Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Constantine: City of Demons

Reviews
October 15, 2018

John Constantine, done right, is one of DC Comics’ strongest characters. The current incarnation in the Rebirth universe is a pale comparison to his Vertigo roots and the NBC series didn’t push the horrific elements far enough (being a prime time series, after all). Matt Ryan’s wonderful interpretation has been further watered down for the CW’s Legends of Tomorrow, so hearing him in all his weary glory in Constantine: City of Demons is most welcome.

This is one of the best animated adaptations of a comic book character, thanks to letting it be an R-rated film ensuring the horror/supernatural elements were true to the source material and not just curse words tossed in for “authenticity”. Kudos to J.M. DeMatteis for bringing Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben’s character to proper life. His original script loosely adapts Hellblazer: All His Engines graphic novel by Mike Carey and Leonardo Manco.

We open with hints of what happened in the past, sending a young, irresponsible Constantine to Ravenscar. His guilt, especially as the past is revealed throughout the 90-minute film, drives his actions and decisions, building to a most satisfying climax.

Constantine is cursed to fight the good fight but at a terrible cost and that has never been truer here. His longtime pal, Chas Chandler (Damian O’Hare), seeks him out to help find out what’s ailing his young daughter Trish. Of course, it’s supernatural in nature and off we go.

While Constantine and Chas jet from London to Los Angeles, Chas’ estranged wife Renee (Emily O’Brien), watches over their comatose child. Watching over her though is Asa the Nightmare Nurse (Laura Bailey), who is, of course, not what she appears.

This is the Constantine who practices magic, who smokes too much, drinks too much, carries too much pain with him, and is at his best when his back is up against the wall. While he tries to free Trish’s soul from Beroul (Jim Meskimen), he also has to contend with the Aztec god, Mictlantecuhtli (Rick D. Wasserman). The only assistance he receives is from the enigmatic Angela (Rachel Kimsey), who acts like Deadman, but has less altruistic motives. He makes deals, double-crosses whoever or whatever he needs to, all for the right reasons. However, there’s a price, always there’s a price. You suspect you know who pays it but it’s far steeper than imagined.

In Director Doug Murphy’s capable hands, the film is dark, atmospheric, and graphic in its violence. Whatever awkwardness existed when it ran on CW Seed in six parts is gone in this compilation.

The film has been released by Warner Home Entertainment in a 4K/Blu-ray/Digital HD combo set. Obviously, the 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD definition is sharp, but here, it’s noticeably better than the Blu-ray disc, with more subtle colors popping off the screen. It is well served by the DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio track.

Both 4K and Blu-ray come with a scarcity of bonus features. The most interesting is The Sorcerer’s Occultist: Understanding John Constantine (13:38), exploring the character with director Doug Murphy, producer Butch Lukic, executive producers David Goyer and so-called “Occult Expert” Jason Louv. Entertaining but less interesting is the WonderCon Panel—2018 where we hear from Ryan, DeMatteis, and Blue Ribbon Content’s Peter Girardi. There are also trailers for other animated fare all of which pale in comparison.

Note: Some version of the film will air tonight on the CW, but I suspect some of the gore and language will be scrubbed.

Book-A-Day 2018 #287: The Imitation Game by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis

Reviews
October 14, 2018

I’m going to start out with a potted rant; regular visitors may want to skip it.

A graphic novel is not “by” the writer. It is not “illustrated” by the artist. It is an inherently collaborative work equally created by both of them. (Assuming there are only two: it could easily be more.) Crediting a book that way is a mistake: even if the writer does detailed thumbnails of every single page and the artist follows them scrupulously, what the artist brings to the table is crucial to the telling of that story. It is not secondary; it is not “illustration.”

The Imitation Game is a biography in comics form of British mathematician Alan Turing. The copy I have is credited as “by” Jim Ottaviani and “illustrated by” Leland Purvis. Now, I have an uncorrected proof, so the final book may have changed that.

But, if not, this is me looking sternly over my glasses at Abrams ComicArts and saying “tsk-tsk” while I do that little one-finger wave. This is Not Proper. This is Not Done. And we are Not Amused.

But on to the book itself. (If skimming to find the end of the potted rant, this is it.)

