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7 Psychopaths #1 and A God Somewhere reviews @ Pop Syndicate

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7 Psycopaths #1 by Fabien Vehlmann and Sean Phillips

What does it say that our fictional heroes who once were Telly Savalas, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne have become true killers in stories or, worse yet, inept fools like Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, another war story on the same wavelength as 7 Psychopaths?  World War II wasn’t broadcast 24 hours a day on the cable news networks until the ratings began to drop.  They didn’t watch the bombs fall or the roadside bombs explode the same way that we do today.  Our perceptions of war have changed so that we don’t have heroes anymore in our war stories, whether they are stories about Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf or even going back to Germany and Japan in the 1940s.  I honestly don’t know if war is fundamentally different now than it was back then but our stories about war have become cynical and we don’t have war heroes anymore.  Vehlmann’s story is another cynical and modern take applied to an old war that had heroes.

Click here to read the full review.

A God Somewhere by John Arcudi & Peter Snejbjerg

Arcudi and Snejbjerg may want “power” and “responsibility” to go hand in hand, like some great old Marvel comic book but the story they tell is about the corruption and the transformation of a good man to a bad man.  Eric, maybe rightly, believes that he has his powers because he’s become a god with no relationship anymore to the mankind which he once was part of.  He looks human but nothing about him is remotely human.  Morality is defined by God and since he’s a god now, morality must be defined by him.  Arcudi and Snejbjerg take all of our benevolent power-fantasy trips and show us just how wrong they can be.  They pick up on distrust of super power that first showed its head around the time of Watchmen, Miracleman and The Brat Pack but strip out the bright costumes and colorful names.  Like Alan Moore and Rick Veitch did 25 years ago, Arcudi and Snejbjerg toss out the romanticism and instead show us the worst of humanity and power.

Click here to read the full review.
A God Somewhere is available on Amazon.com.

Alone and bored on a 30th Century Night-- a review of Legion of Super-Heroes #1

Note 1:  I hope I haven't used that Barenaked Ladies line before on a LSH review before but I think I have.
Note 2:  The Jim Lee variant cover is fun for so many reasons, not the last of which is the 70s style Legion logo and the classic space cruiser in the background.

In many ways, it feels like it's 1989 again and all may be right with the world again.  After 21 years, Paul Levitz is back writing Legion of Super-Heroes again.  Even the cover logo is the same as it was for the 1984-1989 Levitz-penned Legion run.

Legion of Super-Heroes #1 is a prime example of how to write a comic book in the year 1989.  It's plot heavy, dialogue intensive, character packed and gives you just enough explanation to bring you up to speed but assumes that you already have a strong grasp of what's going on.  Let's be honest, the Legion has never been an easy book for a new reader to penetrate, mostly based on the sheer size of the cast and long history of the team and I don't know how much Levitz goes out of his way to really make this the mythological "new reader friendly" book.

And, honestly, I don't care because I finally have my Legion back.

I used to pick up the old Adventure Comics little digests back in the early 1980s, after Adventure had become a reprint series.  There were great old Superman and Supergirl stories in there but the main showcase of those reprints were the great Silver Age Legion stories, where anything could happen.  Space whales, lightning-induced resurrections, Legion of Super-Pets and untold tales of the Adult Legion where all of the women were trying to outdo all of the men in some kind of futuristic sexual revolution.  And all of those wonderful stories were couched in a vision of the future inspired by 1950's science fiction.  From there, I eventually discovered the actual Legion of Super-Heroes title, jumping on just in time to catch the end of Levitz and Keith Giffen's "The Great Darkness Saga," one of the few truly memorable post-Kirby New Gods tales.  At the same time, Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman may have been getting the accolades for their character-driven runs on Uncanny X-Men and New Teen Titans but Levitz was right there, keeping pace with them and, miraculously, keeping a long, good run together even as Claremont and Wolfman petered out in their titles.

From a purely fanboyish perspective and even with as much as I enjoyed most of what came afterwards, Paul Levitz's Legion is my Legion.

20 years later, Levitz has remembered what made his run successful; his focus on the large cast.  Looking at the number of Legionaires who are in #1, it's shocking to try and think how many more weren't present.  Tyroc, anybody?  That's what I always liked about Levitz's stories; he juggled more characters and plots than anybody else and would let them play out as long as possible without ever getting into the Claremontian dangling-plot territory.  Legion of Super-Heroes #1 shows us the beginning of many different plots and character stories, all possibly building out of the same events.  Levitz has the whole of DC's future to play with and he's willing to tackle that large canvas and make his stories large as well.  It worked for him back in the 80s and hopefully it will work for him here too. 

