantern is still an up and comer and is worried about what Superman thinks of him, Green Arrow doesn't get how he'd fit in with all the superpowers, etc. The dysfunctional team dynamic mixed in with epic scale action sequences have rarely been done better.

Sven

03-16-2013, 06:13 PM

I will chime in to voice dissent on Porter/Dell's artwork. I think it's terrifically executed, Dell being one of comicdom's miracle inkers and Porter finely navigating a balance between silver and modern styles, all while saliently delivering a clear, dynamic visual translation of Morrison's ambitious scripts. I also really like Pat Garrahy's popping colors, an impressive blend of gradients and flats that highlight the mythic contours of Porter's statuesque figures.

June's DC solicits feature a whole lot of Porter covers and it looks like he has stylized a bit more in the passing years.

Grouchy

03-16-2013, 09:53 PM

Even small stuff like the Matches Malone alias that he brings out again in Batman Inc. is fun to recall.
I apologize in advance in case you know this, but Matches Malone is an established alias for Batman and not Morrison's creation.

I agree that Morrison's JLA are some great, great comics.

sevenarts

03-18-2013, 02:25 PM

Just one update this time, next time I'll have some JLA miscellany to cover.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow (Dennis O'Neil & various artists) - This is an important series, a landmark of comics history in which Dennis O'Neil, assisted most notably by penciller Neal Adams, transformed the Green Lantern series into a soapbox for social commentary and polemics, many of them voiced through GL's new costar, Green Arrow, who was recast as a modern-day leftist Robin Hood. It's a pretty astonishing transformation. Before #76, the first issue tagged as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, there was no regular writer on the Green Lantern ongoing, and O'Neil was just one of several writers doing an issue or two at a time, telling generic, disposable, instantly forgettable tales of GL facing off against monsters, aliens, robots, etc. There's nothing in the preceding dozen or so issues, including those written by O'Neil, to prepare one for #76's slap in the face, in which GL and GA face off against a corrupt landlord, and in which GL is famously confronted by a black man who accuses him of doing lots for aliens with purple or blue skin, but nothing for those on his own world with black skin. Immediately, the duo take off on a trip across America, accompanied by a disguised Guardian from Oa, encountering racism, poverty, drug use, and other social and political issues. By today's standards, O'Neil's writing is preachy, unsubtle, and often rather ludicrous, and he has a tendency for trotting out Nazi comparisons at the slightest provocation (including actual Nazis teaming up with corrupt capitalist employers). It's politics-for-dummies, in its way as simplistic and morally black-and-white as the GL vs. Sinestro stories that had earlier defined this title. But these are still important comics, elevating these characters beyond the repetitive, thematically threadbare stories that had previously contituted their monthly adventures, suggesting that comics, even superhero comics, could have real moral content and could deal with the real world, however clumsy these efforts often are at tackling these themes.

That sense of a stab at realism is aided in a big way by Neal Adams, whose grainy, gritty art is as much of a game-changer as O'Neil's new stories. With the first O'Neil/Adams issue, this immediately looks and feels like a whole different book, its new street-level themes mirrored in Adams' realistically rendered faces and love of shadowy textures. O'Neil, for his part, doesn't really maintain the same level of commitment throughout this sequence of issues. The initial burst of socially conscious stories lasts a mere four issues before the heroes are once again confronting cosmic menaces and supervillains, albeit with a pronounced allegorical undercurrent to it all. This synthesis is most powerful in a story that casts the villainous Black Hand as an agent of a sinister conspiracy to keep people docile through consumerism; elsewhere, O'Neil offers up muddled and incoherent satires of Nixon/Agnew and women's liberation, with the latter story nearly sabotaging the whole run by making feminists into (literal!!!) harpies.

But then comes probably the most infamous story of this series, the two-part tale in which Green Arrow's "ward" Speedy becomes a drug addict. It's easy to mock now, and there's no question that, like all of O'Neil's work in this period, there's a thread of camp outrageousness here, as well as an over-the-top preachiness that makes the moralizing speeches come across like an after-school special. At the same time, the story is remarkably candid about drug use, and remarkably sympathetic (given the tenor of the times) towards the addicts, who with exceptional self-awareness lay out their reasons for turning to drugs, saying that drugs help them forget the problems of their lives, help them ignore the racism and neglect they face from their elders and the rest of society. It's probably the most morally complex of the GL/GA stories, because though in the end the heroes catch the villain who's peddling the drugs, it feels like a pretty hollow victory, underscored by having the story's last pages take place at a funeral for an overdose victim. This particular villain is caught, but there's a sense that nothing has changed, that the problem is a lot larger and can't be solved with mere fisticuffs or simplistic ideas of "justice" - a pretty mature admission from the superhero comics of the time. Adams also turns in one of his very best sequences in the form of a harrowing page on which Speedy, withdrawing cold turkey, staggers around under the watchful and sympathetic eye of Black Canary, who's helping him through his pain. It's beautifully rendered but horrifying, Adams' expert handling of body language perfectly capturing the young addict's anguish in just a few nearly silent panels.

The O'Neil/Adams run ended with #89, a hamfisted but oddly compelling mash-up of Jesus' death with an environmentalist parable, notable for unsparingly making GL's girlfriend Carol Ferris kind of the villain here, and the story ends with GL blowing up one of her airplanes in a burst of righteous anger. The series blew up too - it won awards but apparently never sold well. O'Neil continued the saga with backup stories in The Flash, with Adams sticking around for the first 3 installments, long enough to give Green Arrow and Black Canary a relatively graceful goodbye before O'Neil started churning out GL solo adventures. O'Neil revived the series years later, but without Adams (Mike Grell drew many of the new issues) and without the social commentary. The issues O'Neil wrote from #90 on, starting in 1976, have very few traces of the earlier series' political ideology or issue-oriented themes. There are scenes here and there that reference poverty or race or drugs, but never in the sustained way that the earlier run had done. Instead, it's a return to space opera, alien invaders, alternate dimensions, and so on, and it's mostly a bore in comparison to the vitality and emotional excess of the original O'Neil/Adams run. There's some campy appeal here - Sinestro disguised as a jester; the bizarre saga of Itty Bitty, a flower-shaped alien who dies and comes back as a zombie flower; Hal Jordan as a trucker who mostly stashes his rig in space while fighting alien menaces; Hal hooking up with and nearly marrying Guy Gardner's psychic gypsy girlfriend. It can be fun, and silly, and Grell (in particular among the several pencillers who rotate through these issues) is a fine artist, but the series is always a pale shadow of its former identity, and it's never quite clear why exactly Green Arrow is tagging along on all these spacefaring adventures at all - his presence was really only required to be a voice of social consciousness and down-to-earth realism, both attributes purposefully missing from the rebooted series.

ledfloyd

03-18-2013, 07:45 PM

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2013/03/brian-k-vaughan-and-marcos-martin-tease-new-project/

So that's why Martin left Daredevil.

sevenarts

03-19-2013, 02:22 PM

I lied, one more update before I get to the rest of the JLA stuff. I needed a palette-cleaner from superheroes.

Wasteland (John Ostrander, Del Close & various artists) - A really strange beast, hard to imagine that DC ever even published this weirdo series. It's a horror anthology, written by John Ostrander and improv guru Del Close, and drawn, at first, by a cast of four artists (David Lloyd, George Freeman, William Messner-Loebs, Don Simpson). This group doesn't stick to the usual horror formula, opting instead for psychological and metaphysical horror - more than anything, it's the horror of living in a fucked-up world. The stories are some combination of bizarre, druggy, darkly humorous, creepy, politically satirical, ridiculous, ugly, unsettling, but seldom outright horrific. In 18 issues, each of which housed 3 short stories, only rarely did Ostrander and Close resort to the usual supernatural/gore touchstones, instead opting for weird morality studies, futuristic satires, grim studies of fragmenting mental states, and absurdist glimpses into Close's autobiography, most of which are footnoted with admissions that some of the truth has been, shall we say, tweaked, deliberately calling into question just how true these crazy "true stories" are. Like any anthology, not all of it is great or even good, but collectively it's a great work, and there are stories and moments that stand out as especially bracing and powerful.

Some of Close's ridiculous autobiography is just tiresome, but at his best he's entertaining, especially in a weirdly profound encounter with L. Ron Hubbard, and a two-parter about a theater troupe in a violent mining town. Issue #3 is one of the best all-around, opening with a bizarre, richly ambiguous Close/Simpson pastiche of American Splendor, then delivering Ostrander/Lloyd's "Dies Illa," one of the series' most horrifying and creepiest vignettes, pairing Lloyd's muddy, grimy art with Ostrander's jaw-dropping portrait of a cop gradually coming to believe in an impending apocalypse - and experiencing a metaphysical rather than religious hell. In #4, Ostrander and Freeman memorably build a tale of Reagan-era suicidal angst around a Shakespeare sonnet. In #5's "Big Crossover Issue," Close and Ostrander meander through a metafictional reality, illustrated in a less stylized vein than usual by Lloyd, in which various DC superheroes wander into the frame, with Swamp Thing memorably mooning the audience with a flower growing out of his butt. #15 has Ostrander and Close exploring mortality and memory through "Zero Hour," with Joe Orlando providing whimsical images that evoke Peanuts at first, only to gradually become experimental and fluid as the story's logic breaks down and reforms, and the whole thing takes on a new meaning. There's also the Ostrander/Loebs "Dead Detective" trilogy, which seems simultaneously nostalgic for old genre forms and all too sadly aware of their irrelevance in the grim and complex modern age - the literally dead anti-hero of these stories sits stoically at his desk, understanding nothing, doing nothing, blood oozing from the bullet wound between his eyes as the world goes crazy around him.

#11's "Dissecting Mr. Fleming" - by Ostrander/Close with Ty Templeton guesting as artist - is probably the highlight of the whole series, an offhandedly amoral slice of gory horror, the shuddery terror of which is increased tremendously by Templeton's slick, cartoony images and the ending's golly-gee moral takeaway. It's a great story, well worth seeking out on its own, and it makes great use of the cartoony style, so different from most of the anthology's artists. The series concludes, in #18, with the only issue-length story they ever did, a hallucinatory trip back through many of the preceding stories, weaving them together into a dense and metafictional pastiche, written by Close/Ostrander and drawn by several of the series' most frequent artistic contributors. It's a great way to wrap it all up, revisiting the themes of alienation, questioning reality, and mundane horror that had driven the preceding 17 issues.

