Last Issues, First / Last Issues, Second Issues (that could be first issues) and so on...

 

Grand Champion of the Kumite Brian Hibbs is going all Howard Beale above and below this post.  Go check 'em out and get smart.  Or, read me going on about comic books.  Win / win, right?

Disclaimer: This is not to say that Hibbs will follow down the awful rabbit hole Beale goes in Network.  He's just mad as hell and he's out the window telling you about it.  You're human beings, damn it!  Your lives have value!

Capsules of the last weeks after the jump!

Dial H # 15

Mieville / Ponticelli

At $4.99 and stuffed with 38 pages of story Dial H #15 doesn’t disappoint in the “crazy be crazy” department.  My interest in the series had waned after the initial arc but I kept on with it and now at the abbreviated end I’m glad that I did.  Ponticelli’s rough madness grew on me throughout and Mieville introduced some elements I’d never thought of let alone seen in a Dial H comic.  These radical takes on existing property seem to get shorter and shorter runs at relevancy and I’m left wondering what a juggernaut like DC is doing trying to have main line (52) contributions from books like these on a sales level.  One hopes that Vertigo provides a lifeline with realistic expectations.  Oh, also, does anyone give a rip about those Channel 52 things?  Seems an indulgent house ad with no discernible value when “costs keep going up!” (by the by – 7 pages of ads in this one – mostly house and house adjacent)

Though…this is pretty funny.

Prophet #38

Graham / Milonogiannis / Roy

$3.99

First, I got the Jim Rugg cover and it’s pretty great.  I highly recommend seeking out SuperMag #1 by the man himself.  Stylistically and in all different types of delivery Rugg is really and truly a virtuoso talent.  Stunningly flexible. Check it out.  Amazing. (Additional superlatives needed)

Anywho, Prophet is lean and mean as a comic book.  The gang throws us 29 pages of story content with nary an ad.  Even the inside front and back covers are dedicated to story.  It’s a generous gesture and almost certainly costs someone money.  I can’t stress enough how immediately – by breaking the opening page monotony – Prophet slams you into the narrative.  By changing the pace you change the experience.  Not cookie cutter comics.

Also worth mentioning is the continuing and “as the wind blows” back-up selection.  This month, Kate Craig brings us a precious story about the emotional and psychological benefits of not always trying to annihilate anything that has the temerity to exist outside our immediate scope of meticulous plans and schemes.  Being decent, essentially, is its own reward.  The whole thing is enjoyably paced with a nice, emotive style.  Kate also draws amazing and weird hands / paws.  Cool.

Catalyst Comix #2

Casey / McDaid / Maybury / Farinas

$2.99 

Art = NICE.  Each brings an identifiable tone – sense of place – and individual style.  I gushed over each of these in my original review and talked through the motifs they’re employing but I have to say – AGAIN – that the super…SUPER…SUPER star of this thing so far is Brad Simpson.  The color palette for each of these chapters is individual – unique and simply gorgeous.  Colorists just don’t get enough love and this guy is on another level.  A true secret weapon who deserves all the credit in the world for giving this book something to simultaneously help hold it together and break it up.  Get paid, Brad Simpson.  Get paid!

On the other hand your enjoyment of the story is going to be largely dependent on how much you enjoy winking asides.  If, like myself, you generally respond with atrocious and socially unacceptable amounts of sighing and eye-rolling you may want to read this one in the isolation chamber.

At points Casey goes full frontal assault, totally aping Dr. Strangelove, using Vandelay Industries as the company responsible for rebuilding the trashed city (when everyone knows they deal exclusively in latex), and having the group therapy session centerpiece of Change Agents not only fall prey to every, single, boring satirical stereotype trope of such an encounter but also take place in the gymnasium of the Jean M Giraud Fighting Arzachs.

That is to say...it's kind of what you expect from a Joe Casey comic and that's not what I was sold as a "bold re-invention of the super-hero comic experience."

Anywho, all 3 segments here could actually be part of an extended #1 comic.  We’re re-introduced, the supporting cast fleshes out a bit, a new wrinkle is revealed.  I think it’s not a bad strategy early on to give people late to the party a bit of breathing room so, from me at least, the feel of the pace is not too bad.

Still, does this line make any f’ing sense?  I must have read this three times and I was afraid it was going to give me a Lewis Black aneurysm.  Maybe Casey is trying to say the guy talking is just coming right out of his ass with this stuff but…I kinda doubt it.

