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| Tuesday, October 16, 2007 01:10 PM |
| The Take |
 by Fëanor |
Okay, I got a little carried away this week. It's just that, they had a lot of things I'd been looking for for a while, so I... bought them all. Ah, well. Early Christmas for me!
New Avengers/Transformers #4
So... why did I buy every issue in this series again? Because this one was just bad. I need to pack all these up and sell them on eBay immediately, then pretend like I never had them, no matter what it says in my blog.
B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground #3
What can I say? Another great issue. Had me turning the pages frantically and actually gasping aloud in horror and surprise. All kinds of crap is going on all at once, and I'm not even sure if it's all related, but it's all totally gripping.
Fantastic Four #550
The cover of this book features a majestic portrait of the original, founding members of the team standing together, and the "New" dropped from the title, so you can guess how it ends. Yep, they finally get the band back together! Not to mention wrap up that whole pesky "the entire universe is falling apart" storyline. And while the way that both of those things come to a conclusion is rather rushed... I still rather like the way they're handled, and I really enjoyed this issue. It's funny, it's epic, there's lots of action, a bunch of big-name Marvel characters get cameos, and a bunch of crazy stuff goes down. That's good comics.
Nova #7
Things are looking up - sort of - for our hero and beleaguered final member of the Nova Corps. The sequence where he's fighting off the virus is a bit corny, but mostly it's handled pretty well and in a way that makes sense and doesn't feel like a cop-out explanation (although, what was with the little Pokemon Nova guy?!). And then there's plenty of action and explosions to distract you, anyway. Ah, Nova. How I love thee.
Punisher War Journal #12
I'm really just going to have to settle down and get used to the idea that Matt Fraction is uneven as a writer. This issue, which features a picture on the cover of a giant Punisher fighting a giant Hulk over the skyline of New York, actually doesn't have the Hulk in it at all, and isn't really very good, either. Olivetti is back, so the art is at least well done. But the story is written with one of those annoying recurring stylistic gimmicks that Fraction is so unfortunately fond of. In this case, it's dueling narration, with one set of narrative boxes giving Frank's simple, straightforward version of events, and the other giving the rather pompous and questionably truthful version of events laid out in the journals of one of the big bug aliens. This is supposed to be funny, but it ends up just being rather tired and irritating. In fact, the story as a whole is rather tired, and even corny, with Frank helping a family - which includes a cute little girl and her cute little cat - to escape New York.
Still, there are definitely cool parts to this one - like all the bits where Frank gets to play with crazy weapons. A chainsaw in each hand? Wicked. A gun that shoots swords? Brilliant. Techno-spawn armor? Awesome.
Runaways #28
A bunch of interesting new characters (love the steam-punk robot guy), a run-in with Gert's parents, another jump through time (I think?), more soap opera-style romantic issues, and plenty of other madness. Fun stuff!
Ghost Rider #16
Man, I am just enjoying the heck out of this book. All kinds of clever, funny dialogue and awesome, violent action. I'm still puzzled as to exactly what the various characters' plans are, but I think that's by design and things will start to clear up soon.
Heroes for Hire #14
Blah blah blah, busty girls running, blah blah blah, busty girls getting hurt, blah blah blah, Paladin screws over everybody, blah blah blah, bug guy is more buggy than he was before. This book isn't awful - I love a busty girl as much as the next guy - but it's just not very good. I think there's only one more issue tied in to WWH, though, so I'm almost done with it.
World War Hulk: Front Line #5
The robot murder mystery wraps up pretty much the way I expected it would, then we get to see Sally wandering drunkenly through the city trying to reconnect with her co-worker, who nearly gets crushed to death, and then the Sentry shows up. Then there's one of those silly two-page back-up parody stories, which again appears to be written for a fan of a far more knowledgeable and hardcore type than myself, because I really didn't get hardly any of the jokes. The robot story is well drawn by the same guy who did it last issue, and although it's cliched (which they essentially admit to in the text, when the cop says he understood the way the robot's logic worked from watching Star Trek), it's still reasonably well written. Sally's bit has a surprising cameo from Moon Knight, who I should probably learn more about one of these days, but is otherwise not all that exciting. So yeah, another "just okay" issue of WWH:FL.
