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| Saturday, June 14, 2008 03:36 PM |
| (Last updated on Wednesday, June 18, 2008 07:51 AM) | | The Take |
 by Fëanor |
Fëanor's weekly comic book review post.
This covers books from the week of 6/4/08, as well as a few acquisitions from the library that I've finished reading since last time. Yes, I'm falling behind again! And I expect to continue to do so for the next couple of weeks, until we're settled in the new place and get some of our free time and sanity back.
Back issues and old data
A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics
I saw this at the library the other day and just had to take it home with me. I thought about handling it in a separate Book Report post, but then I decided that since it's pretty much entirely an anthology of reprinted comic books (with a little bit of history and biography tucked in between), my analysis of it really belonged here.
The book was published in 1981, and interestingly enough focuses mainly on comedy comics of the Golden Age (c. 1938 through c. 1955). It has the first Superman story from Action Comics #1, the first Batman story from Detective Comics #27, as well as some Plastic Man stories, a Captain Marvel story, and a handful of Will Eisner's The Spirit. But the other 20 stories reprinted here are from comedy titles that I was almost entirely unfamiliar with.
Of course I've already read and blogged about the first Superman and Batman stories, so I won't talk about them again. Next up in the book is a story arc from Sheldon Mayer's Scribbly which consists of a parody of super hero comics. After hearing about such characters from her kids, Ma Hunkel decides to become one herself to fight crime and injustice. Thus is born the Red Tornado (later to become an actual DC super hero). These stories are drawn pretty well and are vaguely amusing, but nothing special (comments that I could easily apply to many other stories in this book).
Next up is Jack Cole's Plastic Man, which I was rather eager to read, having heard many great things about it. The two stories they chose to reprint here are Plastic Man's origin story from Police Comics #1, and the origin story of the character who eventually became Plastic Man's comic relief sidekick, Woozy Winks, from Police Comics #13. These are actually pretty good stories, with some fascinating ideas and funny gags. Still, I guess I was expecting more. I found the next story far more entertaining: "Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe." This is a grand old Captain Marvel story arc from the landmark 100th issue of Captain Marvel Adventures. It features Marvel teaming up with his friend Talky Tawny to face off against his arch-enemy Dr. Sivana. The story is pure insanity, with time travel, magical new elements with extremely unlikely properties, and clones of our hero and of our villain. But it's also pure fun, and fantastic comics.
Next up is some random work from Basil Wolverton. Wolverton's drawing style is unique and was immediately recognizable to me. So visually these comics are pretty neat, but the backgrounds are overloaded with silly gags, and the stories, too, are just one silly gag after another with no real plot to hold them together. These are kind of entertaining, but not fantastic.
Next up is George Carlson. The introduction to this section talked up Carlson so much I was really expecting something special, but, although visually it's rather fascinating and familiar, story-wise it's literally pure nonsense. I realize it's meant to be kids' stuff, but even from children's stories I expect at least some kind of logic. This is just a big meaningless mess that I can't get excited about at all.
Little Lulu I was familiar with as a character from vintage cartoons I'd downloaded, but I'd never seen the comics. Reprinted here is some of John Stanley's work on the title. I didn't really like Lulu in the cartoons. I like her a little bit more here, but the sad fact is, comedy just really isn't my thing. That sounds weird, even to me, but this kind of light comedy title just doesn't interest me at all. It's kind of amusing, but it just seems... disposable. Unimportant. I'm afraid I feel similarly about Carl Barks' Donald Duck. I've been reading a lot recently about the great things Barks did with Donald Duck, but I was pretty underwhelmed by the story reprinted here, which features Donald trying to get help from his Uncle Scrooge McDuck to purchase an unlikely Christmas gift for his nephews.
Next up is Walt Kelly and his animal stories, which are set in the Okefenokee and feature Pogo the Possum. The introduction talks about Kelly and Pogo as if everybody knows who they are, but this was all new to me. Still, yet again, the drawing style was familiar to me, and it was easy enough for me to connect with the basic stories and simple and amusing slang. It's more light comedy, with no real big belly laughs or stunning punchlines, but it's pleasant enough.
Next up was a title I was really interested in reading: Will Eisner's The Spirit. They picked some interesting issues of it to reprint here, where the Spirit himself is a background character, and the central story is a character portrait or a philosophical meditation of some kind. In the first story, a scientist's invention allows a crook to see into the future and avoid a terrible mistake. The second story is the sad, darkly comic story of one Gerhard Shnobble, who, it happens, can fly. And the final story counts down the last ten minutes of a young man's life, to show you how quickly everything can go wrong. It's interesting stuff, pretty clever and experimental in plot and visuals. Sure, there's a corny, Twilight Zone kind of gimmickry to it, but it's well done, and I like the way he plays with integrating the titles into the backgrounds of the story. Fascinating stuff.