Alan Turing, I think, was born at either the exact right time or the exact wrong time. Professionally, he couldn’t have turned up at a better moment to turn his particular genius into reality. But socially and personally, he might have had a quiet happy life in some earlier time and he definitely would have been better off born a decade or three later, when his condition would be better understood and accepted. (I mean his mental condition, since he seems to have been somewhere on the autism spectrum, but his homosexuality would obviously have been less of an issue.)

Ottaviani tells Turing’s story at a slant, or at least starts that way: he opens with (and occasionally returns to) a conceit that he, or someone, is interviewing Turning’s friends and family after his death. But most of the book is just his life dramatized, with lots of explanatory captions (sometimes voiceovers from those interviewees) and a tight focus on his work during WW II.

Imitation Game doesn’t get into the math; it just shows what Turing did, and is particularly interested in the title experiment, better known to us as the Turing Test. It’s also very much a serious biography in comics form, and isn’t afraid to get a little artsy in presentation here and there. Turing’s suicide — I might note that there is now some scholarly doubt as to whether it was suicide — is presented in a particularly elliptical way, and readers who don’t know what he actually did will probably not be able to tell what he actually did.

(On the other hand, I read this in a black-and-white proof, and sometimes color can make things clearer in comics.)

I think biography, particularly of a thinker, is an odd subject for comics: it’s harder to show interior life in comics than in prose, so it’s a slightly less useful tool for the job than the usual one. That said, Imitation Game is a good, thoughtful biography of an important, quirky man, told well and using the form’s strengths well.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #285: High Society by Dave Sim

Reviews
October 12, 2018

I don’t have an accurate record of when Dave Sim first said Cerebus would run for 300 issues. But my guess is that his plans became real during this storyline.

The first volume of Cerebus, which I covered last month , saw Sim moving rapidly from an amusing Thomas/Smith Conan parody with an oddly funny-animal main character to something more detailed and particular, and those twenty-five issues moved from standalone stories to trilogies and ongoing continuous plotlines.

No one expected Sim would then embark on a new story that would be as long as all of Cerebus to date. My guess is that not even Sim knew, when he was writing and drawing issue #26, “High Society,” that that would be the title for a much longer story. Somewhere in those first few High Society issues, though, it clicked: he wasn’t just making a somewhat longer story: his narrative would stick around the city-state of Iest for more than two years of serial comics, over five hundred pages, and more political machinations than anyone had ever seen on the comics page.

So it became High Society. And a storyline many times longer than the previous ones posed a problem to Sim in the mid-80s. He was already a pioneer in reprinting his comics in permanent book editions, with the Swords of Cerebus series. But the sixth volume of that was already longer than the previous ones, reprinting five issues instead of four. Swords of Cerebus Seven would either be five times as long as the previous book or would break in the middle of the story.

Obviously it didn’t. Instead, Sim invented the “phone book” format — one little-used by other creators since, mostly because very few comics-makers have series with multiple five-hundred-page long plotlines to begin with. (He also annoyed the comics distribution network by going entirely direct-to-consumer for the High Society first printing, an innovation that made him money immediately but caused hassles for a while afterward.)

We tend to forget all of the business things Sim pioneered in independent comics, but there’s no Image without Sim, without that model of doing your comics your way, and then collecting them permanently. And this is the era when Sim was still exciting and vital and fizzy and Zeitgest-y, telling his own story and making sarcastic comments on the current comics scene at the same time.

High Society is probably the single highest point of Cerebus: a graphic novel that can stand alone and that a new reader can come into cold. Cerebus is this guy arriving in a new city, and then stuff happens to him: you don’t need to know more than that, and the first page tells you that much.

“Stuff happens” gets very baroque very quickly: Cerebus is caught up in other people’s schemes, as had been more and more central as the comic Cerebus went on the early ’80s, and the ultimate mover of those schemes was Sim’s brilliant re-imagining of Groucho Marx as Lord Julius, ruler of Palnu. [1]

High Society is a story about money and power, and particularly the power of money. Palnu is the only fiscally sound city-state in the entire Feldwar valley; every other country is running massive deficits and getting further and further in debt to Julius. Cerebus is the perfect counterweight to Palnu’s soft power, since he’s instinctively a creature of hard power: he knows armies and mercenaries and war tactics deeply, and his first instinct in any situation is to find and army and conquer something.

(This is not a good impulse in a modern world, obviously. But that raises the question of how modern Cerebus‘s world is. Is it modern enough that wars of conquest primarily smash economic activity and leave everyone poorer, or is it still medieval enough that conquest can be lasting and profitable?)

