drupal stats

Americanvampire2

It's over at Popdose.

If the book lost one writer, it picked up an extra artist as Rafael Albuquerque is joined by Mateus Santolouco. The two artist trade off scenes during the Las Vegas story with Santolouco doing all of the art on Hattie’s story. There two art styles are complimentary, never clashing or jarring as you move from one artist to the other. Albuquerque’s is has more character to it while Santolouco’s is more rendered. When you look at individual pages from both artists, you can easily spot the differences in their work. When you read the book, experiencing their pages interwoven together, there’s a great visual continuity created. Albuquerque has set the visual character that comes from the unfussy way he puts ink down on the paper while Santalouco’s artwork looks rendered so that each and every line fulfills an intended storytelling purpose.

Catching up with reviews at Newsarama

Click on the bolded title to be taken to the full review.  You may need to scroll through the page a bit to find my reviews.

The first rule of The Walking Dead Volume 14 is that you don't talk about The Walking Dead Volume 14:

Adlard is a wonderfully naturalistic artist who's great at drawing people actually just talking, which happens a lot in this story.  Particularly in this new volume, if you didn't see the zombies, you could swear that Adlard is drawing some kind of bedroom drama or a character driven piece about people trying to live up to their own personal images of themselves.  And that's actually a pretty good description of The Walking Dead for the past couple of years, only with zombies thrown in between the bedroom parts.

There are a lot of books lately whose titles reference six guns like David Gallaher and Steve Ellis's Deadlands: The Devil's Six Gun:

It’s a strange, short tale that takes one or two odd turns, particularly a brief passage where Blackburne becomes some kind of carnival act, sharing mystical visions with an audience. It shows just how far Blackburne has fallen from the path of science and inventing. Gallaher’s story is heavy, cramming a lot of plot into the book and Steve Ellis does a good job keeping it moving along.

With the upcoming DC relaunch (don't call it a "reboot",) I'm trying to figure out how much faith I have in Paul Levitz after reading Legion of Super-Heroes #14:

Levitz practically pioneered the six or seven part storyline in super-hero comics but he seems to have forgotten that you need to focus on the characters to give the story its purpose. Maybe he needs to go back and read “The Great Darkness Saga” and see how it’s supposed to be done.

I've been waiting for a Frankenstein series ever since Seven Soldiers and Jeff Lemire doesn't let me down with Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown #1:

The best part of Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown #1 may just be that Lemire and Roberson wisely ignore that first part of the title, "Flashpoint."  There's nothing linking this issue to DC's mega, continuity changing series.  Lemire and Roberson don't feel like they're creating a continuity-heavy tie-in book.  They're just writing and drawing the first issue of a three issue miniseries.

Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden and Ben Stenbeck come close to rewriting Moby Dick in Baltimore: The Plague Ships:

With Golden riding shotgun, Mignola puts all the familiar elements of his stories that we're used to in this book but the book never feels as frantic or adventurous as most of his stories usually do.  This book, following Baltimore on his quest to find the vampire that killed his family is much sadder than most of Mignola's stories are.  Baltimore's tale isn't one of adventure or destiny or even the day-in/day-out workings of fighting monsters; it's the story of one man trying to atone for his sins and that gives it a different feel than almost anything else that Mignola has done.

I hate to say it but I've never been able to get into Adam Warren's Empowered and Empowered: 10 Questions for Maidman didn't help at all.

While Warren has his fun poking at the sexuality of superheroes who run around dressed as animals (could he be right that this borders on bestiality?) and anime fan service pointing out how Maidman's outfit is perfect for panty shots, this comic is disappointingly light on the tease and really doesn't have of anything beyond the story.

Savage Dragon #171 reminds me just how much fun Eric Larsen's artwork is.

Larsen's art in this issue looks easy and fun. It looks like Larsen has fun drawing in a way that too many other artists don't. Each page is exciting and pure as Larsen gets out of his own way and lets the story happen. He's a natural storyteller as there doesn't appear to be much effort put into the book yet the story is tight and well done.

It's always good when Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips get back together on Criminal like they have done with Criminal: Last of the Innocent #1:

Riley is trapped in the world that he longs to regain and the world that he's stuck in. Brubaker and Phillips give him a lovely moment of clarity at the end of this first issues when the two worlds collide in a dream sequence. As he sees his past, not just as memories but as something that can be regained, Brubaker gives Riley a perfect moment of dark humor, a near perfect cliffhanger that lets you know just what Criminal: The Last of the Innocent is going to be about.

