Tagged: art

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Two More Minxes

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A few months back, I reviewed the second and third graphic novels from Minx (DC’s new line aimed at teenage girls, published in a manga-ish size and format but not otherwise much like manga). I’ve since dug up the first and fourth Minx titles, The Plain Janes and Good As Lily, for another compare-and-contrast.

The Plain Janes was the Minx launch title, back in May, and was the only one of the first wave of Minx books to have any female creators involved. (Which lack, if you recall, caused somewhat of a hue and cry in some circles.) The writer, Cecil Castellucci (that single female creator), is an established Young Adult novelist, and, perhaps because of that, [[[The Plain Janes]]] is the closest to mainstream realistic fiction of any of the Minx books I’ve seen so far.

Our heroine, Jane, is a young teen who lived in “Metro City” until she was caught at the edge of a random bombing, which made her parents paranoid enough to move the family to the suburbs. (Jane is presumably an only child; we don’t see any siblings.) The bombing affected her just as strongly as it did her parents, but in a different way: it shocked her out of her old complacent life (concerned with boys and clothes) and turned her into An Artist. So she resists the urge to fall in with the same sort of crowd she hung out with at her old school, and tries to make friends with a group of outcast girls.

Unfortunately, those girls are straight from Central Casting: the brainy one, the sporty one, and the theatrical one. (There’s even the school’s token One Gay Guy, who gets involved later on.) Worse, their names are all versions of “Jane,” telegraphing the manipulation even further. They’re all decent characters – well differentiated from each other and generally believable – but it didn’t make much sense to me that the three of them would be friends, and each have no other friends, when they have nothing in common but their outcast status. (Then again, I was never a high school girl, and the social structures boys set up can be quite different.)

Our Jane has to work to get the other Janes to like her – she’s pretty and should be popular, so why would she be hanging out with them? – and keeps turning down the friendship advances of the local Queen Bee. But, eventually, her plan comes together, and she recruits the other Janes into her secret organization P.L.A.I.N. – People Loving Art in Neighborhoods – to do various bizarre “art” events secretly around town. They are, of course, the very po-mo kind of art that doesn’t require any ability to draw or paint or otherwise create something specific; it’s all installation-style pieces that only are art because someone says they are.

This leads to the expected, and overwritten, trouble from the authorities, who clamp down hard on any sign of rebellion in their community. (Sadly, this was all done more deftly, and with a lighter touch, in the ‘80s movie Footloose. Yes, it’s that sort of thing all over again.) But, in the end, art, and P.L.A.I.N., prevail.

So The Plain Janes is a bit obvious and a bit too much – at least for me, jaded thirty-something that I am. It may be much more exciting for a teenage girl who hasn’t seen this plot before and doesn’t realize she can pick her friends and do the things she wants to do. And, if so, then it will do its job just fine.

(I don’t have much to say about the art – it’s solid, in a mostly mainstream-comics style, with lots of close-ups on faces. It’s noticeably less stylized than the art in the other Minx titles I’ve seen, which fits this more grounded, mostly real-world story.)

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The PFVM Principle

  • News
  • September 5, 2007

elayne100-2362892There’s been a flurry of posts lately in the comics blogosphere, including Glenn Hauman’s last column here, about perceived value for money (let’s just call it PVFM) when it comes to comics. The consensus seems to be, American comics periodicals from the Big Two are usually about 22 pages long and take mere minutes to read through, which is Not Good. Added to that the current buzzword in vogue for what used to be called "padding," now rechristened "decompression," and the PVFM aggravation level shoots way up as the time actually spent reading the thing goes way down. And the conclusion is, there just ought to be more words per page, and possibly more pages per pamphlet, so the reading time (and thus the presumed enjoyment time) increases and fans don’t feel like they’re being ripped off and more readers will return to comics and all will be well with the world. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually seen online comics pages where a writer/artist will put up a page of wordless story and apologize for the lack of dialogue on it!

Allow me to ask: When did PVFM become a condition upon which entertainment should be created? Do all stories have to be dense, or should all stories strive instead to be good?

Look, I understand PVFM. I frequent an all-you-can-eat sushi place, for cripe’s sake. The sushi’s very good there, or I wouldn’t frequent it. But I’ve been to lots of AYCE places that made me wish I paid more for less-but-better stuff. As anyone who’s visited a 99-cent store would agree, quantity isn’t always synonymous with quality.

Particularly where such a subjective experience as entertainment is involved. Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask this, what with my swiss-cheese retention abilities, but were all the stories you really remember fondly real long ones? I’ve been to some long, dense movies that were full of sound and fury and signified less than nothing; the concession candy had more fulfillment. And I’ve spent two minutes reading various pithy blog posts that stick with me far longer than the screens and screens of blather that, frankly, I usually can’t even make it all the way through. But okay, let’s be fair — comics aren’t blog posts, where brevity and getting to the point is often prized. And they’re not movies, where unspoken movement can convey so much that a constant stream of words isn’t necessary.