Throughout, there are plenty of throwaway tales, too, and at least a few that resort to groan-enducing twist endings of precisely the kind that most of the series tries very hard to avoid. Still, the high points are well worth the trip, and even when a particular story or issue isn't up to snuff, the overall spirit of experimentation is hard not to love. This book often feels more like 70s underground comix than anything at the Big Two, including even, or especially, the old anthology horror books from which it was ostensibly taking its format. The stories are weird, and the art is quirky and individualistic, with each artist imparting his own skewed style onto his contributions. Today, it probably wouldn't even be made at either Marvel or DC, and it's something of a miracle that DC put out 18 issues of this even in its more experimental and daring pre-Vertigo days. It's odd, too, that Wasteland isn't discussed more often as one of DC's predecessors to Vertigo - if it had been put out a few years later, it would have fit in very nicely indeed alongside the rest of the inaugural Vertigo line, and it definitely belongs in that conversation with Swamp Thing and Hellblazer and the other out-there stuff DC was doing in the late 80s and early 90s. It's a really interesting series, a nearly forgotten artifact of corporate comics' weirder fringes.

number8

03-19-2013, 03:12 PM

That BKV and Marcos Martin comic is digital only, and it's pay what you wish. The first issue is up:

http://panelsyndicate.com/

sevenarts

03-19-2013, 03:39 PM

That BKV and Marcos Martin comic is digital only, and it's pay what you wish. The first issue is up:

http://panelsyndicate.com/

I like this a lot, very promising first issue. The Paypal option seems to be broken, though, so I couldn't pay for now. I'll have to go back once they fix that.

number8

03-19-2013, 04:11 PM

Yeah, pretty great premise. I like that it's a fitting subject for a digital only comic.

ledfloyd

03-19-2013, 04:57 PM

It's probably ironic that the first individual issue of a comic I've paid for in several years (I've bought collections and graphic novels in the interim) is the one that was offered to me for free.

Sven

03-20-2013, 02:03 AM

(I've bought collections and graphic novels in the interim)

Good save, bro.

Grouchy

03-25-2013, 03:47 PM

I don't know why I didn't mention this before, but I finished reading The Boys and was completely blown away. Garth Ennis might be my favorite comic-book writer ever, bar none. You might enjoy his personal fixations more or less (or outright hate them, of course) but he knows how to tell a compelling story better than anyone else in the business. When a writer introduces stuff on the first issues that play like random occurences and throw-away jokes and then creates hilarious and emotionally resonant moments with those in the closing chapters, you know he knows his trade.

number8

03-25-2013, 04:23 PM

Saga #11: First time I've ever seen anyone propose through the letter pages of a comic book.

ledfloyd

03-25-2013, 05:26 PM

Saga #11: First time I've ever seen anyone propose through the letter pages of a comic book.
I haven't gotten around to issue 11 yet, but those letter pages are great.

number8

03-25-2013, 06:58 PM

I always read letter pages. Part of the fun of reading comics monthly instead of in trade. Hawkeye currently has the best one, but I also love how Thor's has recommended metal songs to listen to while reading.

sevenarts

03-26-2013, 01:09 PM

Here's the rest of the JLA-related reading I've done in the wake of Morrison and Waid's runs...

JLA Classified #1-3 (Grant Morrison & Ed McGuiness) - The first leftover from my JLA readthrough is an arc Morrison did years later for this series, which was intended as a gathering place for orphaned arcs and projects that didn't belong in the then-current JLA continuity. This belatedly picks up the characters from the earlier Ultramarine Corps. arc of JLA, putting them in the spotlight. Like Morrison's JLA, this is setting the stage for things to come, namely the Seven Soldiers epic and the Club of Heroes stories in Batman, driving home just how densely intertwined much of Morrison's DC work has been. This is also sheer bonkers entertainment, right up there with the high points of his earlier JLA run, another great example of his dense, elliptical action format at its best. This thing moves at a breathless pace and barely ever pauses, and every page is an invitation to marvel at Morrison's grand concepts, to laugh along with a bit of perfectly timed dialogue, to enjoy the well-calibrated sweep of McGuiness' art and the eye-popping colors that complement it. Love this, especially all the stuff with Beryl/Squire in the first two issues. This is right up there with "Rock of Ages" as the peak of Morrison's JLA work.

JLA/WildC.A.T.S. (Grant Morrison & Val Semeiks) - I skipped this cross-company crossover in reading through Morrison's run on JLA, but it's very much in the tenor of his run, like a condensed version of one of his arcs. Big world-threatening bad guy, craziness ensues, go! It's pretty fun, with the JLA dimension-hopping to team up with some Wildstorm counterparts, briefly fighting each other because that's the superhero convention, then teaming up to stop the bad guy. A lot of it reads like JLA-by-numbers, and that's fine, but the time travel element adds some additional wrinkles, like the great opening scene in which Kid Flash is rescued from the Lord of Time by... of course, Wally West, all grown up now and no longer appending "Kid" to his superhero name. There are also some wonderful scenes in which the baddie, his consciousness expanding as he conquers all of time and space, is overloaded by the sheer amount of information bombarding him. Not a bad extended issue: some typical superhero fight scenes, some nice Morrisonian chaos, a touch of sharp humor especially in the rapport between Batman and Grifter.

JLA: Paradise Lost (Mark Millar & Ariel Olivetti) - A spinoff from Morrison's JLA, centering on Zauriel, a fallen angel who Morrison introduced because at the time he couldn't use Hawkman. Zauriel, like the other Morrison/Millar new character of the time, Aztek, isn't especially memorable, and neither is this miniseries. It's totally credible action using a familiar premise - an angel gives up immortality for the love of a human, then must protect her - but it doesn't zing and careen around with the vitality of Morrison's JLA. The angel arc wasn't Morrison's strongest moment to begin with, and this continuation of that story doesn't add much to it or really do much to justify Zauriel's importance as a character. A few nice moments here, and Olivetti's art is fine, with a bit of a scratchy Vertigo vibe, but it's overall a forgettable story, and Zauriel's love interest isn't much more than a plot device.

JLA Classified #10-15 (Warren Ellis & Butch Guice) - A pretty good basic JLA arc by a very good writer. It's the usual JLA template, the same one that Morrison and Waid followed throughout their runs: big world-ending threat appears, JLA scrambles, saves the world yet again. What makes it fun is Ellis' subtle and brainy approach to this material. Instead of the heroes defeating the villains with sheer brawn and fighting, they do it by outsmarting the enemy, by thinking through the problem and overcoming the threat with ideas. Ellis is great at this kind of conceptual stuff, and he does a great job of placing each hero into a seemingly overwhelming situation, only to have them think their way through it - rarely have braininess and lateral thinking seemed so dynamic or action-packed. Ellis also nails the character interactions, giving some witty dialogue to the various JLAers. The highlight in that respect is the relationship between Clark and Lois, whose gentle, affectionate marital sparring is razor-sharp and sexy as hell, calling to mind old-school Hollywood charmfests like The Thin Man. I'd love to see Ellis do a whole Clark/Lois reporter series based around that repartee. Guice's hyper-realistic art and mastery of facial expressions is a big draw as well, particularly in the aforementioned scenes of downtime with the characters in their ordinary lives. A nice little story, not essential but certainly a fun enough read.

JLA Classified #37-41 (Peter Milligan & Carlos D'Anda) - Originally intended to be a standalone graphic novel, it was cancelled and wound up here years later instead. It's not hard to see why it got shelved, though the idea behind this series is great and there are scenes (mostly early on) that really live up to that potential. It's Milligan's story about Kid Amazo, a cyborg "son" of the JLA enemy Amazo. This cyborg didn't know of his origin, and was going to college with false implanted memories until his father bursts into his life and reveals the truth. Milligan's conception of this burgeoning young villain as an angry, confused teenager is pretty brilliant: he wants to rebel against his father, so of course he becomes a superhero, but then he realizes that the Justice League also just want to control and discipline him, so he swings the other way. His girlfriend breaks up with him so he threatens to kill Wonder Woman. He ponders Nietzsche while trying to define his own identity, separate from his programming. There's some interesting stuff here about the nature of free will, philosophy, growing up, family, and so on. But the execution is spotty. Milligan seems disinterested in the JLA, who consistently act out of character, and the ending is a mess, discarding much of what made the premise so interesting to begin with. D'Anda's cartoony art is also nothing special, a little stiff and posed during what should be the big dynamic action scenes. Overall a disappointing read, mainly because the idea is great and Milligan could do so much better with this material.

ledfloyd

03-26-2013, 04:11 PM

number8

03-29-2013, 09:58 PM

Yay! Lapham drawing again! His 80s monster story Juice Squezers to run as a three-part story on Dark Horse Presents, but hopefully turn into an actual series, or at least OGN.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2013/03/dhp2-27-fc.jpg

Sven

03-30-2013, 08:05 AM

Cool article about comics collection at MSU:

http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2013/03/msu_libraries_resident_comic_e .html

sevenarts

03-31-2013, 08:37 PM

Silverfish (David Lapham) - A great crime graphic novel in the vein of Stray Bullets, dark and intense, beautifully drawn, oozing with psychological horror and human ugliness. The story percolates slowly along as a group of bored teens, in between idle makeout sessions, stir up a secret from the past by calling names in the address book of one girl's stepmother. It's acutely observed and earns its eventual harrowing climax through careful character work and a mounting sense of menace as the vicious, psychopathic Daniel, haunted by a head full of razor-jawed fish, enters the story more and more. Lapham's black-and-white art is perfectly suited to the sweaty terror and explosive violence that eventually rocks this suburban calm. As always, Lapham brilliantly conjures a world in which there is no pure goodness, only raving evil and flawed, morally compromised "good people" whose mistakes, petty cruelties and self-delusions enable evil to flourish. Some nice callbacks to Hitchcock's Psycho, too.

Holy Terror (Frank Miller) - The infamous story in which Batman and Catwoman, kinda, fight Al Qaeda. For obvious reasons DC rejected the story, so Miller basically just erased the ears from the costumes and changed the names. It's crazy and weird and politically suspect and honestly pretty dumb... But also, strangely, a lot of fun, and in its way really compelling. Miller draws this gothic city as an anonymous scrawl, the pages scarred with near constant rain lines, as these fetish-leather sex symbols leap across the darkness, their pursuit and fighting merely foreplay to hot sex on a rooftop. In a way, this extended, often wordless intro is the best part, before the terrorists come into it. Once the terrorist bombs start going off, it gets wordier and even weirder, with love letters to torture, revenge, and patriotic violence. Miller also throws in a lot of real political figures, with little context, though it's obvious his leftist caricatures are purely motivated by bile and disdain. In a few great sequences, Miller recalls The Battle of Algiers (a reference he'd probably sneer at, but still) with pages full of little portraits, all of them people about to die in a terrorist attack. There's little grace here, and less subtlety, but as a pulpy, absurdist take on post-9/11 revenge fantasies, it does what it's meant to.

Bad Boy (Frank Miller & Simon Bisley) - Miller's nightmare of liberalism gone mad, a "paradise" in which there are no cigarettes, no pollution, no bad words or uncouth ideas, no unhealthy food. And no free will. Clever, funny, and vehemently satirical, it's a nasty little jab in the eye of a book, a sharp and unfettered satire that fully embodies its own ideals of free expression, its valorization of sloppy freedom over enforced "sensitivity." It's punk conservatism, and Bisley is a perfect collaborator for this kind of tale, lending cyberpunk vividness to this snotty little antihero's attempts to free himself from the mind control of the fascistically well-meaning. Miller makes good use of repetition, with subtle variations, to convey the sense of a bureaucracy that only wants to see one outcome, one possible way to live and to be.

