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The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958 by Charles M. Schulz

I reviewed a lot of the Complete Peanuts series when they were coming out – I bought them all, and read them contemporaneously, but the blog started up in the middle of that timeframe – so there’s already a lot of words on this blog about Charles M. Schulz and his comics. This one, back in the day, was the first volume in the series covered here, in a quick round-up post of the kind I used to do. [1]

I used to throw in a big block of links to all of the books in the series in my Peanuts posts; I’m not doing that this time. Let me instead link the first and last  books; you can go forward and backward from there if you have the time and inclination.

When I buy new books, they sit on dedicated shelves, and have to run under my eyes to win their places on the “real” shelves. (Do other people do that, too?) I even do that if I’m buying a new copy or edition of a book I read before – if I like it enough to pay for it again, I must like it enough to read it again, right? So I’ve had a new copy of this book for a few years, and finally re-read it. I’ll try to be more concise than I was for a lot of the books in this series, since I’ve already written so much about Schulz and Peanuts.

The Complete Peanuts, 1957 to 1958  collects, like most of the books in the series, two full years of the Peanuts comic strips, daily and Sunday, in order. The whole fifty-year (with an asterisk; it’s actually 49-years-and-four-and-a-half-months) run was written and drawn by Schulz, with no assists from anyone else.

The first time around, I was struck by the energy and novelty of Schulz’s early work, all of these still moderately realistic kids in a suburban setting that was empty of anything but them, most of the time. Parents and other adults are occasionally offstage voices, in a way Schulz would reduce and eliminate over the next few years. The personalities are still shifting – Violet is still prominent here, mostly as a foil for Charlie Brown, but in ways that are more generic and less specific than the foil Lucy was turning into.

This time, I found it more transitional: not the shock of the first couple of years, when the kids were as close to feral as 1950s newspaper-comics kids could be, and not the full emotionally-resonant world that Schulz built out, starting in the early 1960s. Charlie Brown has completely transitioned into a sad sack; we see him failing to kick the football and managing his baseball team (as well as he can, which is not well). Lucy is somewhere in the middle, still half fussbudget but getting closer to the force of nature – loosely based on Schulz’s first wife in later years, many commentators believe – that she became. Linus is continuing on his own path, still very much “the little kid” for jokes about his security blanket but more philosophical more of the time.

And Snoopy, as called out by the cover and the introduction by Jonathan Franzen, hasn’t gotten into any of the manias he would embody in future decades – he’s not “Joe” anybody yet, and his doghouse is still conventional and static – but he’s clearly not a real dog, or a normal one, and his personality is getting bigger and brighter and more expressive. I still think the real era of Snoopy doesn’t start until after the big continuity sequences of the ’60s and early ’70s – the cult of Snoopy started about the time of the bicentennial – but Schulz was already heading in that direction almost twenty years earlier, and Snoopy was clearly the same character he would be in those later strips.

There are some short sequences here – one week, maybe two – but this is mostly gag-a-day work. The sequences are often just five or six similar gags, with Snoopy impersonating a vulture or Beethoven’s birthday or Linus’ blanket jokes.

Schulz got more sophisticated and deeper than this, but you can see the seeds of his peak from here – he was building up to it, adding characters and shifting the characters he already had. And his drawing was up to its peak already: that can be hard to realize until you see someone else trying to draw Schulz’s characters, and you realize how precise his poses and lines are, how few details he actually draws to make his whole world.

[1] At some point – much later than it should have been – I realized that a working editor should not be posting quick thoughts in public about books he was considering for his publishing program. I was remarkably dumb in public for a remarkably long time; I hope I’m at least making different mistakes now.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Wild That We’re Alive by Lauren Haldeman

Every book is from a particular person, with a distinctive point of view. The best authors realize that, and are as deeply themselves as they can be, to emphasize the things only they would say, in the ways only they would say it.

Wild That We’re Alive  is a collection of diary comics, from one woman, mostly about her family life. It’s not anything at all like that description would make you think it is – some hybrid of Erma Bombeck and James Kochalka – because that’s not who Lauren Haldeman is.

