yammering. ger. Conversation about whatever comes to mind, emitted to fill the silence.
Attention Marvel and DC: Page numbers: They're useful, they're helpful, they've been a standard of English publishing since before Webster. Use them, dammit.
Adam Strange 1-2: I picked this up on Marc's recommendation of a couple months ago. Eh. One of the useful things about color, see, is that it can provide contrast, make images pop out, and this is difficult to achieve when everything is the same color. Look at issue one, page two, for example. Or compare the top of page (flip flip count count) five with the rest of it--Adam's and Alanna's contrasting colors make the top panel readable, while the rest of the page is a fuzzy orange mush.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I accidentally read issue 2 first. Since I understood what was going on and was impressed at how fast the story started off moving, that means that, oops, issue 1 wasn't necessary, that the writer started the story too early and that, once again, the story editor didn't actually exist.
And as I mentioned in an earlier post, Superman tells Adam Strange that Alpha Centauri A went supernova (this is six months prior to current time, according to the narration). And this news is not immediately accompanied by massive, Earth-wide panic due to our 4.3 years hence broiling. The text at the end of issue 2 is a bit incoherent; it's not clear where in the system Adam is beaming to; the text says he's beaming into the path of the supernova (i.e., at least six light-months out from Rann), but, in fact, he seems to have beamed into Rann's original position, a few light-minutes frmo the collapsing neutron star remnant of Alpha Centauri A. Nothing an editing pass wouldn't have fixed, but still. And that's one hell of a spacesuit he's wearing; it protects him from corona-temperature plasma, 15,000 degrees.
Batman: The Man Who Laughs: Not recommended; pick up one of the many reprints of Batman #1 available, wherein this story was done with more craft and attention to detail than ever needed to be retold. Not one of Brubaker's elaborations and additions is necessary or useful, and the wholeness of the narrative is discarded. The double assault on Wayne and Lake, for example: the Joker's men attack Lake early without explanation (in defiance of formula), coincidentally with Wayne triggering a fairly foolish gambit to get him free of surveillance, and Gordon says it's 11:30 PM when Wayne's clock clearly says it's five till midnight. There's at least three major errors of craft there in only two pages. Gardner Fox at the dawn of comics knew more about how to put a story together than Ed Brubaker does sixty-five years later.
Doug Mahnke's art is pretty good, actually. There's the usual swipe from Mazzucchelli for Bats' origin, of course, and the now mandatory swipe of Batman's boots from Jim Lee, so it's not like it's specially original.
Birds of Prey 70-78: I have a bad habit of putting books aside for several months at a time. So I read a big lump of Birds of Prey all at once. You know, I enjoy this series. Simone is good with the characters, the art is clear (and I like the cheesecake as long as it doesn't interfere with the story), the cast and premise lend themselves to superheroics well within my comfort zone. The addition of Lady Blackhawk to the cast is wholly unexpected and yet entirely appealing. Recommended.
Deadshot 1-2: I picked this up on Marc's recommendation of a couple months ago. It's not for me. Probably Suicide Squad fans will groove on it, though.
Doc Frankenstein 1-2: I picked these up for the Steve Skroce art, and I shan't be continuing with them. It's pretty enough, I suppose, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Extremely heavily armed church militias going to war on American soil? And Doc's lettering font is annoying. Neutral recommendation.
Earth's Mightiest Heroes 1-8: This, on the other hand, is really pretty good. I'm only familiar with early Avengers history in an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe sort of way, but this kind of allusive reference to those stories with elaboration in the interstitial moments seems quite well done to me. This doesn't seem like an attempt to retell early Avengers history; it seems like an attempt to build on early Avengers history. And its scope isn't to be as big or important as those early stories; it tells smaller stories about smaller moments. The last issue's a bit too much stop, not enough end, however. Otherwise I'm impressed. Joe Casey, I'm going to have to pay more attention to. Recommended.
Fables 31-34: I'm on inertia here, as I suspect Bill Willingham is. Still, it seems more likely that he's accreted enough continuing story elements that inertia can keep him going for a long time yet, like the sweet spot in a long-running RPG campaign's lifetime when the characters generate their own adventures. Mildly recommended.
Flash 215-218: More gimmicky adventures, less psycho-drama, please. I want the Cary Bates/Irv Novick era Flash back. Neutral recommendation.
Hawkman 30-36: Like Birds of Prey, this got set aside for a while, but for a different reason; I had about decided that new writers Palmiotti and Gray weren't any good. I was wrong. They are good. The stories are easily digested superheroics. I especially like the assembling Hawkamn Rogues' Gallery, since the appreciation of DC Comics's depth of history is one of the things that draws me to the line. Mildly recommended.
Little Lulu: Lulu Goes Shopping: I'm more of an Uncle Scrooge man. This would make an excellent gift for the beginning reader in your family, however. Recommended on that basis.
