Tagged: review

Larry Hama joins G.I. Joe Film, Devils Due loses license

  • News
  • January 30, 2008

Sure, there have been a lot of recent announcements regarding the live-action G.I. Joe feature film, but they all pale in comparison to this one, folks: Larry Hama, the architect of much of the G.I. Joe mythology for several decades now, will be joining the G.I. Joe film in some capacity!

According to The Latino Review, an announcement is expected later today, but it’s believed that Hama will be a creative consultant for the film.

Hama is well-known for writing the Marvel Comics’ G.I. Joe series that ran for 155 issues (1984-1992). He also wrote the "file cards" on the G.I. Joe action figures produced during that period, and many of the characters are named after Hama’s friends, family and favorite historical figures.

In other G.I. Joe news of note, Devils Due Publishing will not have their contract renewed with Hasbro, owners of the G.I. Joe license.

First reported over at IESB, it’s speculated that Marvel or IDW will receive the license, with IDW the more likely recipient due to their current contract with Hasbro for the Transformers license.

Devils Due was widely regarded as a savior of the G.I. Joe property when they acquired the license in 2001, publishing numerous critically praised stories under the G.I. Joe banner, including the 2006 Snake Eyes: Declassified miniseries.

With the G.I. Joe feature film scheduled for a 2009 release, it appears as if Hasbro is looking to consolidate its film properties with a single publisher, much to the disappointment of G.I. Joe comics fans.

 

Checking Out Penny Arcade: The Game

  • News
  • January 25, 2008

Ever since it was announced in 2006, details have been hard to come by regarding Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness, the videogame based on the über-popular Penny Arcade webcomic. That’s starting to change, however, as the anticipated release of Episode 1 nears.

The crew over at Wired were recently offered the opportunity for a semi-review of the game (they weren’t allowed to actually play it – they just watched the designers), and the their description of the gameplay, graphics and overall outlook on the game will certainly whet the appetites of eager videogame and/or webcomic fans.

According to Wired‘s semi-review, the game "blends old-school point-and-click adventure gameplay with RPG combat." The dialogue and art were praised by the reviewer, and some hints were provided about PA characters appearing in the game and, in some cases, the roles they’ll play.

Early in the tutorial, you’ll come across the first of the game’s three support characters, who act like summoned monsters in Final Fantasy. Their gauges build up slowly and over time, and you can call them out when they’re ready to deal a big attack to all enemies. The first support character is Thomas Kemper, the PA gang’s erstwhile cat. ("The cat appraises you, and finds you wanting," reads the text when you first encounter him.) His special move is to walk out and lick his cathole, causing one point of damage to all enemies. This is absolutely useless, but very rarely he will do something better, although I’ve been asked not to spoil what that is.

The reviewer ventures a guess that Episode 1 will hit shelves sometime this spring (judging by its level of completion at the time of the review), with installments released at four-month intervals.

If you’re the type that needs to see it for yourself to believe it, you can also view some footage of Episode 1 over at Game Trailers.

 

No Boobies on Camera!

  • News
  • January 21, 2008

In 1916, only seven years after its inception, The National Board of Review, otherwise known as the National Board of Censorship, once the watchdog of the industry, covering filmmakers’ backs from the evil censorial ways of the powers that be, became on this day the National Ball Vice of America, saying no to pee-pees and boobies on camera.

Because we all know that if anybody, my god, if our children see nipples, they will go CRAZY.

Because the truth is, Mattel got it right with Ken and Barbie. That’s how we all really look under our clothes, kids. I’m going to go feel ashamed about my body now and shower with my underwear on.

The Museum Vaults Review

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  • January 17, 2008

The Museum Vaults is the second of four graphic novels created through an unlikely publishing partnership: noted American art-comics publisher NBM and France’s cultural powerhouse museum the Louvre. All four of the stories will be about the Louvre in some way; the first book, Nicholas De Crecy’s Glacial Period, was published early in 2007.