Haldeman is a poet – with several awards and a pedigree from the University of Iowa, so I don’t just mean “someone who has written some poetry” – a web designer, editor, painter, and obviously a maker of comics. But what I think is the key fact is that she’s the kind of person who has one child, and that child is named Magnus.

There’s a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There’s a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can’t predict. And there’s a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

Magnus is a character here, appearing in a number of comics. Haldeman’s husband, Ben, is mentioned but less present. But they’re all about her: these are diary comics. Each one is generally a single image, captioned or with dialogue – one image for a single moment, a single thought. Haldeman works in big blocks of generally light, soothing colors, and a bold, expressive, individualistic line.

She draws people somewhat anthropomorphically – maybe dogs, maybe bipedal kangaroos? – with herself central in most of these comics. They’re about what’s it’s like to be Lauren Haldeman in the world, sometimes the physical world but even more often her mental world. I think Haldeman is the kind of person who never stops thinking about things, even when she wants to be quieter and just present. (Ask me why I recognize that.) She doesn’t always provide context: there are a number of comics about grief, but we never learn who Haldeman is grieving, how recent the loss was, or anything like that. They’re all from her point of view, so things she already knows likely won’t be mentioned.

Wild That We’re Alive is organized as a year. After a brief introductory section about her family and animals, Haldeman mentions she thinks of years as beginning in the fall – she seems to still be embedded in the academic year, from her work with the University of Iowa and maybe other academic-related web-design work. So the book follows that flow, with full-page paintings for half-titles (and occasionally elsewhere) leading into sections of comics from that time of year.

I think this was a project, a daily comic Haldeman did. Maybe for one particular year, maybe off and on for several years. I don’t see it on her website, so maybe it was mostly on social media, in the way a lot of comics-makers do these days. (If the eyeballs are on Instagram, it only makes sense to post there first.)

I’m not the first person to point out that poets and comic-writers need to have a similar level of concision, of using exactly the right word in a space where there’s only room for a few words. Haldeman is a great example of that; her language is precise and thoughtful, but also conversational and playful – not “poetry” in the old academic “study-this” sense, but poetic in the allusive, connected, word-besotted sense.

At times, Haldeman feels like a higher-brow version of Grant Snider – similar concerns about internal emotional states and the purpose of life, but pitched in a mindset informed by more of the academic world and with some weltschmerz behind it. I like Snider, and I like a more rigorous thought-pattern, so both of those things are good.

To close as I started, Haldeman is particular and distinctive: that’s good in and of itself, even more so because she has interesting thoughts and makes striking pictures about them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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C-Villain Boomerang is Upgraded to the Amazing Venom

New York, NY— June 8, 2026 — The mystery wearer of the super stylish new Red & Blue Venom suit was revealed this past April in Web of Venom #1 to be none other than fan favorite villain-turned-vigilante Boomerang! This September, after fighting alongside his fellow symbiote heroes during Queen in Black, he’ll swing into his first solo adventure in AMAZING VENOM, a five-issue limited series from the returning Web of Venom creative team, writer Jordan Morris and artist Luke Ross. Now calling himself COMEBACK, Fred Myers sets a course for Klyntar, the symbiote homeworld, on a cosmic quest that will test his limits as a hero and reshape his understanding of what it means to be a symbiote host.

When last we left the red-and-blue be-symbioted Fred Myers—formerly BOOMERANG, now COMEBACK—he was trying to keep his life uncomplicated. The last thing he wanted was to get caught up in the symbiote nonsense of Hela and Knull’s war over Earth… but the best-laid plans of saps and symbiotes often go awry. Now, in the fallout, Fred and his symbiote, Passenger, find themselves on a mission way, way, WAY more complicated than your average Venorang can handle!

