Tagged: review

Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality Review

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  • November 21, 2007

Modernism and self-referentiality have been rampant in superhero comics for a good twenty years now; Alan Moore was the main instigator, with his great final Superman story and the Watchmen “pirate comics” motif. Some of the best and most entertaining stories since then have been knowingly "comics," from Grant Morrison’s "The Coyote Gospel" in Animal Man to John Byrne’s pleasant run on She-Hulk. But self-referentiality can also curdle like milk, or gnaw away its own belly like the fox under the Spartan boy’s cloak. There’s a huge streak of allegory in modern superhero comics – actually, "allegory" gives it too much credit; what we actually find are naked bids for audience identification and equally naked scornings of any connection to or interest in the supposedly puerile and retrograde wishes of that audience. (Pop quiz: who does Superman-Prime represent and why?)

Mainstream superhero comics have become a high-speed whirlwind of reader-response feedback done mad, with convoluted continuity one week and shredded history the next, and, no matter what, the anvil chorus of comics bloggers complaining that something or other is “raping their childhoods.” Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality is not the first series to dive into the middle of that debate – hell, most of the big crossovers now are thinly veiled attempts to seduce the audience into believing in one propaganda version of continuity or other. (“Marvel has always been at Civil War with Eastasia.”)

But Doctor 13 does have the advantage of trying to be fun – and, even better, at generally succeeding. It does feel a bit like special pleading in the end; Azzarello is yet another guy who grew up with comics and wants to celebrate the stuff he loved as a kid. (Exactly the kind of comics writer, I’m afraid, that we need less of today.) The art is also very nice: Cliff Chang has clean, confident black lines defining crisp space, and is particularly good at drawing people. (more…)

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…)

Live Free or Hairspray Hard by Ric Meyers

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  • November 18, 2007

When I was attempting to explain the joys to be found in a good kung-fu film in my Martial Arts Movie books, I suggested that the exhilaration of a great wushu battle is only really comparable to the delights of a good movie musical. Both feature operatic emotions with balletic energy. I was reminded of that comparison when watching Hairspray, one of my three favorite summer o’07 films (Ratatouille and Superbad were the others). I admired it so much I even included it in my Inside Kung-Fu magazine media column (after all, the word “kung-fu” actually means “hard work”).

   

Now the DVD is out, and in a two-disc “Shimmy and Shake Edition,” too. After the too-few extras on the Ratatouille and Help! DVDs, it’s nice to find a release with the reams of special features about the kung-fu I so enjoy. There’s two audio commentaries – one with star Nikki Blonsky and director/choreographer Dan Shankman, and the other with two producers (Neil Meron and Craig Zadan). The latter is a little more informative but the former is a lot more fun.

   

Joining them on the first disc is a “Hairspray Extensions” featurette that lives up to its title – in that it shows six musical numbers as they were built, step by step, from rehearsal to filming. For Dancing With the Stars fans, there’s also a “Step by Step Dance Instructions” featurette that carefully and completely teaches you two of the film’s signature boogie-woogies. Finally, there’s a “Jump to a Song” feature which allows you to avoid all those pesky dialog scenes.

   

Then there’s the second disc, which balances extensive and exhaustive “making of” docs (on the music by Marc Shaiman, who also composed the South Park movie, dancing, design, costumes and cast) with historical context featurettes on the original non-musical John Waters film, the actual Baltimore TV dance show the film was inspired by, and the Broadway musical that was adapted from Waters film. But, as they say on TV, that’s not all. Rounding out the second disc are a bunch of deleted scenes, including an evocative song that was cut from the film (probably wisely – though effective, it clearly slowed the film’s pace). (more…)

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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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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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Life, in Pictures — Review

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  • November 8, 2007

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OK, so you all know Will Eisner is a genius of comics – inventor of The Spirit, possibe coiner of the “graphic novel” term, namesake of awards, grandfather of every autobio cartoonist of the last three decades – right? But how many of you have actually read his stuff recently?

(Or is it just me – am I the only one who had spent more time reading about Eisner than actually reading his works?)

Eisner, at the end of his life (he died in early 2005), made a deal for much of his extensive backlist to be republished by the very classy – and previous not open to comics – publisher W.W. Norton. They published his last graphic novel, the not entirely successful The Plot, are in the process of reprinting many of his works, and, in particular, assembled three big omnibuses of Eisner’s best stories. The Contract With God Trilogy came out in early 2006, Will Eisner’s New York in late 2006, and now Life, in Pictures collects three of his most autobiographical graphic novels (and a couple of shorter stories).

Eisner was born in 1917, and turned back to comics after his retirement in the mid-‘70s, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s something old-fashioned about his stories. But yet these stories are so relentlessly old-fashioned, and so steeped in a New York that was obsolete before I was born, that it needs to be noted. (The story set the closest to modern times in Life, in Pictures is the earliest story, “A Sunset in Sunshine City,” set roughly contemporaneous to its 1985 publication. Other than that, the stories here reach up to WW II at best – and, then, only at the very end of a long story.

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A Few of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

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  • November 7, 2007

elayne100-1811653Back in the days of Usenet, I used to hear a lot of variations of “Why are there so many negative reviews and so few positive ones?” As one of those reviewers who not only discussed the art half of comic books but who also wrote a lot of positive reviews in my 4½ years of doing Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts, I would see this manifest more as “Why are the threads responding to the few negative reviews so long, as opposed to those on the far more numerous positive reviews?”

The answer was pretty self-evident to most of us reviewers. In general it’s much easier for people to perpetuate clever putdowns, or to pile on a negative thread, than it is to engage in the vocabulary of positive discussion. One of the things we would identify as a next-to-useless post would be someone merely typing “Me too” or “Ditto.” It added nothing of substance to the online dialogue, it just took up bandwidth. But it had the opposite effect of the real-life etiquette advice that “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It became “If you can’t add something of substance to a discussion rather than just agreeing with the original poster, you’re better off not contributing at all.” I suspect that what some of them actually meant was “Bored now. You’re being too nice; throw us some raw meat.

And of course, that was a shame. I’ve never found it that hard to say good things about comic books. I love comic books. I buy and read quite a wide variety of graphic literature, and as I’m generally not in the assumed demographic for much of it I’ve learned to adjust my tastes accordingly — that is to say, there’s still some subject matter that doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ll generally try to give most of my chosen reading a fair chance, and I think I tend to be easily pleased. Nitpicking details, while worth noting in a review, has never weighed as important to me as how the work made me feel, whether it held together as a whole and moved me during the time it took me to read it.

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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…)

OnlineComics.net and WebComicsNation merging

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  • October 29, 2007

Just in time to suck the air out of the Zudacomics launch, Josh Roberts (owner of ComicSpace and Onlinecomics.net, and administrator of Comixpedia) and Joey Manley (owner of WebComicsNation, TalkAboutComics, Modern Tales, Serializer, Girlamatic, Graphic Smash, and Graphic Novel Review, among others) have announced that they have signed a Letter of Intent to merge our businesses into one corporate entity. The entire magilla will be under the ComicSpace brand.

They will be working with a company called E-Line Ventures, a New Jersey-based "double bottom line" early-stage investment firm (they say they look at both the financial and social impact of their investments) to secure the necessary funding and support for them to effectively merge and run the combined business. They plan to use money raised to facilitate the merger, hire programmers and develop new features for readers and creators, which they anticipate will be rolled out in a couple of months.

Joey’s press release is here. Josh’s is here.

We here at ComicMix wish them the best of luck. We need a healthier ecosystem for online comics, and this looks to be another giant step forward.

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…)

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