Reviews @ Newsarama: The Tooth, DV8, Donald Duck, The Bulletproof Coffin and more

It’s been a while for one of these.  While activity here at the Wednesday’s Haul base camp has been fairly dormant lately except for a review of the Thor by Walt Simonson omnibus, I’ve been active at Newsarama while being a major slacker at Popdose.  Only now as I’m trying to put this together am I realizing that I went all of May without having anything over there.   I’ve got 2 or 3 things for that site, hopefully one that will make Johnny Bacardi happy once I better wrap my mind around one of his favorite books.


(Below you can click on the links to be taken to the full review)


So just this week over at Newsarma, I wrote a bit about Cullen Bunn, Shawn Lee and Matt Kindt’s The Tooth, a book that I had a great deal of fun with.  


While maybe not as intense as either of those stories, The Tooth, a comic that only children raised on Steve Gerber, Man-Thing and a heavy dose of Stan Lee-inspired prose, could create and could love, provides the same thrills with extra doses of pure charm and fun. This is the comic that you wish you made when you were in 4th grade.”


And then there was the mess that was Green Lantern: Emerald Warrior #10:


“Remember when the Red Lantern Corps first showed up and all they did was vomit red age? That was the extent of their power: to be really, really angry and to vomit up red blood. Got that picture back in your mind? If it helps, the only truly memorable member of that Corps was a little, cute kitty cat who could puke rage with the best of them. Now imagine a whole book like that, puking up all the colors of the rainbow for twenty-some pages. Well, the good news is that you don't have to imagine it because Peter Tomasi and Fernando Pasarin give you that book and technicolor vomit in Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors#10.”


At least that week also gave us the collection of the excellent DV8: Gods and Monsters by Brian Wood and Rebekah Isaacs.


Maybe as kids it's too easy to just become something like friends with the people that you're thrown together with. Maybe it's too easy to become comfortable with them and yourself until you're pushed into new experiences and have to try to figure out who you really are. Those are the kind of stories that Brian Wood is so great at telling, where the characters have to figure out if they're going to remain as kids and immature all of their lives or whether they're going to take on some kind of responsibility and become an adult. With this book, he blends that journey with super powers and creates the superhero equivalent of Lord of the Flies. There's a lovely sense of foreboding hanging over this book as you just know that these kids are completely unable to make the right decisions.”


And if superheroes aren’t your thing, there’s always Disney duck books like Boom Studios’ Walt Disney Treasury Donald Duck Volume 1.


“There are more than jokes to Rosa's stories though. Two entertaining stories show how well Rosa is at doing adventure stories with these characters. Spurred on by Scrooge McDuck's need to own everything, Donald and his nephews travel the world in these stories to bring back exotic treasures for their beloved, yet stingy, uncle. Rosa shows that these characters can do more than the jokey short stories that show how silly and simple they are. These adventure stories are rich and exciting, inspired as much by Indiana Jones as they were by Walt Disney.”


And sometimes you just want slice of life manga like Shunju Aono’s I’ll Give It My All Tomorrow:


“In a fascinating and funny dream sequence, the 42-year-old Shizuo ends up arguing with the 32-year-old, 22-year-old, 17-year-old and 15 -year-old versions of himself, moderated by "God," who looks a lot like a hip Buddha-like Shizuo. None of his younger selves can understand why Shizuo made the decisions and gave up everything until the 11-year-old Shizuo shows up and gives the older Shizuo a thumb's up. That's all the justification and approval that Shizuo needs to continue with his dream.”


Of course, you really want to know about Flashpoint #1 even though Flashpoint #2 just came out:


“Brother Adam and father Joe's artwork carry bigger emotional impacts as their lines and cartooning tend to be more expressive. Kubert, particularly here as he's inked by Wildstorm alum Sandra Hope, tends to look more like Jim Lee or Neal Adams, going for a strong realism in his artwork. He is a fantastic superhero artist, carrying through in his art all of the importance and heaviness that any script requires. There's little subtleness in Kubert's work as all of his characters show exactly what they are thinking. It makes for clear and concise artwork that looks strong and heroic but lacks any emotional punch.”


A book that really has struck me how much I’ve enjoyed lately has been Jonathan Hickman’s FF #3.