“Boomerang has always been one of my favorite Marvel anti-heroes, and sticking him with a hyperactive symbiote in Web of Venom was a bonkers amount of fun,” Morris shared. “I’m so stoked that we can continue their adventure in THE AMAZING VENOM! Readers are in for a wild slurry of action, comedy and (gasp!) maybe even a little character growth for everyone’s favorite boomerang-hurling scumbag!”

AMAZING VENOM #1 (OF 5)
Written by JORDAN MORRIS
Art by LUKE ROSS
Cover by STEFANO CASELLI
Variant Covers by LUKE ROSS, ERIK LARSEN, and MATTEO LOLLI
On Sale 9/16

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Goes Like This by Jordan Crane

I like reading short stories much more than I like writing about them. And I don’t read short fiction all that much, so maybe I don’t even enjoy even reading them as much as I think I do. That’s complicated math, so I’ll leave it there.

Jordan Crane has been making comics for thirty years, but I only noticed him with his magnificent graphic novel Keeping Two  a few years ago. (Insert the usual disclaimer about the world being huge and full of interesting things, so no one can see all of it they want to.) Since making comics is time-consuming, his next book was Goes Like This , a collection of shorter works – and a lot of prints, actually – originally published from 2002 to 2022.

It is visually inventive, especially the prints, which are eye-popping and stunning. The stories are varied, from wordless one-pagers to longer dialogue-filled full stories. They tend to be sad or depressive at their core, with a surprising amount of death piling up, especially early in the book. (The first two long comics stories, if I remember correctly, sandwich a bunch of prints that all seem to be people falling to their deaths with their mouths open, so I wonder if Crane had a period in his work that was particularly doomy.)

His art style is somewhat malleable – this collection does span twenty years – but it’s all in a crisp, indy-comics storytelling mode, his people just a little soft and rubber-hose, their faces expressive with their usually-narrow eyes and other features defined with a few bold lines.

Without diving into individual stories, there’s not that much more to say: it’s a compelling collection of strong work. The stories stand alone, aside from the first two numbered chapters from a project that I suspect might have been an early attempt at what became Keeping Two. Those stories also tend to have simpler palettes – usually black and white or a few tones – while the prints are often overlaid with bright, jangling patterns. They almost seem to come out of completely different creative impulses in Crane, though you can see some continuity in his people and the situation they’re in: the prints are occasionally static, but, especially early in the book, they depict moments, out of context, where something is happening that would not be out of place in his stories.

There is a lot of death in it. Even the stories that don’t have on-panel deaths tend to be thematically about things dying or sickly, a relationship or a way of living. Crane does not seem to be a cartoonist of happiness: this is what I’m saying. That’s somewhat expected in indy-comics circles, admittedly, but know that Crane goes deeply to that well, both in narrative and in imagery, in this collection.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula

Growing up, I learned many things, among them that John Carradine never met scenery he couldn’t chew and that his Billy the Kid vs. Dracula is one of the all-time bad movies. It’s also fallen into the public domain, so multiple versions can be found for sale. Joining the collection is this new 50th-anniversary Blu-ray from Shoreline Entertainment, which comes with just the film and nothing celebratory.

Carrdine has said on more than one occasion, “I have worked in a dozen of the greatest, and I have worked in a dozen of the worst. I only regret Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Otherwise, I regret nothing.”

Carradine is actually a fine actor with the right material. I recently observed him in his earlier Captains Courageous. But, as a working man, supporting a family (including several who became actors themselves), he took whatever job he could get. That said, maybe it was director William “One-Shot” Beaduine or the script by Jack Lewis, although credited to Carl K. Hittleman, who did nothing with the part.

There’s nothing wrong with a vampire, even Dracula, operating in the Old West, but the cherry-picking of the lore is a disservice to what has come before. He’s a bat and bites pretty women and is susceptible to the crucifix and wolfsbane, but little else. Carradine had previously worn the fangs in House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) and did a far more credible job. Here, he doesn’t even attempt to project the old-world European charm he once had.