Dr. Strange: The Oath (Brian K. Vaughan & Marcos Martin) - A really fun and smart miniseries that explores the Sorcerer Supreme through the lens of not only magic but science and medicine, the earthly as well as the mystical. Vaughan imparts thematic richness to the story through flashbacks to Strange's youth as an arrogant surgeon, and a plot in which the medical and the magical cross over and intermingle. Magic "has no rules," someone complains early on, so Vaughan confronts Strange's magic with the laws of nature, the laws of man, and science's constant quest to test the boundaries of those laws, and to expand those boundaries. Martin's art is dazzling, with a charming cartooniness and bold, thick lines - it's Martin, as much as Vaughan, who makes this book essential. Martin also gives the book much of its charm and energy, in the rakish wit of Strange (very like William Powell here), the simmering romantic chemistry between Strange and Martin's effortlessly sexy, sophisticated Night Nurse, and the eye-popping imagination of the book's mystical realms and magic battles.

sevenarts

04-03-2013, 07:51 PM

American Captain (???) - A really charming webcomic (http://americancaptaincomic.tumblr.co m/) that claims to be the diary of a certain frustrated artist and man-out-of-time named Steve Rogers. Like a more emo, light version of Millar's Ultimate Captain America, this Cap is haunted by his time displacement, baffled by the modern era and grappling with the insecurity he feels when confronted with this alien modernity. Often very funny or quietly witty, the strip also takes its premise very seriously, never resorting to a cheap punchline. Steve earnestly discourses on religion, art, gender, technology, and politics, all of which have changed tremendously in his time away. And the humor is balanced by real, sometimes startling, pathos and emotion. The simple, economical drawings, with the figures and their musings positioned in white space, both fits the faux-sketchbook format and places the emphasis on the cartoony expressiveness of these characters. A quick must-read for any fans of superhero psychology.

Legends of the DC Universe #24-25 (Jamie Delano & Steve Pugh) - As recommended by Sven. Really excellent. A punk kid on Apokolips reawakens the spirit of resistance and free will through graffiti and an unwillingness to follow orders. Really moving and poetic, especially since Delano traces much of the story through the transformation of one of Darkseid's Hunger Dogs, who is so shaken by the kid's disobedience that it totally undoes a lifetime of subjugation, of cruel deeds perpetrated both on and by him. It's hard to imagine a better ode to the persistence of the human spirit, with Pugh channeling Kirby's grandeur and bombast in the art to further convey this optimistic, heartfelt message. It's a great fusion of punk ethos with the Fourth World saga's potent morality.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (Terry Moore & Craig Rousseau) - I love Moore's recent genre work in Echo and Rachel Rising, and was curious to see what he could do with a superhero property, especially one as seemingly tailored to his strengths as this. But, it's just kind of eh. Part of it is that he doesn't draw it - Rousseau is a fine manga-inspired artist, but Moore's covers immediately make me wish he was drawing the interiors too, lending his unmistakeable gift for expressions and body language to MJ and Gwen and the rest of the high school Spidey supporting cast. But the book also just flat out doesn't live up to its promise. It's a good idea to do a story that focuses on MJ, with Peter seeming like a bad friend by constantly darting off with flimsy excuses. But it's all so fluffy, with lame HS drama like someone making a bitchy website about MJ, which of course turns out to be the work of the girl with the broadly telegraphed family problems. And the writing doesn't feel like prime Moore - he tries too hard to get a distinctive teen cadence and instead just sounds like Bendis most of the time. Hard to say if it would've gotten deeper or better with more issues, but as is it makes sense that it was cancelled after only five.

Avengers: The Origin (Joe Casey & Phil Noto) - Casey writes between the lines of the original early Avengers issues, not so much modernizing their origin - this isn't Millar's Ultimates by any means - as expanding and retelling it. Which begs the question, why? Not sure Casey has much of an answer either. There are flashes of fun, mostly in the focus on Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade, a concept that Casey explores in much greater depth, and with a much more radical approach, in Vengeance. Here, Jones and his teen radicals provide some fun color at the edges, a necessary distraction from the bland and stiff superhero stuff, which mostly consists of generic chit-chat about how to stop the Hulk. Casey's deeply sad, pathetic Hulk is really well-written, but the other main characters might as well be cardboard. Noto's clean, minimalist linework is nice, but not enough to overcome the emptiness and pointlessness of this whole affair.

ledfloyd

04-03-2013, 08:46 PM

EyesWideOpen

04-03-2013, 11:18 PM

The Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane that I always heard good stuff about was the original run not the later Terry Moore miniseries.

Sean McKeever and Takeshi Miyazawa did two Mary Jane miniseries and then a 20 issue Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane series that was pretty critically acclaimed.

Sven

04-04-2013, 12:59 AM

Legends of the DC Universe #24-25 (Jamie Delano & Steve Pugh)

Cool, glad that my mention of it got someone to seek it out. I'm not sure much of the optimism you felt resonated with me. Or rather, the story doesn't ring of optimism so much as it conveys, through displacement, the vertical depiction of an utterly subjugated world. The story's main success is in capturing what Darkseid and Apokolips are all about, doing so through a bizarrely poetic and doubly subversive story "about" redemption. Plus, Pugh's artwork is never to miss.

And yeah, I don't care for any of Casey's Avengers work. Surprisingly bland. He embodies the "For Hire" schtick sometimes, sadly.

sevenarts

04-04-2013, 12:03 PM

Cool, glad that my mention of it got someone to seek it out. I'm not sure much of the optimism you felt resonated with me. Or rather, the story doesn't ring of optimism so much as it conveys, through displacement, the vertical depiction of an utterly subjugated world. The story's main success is in capturing what Darkseid and Apokolips are all about, doing so through a bizarrely poetic and doubly subversive story "about" redemption. Plus, Pugh's artwork is never to miss.

Yeah, it's all about the nature of Darkseid, and ends with him struggling to erase D-Vo from his subjects' consciousnesses, and mostly failing. That's the optimism, this suggestion that however strong Darkseid seems, however pervasive his fascist ideology might be, it's actually really fragile and the order can be shaken up by something as simple as one person who refuses to go along. The really interesting thing is that Delano gets a lot of this across by focusing on the feelings of the dictator, by exploring Darkseid's frustration and sadness. Anyway, a great read, more evidence that Delano is unfairly underrated among the British Invasion big guns.

number8

04-04-2013, 02:30 PM

I love American Captain. The one where Steve lectures Tony about drinking because of his father's own alcoholism is fantastic, especially the way it reveals Tony's insecurity when he realizes that they have that in common, but instead of sharing, he decides to just quickly apologize and make a joke about it.

Sven

04-04-2013, 03:17 PM

Anyway, a great read, more evidence that Delano is unfairly underrated among the British Invasion big guns.

I'm convinced he's maybe the best one. Have you ever read The Horrorist? It's on par with, maybe better, than anything I've read by Moore/Morrison/Gaiman/Ellis, et al. I still feel that Milligan is the real monumental member (despite him having the least consistent oeuvre), but hot damn if Delano doesn't out-purple, out-twist, out-reach, and out-class the majority.

number8

04-04-2013, 03:27 PM

Horrorist is pretty great. I just finally read Pandemonium the other day. The way he writes Constantine seems a little out of sync with the way the character's been portrayed for the, what, nearly two decades since he last wrote him (Delano always has him more casually cruel and indie-band-political-poet, a little bit of an 80s emo relic, than the blue collar streetwise smartass he's become), but fuck it, Moore created him, but as far as I'm concerned, Delano defined him.

Sven

04-04-2013, 03:34 PM

Also, his Animal Man > Morrison's. Sorry but true.

number8

04-04-2013, 03:38 PM

Morrison dislikes Delano's run, IIRC. He hates Delano's introduction of "The Red."

number8

04-04-2013, 03:41 PM

sevenarts

04-04-2013, 03:54 PM

Also, his Animal Man > Morrison's. Sorry but true.

I love Delano's Hellblazer and like his Animal Man, but no way. Some of the political/feminist stuff is pretty awkward, especially Ellen and the lesbians, though it does pay off in the end. His first arc, with Buddy dying and reassembling himself, is a work of genius, though.

Now Milligan's Animal Man is a mini masterpiece.

ledfloyd

04-04-2013, 04:10 PM

Have you read any of Lemire's Animal Man, btw? It pretty shamelessly borrows everything from the Delano run (it's more or less a remake), culminating in them actually getting Steve Pugh to draw the damn thing, heh.
I ducked out pretty early into Rotworld.

number8

04-04-2013, 04:12 PM

Smart. The whole thing was so bad it ruined two books at once.

Sven

04-04-2013, 04:42 PM

number8

04-04-2013, 04:48 PM

Read the first few issues and hated it. Also, I think you're thinking about Morrison's comments about Lemire's run.

I actually don't know if he ever trashed anyone's runs, I just remember he said "The Red" concept is shit, and that was Delano's idea.

Sven

04-04-2013, 04:53 PM

Some of the political/feminist stuff is pretty awkward, especially Ellen and the lesbians, though it does pay off in the end. His first arc, with Buddy dying and reassembling himself, is a work of genius, though.

Buddy's excursion through animalia is indeed a wonder (I have cited it as my favorite comics run several times in the recent past), but I disagree with you about the later material. One of the most salient aspects of Delano's writing from the beginning is a precise refusal to adhere to gender norms, and I think his address of sex (and its relationship with a communal and ecological spirit) is at its height in those Animal Man issues.

Now Milligan's Animal Man is a mini masterpiece.

Yes. I like the whole run to some extent, even Prosser/Harper's capstone and Veitch/Dillon's inexplicable side note, but Milligan's is a major masterpiece.

Sven

04-04-2013, 04:54 PM

I actually don't know if he ever trashed anyone's runs, I just remember he said "The Red" concept is shit, and that was Delano's idea.

At MorrisonCon he was asked about Lemire's run, and that is when he mentioned how little he liked the idea of turning Animal Man into Swamp Thing.

number8

04-04-2013, 09:37 PM

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm. Speaking of Animal Man...

Carmine Infantino passed away today.

Sven

04-04-2013, 10:04 PM

Carmine Infantino passed away today.

Well shit.

EyesWideOpen

04-05-2013, 10:32 PM

Making some changes to my pull list...