FF is a book of mourning. Hickman is not letting his characters feel anything but numb as Reed, Sue and Ben are understandable emotionally drained but their pallor hangs over the ever growing cast that Hickman's assembling right now. There are no emotional highs or lows in FF #3, just a series of events as lost characters try to find and define their lives in a world that none of them wanted. It's not that any of the characters are good or bad in this issue. It's just that they're searching for a purpose, anything to justify where they are in the world right now, whether they've lost a dear brother and friend or whether they've always been defeated by the Fantastic Four and are trying to figure out how to score a victory.”


Sometimes you know just what you’re getting, like ‘Breed III #1:


“Stoner, who transforms into a large hulking demon to fight other demons, is a hero in spite of himself, kind of like Starlin's Dreadstar or Adam Warlock.”


And sometimes you don’t. like David Hine and Shaky Kane’s The Bulletproof Coffin:


“Comic books need to be dangerous again. They need to be full of seditious ideas that create more than simply an audience of consumers. Comic books need to lead the revolution of storytelling and what a better place to begin that revolution than with David Hine and Shaky Kane's subversive The Bulletproof Coffin, a paean to almost every evil and every mind-warping scenario that Dr. Wertham warned us about in Seduction of the Innocent back in the 1950s. After the comic burnings and Senate hearings, comics may have tucked their tails between their collective legs but Hine and Kane kept on producing their EC like books in secret, continuing The Unforgiving Eye, Shield of Justice and Ramona, Queen of the Stone Age for more issues than any price guide is willing to catalog. At least, that's what The Bulletproof Coffin would have you believe.”


Black Dynamite, a great movie but a not-so great comic:


“The odd thing is that we practically got a Black Dynamite comic book last year in Jim Rugg’s Aphrodisiac. Rugg’s book, while it has nothing to do with Black Dynamite, homages the same blaxploitation movies as well as comics from the 1950s to 1970s. The movie Black Dynamite and the comic Aphrodisiac are both as much about the medium of film or comics as they are about the genre of blaxploitation.”

Marvel Team Up: Spider-Man & Major Grubert

A Marcos Martin comic is always a special thing so today when Marvel released The Amazing Spider-Man: Spidey Sunday Spectacular, I had to pick it up.  Collecting a bunch of two-page stories that Martin did with Stan Lee, it is great to see Martin work his magic on each and every page.  But flipping through it tonight, I found what may be one of the greatest Spider-Man pages ever.
 
 

I usually like to say that there’s two Spider-Man artists, Ditko and Romita, and everyone is trying to be one or the other.  Martin is usually in the Ditko camp of Spider-Man artists but there’s something very Romita-ish in that last panel.  It recalls this Romita cover:

 

 
I really like the way that Romita and Martin twist Spider-Man’s body in these images and the up-shot angle seems like it should be a natural angle to view the character at but so many images put us on an even level wtih the character.  He’s a character that we should be looking up at as he swings over the city.

But it’s actually the middle two panels that made me stop and pause for a moment.

Is it?


Can it be?



It is!!!!!!!



Moebius’ Grubert has made his way to NYC!  It’s a fantastic little detail thrown in by Lee and Martin into the story that has absolutely nothing to do with the story but is a fantastic bone to throw out to Moebius fans.

And Martin doesn’t do a half bad Grubert.  

All I'll add is that I follow a lot of those "panel of the week" bloggers and I don't recall any of them throwing this panel into any post.  For shame, my fellow bloggers.  FOR SHAME!!!!!

 

Let's all go to the Comic Shop-- 5/4/11

385704-lobby

Here's a few of the books that you may find in your friendly neighborhood comic shops today. Really, this is just my way of telling you what I'm not buying this week.  Think of it as anti-reviews where applicable.