Crécy
Like almost everything else I've read by Warren Ellis, this is absolutely brilliant from beginning to end. It's a hilarious, thrilling, rollicking retelling of the historical battle of Crécy, wherein a small force of regular Englishmen with longbows completely destroyed - with almost no casualties among their own forces - a much larger force of armored French aristocrats and Genoese mercenaries with crossbows. It's a stunning and dramatic moment in history, and a transformative moment in warfare. The story is told from the perspective of one of the English bowmen, who is both a character in the story, and also a nearly omniscient narrator, able to speak to us somehow with knowledge of both his own time and ours, making references and comparisons to contemporary events and issues. His narrative voice is rude and insightful, informative and hilarious, and is a large part of what makes the book so entertaining. And for what is essentially an expository retelling of a historical event, the book is indeed ridiculously, sinfully entertaining. The bowman, understandably, takes pains to paint his own people in a good light - as freedom-loving underdogs seeking revenge on their oppressors - and the French in a bad one, but on the other hand he doesn't flinch away from the barbaric things the British did during their terroristic march across the countryside and the subsequent battle at Crécy. Oh, and did I mention that the artwork - in black and white, by Raulo Caceres - is thrilling, beautiful, cinematic, and fantastically detailed? I particularly like the way he captures the noblemen, and the brutality of the battle.
I'm very glad good reviews on the internet convinced me to pick this book up. It's an excellent addition to my collection.
Batman: Gothic
This is a storyline I'd read before many years ago, I believe in issues, though I'm not sure. It's written by Grant Morrison, with art by Klaus Janson. I remember liking it quite a bit back then, and I did enjoy it again this time, but I also found it a bit flawed.
As the pretentious and ridiculous introduction by F. Paul Wilson points out, the story is "Gothic" in many ways. It's a ghost story, complete with a ship full of dead men; a drowned church haunted by a burning nun; a deal with the devil; an immortal killer; revenge from beyond the grave; an attempt to trick the devil that goes awry; the threat of plague and disease; haunting memories of childhood and parents. There's even magic in it, an old and impressive kind of magic that involves tricks like capturing your soul in a piece of cord by measuring your shadow with it.
And it's a pretty good story, too. The familiar elements in it are less cliches and more archetypes carefully fitted into place to make a new, more fascinating whole. But I'm not so sure it's a story that Batman belongs in. It feels almost as if this was a story Morrison came up with independent of the comic, decided he wanted to tell it, and since he was writing Batman at the time, he jammed Batman into it. To put it another way, the Batman who appears in this story doesn't seem like the Batman I know.
For instance, Morrison does some retconning and makes the young Bruce Wayne into a shy, weak child who attended, for a short time, what was essentially a British boarding school somehow transplanted into the middle of Gotham City. It's an interesting concept, and how it and the villain fit into Batman's origin is interesting as well, but it doesn't make all that much sense.
And Batman himself seems a bit off. Despite the fact that his enemy's only real ability is that he doesn't die, Whisper gets the drop on Batman and defeats him in combat multiple times. And neither time does Whisper do anything particularly impressive. He just punches Batman, or throws something at him. That makes no sense. Batman was trained by ninjas! He can beat anybody (in some cases, even super-powered somebodies) in a straight fist fight; hell, he can practically dodge bullets. Some old guy punching him and throwing a hook at him shouldn't even slow him down.
Batman also seems to get scared and freaked out a lot in this story, which doesn't really fall in line with his normal personality either. I think the problem is that this is a horror story, and in some basic ways, Morrison wrote it as if Batman was your average horror story protagonist - a regular guy in danger from, and deeply afraid of, a horrifying monster. The problem is, the rest of the time, Batman is the monster. To see him gasping and screaming and running and getting knocked out just doesn't feel right.