Books I'm dropping:
Adventure Time
Lost Vegas
The Massive
Mind the Gap

Ongoings:
Bedlam
East of West (added)
Fatale
Helheim (added)
Lazarus (preordered/not out yet)
The Manhattan Projects
Mind MGMT
Nowhere Men
Rachel Rising
Revival
Saga
Sex (added)
Suicide Risk (preordered/not out yet)
Uncanny (preordered/not out yet)

Mini's currently getting:
12 Reasons to Die (preordered/not out yet)
Dream Merchant (preordered/not out yet)
Mara
Snapshot
The True Lives of the Fabulous Kill Joys (preordered/not out yet)

number8

04-06-2013, 04:06 PM

Oh hey, someone else is reading Bedlam. That series is severely underhyped.

EyesWideOpen

04-06-2013, 06:13 PM

Oh hey, someone else is reading Bedlam. That series is severely underhyped.

Definitely. Love Rossmo's art.

sevenarts

04-06-2013, 09:46 PM

Hell Eternal (Jamie Delano & Sean Phillips) - A 68-page one-shot that starts out feeling rather conventional but quickly reveals some much weirder and more interesting attributes. At first it seems like the usual noirish jilted lover/revenge story, as a young woman on the run thinks back on a torrid lesbian romance that soon evolved into a menage a trois. But Delano is seldom that straightforward, and soon the story becomes a consideration, from Delano's British outsider perspective, of American gun culture and its connections with conspiracy theories, rightism, fascism, and power fantasies. Delano just keeps upping the insanity, challenging his readers to be offended or shocked as he stirs up sex, racism, violence and political extremism. He's making explicit the subtextual sexual component of gun love - the book's narration is all addressed to the narrator's treasured gun, a Ruger - and showing just how easily what starts out as benign sexual games can lead to violent real-world action. It's a criticism of the idea, all too common in all kinds of pop culture, that guns and those who use them are sexy or exciting - instead, these would-be terrorist revolutionaries are inept, sad, and scared, desperately looking for something to make them feel like they're in control. Phillips' art positions the story squarely in the noir tradition, which only makes Delano's gradually accelerating genre subversion all the more bracing. A really strong short story.

Nemo: Heart of Ice (Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill) - Moore and O'Neill return to their LOEG universe for a look at Nemo's daughter, a character who'd been important but not central in the recent Century cycle. This is fine stuff, a typical Moore-ian pastiche of pulp adventures, sci-fi, and horror. It's also a subtly character-based story, all about getting Janni to realize that her father's legacy of adventure has a cost, as her blithe insistence on a trip to Antarctic regions, for no better reason than a challenge, results in much death and pointless loss. But the real appeal is the way Moore casually tosses off one great idea after another, from the sinister dove-killing princess to the bizarre realm of Metapatagonia. Best of all is a mind-bending sequence in which the explorers traverse an area of chronal disruption, its effect felt in shuffled and repeated panels that leave readers piecing together what happened in the same way as the time-warped adventurers.

Strange Days/Johnny Nemo/Paradax (Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy & Brett Ewins) - A collection of early material from these British writers and artists. Across several different titles, this trio explored some weird creations that blend superheroes, sc-fi, and avant-garde poetry. The Freakwave strip, by Milligan and McCarthy, is the weirdest of the bunch, a fragmentary trip through a hallucinatory wasteland in which evil captains pilot floating mechanical heads, plotting against a mysterious drifter/messiah. It's free-associative apocalypse, the emphasis on Milligan's dense, punny, elliptical narration and McCarthy's bad-trip imagery rather than plot or character. The other strips from this era are more conventional and comprehensible. Johnny Nemo is an amoral private eye whose adventures lay bare the fascistic underpinnings of the action hero, who leaves a tremendous body count in his wake and shrugs it off. Nemo's story finishes in his own three-issue magazine with a gleefully deranged final chapter in which any remaining niceties are stripped away and the hero ascends to the status of a death god. Paradax is the lightest of these stories, about a self-involved hero whose origin involves ogling his own spandex-clad body in a mirror. This is all fun, freaky stuff, a great glimpse into these creators' early days.

Sven

04-07-2013, 01:42 AM

That's one of the few Delano's I still have left to read. Can't wait.

And early Milligan > all. Have you read his Bad Company stuff? Also Ewins (as well as some great work from others of the era, including McCarthy). It's a feverish, poetic sci-fi nightmare. Big fan of Johnny Nemo. Check out Paradax Remix as well as the Freakwave chapters in the Vanguard Illustrated issues for some good bonus material.

Acapelli

04-07-2013, 02:48 AM

Oh hey, someone else is reading Bedlam. That series is severely underhyped.
i think a lot of it has to do with how bad nick spencer generally is

Sven

04-07-2013, 05:11 AM

i think a lot of it has to do with how bad nick spencer generally is

True 'dis. I've only read a few of his issues, but, along with Edmondson, I can't think of two writers getting more work than their talent deserves. I have stopped reading anything by either.

EyesWideOpen

04-07-2013, 01:10 PM

I read Morning Glories in trade and Bedlam. Both are fantastic. Haven't read anything else by him other then a random issue.

slqrick

04-07-2013, 02:12 PM

I think Spencer's problem comes from overexposure on Marvel. His THUNDER Agents book had a really fun premise, but stuff like his Secret Avengers run exacerbates his weaknesses.

number8

04-08-2013, 06:49 AM

Never bothered with Spencer's Marvel and DC stuff. Morning Glories and Shuddertown are all right. Infinite Vacation was great despite the lateness, and Bedlam is awesome.

Acapelli

04-08-2013, 07:27 AM

i thought you liked his first secret avengers issues (the fear itself tie-in)

i thought it was one of the worst, if not the worst, big two comic of 2011

sevenarts

04-08-2013, 01:43 PM

A big summary of Mike Grell's Green Arrow work.

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters (Mike Grell) - This was the start of what turned out to be an epic run by Mike Grell on this character, a three-issue miniseries that revitalized Green Arrow and attempted to introduce him into the new "grim and gritty" era of superheroes the same way Frank Miller had for Batman. It's an interesting, lovingly made work with some contradictions and problems that prevent it from being a total classic, even if it is still one of the essential GA tales. Grell wrote and drew the series, and his art is gorgeous, alternating between multiple styles: some panels pop out in hyper-realistic detail, others are sketchy and minimalistic, and others have more of an in-between, conventional superhero style. The contrasting styles work really well together, and it's all held together by Julia Lacquement's sumptuous colors, which look like they're done with a mix of paints and colored pencils. The book simply looks AMAZING, even if Grell is a better draftsman than he is a designer, and some of his page layouts are somewhat cluttered and confusing. The story is interesting, too, and Grell gets a lot right. He establishes Oliver Queen (he's never really called Green Arrow in Grell's comics except on the covers) as a character outside of his superhero identity, an aging radical who still holds on to some of his idealism, as he wonders what he should be doing as he gets older. Grell also does a great job of setting up the romance between Ollie and his longtime girlfriend Dinah Lance, AKA Black Canary. The love and tenderness and emotional connection between this pair are richly developed in their scenes together. Probably the high point of the series is the moment when Ollie, feeling old and wanting to start a family, asks Dinah to have a child with him - her devastating response is framed by Grell in one of his hyper-realistic panels, her sad face highlighted by the bold, photo-like styling of this panel.

That emotional richness is one reason why it's such a shame that Grell ultimately can't think of anything better to do besides falling back on the cliched old trope of having the hero's girlfriend kidnapped, tortured and sexually assaulted, causing him to go on a revenge quest. The fact that the damsel-in-distress here is herself a hero with a long history in the DC universe only makes it worse; Dinah, of all people, shouldn't be relegated to woman-in-refrigerator status, a mere victim to spur on her man's violence, especially since elsewhere Grell does so much more with these characters and their relationship. There's something shallowly "dark" about all this implied rape and sexualized violence, a sense that the series is just trying to respond to the era's imperative to make every hero grittier and more violent. Moreover, such excess isn't necessary: the series is most "mature" when it candidly deals with the main characters' feelings for one another and their conflict over starting a family, not when it resorts to shock-value violence and sexual torture. There's a lot to like here, in the gorgeous art and the compelling characterization - of Ollie, Dinah and also the new character Shado, who would become very important to Grell's GA - but the more violent and sexualized moments too often feel forced and unnecessary.

Green Arrow #1-80 (Mike Grell & various artists) - Following the success of Longbow Hunters, Grell moved on to write (but mostly not draw) an ongoing GA series for 80 issues. I read it in a condensed period of time, but still, by the end, it was all but impossible to remember why I had enjoyed it at the beginning of the run. There's no getting around it: this goes way downhill after a while. At first, though, it's pretty good, not without some of the same problems that marred Longbow Hunters, but still solid enough. Nice interactions between Ollie, Dinah and, at times, Shado, who pops up for arcs at predictable intervals. Some decent issue-oriented action with Ollie taking on street crime, prostitution, drugs, the environment, and all the kinds of often-hamfisted social issue stories you'd expect from a Green Arrow series. Moreover, the first 34 issues or so provide a nice arc and a nice resolution to some of the issues raised by Longbow Hunters - notably, a sequence that mirrors the one where Ollie rescues Dinah, except with her taking the active role this time, thereby neatly calling back to the earlier scene and this time letting Ollie know how it might have felt for Dinah to be the helpless victim being rescued by him. There's also the heartbreaking scenes that follow this rescue, when Ollie and Dinah decide they might want to start a family after all. And then, well, it all goes off-track. The subsequent "Black Arrow Saga" is promising but doesn't live up to its potential, sacrificing drama and action to introduce the annoying new character of Marianne and her especially annoying accompanying narrative boxes. And then Ollie goes off on his own for a year, wandering the world through a series of dismally boring and predictable adventures. When he gets back, it's not much better, and except for the inevitable appearances by Shado, who shows up about once a year for a four-part arc, the series trods through one forgettable two-parter after another. There are especially abysmal stories that riff on various pop culture touchstones, like clumsy takes on Shane and Cat People. There's a very odd story about the death penalty that ties itself into moral knots trying to deal with this issue in the context of a vigilante hero who has at times killed those he felt deserved it. The series reaches its nadir in issue #75, which throws in a ton of guest spots and tries to stir up some cringeworthy drama out of nothing. It's all over not long after that. The run has its moments, mostly early on, but it never really rises to the level of greatness, and Grell keeps sabotaging the best attributes of the series, neglecting the great Ollie/Dinah romance in favor of disposable and rushed "issue" stories, while Dinah too often disappears into the background for long stretches. The big action arcs, often focusing on Shado or the morally ambiguous assassin Eddie Fyres, are better, with Grell spacing out just enough emotional beats to keep the series from ever becoming completely brainless. It's an important and often interesting run, and it contains the seeds of a truly great and revolutionary take on these characters, but Grell is never able to bring it all together into a satisfying whole for any sustained period.