Brain…hemorrhaging….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ0s0KUUpxo

"If it weren't for my horse..."

Save me…Paul!

The Invincible Haggard West #101

Paul Pope

$2.99

32 pages – No ads

All this goes without saying and to prattle about it would really belabor the point but it’s really and truly quite striking as an artistic statement.  From the hand-drawn sound effects to the visual choices made for each character this thing is a note perfect juggernaut.

Quickly

Each sound effect is perfectly and I mean fucking perfectly suited and delivered.

Contrast a well placed “Klop, Klop, Klop” or “TCHOOF!!” with some digitally inserted garbage in Batman / Superman and that tells you there is a difference between art and product.

The design work is so elegant and beautiful it engenders hyperbole.  In action or at rest Haggard’s “flight frame” is a thing of wonder.  His guns are neon tube death machines with impossible innards.  Hell, the man himself is so pulpy when his scarf gets shot you feel him take things to the next level.  (I pulled two vertical panels out of sequence just to show you the elements)

The supporting characters are well rendered in a minimum of space.  Haggard’s daughter, Aurora, is on for all of three pages and she’s already got a backbone to envy and a multifaceted personality.

This is A work and EXCELLENT.  Battling Boy can’t come soon enough.

Happy reading, everyone!

Jeff "Reviews" The Amazing Spider-Man film

I mean, I kinda hate saying "reviews," when the proper term for it is really, uh, "bitches about," but feel free to join me behind the jump for scattered thoughts (seriously, really scattered thoughts) about the Amazing Spider-Man movie. Think of me like your virtual movie buddy! You know, the one you didn't come with, but who is sitting directly behind you in the otherwise empty matinee performance muttering comments under his breath because he is lonely, oh god so terribly, terribly lonely.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (the movie reboot):  As it goes, this is actually a pretty great recreation of the 1977 TV show starring Nicholas Hammond:  crap spidey-lenses, weird-looking suit modeled by a scoliotic stuntman with a half -yard of spandex riding up his asscrack, cipher-like villains, time-killing script, ear-stabbable music score...

Okay, it's not quite that bad, but it really is not very good. Almost all of the charms come from Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, even though Garfield is a bit overly mannered and Stone's character has nearly nothing to do except react (usually to Garfield) and wordlessly emote (usually to Garfield).

(Though there is that one scene where Gwen, in order to keep her father from entering her room [although the way the scene is filmed, it doesn't really seem like he's about to], talks about her period to drive him away. Oh, 21st Century Hollywood! You really are the most progressive place on Earth, aren't you?)

The entire enterprise lives and dies by these two talented young actors seriously committing to leaden material that's utterly uninterested in humanity but also lip-puckeringly absorbed in its continuity revisions. It's kind of unfair but that appears to be the state of Hollywood these days: an entire generation of craftsmen contributing their end of the affair with the help of excel spreadsheets, screenwriting programs, and small armies of non-unionized computer programmers and animators, and then tossing the resulting quasi-homogeneous paste -- with a shrug and an "eh, you're the one getting paid millions of dollars, you figure it out" -- at the thespians.

I know a lot of people really liked 500 Days of Summer, which struck me as similarly dull-as-hell-but-for-the-charms-of-its-leads.  I guess it is this eye for talent that has allowed Marc Webb to overshoot the "director of more than two dozen Sunny D commercials" destiny his abilities would otherwise suggest.

Most of the other actors are...okay, I guess? Rather than try and make Dennis Leary look like the original Captain Stacy (a pretty smart call since the original looked like John Romita, Sr. trying to draw Vitamin Flintheart), they went with...I don't know, Donald O'Connor from Singing In The Rain?  Something went weird with Leary's face, that's for sure, but maybe that was all stuff he did to himself? I admit it, I spent some time in wondering if, after they hired him, the producers recognized  Leary's superficial resemblance to Willem Dafoe, the first franchise's Green Goblin, and decided to change up his features.