So tell me, without looking: what’s your favorite comic book story, and how many words does it contain?

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COMICS REVIEW: Amazons Attack

23630_4_006-8429163At Heroes Con in Charlotte this past June, one convention goer asked DC EIC Dan DiDio what was the point of Amazons Attack. “What’s the point of any comic?” DiDio quipped back, leaving me to believe that the point was in fact simply to separate me from eighteen dollars and eat up ten minutes of my life for each of six months.

It’s been a couple of shaky years in the world of [[[Wonder Woman]]] fandom; turning her into a killer, handing the mantle off to Donna Troy – which you would have missed if you blinked, the “who is Wonder Woman?” plotline which I’m not even sure has started but was touted as ”next” at the end of issue #4, which then begs the mention of the sporatic publication of the book itself mere months into the re-launch of the series.

After all that, “the first major comics event of 2007,” as the house ads touted, should have given us six action packed issues that could not be contained in the regular monthly title. Instead, [[[Amazons Attack]]] was confusing, boring and left me month after month echoing that Charlotte fan’s question.

Why was this a mini-series? This story could have easily been told in the pages of the monthly [[[Wonder Woman]]] book, and then perhaps they wouldn’t have replicated numerous scenes in multiple publications across one month, while leaving questions up in the air because it was so easy to not pick up a tie-in or read them out of order. Was the project ill-conceived or just poorly managed?

The art was amazingly varied from the main AA book to the tie-ins, it was sometimes hard to see where they tied in since there visual cues were often non-existent. Sadly, the art in the main title fell short: there was something lacking in what Pete Woods did that left the characters looking very flat and ill-defined facially.

It only being a few hours since I finished the series, it hasn’t sunk in yet that the whole thing served only one purpose: to set up Jim Starlin’s The Death of the New Gods.

***Spoiler Alert (but I see it as saving you the trouble of reading this mess)**

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Stupid — It Burns!

  • News
  • August 29, 2007

elayne100-7557489I’m sure most readers will agree that we all bring our own unique views to our entertainment experiences, our own desires and prejudices and lifetimes of baggage. And many of us try to partake of those experiences bearing that baggage in mind, allowing for it or disclaiming it or even using it to enhance our POVs.

For the average consumer, baggage is something you try not to let get in the way. But a certain subset clings to it like a badge of honor. That’s the portion of the crowd that brags of specialized knowledge, and will accept nothing less than that same level of specialization in their entertainment. Which is silly, in my opinion. You may be a rocket scientist, or a medical intern, or a lawyer, or even a secretary, but the people who write movies and comics and whatnot, well, they’re just storytellers.

This is not to say that a certain verisimilitude isn’t welcome. A story needs to be internally consistent, after all, to keep you involved in its world. But if you’re from Cleveland and the movie you’re watching is supposed to be set in that city and it’s pretty darn clear that it was shot in Vancouver, it can take a bit more effort to stay with that story when you keep going "But that’s not the street I used to walk to school on!" If you’ve just come home from a day in the newsroom, opened up the latest Superman comic and noted that the Daily Planet scenes don’t resemble your job in the least, I can understand the irritation. Many’s the time I’ve watched actors pretend to type or play a musical instrument as just something to do with their hands, not as though they were actually performing the task at hand. (By the way, how things have changed on the typing front since the advent of PCs and laptops; one of the things I love about the TV show The Office is how the actors actually type IMs to each other during filming; they look like they’re at their desks doing actual office work, just like me!)

But obsessing on these comparatively minor things to the point where they ruin your enjoyment of the story is, to my mind, just silly. It’s not seeing the forest for the trees. Even if they’re palm trees and the story’s set in a northern climate.

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9 Superpowers You Might Actually Want

  • News
  • August 21, 2007

From The Best Article Every Day, 9 Superpowers You Might Actually Want:

Humor ESP. You’ve got a great joke involving St. Peter, a stripper, and a tricycle, but you’re not sure how it will go over with your friend’s new boyfriend, whom you’ve only met once but get the feeling doesn’t really like you. Your humor ESP will let you know whether the joke will end in laughs or a theological debate. This peculiar psychic ability also comes in handy when you want to come up with the exact line to scare off that guy at the bar who just won’t leave you alone.

I’ve got a few of my own:

Time Dilation & Compression: Make those slow movies fly by and meetings with the in-laws fly by, and stretch out that vacation time and get a few extra hours to finish art corrections.

Parking Spot Creation: The ability to magically have a parking spot appear wherever and whenever you need one.

Human Computer Antivirus: Nuff said.

What are yours? Leave them in comments.

