Detective Comics #854 - Rucka,Williams, & Stewart

I have been very anxiously awaiting this issue since I heard about it. I have been waiting almost rabidly since i first saw some of the artwork posted for it. I liked what we saw of Batwoman in 52. I have liked the character of Renee Montoya for as long as she has been used in things. Montoya as the Question has never sounded like my favorite thing, but I have to say that the 8 page 'second feature' also written by Rucka, but with art by Cully Hamner, is really good. The art is great, and despite my issues with the Question, whatever they may be, it looks to be a good ongoing read as well.

Greg Rucka, J.H. Williams, and Dave Stewart have done something pretty amazing in this first installment of Batwoman's run headlining Detective Comics. They have made a beautiful and stylish work of art that is a masterwork of layout and graphic storytelling that is every bit as well written as it is beautifully laid out, drawn and colored. The coloring and layout are like characters in their own right. I am genuinely excited by how good this comic is. I'm not doing a synopsis here, you can find those elsewhere, or better yet, buy the comic! 32 great pages for $3.99. Yes I think that is still too expensive, but you are unlikely to feel screwed after you read it.

I sure hope we get a good run at this level of quality. It certainly looks probable right now.

If you are the sort of person who likes smart well written pieces to validate what you read here, I am posting a link to the always insightful Joe McCulloch's blog, Jog the Blog, and his love letter to the craft exhibited in this issue

Andy Bellinger's Bottle of Awesome (and Raising Hell)

Bottle of Awesome is a new Zuda Instant Winner that premiered today. The art is pretty amazing, but that should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Bellinger's work. At the moment there are only two pages up, but it looks like it will be pretty cool, the premise seems promising, and it will be updating regularly from this point on. Here is the synopsis from Zuda:

This is a story about a boy named Billy Butterman, a loser, a putz - what have you, just trying to get through grade nine. High school is a total nightmare. All the cool guys pick on him, chicks don't dig him and everyone at the school calls him "Butterpants," because he had bladder control problems till he was twelve. That is, till the day he finds a hobo in an alley. Billy notices the bum has a full bottle that he’s not drinking from and the bum tells him it is because the bottle is full of awesome and that a a sip will make him awesome as well. He warns the boy that a person can get too awesome, but will Billy heed his words?

What I imagine we will get from this series, although much different in subject matter, is the same sort of terrific art, humor, and characterization that Bellinger has proven himself to be particularly good at in his fantastic zombie apocalypse meets dysfunctional relationship webcomic Raising Hell (not for kids) at Transmission X
Raising Hell focuses on Aries & Kitty, a can't live together, can't live apart sort of couple, always on the verge of making out or beating the crap out of each other. In addition to those two, we also get a nice cast of equally interesting and well defined supporting characters. The story starts on Halloween, and we get a good long setup of the sort of folks we will be spending time with before we are plunged into gore-filled chaos and humor.

It's really good stuff, the writing and art/layout/color, are all just perfect. It moves fast and really makes it hard to pull yourself away from it.


I recommend both of these, and as always, if you aren't already making the most of Zuda and the great free comics you can get there, you really should be. I know I say it a lot, but I also say 'get free comics at your local library!' I don't get anything from Zuda but the comics I read there, I just know that there are some very good creators and and some exceptional comics there. Remember to view the comics in full screen mode for best effect!

Profiles in Awesome (and book review)

Review - Dark Entries and Filthy Rich (Vertigo Crime)

Many thanks to the good folks at the Inkwell Bookstore Blog!! Recently they did a book giveaway for folks that were following their blog. All you had to do was let them know the sort of things you were interested in, and they would try to find something that seemed appropriate to send you.

Prior to reading that post, I had already added them to my blog list, because I enjoyed their replies to my posts, and really liked what I had read on theirs. I hadn't gone in officially and followed them, but I righted that wrong and sent them an email anyway.

Not terribly long after that I got a package in the mail with a cute drawing of Oscar the Grouch on it, and marked BOOKS. It was very exciting, and even more exciting after I carefully opened the package.

They sent me two different Advance Copies of titles due out in may through the Vertigo Crime line. I have since had a chance to read both, and will talk about them briefly right here.

Dark Entries - Ian Rankin & Werther Dell'edera - This is a John Constantine mystery, and it's sort of an odd one. I am in a strange position of feeling that it was almost laughable, but also really enjoying it as well. I won't give much away here, but Constantine is paid to go on the set of a reality tv scare show called Dark Entries(I perked up at the title, as it is also a song by Bauhaus) . The show features a group of people locked in a 'haunted house' and subjected to all sorts of psychological torment. The only way they can get out of the house is to find the secret treasure room that is hidden in it somewhere. There is a problem when all of the contestants start seeing ghosts and visions prior to the real start of the game. The producers hire Constantine to go in and investigate. They put him into the game and he gets the feeling pretty immediately that things aren't all that they appear to be.

It's not a bad read. I enjoyed it, but I think some of the situations were a bit silly. The art and the writing are very good, regardless.

