Two For You

It's already the tenth and where have I been? I am still not reviewing for PBR, but I think I am working my way back to it. Here are a couple of reviews I posted in forums. Expect more.

DOKTOR SLEEPLESS, Vol. 1: ENGINES OF DESIRE

Writer: Warren Ellis; Art: Ivan Rodriguez
Published by Avatar 2008

I remember when Ellis first began to promote this work. He made the point of comparing it to Transmetropolitan. Doktor Sleepless is a Spider Jerusalem for the 21st century (not a direct quote, but you get the idea). But it’s a comparison that does this troubled story no favours. Spider was a passionate gonzo journalist, obviously modeled on Hunter S. Thompson. He exposed fools and he sometimes played the fool. The tone of that comic was deeply set in the socio-political revolutions of the 1960s; the last time a large segment of the population believed that positive social change was both possible and inevitable. We may look back and cringe at their naivety - we may not - but their intentions were good. Sleepless is a meglomaniac who seems more concerned with the cyber-punk (or whatever the current nomenclature is) community than with the world in general. Not that he cares about the world. He wants to bring it all down. Maybe literally. There is an odd Lovecraftian turn at the end. What we get is a couple hundred pages of techno babble and a screed about how the world we have isn’t what we thought it would be when we were kids. Just a lot of whining about authenticity. It’s a concept that get bandied about a lot (the cynic in me wonders if its use here isn’t derived from rock music criticism) but it has little practical value. The world you live in is the real thing, however disappointed you are in it. Trust me. Driving jerk boyfriends to suicide and enabling the beating of a rent-a-cop take the place of political action. I like Ellis, and I wanted to say something positive, but there isn’t anything here.

Rodriguez’s art doesn’t add anything either. I was struck by how much alike his characters look. When a women with short blonde hair puts on a brunette wig, she is a dead ringer for another character. She isn’t meant to be. Like a lot of comic artist, Rodriguez relies on costumes and hair to tell the audience who is who, and there aren’t many costumes here.

Ellis seems to be moving away from comics and I would be very surprised if this series went even half the distance Transmetro did. Honestly, I don’t think that’s much of a loss.

GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT: A TALE OF THE BATMAN

Writer: Brian Augustyn; Pencils: Michael Mignola; Inks: P. Craig Russell; Colour: David Horning; Introduction by Robert Bloch
Published by DC 1989

Gotham By Gaslight puts Bruce Wayne and the origins of Batman a hundred years into the past (as of the time it was published) and sets him up against Jack the Ripper. Wayne has spent five years in Europe preparing himself under the tutelage of such men as Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud and now feels ready to take up his mission and save Gotham from its criminal element. We get a quick series of retellings, detailing the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne and introducing a familiar cast of Gothamites. It soon becomes apparent that Wayne isn’t the only one newly arrived from the Continent. Jack the Ripper is also in the city, and two - the Bat and the Ripper - quickly have the entire city up in arms.

It’s a good story and it’s well told. I can see why it has remained so popular for twenty years. However, there are a couple of obvious weak points. First, we know who the Ripper is right away. We are not supposed to, but the moment he appears on the page, your first thought will be, 'I bet that’s Jack the Ripper.' And you’ll be right. Second, Batman ignores the Ripper’s actions in Gotham, content to follow his own agenda, until circumstances make him act. I don’t care how many Elseworlds there are, Batman wouldn’t act like this on any of them. It’s a fundamental misreading (mis-writing?) of the character.

This book comes with some interesting contributors. Neither of the artists are associated with superhero comics and the intro is written by Robert Bloch. Bloch was an early Weird Tales contributor, and his career was mentored by his friend H.P. Lovecraft. Today Bloch is best known as the author of Psycho. He takes an original approach, writing the introduction as Jack the Ripper.

I picked up my 1989 edition of this at a recent convention, but DC put out a new trade addition in 2006, which includes a follow up story, also by Augustyn.

Still Here. Really.

Looking back it seems like May was the last month in which I really did any blogging at all. For the last couple of months I blogged exactly one time each. Not good. But I am still here and I will try to make an effort. I haven't been writing for Paperback Reader either or Christian Beta. Well, a little bit for the latter. Its getting to the point where I am actually starting to miss it. I did finish a short story I started last summer. I think if I had worked on that everyday it could have been done in a couple of months! I have given it to two or three friends to read, and told some family members they're welcome to look too. Once I get some feedback I will give the story a last going over.

I am adding Robot 6 to my list of Sites Worth Noting and I am leaving you with another of Paul Pope's brilliant Dune pages. This one isn't from his blog (it's from the Dharblog). As far as I can tell he is just doing these as the inspiration strikes. There doesn't seem to be any grand plan, and he certainly isn't working on an adaption. Which is almost too bad. I say almost because he is still working on Battling Boy and First Second isn't going to re-release THB until they're ready to release Battling Boy (I emailed them and asked). So once he's done that, maybe then he can start on Dune?