Brave and the Bold: Green Arrow/The Butcher/The Question (Mike Grell, Mike Baron & Shea Anton Pensa) - A six-issue spin-off miniseries that teams up these three fringe characters. It's pretty bad. The story is a mess, involving a conspiracy between the IRA and various Native American tribes, with weapons deals and rebellions and terrorist attacks, but rather than seeming like a twisty action plot, it's just a confusing jumble that never makes much sense or really deals with its underlying issues in an interesting way. It winds up just being an excuse for some lame action. But the worst aspect of the series is definitely Pensa's art, which just doesn't work at all on any level. It's sketchy and cartoony and stylized, which is fine, and there are panels here and there where I can sort of see what he's going for - a garish, cartoonish style reminiscent of Moebius' more humorous moments. For the most part, though, it's just hideous and unclear. Pensa's terrible at character definition, so the large cast is impossible to keep track of, the Question just looks like Green Arrow without a beard, and at one point there's a villain who looks exactly like Ollie. He makes Dinah look like Mick Jagger. This isn't a good story to begin with but the ugly art just makes it intolerable, easily the worst thing to come out of Grell's entire Green Arrow run.

Shado: Song of the Dragon (Mike Grell, Michael Davis Lawrence & Gray Morrow) - In contrast, this is a really great spin-off, featuring Shado finally on her own, without Ollie around (he appears only in a brief flashback/memory). The story is somewhat formulaic, and indeed it drives home that Shado is a great character about whom there are a limited number of stories that can be told, and most of them just involve her fighting the yakuza. But this series finally allows her a moment to shine on her own, without being a player in a Green Arrow plot, and she definitely carries the miniseries, with some help from a small cast that's assembled around her. The story touches on the usual Shado themes - particularly the driving forces of honor and destiny - and surrounds her with other characters who have their own conceptions of honor, their own ideas of the things they must do. But the art is the real star: Lawrence inked by Morrow, for a style that's thoroughly realistic in its figures and faces, but stylized in the loose, free-associative page layouts. Lawrence also provides rich color washes that give the book a very sensual and almost abstract feel. There are some occasional data dumps about Japanese history or the characters' histories, so the writing isn't always that graceful, but for the art and the overall feel of this mini, it's well worth reading.

Green Arrow: The Wonder Year (Mike Grell & Gray Morrow) - Late in Grell's run on Green Arrow, he offered up this miniseries detailing Ollie's origin. It's his attempt to do a Year One-style take on the character, but like a lot of Grell's work on this character, it falls short of its aspirations and its promise. On the plus side, it's a great-looking comic, a worthy successor to Longbow Hunters in that respect at least. Morrow is mostly inking and finishing over Grell's layouts and pencils, and the art is sumptuous and richly varied. The regular Green Arrow series often looked very good, but Grell really trotted out the big guns, artistically, for these Prestige miniseries, and the amount of work that went into making this look so good is very apparent. It's a shame the story isn't worthy of such effort. Grell, during his run, disposed of all of Ollie's trick arrows and gimmicks and attempted to make him a realistic, street-level hero. This origin story fits awkwardly with that approach, constantly calling attention to how ridiculous it is to run around with a bow-and-arrow and a Robin Hood costume fighting crime. There's a level of suspension of disbelief that Grell has to overcome here, to sell the idea that this idle rich guy, changed by his experience of being stranded on an island, dresses up as Robin Hood and runs around fighting bad guys, and he can never quite get this across. The story is nothing much, either, riffing on the 60s and 70s radical student groups as a figure from Ollie's past gets tangled up in a conspiracy stretching back to a decades-old terrorist attack by one of those groups.

number8

04-08-2013, 02:21 PM

i thought you liked his first secret avengers issues (the fear itself tie-in)

i thought it was one of the worst, if not the worst, big two comic of 2011

I don't actually remember it. Somehow my memory thinks that title went straight from Brubaker to Warren Ellis. Is that the one where Beast talks to someone in Congress while the Nazis bomb DC? I seem to remember that was all right, though I can't recall any specifics whatsoever so that may not be a good sign. I'm not really sure if I even picked up his other issues or if I dropped it until Ellis came on...

sevenarts

04-08-2013, 02:30 PM

I don't actually remember it. Somehow my memory thinks that title went straight from Brubaker to Warren Ellis. Is that the one where Beast talks to someone in Congress while the Nazis bomb DC?

That's the one. It's one of the worst comics I've ever read, so much so that I've had little inclination to read much else by Spencer. If I mention the Lincoln Memorial getting up and walking, perhaps you'll remember just why it's so bad.

number8

04-08-2013, 04:01 PM

lol how the hell did I forget about that?

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lltclztXC71qzniqdo1_500 .jpg

I dunno, I'm kinda for it.

number8

04-08-2013, 04:07 PM

Also, agreed that Grell's Green Arrow run was mostly hit and miss. His handling of the Ollie/Dinah romance was incredibly good, but the rest was just really so tiresomely gritty and cliched. A lot of it was rather deliberately derivative, especially in tone, of Denny O'neil's Question run, which was a much better exercise in taking a marginal superhero, separating him from the DCU, and telling mature stories.

number8

04-10-2013, 02:42 PM

I wrote about Thatcher. (http://www.artboiled.com/2013/margaret-thatcher-the-death-of-a-comic-book-muse/)

sevenarts

04-10-2013, 05:02 PM

I wrote about Thatcher. (http://www.artboiled.com/2013/margaret-thatcher-the-death-of-a-comic-book-muse/)

Nice piece. What I love about so many of those early Vertigo/proto-Vertigo comics was how politically engaged they were, and in that respect the poster child is definitely Delano's Hellblazer, which is so deeply mired in Thatcherite England that it often seems like Constantine is fighting the system rather than facing off against any particular supernatural threat.

This is outside of the scope of your piece, but probably the most interesting comics depiction of Thatcher, for me, will always be her appearance in Cerebus, especially at the end of Jaka's Story, where in striking contrast to most of her other comics caricatures, the creator of the comic actually has some sympathy for her viewpoint. She's still a villain and a caricature, but it's far from the unambiguously hate that is directed at her whenever she graces the pages of most other comics.

number8

04-10-2013, 05:04 PM

Yeah, although Dave Sim certainly was against Thatcher. He contributed to AARGH!, after all (which I tried to mention in the article but couldn't really fit it into the narrative).

ledfloyd

04-10-2013, 05:36 PM

I know stating how good Saga is is getting old, but guys, Saga.

sevenarts

04-10-2013, 05:58 PM

Saga rules. Anyway, here are some more blurbs on old comics.

Kingdom Come (Mark Waid & Alex Ross) - A classic epic that treats DC's heroes almost as myths, as gods, legends, icons, their feats and adventures rendered glossy and titanic through Ross' slick paintings. I'm usually no fan of Ross, but his style is undoubtedly suited to a project like this, that aims for such a purposefully overblown, biblical style. In this book, the "classic" heroes have been replaced by a new, more violent and abrasive breed - an obvious metaphor for the 90s comic industry - until Superman returns from self-imposed exile to inspire the old guard heroes anew. The series is an impassioned argument for superheroes - and by extension, superhero comics - that inspire readers instead of merely wallowing in nihilism and violence. It's about getting back in touch with the glossy archetypes, through these alternate versions that are aged but very resonant of their most iconic antecedents. This is big, bold, glossy, colorful, an idealized vision of what superheroes mean, tinged with plenty of nostalgia for the simpler times in which these old heroes were born.

The Kingdom (Mark Waid & various artists) - The sequel to Kingdom Come, done without Ross since he and Waid couldn't agree on a direction. It's a worthy successor, though, with an interesting structure: two bookend issues comprising the meat of the tale are built around a series of one-shots about some important characters, most of them children of the iconic heroes who were at the center of Kingdom Come. This sequel is even more metafictional than its predecessor, making itself more or less explicitly about the nature of the DC heroes and the universe(s) they live in. It's about continuity, really, about recovering from the loss of the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths. In the especially meta conclusion, Rip Hunter wonders why anyone would prefer the boring straight lines of a linear continuity to the chaos and possibilities of multiple timelines and multiple realities. With that in mind, this series reintroduces such possibilities, courtesy of Grant Morrison's hypertime concept, which provided an elegant way of celebrating divergence and alternatives and elseworlds, and which of course nearly everyone ignored after this series was done. That's a shame, because the idea's great, and it's just one of the dazzling ideas that Waid throws out here. I especially love the Planet Krypton issue, which is seemingly disconnected from the rest of the series - beyond some hints and a thematic emphasis on heroism - and tells a nice street-level story, but which brilliantly ties in to the finale. Also poignant is the way the series deals with superhero legacies and the relationships between parents and children - particularly in Offspring's eventual embrace of his similarities to his goofy joke of a father.

Hourman (Tom Peyer & Rags Morales) - Yet another spinoff from Grant Morrison's JLA, taking a minor character from "Rock of Ages" and DC One Million and developing him into a full-fledged character with a rich and vibrant supporting cast. Hourman was a near-omnipotent android, a plot device allowing for time travel, but Peyer makes him genuinely compelling, a naive youth saddled with cosmic greatness. Hourman settles down on modern-day Earth, the distant past for him, with former (now disgraced) JLA sidekick Snapper Carr, who teaches the robot about humanity and fallibility and second chances. It's fun and fast-paced, crackling with humor and wit, loaded with heart, with a real love of language in the contrast between Hourman's stiff formality and Snapper's beatnik throwback cadences. A particular highlight is #5, in which Hourman swallows a Miraclo pill and relives the life of his predecessor, Rex Tyler. Illustrated by Morales in a variety of different pop-art styles, this issue is a standalone masterpiece that encapsulates this series' considerable charms. Beyond Peyer's great character work and sharp writing, there's also the appeal of Morales' art, with its distinctive weight and strong sense of motion. Of particular note is Bethany, Snapper's ex-wife and Hourman's current main squeeze, who Morales draws as an impossibly sexy cheesecake confection in ridiculous outfits, even as Peyer makes her a fun and compelling presence beyond the visual va-va-voom. The continual evolution of Amazo as Hourman's nemesis over the course of the series is another great component in an overall fantastic assembly.

dreamdead

04-10-2013, 05:58 PM

Hope to read Saga later today.

I'm at work and purchased Vaughan's and Martin's The Private Eye. It's interesting in its world-building, and the kind of thing that should resonate well with a culture all too willing to store everything on hard drives. That kind of statement could maybe be so prescient that it short-circuits the rest of the plot, but I'm interested to see where it goes.

Grouchy

04-10-2013, 06:21 PM

I wrote about Thatcher. (http://www.artboiled.com/2013/margaret-thatcher-the-death-of-a-comic-book-muse/)
Great article. In the department of strange coincidences, I only read that Planetary issue online today.

Sven

04-10-2013, 08:15 PM

Tom Peyer is in the annals of writers that deserve much more recognition than they get. Talented dude.

sevenarts

04-10-2013, 10:49 PM

Tom Peyer is in the annals of writers that deserve much more recognition than they get. Talented dude.

What else do you recommend? I've picked up a couple things by him to check out since I enjoyed Hourman so much, but it seems like most of his work consists of bits and pieces here and there.

Winston*

04-10-2013, 11:15 PM

Preordered the first Dial H trade paperback. I have now bought two comics in my life.