Next is a random collection of stuff from EC comics: a couple of darkly thoughtful, serious, humanistic Korean War stories; parodies of Superman and Howdy Doody from Mad; and a very artistic, and also quite brutal, little story about the emotional after-effects of the Holocaust. I feel like the parodies fall pretty flat, but the serious stories are pretty strong. These kind of war stories I've seen many times before, but they're done pretty well here. In the Nazi story the plot is perhaps a bit familiar, but still well constructed, and visually it's quite stunning.
All in all, it's a fascinating collection that gave me a glimpse of a lot of Golden Age titles I'd never seen before, and I'm very glad I came across it - even if most of those stories weren't as entertaining as I might have hoped.
Thumbs Sideways
Houdini: The Handcuff King
This black-and-white and gray-blue graphic novel by writer Jason Lutes and artist Nick Bertozzi is another prize found in the library. When I picked it up and flipped through it, it looked familiar, either because I'd seen it in the library before, or because I'd seen parts of it reprinted in some other publication (possibly the comic news) before. Regardless, since it's about Houdini, and I love Houdini, I decided to get it out.
Rather than attempt to tell the entire life story of Houdini, the book instead focuses on one particular incident in his life, and from what he does and says, and how he interacts with people during this incident, you get a pretty clear portrait of him as a person, as an entertainer, and as a husband. When we meet him first, he's practising picking the lock on a pair of handcuffs. Then we seem him training himself, thinking about ways to promote himself, sharing some romantic moments with his dear wife Bess, practising for his next stunt, doing an interview with reporters, and dealing with one "reporter" who turns out to in fact be an agent of one of his rivals, there to discredit him and reveal him as a fraud. The tension and excitement builds as Houdini heads out to perform his next stunt (jumping from a bridge into an icy cold river, naked except for a small swim suit, and with chains binding him hand and foot). His wife Bess has to meet him before he jumps so she can kiss him, and thus secretly pass the all-important lock pick from her mouth to his. But when she's held up by the "reporter" we begin to worry - will she make it in time? Will he escape his bonds? Of course the answers to these questions are obvious and the outcome is inevitable, but the story is no less thrilling and triumphant for all that.
Besides thrilling and triumphant, the book is also funny, warm, and wonderful. What makes it so good is clever writing, beautiful art, and some truly fantastic visual story-telling. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the subject of the story is one of the most fascinating, talented, and intriguing men ever to have lived.
The main story is followed up by some annotations that explain some of the historical background and offer some interesting factual details. All in all, a really lovely little book.
Thumbs Up
New releases
Abe Sapien: The Drowning #5
This fantastic miniseries comes to its fantastic conclusion in this fantastic issue! Can you tell I like it? But really, how could I not like it? It's got the whole package: beautiful, eerie, atmospheric art; a great plot with magic, monsters, and fighting; and, of course, great writing and characters, especially Abe, who's fighting the whole time not just against ghosts and demons, but also against himself and his own lack of self-confidence. He comes of age, in a way, through the course of this arc, realizing his own potential. He also gets to shoot a lot of things, witness a really bad-ass magic-user fight, and, in a gasp-worthy moment near the end of this issue (spoiler alert!) gets a glimpse of the very jellyfish-like deity that made him who he is. Interesting stuff. And the end of another great Mignola miniseries.
Thumbs Up
Ultimate Origins #1
This is the first part of a five-part miniseries wherein Brian Michael Bendis is going to pull together the threads of the Marvel Ultimate universe and reveal that everything is connected, apparently as part of some vast, strange conspiracy. I'm only an occasional fan of Bendis' work, and only an occasional fan of the Ultimate universe, but I thought I'd give this a shot. I ended up mostly enjoying it.
It opens more or less in the present ("six months ago" it says), with Bruce Banner trying to impart some great secret to Spider-Man: "It's all connected!" But before he can explain, the army attacks, he turns into the Hulk, and jumps away. Flashback to WWII and the birth of the American super soldier program. Then jump forward a bit and we see three soldiers looting in war-time Sicily. One of them is Nick Fury. Another is James Howlett, the man who will eventually be known as Wolverine. And the third is named Fisk (probably the Kingpin). The three of them are caught, and Fury ends up being shipped off to a jail cell full of other black men. He's experimented upon, and apparently becomes a kind of super soldier. Next we see Howlett being experimented on, as well, as part of Canada's super soldier program. During the experiment, the mutant gene is created, and Howlett becomes mutant zero.