Artist Vildiray Cinar can pull off a lot of the super-hero stuff in Legion of Super-Heroes but I don't know if he can pull off the future.  Cinar is a good super-hero artist, often looking a bit like Tom Grummett (an artist I've always wished would take a nice, long stab at drawing the Legion) but ever since Keith Giffen, the future has always looked wonderful.  Giffen introduced a sense of design into the future that's been carried on by Olivier Coipel, Chris Sprouse, Barry Kitson and Phil Moy.  There's almost always been a unified look to the design of buildings, space ships and technology that set the Legion's future apart from anyone else's future.  Hopefully Cinar will be able to find his own sense of design and really define what the 31st century looks like now.

Going into Legion of Super-Heroes #1, I knew what I wanted out of it and that's mostly what Paul Levitz and Vildiray Cinar delivered; a return to a future and to characters that I know.  Maybe that's a selfish way to review a comic but I wanted "my" Legion back and that's what Levitz has given me and no one should know "my" Legion better than the man who wrote it. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #1
"The Scream Heard 'Cross the Universe"
Written by: Paul Levitz
Pencilled by: Yildiray Cinar
Inked by: Wayne Faucher
Lettered by: Sal Cipriano
Colored by: Hi Fi

The old order yadda, yadda, yadda... - a review of The Avengers #1

"And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth's mightiest heroes were united against a common threat! On that day The Avengers were born — to fight foes no single hero could withstand!"

Luke Cage almost perfectly sums up recent Avengers' history as possibly only he can; "Then what was the @#$% point?"  After 6 years of disassembling, alternate realities, wars, invasions and sieges, Bendis has brought the Avenger's full circle and begins a new cycle with The Avengers #1.  Thor has escaped Ragnarok, Steve Rogers isn't dead, Tony Stark isn't brain dead but Spider Woman is still an Avenger.  I guess we'll just chalk The Avengers #1 up to "the more things change, yadda yadda, yadda."

We've seen this story, or at least versions of it, countless times; it's the assembling of a new team.  You can get the classics this way; the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Giant Man and Wasp.  Or you can get Gilgamesh or Dr. Druid, both of whom are thankfully absent from this issue.  And even beyond the Avengers, the "getting the band  together" type story has become it's own cliche in comics; it can be just another version of Professor Xavier traveling the world to find his New Uncanny X-Men.  The last time Bendis did this, he did his own riff on the original Avengers' story as fate brought a dissimilar cast together and forged them into a team back in New Avengers #1.   That was a fate that, at the time, I don't think Captain America bought into that much.  Maybe that's why Bendis has him superseding fate and actually recruiting a team of Avengers. 

Bendis' story is far too mannered and obvious.  All of the darkness of the past few years, mostly built off of concepts he introduced to the Marvel Universe, are gone so it is time to once again assemble an Avengers team and a true Avengers team not the "street level" team or the villainous team that have been masquerading as Avengers for the past couple of years.  There's no great surprises or shocks here as everyone Steve Rogers recruits has either been a New, Mighty, Initiative or Young Avenger recently.  Meet the new Avengers, sames as the old Avengers.  There's no fate or kismet or even Loki involved this time; it appears that the only requirement to be an Avenger nowadays is that you had to once be on a team that billed itself as an "Avengers" team.

Stylistically, there's even less change from the old Avengers to the new Avengers; Bendis's writing is practically the same, right down to the little dialogue ticks that he's repeated and repeated during the years.  Occasionally his light touch on the dialogue works, such as when Thor has no idea who the current Captain America is or Spider-Man hounding Hawkeye about Hawkeye's current costumed identity.  Those are light moments that help establish a bit of the mood but Bendis tries to carry his witty repartee over into more serious moments such as when Steve Rogers and Tony Stark talk around their recent history.  It's not nervousness, friendship or just awkwardness that comes through but it's Bendis who does; it's his voice that comes through too much and not the characters.  His writing style works well on one of his own books like Powers but it falls flat more often than not on a book like The Avengers. 

John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson join Bendis on the book and, if recent history is any indication, do we believe that either of them is going to stick around more more than 6 issues?  The two artists have been paired as penciller and inker for a long time now, producing some great work.  Romita Jr. has his father's strong foundation of storytelling with Jack Kirby and Frank Miller's sense of pacing and action which seems wasted on a talking-head book like The Avengers #1.  Bendis's story, like so many of his Avengers stories have been, is people standing around and talking, just talking and talking.  Romita Jr. is all about composition, action and  power and not about expressions or body language, two elements which really contribute to a typical Bendis script.