Ellison, Fantagraphics settle

  • News
  • August 17, 2007

The world is a bit nicer today, as the acrimonious lawsuit between Harlan Ellison and Fantagraphics has not only been settled,but the terms of the settlement have been released.  Both parties agreed that "ad hominem, personal attacks" will cease as long as each is alive (or, in the case of Fantagraphics, in business). 

In addition, Fantagraphics agreed to remove Harlan’s name from the cover of future editions of Comics Journal Library 6: The Writers, as well as his interview, and to remove passages from the book Comics as Art: We Told You So, as well as removing those paragraphs from its website.  At the same time, Ellison’s website will remove allegations that Groth embezzled funds, anad which "likened him to a child molester."  A rebuttal statement will be on his site for at least 30 days.

Fantagraphics may not solicit any further donations of art for its Defense Fund, but may market those pieces which have already been donated.

Ellison will receive two copies of all Fantagraphics publications or any of its imprints which contain material he wrote.

Each party is responsible for its own legal fees.

 

Can you ReBoot?

  • News
  • August 16, 2007

reboot-8996452As part of a promotion for the ReBoot TV series (which Rainbow Entertainment is trying to revive), Zeroes 2 Heroes is going to publish a new ReBoot comic.  They’re looking for an art team with a contest online. 

Here’s what you do:  Pick a ReBoot character and sketch it.  Fans will vote and you’ll be notified in August and start work in September.

  1. The ReBoot pitches are found here; you need to be logged in.
  2. Launch the Flash viewer by clicking on any of the pitch thumbnails.
  3. Browse through the pitches and pick the character or world you think is the most interesting.
  4. Upload a sketch using the "Upload" button.

Then tell ComicMix how it goes.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Screw Heaven, When I Die I’m Going to Mars

screw-7449533Shannon Wheeler (no relation, as far as I know) is, of course, the creator of Too Much Coffee Man, and also the possessor of the world’s greatest surname. (Trust me: I know.) This is his new book, which is not another TMCM collection, though TMCM does show up in a couple of strips.

Screw Heaven is copyright 2007, and doesn’t contain any information about previous appearances of any of the strips collected in it. That either means that it’s all completely new and never-before seen (plausible, but I’d expect the book would hold together more coherently if that were the case) or that Dark Horse neglected to mention that these are from Wheeler’s previously-published comics, or website, or magazine work, or something else entirely. I’m a suspicious, pessimistic, grumpy guy, so I’m assuming that the latter is actually the case – though I have no evidence either way.

Screw Heaven opens with an introduction by Jesse Michaels (singer of something called Operation Ivy, of which I have never heard) and then dives into twelve “chapters,” each with between one and twenty single-page cartoons. Some of the chapters collect cartoons that clearly go together; chapter three, for example, is nearly a complete narrative. Others are more general, and only tied together by a theme.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Saga of the Bloody Benders

benders-9425765It’s been twenty years since Geary’s original A Treasury of Victorian Murder was published – and who would have thought, then, that a slim book of arch graphic short stories about little-known murders in Victorian England would be the beginning of the comics Geary would spend most of the decades to come creating? The first of the smaller-format, single-case volumes, Jack the Ripper, followed in 1995, with a new book every other year through 2005’s The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. Then 2006 saw The Case of Madeleine Smith, and this year yet another new Geary murder case.

Except for the first volume, each “Treasury of Victorian Murder” is a small book – about 5½ “ x 8¼” with roughly eighty pages of comics – about a particular, somewhat famous murder case from 19th century England or the USA. He’s covered the deaths of two Presidents – Lincoln and Garfield – and the cases "H.H. Holmes," Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper. The remaining two books – about Mary Rogers and Madeleine Smith – are about famous sensational cases, crimes of passion.

The Bender “family” – there’s some doubt as to whether they were actually related, as they claimed to be – of Labette County, Kansas are not quite as famous as most of those cases (though I hadn’t heard of Madeleine Smith before, either). But they were certainly actively murderous and impressively mysterious, so their story gives Geary quite a bit to dig into. The Benders arrived in that raw, rural area of Kansas in 1870, very soon after the Civil War and not much longer after Kansas became a state in 1861. They set up a single-room (divided by a hanging canvas) inn and grocery on the major trail through the area, and settled into the community – considered eccentric, certainly, but basically accepted.

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The Big ComicMix Broadcast in San Diego!

It’s Day One for the Big ComicMix Broadcast at the San Diego Comic-Con International 2007, which begins with time spent in a long line … but we make a new friend … then we hit the panels for a scoop on where Countdown is going at DC. Next we head down to the dealer’s room for a a quick lesson in buying original art and then over to the publisher’s row for a sneak preview at the Babysitter’s Club Graphic Novels. We even had energy left to look back  at the FIRST San Diego show – and the hit album track everyone was listening to that weekend!

You PRESS THE BUTTON while we soak our feet for awhile!!

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