Tagged: ComicMix

Boneyard, Volume 6 Review

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  • November 19, 2007

Boneyard is a series about a guy – Michael Paris is his name – who inherited a cemetery way back in issue #1, and arrived to find it full of various monsters from myth and legend. Luckily, the vampire, werewolf, troll, gill-woman, and so on were friendly, and convinced him not to sell out to evil forces. As you can see from the cover, we’re up to the sixth collection by this point, so the series has settled into itself, and is somewhat predictable. (On the other hand, these are all thin collections, of about four issues apiece, so we’ve only gotten up to issue #24 – it’s not in any huge rut, just a comfortable status quo.)

The major overall plot of the Boneyard series involves the machinations of Certain Forces – culturally literate readers might take Mayor Wormwood’s surname as a major clue – to buy the cemetery from Michael or to obtain it in some other way. (For nefarious reasons, of course.) The main subplot centers on Michael’s very, very slowly budding romance with Abbey, the cute ancient vampire. (Given that much of Boneyard creator Richard Moore’s other work is pornographic, I find it amusing that his characters either immediately have sex upon meeting or are too shy to even talk to each other.)

This volume, though, isn’t really about either of those plots – it touches slightly on Abbey’s long-time rivalry with Lilith (another ancient, powerful vampiress), but it’s mostly about the cast going to a big dress-up party thrown by a previously unmentioned ultra-powerful supernatural being called the Luminary (who is called the Illuminary on the back cover). (more…)

Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and the High Price of Irony, by Mike Gold

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  • November 19, 2007

Last Thursday, Alex Rodriguez signed a 10-year contract in excess of a quarter billion dollars that allows him to continue working for the New York Yankees, a team about which, in the interest of full disclosure, I couldn’t care less. A couple hours later, the government indicted San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds for lying to a grand jury.

That’s a nice slice of irony. When Rodriguez “quit” the Yankees he announced his decision during the final game of the World Series, effectively destroying the momentum of the business’s most holy event – particularly if you’re from Boston. Still, it was bad form and I enjoyed seeing those chickens come home.

So now A-Rod (not to be confused with L-Ron or Kal-El) gets a nice locker at the new Yankee Stadium. But what goes around comes around and then goes around again: part of Rodriquez’s deal is that he gets all kinds of bonuses for accomplishing major feats that will inure to the financial benefit of his employer. Among these is breaking Barry Bonds’ home run record. I love irony.

That’s just become a whole lot easier. Bonds is without a contract and is now, effectively, unemployable. Like Willie Mays, he’s now standing still and breaking his record is much easier. Not that A-Rod doesn’t already have enough money to buy Mongo air-turf from Prince Vulcan, but still, we probably won’t have to worry about asterisks for very long.

While still wallowing in the synchronicities of irony, I listened to Dave Ross’s editorial on CBS Radio. Dave pointed out that Bonds is over 18 and if he wants to pump dangerous drugs into his veins, that’s his right. Dave lives in Seattle; they think like that up there. If it violates the rules of Major League Baseball, that’s the business of Major League Baseball and not our courts. He lied to a grand jury in 2003? It didn’t physically harm anybody except himself and gamblers. If a grand jury looked into lies that actually harmed people in 2003, Dave pointed out, they wouldn’t have any problem finding people to indict.

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Unconventional reading

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  • November 18, 2007

Some of us not being nearly as young as we used to be, yesterday’s National convention in NYC pretty much wiped us for the weekend.  Other ComicMix folks will be in attendance today, but we’re resting our aching back and legs and never-you-mind, and catching up on the past week of columns:

And, although it goes without saying, don’t forget to click on our free online comics as well!

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MW: A Review

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  • November 17, 2007

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It’s difficult for an American to appreciate the place Osamu Tezuka held in Japanese popular culture. Tezuka created the first massively popular character and storyline in manga, Astro Boy – something on the level of Siegel & Shuster’s Superman. But he also owned that character, and ran a studio to produce stories – something like Will Eisner. (And he went on to create more adult, complex works later in life, also like Eisner.) But Tezuka was also a major force in animation – roughly the Walt Disney of Japan. And he was massively prolific for forty years; his “Complete Works” (collecting just over half of his manga) runs 80,000 pages through 400 volumes, and his animation work was similarly large. So his impact is absolutely colossal; I’ve seen some commentators claim that every single Japanese comics sub-genre derives from something Tezuka did.

