Tagged: comics

Manga Friday: Superpowers

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  • November 2, 2007

alice-2476961Only two books for Manga Friday this week; the deadline crept up on me and found me with a smaller “read” pile than I expected. But they’re both pretty good, and both are brand-new, which may make up for it.

First is Alice on Deadlines, which is the first time I’ve hit a concentrated dose of that Japanese-comics staple, the panty shot. Lapan is a Shingami — essentially an angel of death, or one of a legion of Grim Reapers, or something in that line of work. He and his co-workers travel to Earth to bring back dead souls who don’t come on their own, which sometimes requires a lot of “persuasion.” Lapan is also a fine example of that stock manga character, the horny creep. (We first see him absorbed in a dirty magazine at his desk.)

And, on the other side, Alice is a voluptuous young woman — presumably in high school. She’s terribly normal and average, except for being gorgeous (and it looks like all the other students of her all-girls school are also gorgeous).

Due to a mix-up, Lapan ends up in Alice’s body instead of the skeleton he was supposed to inhabit. And Alice is bounced into the skeleton. Wacky hijinks ensue, mostly involving Lapan-in-Alice’s-body trying to find a quiet place to fondle himself, and falling all over the other students. Along the way, the two of them do manage to take care of a few shishibitos (souls that cling to life instead of moving on, and which sometimes manifest magical abilities).

(more…)

Dumb Ass, by Michael Davis

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  • November 2, 2007

DNA pioneer James Watson says blacks are genetically less smart. He told a UK newspaper whites are more intelligent. Watson, the man who along with Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, is facing a HUGE backlash after claiming that black people are genetically less intelligent than whites.

 

I don’t know what the uproar is. He’s right. Well he’s right when it comes to me. I’m sure he’s smarter than I am.

Or is he?

I’m a pretty smart guy but I doubt if I’m smarter than a Nobel Prize winning scientist.

Or am I?

Mr. Watson tells the world that black people are dumber than white people and expected kudos from the world for his insight.

That’s like me saying Hitler was a hero and expecting a parade for my words of wisdom. Some small minded sick fools may believe that, but just how stupid would they be to say it? (more…)

Getting Good and Scared, by John Ostrander

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  • November 1, 2007

Have a nice Hallowe’en? Was the Great Pumpkin good to you? Did you grab a few treats, pull a few tricks? Watched a nice scary movie or two? Seen a few Saws? Are you ready to get back to the real world?

The real world has gotten a lot scarier than anything Stephen King is putting out or that Hollywood is dreaming up. Crude oil is hitting record highs. Drinking water is drying up on both a national and an international level. The American housing market is in the toilet and likely to remain there. About a year from now we’ll be electing a new president and a new Congress, which means that we’re about to hit the hardcore election season during which little or nothing of substance will be done in Washington.

“Old news,” right? Heard it all before. Maybe we should summarize what it all means quickly and simply, the way Americans like it. Unless there are drastic changes made, America is going into its decline. Unless you’re in that upper small percentile of Americans that are really rich, the quality of your life is going to decline as well and not get better.

Fact? Not yet. By the time it’s a fact, it’ll be way too late to change. No, this is a projection based on facts. When I was a teacher at the Joe Kubert School, teaching writing to artists (an interesting task), one exercise I would give teams of students was to create a future based on facts derived from the research. The scenario had to be a reasonable extrapolation from existing facts or events and they had to explain the reasoning. (more…)

Top 7 reasons to root for a writers strike

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  • October 30, 2007

I didn’t think I’d be writing this, but I think I’m actually looking forward to Hollywood having a writer’s strike.

Why? What sort of un-American bastard would be hoping for the shutdown of production across TV shows and movies across this great land of ours? My god, man, you might force the audience to think or something! Sorry, no. I can think of seven good reasons.