Paul Pope Does Dune

Paul Pope has decided to take the lessons he learned doing Wednesday Comics and apply them to Frank Herbert's Dune. Sadly, there is just the one page.

I just finished re-reading Dune last week. It was the first time in about 35 years! I was surprised to realized how much my memory of it was influenced by the film and mini-series. After a couple of other books, I intend to continue the series (just the six Herbert himself wrote).

Wednesday Comics

The Good:

For me the top five stories were Strange Adventures, Flash, Kamandi, Deadman, and Supergirl. Yes, Supergirl. It took me a few weeks to get into her story, but once I accepted that it was aspiring to nothing more than a cute, all ages tale, I grew to like it more and more. As for the other four, they each told great stories and used the new format to their best advantage. The writers paced the stories well, giving us a reward for reading each week and the art made good use of the whole page and recognized the possibilities in the larger canvas. My only reservations with these stories is that I found Kamandi’s use of caption narration distancing. It took me out of the story. And Deadman spent a little too long in a bust up with the main villain early in the tale, but moved past it. Pope’s Strange Adventures got a lot of well deserved praise, but Flash, which was one of the more innovative in the bunch, deserved to have gotten a lot more.

The Middle Ground:

These four stories can be divided in half, with two stories that were okay, but didn’t appeal to me, and two stories that I think were interesting failures. The ones that didn’t appeal to me were Metal Men and The Demon and Catwoman. I can’t really fault Metal Men in terms of story or story structure or art, and it really seemed to reach out in many ways for the same tone Supergirl did, but I have never really been a fan of the group (never a detractor, just not a fan) and nothing in the story really drew me in. As for The Demon and Catwoman, too much Demon and not enough Catwoman. Actually, too much Morgan Le Fay. Some stories just don’t reach you.

The two interesting failures were Metamorpho and Wonder Woman. I wanted to like Metamorpho more than I did, but it didn’t make it easy. The problem was clearly demonstrated when Metamorpho and two other element characters are chasing each other through the element table. The names of the various elements are worked into the dialogue, but that proves difficult, so Gaiman has the characters start referring to them directly. Then, after a week of this joke not quite working, they bring it back and fail to make it work again. A lot of promise, but an so-so delivery. With Wonder Woman, I got the idea that Caldwell was trying everything he could think of, but it took him the length of the run to get a handle on the pacing and paneling. The story itself wasn’t that interesting, and was further weakened by being a dream - Were there consequences? Could Diana have simply woken up? - and by its muddy coloring.

The Bad:

Interestingly, the stories featuring the DCU’s so-called “Trinity” were amongst the weakest. Wonder Woman stands above Batman and Superman only for being a more interesting failure.

Whenever I watch Batman: The Animated Series with my 2 year old, and there is an extended scene with Bruce Wayne, I am treated to a constant chorus of ‘Where’s Batman? Where’s Batman?’ until he reappears. I started thinking the same thing myself when reading the Batman story. A too obvious murder mystery and not enough Batman. The last Batman story I read by Azzarello and Risso was Broken City (perhaps their only story) had great art and a so-so story. This time the art wasn’t enough to make up for the story. I just don’t think Azzarello’s noir-ish style is a good fit for Batman. And nobody liked the Superman story, and for good reason. A meandering story about an emo Superman? Arcudi has been doing such a great job with the BPRD lately, I guess he was due for a misfire.

As for the rest, Teen Titans featured a bland story, with indistinct art, that was too dully colored, and Green Lantern, Hawkman, and Sgt. Rock featured poor pacing, poor art or both. In Green Lantern, I liked the art, but we had three or four pages of story stretched out to fit twelve weeks. The stories were stretched too thin in the other tales too, but the art in Hawkman was terrible - with far too much use of the cut-and-paste feature of whatever art program Baker was using, and Kubert’s Sgt. Rock completely missed the point of the new format, offering nothing more than your standard six panel grid blown up in size.

I really hope to see more of this. The weakness of the format is that it doesn’t really lend itself to a collection. Well, some of the stories do, but you really couldn’t get away with shrinking others (such as Wonder Woman) down. But I do want to see more. Imagine giving someone like JH Williams III a monthly in this format! The potential is just too great to let it die now.

Mrs. Dean

Yesterday my daughter Alanna was married to Evan Dean. I'm in the process of putting together an album on Facebook, but I'll probably add more here too.

The bride.



With her husband, Evan.

Hercules On Thor

Someone linked this at the Outhouse. Very funny.

(Fine. I thought it was funny.)

Golden Age Comic Book Stories

I don't know why I haven't posted a link to this blog before. I've known about it forever, checked it out often, and I am always amazed. This image is a book illustration by N.C. Wyeth. There's a lot of stuff there that really doesn't have anything to do with Golden Age comics. Do check the site out. You could be there a long time!