The Avengers #1 is a return to tradition, a return to form and, therefore, a return to the old ways.  Captain America, Iron Man and Thor will always be Avengers and there will always be the odd characters brought in to be given a chance at becoming true Avengers.  Once upon a time, it was Hawkeye and now it's Wolverine.  See, things don't change all that much. 

The Avengers #1
"Next Avengers Part 1"
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
Penciled by: John Romita Jr.
Inked by: Klaus Janson
Colored by: Dean White
Lettered by: VC's Cory Petit

Weekly Comic Shopping List 5/26/10

Just when I'm thinking that I'm not reading as much manga this year as I was last, Viz comes to the rescue with 2 series that I'm really looking forward to.


Guild #3-- This has been a nice, little series but, in the end, it hasn't been that memorable.  I'm glad that this is only a 3-issue mini.  It's been fun but I don't know if I'd really stick around for another set of stories at this point.

Wednesday Comics HC-- Even though I wasn't that impressed with the stories in Wednesday Comics, I want to pick this up just to drink in the artwork, most of which was excellent.  Oversized Paul Pope, Ryan Sook, Joe Kubert, Dave Bullock, Eduardo Risso and so many others make this one of the ultimate artbooks of the last 10 years. 

Torpedo Vol 2 HC-- The first volume of this is still sitting on my desk, waiting to be read.  Between Torpedo and the Tardi, I'm stock piling the European books even though they look marvelous and rich. 

Naoki Urasawas 20th Century Boys Vol 8 TP-- Ah, the mysteries of Bloody New Year's Eve as supposed to be answered and we find out what happened to Kenji and his band of friends.  While it doesn't have the concentrated punch that Pluto had, Urasawa is really telling a broad and ambitious story here, jumping around in time and revealing answers only when he wants to. 

Saturn Apartments Vol 1 TP-- This manga wasn't even on my radar until last week but some of the preview art that I've seen looks wonderful and I'm a sucker for manga that's about living in or the exploration of space. 

Random Quotes-- Of Iron Man movies, Deadpool comics and Walt Whitman

"... we're not interested in how a movie does at the box office or really even how other people respond to it.  It's just about us expressing our reaction."
                                                Adam Kempenar on Filmspotting #302


In the latest Filmspotting episode, responding to some criticism of their review of Iron Man 2, host Adam Kempenar responds with what he's trying to do on the show;  it's their reaction to a film and not other people's.

I wonder how much Kempenar really believes this. The conversation begins with his and Matty Robinson's pan of Iron Man 2 and some feedback where one of their listeners accuse them of being out of touch and points towards to box office Iron Man 2 has achieved so far as his justification.  Iron Man 2 is what we want and by panning it, Kempenar and Robinson showed just how out of touch they really were.

Well, I agree with Kempenar's statement about how they're not interested in box office receipts; much like the Diamond Comic list, this just doesn't matter.  When we're talking about pieces of art, we shouldn't pay attention to the business the underlies the art.  Business and art are two separate discussions and the joining of them is a third discussion that Filmspotting has never been interested in, other when they're championing smaller independent films like Brick.

This strikes me even as iFanboy is a couple of week's into Jason Wood's more financially-centered comic book articles, such as this week's look into the plethora of Deadpool stories.  It's odd to see an almost clinical look into the business of comics.  We all play arm-chair business man whenever Diamond releases their monthly best sellers but it's so much shooting from the hip that there is hardly anything really worthwhile being said about these things.  The 'net is full of articles that tell us what we already know about Siege and Blackest Night and their affect on the business of comic selling.

Wood, with a financial profession and background that I can barely understand, brings a more seasoned eye to the business of comic selling, even if it is more of a "business" background and less of a "comic selling" one, that lays out the whys and hows of how Deadpool can have 10+ books in a given month as he writes:


Two things worth noting here:
 

1) Every single Deadpool related book sold more than the Marvel average

2) The average sales for DP related titles were 29% higher than overall Marvel sales

 
In Wade Wilson we trust.

We trust Wade Wilson I guess but is that what really matters?  I know Wood would say "no, that's not all that matters" as he'd go on to sing the (worthy) praises of Jim Rugg's Aphrodisiac but I wonder when did we become so interested in the business of comics?  When did it become de rigueur of comic websites and comic fans to talk about this stuff?  "Journalism," some would say.  "Since Marvel and DC became the only game in town," others might suggest.