(I also admit to idly wondering at one point what Bill Hicks' Captain Stacy would've been like -- "Gwen, come down here and eat this hash twinkie! And stop hanging out with that Parker kid...he looks like a fucking narc!" -- as well as what other roles Hicks might've ended up playing in Hollywood if he were still alive.  You know, would he have disappeared into the woodwork and only came back when Judd Apatow cast him as the dad in Undeclared? Or would he have kind of carved out this secondary career for himself while still doing comedy, a la Louis C.K. or what?  Anyway, I only got as far as: bit roles in Soderbergh's Traffic, The Limey, and Ocean's 13; Howard Cosell in Michael Mann's Ali; and the voice of voice of Paul in Paul; it'd be awesome if he'd, like, gotten cast in the Kevin Spacey role in American Beauty and gone on to this whole other level but I just can't see that happening, which tells you something sad about how much fantasy I can bear to bring to my fantasy universes.)

I could tell you about the plot and stuff so you could feel like you were getting a real "review" but...why?  There's not really much of one, to be honest: after burglars break in at the Parker home, Dad Parker and Ma Parker leave young Peter with Ben and May, promising they'll be back soon.  Then they die in some plane crash type thing and Peter becomes Andrew Garfield, a twenty-nine year old man pretending to be a teenager who walks around with a skateboard and a camera and who sticks up for the little guy despite being unable to lift his arms except to convey inarticulacy a la James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

Then he comes across his dad's briefcase which has some stuff in it including a picture of that guy who got naked in Notting Hill who's now working at Oscorp.  Peter goes there to get close to the guy who got naked in Notting Hill...to find out what he knew about his parents, I guess?  But by then, there are spider bites and mouse mutations and a weird-ass video game and yakkity yakkity yakkity and by the time the movie is over, you realize Peter never got around to asking any questions about his parents and in fact doesn't really seem to give a shit, and this is even before you realize the movie sells out its tragic ending twice before the final credits roll.

Oh, and they break Spider-Man, which kinda sucks.

See, in the movie, Uncle Ben gets shot by a blond dude who has just robbed a bodega (where Peter didn't do anything to stop him, of course).  So Peter becomes obsessed with finding the guy, and he begins listening to a police scanner, and starts wearing a modified wrestler's outfit, and running around in the night, and well, okay, this is 2012, right, so they got to update some stuff, fine, I get it.

But here's the thing: Peter never finds the guy. He keeps busting various blond dudes and none of them are the actual guy.  (They lack the crucial tattoo on the inside of his wrist Peter and the audience sees when the guy robs the bodega.)

And then later, when Peter has dinner at the Stacy household, Captain Stacy starts talking about this crazy vigilante running around who has to be stopped. And Peter does the old "stick up for your alter ego" shtick, saying "oh, I don't know, I think this guy is doing something the cops can't" and "this Spider-Man is actually interested in justice."  (Of course, since Garfield overcommits to the role a wee tad, it's stunning nobody at the table goes, "Wait a minute. That guy is you, isn't it?")

But what's worse is, he's wrong.  The way the scenario is set up in the movie, Peter is out for vengeance.  He's not acting from a sense of guilt, or the knowledge that with great power, comes great responsibility.  (Unless they somehow dramatically misunderstood that expression and they're trying to show that, yeah, Peter now feels greatly responsible for his uncle's death.)

Although they show Spider-Man doing heroic stuff in this movie (and the setpiece on the bridge is actually quite good), he is, for the most part, not a hero.  To the extent you see him helping fight crime, it's only because he thinks the guy might be the person who killed Uncle Ben.  When Peter is sticking up for Spidey at that dinner table, the people responsible for the movie have screwed things up so badly that he's actually wrong.  Spider-Man isn't interested in justice in this film: he's interested in vengeance and it's not the same thing.

It's weird. I'm a big obsessive Spider-Man nerd (so much so that (a) I spent no small amount of time in this movie thinking that C. Thomas Howell in the bridge sequence actually looks like a guy Steve Ditko would draw, he has that exact same "thin lip/mouth bursting to the brim with teeth thing" Ditko does, and (b) I kept getting distracted by how much the Lizard actually looked more like the Scorpion in close-up) and I never considered how essential it is that the guy who shot Uncle Ben is caught in the very first story.

(Looks like every guy Mr. A ever punched, doesn't he?)

But if you don't have it happen, you risk fucking up something kinda inherent in the character: some quality to his anguish and his decency gets tarnished because he's no longer helping people out of a yearning for expiation that so clearly cannot be granted it becomes indistinguishable from goodness. Even with an actor so good I wish I'd been watching him through the three Sam Raimi movies (of which the second is the only one for which I have any affection and the only one which I'd actually call something close to a good movie), this Spider-Man is not only struck me as EH, and not so much "amazing" as "ersatz."