So Cerebus is first the Ranking Diplomatic Representative of Palnu to Iest, named as such without his knowledge. And then there’s a confusing plot where he’s running to keep that title, even though it’s pretty obviously a role that is going to always be in the direct remit of the ruler of the sending country. (How could it be otherwise?)

But that campaign ends up being the warm-up for the real one: Cerebus runs for Prime Minister of Iest, a job that has first slowly and then suddenly transformed from being a minor adjunct to a theocracy to being the center of secular power in the city-state. And that “suddenly” is because of Cerebus personally, in the sideways complicated manner common to Cerebus plots.

Like the best Cerebus plots, High Society is a one-damn-thing-after-another story. Cerebus is always his own worst enemy; he’s never satisfied with what he has and is the epitome of the guy who hits on sixteen every damn time. And Sim was notably never on Cerebus’s side, which is rare for a creator so closely identified with a single character. Cerebus is a horrible person in a whole host of ways, and was like that right from the beginning: Sim made him that way, and kept putting him in plots that exploited his flaws and worst tendencies. For about the first half of his adventures, Cerebus is the greatest anti-hero in comics.

Alongside all of the politics and plotting is Sim’s characteristic humor: he was the most consistently funny comics humorist of the early ’80s, and this volume has a string of his greatest hits. Sure, a lot of that humor was odd adaptations of other people’s characters — every funny character in Cerebus is based on a comedian or outside source — but Sim turned it all into comics, made it all work in his specific invented world, and gave all of those characters new, setting-appropriate jokes to tell. It’s hugely idiosyncratic, but it works amazingly well.

If you’ve never read Cerebus, and you’re willing to give Dave Sim one shot, this is the shot to take. Some parts of it are more meaningful, or funnier, if you’ve read the stories in the first collection, but I don’t think anything will be incomprehensible or particularly obscure. This is a great story about a grumpy, self-destructive guy who falls into politics in the worst way, in a vaguely late-medieval world where parts are rapidly modernizing, and has a masterful mix of humor and seriousness. If any of that sounds appealing, give it a try.

[1] Julius would make an interesting contrast to Terry Pratchett’s Patrician: both rule completely and capriciously, and both are shown to be master manipulators who always come out on top. But the Patrician works by extreme clarity and veiled threats, while Julius is his world’s master obfuscator and equivocator and either is the most Machiavellian planner of all time or just extremely good at thinking on his feet.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #283: Descender, Vol. 5: Rise of the Robots by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen

Reviews
October 10, 2018

In a serial medium, there’s always the need to make sure the audience keeps up. So each new installment needs to do some work to give backstory, either with the potted “who they are and how they came to be!” box or flashbacks or whatever.

And when the story is moving quickly, one of the ways to do that effectively can be to slip back in time slightly at the beginning of each new installment, so the end of Section X and the beginning of Section Y tell the same moment in time, and overlap.

Jeff Lemire does that for every single transition in Descender, Vol. 5: Rise of the Robots , which I’m taking as a sign that he’s stomping his foot down on the gas and charging towards an ending in the not-too-distant future.

(I might as well throw in links to my posts on the earlier books, for those of you who are lost or just want more details: one and two and three and four .)

If you haven’t read Descender before, it’s soft-ish medium-future SF (intelligent but not godlike AI, some kind of unexplained FTL, various alien species, a galactic scope) in which planetoid-sized robot “Harvesters” appeared mysteriously about a generation ago, killed a large proportion of the organic sentients in the galaxy, and then went away. Since then, the robots created by those sentients have mostly been hunted and destroyed, for understandable if not strictly logical reasons.

(It’s a second cousin of the Butlerian Jihad, I suppose.)

Our main characters are on the human/robot interface: one special robot boy who was in hibernation since the attacks, the man who was his human companion as a boy, the roboticist that created that robot boy. Plus, of course, a larger cast of soldiers and schemers and killers on all sides of the conflicts — what was a fairly unified, advanced multi-species civilization shattered into a dozen or more nastier shards in the aftermath of that attack.

And it’s all coming to a head now: the Harvesters may be coming back, the local robots have definitely organized and are ready for their own counter-pogrom, and more individual acts of violence are also happening quickly.

Descender is a strong, somewhat space-operatic comic, a little more conventional and action-oriented than I’d expect from Jeff Lemire — but, then again, I’ve never read his Big Two work. It shows every sign of having a real ending, and to be barreling at top speed towards that ending. It’s good stuff: if you like SF, you should check it out.