For reasons unknown, Dracula is traveling the American frontier in the late 19th century and finds a portrait of Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman) so captivating that he decides to make her his next bride. He kills her relatives, with whom he had been sharing a stagecoach, and impersonates her uncle. An older couple, also newly in town, recognize the charismatic figure and do everything they can to protect Betty after Dracula has claimed their own daughter (although killed, she doesn’t rise as a vampire).

Betty’s fiancée just happens to be the notorious Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney), trying to find peace working the Bentley Ranch. However, when Dracula makes his move, you can be sure there will be gunplay, fangs, and more. The finale is set in a silver mine so one might expect the ore to play a factor in the climax, but that’s not the case.

Courtney is a fine stuntman and a stiff as an actor, more familiar to viewers as Dan Reid, the title character’s nephew on The Lone Ranger. The rest of the cast are character actors recognizable from other productions in the 1950s and 60s.

Shot in eight days, it has a rushed, sloppy feel. Stereotypes masquerade as characters, and the dialogue is about as perfunctory as you can get.

No details on how the transfer was made, but the 1080p is serviceable with adequate audio. Lacking any special features, this is as bare-bones a disc as it is a horror film. Keno has a superior Blu-ray edition, released in 2019, complete with audio commentary.

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Young Shadow & the Watchdogs by Ben Sears

I’m still not sure if Ben Sears intends his comics to be all-ages (or, more specifically, most-ages, for tweens and up), or if it’s a by-product of the stories that he tells. Either way, I’d say his books are OK for tweens, mostly, if that’s something you care about.

Young Shadow & the Watchdogs  is Sears’ new book this year; it follows 2021’s Young Shadow  and can be considered a sequel to that book. I say “can be considered,” because it doesn’t reference the plot of the first book in any way, and Spiral Scratch isn’t in this book – so maybe it’s a prequel, instead. Or just another book in the same world, with no clear time sequence.

In the first book, Young Shadow was an urban vigilante, of the kind renowned in comics since the 1930s, though he was somewhat more lefty – mostly beating up polluters and corrupt cops – than the typical Big Two character. And he’s still doing some of that here: the story starts with Shadow and a group of kids – a distributed group of sidekicks, I suppose, or something like the Shadow’s organization, or a anarcho-syndicalist collective, if we think he’s leaning more heavily into the lefty thing – follow a truck with two bearded guys, stop them from dumping large barrels of something toxic in a place they shouldn’t, and turn them those bearded guys to the authorities of Soil & Water.

So we think “Young Shadow & the Watchdogs” is this vigilante group, probably. The title at first made me think it was a band, but sadly it’s definitely not that. But it’s not exactly a superteam, either: The Watchdogs are actually a baseball team, and Shadow is their coach. There’s only eight of them other than Shadow, which means, including him, they only just barely have enough players to field a team, and can never change pitchers – but it’s comics, and I suppose Sears wants to avoid having a too-large cast.

Anyway, the Shadows have a game coming up, with the requisite snooty rich kids – the term of art used in the book is “prep school jerks” – in two days. So the day after the vigilante action, they’re going to have a big practice to make sure they’re ready.

Parenthetically, these seem to be school-age kids – maybe middle school, maybe late elementary – but no one even mentions school. They’re out late at night stopping polluters who threaten them with guns, and parents don’t seem to bat an eye. And they spend the whole next day playing baseball. I assume that Bolt City has public schools and that these kids are enrolled, but the book itself provides no evidence to support that.

The reader thinks that the book will be about that big game with the snooty rich kids, and this old Meatballs fan was up for that. Or, possibly, that the polluters would come back and interfere with the game: some kind of intersection of the vigilante plot and the baseball plot. Neither of those two things are true.

Instead, Watchdogs takes a turn into the supernatural – signposted by a cold-open sequence about a nasty pro baseball player, in some earlier time and place – and the Watchdogs instead play a very different baseball game, against an unexpected opposing team. I don’t want to be coy about it; you can see them on the cover: the Watchdogs need to battle a team of skeletons because of the usual haunted-artifact-makes-them reasons. If they lose, they all die.