If we have to have these conversations, I know I trust Wood more than a lot of the other so-called regular commentators about the monthly numbers and the business of comics but I find myself more like Kempenar, I'm just less and less interested in how other people respond to those numbers. More and more, comic websites seem to be less interested in talking about comics; they want to talk about television shows, business deals and creators on-line faux pas but the Newsarama/CBR/Beat/Bleeding Cool carousel seem less interested in being about the comics and more about the aura of comics, the "coolness" and "drama" of comics.

And, yes, with this blog post, I'm just as guilty of it as they are.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

        Walt Whitman, SONG OF MYSELF

Carpe Diem, Memento Mori and all that jazz-- a review of Daytripper #6

Thanks to the repetitive nature of Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon's Daytripper, each issue ending with the death of the main character Brás de Oliva Domingo (I hope that isn't a spoiler to anyone by now,) there's not a lot of suspense to the story.  Brás is going to die; it's just a question of how Bá and Moon are going to pull that particular trigger this time around.  The opening of Daytripper #6 feels like they've accepted that everyone already knows how this is going to end because they telegraph the ending; a truck driver sits at a late night diner after driving for two days straight.  This isn't a full stop but a quick rest for good food and hard drink, his "little fix" to keep him awake.  Walking out, he brags that God is his co-pilot and "With him by my side, nothing bad can happen to me inside my ride."  The truck driver is the ending of the story but he isn't the story.

A passenger plane from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, Brazil crashes on landing, leaving no survivors.  The obituary writer for the local newspaper, Brás has to write tributes to everyone on the plane, not for the dead, his editor tells him, but for the survivors.  "Write about their sons, daughters and friends.  They're dead.  Period.  Help these people accept it and let them move on."    Brás digs through their lives, talking to their loved ones and he gives the sons, daughters and friends the closure they need; he comforts them through this obituaries.  While he gives them what they need, he's empty because he thinks his friend Jorge may have been on that flight.  Even after all the dead are identified and none as Jorge, Brás can't track down his friend.  One day, Jorge calls; he wasn't on the plane but the whole thing shook him up.  After some soul searching, he's calling to tell Brás that he can't go back to his life; he's never coming back.  "Do something with your life" are the last words Jorge tells Brás before hanging up.  But there's that truck driver out there, with his copilot and his "little fix."  And we all know how the issues of Daytripper end, don't we?

Daytripper #6 takes the basic premise that Bá and Moon have set up and twists it around a bit.  They end up in the same place as each issue has but they have to; that's part of the rules that they've set up for themselves in Daytripper.  As the second half of their 10 issue miniseries begins though, they send a message to Brás through Jorge.  For five issues, Brás has gone through his life and just as he's on the verge of discovery or acceptance, he gets shot, electrocuted or drowned.  He never gets to the point where he learns something and grows.  He gets to the precipice but never gets to peer over it.  In this issue, Jorge almost ends up being in Brás's role.  Jorge is the one, through some strange twist of fate, who's put in mortal danger but he doesn't die.  He's not killed and that changes his life.  "Life is too short, man...  I can't go back to that life."  Those are the words that we've wanted to hear Brás say but he never gets that far in his journey so he has to have them said to him.  He's got to hear someone else have the epiphany that he should have had five issues ago. 

Jorge also shows us that death can be avoided in Bá and Moon's story.  There can be life; we got hints of that an issue or two ago with the story of the birth of Brás' child and now we get it again here with Jorge.  Maybe Bá and Moon are moving the story toward a point where life will win out; where, if nothing else, Brás will be able to die of old age, surrounded by family and loved ones after a good long and well-lived life.  Maybe he has to go through all of these deaths to discover what life is.  Jorge has found that out and maybe he'll be able to shepherd Brás towards that knowledge as well somewhere during the remainder of this series.. 

Brás obituary this issue reads "Some might say success was not in Brás de Oliva Domingo's destiny, but they might also say God works in mysterious ways."  Is there much of a difference between a trucker's co-pilot and a worker of mysterious ways?  Daytripper is about death, mortality, lessons of living for the day and reminders that each day may well be our last.  We all can't be Jorge, narrowly avoiding death thanks to the whims of an airline schedule but what if we're Brás?  What if there are lessons that no matter how we hear them, we just can't or won't accept? 