Filthy Rich (Brian Azzarello & Victor Santos) - This is a perfectly brilliant Hard-Boiled story of a former and somewhat disgraced football player and failed used car salesman who gets caught up in a world of privilege, sex and danger when he is hired to be the bodyguard of a spoiled rich girl with a penchant for getting herself into the tabloids. It is a perfectly fast and fluid read. The art is fantastic and only contributes to the feel and pace of the story. I have a feeling that anyone who has enjoyed Brubaker's Criminal, should enjoy this story. It has sex and doublecross, interesting characters and a glimpse at the dark side of privilege and fame. It's really good stuff. I recommend checking this out.

Just as fat, 3x as cool

A while back I saw something somewhere about Atomic Robo T-shirts. I looked into them, and found that they didn't go to my size according to the site, but the site basically welcomed any questions one might have, etc.

I emailed and asked about the possibility of getting a 3x Robo t-shirt, etc. and asked what the cost would be etc.

I had to wait a little for a reply, but it was well worth it, and I got an apology for the delay, etc. After a series of very pleasant back and forth email messages, I got the following offer. I could get three different Atomic Robo T-shirts, all 3x sized, and I could pick the colors from the stock of 3x shirt they had available, and I could get them for 30 bucks shipped*. Great customer service, great deal, and ultimately (as of a few days ago...) really cool t-shirts! I think these are my first comic t-shirts ever, which is odd given my 30+ years of loving comics.

So here is a Talkin Bout Comics Plug for The Secret Bunker (this is an unsolicited plug, I like the service and the product, so they get a shout out like I would do for anything else!)

Very easy to deal with. The products seem great, and once the payment was in, the turnaround was very fast.

*No idea if this price is available, may have been a one time thing. I am not complaining.

Apollo's Song - Review

Apparently it's Manga week at TBC... After I read Osamu Tezuka's 8 Volume Buddha (borrowed it from the library, although I hope to own the whole thing some day) I bought Apollo's Song. I have had it for quite some time, and have been keeping it near my computer for a month or two with the intention of reading it. After reading A Drifting Life, I decided it was a perfect time to tackle the other giant book 541 pages of Tezuka goodness.

This is a strange book. I found it to be brilliant, but still kind of strange. There is a lot of moralizing in it, and it comes across in a way as a sort of... environmentalist / anti-technology, I am the Lorax I speak for the trees sort of statement. That isn't the main focus of the book, but the theme of the evil men do to the planet and each other and nature, resonates in each of the sort of dream sequence stories that make up a good portion of the book.

Our young 'protagonist' Shogo has all the makings of a sociopath. He cruelly kills animals, he attacks couples, etc. His primary reason for killing the animals he does is that they are showing attraction for each other or tenderness toward each other (yes, he kills animal couples, or animal babies, etc.)

He is hospitalized, and during a course of electro-shock therapy, he sees a giant statue of a goddess that condemns him to fall in love with one woman and then be separated by death from them over and over again. We see this happen in sub-stories that happen when he is rendered unconscious. The stories vary from his being a german soldier and falling in love with a condemned Jewish girl, to his being a human in love with a synthetic being in a future where synthetic beings rule the world. In addition to these 'dreams' , his story continues to play out in the 'present' It's really well done. Tezuka really did some comics ways that I just don't see being done very often. The medium is used perfectly, it's funny and silly and profound and preachy. It's a crazy story premise, but works. It didn't even scare me off with it's half representational and half realistic lesson on where babies come from (that it opens and closes with.

It isn't a flawless piece, but I enjoyed it and it made me think about what was being said (regardless of my agreeing with it or not). This is a good book and I recommend it if you like this sort of thing.

A Drifting Life - Review

It has been pretty hard this year to not get at least a bit curious about a book that has gotten as much buzz as this one. I am not a voracious Manga reader by any means. I have read some, and enjoyed much of what I have read. My oldest daughter is certainly more into manga than I am. I have read Tezuka's Buddha, and was pretty much awed by how good it was on so many levels.

I am not a history buff for the most part either. I like knowing where things came from, and how they came about, etc. but I am lazy about it and don't seek it out very much. When it comes to comics, I am generally happy to stay well on this side of the 1950's or 60's.

I have read Scott McCloud's Understanding, Reinventing, and Making, Comics. I think pretty highly of McCloud's work for a lot of reasons, and will say that I sort of put him in the same category that I put Alton Brown with regard to food, or the Mythbusters with regard to weird stuff I'm curious about that can only be explained by blowing things up. They all show and explain things that I am extremely interested in, in a fun and accessible way that shows me the science behind it, without diminishing the joy of it in any way. I would assert that their treatment of their subject matter greatly increases my understanding and enjoyment of it.