Words With Friends: Jeff Talks About A Few Comics

I promised myself if I ever got caught up, I'd do one of these.  The last couple of podcasts, we've wrapped up with a one or two books that I'd read still left unmentioned.  Hmm, I thought to myself.  If only there was a way I could actually share my thoughts on these books without ceaselessly cutting off Graeme just as he was saying something sensible and well-reasoned.  Via some kind of...written medium, maybe... After the jump: the miracle of the written word!

MIND MGMT #1:  Did you pick this up?  It's an odd, paradoxical package: a $3.99 book without any real "hand" to it that is actually a full, satisfying read; a "by-the-numbers" plot that feels unique and idiosyncratic; art that straddles the line between off-putting and charming; a comic that all but screams "self-published labor of love" that comes with the Dark Horse stamp on it.

None of it should work.  Almost all of it works. And it works because the creator Matt Kindt is the kind of guy who has ambition to burn and mad formalist chops.  The best I can do to make my point is to point you to page 24 of the book, where the bottom six panels of the nine page grid are actually a single image just as the narrator explains the secret behind a psychic able to see the future by reading the minds of every living creature around him.  You literally see "the big picture" at the same time as the revelation, which lets you experience how the psychic's power works.

While I didn't put down the book with any especially strong desire to see what happens next in the story, I can't wait to see the next issue, to see what Kindt tries to pull off next, and to see if he can use those formalist skills to make me care about what's happening.  This is quite a GOOD book and worth your time.

MUD MAN #4:  Mud Man is one of those books I soooo dearly want to love.  Paul Grist is really working the Lee/Ditko vibe of Amazing Spider-Man, trying his damnedest to re-create that odd, off-kilter feeling of a teen superhero trying to get by without a rulebook to follow.  Rather than follow the beats laid down by Lee and Ditko (and copied by generations of comic book creators since), Grist is using his own rhythms and ideas and the limitations he's put on the title character.  There's a charming little essay on the inside cover about where the title should go in comic books, the last line of which is "Why Don't People Do Comics The Way I Want?" and it's pretty easy to see Mud Man as Grist doing the superhero comic he wants to read the way he wants.  I feel like he should be lifted on the shoulders of the comics industry for it.

And yet, once you strip away some of the smart and dynamic page layouts, the masterful use of white space, and the charmingly low-stakes action (this is our first supervillain, and he's a shirtless old guy),  the book doesn't really have that much different from it from what you'd see in, say, the Rogers/Giffen run of Blue Beetle: it's very much the "young hero gets a cool, enigmatic  mentor" turn with an additional four page action sequence that turns out to be a daydream.

I know, I know: that's a lot of amazing stuff to put away to one side, like I decided to complain about a cake with the opening argument of "putting aside the amazing frosting and the amazingly rich texture of the cake itself..."  But I think maybe there's some validity to not being satisfied with a chocolate cake without any chocolate in it.  In Mud Man, our hero makes a heroic choice to save the guy who bullies him in his secret identity, but he does it without any use of his superpowers.  (And the best, most exciting example of his power ends up utilized in the four page daydream sequence.)

Lee and Ditko did an amazing job of making Peter Parker an object of pathos, in both his secret and public identity.  But we also got to see Peter kick some ass in exactly the right proportion to all the superhero-deflating hijinks.  I know it makes me a bad reviewer to judge this book on what I want rather than what Grist intends, but just a dash more superheroing in this superhero book would make it so much more than the OKAY read it is to me.

PLANETOID #1:  Okay fine I admit it I am a stinking bourgeois pig who went out and got an iPhone 4S a few months ago when I came to the perfect intersection of necessity (we needed to change carriers) and culpability (as I recall, Apple had just opened Foxconn and their partner manufacturing plants to outside review) but you know what: don't tell me you couldn't give a shit about Siri because YOU ARE LYING.

I submit this sci-fi book by Ken Garing as Exhibit A, because no sooner than the protagonist crashes on a strange planet than he activates RICTER, his interactive analytical assistant.  Yeah, that's right, bitches:  our indy comic protag only makes it four pages before he decides he needs a faceless servile voice to catalog his inventory.