EDIT: Actually, it's three. Forgot about the copy of Maus I bought last year for an essay I didn't end up writing. Will keep you all posted.

Sven

04-10-2013, 11:28 PM

What else do you recommend? I've picked up a couple things by him to check out since I enjoyed Hourman so much, but it seems like most of his work consists of bits and pieces here and there.

Totems is cool if you're looking for a straight shot of prime late-90s Vertigo. He did a cool mini with Delano called Cruel and Unusual that's pretty fascinating. His four issues of the Punisher, detailing the Taxi Cab Wars, is a whole lot of awesome. I love love love his bizarre arc on the original Authority series.

Sven

04-12-2013, 01:26 AM

Whoa! Dark Horse has solicited a collection of Milligan/McCarthy's early work. Amazing. A necessary possession.

sevenarts

04-12-2013, 01:18 PM

Amazing news on Milligan/McCarthy. Shame they're not throwing in the Milligan/Ewins work from the same period though, "Johnny Nemo" is awesome.

If anyone's interested in Fantagraphics stuff, now's the time to start chipping away at your wish list. They've got a ridiculous deal going on from now until Monday:

http://www.fantagraphics.com/fantabucks

For $50, they'll give you a coupon worth $100, so you basically get $50 worth of free Fanta books. I ordered 3 coupons.

ledfloyd

04-12-2013, 01:48 PM

Man, I wish I had some extra cash to drop on comics right now because I would buy all the Love and Rockets books.

number8

04-12-2013, 02:32 PM

Paycheck on Monday. Will be on it.

Grouchy

04-12-2013, 05:49 PM

I didn't know Metamaus existed. How long has that been around?

sevenarts

04-12-2013, 07:01 PM

Ritual #1 (Malachi Ward) - An ambiguous, pretty creepy short story called "Real Life" that is very reminiscent of Charles Burns in its exploration of a subtle, unsettling weirdness buried within the ordinary. It's quiet and uneventful on its surface, and Ward does a great job of balancing the comic's dark horror elements against everyday normal events. In the opening scenes, a young woman has an eerie and realistic dream (?) of insects burrowing into her boyfriend's flesh while he sleeps, but when morning comes everything seems sunny and ordinary. She goes to work giving music lessons, curses at a reckless driver, then returns home to sing and practice the mandolin while her boyfriend does some work at the computer. A power outage sends them listlessly wandering over to a friend's nearby apartment, experiencing what might be a cosmic/spiritual event of some kind that they barely remark on, and then heading back home to go to sleep. After this, in what might be a nightmare or else a sudden turn into outright horror - it's left intentionally ambiguous - the girl is sent running into the night with the suddenly terrifying figures of her boyfriend and her neighbor pursuing her through the streets. Ward builds a powerful atmosphere here, leaving much unsaid. Beneath the idle, realistically banal chit-chat is a sense of something deep and dark, poignant and profound and terrifying, a glimpse of a mystery beyond "real life." The comic's opening page depicts a hand appearing in the sky above the town, turning palm upwards and unleashing a stream of light, which later interrupts the characters' conversation only briefly, as they dismiss it as lightning or a transformer exploding somewhere in the neighborhood. This is a great book, concise and perfectly paced, beautifully drawn with dense, thick blacks that impart a real sense of dread to the nighttime scenes. I can't wait to check out the second issue, which is also a self-contained short story.

The End of the Fucking World #1-12 (Charles Forsman) - A series of tiny minicomics detailing, in bite-sized snippets, the life-on-the-run of two disaffected teen runaways. The issues alternate between the perspective of the guy and the girl: he's a budding sociopath, terminally unable to feel, teetering on the brink of an outright kill spree, while she's just bored and lonely enough to overlook all the unsettling things about this boy she sometimes thinks she loves. Forsman's drawings are simple and cartoony, especially in his exaggerated facial expressions which draw on a whole familiar lexicon of comic strip faces. The simplicity and minimalism of the art are mimicked in the carefully spaced out, laconic dialogue and narration; it's all so economical, conveying the complex emotions at play here with the bare minimum of words and lines. It's a very convincing portrait of teenage alienation, the world as seen through the eyes of two desperate, disconnected kids, wandering off into a wasteland that really might as well be apocalyptic. The plotting and world-building are fairly pulpy - this world is populated by Satanists, molesters, suicidal parents and garishly decaying bums - but Forsman presents it all with such a subtle lack of showiness that it all seems perfectly natural, perhaps not a realistic world but a realistic depiction of what the world feels like to these teens. It's dark and depressing and in its way quite beautiful, as these kids fumble through tentative sexual awakenings, encounter the evils of the world, and strike out with violence of their own. Parents are absent and disinterested, and most adults they encounter seem to have sinister ulterior motives for luring the teens close - it's a world in which nobody can be trusted, even the rare, seemingly genuinely good strangers they run into along their path. Great stuff. There are four more issues I haven't read yet (but will as soon as I get my next package from Forsman) and then the whole thing is going to be collected into a book from Fantagraphics later this year. I'm very happy about that, because this work, and this artist, definitely deserves the wider exposure he'll get from a big glossy book. Still, the miniature photocopied pamphlets that Forsman has released himself are arguably even better suited to this story and its atmosphere.

sevenarts

04-15-2013, 01:09 PM

Sigmund Freud (Hans Rickheit) - Hans Rickheit has long been one of my favorite artists, a fearless explorer of deranged psychosexual states and outlandish imagery. His bizarre genius is apparent even in an odd one-off like this, a minicomic about Freud written and drawn in the style of a Jack Kirby Fourth World cosmic epic. In some ways, to describe this is to know its one joke, rendering Freud's navigation of the mind into a physical journey complete with larger-than-life Kirbyesque narration, dramatic poses, cosmic energy, and even a parody of the crude collages that Kirby often used to visualize particularly strange sci-fi realms. But Rickheit completely commits to the premise and makes it luridly compelling, ridiculous and funny as hell, especially when Freud strikes back against his nude mother using his psycho-phallus (!!!) then encounters his father as a splash page of a giant, gleaming mechanical head with a laser shooting out of its forehead. Absurd and clever in equal measures, this is a great pastiche, and Rickheit's Kirby imitations are dead-on, their contorted bodies and exaggerated emotional reactions a perfect way to express the psychosexual stresses and anxiety of Freud's conception of the mind.

The Nancy Auditions (Ivan Brunetti) - A charming little collection of a comics oddity: a few weeks worth of actual Nancy strips written and drawn in 1994 by indie cartoonist Ivan Brunetti as a tryout for the job of doing the daily newspaper feature. He didn't get the spot, but these strips survive as a curiosity. Pretty neat and fun stuff, with Brunetti mostly disappearing into the role of aping another artist's style, channeling familiar icons. The job of a ghost artist like this is to be all but invisible, though, so it's perhaps inevitable that Brunetti didn't get the job. Even in this small sampling, he doesn't entirely suppress his own quirky and dark sense of humor, notably giving a bit of a subversive edge to a few strips that have Nancy contemplating some punky fashion choices or commenting on mosh pits and grunge rock. Even better are the strips that reflect Brunetti's typical self-effacing, terminally depressed schtick, except here delivered by these pop culture figures. In one strip, Sluggo asks Nancy if there's anything on TV; she responds "nah" but he sits down to watch anyway, and the pair stares silently off-panel for the remaining two panels of the strip. In another installment, Nancy admonishes Sluggo to get a job, but when he blankly responds "why?" she has no answer, and instead lays down with him on the ground, again for two silent, affectless panels. This kind of stuff is interesting because it's not radically outside the style or feel of Ernie Bushmiller's creation, but nevertheless also represents this artist's ability to find his own interests, his own (downtrodden) emotions, within another's creation.

Scarlet (Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev) - A controversy-baiting series that dares to make its central, titular character a revolutionary terrorist who strikes out at the unfairness of the world by killing corrupt cops. Bendis' premise predates and then feeds into the fervor of the Occupy movement, which sprung up in the real world during the big gap between issues #5 and 6. In Scarlet, he essentially imagines what would happen if all the usual impotent, undirected youthful rage at the nature of the world were to build up into an actual revolution. It's intentionally provocative stuff, and Scarlet's habit of addressing the reader as though he or she is a co-conspirator implicates the audience in this anti-hero's questionable actions. So far anyway, her point of view is privileged: she's young, and something terrible happens to her, and she abruptly realizes that the world is unfair, and she decides to do something about it. There are some small signs, 6 issues in, of Bendis gradually expanding beyond this insular POV, bringing in an FBI agent and a police detective who are pursuing Scarlet. It must be said that Bendis doesn't always build a convincing world here, with various unbelievable leaps of logic - the most egregious of which is the idea that government officials would even entertain the idea of allowing a known terrorist and cop-killer fugitive to address a massive public gathering in full sight of the police, who are ordered to hold back so as not to start a riot. There's a sense that some rather unbelievable stuff is going to have to happen to maneuver Scarlet into position so that she remains free and leads an actual revolution. Still, Maleev's art is gorgeous as ever, and the story deals with some interesting moral complexities, and Bendis' sharp dialogue helps build compelling characters even beyond the political/moral themes of the plot.

ledfloyd

04-15-2013, 02:13 PM

Does anyone else wonder how sevenarts reads so much!?

number8

04-15-2013, 02:39 PM

I've said it before: Scarlet is Bendis' best writing since his Daredevil run.

number8

04-15-2013, 02:41 PM

Does anyone else wonder how sevenarts reads so much!?

The quantity doesn't alarm me that much. I'm more impressed that sevenart took the time to write down such long, clear thoughts on every one of them. I certainly think some of the stuff he reviewed aren't worth such detailed write-ups.

sevenarts

04-15-2013, 03:49 PM

Yeah, sorry for clogging up this thread at times. I've been reading a lot of comics lately and like to do blurbs for nearly everything so I can keep track of it all.

I certainly think some of the stuff he reviewed aren't worth such detailed write-ups.

Which stuff? I'll be the first to admit that maybe Brunetti's Nancy didn't need much of a writeup, even if I did enjoy it.

ledfloyd

04-15-2013, 04:10 PM

Yeah, sorry for clogging up this thread at times.
No need to apologize. I don't always have comments, but I enjoy reading your blurbs.

number8

04-15-2013, 05:11 PM

Which stuff? I'll be the first to admit that maybe Brunetti's Nancy didn't need much of a writeup, even if I did enjoy it.

