Category: Reviews

REVIEW: Fast X

I am not a gearhead, so I have always looked at the Fast and the Furious franchise from a distance. But their popularity makes them hard to avoid. Fast X, the tenth installment in the series, arrives on disc and streaming this week from Universal Home Entertainment and no doubt entertains those who have been there from the beginning.

As with any franchise with multiple chapters, there’s the core set of characters and then all the supporting players who drop in and out of these chapters as needed. And, to keep things interesting, new players are added, usually the antagonist and maybe a new ally or frenemy.

Here, we have the sociopathic Dante (Jason Momoa) seeking vengeance on Dom (Vin Diesel) for the death of his father (Joaquim de Almeida) a decade earlier, as depicted in Fast Five. With seemingly limitless cash and men at his disposal, he has laid out his traps and begins to ensnare the team. We learn some of this when a severely injured Cipher (Charlize Theron) shows up on Dom’s doorstep.

First, Dante seemingly frames the team—Dom, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), Han (Sung Kang), and Tej (Ludacris)—for an attempted bombing of the Vatican, although anyone paying attention to the data would have seen them trying to stop the bomb.

But, this begins the dominoes falling as The Agency’s current leader, Aimes (Alan Richardson), convinces his superiors to also hunt them down, despite Mr. Nobody’s daughter Tess (Brie Larson) protestations.

And we’re off.

The film has the usual over-the-top set pieces, but these grow tiresome quickly. Everyone is an expert driver and an expert fighter, so there’s no real tension here. Just wanton destruction and a callous attitude toward life.

Dom and Letty are filled with cliché platitudes about family and friendship, but it’s tempered by the lengths they go to protect their son  Brian (Leo Abelo Perry). His protector comes in the form of Uncle Jake Toretto (John Cena).

The screenplay from Justin Lin and Dan Mazeau keeps multiple threads moving but spends zero time of making us give a shit for anyone except maybe Brian. There’s no interesting chatter among the regulars, who seem to be hitting their marks, saying their lines, and collecting their checks. Worse, there are several moments where the story stops making any sense whatsoever, making Dante so perfect, so well-planned that everything breaks his way.

The only ones who seem to be having any fun in this film are Larson and Momoa, both of whom have a cocky attitude that shines among all the scowls and snarls.

The film screeches to a stop with the return of the once-dead Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot) and the mid-credit sequence that welcomes Dwayne Johnson back to the series after his Black Adam arrived stillborn. The eleventh film is scheduled for 2025, but it likely may move, thanks to the current strikes.

The film was reviewed via digital HD code and looks very crisp and sharp in high definition. It is also available on 4k Ultra HD and Blu-ray in varying combo packs. The Dolby TrueHD 7.1 audio sounded just fine on a home theater system, so every boom and punch is quite clear.

Special features include an Audio Commentary with Director Louis Leterrier, plus an above-average assortment of material: Gag Reel’ (4:35); This is Family’ (35;00); Fast Breaks: Scene Breakdowns with Louis Leterrier (8:00); Xtreme Rides of Fast X (13:00); Belles of the Brawl (7:00); Tuned Into Rio (5:00); Jason Momoa: Conquering Rome (3:00); Little B Takes the Wheel (3:00);  A Friend in the End (1:00);  and there are two Music Videos: “Toretto” by J. Balvin and “Angel Pt. 1” by Kodak Black and NLE Choppa, featuring Jimin of BTS, JVKE and Muni Long.

Pop Gun War, Vol. 2: Chain Letter by Farel Dalrymple

What’s important here, I think, is that it’s a delayed sequel. One that came a decade later, after other stories. Everything else flows out from there: this is not the next thing, but a later thing.

Pop Gun War, Vol. 2: Chain Letter  was collected in 2017, from material that mostly appeared in ISLAND magazine the previous three years. I was confused by the notation in the app where I read it (Hoopla) that it collected issues 4, 5, 10, 14, and 15, as if those were the issues of Pop Gun War – those are the places this appeared in ISLAND.

It’s more Farel Dalrymple, vague drifting stories that take SFF adventure story tropes – often deliberately as if conceptualized by children – and mix them with a vaguely existential strew of ennui, angst, and confusion. There are plots, sort of, of a kind, but they start aimlessly, run for a while, and then get abandoned. There are characters, and we hear their interior concerns and worries, but they’re not all that rounded: each one is a fragment or facet or avatar. There are places, striking and strange and weird, but we don’t learn how they connect to each other, or any serious background details – they are creepy or shiny or bland places where things happen, nothing more.