To immediately defuse all tension, they do not get eaten by the eels at this time. Sears works in a combination of the traditions of the superhero comic and the It-was-Old-Man-Jenkins! kid-friendly mystery, both of which require that the hero win in the end and everything be put right with the world. So they play fair, they play well, and they win in the end. The haunted artifact is returned to its proper custodian, and even the grumpy old  supernatural baseball player has a change of heart, maybe, we think.

Sears tells all of this in a fun cartoony line, softly rounded and full of amusing visual interest in every panel. He tells it all straight, but his art subtly tells the reader not to worry; nothing too scary will happen from these skeletons and other monsters. That’s another reason I think his books are OK for younger readers: they fit well in that tradition, and tell stories in ways that audience will both enjoy and be familiar with.

I’d still like to see a proper sequel to Young Shadow, to see what happens next and what’s the deal with Bolt City, but this was an amusing diversion from that plot, with an appealing cast and a lot of pages with great bits on them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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A New Book of Boba Fett is Coming in Sept.

New York, NY— May 26, 2026 — After his long-awaited return in The Mandalorian, Boba Fett went on to headline his own Disney+ series, The Book of Boba Fett. The hit show reintroduced the iconic bounty hunter to fans everywhere as he navigated the galaxy’s underworld and claimed control of Tatooine following Jabba the Hutt’s fall. This August, in the long-standing tradition of Marvel Comics epic Star Wars adaptations, Marvel brings this pivotal Star Wars saga to comic stands in STAR WARS: BOOK OF BOBA FETT, a seven-issue series by Star Wars veterans Rodney Barnes (Han Solo – Hunt for the Falcon, Ahsoka) and Will Sliney (Rise of Kylo Ren). The comic series marks the exciting comic book debut of several key characters, including Garsa Fwip, Dokk Strassi, Mok Shaiz’s majordomo, and more!

BOBA FETT HOLDS COURT AND FACES NEW CHALLENGES ON TATOOINE!

After escaping from the Sarlacc Pit, Boba Fett has taken over Jabba the Hutt’s syndicate—but does he have what it takes to keep Tatooine in order?

“I’ve loved Boba Fett since early childhood!” Barnes shared. “Adapting this series has been a complete joy, and I can’t wait for Star Wars fans to read it!”

STAR WARS: THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT #1 (OF 7)

Written by RODNEY BARNES
Art by WIL SLINEY
Cover by ALEX MALEEV
Variant Covers by RICKIE YAGAWA, E.M. GIST, JERRY ORDWAY, and PETE WOODS
On Sale 9/9

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First Midnight X-Men Details Revealed

New York, NY— May 26, 2026 — The light had its turn.

Following up on the reveal of the all-new, all-terrifying MIDNIGHT UNIVERSE, Marvel is proud to lift the curtain on the first look inside the debut series from writer Jonathan Hickman (House of X, Ultimate Spider-Man) and artist Matteo Della Fonte (Nova: Centurion) along with a movie homage variant cover by Björn Barends.

“We were very keen to have Matteo on this series, and we have not been disappointed. His storytelling is so good, and he is absolutely nailing every aspect of Jonathan’s script,” said Jordan D. White, senior editor of the series. “I could not be more thrilled to be working on shaping the Midnight line. Everyone has been cut loose and is truly firing on all cylinders. I cannot wait for everyone to see these books.”

AN ALL-NEW, ALL-DISTURBING UNIVERSE BEGINS HERE!

The clock strikes midnight and it’s the dark dawn of a new era.The shadows of New York City are stalked by vampires and the mutant empyres. The sword of Damocles hangs over the peace between these two species and the factions within them. An outright war is brewing and the unturned will be caught in the crossfire. Blockbuster comic book writer Jonathan Hickman returns to the X-Men with a hunger for blood as this new world of terror reimagines the heroes of the Marvel Universe!