  • Brightest Day Vol 2 HC-- I'm trying to get the superhero monkey off my back so I'm posting this here to say that I don't think I'm getting this book.  DC needs new blood in its writing pool because Geoff Johns has reshaped DC comics into his own image, which really means that he's shaped it into an image of the 1980s comics that he idolizes.  7 years ago, it was fun and exciting.  Now it's just 7 years older and feels as played out as it did in 1989.  
  • DMZ Vol 10 Collective Punishment TP-- Brian Woods is one of the most exciting and dangerous writers that DC has and he's been kind of forgotten by the comic buying public, myself included.  I'm a bit behind on DMZ, mostly put off by petulant Matty who's become a fairly unlikable character but I think that's a bit of the point.  He's one someone we're supposed to really like or sympathize with.  His situation is as much his making as it is anyone else's.  
  • Gladstones School For World Conquerors #1-- You'll see a lot of Hogwarts references in reviews of this book but it's more akin to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters if Magneto booted Xavier and kept his name.  It's clever and charming even if it doesn't really have anything new to say about schools for superpowered kids that wasn't addressed in Disney's Sky High.   And Sky High had Kurt Russell which this book doesn't have.  :Clever" and "Charming" about sums up my feelings on this one.
  • Fear Itself #2-- I think I may have been the only person underwhelmed by Stuart Immonen's artwork on the first issue.  It was Immonen-level good but it lacked the flow of his Nextwave or even his New Avengers work.  Ellis and Bendis showed what a great sense of timing Immonen had and Fraction's story with Immonen's artwork just felt flat.  I may flip through this one and see if it looks any better.
  • Alexandro Jodorowsky's Screaming Planet HC-- When was the last time we saw Ladronn do anything but covers?  A fantastic lineup of artists drawing Jodorowsky's short stories sounds like a great thing but I hope this is less The Weapons of the Metabarons and more of his actual Metabarons run in terms of quality and punch of the stories.
  • Bat Boy The Weekly World News Comic Strips By Peter Bagge HC-- It's Peter Bagge doing Bat Boy.  What's not to love?
  • Artifacts #7-- I hate to say but I read a review copy of this issue and I can't even remember a single thing that happened in it?  Or the last 2 issues either.  I think my brief dalliance with Top Cow comics is over.   
  • Fame Glee Graphic Novel from Bluewater-- Just seeing if you're paying attention.  But I really need to get on Bluewater's comp list.  My Newsarama reviews would become heavily Bluewater-centric.  That Newsarama audience just can't get enough Justin Bieber.

Knowing when not to say anything-- a review of Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth's Stumptown

Matching Rucka’s writing, Matthew Southworth is a great artist for this series. Like Sean Phillips and Michael Lark, he has a very natural and understated style that’s enhanced by creating a shadowy and morally ambiguous world. Southworth creates a very real world for Dex without getting lost in the details. Like Rucka, he knows when to let the reader do the work and fill in the blanks. He provides enough details about Dex and Ansel’s house to make it a real place from scene to scene. From a few simple panels, we can immediately know the layout of Dex’s house and even what shelf in the refrigerator she keeps her frozen peas, mostly used to compress bruises more than as a side dish at dinner. Sue-Lynne’s casino and office are real places. Her office is not a place you want to get called in to. Southworth is not faking any of the settings or making any of this up as he goes along. Each scene has a very solid sense of time and place thanks to Southworth’s artwork.

Read the full review at Popdose.

Rapid Reviews @ Newsarama: Batman Incorporated #5 and Rasl #10

Quick blurbs from last week's Rapid Reviews at Newsarama:

Batman Incorporated #5:  This issue feels a lot like Morrison's early issues of Batman, where he was constructing his framework for Batman RIP. Like then, not all of the individual elements make sense on their own but hopefully will when the master plan for this series is revealed.

Rasl#10:  This issue plays much more with the heart of the series main character, as he tries to race and hold on to some constant in his life, a life that's almost nearly the same yet is constantly changing.

They say this cat Black Dynamite is a bad mother

O.k, so maybe the line doesn't quite go that way.  

Earlier this week, I reviewed Ape Entertainment's Black Dynamite over at Newsarama and found it a bit bland...

Black Dynamite’s infiltration of the slave island and the freeing of the slaves should be a larger-than-life story of pain, of heroism, of wine, women and song. The movie is a good movie not because it told a strong story, but because it lovingly and equally embraced everything that was great and horrible about those movies, from the passion behind them to the lousy craftsmanship that was often on display on the screen. Ash’s script in the comic is played too straight laced to be either homage or spoof. There’s no love for the material or humor in the situation anywhere on display in this book. There’s no exaggeration in this book that gives you any sense that there’s any feelings or love behind this book.

Going into the book, I wanted to hold it up as a companion piece to Jim Rugg's Aphrodisiac, but instead I talk about how Rugg's book if far more in the spirit of the Black Dynamite movie than this comic book is.