I’ve only read a few of those four hundred volumes – in my defense, most of them aren’t available in English — but I’ve found Tezuka an interesting but quirky artist. (I’ve reviewed the first six volumes of his Buddha series on my personal blog, and here at ComicMix I’ve looked at Ode to Kirihito and Apollo’s Song.) MW is another graphic novel in the vein of Apollo and Ode: dark, adult, violent and occasionally sexual. It’s from the late ‘70s, several years after Apollo and Ode, and originally appeared in the Japanese manga magazine Biggu Komiku (whose name I never fail to find humorous).

Unlike Ode and Apollo, MW has no supernatural element, and it’s even bleaker than those two works (neither one terribly cheerful). Fifteen years before the story began, a massive, horrific event occurred on a remote Japanese island, and that event bound together a boy and a man. When the story begins, the man, Garai, is a Catholic priest – from what I’ve seen, Tezuka was fascinated by Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, returning to its iconography and doctrines over and over. The man is tormented because of his relationship with the boy Yuki, who has grown into a dangerously attractive young man – and who was warped into a sociopath by the event they lived through.

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Reasons To Be Cheerful, by Martha Thomases

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  • November 17, 2007

It’s Thanksgiving week. Impossible to get anyone on the phone. News stories about crowded, delayed and cranky airports. Christmas music reaches overload levels.

Let’s talk about giving thanks, and what inspires it. Here are some of the things for which I’m grateful this year:

  • It’s a great time to be a comics reader. Even during the birth of the direct market when there were all kinds of cool independents, I don’t think we had the variety we have now. A lot of this is due to the Interwebs, the series of tubes that provides a low cost of entry for new readers and creators. A lot of this is due to the success of graphic novels in bookstores, which opens the medium to new readers who might want more than superheroes (obviously, what they want is manga). There’s comics for kids, comics for historians, comics for soap opera fans – really, the list goes on and on. Dirk Deppey, at ¡Journalista!, separates “literary” and “pop” comics, a dichotomy with which I disagree, but not in a hostile way, more of a “let’s have a few drinks and argue all night at the bar” kind of way.

  • It’s great to be back in the comics business after doing other things for nearly a decade. I’ve gone to a lot of conventions this year, and seen people I hadn’t seen for a long time. Here, in no particular order, are a few that I missed while I was gone: Marc Hempel, Mark Wheatley, Ted McKeever, Scott Hampton, David Glanzer, Richard Case, Bo Hampton, Denys Cowan, Dick Giordano, Eric Shanower, Axel Alonso, Dean Haspiel and Nick Bertozzi, Mark Millar, Joel Meadows, Stuart Moore, Maggie Thompson, Joe Illidge, Mimi Cruz, Michael Eury and a bunch more I can’t remember at the moment. And, of course, my pals here on ComicMix, like Mike Gold, John Ostrander, Glenn Hauman, Michael Davis, Brian Alvey, Denny O’Neil, Mike Raub, Kai Connelly and Elayne Riggs.

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Manga Friday: Romance Is in the Air

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  • November 16, 2007

Manga Friday continues to go backwards and forwards at the same time; this week, I read the first volumes of two very popular and long-running series, and the latest volume of Path of the Assassin, a lesser-known samurai series from the creators of Lone Wolf & Cub. Our theme this week is young love…but this is manga, so we’re talking about lots of panty-shots, blood spewing out of noses, gigantic sweat-drops, tasteful nudity, and utterly gormless young men. So let’s dive right in:

Ai Yori Aoshi, I’m informed by its foreword, is a romance comic for young men. (They don’t put it quite that way, of course, but that’s what it is. And it shows just how big the Japanese marketplace for comics is when even the odd niche of a love story in a boy’s magazine is filled.) Kaoru, a young student, ran away from his terribly rich, terribly powerful, terribly conservative, and terribly controlling family some years ago, and is now in college. Aoi, his incredibly sheltered childhood sweetheart – who is the scion of a similar family, and who was betrothed to him at a very young age – runs away to find him, since she’s utterly in love with this man she hasn’t seen in a decade (or at all as an adult). They meet cute, she goes home with him – not like that, get your minds out of the gutter – and then the engine of plot complication starts to chug along.