MIDNIGHT X-MEN #1
Written by JONATHAN HICKMAN
Art by MATTEO DELLA FONTE
Cover by DIKE RUAN
Movie Homage Variant Cover by BJÖRN BARENDS
On Sale 8/5

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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair Comes to Disc in July

In 2003, Quentin Tarantino hadn’t made a film in six years. After the films Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, 1997’s Jackie Brown showed the restraint of Tarantino, in the only film he’s ever directed based on existing material, and with a relative quietness that his films haven’t had in quite the same way. But his fourth film would be the polar opposite: an explosion of excess, ambition, and playfulness. It was a film so big that it had to be cut into two parts. Kill Bill Vol. 1 was a wild, blood-soaked martial arts film, while Kill Bill Vol. 2, released six months later, remained a revenge film, yet one that was more focused on the dialogue that Tarantino does so well. Maybe more than any other film, Kill Bill, in both its parts, was Tarantino leaning into the genres he loved and doing his own take on them.

Splitting Kill Bill into two parts allowed more breathing room for Tarantino to add bits and pieces of this
story that flesh out this world. Tarantino has said that had it originally been released as one film, Kill Bill wouldn’t have been four hours, and those segments such as the Pai Mei sequence in Vol. 2 and the anime sequence in Vol. 1 would’ve been cut significantly. However, a cut that brings the two entries together, titled Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, has screened here and there over the years, most frequently at Tarantino’s own L.A. theater, the New Beverly Cinema. Now, The Whole Bloody Affair is receiving a full-blown, 4+ hour cut in all its glory, and it’s a sight to behold — as one would expect. Over 20 years after both volumes were released, The Whole Bloody Affair isn’t just an incredible way to experience Tarantino’s most bombastic film; it’s also a great reminder of just how much QT has grown as a filmmaker over the last two decades.

For those unfamiliar with Tarantino’s fourth film, Kill Bill tells the story of The Bride (Uma Thurman), a former assassin who runs away from her lover and the leader of the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad. Bill (David Carradine). A while later, at her wedding rehearsal, a now-pregnant Bride is gunned down in church by the Deadly Vipers. Yet it’s not that easy to kill The Bride, formerly known by the codename “Black Mamba,” and four years later, she wakes up from a coma, no longer pregnant, and ready for revenge against those who shot her down.

The Bride makes a kill list and makes her way through the squad. There’s O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who has become a yakuza leader in Tokyo over the last four years; Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), who is now a mother and wife in suburbia; Budd (Michael Madsen), Bill’s drunk brother who lives in a trailer in the desert; and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), a one-eyed assassin who hates The Bride more than any of the rest. Once The Bride has taken out her four former squad members, she will set out to finally, as the title implies, kill Bill.

The Whole Bloody Affair’s changes are relatively minor, but they do change the momentum of the story. While Vol. 1 ended with a jarring moment that put the audience on the edge of their seats waiting for Vol. 2 to be released, The Whole Bloody Affair no longer includes this moment, since it’s not needed to bring the audience back to theaters. By getting rid of this scene at the end of Vol. 1, it makes the finale of Vol. 2 even more impactful, a shot in the chest that hadn’t been hinted at two hours prior. It’s not necessarily a game-changing shift; however, for fans of Kill Bill, it is a noticeable shift in how this story is told. Also absent, understandably, is The Bride’s introduction to Vol. 2, catching up the audience on what happened in the first volume.

The Whole Bloody Affair, however, is most compelling as a look at a master filmmaker at the height of his experimentation. Tarantino has grown significantly in the two decades since Kill Bill, yet this film is an example of QT at his most maximalist, as he throws everything into the mix to see what sticks. This is a filmmaker who has made three of the defining films of the ‘’90s, making whatever the hell he wants, and gleefully doing so. Tarantino has always worn his inspirations on his blood-soaked sleeve, but Kill Bill is him completely being taken over by the films he loves, and it’s a joy to watch him play in this sandbox.