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #282: Multiple Warheads,Vol. 2: Ghost Town by Brandon Graham

Reviews
October 9, 2018

I don’t want to call Multiple Warheads just a stoner comic — for one thing, I’m about as far from a stoner as you can get, and I like it quite a bit. But there’s a definite free-and-easy, anything-goes vibe to it that will appeal to the cannabis-inclined among us.

Brandon Graham started Multiple Warheads as a sex comic — I was surprised, several years later, when reading the first collection to find that hardcore-sex scene embedded in the middle of it — but it mutated after that first story into something less gonad-centric [1], a medium-future amble through what seems to be the radically changed former USSR, full of weird technology and various kinds of sapient creatures and lots of dodgy schemes and little-to-no effective government.

After a hiatus, Graham came back with a second cluster of Multiple Warheads stories over the past year or so, and those were collected this summer as Multiple Warheads, Vol. 2: Ghost Town . (The cover seems to make that last bit “Ghostown,” but I think that’s just Graham’s design-style, which leans heavily on punny misspellings and similar wordplay.)

Our main couple, Sexica and Nikoli, are on an extended journey: Sexica is delivering “the warhead” somewhere for a reason that I don’t think was deeply explained in the first volume and definitely isn’t here. They’re “on vacation,” as they put it — Nikoli is definitely away from his usual work, though Sexica’s stealing and sneaking is the kind of thing she can do a bit of no matter where she is.

And so she does.

She connects with some people — both bipedal, neither anything like human, which is par for the course in Multiple Warheads — who want to get into a “wizard’s lair” to retrieve something ancient and valuable. Meanwhile, Nikoli wanders around, get roped into doing some mechanic work, and has a surprising transformation near the end. The staff of the place (hotel?) where they’re staying and the intersecting dancers at a club where Sexica has a meeting with her new partners also get some featured scenes — the whole thing is loose and flowing, with an extensive cast who have complicated interrelationships.

Graham presents this all a bit sideways: he is fond of puns and wordplay, and that comes up in dialogue and the names of things (the restaurant All’s Whale That Ends Whale, one guess as to the main ingredient; a local bodega-ish place is the Manticorner) as well as in labels and other “throwaway” text. So this is a world full of wordplay, where things are named quirkily and those quirks are important.

Ghost Town is, at its core, a caper story — assemble the small team of experts, learn the secrets of what they’re trying to do, and watch them go do it — but there’s a lot of other stuff going on around that. Graham gives Multiple Warheads an everyday, lived-in feeling: his world may be a weird mix of technology and what looks like magic, and his people may look like anything and everything, but they’re all still people, trying to make it through their days and get back to the ones they care about.

Despite the big caper stuff, Ghost Town is quieter than the first volume: there’s a lot here that could potentially have been overly dramatic, but that’s not how Graham plays it.

Multiple Warheads is an intricate delight, full of tiny details and silly sidebars. Each page is a moment to be savored…though some, occasionally, almost need to be decoded. This is definitely not a comic for everyone, but its joys are real, deep, and unique.

[1] Though the sex scene is still completely in continuity, and is referenced on the first story page here — the fact that Sexica got a werewolf penis through her nefarious activity and sewed it onto her boyfriend Nikoli is central to a lot of Multiple Warheads in general and Ghost Town in particular.

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

REVIEW: The Faithful Spy

Reviews
October 8, 2018

The Faithful Spy
By John Hendrix
Amulet Books/368 pages/$18.99

Every time you think you’re done hearing amazing stories about individual acts of courage during World War II, another one comes along. In this case, the true story of the German plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler comes in a unique graphic novel that is compelling reading for Middle and High Schoolers.

Dietrich Bonhoffer was a devout Lutheran, a member of a large German family, and destined to be a leader. He went to school, became ordained and was a theologian, teaching and preaching while the storm clouds gathered around Germany. The Nazi Party took advantage of the diaspora surrounding the citizenry, instill outrage at their economic plight and hatred towards the ones responsible for their plight – the Jews.

Bonhoffer’s story is told parallel and intermingled with the rise of Nazi power, a primer to pre-World War II history. Once it became clear that Hitler and his part wanted absolute power, resentment grew in a select few who saw through the artifice. As Chancellor Hitler changed the national dialogue and rebuilt their war machinery in direct violation of the Paris Treaty that ended World War I. A weary Europe tried to ignore them until Hitler seized absolute power in the wake of President Hindenburg’s death. Then the war drums began beating.