I say these things up front because they relate directly to what I felt when reading this 800+ page memoir that takes place during the strange and wonderful early days of post-war manga in Japan. It focuses on the period between the Japanese surrender in World War II and 1960. This was a wild roller coaster ride for the country of Japan, as well as the manga publishing and 'rental book' industry. It is window into the culture of the industry and the spirit and drive of the artists that shaped it. Yoshihiro was no Tezuka, and he knew it. Tezuka was his idol and his example. Striving to be like him seemed to go hand in hand with striving to be something different and new.

In this memoir, Yoshihoro uses a detached storytelling style. The protagonist is his analog Hiroshi Katsumi. We are given a lot of insight, but it is always a third person narrative. When we read that 'later he will come to regret his decision' or something like that, it has a sense of removal from the emotion about it. It is not the same impact as if the protagonist was telling us his own feelings, even though that is the reality of it. I am not criticising this method, as it creates a definite feel of it's own by doing so. There is bit of a feel that you are watching a documentary, rather than living the story of someone's life. This works for me, as it makes the other aspects of the story stand out equally.

This is a memoir of a person, an industry, a movement and a country. You get a real sense of all of those things as you read it. The Author's life is shown, the state of manga is shown, the publishing business(specifically manga) is shown, The alternative manga movement is shown, styles are discussed, the creative process is discussed, the nature of influences on an artist are shown, it really is like you are living inside of Scott McCloud's books. Much of the sorts of things he shows in his works are served here in context. This was a large part of my enjoyment of this work (I know one has nothing to do with the other in regard to their creation, etc. but that doesn't mean we the readers can't draw from both.

The detached style kind of rounded down the emotional experience for me. The highs weren't so high, and the lows weren't so low due to the two steps back manner of story telling, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the thing. I was thoroughly drawn in, and eager to get to the next page throughout the entire thing. You can learn an awful lot by reading this. It is valuable to see the nature of business, it is valuable to see the nature of inspiration and influence, and so much more.

I highly recommend this book. I am also now extremely interested in seeing more of Tatsumi's work.

CBD 6/17/2009 & not too much whining

Fantastic week - Mysterius the Unfathomable, Destroyer, Incognito, Tiny Titans, Executive Assistant Iris

But firs I revisit a thing I mentioned previously.

I am not able to go to Heroes (con) this year. I went last year with my girls and we loved it and loved Charlotte, NC. I was going to make it a family vacation, I got the cheap room at the great hotel, I got my favorite LCS owner to say he would get me in for free, I got the days off, I got the realities of some out of control spending and an economic downturn..., so...

I have adjusted my goals and am shooting for SPX this September. I will try to make that my con for the year, since it is within metro distance and it has the sort of stuff that's hard to find elsewhere, and has a very cool vibe about it.

Not driving all the way there and stretching our finances to do so is a little bit of a weight off, in a strange way, despite how much I was hoping to go. The other good aspect of this is that my family will go visit my parents for the long weekend, and that always means lots of leisure and good food and good company. Going there is always like a vacation for us, and indentured servitude for my parents (They insist on making amazing meals with veggies from their garden and my Mom's (and Dad's) amazing cooking. Plus we will do something with my Dad for father's day and it will be fun.

Oh, right... comics... Here are some lazy and tiny little reviews:

Incognito #4 - Still awesome. Brubaker and Phillips and Staples know how make the heck out of good comics. This should not be a surprise to anyone.

Mysterius The Unfathomable # 6 - Funny and smart and well written interesting stuff with fantastic characters. Parker and Fowler... I may be starting to realize something.

Tiny Titans #17 - My happy place. We get imps, we get Robin's myriad wardrobe, a battle for the cowl, and a discussion of continuity! Baltazar and Franco...

Destroyer #3 - I really love this. I think it is just very well done. Great writing, great art, a great look at a character I had probably seen, but never heard about until this series was solicited, even though he's one of the earlier characters out there. Kirkman, Walker, Staples... (more on that in a minute) This comic is violent. It also features my favorite premise, the 'hero' at the end of his lifecycle (a concept not just limited to Clint Eastwood movies, although Unforgiven and Gran Turino are both brilliant examples of this). Destroyer makes the Punisher look like he's not all that committed to making bad guys pay... Destroyer doesn't just punish... The guy Destroys for cryin' out loud. At one point he fights while covered head to toe in a sort of liquid latex-like body sheath of blood(his and everyone else's). I am not an across the board fan of this sort of bloody violence, but it is done in a tense and serious setting, and still keeps a certain sense of humor about it. It doesn't offend me in this context in the least. I am really enjoying this.

Which brings me to an observation. Every one of the books I got in my box today shares a very common trait. Every one of them has a stellar and proven creative team that knows more than a little about making pretty great comics. There is really no substitute for quality. I'm not suggesting that less experienced writers and artists can't produce amazing comics, I am suggesting that you don't have to buy bad comics. There are people out there who make some amazing stuff. Not only do you not need to buy bad comics, but big publishers don't really need to put out bad comics. It's possible to make good ones every time.

I picked up one book not on my pull list this week, and it is:
Executive Assistant Iris #1 - I haven't had time to do much but flip through it so far, and it looks great. The art is very good, and the feel of the comic is good.