It's actually an intriguing, involving story, well told, with lots of cool ideas, and the scene with the scientists experimenting on the black men like they're animals reminds me very much of the horrific true story of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. I have only two real problems. One is that the art, by Butch Guice, leaves a bit to be desired; some of the characters just look lame and ugly. The other is that... well, I'm just kind of tired of the Ultimate universe always being like a really twisted, dirty, nasty version of the regular Marvel Universe. Did Ultimate Nick Fury have to be a petty looter, instead of a war hero? Still, I'm getting over that, and I'm mostly just curious as to where this story is going to go next.
Thumbs Up
Trinity #1
This is the first issue of a new weekly title from DC focusing on the three major heroes of the DCU: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. It consists of two inter-related stories. The first is "Boys and Their Games..." by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Mark Bagley and it sees the big three meeting in public as their secret identities to discuss some odd dreams they've all been having about some kind of huge imprisoned entity trying to free itself. They end up going their separate ways without having come to any real conclusions, but then each start having weird waking versions of the dream, and then are each struck by different strange catastrophes. And that's it for the first story. The dialogue is a bit clumsy and stilted; there are some pretty lame and obvious attempts to define these characters through the way they order breakfast and how they choose to arrive at the meeting and so forth. But still, there's nothing really awful here, and the story and its central mystery are intriguing (although I assume the entity they're all dreaming of is Barry Allen's Flash, who's struggling to coalesce as a distinct entity again).
Story #2 is "In the Morrows to Come," with writing again by Kurt Busiek, this time assisted by Fabian Nicieza, and art by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens. It tells of a wise-cracking wise-ass with a staff and a metal half mask who shows up at the ruins of a spooky old castle to talk to the ancient witch Morgan Le Fey. Turns out he and the lady have been sharing a dream, too, but their dream is about gaining ultimate power, and it involves three keystones: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Morgan Le Fey looks forward in time and gets some glimpses of pretty nonsensical stuff, involving tarot cards and some weird parallel world. Anyway, they decide they need a third person to counteract the three keystones and go out looking for him. The wise-ass goes by the name Enigma - I wonder if that's a hint that he's really the Riddler? His staff is shaped sort of like a question mark. Hmm...
Anyway, this story is pretty poorly written. The dialogue is really pretty terrible - ridiculous, stilted, overdone - and the characters are pretty silly, too. The problem is, it's also got an intriguing mystery at its heart. In short, I already bought the second issue of this title. I don't know how long I'll stick with it, though, if the writing continues to be this mediocre.
Thumbs Sideways
Secret Invasion #3
The big Marvel miniseries continues. "Jarvis" asks for S.H.I.E.L.D.'s surrender; Norman Osborn tries to talk down "Captain Marvel" (is this the same Skrull Captain Marvel from the recent miniseries, or a different Skrull Captain Marvel?); the Initiative recruits show up in Times Square to help the Young Avengers fight the invasion of Super Skrulls (and none too soon - the Young Avengers are getting their asses beat); and, in the issue's real shocker sequence, "Spider-Woman" (really the Skrull queen) tells Tony (spoiler alert!) that he's a deep undercover Skrull who doesn't even know he's a Skrull, and that he did a great job preparing for the invasion by taking over S.H.I.E.L.D. and starting the Civil War. Woah! Could this be true, or just a Skrull mind-fuck? I think the latter. I hope the latter, actually, because it would be really lame if Marvel tried to turn the Civil War into a Skrull plot. Anyway, the issue ends with an awesome, kick-ass, final page reveal featuring (spoiler alert) Nick Fury and his new Howling Commandos. That's hot stuff.
So yeah, I'd call this the best issue of Secret Invasion yet. Lots of stuff is happening; there are many really impressive and exciting action sequences; I love the reveal at the end; and despite the implications, I like the disturbing thing with Tony that's keeping us off-balance. Good work, Bendis!
Thumbs Up
Nova #14
This latest story arc is really not doing it for me. In this issue, Nova heads up to convince Galactus to hold off for a bit so the planet can be evacuated, but is busted down by the Silver Surfer. There's a bit of a fight, but really, Nova doesn't have a chance. Finally he gets a chance to reason with the Surfer, who consents to use the Power Cosmic to shield the evacuation ships' drive-tech from Galactus' radiation so they're able to take off. So everything's taken care of and the show's over, right? Wrong! The Red Jack alien, who seemed like a pointless distraction in the previous issue, adapts to Nova's shields, busts out of his prison, and starts killing people again. Nova holds it off long enough to let the rest of the evacuees escape - but it takes so long that now he's stuck on the dying planet and can't escape himself. Oops! Don't worry, though; I think it's safe to assume he will talk the Silver Surfer into saving him in the next issue.