Hitler’s actions within Germany are carefully detailed so we see how he incrementally seized control, with events not usually included in historic works, such as Hitler altering prayer so rather than praying to God above all, it was God then Hitler. Yikes.

Concerned, Bonhoffer found himself slowly drawn into a cabal that was determined to exterminate Hitler before he could not be stopped. Yet, while Hitler blitzed his way through Europe, the conspirators proved either inept or unlucky (perhaps both). Obviously, the conspiracy failed as we know, but that makes the book no less interesting. While he was never directly involved in planting failed explosives, he was close enough to eventually be captured and imprisoned.

Even while in jail his spirits and faith rarely flagged despite missing his family and his bride. The ending is somber as Hitler failed and Bonhoffer died a prisoner.

Hendrix works in a complex style, mixing long stretches of text with illustrations and graphic storytelling elements. There are wonderful sidebars that provide context for events and personnel and much of the dialogue comes straight from Bonhoffer’s own writings, giving the work authenticity. The work is visually interesting, printed in black, magenta, and cyan tones. His style is compelling and clear, just cartoony enough to avoid looking scholarly.

The creator provides notes on sources and a limited bibliography for those interested in learning more about Bonhoffer and his colleagues. By all means, check this one out.

Book-A-Day 2018 #279: Sebastian O/The Mystery Play by Grant Morrison, Steve Yeowell, and Jon J Muth

Reviews
October 6, 2018

What do you do with the quirky minor failures of a major creator?

Well, you can ignore them, and that’s what happens most of the time. You can also try to spiff them up a bit, and get them walking two by two, in hopes that they’ll look more impressive in company. If the creator is major enough and his backlist extensive enough, you might find yourself doing that.

In this case, you did — if “you” are DC Comics and “the creator” is writer and self-proclaimed chaos magician Grant Morrison. And you probably made a bit of money out of it, which is the whole point of the exercise.

But these are still quirky minor failures, even twenty-five years later, and perhaps at this remove even more clearly show Morrison’s characteristic failure modes: a reliance on high concepts even when they don’t make narrative sense, a tropism to stylishness as an end in itself, an unwillingness to actually explain anything that might make his worlds actually plausible, provocative dialogue that neither sounds like human beings talking nor has any solid meaning, and, above all else, the love of flash over substance.

The book is Sebastian O/The Mystery Play . The two things collected are 1993’s three-issue alternate-Victorian serial-killer [1] frivolity drawn by Steve Yeowell (who also did the much better Zenith with Morrison) and the 1994 spooky, sophomorically “philosophical” bad detective story graphic novel drawn by Jon J Muth (who later fled comics for illustrating children’s books, possibly because of tripe like this).

Both of them are stylish in their own ways; both are entertaining on their own levels. Both also fail on basic levels of plausibility, much like other Morrison works up to his famous JLA run. So maybe his fans will love these oddball early-90s stories, but I tend to think they’re not the right kind of weird — no superheroes, not set in a cool version of the modern world, not obviously transgressive.

Sebastian O is set in a steampunky alternate-Vistorian world that doesn’t seem to have any real reason to be alternate. The title character, a melange of Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Jack the Ripper, is supposedly a genius, but we only see him run around, murder people, and talk about his clothes. He escapes from jail at the beginning of the story, where he was incarcerated for what seem like vague and trumped-up “being gay and subversive” reasons. We readers would thus be on his side, if not for the randomly violent ways he does escape, and rampages through the secret gay-cult society that apparently betrayed him.

I say “gay,” because the narrative makes that clear, though in the usual Mauve Decade euphemisms. But neither Sebastian nor the people he chases show much affection for anyone who is not themselves, and their choice of sexual partners is not particularly important for this thriller-chase plot. Like so many Morrison stories, it seems like an affectation or a signpost rather than anything intrinsic to the story.

Anyway, Sebastian murders his way out of prison, murders his way through his former friends, and finds the fiend behind the whole thing, who frankly seems somewhat unpleasant but not nearly as bad as Sebastian. There is a Shocking Revelation at the end, which, as often with Morrison, doesn’t actually make any sense, and which is ignored anyway. So we’re left with the story of the murderous rampage of a Victorian dandy — if you’re looking for that, you are in luck.