I could link back to my post on the first Pop Gun War collection , but this is only loosely related. This is, maybe, what happened to Sinclair’s sister Emily at some point during the events of the first book. Or maybe not: Dalrymple is rarely all that definitive.

Anyway, Emily – who here seems to be smaller and younger than I thought she was in the first book, a prepubescent girl barely older than Sinclair and not the teenager I thought she was – is on tour with her band, which is otherwise all young men, of the typical kind that form bands. Their van has broken down in some random town. She goes out for a walk, sees mysterious figures sneaking into a sewer, follows them.

There’s a confrontation, eventually, with those creepy men and their boss, but more important is that Emily finds a room, in those comic-booky high-tech underground corridors, where screens show her visions of the past, present, and future. Most of this book are those visions: other characters doing other things other places, which Emily witnesses and is the frame story for.

She sees Sinclair and Addison, from the first book, briefly, but they don’t do much. She sees private detective Ben Able, who tries to free a group of kids – maybe kidnapped, maybe just playing, maybe something else? – from a creepy haunted house. She sees a cyborg astronaut battling, gladiator-pit-style, in what seems to be Proxima Centauri (maybe connected to that Dalrymple book ), managed by a girl of her age, Gwen Noiritch, who has a cyborg/magic eye. Oh, and there’s a fat kid in a super-suit, Hollis, who bounces into their plot and get the three of them chased around for a while.

None of those framed stories really end, but none of them started cleanly, either – Emily tunes into them at a particular moment, watches for a while, and then something else gets her attention.

Dalrymple’s material often seems like the ideas of a hyperactive kid, someone who’s read masses of SFF and is mix-and-matching all the stuff he loves best with silly names and crazy ideas and not all that much worry about consistency and plot. But the style is more contemplative and adult, looking back at those silly names and superpowers with a wry, forgiving but distanced eye, as if wondering if he ever were that young. I think it’s meant to drive specific emotions, to evoke complex feelings of nostalgia and regret and discomfort. I still couldn’t tell you the why of any of that. But it’s what I think he’s trying to do, and he’s pretty successful at that quirky, counterintuitive thing.

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

REVIEW: Soldier: From Script to Screen

Soldier: From Script to Screen

By Danny Stewart

144 pages/BearManor Media/$32 (hardcover) $22 (softcover)

Everyone has their passion, whether it is universally acclaimed or not. Thankfully, BearManor Media provides an outlet for their authors to share that unique passion with those who also find the subject matter of interest.          

Here, Danny Stewart delves into the 1998 film Solider, which came and went with little notice when Universe released it. Despite some marquee names making the film, it opened to poor reviews (in addition to 15% at Rotten Tomatoes) and dismal box office, earning a mere $14.6 million against a $60 million budget.

It’s justifiable if you don’t recall or never heard of the film. It was based on a script by the noted screenwriter David Webb Peoples, best known for Blade Runner. Some even call the film a “sidequel” to that classic. Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson (best known for the Resident Evil series), with the familiar cast of  Kurt Russell, Jason Scott Lee, Jason Isaacs, Connie Nielsen, Sean Pertwee, and Gary Busey.

Set in 2036, Sgt. Todd 3465 (Russell) is the last survivor of a clutch of children raised entirely by military routine. The next generation is ready, and it becomes a new versus old story, with Russell making the most of his 104 words of dialogue.

The organization of the book is a bit of a head-scratcher. After opening with an analysis of Western tropes being used in SF films, Stewart acknowledges Solider’s spiritual connection to the far superior Shane. Then we get a prose version of Russell’s IMDB page, followed by an in-depth piece with Peoples. One would expect something about Anderson, who was not interviewed, but instead, we go right into the filming personnel ahead of the film designers. That said, it’s fascinating to hear from the Second Assistant Director and the Key Makeup Artist, etc. These unsung heroes of filmmaking never get enough credit, and here, they reveal their influences and techniques brought to the making of the film. A special treat is the write-up done to convince the Academy of Motion Picture Aerts and Sciences to consider the film for a makeup nomination.