I don't have specifics, it's more the somewhat random character runs that you decided to read and write about.

number8

04-15-2013, 06:21 PM

Heh, sometimes I regret dropping Jason Aaron's Wolverine run.

http://i1310.photobucket.com/albums/s652/jeanixfan/1366014055380_zps49a353a3.jpg

Winston*

04-15-2013, 09:06 PM

The writing is interesting in Ex Machina, but I do not care much for the art. All the photo tracing makes people have weird puppet facial expressions.

sevenarts

04-16-2013, 01:10 PM

http://michelfiffe.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/03.jpg
Copra #1-4 (Michel Fiffe) - Who knew that one of the best, purest, most exciting monthly superhero action comics around was being published, not by Marvel or DC or even a slightly smaller publisher like Image, but by a tiny one-man operation? Michel Fiffe writes, draws, colors and self-publishes this remarkable book all by himself, and he does so, astonishingly, on a monthly schedule, a pretty rare feat these days when indie and self-published books tend to come out, if at all, in dribs and drabs. Which would be impressive but kinda moot if the book itself wasn't so good, but goddamn it's great. Fiffe's Copra is a government-sponsored superteam that owes a pretty big debt to DC's Suicide Squad, a comic that Fiffe is pretty direct about admiring, and he also sneaks in homages and references to numerous other mainstream characters, notably a rather direct riff on the Punisher. Big Two superhero comics are merely the foundation, though, a base from which Fiffe builds a tremendous, sprawling action epic, punctuated with bursts of gloriously choreographed action, as well as high-concept sci-fi craziness, sequences of dazzling formal ingenuity, and brief interludes of casual chit-chat and banter that ground and flesh out these characters in the midst of all this high-energy brawling and complex espionage plotting.

Fiffe's art is what really pulls everything together. It's a cartoony and extremely flexible style, gorgeously colored - with colored pencils, I think? - and able to accomodate some rather dramatic shifts in tone and content. Fiffe's action scenes are wonderfully staged, brutal and brisk and very clear, with a real sense of space and motion - there's no waste, no excess, just crisp, perfectly staged violence with careful attention always paid to consequence and loss. Elsewhere, Fiffe adopts a thick, brush-heavy ink style that gives certain pages a noirish spy movie vibe, and his neon-hued coloring in other scenes evokes the glossy sci-fi of Blade Runner. Best of all are the sequences when Fiffe really cuts loose with his experimental page design, reserving these bursts of mind-warping formal play for the times when reality itself seems to be breaking down, when dimensional barriers are crossed and the characters' minds threaten to splinter. In one scene, when a powerful artifact opens a tear in the fabric of reality, the chaos culminates with a marvelous page in which the bottom row of panels is actually folded upwards, diagonally across the page, layered across the other panels - the effect is difficult to describe, but it's as though both space and chronology are being warped and fragmented.

There's really nothing else quite like this out there, except maybe some of the weirder semi-mainstream sci-fi things coming out of Image, like Prophet. Fiffe has a clear love for big action superhero comics, and he filters that love through a distinctly non-mainstream sensibility so that the result is like Dash Shaw doing The Punisher, or a modern, avant-garde Jack Kirby. It's fun, funny, dramatic, at times disarmingly emotional, and thrilling both in its plot and its formal pyrotechnics. One of the best new series I've read in a while.

Sven

04-16-2013, 01:58 PM

Copra #1-4 (Michel Fiffe) - Who knew that one of the best, purest, most exciting monthly superhero action comics around was being published, not by Marvel or DC or even a slightly smaller publisher like Image, but by a tiny one-man operation?

*raises hand

Got first printings of them all.

Acapelli

04-16-2013, 02:54 PM

picked up the copra compendium at mocca last weekend. fiffe even signed it and drew a little sketch too

number8

04-16-2013, 06:28 PM

Very good news. Turns out Heart of Ice is going to be the first in a trilogy of Janni Nemo books. Kevin O'Neill is currently sixteen pages into drawing the second one, called The Roses of Berlin.

After the trilogy is done, Moore and O'Neill already have the premise for LoEG Vol 4 planned.

http://comicsbeat.com/interview-with-alan-moore-part-1/

number8

04-18-2013, 03:56 PM

Most people in the Celeb Obit thread won't care, but Robert Morales, the man who created Isaiah Bradley, apparently passed away. :cry:

dreamdead

04-18-2013, 04:05 PM

Eisner nominations announced (http://www.avclub.com/articles/superheroes-get-spanked-as-fantagraphics-image-lea,96616/). Just ordered up Volume 1 of Manhattan Projects, since it sounds the most interesting of the new titles (already follow Saga and plan to get back into Fatale). The Carol Tyler series looks exceptional--anyone here read the earlier volumes?

Love how far DC has fallen, even though I do think Williams should have been credited for his interior art. I suspect he'll see another nom for this year's Sandman mini, though, so I'll overlook it...

ledfloyd

04-18-2013, 04:44 PM

I read all five nominees for best continuing series. That's a first. I apparently need to get into Michael DeForge (I also didn't realize he and Dalrymple had web comics). Has anyone read Bandette? It looks possibly decent.

sevenarts

04-18-2013, 05:08 PM

Yeah, I read all the continuing series too, Bandette is the one ongoing I haven't checked out at all. I've always liked what I've seen of Coover's art.

I apparently need to get into Michael DeForge

Definitely. He's one of the most interesting artists around these days. Get any issue of Lose you can manage to find.

Grouchy

04-18-2013, 06:59 PM

There's no longer a Best Limited Series award? That's odd.

number8

04-18-2013, 08:16 PM

GUYS. (http://matchcut.artboiled.com/showthread.php?24-The-TV-Discussion-Thread&p=475561&viewfull=1#post475561)

Sven

04-18-2013, 10:17 PM

Sin City is cool.

sevenarts

04-19-2013, 05:12 PM

Doom Patrol (Arnold Drake & Bruno Premiani) - I've long loved Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, of course, but never checked out the series that first introduced the team, originally as part of the anthology series My Greatest Adventure, then in their own series after just six issues. The Doom Patrol predated the X-Men by a few months, and built off the example of the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four - with their constant bickering and sense of isolation, they always felt more like Marvel's fallible, very human heroes than DC's self-assured icons. The Doom Patrol are outcasts, their "powers" having resulted from horrible accidents that left them changed and disfigured in various ways, no longer able to fit in with normal society. Rita Farr, once a glamorous actress, is the least changed: she initially isolates herself because she can't control her size-changing powers, and would unpredictably grow or shrink, but even after she gains control of these powers, she identifies herself as apart from society, even though she could easily reintegrate. The other 2 team members, Cliff Steele (whose accident left him so destroyed that only his brain remains, encased in a robot body) and Larry Trainor (irradiated with nuclear radiation, wrapped in bandages and possessed by an energy-based "Negative Man"), are more thoroughly ostracized, considered freaks by the "normal" populace whose lives they regularly save. Drake regularly comes up with outrageous concepts to confront these weird heroes, pitting them against the equally odd Brotherhood of Evil (led by a disembodied brain in a jar) or the shape-changing Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man.

It's got all the usual problems of comics this old, being mainly targeted at kids, so there's a certain sloppiness and repetitiveness that nobody, I'm sure, expected to matter one bit. Hell, for the first bunch of issues, the writer and artist weren't even being credited except when someone happened to ask about it on the letters page, a sign of the status of these artifacts and those who made them. The dialogue often just consists of the gang narrating how they're going to foil their latest threat, some of the scenarios cross over from inspired weirdness to just plain dumb, and the fact that Mr. 103 is a barely different retread of A-V-M Man is perhaps a sign of the idea well running dry later in the run, at least as pertains to concocting new superpowers. Still, there's a reason these characters and this run have endured. A big part of the appeal is just how strange it all is, and how striking it is to find a goofy kids' comic that deals so candidly with issues of self-image, ostracization, and the frustration of being trapped in a flawed body. Cliff is constantly treating his robot body as disposable, warping and destroying himself, an approach that reaches its peak in an amazingly weird story in #87 where Cliff defeats a villain by using parts of his robot body to get around traps, until he's just an armless, legless torso pinning down the bad guy with metal dead weight.

These characters are very human despite their weirdness, though, and in between the outlandish fight scenes and stiff exposition, they express some very raw, poignant emotions, ranging from Cliff and Larry's sexual frustration (they both yearn for the pretty Rita, though she never seems to even acknowledge them as romantic or sexual possibilities, much preferring the less visibly weird Mento) to the Chief's increasingly desperate attempts to get out of his wheelchair and finally participate in adventures in a physical way rather than just as an advisor. Drake even extends this sympathy to the villainous Madame Rouge, with a long-gestating subplot in which the Chief tries to rehabilitate her, getting in touch with the good side that's been suppressed by the evil Brain's manipulations. This plot reaches its wacky, visually stunning apex in a sequence where Premiani draws Rouge's face being cracked, as though seen in a broken mirror, then stretched apart, until she's literally and physically divided into two twisty, stretchy beings intertwining and fighting - it's an amazing sequence, a perfect example of the visual and conceptual imagination that flows through this series.

It's also a great example of Drake's willingness to let plots develop slowly over time, as the Chief/Rouge plot develops slowly in scenes scattered here and there across months of comics before it finally takes center stage. He often plotted across issues, writing around the obligatory villain-of-the-month to develop larger plots, like the courtship and eventual marriage between Rita and Mento. There's also the green-skinned, shape-shifting Beast Boy, who's slowly introduced into the title and gradually develops over much of the run's second half, the plot with his evil guardian undergoing many twists and turns across many months worth of stories before he's adopted by Rita and Mento, forming a nuclear family of the weird. Drake's multi-issue storytelling contrasted against a lot of other comics from the time, which tended much more towards done-in-one or two-part tales rather than this kind of extended continuity. The team went out with a bang, too, in a final issue where the Doom Patrol, given the choice between their own lives and the lives of a remote fishing community, chose to sacrifice themselves, a noble and very unusual ending for a very unusual series and a very unusual cast of characters.

sevenarts

04-23-2013, 05:36 PM

Assorted blurbs, mostly indies and minis:

Ritual #2 (Malachi Ward) - Even better than the first issue of Ward's short-story series. This one's a haunting sci-fi piece about a family dealing with grief and the accumulating everyday failures of an ordinary life. The first 7 pages consist of 1-page vignettes, each new page set several years apart, spanning from 2009 to 2031, as 2 kids watch their father struggle as an artist and their mother die in the hospital. Having lived through all this disappointment, the father retreats into the Reverie, a new virtual reality realm where anything he wishes comes true, and his children pursue him into the fantasy in the hopes of luring him back to reality. As in the first issue of Ritual, Ward proves excellent at mining intense and rather ambiguous emotions from genre frameworks, delivering mysterious horror in the first issue and equally evocative conceptual sci-fi in this issue. It's all very concerned with what's real and what's fake: the dream world of the Reverie is rendered with the same ease and weight as reality, just as the creepy dreams of the first issue's tellingly named "Real Life" tended to bleed into and get confused with reality. When the boy of this story confronts his father, telling him that his dream-world isn't real, the father angrily retorts that of course he knows that. He's not in denial - he's simply decided that he likes the dream, where his wife is alive and his art is critically acclaimed and popularly loved, better than the "real life" he'd have to live if he returned to the physical world. Who's to say he's wrong: the return to reality at the end of the issue is devastating and almost unbearably depressing. What makes the story so unsettling is this willingness to favor the false and reassuring fantasy over the harsh reality, to suggest that sometimes willful escape is the only possible or logical response, and that the real isn't better merely by virtue of its reality. Great and thought-provoking stuff from a masterful young artist.

