Category: News

Transformers… more than meets the eye. This, we know. But what happens when the mighty all-spark malfunctions and sends the Michael Bay Monstrosities to wage war against the Autobots and Decepticons of our shared youth? We’ve got a few battles in our back pocket ComicMixers… let’s let em duke it out, shall we?

Round One: Satellite Scoundrel or Baneful Boombox?

We know him collectively as Soundwave. Always loyal. Always awesome. As the Decepticon Comununications Officer, he’s known as the vocoder-voiced master of sonics. Whether he’s deploying his evil tapes-in-diguise (Ravage, Laserbeak, Ratbat, Rumble, just to name a few…) or spying on unsuspecting Autobots in his tape-deck form, he’s always the evil bot in-the-know. A warrior thru and thru, Soundwave is never one to shy away from a fight. And with his shoulder mounted blaster, he’s packing enough punch by himself to lay waste without need for calling in backup. But let’s say he wants to bring a few friends to the party? Well then, Soundwave is the one-man band. His battalion of tape sized Decepticons can take to the skies, or shake the ground. They can hide in plain site, or join their Blue Boss for any fracas that he may take apart in.

Fans clamored that Soundwave didn’t make it into Bay’s movie in the first go-round. Deciding that he’d actually listen to the fans, Michael Bay made sure Soundwave would make it into Transformers: Rise of the Fallen. Given that Bay thought the “size-altering” Transformers of the cartoon was “too detached from reality” (So you can’t buy that they can’t alter their size Michael, but you’ve no problem with high school kids being able to outrun an alien overlord who fought Optimus Prime to a standstill? Just wondering.) Soundwave would be given a new form for the movie. Taking shape as a satellite, Soundwave hovers in Earth’s orbit… perhaps to jam communications? Maybe he’ll be influential in sending more Decepticons down to Earth to free his master Megatron? We’ll have to catch the flick to find out, but in the mean time… we might as well ring the bell!

Who would win in a battle to the end? Would it be the blue-hued tape-deck of doom (with small battalion of smaller-still tapes-of-doom)? Or would it be the Bay-born Satellite of Spite? Only you, the cosmically-conscious ComicMix commenters can conclude! Now cast your votes!

In this week’s installment of Lone Justice:

The party is over! Time for Octavius Brown to get a job!

Brought to you by Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley!

Start reading now! Or start from the beginning!

Normally, we wouldn’t promote in such blatant promotion efforts. Heck, we haven’t even gotten around to publishing our own GrimJack press release. But this touching effort by Stephan Pastis for his latest Pearls Before Swine collection was so earnest, we just had to show you.

Pearls Sells Out: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury, the 12th book in the series, comes out August 18. Order now.

As it turns out, the man who wrote Understanding Comics
and Making Comics
is pretty good at understanding and making the multimedia presentation too. (This isn’t a real surprise– in the mid 90’s, at the initial boom of the World-Wide Web, a lot of web designers and artists had copies of Understanding Comics
on their desk, because it helped them get a handle on this new medium and how to communicate in it.)

Here’s Scott McCloud at the TED Conference. Enjoy the lazy Sunday afternoon and enjoy Scott’s speech:

Just when you think you’ve gotten the hang of Asian comics – you can read right-to-left without blinking, speak of shojo and shonen with ease and have even been known to bring up seinen in casual conversation – you get caught up short with the realization that Japan is not the entirety of Asia. There are other countries with their own comics traditions, and you (well, me) suddenly realize that you (no, it’s still me) don’t know all that much about them. But there will always be more books you haven’t read than those you have, so the only thing to do is dive right in….

Mijeong
By Byun Byung-Jun
NBM ComicsLit, July 2009, $19.99

If Bret Easton Ellis was a Korean cartoonist – and about twenty years younger – he might have produced a short-story collection like Mijeong; Byung-Jun’s characters are mostly urban young people, disaffected more often than not. There are seven stories here, in a wide variety of art styles – some painted, some drawn, and all absolutely stunning in their virtuosity – but they’re all quite bleak.

Byung-Jun’s stories traffic in rape and abduction, murder and suicide, but his viewpoint is distanced and quiet, as if to say that this is just life, and none of it can be helped. Some of the stories end on a relatively upbeat note and some the other way, but it doesn’t really matter – they all have that quiet, detached tone.

Byung-Jun’s art is amazing in its textures and environment, though his people, deliberately, have mask-like faces that show little emotion most of the time. It’s harder to judge his writing – there are passages like “For weary lovers, love seems distant. But they’ll endure it all. Overwhelmed, they endure. But, in the end, they’ll manage.” that clunk around like a tire with a bald spot, but it’s impossible to say if that was clunky in the original Korean, or if the translation (by Joe Johnson) is responsible. In either case, the writing aims towards sublimity but doesn’t always make it.

Mijeong is an Asian comic for people who usually like European comics – it’s nuanced and subtle, quiet and vaguely depressive, with gorgeous art and a deeply jaundiced view of the world. Perhaps the fact that it reads left-to-right – since it’s Korean, and that’s the way their books run – will help it find that audience. (more…)