Stewart then gives us a piecemeal analysis of the film’s story, theme, and characters before running a series of essays and reviews from others. Closing out the book is an essay by Cinefantastique veteran Paul Sammon, whose making of books should have been used as a template.

Most script to screen books give us a better sense of the context from Peeples’ script to release. We have no real idea of how the various jobs intersected or overlapped. A production diary or calendar would have been interesting, as would have an analysis of why Stewart loves the film while the majority of moviegoers gave it the cold shoulder. At 144 pages, there was certainly more room to explore these issues.

The book needed more careful attention to proofreading, especially for style and consistency.

REVIEW: Popeye the Sailor: The 1960s TV Cartoons

Popeye the Sailor: The 1960s TV Cartoons

By Fred M. Grandinetti

230 pages/$30 hardcover $20 softcover/Bear Manor Media

Like author Fred M. Grandinetti, I was a child of the 60s and was exposed to all the Popeye cartoons, and it took time for me to understand that some were excellent, some were good, and some were outright bad. It slowly became clear to me that the best was the theatrical shorts made in the 1930s by the Fleischer Studio. What was less clear was who made the others of varying quality.

Thankfully, Grandinetti provides us with a handy guide, breaking down which animation house did what, all in an attempt to corner the syndicated cartoon market when there were hours upon hours of time to fill.

Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theater featured the Oyl family, with new characters coming and going as needed for each serialized adventure. On January 17, 1929, readers met Popeye, who caught their imagination, and he never left. (That same month, they were also introduced to Tarzan and Buck Rogers, quite an exciting time to read the newspapers.)

Grandinetti has written many other works on animation with a focus on Popeye so he’s the acknowledged expert. The problem with being the expert on something is that so much is in your head that sometimes you presume everyone knows this too. There’s an awful lot of context missing from the narrative.

We open with a brief background on the strip, although the current creator, R.K. Milholland, is not listed. Then we get into his screen adaptation (here, David Fleischer is not credited at all. From here, we get the handoff from Fleischer to Paramount’s Famous Studios, and then Associated Artists Productions acquired the library of 234 shorts dating back to 1933.

As children’s television programming arrived in 1949 (Crusader Rabbit), more followed with limited animation used for cost purposes. The made-for-television shorts could never compete with the hand-drawn work for features. However, by the late 1950s, cartoons vanished from movie screens and could only be found on the small black and white screens at home.

AAP’s package of cartoons was a ratings hit for countless stations and a financial bonanza for them. King Features, which owned the character, decided to get in on the act and formed King Features Syndicate Special Service, which went on to make the comic strip characters and turn them into animated fare with very mixed results.

Hired to oversee the Popeye cartoons was Al Brodax, best known today for his work on Yellow Submarine (which featured a Popeye cameo). To get 220 new cartoons made, he divided the work over six animation houses worldwide, hence the uneven quality and clear lack of quality control.

The book has an odd order, so we get info on these studios before we do the characters. Additionally, Grandietti and the book’s editor don’t like using paragraphs, so there are long blocks of type that really needed to be broken up.

Thankfully, when he does get to the characters, he clears up, once and for all, the confusion between Bluto and Brutus, so thanks for that.

Jack Mercer, Mae Questal, and Jackson Beck. The voices of Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Bluto.

We also get nice thumbnails of the key voice performers, including Jack Mercer (whom Grandinetti wrote a bio about) who was an animator that got discovered. He also wen ton to write some of the cartoons.

Grandinetti includes sections on spinoffs inspired by the cartoon, including related merchandise.

By page 77, he seems to run out of things to say about the character and the animated history. The remainder of the book is very detailed episode guides divided by the production house. Some contain additional credits; some contain one or two lines of opinion on the quality. As a result, you really have to be a fan of the character or an animation aficionado to appreciate this book.

The designer oddly clustered all the images at the end of text sections rather than intersperse them for a better overlook loo; It would have been nice to see examples from each studio as we’re reading their history or about their output.

Ultimately, this is an uneven valentine to the lesser known and appreciated animated saga of everyone’s favorite Sailor Man.

Impossible People by Julia Wertz

It’s reductive and not quite true to say that this book is what Julia Wertz wanted Drinking at the Movies to be – but it’s a good enough place to start.