Kou Fumizuki, who created this series, does make Aoi believable, which is not an easy achievement – she’s confused about nearly everything to do with Kaoru and modern life, and that’s the main driving factor of the plot. Kaoru is more generic, the usual audience-identification character (smart enough but not too smart, hardworking ditto, and so on), but he works, and centers the story reasonably well. I suspect that over-controlling rich families and arranged marriages are mostly things a generation or two in the past for the Japanese public, which makes them fodder for melodrama and comedy. (If they were still living institutions, stories about them would be drama.) (more…)

Residual Effects, by Elayne Riggs

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  • November 14, 2007

elayne100-1758150I was going to continue my review of art I like, but since last week the new DC comp box arrived and I want to catch up before I write any more about that. Plus, I had a fairly major lifestyle change, more about which later. Meantime, the Writers Guild of America strike is into its second week and, while a resolution still seems fairly far away, I think it’s done a lot of good already in terms of consciousness raising. As with other recent revelations a lot of Americans have had, many people are starting to question why such a modern and powerful country seems so backwards when it comes to its citizens fairly sharing its bounty, whether that means providing health care for all or living up to its humane ideals in its treatment of captives or celebrating and supporting the collective strength of productive workers.

I think the WGA strike has resulted in a lot of folks who’ve never heard anything but anti-union talk since before Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO workers rethinking that knee-jerk (but craftily cultivated) attitude. They’ve learned that about half of WGA members are unemployed or underemployed in a given year, and they don’t buy the studios’ insistence that the strike is “millionaires versus billionaires.” They’ve learned that professional writing, like a lot of other entertainment-related professions that seem all-fun from the outside looking in, in fact represents a lot of hard work and long hours. They’re learning to deeply mistrust the line they’ve been fed for so long, a version of the famous Peter Stone dialogue from 1776 that “most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” Nowadays it’s become imperative to protect the reality of being able to survive. And they understand that residual payments are the way most WGA members survive between the relatively few successful gigs they’re able to score.

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Mighty Marvel MONEY Society

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  • November 13, 2007

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They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s a shame they didn’t get it right.

Several months after ComicMix started posting serialized new comics for free, several weeks after ComicMix started posting complete previously-published comics for free, and, what, about a year after Newsarama started posting Powers and Kabuki and other titles for free, our friends at Marvel Comics have started reprinting their classic fare online – for ten bucks a month.

"We did not want to get caught flat-footed with kids these days who have the tech that allows them to read comics in a digital format," Marvel president Dan Buckley told USA Today. "Our fan base is already on the Internet. It seemed like a natural way to go."

Well, Dan, welcome to the club. We’ve been saving you a seat for a while now. By the way, since you’re charging so much money for all this, how much cash do the writers and artists get?

Coming Soon To A TV Near You, by Mike Gold

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  • November 12, 2007

The television and movie writers strike is entering its second week. The picket lines are being staffed by more stars than there are in the heavens. The writers are looking for their fare share of DVD revenue – currently, approximately three to four cents per sale – and of commercial Internet action – currently, zilch.

Ironically, as teevee shows are starting to go on early hiatus, us folks back home are beginning to turn to DVD purchase and rentals to fill the downtime, lest our sets stare blankly back at us.

This one seems simple. If somebody is making money off of your work, you deserve a fair share of the action. Or even a taste. Anyway, something more than an insult. Collective bargaining is genuinely American; it mirrors the very values of fair play that we were all taught in school. Just like “socialized medicine,” there is nothing left wing or communistic about it – despite what some of our right wing politicians, corporate magnates and the liars at Fox News babble incessantly babble.

We need to look no further than the deposed leader of Disney, Michael Eisner. “It’s a waste of their time. “(The studios) have nothing to give. They don’t know what to give.” Oh, really? These clueless number crunchers who “earn” eight digit compensation packages strictly solely off of the sweat of the artistic community (writers, directors, musicians, performers – 90% of whom are largely or completely unemployed at any moment in time, et al) have nothing to give? How about starting with me, and give me a break. (more…)

Striking the right notes

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  • November 11, 2007

As the WGA strike begins its second week, ComicMix staffers and columnists applaud our fellow writers, remind readers to keep turning to United Hollywood and Deadline Hollywood Daily for the latest news, and promise to keep entertaining you as best we can!  Here’s what we’ve had for you this past week:

May the WGA get everything it wants and well deserves!

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