Like I said, this arc really isn't working for me. I just don't care very much about this planet or its people; the Red Jack alien entity is boring and cliche; the whole "Silver Surfer is haunted by the vestiges of conscience but must do his duty" thing has already been done to death in many other comics before this one; and the writing as a whole just isn't that strong. Still, I'm hoping the series will pick back up again soon, and I'm sticking with it for now.
Thumbs Sideways
Omega the Unknown #9
In this, the penultimate issue of this miniseries, Alex finally puts on the Omega costume, then has to deal with the press and the Mink's men dogging his steps, but he takes pretty well to organizing and leading a counter-attack against the spreading robot forces. Meanwhile, the Over Thinker provides some slightly corny, but also rather fascinating and insightful, analysis of the story and especially of Omega's character. It's essentially a story about individualism versus group-think. A person alone versus an all-consuming franchise. Anyway, next the Mink, after being dumped by his girlfriend in his own helicopter, has a very odd moment wherein he quotes various song titles, and then paraphrases Shakespeare, before finally performing a genuine (if rather clumsy and mostly ineffectual) act of selfless heroism. Sadly, as Alex and his friends escape from the robot hordes, they don't realize that the original Omega is right behind them, and fly off without him. While they continue working on a plan for a massive cure of the robot franchise infection, the original Omega is fighting the robots at the latest commercial venture they've taken over: a shipping company. Then suddenly the Over Thinker gets pulled into the story and becomes a part of it in a rather spectacular way. I have to say, I rather enjoy the idea of matter and doesn't matter imploding when they meet.
It's been a strange series, but also a unique and fascinating one. I look forward to seeing how Lethem and friends pull it all together in the last issue. From the preview image, it looks like the Omegas of many worlds, arrayed in their variety like the Green Lantern Corps, will be tuning in for the grand finale.
Thumbs Sideways
Criminal 2 #3
This is the third and final of a series of one-shots for this title. Each of them have told essentially the same story, but from a different character's perspective, slowly filling in the details until you get the whole picture. This issue is called "Female of the Species" and takes Danica, the one-time girlfriend of Sebastian Hyde, as its main character. We see just what happened to her to fill her with the terrible, empty rage that makes her do what she does. In other words, it's another fantastic, brutal crime noir story, with a dark character portrait at its heart, from Messrs. Brubaker and Phillips.
In the back of this issue we learn that next issue will be the start of a new multi-part story arc called "Bad Night," which is exciting news indeed. And after that comes a short essay by Michael Stradford on a movie called The Yakuza, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura. Sounds very cool; I'm adding it to the Netflix queue as I write this.
Thumbs Up
House of Mystery #2
Vertigo's weird new anthology series continues. In this issue, we learn a bit more about Fig and the other people trapped in the House of Mystery, and we get a surreal and goofy little fantasy adventure story from a man who claims to be the greatest living process server in more than three hundred worlds. There's nothing really great in this issue, but there's nothing really terrible, either, and there are a few amusing, whimsical touches that are entertaining. Like the big ol' sea monster. I also like the concept of the house - the way it grows to accomodate new people, and seems to shift and expand around you. It reminds me of some of my favorite concepts in House of Leaves.
In the very back of the book is a short preview for a new monthly Vertigo series called Air. Looks like it's some kind of weird sci-fi/fantasy story that's trying to have a philosophical discussion about security and air travel. Problem is, it's totally pretentious and stupid. I definitely won't be picking that up.
Thumbs Sideways
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 #15
No author is as cruel to his characters as Joss Whedon is to his. He only ever gives them happiness and good things so he can snatch them away again. In this issue, he cruelly crushes the heart of poor Xander. Buffy's short-lived lesbian love affair ends as well, though far more sweetly. But the issue isn't all about the characters having their emotions trampled on by Mr. Whedon. There's also incredible amounts of humor and action, with brutal vampire slaying, crazy magic fights, and even a duel between a giant and her be-tailed mecha opposite, to Andrew's great delight (and mine). Also, Dracula gets to be a serious bad-ass. In other words, it's a brilliant and exciting conclusion to another great Buffy storyline.
Thumbs Up |
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