@ Newsarama: Marijuana Man

So, over at Newsarama, I wrote a review of Ziggy Marley, Joe Casey and Jim Mahfood's Marijuanaman:

Too many of the characters in Marijuanaman are just types; there’s the foxy babe, the sidekick, the hero, the wiseman and the greedy corporate bad guy. That’s it. That’s all you need to know about any of the characters in this book. Well, you need to know those types and that the good guys smoke pot. There’s sadly no depth to any of the characters or their situations in this book. There’s no investment in them or any nuance that would make this a book you would want to return to over and over again to discover anything new.

I think this book wanted to be a socially relevant underground comic but it falls far short as there's no substance to anything that Casey writes.  It's a weak main character, non-existent supporting characters and a heavy-handed morality story that just has no charm or whit to it.

At least it looked nice.  

The manga revolution will be blogged.

Stu Levy thinks that the "manga revolution" has been won so, in a odd victory lap, he's shutting down the North American publishing arm of Tokyopop, his company that inspired and lead so much of that revolution. Before Tokyopop, we had translated manga. Maybe you could point to Viz, Marvel and First Comics back in the 1980s and 1990s for first bringing manga to the states but they did everything that they could to make those books look like Western comics, flipping artwork, trimming stories down to 34 pages a month and trying to get them sold on the shelves at comic shops next to Superman and Spider-Man. Tokyopop was one of the first though that tried to replicate the Japanese reading experience with the takubon (or as we like to call it, the digest format,) asking its audience to read from right to left, and bringing a deep and varied catalog of titles over from Japan. They got their books into Borders, Barnes and Noble and Musicland. They had selection, distribution and fans.

As a comics fan, I credit Tokyopop with increasing my awareness of manga in the 2000s even if I don't have a lot of their books on my shelves. It was hard not to notice when their section in Diamond's Previews catalog became almost as big as DC's. It was hard not to notice when a lot of comic shops suddenly had a large selection of manga.

Maybe the revolution was won a long time ago and Stu Levy got bored during the time of peace.

If the seemingly rapid growth of manga wasn't hard to notice, the resulting market contraction and correction was equally evident.  When so many publishers took a hit when Musicland closed and returned tons of unsold product, maybe we should have then realized that the ground on which the manga revolution was built was unsteady. ADV Manga looked to be a serious contender until they folded following Musicland's quick and sudden death.

I don't know if I've ever believed in the myth of the "manga generation."  We were sold the idea that children were the future and that those kids reading manga now were going to read manga and maybe even comics forever. There were so many stories about kids plopped down in the aisles of bookstores, crowding the floors as they pored over the latest volumes of their favorite stories. Personally, I'd like to know where these kids were?  Living in the Chicago area during this revolution, I can't think of a time when I saw these supposed bands of hooligans taking over the floors of Borders and Barnes & Nobles. The audience was obviously there for manga and Tokyopop at some point but I believe we were oversold the size and power of that audience.  We were  told we were on the precipice of something big and when it failed to materialize, we carried on with life looking at the rows and rows of manga at Borders that was always stocked buy what, other than the few category drivers, ever sold out of those aisles?

For me personally, the revolution can be pinpointed to between 2006 and 2009. And the revolution on my personal bookshelves was fought by Viz, Drawn & Quarterly, fantagraphics, Vertical and Yen Press. I think the only Tokyopop that remIned in my collection is Planetes, a wonderful series that's infamous for how poorly it sold. With my local Borders now gone, I wonder how NYC new manga I'll discover?  It was nice to go to thestire, flip through books and find something that looks interesting. I'll still have series and creators that I'll follow but my huge concern is that I and those comic book fans who glommed onto manga during the last 10 years will lose out on seeing things due to the combination of Tokyopop and Borders. Manga will once again become like European comics in the American audience, a niche where we see only a small smattering of everything that's available.

Tokyopop wasn't a huge part of my own reading experience but the loss of them in the North American publishing world creates a huge vacuum in manga both for readers and the remaining sellers. You've got to take this news and wonder a bit about Viz but they're a company with deep roots an they've already demonstrated that they can adapt to changing markets. There are plenty of other and smaller manga publishers but they are more like publishing boutiques, much more narrowly focused on the type of books they publish that Tokyopop ever was.

Just a couple of years ago, I was excited about an explosion of manga that I thought was happening, or at least as it was happening from my viewpoint.  There was so much good stuff being published and it all looked so different than most of what Tokyopop was publishing.    Personally, the loss of Tokyopop hits me the same way that the loss of Borders does; it’s the loss of an avenue for books and my ability to find them.  Those avenues still exist and it’s just up to me to be on the lookout for them.