The One Where He Keeps the Plates Spinning in the Air
I hate it -- hate it -- when comics columnists start something new and different and then it quickly peters out or even worse they don't even bother with a second installment. In case you're not paying attention, believe me, this happens much more often than you'd think.
One of the key elements of my personality is that I never make a promise unless I know just about to a certainty that I have both the will and the ability to fulfill that promise. While I have made no promise about how long Floppy will be around, it does seem to me that starting a new column is, in a way, an unspoken promise. Read this and I'll keep doing it. Unless you're like that prick AK.
Kidding, AK. Kidding.
Hey, just a brief digression involving both AK's old stomping grounds Movie Poop Shoot and the word "prick" -- just a funny story, apropos of nothing.
Last Thursday night my wife Lora and I took our two kids out to dinner. We both had Friday off for the Independence Day holiday (which actually is when I am writing this, so I am getting a bit of temporal vertigo trying to keep this all straight, but anyway -- ), and wanted to get out of the house and have a meal that wouldn't involve either of us actually doing any, well, moving. Anyway, my kids are 7 and 9 and they usually get along fairly well, so they're chattering away at each other at the table about Spongebob and school (they've been out for a week) and such, and I thought they were sort of lost in their own little conversational world, so I decided to talk to my wife. We've been married over ten years now, but at least once a week we try to have a conversation of some kind, just to keep our hand in, you know?
Anyway, at one point I thought it would be funny to tell her how Chris Allen called me a "prick" in his latest column at Movie Poop Shoot -- which is a View Askew property and therefore probably has about a billion visitors a minute or something.
So I said to the wife, kinda sotto voce, you know -- "Chris Allen referred to me as a 'prick' in his column today.'
She asked why and I started to explain about Allen's sublime sense of metaphor and subtle use of satire and -- and --
And my son, age 7, asks, "What's a 'prick?'"
Well, it got very quiet in the restaurant.
For 108 issues (plus the original mini-series) Erik Larsen has been doing just about everything on this title, and this issue sees him even taking on the colouring duties -- a fact I didn't pick up on until the note about same on the letters page. So, Erik, your colouring was just fine -- I didn't notice any difference at all from previous issues, which has to be a compliment of some kind. I think.
Recent issues have featured a lighter, Lee-and-Kirbyesque Fantastic Fourish tone, with the Dragon settling down into marriage and forming a super-team and hanging out in a cool HQ and such. That tone continues for the most part here, although longtime Larsen observers won't be surprised at all that there's also a callous, brutal and misogynistic murder in the course of the issue.
"The Flying Shoes Incident" takes Dragon and his stepdaughter Angel and others to Godtown, a floating city in the sky that echoes recent issues of Marvel's Thor and even features Larsen's own (much less heroic) version of the Norse god of Thunder -- along with some pointed political commentary that fits nicely in the plot. The tale gives Larsen an always-welcome opportunity to work his Kirby/Simonson-influenced artistic chops, with a fairly hilarious sequence involving Angel acquiring a powerful device of the gods, and an unexpectedly tense cliffhanger.
As is usual for Savage Dragon, there's a lot of story with a good balance between the melodrama and the situation comedy, and Larsen's action-packed artwork (accented by his deliciously crunchy inking, some of my favourite ever in comics) is bold, vibrant and full of his enthusiasm for his characters and story. Great fun. Grade: 4.5/5
I had mostly abandoned this title because of the increasingly indecipherable artwork of Whilce Portacio. When you can't tell who any of the characters are in a title you want to like for many months on end, man, it's time to move on, and I pretty much had.
The absence of Portacio and the recommendations of friends and other reviewers convinced me to take a look at these two issues, and I'm glad I did, as Smith brings a stunning clarity to the book that would probably have made it a hit right out of the gate if he'd been onboard from issue #1.
As a Team Achilles member prepares for his wedding, the heist of tons of gold and the President's daughter getting taken hostage spurs the team into action, on the premise that succeeding in getting the girl back safely will make for a better relationship with the U.S. government, which has previously told Stormwatch it is not welcome to operate on U.S. soil. The involvement of longtime Wildstorm überschemer Ivana Biaul adds a nice feeling of continuity to the story without requiring readers to have read every issue of, say, DV8 or whatever.
This is a bloody, violent action tale with some genuinely creepy moments, like the scene in #11 when the President's daughter delivers a message to her rescuers, or the alternate universe carnage depicted in a stunning double-page spread in #12.
Inker Eric Nguyen replaces Sienkiewicz in #12, and the effect is fairly startling. From the gritty look of #11 we go to something that looks much like the mannered, spare, animation-style work that Rob Haynes has done recently on such Marvel titles as Daredevil: Ninja. Not to say the style doesn't work here, but I did prefer the elements Sienkiewicz brought to the party. In either case it's a huge improvement over Portacio's really awful style, which is hung on its own petard on the cover to #12.
All in all, a tense and unpredictable couple of issues that end on a cliffhanger that recalls the glory days of the Ellis/Raney Stormwatch era, some of the best superhero funnybooks of the past couple of decades. Not bad. Grade: 4/5
I feel mostly positively about this upstart small-press offering, a black and white full-sized comic about a group of friends whose conversations range from breezy bullshit to anal sex and whose group dynamics focus squarely on unrequited lust. Walters seems to have a good ear for naturalistic dialogue, although he occasionally lapses into unwelcome stylistic nods to books like Goldfish and Paradigm, the first of which can be a good influence, the latter definitely not.
My biggest problem with the first issue is the lettering, which is amateurish at best -- but I mean this as high praise when I say that despite those deficiencies I was really engaged by the relationships between the characters, especially the sexually charged friendship of Nate and Yessnia. The story features comics as a backdrop, which strikes me as a bit incestuous -- but it's hard to deny that it lends an air of verisimilitude to longtime comics readers who live much like the characters here.