Because of this, Kill Bill still feels like Tarantino’s most ambitious project. For example, the fight with The Crazy 88s is almost as if he’s proving to himself he could make a massive samurai action sequence, and not only does he nail it, but you can almost hear him giggling behind the camera as he does it. He throws in an anime origin story, seemingly just because it’s cool as hell. And while the second half shows Tarantino reining in the wildness a bit, his love for Westerns and Japanese cinema is brazen in almost every frame. At this point in his career, Tarantino is a kid in a candy store with what he’s able to do, and Kill Bill is just about the most fun sugar rush one could imagine him making.

In the years since Kill Bill, Tarantino has made five films, and while they all have grandiose moments of absurdity, from killing Hitler in Inglourious Basterds, to Leonardo DiCaprio taking a flamethrower to Mikey Madison in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Tarantino has been more acutely aware of pulling back and allowing for the ridiculousness as almost a bit of catharsis within his films. Looking back at Kill Bill, it can’t help but seem like a filmmaker who has proven himself and is having a blast, and it almost feels as though it’s from a different storyteller than the one Tarantino is now.

After all these years, Kill Bill is still a remarkable piece of work, one that’s essential to who Tarantino would become with his next five films. Naturally, the key to what makes Kill Bill great isn’t just Tarantino, it’s, of course, Uma Thurman. Thurman has never been better than she is here, and it’s an absolute wonder to watch her shift, change, and absolutely nail everything each chapter individually asks of her. In one scene, she might be killing an entire restaurant full of assassins, and in another, she’s asked to make her heart break at realizing everything Bill has truly taken from her. Thurman is tremendous in every scene, and she certainly deserved an Oscar®r nomination for this defining role.

And while Thurman truly kicks ass, sheds blood, and claims other people’s limbs as her own throughout Kill Bill, it’s the moments of true overwhelming emotion that make this performance work so well. The moment when The Bride wakes up and discovers she is no longer carrying her baby is one of the most heartbreaking and emotional scenes Tarantino has ever directed. Even though Kill Bill is packed with great fight scenes, the most impactful of both volumes remains The Bride’s ultimate showdown with Bill, a conversation that covers everything from the nature of their relationship to the secret identities of superheroes. It’s moments like these where Thurman’s acting prowess shines, showing that some of the best moments Tarantino has had in his career are tied more to his incredible dialogue than to any violence or gore.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair isn’t necessarily the definitive version of this story — it’s just different and intriguing in its slight shifts and changes. At its core, it’s also just a great reminder of Tarantino at his coolest and most playful, and how far he’s come since making this film originally. And it’s always wonderful to watch Thurman’s The Bride cut down someone with Tarantino’s dialogue as handily as she can with a Hattori Hanzō sword. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair might not be Tarantino’s masterpiece, but it’s a brilliant example of a filmmaker with a deep-seated love of movies fully embracing his
inspirations and passions in grand fashion.

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REVIEW: Iron Man: Super Smash

Iron Man: Super Smash
By Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate
96 pages/Abrams Fanfare/$12.99

The team behind the entertaining Iron Man: Something Strange is back with a new graphic novel for younger readers, this time pairing Shellhead with the jade-jawed giant himself, the Hulk. In this whimsical adventure, Iron Man senses the Hulk has something against him, and he takes Thor’s suggestion to heart, that the pair bond through smashing things.

For the remainder of the story, the two travel together as they smash monsters, robot monsters, and rocks. Iron Man tries to get the hang of random violence rather than using his technological know-how to resolve problems. The Hulk is bemused and frustrated by his fellow Avenger. Over the course of the story, it becomes clear one person is behind the mayhem, and the reveal is a nice use of a lesser Marvel villain, one our heroes have little familiarity with but makes long-time readers smile.

The pace is brisk, and the artwork nicely complements the tone. And in a first, I believe Dean Hale has the Hulk be intentionally sarcastic in this not-too-bright incarnation.

There are nice lessons on friendship and responsibility carried throughout the story.

In the back, there are a few pages devoted to the process of going from script to finished artwork, which is a nice bonus for the young readers who will enjoy the adventure.

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