The Mystery Play is more sedate and grounded. The small Yorkshire city of Townley, struggling for whatever reason, is putting on a large-scale production of traditional medieval mystery plays for the Christmas season, dramatizing what seems like most of the Bible for the entertainment of tourists. On the night of the debut of the first play, someone murders the actor playing God.

And, yes, every single person in Townley who talks about this event afterward refers to this as “the death of God.” Not the death of a prominent local doctor, who they all knew, but an amateur acting part that he just took and died in the middle of. And it is Ontologically Important to every single one of them. Morrison’s greasy thumb is particularly prominent with this element, and it overwhelms the entire story.

A single Detective Sergeant is sent from vaguely somewhere else, with no driver and no lines of reporting back to his superiors and no paperwork and no connections to the local coppers. This is of course A Whopping Great Clue, and only the dimmest readers will miss it. It’s also entirely stupid, and wouldn’t actually work for more than five seconds, even before “Detective Sergeant Frank Carpenter” spends all of his time in philosophical musings about God and the Devil.

Eventually, there is another play performed “on-stage” in the story, and it of course is the very end of the mystery cycle, in which Jesus is crucified. Nudge nudge wink wink!

It’s unfortunate that the story is such bullshit, because Muth delivers stunning work here — moody painted pages with stunningly real faces, a fantastic mix of levels of abstraction. Every single page here is absolutely gorgeous, and a masterpiece of the comics art. Shame about the words thrown on top, though.

So Sebastian O is an answer to the question “What if Oscar Wilde was a man of action?” and The Mystery Play similar investigates “What if God were killed during a mystery play?” Neither of those are particularly good questions, and Morrison’s attempts to imbue them with deep meaning fall flat. This is probably why they were quietly out of print for much of the last twenty-five years, and why they will probably slip back into that abyss once the stock of this 2017 omnibus are depleted. Morrison has some little-known gems in his backlist — I mentioned Zenith before, also with Yeowell, for one example — but these are not among them.

[1] Morrison’s main character is a serial killer, and a deeply unrepentant one. Some of the people he kills “deserve it,” but he’s also happy to just slaughter anyone in his way. Since he’s incredibly shallow otherwise, it’s the defining characteristic of his personality.

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

Winter is Coming as is White Walker Whisky

Reviews
October 4, 2018

New York, NY — Send a raven— Scotch has officially entered the realm. In collaboration with HBO®, DIAGEO is unveiling the new White Walker by Johnnie Walker Blended Scotch Whisky and The Game of Thrones Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection. The limited-edition whiskies are inspired by the iconic characters and the creative world of Westeros and beyond and are here to tide fans over during their wait for the eighth and final season. Even the most revered Maester couldn’t have predicted a collaboration of this monumental proportion.

“Groundbreaking partnerships continue to be a strategic initiative for Diageo as they foster exceptional creative collaboration and help showcase the breadth of our portfolio. We are very proud to have our collection of single malts and Johnnie Walker, the number one scotch whisky brand in the world, collaborate with HBO’s most successful TV franchise to develop these limited-edition offerings for fans to collect and celebrate the final season of Games of Thrones,” said Dan Sanborn, Senior Vice President, Culture and Partnerships at DIAGEO.

“We knew there was fan appetite for a Game of Thrones whisky and once we saw Diageo’s vision for a way to collaborate together we knew the idea was perfect and the time was now. From the beginning, they understood that we wanted to create something special, and they’ve accomplished that with both White Walker by Johnnie Walker and the single malt collection. We’re confident fans will enjoy sipping these delicious whiskies as they wait for season eight and beyond,” said Jeff Peters, Vice President, Licensing & Retail at HBO.

The first limited-edition offering available in the realm is White Walker by Johnnie Walker, inspired by the most enigmatic and feared characters on the show — the White Walkers. This blend was created by whisky specialist George Harper alongside the small team of expert blenders at Johnnie Walker. At the heart of this new, innovative blend are single malts from Cardhu and Clynelish – one of Scotland’s most northern distilleries where whiskies have endured long Scottish winters, not dissimilar to the climate north of the wall. This special blend has notes of caramelized sugar and vanilla, fresh red berries with a touch of orchard fruit and is best served chilled – the Night King would have it no other way.