Daytripper #6
"Chapter Six: 33"
Written & Drawn by: Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá
Colored by: Dave Stewart
Lettered by: Sean Konot

Won't you stop and remember me... a review of Tumor

We forget things all the time.  We forget to stop by the store to pick up some milk on the way home.  We forget to put the toilet seat back down.  We forget where we left the car keys but they always seem to end up in the last place we look.  Memory is fickle that way; it can be fleeting at the moment you least want or need it to be.  Luckily, the milk, car keys or the toilet seat end up being not that important in the grand scheme of things but they are things we all forget.  Now imagine you started forgetting bigger things; you wake up in the hospital and the last thing you remember was standing outside of a noodle factory with someone who may want to kill you.  Or you forget that your wife died years ago, caught up in the mess that you created.  Or imagine that the one thing you can remember is a doctor telling you that you have a brain tumor.  For Frank Armstrong, a washed up private detective, his memory doesn't exist anymore as he begins reliving his past and mistaking it for his present, making the same mistakes again even as he tries to protect a girl on the run from her father.

In Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon's Tumor, their followup to 2007's Elk's Run, Frank Armstrong is living with a death sentence, a brain tumor.  There's nothing he can do about it but wait for the end.  But circumstances won't let him wait; he gets suckered into finding a mobster's daughter.  Evelyn ran away from home and her father wants her back.  Maybe this can be Frank's last hurrah, the last chance to be the hero he was never actually able to be during his life. 

Fialkov creates a delicate and fragile story.  The story has to be that because that's what his memory is to Frank- delicate and fragile.  His mission to rescue Evelyn, to be her savior, almost falls apart as Frank's memory falls apart.  Evelyn becomes his late wife Rosa in his eyes and he becomes the young man he once was, trying to protect his wife the same way he needs to protect Evelyn.  Fialkov uses Frank's brain tumor to look at the mistakes a man can make in his life and how, years later, he can still struggle to make those mistakes right. 

Or maybe Fialkov is saying that Frank is still making those same mistakes.  Tumor takes place in two distinct time periods, the now with Evelyn and in the past, shortly after Frank and Rosa's wedding.  There's nothing in between those two times even though there's years between them.  Fialkov shows Frank making mistakes in the past, failing Rosa, and here he is, apparently making the same mistakes with Evelyn even as he knows or at least can make some kind of connection with his past failures.  There's almost no past or present in this story as Fialkov and Tuazon smash the two time points together to tell Frank's story.  The past is happening in the present and the present happened in the past. 

Noel Tuazon's loose and hazy art perfectly grounds Frank as he loses his perspective between the past and the present.  Like Sean Phillips in Criminal or Darwyn Cooke in Parker, Tuazon creates a natural look to Frank's world.  With the plethora of crime books that have been out in the past year or two, the art is what really sets one work apart from another.  Phillips and Cooke creates visual worlds that you never question or doubt.  That's what Tuazon does in Tumor, creating a sketchy and hazy world that seems only as solid as Frank's memory is.

Tuazon's present is made up of solid but quickly sketched lines.  His present is there and real but it's not complete.  It's not sharp or detailed.  As Frank has to exist more and more in the moment, whether it's in the present with Evelyn or the past with Rosa, it almost feels like Tuazon is staying only one or two steps ahead of Frank, quickly scribbling walls, furniture, people action as it's happening.  Tuazon's art is immediate and it's happening now.  Even when he switches it up a bit, creating gray-washed images to reflect Frank's memory, there's still the feeling that Tuazon is right there, pen and brush in hand, finding out what's happening to Frank just ahead of Frank himself.  Tuazon's quick style perfectly mirrors the way that Frank is experiencing the last days or months of his life.  It's all happening now both in the story and in the art.

Tumor
Written by: Joshual Hale Fialkov
Drawn by: Noel Tuazon
Lettered by: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

Tumor is available on Amazon.com.

Go look: Frank Frazetta Movie Posters

I hate to say that I honestly don't know that much about Frank Frazetta.  Ever since the 80's, he's been an omnipresent artist, showing up on paperback book covers and comic books and I always thought I'd get around to really diving into his work but that sadly hasn't happened yet. 

Among all of the online tributes and remembrances to Frazetta, Glenn Kenny's jumped out at me because he posts some of Frazetta's movie posters.  While it makes sense, I hadn't even realized that Frazetta had done any movie posters.

You can see even more Frazetta movie posters at Kenny's fantastic blog Some Come Running.