Perhaps I'm harping on this too much, though. Batman is written pretty well in other parts of the story, and Alfred is written exceptionally well at all times - constantly digging at Bruce with his dry wit while Bruce studiously ignores him. The art and colors are a little ugly sometimes, but generally they work pretty well for the story. And the story, as I said, is quite a good one. So, I can't call it my favorite Batman book ever, but it's fun nonetheless.
Coup d'état
This was pretty disappointing, as I should have expected. It's all the issues in a giant Wildstorm crossover event, collected together in one book, which tell the story of how and why the Authority take over the government of the United States of America. At this point, The Authority was being written by Robbie Morrison, whose run I skipped over due to the fact that I'd heard it wasn't very good (which I can believe quite easily after reading this). Besides Morrison's Authority, the book also involves issues of Sleeper by Ed Brubaker, Wildcats Version 3.0 by Joe Casey, and Stormwatch: Team Achilles by Micah Ian Wright. Sleeper I wasn't familiar with, but it apparently involves a super-powered guy who absorbs pain working as a sleeper agent under the command of a supervillain named Tao (Tactically Augmented Organism). Tao seems to be Morrison's nemesis for the Authority, but despite that fact, and the fact that he essentially sets in motion the chain of events that leads to the Authority's takeover, he hardly appears in this book at all.
The sleeper agent runs a mission for Tao which puts a device into the hands of the American government that allows them to enter the bleed, something they've apparently been wanting to do for some time. So they use it before really taking the time to analyze it completely, and it ends up blowing up a ship full of aliens called the Vigil, who are the Wildstorm universe's version of the Watchers (why does every comic book company's universe have to have a race of alien beings who sit around watching and recording everything?), tearing a whole in the bleed and causing the burning corpses of alien giants to rain down on Florida. Which actually sounds like a pretty classic Authority storyline, and I applaud it. The real problem is, the way the Authority reacts to this chain of events.
Now, it's true that the Authority are pushy bastards, and have always been pushy bastards. But they've also always been intelligent pushy bastards who do incredible and sometimes terrible things for intelligent and understandable reasons, and I've always absolutely loved them for it. But in this book, not only do I find myself disliking them, I hardly recognize them. When they discover that the American government used this bleed-exploring technology without fully testing it, thus causing the disaster, they pretty much instantly flip out and decide to take over the country. They never even try to figure out where the technology comes from. They never discover that Tao was behind it at all (which they would have done, if they had just investigated a little bit more). They just get a certain amount of information, and then react explosively.
I'll admit, it's not hard for me to imagine the Authority I know and love deciding to take over the USA. When I heard that that was the plotline of this book, I didn't think, "Wah?!" I thought, "Sure, that makes sense; sounds good!" But the American government has already done a lot of terrible things - to the world and to the Authority personally - and the Authority has never reacted before by crushing the American army and air force and killing the president (who is so obvious and clumsy a parody of George W. Bush that it's not even funny). So I figured what America did in this book would have to be really, really awful. But it's actually not. They just use some untested technology in an attempt to explore the realm between dimensions, and a terrible accident occurs. Sure, it was a pretty incompetent thing to do, but it wasn't done with intentional malice; in fact, a trick was played on them by a villainous genius. But for some reason the Authority just ignore all of these facts, don't even try to figure out who might really be behind the plot, and make a crazy decision without having all the information. That doesn't sound like them at all to me.
And yet they're characterized this way throughout the story. In one sequence, they arrive just as a StormWatch team is leaving, and make the assumption, based on almost no information whatsoever, that the guy with the bullet in his head on the ground must be a poor, innocent super-human that StormWatch shot just because he had powers. Except he's not - he's a crazy supervillain who was planning on taking over the world. Which would have become obvious had they even looked around a little. But instead they again make ridiculous assumptions based on very little information, something I have never seen them do before, and would never reasonably expect them to do.