The lettering and design vastly improve by #2, with nice tone work making up for the minor sins of the occasionally awkward artwork. Suburban Folklore is a sexy and offbeat look at the lives of young people today, their frustrations and ambitions at odds with their directionlessness and ennui. These two issues have me convinced this could be one to watch, an alternative comic with a genuine point of view and very possibly a creator with something to say. Grade: #1: 3.5/5 #2: 4/5
Gemstone brings the ducks back to market with two monthly titles packed with quality stories in a deluxe, squarebound comics format priced at $6.95 US. The price point may be off-putting to some, but the format is perfect for young readers to dig into for an hour or two and the talent is top notch, including two of the most acclaimed chroniclers of duck tales, Don Rosa and Carl Barks.
Rosa's novel-length "The Dutchman's Secret" leads off Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge #319, a sprawling adventure about a search for hidden gold in Arizona. Uncle Scrooge is joined by Donald's three nephews as they explore the real-life mysteries behind a huge cache of gold; Rosa has a full-length text piece at the end of the issue that fills readers in on the true story he used as his inspiration for the tale, which seeks to provide a real solution to a longtime mystery.
One of the most striking things about the story and the overall look of these issues is the high quality of the reproduction. Colours are mostly flat as they should be, although some modern-day techniques are subtly integrated in the backgrounds to give the comics an up-to-date feel. I was a little disappointed in the reproduction quality of the Barks story reprinted here (1951's "Terror of the Beagle Boys," the introduction of the hapless bad guys). Like the Free Comic Book Day Gemstone ducks giveaway, the art is obviously scanned from an original comic, and even though it's a fairly good quality scan, I wish publishers would realize just how much information is really lost when the artwork is presented in this manner.
Despite that concern, these two issues provide lots of adventure and laughs with an appeal far beyond the presumed target audience of children. It remains to be seen if the market is there for $6.95 monthly comics, but this will be a good test, and I hope a successful one. Grade: 4/5
Teen Spidey meets three Teen X-Girls while wearing a costume that very closely resembles pajamas in one of the better issues of the usually-excellent series.
What makes it above the average for USM is the genuinely interesting, fun and human interaction between Peter Parker, Jean Grey, Ororo Munroe and Kitty Pryde as their Ultimate versions meet and discuss the mutant gene, where costumes come from, and what guys usually think about Jean the first time they meet her (one of the best moments of the series and a great example of Bendis and Bagley's gifts for timing and understatement).
There's also some nice character stuff with other cast members -- for example, I love the friendship between Mary Jane and Gwen, and although I hope they're both a part of the book as long as Bendis is writing it (which is to say, as long as it will be worth reading), I suspect that science teacher's last name might be Warren. Not that it's ever easy to predict where Bendis and Bagley will go in reinterpreting the stories of Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita and the others that originally built this sandbox for Bendis and Bagley.
The creative team does honour the history and tradition of this American icon, and this opportune crossover (happening to coincide -- probably not coincidentally -- with Spidey's appearance in Ultimate X-Men) is great fun to read, with a surprisingly effective and tense cliffhanger. Grade: 4.5/5
After seeing how writers Brian Michael Bendis and Steve Niles were used and disposed of by Todd McFarlane and his empire of ethical assholiness, you'd think the co-writer of Bendis's fairly great Torso graphic novel would know better than to get involved with a TMP book. And yet here we are, and I really don't know the details of Andreyko's contract, so for the purposes of this review we'll just try to pretend that Todd McFarlane A) Has nothing to do with this comic and B) Isn't perhaps the biggest disgrace to creator's rights since Marvel Comics and their decades-long and ongoing ass-raping of some of the most noteworthy talents ever to work in the genre of superhero comics.
So all that out of the way, this is a pretty good first issue.
Never been a fan of Spawn, where Sam and Twitch come from, and I'm pretty sure I've never read any of their previous appearances. Despite that, here we have an experimental first issue that works well using a gimmick I usually despise; each panels has three panels, each of which depict a different timeframe explaining how things got to where they are in the bottom row, Twitch in jail for murder.
There's a dark sense of inevitability that permeates the story, thanks in part to the multiple timeframe technique and also to Morse's subdued, impressionist style. Going into this issue I had no reason at all to care about the characters, but the plot manages to convey the grim horror of Twitch's dilemma quite effectively and I was immersed in the drama of it all despite my initial inclination against any TMP-produced title.
That may seem like damning with faint praise, but the fact is that as crime comics go, this one compares favourably to other great current books like Gotham Central and Powers. Your conscience has to be your guide when throwing money at McFarlane, but I got it for free. Grade: 4/5
When I noted Saturday at the comics shop that I thought this issue was not as good as the last one, one of the clerks enthusiastically said "Yeah, but it's assault on Weapon Plus, man," or words to that effect. So I guess this is supposed to mean something; I have no idea what it means, or who this Fantomex person is supposed to be that is the main character this issue.
Overall it seemed like a poor imitation of an issue of The Filth, with page after page of visually confusing goings-on about which the script made me care not one bit.
Last issue's combination of restrained, almost elegant work by Bachalo and Morrison's canny deconstruction of X-Book mythology made for one of my favourite sooperhero stories last month. Given that neither of those appealing creative elements is to be found here, but are replaced by the worst creative instincts of Morrison and Bachalo, I didn't care for (or about) this issue in the least.
This is an unusual issue of Morrison's New X-Men in one regard -- it's usually one of the fill-in artists that provides the major disappointment. This time out it's his script. Explore all the "mad ideas" you like, but make me care about them if you want me to be engaged by the story or hell, even come back next month. Grade: 3/5