Museum Vaults’ author, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, has been a prolific French cartoonist for the past twenty years, though very little of his work has turned up on this side of the Atlantic. (I’ll admit I didn’t previously know his work myself.)

As Museum Vaults opens, a young expert, Monsieur Volumer, arrives at a museum whose original name has been forgotten. His job is to delve into the subbasements beneath this museum to study, evaluate, and index the collections – to fully understand the museum. (more…)

Paris Review

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  • January 14, 2008

Paris collects a four-issue mini-series set in that city in the early ‘50s, written by Andi Watson and illustrated by Simon Gane. Watson is fairly well-known these days as the writer-artist of such relationship-oriented comics as Slow News Day and Love Fights, but I haven’t heard of Gane before. (From a quick perusal of his blog I think that’s because he’s mostly worked in the UK and for music magazines.) Gane has a very ornate, ornamented, even rococo style, which is a good artistic choice for a historical comic – it clearly distances the action, and keeps it from feeling contemporary.

The story of Paris is pretty straightforward, and focuses on two young women from elsewhere living in that city. Juliet is an American, studying at the Academie de Stael by day and painting society portraits by night to pay her rent. Deborah is an English aristocrat chaperoned by her hideous aunt Miss Chapman. (more…)

A Deeper Origin of the Asian Horror-Film Phenomenon, by Michael H. Price

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  • January 6, 2008
Blame it on Bud Pollard, for want of a more readily identifiable scapegoat: Hollywood’s prevailing obsession with remaking scary movies from Japan seems to have caught fire with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), which led to Gore Verbinski’s The Ring in 2002, with sequels and imitations from either side of the planet.
 
Old-time hack filmmaker and Directors Guild co-founder Pollard (1886-1952) helped to seed the movement back during 1932–1933, though, when a domestically un-releasable flop of his called The Horror – involving an Eastern curse placed upon a Western thief – became a well-received attraction when exported to Japan.
 
Ignored by the Depression-era American critics and seldom shown in the U.S., The Horror garnered thoughtful, if dumbfounded, coverage in its day from Japan’s influential Kinema Junpo magazine. As translated from the archaic pre-war Japanese grammar and syntax, the Kinema Junpo review finds the critic-of-record as fascinated with the rambling, surrealistic presentation as he appears flabbergasted by the film’s refusal to follow a coherent narrative arc.
 
Leslie T. King – who had played the Mad Hatter in Pollard’s similarly odd 1931 Alice in Wonderland – serves The Horror as a traveler who steals a sacred idol, only to find himself besieged by weird apparitions and a disfiguring transformation. Pollard re-edited The Horror during the 1940s to convey a temperance lecture, re-titling the film as John the Drunkard and explaining the ordeal as a nightmare brought on by an alcoholic stupor. Where The Horror had gone largely unreleased in America as a theatrical attraction, its preachy condensation played long and widely in church-and-school bookings.

 

(more…)

Out of Picture, Vol. 1 Review

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  • December 31, 2007

The animators of Blue Sky Studios were finishing up their work on the movie Robots in late 2004 when a group of them decided that was the perfect time to do a collection of more personal stories. (A similar impulse is behind the Flight series of anthologies, to which more miscellaneous animators, illustrators, and cartoonists have contributed.) The first edition of Out of Picture – published in hardcover by a French house – debuted at 2006’s MoCCA show, and was a surprise hit there. Now, Villard has brought out an expanded edition of Out of Picture in paperback, with the promise of a second volume to follow next year.

I do first have to admit that the art is absolutely stunning – the different artists are varied in their approaches, but all are successful in creating their own worlds. On the other hand, Out of Picture is reminiscent of Robots (and other Blue Sky productions, such as Ice Age) – the visuals are amazing, showing deep thought and amazing skill, but the stories those visuals tell are much less original or special.