Drinking  was her first full-length graphic novel after two collections of Fart Party stories; at the time, I thought it was more of a collage that it didn’t quite turn into a single narrative, but was definitely bigger and more ambitious that her previous work. It was also – I shudder to realize – published in 2010, almost fifteen years ago.

Impossible People , Wertz’s big new 2023 book, is her first memoir since Museum of Mistakes  in 2018, which mostly collected older work. (In between was Tenements, Towers, and Trash , a book of New York cityscapes and related material.) It’s odd to realize that: I think of Wertz as such an immediate, confessional cartoonist, her work so direct and plain-spoken. But those stories were mostly about that late-Aughts period; she hadn’t made any books about her thirties yet.

That’s what Impossible People does. It picks up Wertz’s life from where we saw it, in those Fart Party and Museum of Mistakes strips, starting in 2009. (I was surprised to see her at the Pizza Island collective, and realize how long ago that was.) It doesn’t quite get up to the present day; this is the story of the back half of Wertz’s life in New York City, and so ends somewhere in the mid-Teens.

And, as the subtitle “A Completely Average Recovery Story” signposts, Impossible People is centrally about her alcoholism in a way she couldn’t quite wrestle down in Drinking. Again, not to be reductive, but that’s probably because she was still drinking when she made Drinking at the Movies. You can’t tell the story of your recovery until you start to recover.

Impossible People is a big book, full of spaces and people and thoughts and years of Wertz’s life. As with a lot of her work, it’s a lot more carefully constructed and smarter than her cartoony avatar tricks you into thinking. She has a great style for confessional memoir: this is real and raw, says that cartoon Wertz; see how simply I’m drawn, how directly I speak – you can trust I’m giving you the unfiltered truth.

No one makes a three-hundred page book of comics immediately, of course. But that tone, that stance gets inside the reader’s defenses quickly. It’s a relaxing style, one that looks looser and quicker than it actually is. (Pay attention to how detailed her backgrounds are, especially when she runs through all of the finds from her urban exploring – everything is placed just so, both in her actual life and in the comics panel.)

In the end, Impossible People is the story of Wertz’s relationships. At first, she had one overwhelming one: alcohol. I won’t tell the story of how she stopped drinking – that’s what Impossible People is for – but she did manage to stop, and then had to replace that with people. From that point, Impossible is mostly about her friendships – particularly fellow cartoonist Sarah Glidden and fellow recoveree Jennifer Phippen – but also her family, some attempts at dating, the wider circle of cartoonists, and just life in general.

It’s not a happy, uplifting book: that’s unlikely for a book about recovery to begin with, and Wertz isn’t going to turn sunny that quickly. (Or maybe ever: I hope to see the books grumpy old Julia Wertz does in her sixties; those will be a lot of fun.) But it’s a smart, thoughtful book – deeper than it appears, more sophisticated than the art would have you think, more insightful than you’d expect from someone known for something called The Fart Party.

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

The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptations, Vol. 2

I love idiosyncrasy. Even if I’m not as into Idea X as a creator is, the fact that creator is so into it is appealing – I like to see the things creators are passionate about, the things they have to do, even if it doesn’t make commercial sense.

P. Craig Russell adapts operas into comics. He’s been doing it since nearly the beginning of his career, and I see from his bibliography list on Wikipedia that he has a few adaptations of songs from this past decade, though they’re still unpublished.

And what I have today is the second book collecting that work, the grandly titled The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adapations, Vol. 2 . (It followed a full-volume version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and was followed by a third miscellaneous book; with those songs from the past few years, there may be enough material for a Vol. 4 at this point.) It’s a 2003 book, collecting four adaptations spanning the late ’70s to the late ’90s, and Russell worked with different collaborators on each of them, some more involved than others. I’ll take them each separately: Parsifal, Songs by Mahler, Ariane & Bluebeard, and I Pagliacci.

Parsifal is the oldest piece here, originally published as a single-issue comic by Star*Reach in 1978. Patrick C. Mason adapted the Wagner opera and wrote the script; Russell drew it. It only adapts the second act of the opera, but that’s enough drama and then some: Mason also adds in a lot of narration in that ’70s comics style, some of which may transmute lyrics or stage directions. It’s a very wordy piece as well as being super-dramatic, with an amnesiac young knight being tempted by an immortal witch while searching for a holy relic (the spear that wounded Jesus during the crucifixion), and all those words do constrain Russell’s visual inventiveness here – it’s a weird ’70s comic, but still a sequence of pages of people explaining their emotions to each other at great length, and so not a million miles away from a contemporary Chris Claremont joint.