1. The writers deserve to be compensated. First and foremost, this is the biggie. As Mark Evanier points out, "the same studio execs who say there’s no more money are elsewhere bragging about record profits and taking home seven, eight and even nine figure annual salaries." Some studio heads are saying that they need to cut upfront costs. My reply is that it’s the studios’ own damn fault, because nobody trusts them to ever pay out any money on the back end. If you could be trusted, you wouldn’t have to shell out all the money in advance. If you were fair in sharing the revenue from home video and DVD sales in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this fix now. (more…)

The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 8: Review

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  • October 30, 2007

Yes, we’ve hit the point where reprints of medium-level ‘80s comics can run to eight volumes – and, since the comic in question is GrimJack, that is perfectly dandy with me. Since GrimJack was gone for a good decade (before the recent Killer Instinct miniseries, and, of course, these trade paperback reprints), I suspect that some of you might not know what the man and his world.

Well, let me quote myself to bring you up to speed:

John Gaunt, aka GrimJack, is a cop/secret agent/PI in an aggressively multi-dimensional (and arbitrarily immense) city, and he walks down those mean streets, yadda yadda yadda. It’s hard-boiled fantasy adventure, in a setting where anything can pop up and probably will. Everybody betrays everybody (especially the dames), and everybody but our hero is corrupt as all hell. This is the kind of comic that the comics world thinks of as being vastly different from superheroes, even though John Gaunt:

  • wears the same clothes all the time, which instantly identify him
  • saves people (and the world) regularly
  • has what amounts to a codename
  • has a couple of similar friends who he "teams up" with on occasion
  • appears in 4-color pamphlet form

This volume reprints issues 47 to 54, right in the middle of the 81-issue run, with stories that originally saw print at the end of the ‘80s. Most of this book consists of the end of a long storyline that started in the comics collected in Volume 6 and saw John Gaunt killed and resurrected, among other changes. That big storyline (which doesn’t seem to have an official name) had kicked off when Tom Mandrake took over penciling this series, which was the first time he and Ostrander worked together extensively. (They would later rack up long, successful runs on Spectre and other series at DC.) (more…)

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Fear Factor, by Dennis O’Neil

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  • October 30, 2007

dennyoneil200_sepia-1714086Boo.

Did I scare you?

About that boo…Frankly, it’s a sleazy and probably ineffective way to get your attention. But it is sort of appropriate because it’s a word often encountered in late October and I’m perpetrating this opus a few nights before Halloween, which seems like an appropriate time to be both booing and writing about comics. Because, you know, comics and Halloween are kissing cousins.

Comics, like Halloween, often deal with unearthly phenomena and unlikely characters and, yes, costumes. Both comics and Halloween offer reassurance that after sojourn spent confronting ghouls, goblins, ghosts, vice-presidents and assorted other hellish manifestations of ghastliness, you can retire to someplace comfy and safe.

Fairy tales do that, too, and despite people, including me, frequently comparing comics to mythology, they’re at least as much fairy tale as myth. They don’t, after all, offer cosmic explanations of why we’re here and where we come from, as myths are wont to do, and they almost always end happily. According to a psychologist named Bruno Bettelheim, those happy endings are what make fairy tales useful to little kids. The message is, you can confront ghouls, goblins, ghosts and even vice presidents and you can prevail – you can go home again and maybe score some hot chocolate.

(more…)

Hellboy, Vol. 7: The Troll Witch and Others — Review

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  • October 29, 2007

This is another one of the periodic clean-up volumes to collect shorter Hellboy stories – like The Chained Coffin & Others (volume 3) and The Right Hand of Doom (volume 4). Shorter doesn’t necessarily mean less interesting, but these aren’t stories that advance the Hellboy mythos or continue his main story – they’re all set in his past (from 1958 through 1993, up until about the time of the first major Hellboy storyline, Seed of Destruction) and mostly feature retold bits of folklore or tales.