So don't tell me you don't dig the idea of holding up your phone and giving it some numbers to calculate a percentage of, or what time sunset is set for, or to send a message to your wife telling her you've managed to lock your keys inside the car for the third time this month and could she please come downtown with the spare set.  Because I've got HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paul Bettany in all those Iron Man movies, and mother-fucking Ricter from mother-fucking Planetoid #1 to call you out on your shit.

As for the book itself, it's a very generous 32 pages for $2.99, and although it's about as by-the-numbers as you can get, it's lovely to look at and is scratching that new, weird sci-fi comic itch recently brought about by Prophet, Saga,  the first two years of Uncanny X-Force, and being able to buy issues of Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Bros. and Savage Henry for ninety-nine cents a pop over on Comixology.  It's an OK book, the kind of thing that could be entirely disregarded if just one of the factors (price point, talent, individual interest, use in dumb pop-culture arguments) wasn't met.  But they were so, yes, OKAY, indeed.

POPEYE #2:  Comes sooooo very close to being the absolute slice of licensed genius I want it to be: in fact, that Sappo story in the back by Langridge and Tom Neely is in fact something breathtakingly close to perfection.  In the way it takes an goofy premise and logically makes it goofier and goofier while keeping it grounded by its characters (or character types, really), it reminds me of a lot of what I loved most about Segar's work.

The Popeye story, however, doesn't work quite as well despite having a classic premise--Popeye has to compete against the dastardly movie star Willy Wormwood for Olive's affections.  All of the pieces are in place and each character is recognizable and in character--Olive is fickle, Popeye is a sensitive roughneck, Wimpy is a smooth conniver--but for some reason nothing really quite lands.  I don't know if the licensor had problems with the script, or Langridge didn't have time to finesse things  or what, but when you've got a potentially genius set-up as Wimpy playing Cyrano and feeding lines for Popeye to say to Olive and you get rid of that idea in a quarter of a page, something has gone screwy.

I know Langridge and Co. don't have the freedom to  play a comic bit out for as long as they want the way Segar did with his strip, but, unlike with the Sappo piece, the main story felt overly full and oddly static at the same time.

Thanks to the Sappo story, I'm giving this issue an overall GOOD rating, but I' d love to see it get even better next issue.  It's got more than enough potential to do so.

Quick Notice: Because There Are Reviews, There Will Be No Reviews.

Hibbs is out of town but he emailed me yesterday, breathlessly and with that slipshod sense of punctuation you expect from people on the road (oh how I wish I had that excuse!), to let me know that it was very important that  I tell everyone that, yes, he had written reviews but no, he had not thought to bring his password with him and so, even more so, no, there will be no reviews from him until after 4/3...not because there aren't reviews, mind you! (No, of course not.) So...there's that.  In the interim, please check out John K's excellent review of the Goodwin/Simonson adaptation of Alien and also, Tucker Stone's latest slate of reviews over at The Comics Journal, complete with a most excellent cameo from Abhay.  It is a fine, fine way to start your day, and a healthy part of this complete breakfast.

Carry on!

You can knock us all down, try to mute the sound: Graeme speeds through the big event.

A surprisingly quick one from me today, as I try to get caught up on everything that's been happening while I've been in the land of "time off after surgery". Hint to everyone: Taking two days off work - Fun at the time, even with the medication, but really shitty when you get back to the office. And talking of fun...

WORLD WAR HULK #1: As much fun as this issue is - Although, isn't this the third opening for the event, following the World War Hulk Prologue oneshot and Incredible Hulk #106? - it feels as if it's yet more proof that we're heading for some kind of cosmic Marvel reboot down the line somehow. I mean, I can't see the Hulk continuing to be an alien overlord waging war on Earth by the time the next movie comes out... It's just too far outside of his iconic status, if that makes sense. Because of that feeling, it's both harder to enjoy this ("It doesn't count!") and much easier; there's a freeing feeling that comes with the idea that nothing really counts in the long run - They can do whatever they want, up to and including have Black Bolt beaten up and destroying the Avengers Tower or even killing Iron Man. It's that uncertainty that stops this issue (otherwise very very enjoyable, and a million miles away from something like Civil War; things actually happen in this comic, for one thing) from getting higher than a Good for me, and I'm sure that's just me being jaded (Pun not intended)...