Songs by Mahler is the shortest section, with two songs, three pages each, from 1984. The first is credited as translated by Mason; the second has no credits other than Russell. These are more imagistic, less narrative, and much more successful as comics, even if they’re not stories.

Ariane & Bluebeard is from 1988, and doesn’t credit anyone other than Russell; so I guess he translated Paul Dukas’s French opera and scripted this forty-page version. This showcases Russell’s design sense, his use of color, and his eye for high drama – there are great, striking pages here, including a few wordless ones, showing he’d gotten to a point of confidence in his art to reproduce the feeling of the music of an opera without needing to explain. This is even more dramatic than Parsifal, largely because Russell is in better control of the material, and opera is super-dramatic – at least, the ones Russell is most drawn to adapt; I don’t think he’ll do Einstein on the Beach anytime soon – to begin with. The opera is the old Bluebeard folktale: young woman is married to an older man with a secret, who has been married several times before (and the fate of those brides is the secret), and she learns the secret, amid a lot of loud singing.

Last up is the black-and-white The Clowns (I Pagliacci), from 1997. This one was translated by Marc Andreyko from Leoncavallo’s opera, laid out by Russell, penciled and lettered by Galen Showman, and inked by Russell. The art is striking, the adaption is swift and assured, and the story is presented well – a traveling troupe arrives in a town, and art imitates life as both the character of the leading lady and the woman herself have an affair, which ends in death at the hands of the title clown. This is less visually inventive than Ariane, but tighter and clearly focused – I’d say it’s the best piece in the book, but that may be partly individual taste. (I like Russell’s vibrant colors and big layouts, but find them a bit too much some of the time, and Ariane is full of that stuff.)

Again, if you want comics adaptations of operas, Russell is not only your go-to, but pretty much your only choice. Luckily, he’s good at it and chooses works that adapt well.

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

Blue Is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh

I shouldn’t be the one to tell you about this book: I’m the wrong gender, the wrong orientation, the wrong nationality, the wrong generation. So don’t trust me.

Blue Is the Warmest Color  is a graphic novel by Julie Maroh – that’s what the edition I read says; I see indications that the author goes by Jul Maroh now and is transgender and nonbinary, which adds another wrinkle to the story. But this presents itself as fiction, even if, like anyone’s first big story in public, we suspect there are autobiographical elements in the mix. (It clearly can’t be entirely autobiographical, for reasons that should be obvious.)

Maroh is French; so is her cast. I found the story to be in a older mode than I expected: a frame story, coming out amid self-loathing, the clear tragedy of older gay/lesbian stories. It wasn’t nearly as 21st century as I was hoping from a book published in 2010 and translated in 2013 (and turned into a movie in French the same year). It’s not my world, not my community, but I thought we were past the sad dead LGBTQ people.

The main character is Clementine, but we start with her partner, Emma, after Clem’s death. Emma is retrieving Clem’s diaries from her partner’s parents. It’s not really clear how old everyone is, but we immediately dive out of the frame story into the main narrative, and the frame is just used for occasional (and I’d say, unnecessary) commentary. The frame is distancing at best: a more confident creator, later in their career, probably would not have made that choice.

The bulk of Blue is Clem’s story, starting on her fifteenth birthday in the mid-90s. She gets her first boyfriend, Thomas, is focused on school, has dreams of her future – the whole standard deal. She also sees a lesbian couple on the street, and has a strong, unexpected reaction to one of the women, with bright blue hair.

That’s Emma. We already know Clem ends up with Emma; there’s no mystery or surprise there; the frame story has eliminated that possibility. So I won’t run through the plot details, of how Clem denies she could possibly be lesbian, how wrong and unnatural and strange that is, how all of her friends (except one gay man) abandon her eventually. I said this was in the old mode: all that is familiar.

On the other hand, Clem does meet Emma more seriously, and they become first friends and then lovers. Emma is nearly a decade older and already in a relationship, with the forbidding Sabine, both of which would be warning signs in a more modern, conventional romance. But I think Maroh doesn’t mean any of it that way: this is a world where lesbians still live mostly quietly, out of sight, and young lesbians need to be introduced to that world and find a way in; they can’t just declare themselves and be accepted by the wider world.