The most substantial work here is Makoma, a two issue series written by Mignola and with art mostly by Richard Corben (inside a Mignola framing story). It’s a little odd to see Hellboy drawn by someone else – Mignola has let other hands illustrate the B.P.R.D. stories, usually Guy Davis, but this was the first Mignola Hellboy story of any length illustrated by someone else. Makoma retells an African folktale – of the “series of trials of the hero” variety – with Hellboy taking the place, and name, of the original hero. Corben’s people are less stylized and fleshy than they sometimes are, which suits my tastes, but it might feel like lesser Corben to those who prefer him at his most distinctive. The story itself is pretty straightforward, and adapts well to Hellboy – Makoma also was the kind of hero who walked up to giant monsters and started hitting them until they either died or gave up – though it’s fairly thin. (more…)

Of course A Is A, by Mike Gold

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  • October 29, 2007

I finally got around to watching Jonathan Ross’s excellent BBC-TV documentary In Search of Steve Ditko and I’ve gotta tell you, this week’s Wazoo is going to be about one-third disclosures.

Disclosure #1 – I know Jonathan Ross. I gave him his first tour of DC Comics. At the same time, Karen Berger was giving Neil Gaiman a tour. Jonathan is a major teevee star out in Britain but was largely unknown in the States at the time. A long, long time comics fan (he owned a London comics store with Rolling Stone correspondent and seminal letterhack Paul Gambaccini), I think Jonathan was really into the anonymity of the tour… until we turned the corner and smacked into Gaiman. Being British and familiar with Ross’s work, Neil turned into a babbling fanboy. Being a comics fan, Jonathan was already a babbling fanboy. The two got along famously, while Karen and I were having a nice chat on the side. This connection actually becomes relevant anon.

Disclosure #2 – I know Steve Ditko. I love his stuff; all of it. We worked together on several comics projects, one of my personal fanboy highlights was standing in his studio in the then-lower rent portion of Times Square, and we’ve had lunch and dinner together on several occasions, usually with my pal and his frequent collaborator Jack C. Harris. We talked politics (go figure) and philosophy. In private, Steve was always free about his experiences at Marvel. This, too, actually becomes relevant anon.

One of the more interesting experiences I enjoyed was introducing Steve to Ross Andru. Both came into the business at roughly the same time and, coincidentally, both had drawn Spider-Man… although, of course, only one had co-created the character. Ross was as quiet as he was fascinating. He was well-versed on the Illuminati conspiracy, which was a favored topic of ours. I digress. (more…)

Because I Said So, by Michael Davis

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  • October 26, 2007

My mother is almost 60 years old. She has been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for almost 40 years. I don’t smoke. In fact I think it’s a stupid habit and I’m glad she told me not to do it.

She told me not to smoke. I listened. I’ll get back to that in a sec.

As I write this there is a raging debate over who can adopt and raise DOGS in this country. The talk show host Ellen DeGeneres gave a dog away she adopted. The agency said (and it was in the contract Ellen signed) you couldn’t give away an adopted dog so they went and took the dog away from the little girl Ellen had given the dog to. So Ellen goes on her talk show crying like a girl and tells the world of the injustice that has been done to this little girl. So what happened? Well the dog agency owners start to get death threats and Ellen’s legal team threatens “legal action” against the dog adoption agency.

What do I think? I could care less about Ellen, the dog agency, or the dog.

I am a wee bit concerned about this: why there is so much of an uproar about who raises a dog and virtually none about who raises kids? (more…)

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography review

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  • October 25, 2007

Charles Schulz‘s life is already turning into a legend, in large part because he did the one thing a man can rarely control: he died perfectly, at the precise right time and place. Late in the night before his final Peanuts strip would appear in newspapers, on February 12, 2000, Schulz slipped into immortality.
 
On the other hand, he was close to immortal already; Peanuts was one of the biggest comic strips in this history of the medium, one of the largest licensing empires in the world, and one of the most beloved set of characters in the USA. And, since Schulz famously wrote every word and drew every line of the 17,897 strips from 1950 through 2000, it was purely his own achievement. Snoopy sheets would never have been big business if kids hadn’t already loved Snoopy, and they never would have loved Snoopy without Schulz. It’s difficult to overestimate what Schulz meant to cartooning over the past fifty years: he reshaped the newspaper strip in his image, brought a new tone and style to public discourse, and was hugely influential far beyond the bounds of the newspaper page.
 
And now, seven years after Schulz died, comes the first full-scale biography of the man who changed the face of newspaper comics forever. (more…)

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