The bottling brings you right to the Frozen North with its icy white and blue design along with the iconic Striding Man now fashioned in armor to fit in among the ranks of the Night King’s forces. Utilizing temperature-sensitive thermal chromatic ink technology, fans will be reminded that “Winter is Here” from an unexpected graphic icy reveal on the bottle when frozen.

The Game of Thrones Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection features eight, scotches that are all new to the U.S., and are each paired with one of the iconic Houses of Westeros, as well as the Night’s Watch, giving fans an authentic taste of the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. Diageo’s unparalled diverse range of distilleries in Scotland, much like in Westoros, each have their own unique characteristics and produce a distinctive whisky representative of its local terroir. These similarities were the inspiration behind the collection, drawing an authentic storyline between each House and single malt pairing – from the power of water between both House Tully and The Singleton of Glendullan, to the legendary women behind House Targaryen and Cardhu, or the royal lineage of House Baratheon and Royal Lochnagar and more.

These limited-edition whiskies are certain to be as fleeting as the holder of the Iron Throne, so be sure to have White Walker by Johnnie Walker or one of the unparalleled Game of Thrones Single Malt whiskies on hand to toast to the final season before they are all gone.

White Walker by Johnnie Walker will be available nationwide starting October 2018 wherever fine spirits are sold. The Game of Thrones Collection Single Malt Scotch Whisky Collection will be available nationwide starting fall 2018 wherever fine spirits are sold. Suggested retail pricing is included below.

White Walker by Johnnie Walker SRP: $36 for 750ml; ABV 41.7%
Game of Thrones House Tully – Singleton of Glendullan Select; SRP: $29.99 for 750ml; ABV 40%
Game of Thrones House Stark – Dalwhinnie Winter’s Frost; SRP: $39.99 for 750ml; ABV 43%
Game of Thrones House Targaryen – Cardhu Gold Reserve; SRP: $39.99 for 750ml; ABV 40%
Game of Thrones House Lannister – Lagavulin 9 Year Old; SRP: $64.99 for 750ml; ABV 46%
Game of Thrones The Night’s Watch – Oban Bay Reserve; SRP: $62.99 for 750ml; ABV 43%
Game of Thrones House Greyjoy – Talisker Select Reserve; SRP: $44.99 for 750ml; ABV 45.8%
Game of Thrones House Baratheon – Royal Lochnagar 12 Year Old; SRP: $64.99 for 750ml; ABV 40%
Game of Thrones House Tyrell – Clynelish Reserve; SRP: $59.99 for 750ml; ABV 51.2%

Book-A-Day 2018 #276: Sex Criminals, Vol. 5: Five-Fingered Discount by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky

Reviews
October 3, 2018

I have two ways I could start this, and I don’t know which one to take. So my indecision will instead be the actual starting point, and I will provide you with two options:

Last time out, I noted that Sex Criminals seemed to be sliding in the direction of being a superhero comic about people with sex-based powers, but that tide is now going out.
There might be a real honest-to-god ending coming up for Sex Criminals, and not just amusing sex-jokes and vaguely sex-positive character development.

Both of those things are positive, to my mind — the world already has too many superhero comics, and not enough comics that actually end well. So I’m reenergized, at least a bit, which is a nice thing to have happen five books into a series.

In case you’re lost, I’ll repeat the information in the title. The book is Sex Criminals, Vol. 5: Five-Fingered Discount , reprinting issues 21-25 of the Image series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Chip Zdarsky. For some more context, see my posts on the earlier books: , , . and .

As the back covers explain amusingly, both Suze and Jon make time stop when they orgasm. They discovered their mutual secret the first time they had sex, and used it to rob banks for a while. Since then, they’ve learned that a bunch of other people can do the same thing, and even weirder things.

In the last volume, they broke up. (Um, Spoiler! I guess.) Since Sex Criminals is a reasonably mainstream serial comic with occasional superhero tropisms, we know both that “breaking up the team” is something that will happen every so often and that it cannot be permanent.

I’m not going to throw in a Spoiler! again, but guess what?

This is the volume where nearly the entire sex-powered cast (which is all but one or two of them) are slowly gravitating towards each other, slowly giving up their individual complaints and animuses, for the big team-up against the real villain: the rich guy.

(He is a real villain, too, and a complete asshole, but he’s also the one rich guy.)