Zaucer of Zilk (Brendan McCarthy & Al Ewing) - Originally serialized in British sci-fi weekly 2000 AD, then published in the US as a 2-issue miniseries, this is a wacky and woolly showcase for McCarthy's skewed visual imagination. It's co-written by Ewing and McCarthy, which really amounts to a barrage of crazy concepts and tongue-in-cheek narration as McCarthy unleashes page after page of demented genius straight from his computer, in the full flowering of his current garish digital graffiti style - it's a crazed mash-up of Microsoft Paint scribblings, psychedelic acid-trip posters and the height of Geocities web design circa 1996. The bright, neon coloring (courtesy of Len O'Grady) is as integral to the party as McCarthy's warped character designs and trippy, ever-shifting sense of reality, and the result is both jaw-dropping and headache-inducing. It's appropriate that the story starts with a downtrodden youth discovering a psychedelic sweet shop and chowing down on sugary saucers, because this is like a visual sugar-rush, an idea that's later literalized by a realm of tooth-headed beings floating on clouds, gorging themselves on the reality TV of other dimensions. It's a garish and rambling kind of book, but it's also not quite as scattered or shallow as it might appear at first glance. Despite the tooth-decay aesthetics and characters who speak in Internet meme language, this is at its core a tale of youth gradually acquiring wisdom through the acceptance of mortality and age. It's a familiar story: the main character is a callow youth blinded by fame and his own seemingly ageless beauty, but through this wild adventure, he learns that he's not immortal, that he must grow and change and accept responsibilities beyond his own self-interest. What's striking is that McCarthy reverses the usual fantasy/reality dynamic present in books like this, by making the reality bright and childlike, with grim and dark images reserved for false alternate realms. McCarthy contrasts the bright fantasia that dominates the book against darker, rain-soaked pockets of reality that the characters perceive as *less* realistic than the bold hyperstylization of their usual world. It's a story about growing up and growing old, but even to the end it remains gloriously young and fun in its aesthetics.

Too Dark To See (Julia Gfrorer) - I really love when artists, in any medium, try to deal with horror within a mundane, realistic framework. Julia Gfrorer is really good at this. This haunting little comic is, on one level, a devastating and unflinching portrait of a couple drifting apart in petty ways. Though the book opens with them having sex and declaring their love, they spend the rest of the pages sniping at each other, exchanging cold, flat phrases, barely listening to each other. Gfrorer weaves this story together with a creepy subplot about a shadowy woman who mounts the man in the middle of the night and has sex with him. This could be seen as a metaphor for the crumbling relationship - he's already cheating on her in his dreams, if not in fact - or as a literal supernatural phenomenon, an intrusion of dark forces into this otherwise ordinary domestic drama. Either way, it's eerie and sinister and builds upon the the equally bleak but much more familiar feelings found in the story's relationship drama. Gfrorer's scratchy, realistic linework also contributes to the overall edgy mood of the comic: everything is so precisely rendered, the body language totally realistic and communicative, but there's this slight spikiness and darkness to it all, her drawings all hard edges and sharp angles, with scratchy areas of darkness and shadow through which terrifying and mystifying forces can slip into our world. It's great stuff, and I can't wait for her new book this year.

King-Cat Comics and Stories #69-73 (John Porcellino) - I've read a bunch of Porcellino in the past and always been conflicted about him, torn between being compelled or bored by his minimalism and his self-conscious attempts at poetry. This is the most recent stretch of his self-published and long-running zine, which he's been writing and drawing himself since 1989, and it's pretty much of a piece with what I expect from his comics. Porcellino's drawing style is the extreme of minimalism: spare, economical, with a minimum of lines. His nature scenes, especially, tend towards simplicity: a curvy line or two might convey the sweep of a hill, a river bend, a fluffy cloud, in an otherwise blank white panel. At times this sabotages the expressiveness of Porcellino's work, as in a story about seeing the moon one night where it's utterly unclear what's being seen or, more importantly, felt. At other times there's a flatness and inconclusiveness to these anecdotes and vignettes, most of them taken from various points in the author's life. But every so often, there's a story of great power and mysterious beauty that completely validates Porcellino's approach. In this stretch of issues, the one that stands out is a nearly silent story (in #72) about walking through the snow on Christmas Eve, which perfectly communicates a sense of loneliness and sadness coupled with awe at the cold beauty of this winter night. It's gorgeous, in just a few pages creating this intense stew of emotions without departing at all from the spare, simple linework that has always characterized Porcellino's work. This story feeds into a compelling subtextual current in these issues, which is that somewhere between 2008's #69 and 2009's #70, Porcellino and his second wife got a divorce. He doesn't address it explicitly very much, but it's implicit in many of these stories, and in the sense that in the aftermath of the divorce, he was very much casting about for what to do next, moving to Florida on a whim, then wandering back to the Midwest. Whatever else is going on in these comics, they're fascinating because they feel so much like artifacts from a man's life, bits and pieces of himself shaped into a little photocopied annual zine, providing little glimpses into his present and his past. They're not perfect, but they're not supposed to be - #72 even contains a run of three-panel diary strips that are simple and rough even for Porcellino, just raw scribbles relating trips to the library or the bank. There are also disposable one-pagers, random memories, stories about mundane activities, cutesy cat strips, curiously detailed research pieces about animals or plants, just everything that constitutes a life with its peculiarities and hobbies and random interests. So maybe it's appropriate that a lot of this is forgettable, and some of it is not so good, because hey, life is like that, but along the way you get those moments of transcendence, brief glimpses of something special and powerful.

sevenarts

04-26-2013, 01:21 PM

More blurbs. Sorry for dominating this thread, someone else chime in! Did anyone besides me read Bandette after the Eisner noms came out?

Bandette (Paul Tobin & Colleen Coover) - Like a lot of people I'm sure, I checked this out since it was the only one of this year's Eisner-nominated ongoing series that I wasn't already reading. Obviously Eisner knew what they were doing with this one, because it's a total delight, a really fun and beautiful comic that's bursting with humor, energy, and sweetness. The concept and the overall attitude owe a lot to the Fantomas serials, focusing as it does on the titular robber girl, an outlaw who steals from other criminals and also helps out the police on occasion, doing it all with a wink and a cheery grin and a hearty, optimistic attitude. Tobin's writing is breezy and witty, making Bandette and her colorful enemies and rivals instantly likeable - the fourth issue's duel between Bandette and the villainous Matadori is sprinkled with so much witty, almost friendly repartee that it begins to seem less like bitter enemies battling than a couple of friends lightly sparring. As fun as this spirited attitude is, it would be nothing without Coover's bright, cartoony art, which renders a larger-than-life fantasy Paris in which Bandette (who looks much like Coover when she's out of costume) can have her carefree adventures and innocent flirtations. It's all styled almost like a kids' book, though it's not without a few elements that suggest more adult themes. Mostly, though, it's just so much fun, a perfect mesh between Tobin's brisk writing and Coover's luscious, lively art - this is a husband-and-wife collaboration and it feels like their love and admiration for each other is encoded in these pages, perhaps in the gentle affection Bandette feels for her friend Daniel, or the more dangerous feelings that seem to exist between Bandette and her rival thief Monsieur. It's a great series, and I hope it's collected soon since it definitely deserves to be seen beyond its current digital-only format.

Reporter (Dylan Williams) - Dylan Williams was best known, until he died a couple years ago, as the man behind Sparkplug Books, a small-press comics imprint that put out lots of fine, under-the-radar books over its years of operation. Williams was also a cartoonist and writer, and the Reporter series (started in the late 90s) was his most sustained work. It's a series of loosely connected tales centered around the town of Willoughby, set in 1956. Williams' influences are obvious, as he blends film noir and 60s European art films alongside a clear appreciation for old-school cartooning in the vein of Ditko or the EC stable. Much of the art is rough and shaky, though he gets better with each issue. His line is fairly thick and he favors lots of dense shadow, giving his pages a dense, raw, intense look. At times I'm reminded of British cartoonist Chris Reynolds, not a bad comparison point in general. Coupled with Williams' bluntly philosophical dialogue and tendency towards pointed commentary in caption boxes, this aesthetic lends itself well to these tales of people trying to figure out their place in life, grappling with career and love and ambition and the workings of one's own mind. It's pretty good stuff. Issues 3-5 are interconnected in interesting ways: #3 shows the aftermath of a bloody robbery (very reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs); #4 shows the robbery itself, first in reverse and then again chronologically, all without words; and #5 is a flashback to the Korean War experiences of the robbers. The silent issue, #4, is a great concept that's executed a bit clumsily, but the rest of this interwoven tale is quite well done. The highlight of the whole series is #6, the final issue, a standalone story based on Antonioni's La Notte, in which a couple - one half of which is Adam, a newspaper reporter and the closest thing the series had to a main character - go to a party and have some wordy but ultimately inconclusive conversations with the guests. It's fascinating because Williams is really risking alienation here, delivering all these lengthy dialogues about philosophy and choice and politics and religion, but instead of seeming pretentious he gets across how desperate these people are to understand themselves, how behind their grandiose words is a real desire to find meaning or a common ground with other people. No matter how much they talk, the other person in the conversation never understands, never agrees, because he or she is coming from an entirely different perspective. It's a great portrait of the ways in which we're all united in a quest to understand things, and yet separated by that gulf between our individual outlooks. Reporter was a fine series, the work of an artist loaded with raw ambition and talent. It will now forever be unfinished, though its anecdotal structure never really seemed to be leading towards a concrete ending of any kind - what's more important, and sadder, is that the promise revealed in these pages will now never be realized, never be developed further.

Totems (Tom Peyer & various artists) - A one-shot released as part of Vertigo's pre-millennium V2K series. On one level it's basically Peyer's celebration of the Vertigo aesthetic and the characters associated with it, a massive party with Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Constantine, Robotman, Shade, and Black Orchid attending. Peyer was mostly associated with DC's mainstream universe, particularly with more lighthearted characters and series, so this was his opportunity to cut loose with something totally different. It's also a surprisingly poignant tale about how desperate some people are for meaning, excitement, something of substance in life - Peyer ties that desire to all the conspiracy theories and paranoid end-of-the-world hysteria that was in the air around the turn of the millennium. His main character is an ordinary guy who grows obsessed with aliens and government coverups and all the other weirdness that some people want to believe is hidden beneath drab ordinary reality. In desperately pursuing these secrets and mysteries, he foresakes his own ordinary life, his family, the happiness he might have had from simply enjoying what was already in front of him instead of searching fruitlessly for something more. Apparently this was widely panned when it came out, but it's pretty fun, a slightly skewed, off-kilter look at all the Vertigo mainstays and the dark world they inhabit.