(I may be naïve in thinking the other is true, now or at any time, in my country or this one. Again: don’t trust me.)

Blue covers two or three years in depth, and then jumps forward a decade to see Clem settled as a schoolteacher approaching thirty, to set up for the inevitable tragic end. There’s no intrinsic reason for this to be a tragedy; that’s unrelated to any of the main plot.

I would have preferred a happier romance; I was expecting one from the cover and the publication date. I’d like to think we’ve had enough tragedies about loves that can’t speak their names, and that most of us are happy to name those loves out loud, even if they’re not the ways we love. Again, I may be naïve.

But this is the story Maroh wanted to tell. It’s a personal, specific story, and I believe the world and the people. Maroh keeps it mostly monochrome, in soft greys and off-blacks, with blue as the one pop of color, making Emma almost luminous, especially in the early days. Like a beacon, like a signpost to a better world for Clem, if only she’s able to follow that sign and join that world – as she does, for a time.

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

An Enchantment by Christian Durieux

There is a long-running – it may have ended; I don’t know – series of graphic novels about the Louvre museum, officially licensed by that museum. Each one is separate, a different idea from a different creator or team. It started in 2005 with Nicolas De Crecy’s Glacial Period , and I’ve seen a few more, mostly years ago: The Museum Vaults, On the Odd Hours , The Sky Over the Louvre , (There’s what may be a comprehensive list of the series on Goodreads ; I note that half or more of them have never been translated into English.)

I have a weakness for bizarre publishing projects and quirky brand extensions, so I’m going to try to find all of the books in this series that have been published in English. I’ll go in order if I can, so the next one up was An Enchantment  from 2011, by creator Christian Durieux.

It takes place during some kind of celebration at the museum. We see uniformed staff bustle about, setting gala tables, and an old man in a suit quietly grab two bottles of wine and sneak away. We learn, before too long, that the celebration is for him: he’s some sort of political leader, who has just retired.

We don’t know his name. He does cast some scorn in the direction of a certain leader of Italy who I’m sure is meant to be Berlusconi, so my guess is that this is Jacques Chirac, or a transmuted fictional figure with some aspects in common with Chirac.

That doesn’t really matter: like the other books in this series, An Enchantment is symbolic and allusive and backwards-looking, a meditation and a dialogue rather than a book driven by plot.

And the dialogue this unnamed man has is, of course, with an equally unnamed gorgeous young woman who he meets as he sneaks away from his own fete to explore the museum. They appreciate art, talk about their own lives to some degree, and engage in the typical French philosophizing about life.

Along the way, Durieux has the opportunity to drop in about two dozen major works that are in the actual Louvre, and the handy backmatter tells us in exactly which galleries they can be found, so we could retrace this journey if ever we find ourselves in Paris.

Durieux makes nice pictures and constructs strong pages, though I find his philosophizing somewhat less compelling. (I’ve seen a lot of philosophizing in my day, and this isn’t terribly distinctive or unique – it’s yet more gather ye rosebuds while ye may.) Within the context of the series, this is fairly straightforward and normal, though: quite French, as is to be expected.

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

Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 3 by Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier

The modern era of comics is built for short attention spans, all miniseries and limited runs and hot new creators, emphasizing new “jump-on issues” and trying to ignore that vastly more people are jumping off, every chance they get.

Some of that is effect, some of it is cause; it’s been a spiral since the ’90s crash fatally injured the viability of the long-running series. Frankly, long series always tended to dip and (if they were lucky) rise over time – it’s just the “rise,” unpredictable as it used it be, got eliminated from those calculations forever sometime in the early Aughts. [1]

So a comic that’s published anything like regularly doesn’t look regular. There’s this twelve-issue series and that thrilling relaunch and the other one-shot tying into something else. And each one of those “new” things has to be new enough for the fabled “new reader” to start there, which means we get a lot of repotted origin stories and returns of fan-favorite characters and “here’s my favorite Batman story from childhood, done totally awesome!”