They're also constantly shown reacting thoughtlessly, violently, and angrily to just about everybody; making speeches at the drop of a hat (in fact, in one particularly unfortunate sequence in the Wildcats section, Jack Marlowe and the Authority each make pretentious, nonsensical speeches at each other); and in all other ways being a bunch of blithering dunderheads. WTF? Who are these guys and where are my Authority? Did they get replaced by Skrulls or something? If that's how this is all eventually explained... well, that would be totally stupid, but it would at least make more sense than this book does.
The Authority: Revolution Book 1
The Authority: Revolution Book 2
Now this, this is the Authority. I made the mistake of starting Book 1 late Saturday night and had to stay up until early Sunday morning finishing both volumes. It is one, long, extremely engrossing story about how the Authority deal with the aftermath of their take-over of America and what happens when an old villain or two from their past intrudes and nearly destroys them entirely. I find Ed Brubaker - the erstwhile author of this piece - to be a bit uneven as a writer, as he occasionally will tend towards the depressive and melodramatic, but here he does a fine job, crafting an intriguing and credible story with lots of epic action, complex issues, and difficult choices. And, perhaps most importantly, the team he gives us in these pages feels like the one I know. Sure, they still all have pretty short fuses, but the way they react to things and what they do all makes sense.
I don't want to go into too much detail about what happens, as I don't want to lay too many spoilers out for you (even though these books are pretty old). Suffice it to say, terrible catastrophic events occur, they fight another crazy super-team, somebody dies, and the Authority as a team changes forever. Also, holy crap Jenny Quantum is powerful - and yet, still human, and so still vulnerable and interesting. There are some great Apollo/Midnighter sequences. And even a D&D joke! ("Super-charisma? How many dice did he have to roll to get that?") So, all-in-all, great stuff.
I'm rather sad now that there are no more Authority trades I'm interested in picking up. But I understand that a new Authority miniseries should be starting up later on this month, so I still have that to look forward to. And maybe I could start collecting Midnighter...
Hellboy Volume 7: The Troll Witch and Others
With the purchase of this book, I now own every existing Hellboy TPB. Ah, that feels good. Of course, looking in the back, I see there's quite a few BPRD TPBs out there, and I don't own any of those yet. Hmm... Anyways, as for this book, it's awesome, just like pretty much every other Hellboy collection. It's not one full story arc, but a series of unrelated short stories, most of them previously published elsewhere, although one or two is original to this collection. In a first for a Hellboy collection (at least, as far as I remember), two of the stories in here are drawn by someone other than Mike Mignola ("The Vampire of Prague," by P. Craig Russell, and "Makoma," with the frame story drawn by Mignola, but the large central portion by Richard Corben), and the results are totally cool and fascinating. It's true that the current story arcs of Hellboy and BPRD are being drawn by non-Mignola artists, but in those cases, the artists seem to be trying to stick to Mignola's style as closely as possible. In the two stories in this book, Mignola worked with established artists who brought their own very impressive styles to their work here, thus giving us a very new and different look at Hellboy and his world. And as much as I love Mignola's work, it's totally fascinating and refreshing to see someone else's spin on his character.
As for the stories, I love them all, but let me talk a bit about my particular favorites. "The Hydra and the Lion" is a cute piece, with Mignola's daughter apparently making a cameo appearance, and "The Troll-witch" is quite moving. "Dr. Carp's Experiment" is creepy and cool, with a Twilight Zone kind of feel to it. "The Vampire of Prague" is a brilliant piece with wonderful art and colors and a great conclusion.
But the real star of the book, and easily one of my favorite Hellboy stories ever, is "Makoma." This is an African folk tale told to Hellboy by a mummy as he stands dreaming in the NYC Explorers' Club - a tale which he is inserted into so he can play the part of the main character. And indeed the folk tale parallels Hellboy's story in all kinds of fascinating and wonderful ways. It's an epic, sad, beautiful, awe-inspiring, funny, wonderful story told with subtlety and with incredible, jaw-dropping drawings and colors. Just fantastic. |
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