For example, Nash Dunnigan’s “Night School” uses a dark, chiaroscuro palette and well-chosen camera angles to tell a somewhat clichéd, “If This Goes On” style story about religious domination in the mid-21st century. And David Gordon’s “The Wedding Present” is visually stunning, with a great sense of design and the audacity to make his terrorist characters into brightly-colored funny animals. But the story, again, doesn’t really go anywhere. (more…)

Blue Pills: review

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  • December 28, 2007

Blue Pills was previously published in Europe, where it won the Premios La Carcel de Papel in Spain and the Polish Jury Prize at Angouleme. It has sold over 20,000 copies in its original French edition, and now Houghton Mifflin is publishing it in the United States. This graphic novel by Frederik Peeters is a personal memoir of his relationship with a woman and her young son, both HIV positive. Intimate, emotional, deeply personal, it’s exactly the kind of story I thought I wouldn’t like.

I was wrong.

Let’s start with the main thing I thought I wouldn’t like: the artwork. Peeters uses a very blunt line, without a lot of detail. The impression is rough rather than smooth, sketchy rather than finished. The pages are, for the most part, variations on the six-panel grid. It doesn’t feel like something that can easily convey complex feelings, and yet, cumulatively, it does. (more…)

Snaked, eyed: a review

  • News
  • December 28, 2007

snaked01_int1-2-2670924

Are you tired of the Christmas spirit? Clifford Meth and Rufus Dayglo’s Snaked is guaranteed to wash all that away.

In one of the more audacious acts of counter-programming in comics, IDW is releasing Snaked today, in the skip-ship days between December holidays. And Snaked is about as far from Christmas treacle as you can get.

If you’re already a Meth addict, you probably suspected no less. Clifford Meth is a man who does benefits for Bill Loebs and Dave Cockrum– but as a storyteller, he would take Harlan Ellison calling him bugfuck and use it as a cover pullquote. Clifford’s stories have often been dark and mean and nasty and this is no exception. His story hints at, in no particular order, violence, politics, mayhem, cannibalism, September 11, the Bush Administration, the Clinton legacy, and prison rape. Rufus Dayglo’s art reminds one of collages compiled from lunatics’ sketches with crayons drawn on newspaper clippings of murder and corruption trials.

Like I said, the feel-good story of the season.

I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re trying to smile after a few days with the in-laws*– Snaked is a brutal piece of work. But if you’re looking to dispense with plastered on holiday smiles, this book is the comics equivalent of listening to speed metal to get Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer out of your head. And that’s a good thing.

* Unless you’re hoping your in-laws meets the sort of fate that happens to some of the characters. And if so, I don’t want to know about it.

The Art of Bryan Talbot Review

  • News
  • December 27, 2007

There are plenty of comics writers and artists (and combinations thereof) who have never been fashionable, but who do good, interesting work, and even dive in and out of “mainstream” comics as they go. I’m thinking about people like P. Craig Russell, Eddie Campbell, and – most to the point right now – Bryan Talbot. They mostly keep control of their own work, so they never end up as fan favorites for their run on Ultra Punching Dude, but, as consolation, they do get to do their stories their way.

The Art of Bryan Talbot is a 96-page album-sized softcover, with text by Talbot and a short introduction by Neil Gaiman, which traces Talbot’s varied career. After the requisite page of juvenilia, the book moves into Talbot’s first published comics, the “Chester P. Hackenbush” stories in his Brainstorm comic of the mid-‘70s. It all looks very late-underground; interesting but clearly at the far, tired end of a movement.

After that, Talbot’s career goes all over the place, with stints on “Judge Dredd” and “Nemesis the Warlock” for 2000 AD, a pile of art about the singer Adam Ant, some random minor comics projects, and posters/pin-ups on musical and SFnal themes. Talbot refers to himself as a “jobbing illustrator” at one point, and that describes his work in this section. It’s all technically well done, and the pieces are generally excellent for what they are, but they’re extremely various. (Also around this part of the book is a longish section of life drawings Talbot did for a class in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Pencil life drawings are great for an artist’s development, but can be slightly less compelling in the middle of a book of ink and color comics art. They really don’t seem to mesh with the other pieces of art surrounding them.) (more…)

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