This is tedious for anyone who isn’t an utter neophile, but it’s the world we live in. In the case of Groo, it’s why the big series for 2015-16 was Groo: Friends and Foes, a twelve-issue extravaganza in which each issue saw one of the idiot adventurer’s most popular secondary characters returned to do the same things that character (and Groo) does every single time.

Now, Groo was always formulaic: it’s a comedy, and comedies are all about the bit. Groo‘s bit is that the title character is deeply stupid, though well-meaning, and that everything he touches goes wrong and gets broken. It’s usually heavily narrated by The Minstrel – that guy with the jester cap on the right of this cover – in verse that is usually almost as funny as it aims to be. And it’s been running for about forty years now, so there are a lot of recurring characters and running jokes (cheese dip, mendicant, and so on).

That all sounds unfriendly to new readers, but it’s still a light comedy: running jokes are still jokes, and you don’t realize they’re running until it runs into you for the second time. Groo was always built so anyone could drop in anywhere and get basically the same experience; it still is.

So there’s only a thin through-line for this miniseries: it’s basically ten mostly standalone issues, with a recurring character in common, and then a two-part finale. Volume 3 , the book I just got to, has the finale. (See my posts on the first two books for equally random musings about Groo, comics, and comedy.)

This time out, the special guests are: Pal & Drumm, a swordsman nearly as dumb as Groo (though beefier) and his handler/friend; Taranto, the scheming leader of a bandit band; The Minstrel, who I’ve already mentioned; and the recurring new character for this series, whose story gets wrapped up and whose name I won’t mention here to give some very slight suspense for anyone who might read these books. As I said, the first two issues are just like the eight that preceded them, but the last two see the subplot turn into main plot, all of the guest stars for the whole series return for several grand melees and finales.

Like all Groo stories, it’s more good-natured and sentimental than you would expect from a series of stories about a deeply stupid murder-hobo. I’m not a huge Groo fan, so I may seem lukewarm here – and, frankly, I am lukewarm – but this is just fine for what it is, and as dependably Groo-esque as it could possibly be. So those of you who like Groo will be very happy.

[1] Apropos of nothing: in a recent piece I wrote for work and was adapting for UK use, I learned the standard term on that side of the pond (at least according to my organization) for the first decade of this century is “noughties.” I had to believe this out of organizational pride; I can’t require that you do the same.

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

Are We Lost Yet? by Will Henry

I’ve had this same problem my entire book-reviewing “career” – what to say about another book in a series, when it’s the same kind of thing as the ones before. Even if you really like the new one, you’ve already said the things you could say.

So, let me start out by saying that Are We Lost Yet?  is the fourth collection of Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave” daily strip. The comic itself appears in newspapers and on GoComics every day; the three prior collections are Wallace the Brave , Snug Harbor Stories , and Wicked Epic Adventures  (links are to my posts). This one was published last year, so it includes comics that I’ve seen since I started reading the strip online, which is nicely circular.

(In fact, there’s one of my favorite panels in here, which I clipped and saved to use as a reaction image online – though I never get as much use out of the things in that folder as I think I will. I’ll shove that into this post, a little further down, so you can see if your tastes in humor and reactions are anything similar to mine.)

Those three posts are all pretty substantial; I like this strip and have enjoyed trying to explain the things I like about it. I’ve probably devoted less time to Henry’s cartooning in these posts than I should: he’s a supple cartoonist who fills his panels with details but always in a quick-looking, energetic style. He’s really clearly on the side that cartoons should be cartoony: eyes goggle, bodies fly in reaction to events, sound effects proliferate with a variety of perfectly onomatopoetic lettering.

I don’t want to repeat myself, but this is a great strip, one of the best of its kind and one of the most fun and energetic strips currently running. The only contemporary thing as creative and amusing as Wallace the Brave I can think of is the Peter Gallagher Heathcliff, which is otherwise utterly different.

I know Wallace is the central character, the hero, and we’re supposed to relate to him. But he’s just too much of a cockeyed optimist for me to take seriously, too much of that wide-armed American huckster, always with a new story to tell that he utterly believes in the moment. No, for me the best and most important character is Spud, dragged into situations he’s not good at handling over and over again by his best friend, but always himself and never about to change to be more like that annoying/wonderful friend.

This is a fine modern comic strip, in a mode a lot of people have liked in a lot of styles over a lot of years, so I have to think a lot of you will like Wallace the Brave if you see it. So go see it.

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

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