Losers v1: Ante Up: Not my bag, this is the origin of the A-Team done seriously. I would like a hair more exposition, but writer Andy Diggle (as in his Adam Strange series) has a lot of verve and there's little wasted space. No yammering on about nothing in particular to fill up panels here. The art kinda reminds me of Richard Case on Doom Patrol. (Now THERE was a guy whose colorist really brought out the best in his excellent but non-standard art.) Neutral recommendation.
Enchanted Apples of Oz
Secret Island of Oz
Ice King of Oz
Forgotten Forest of Oz
Blue Witch of Oz
When I was home for Christmas, I pulled these out of storage to read again. Holy cow, can Eric Shanower draw! His Oz characters are completely on model, but have never looked better. These absolutely beautiful accomplishements also tell pretty good Oz novelettes as well--this kid has got the chops. I only wish I liked his current series Age of Bronze more. Highly recommended.
Shanna the She-Devil 1-2: This is crap. Very pretty art, with a beautiful babe and plenty of dinosaurs, and good, high-contrast coloring. The story, however, is as thin as a proctologist's glove (and owes far too much to Budd Root's Cavewoman), and the script reminds me of the quality of Todd McFarlane's dialog in Spider-Man. For adolescent males only.
She-Hulk 11-12: This series grew on me (especially when Paul Pelletier came on for art duties). It showed a fine appreciation of what a shared superhero universe is good at, it had a good sense of humor and a good sense of story, and I'll be looking forward to its return. I'm definitely picking up Slott/Pelletier's next project, Great Lakes Avengers. Recommended.
Sleeper v1: Out in the Cold: It's sort of a mob drama, sort of a superhero story. Mostly it's not anything I want to read. As usual, this, like anything that's not a primary superhero comic, is colored in shades of mud. When I am king, all colorists will be restricted to 6-bit color until they demonstrate they can enhance a page's readability with color. I don't mean six bits per channel. I mean six bits. Eight if you can deliver a sensible publishing-technology reason to add a black channel.
Aside from my basic unattraction to the premise of the secret undercover agent who's lost in a world of crimelords, I'm also bored by the appearance of yet another secret, omnipotent world-controlling cabal who are actually incompetent or so hopelessly bound up in infighting as to render the entire concept as ludicrous as the episode of Gilligan's Island with the radioactive vegetables. The sleeper does have a moderately creative power, though. Not recommended.
Superman: Birthright: Eh. Loeb/Sale did it much better in Man for All Seasons. If you'll recall Scott McCloud's "picture plane" that puts photo-realism, abstraction, and cartooning at opposite corners of a triangle representing drawing, most superhero comic art is up around the Milt Caniff/Neal Adams region toward the photorealist corner. Yu's art here is adjacent to that region, just far enough toward the abstract corner to annoy me. (People's faces just aren't shaped like that, among other things.)
Storywise, there's nothing particularly compelling here, nothing in the new revelations and elaborations that demanded this story be told again. Plus, of course, I have been utterly unable to engage a Luthor story in any respect since his 1987 re-envisioning. Thanks, Marv Wolfman; you have apparently put an entire primary segment of Superman myth out of my reach. Despite a distinct swing in Luthor's portrayal back toward the scientist here, he's still primarily a businessman with no emotional or practical hook for his opposition to Superman. Not recommended.
Terra Obscura v2 5-6: To paraphrase Homer Simpson, this wasn't a story. It wasn't even a bunch of stuff that happened. It was just some stuff that happened. Disappointing. There was a fair amount of change in the status quo, it just didn't make much of a story. Not recommended.
Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: I also pulled these out of storage. While Don Rosa's obsession with McDuck continuity borders on the disturbing--it reminds me of myself with respect to DC continuity back in the 80s and early 90s--nonetheless, he can turn out a well-drawn, well-written comedy-adventure story with the best of them. There are other stories of Rosa's that I like better, but this series is undoubtedly his career's touchstone, something made abundantly clear by the fact that the initial twelve chapters have in later years had three or four additional chapters inserted. Highly recommended.
Wanted 6: The last two pages were stupid, all right. Whatever, dude. Otherwise, the series overall probably doesn't suck. The basic structure that the story hangs from is solid--one man's desires for his son result in the destabilization and destruction of the outward expression of his success, but only the outward expression and hence nothing of particular relevance to him. The art is superb. There are basically no original ideas here, just DC's old supervillains wearing phony mustaches. Mildly recommended.
We3 2-3: As others have noted, this has an ending far more happy than might be expected, but I'm going to break with common wisdom and suggest that the tragic ending wasn't required; this was about suffering, and there was suffering aplenty. Mostly, I think, it was about the suffering that is caused when one is in conflict with oneself: a family dog rebuilt as a weapon of war, a scientist who loves animals turning them into weapons of war, etc. Removing the conflict requires even more suffering. But once the conflict is removed, the suffering can end, as we see here; even the scientist going in to testify at the end has found calmness.
This series was a little too advanced for me, not unlike Seaguy, but it is still clear that it is very good indeed. Recommended for the elite (-ist) comics reader in you.
Posted by Greg at March 21, 2005 2:37 PM