From the end of this book, I had the strong opinion that there would be one more volume to get us to the big ending, and it looks like I’m right: random Googling told me that some random Internet guy says that is indeed the case. And if you can’t believe some random Internet guy, who can you believe? (He sourced it to the issue #25 letter column. Does that sound slightly more authoritative?)

So: this is mostly character stuff (plus sex jokes), and the threatened superhero-style all-hands smack-down has been averted, at least for now. There will be one more volume, to fix whatever can be fixed, and give whoever deserves it a Happily Ever After. Stuff actually happens that matters in this book, and it’s pretty much all decisions and thoughts — moments between people. And, again, a lot of sex jokes — what could be better?

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

Book-A-Day 2018 #274: Love and Rockets: New Stories, No. 1 by The Hernandez Brothers

Reviews
October 1, 2018

This week, I Love (And Rockets) Mondays leaves behind the lands of carefully tended and curated reprints and heads into the off-road weeds of messy serial comics. We’ll be back to carefully-tended a couple of times before the end, but Love and Rockets was a serial comic to begin with, and that’s how nearly all new L&R material has appeared for nearly forty years. So we were going to get there eventually.

The paperback Love and Rockets series, subtitled “New Stories,” was the third series. The original magazine-sized L&R ran from 1981 to 1996, was followed by a bunch of individual comics by the two Hernandez brothers (Gilbert and Jaime), and then by a triumphant reunion with the comics-format second series in 2001. After twenty issues of that over six years, it was time for another change, and so New Stories was born: it would come out once a year, with exactly one hundred pages of comics, evenly divided between the two brothers. [1]

That didn’t exactly happen — I keep getting the sense that behind the scenes Gilbert was more prolific than Jaime, which may have caused some stress to the model — but New Stories had eight big books from 2008 through 2016, and only skipped one year as the time between issues kept to twelve months most of the time.

So: this week’s book is Love and Rockets: New Stories, No.1 , which contains the first two installments of Jaime’s Ti-Girls Adventures, which we’ve already seen in revised and collected form in Angels and Magpies, and a collection of not-obviously linked stories from Gilbert, at least one of which is familiar from Comics Dementia. Again, we’re getting into the time-frame where everything hasn’t been collected cleanly yet — or, at least, where I haven’t figured it all out yet.

It’s structured as a sandwich: Jaime has two long (25-page) installments of a larger story, which open and close the book. In between are seven shorter Gilbert stories — including one, “Chiro El Indio,” scripted by his Halley’s Comet of a brother Mario — which feel a bit like palate-cleansers, without any obvious connections to Palomar or Maria’s three daughters.

Ti-Girls is choppier and more comic-booky in this original presentation — each of the two sections is one page shorter than the final version, and Jaime later moved the single “cover” image here and added a new one for the other installment. I have the sense that the dialogue might have also been changed between the two versions, but I’m not looking to do a panel-by-panel comparison. (I still think this is basically Jaime’s least successful story of his mature career.) Given that Love and Rockets was largely selling through direct-market comic shops, and those were (and still are) heavily superhero-centric, I can’t say this was a bad way to launch the new volume, and it might have pulled in new readers.

Gilbert’s stories include the creepy “Papa,” featuring that guy with holes in his forehead and long hair in back. I don’t remember if he comes back directly, but Gilbert rarely hits an idea only once, so I’ll be looking for him. Also a pleasure is “The New Adventures of Duke and Sammy,” a Martin-and-Lewis comic in Gilbert gonzo-space-epic style: it is unique and nutty and coo-coo. The other stories tend to be shorter and more allusive: there’s a full-on dream-logic piece titled “?;” “Never Say Never,” which is almost a fable, in a twisted Gilbert way; “Victory Dance,” which connects oddly to “Papa” and feels like it may be another brick in a much larger wall; and a single page of miscellaneous strips under the title “The Funny Papers” that are not as humorous as you would expect.

It was a decent relaunch for the series, showing what the two brothers could do, and bringing back Mario in a supporting role one more time. Interestingly, it was very much not the two brothers doing their usual kind of stories — Jaime was wandering off into the lands of superhero self-indulgence and Gilbert was making individual unconnected short stories in between longer epics. Maybe after almost thirty years they decided they didn’t have anything to prove this time. (And they didn’t.)

[1] This may be a spoiler, but that paperback-format series itself ended, and there’s now a fourth Love and Rockets series, back in comics format, which started in 2016. There is an unstoppable tropism to pamphlets in American comics; we stand against it at our peril.