Four for All

Recently I have bought and or borrowed several items that just leap out as being things both kids (young adults) and adults(old adults) can enjoy equally. I will keep it fairly brief.

The Amulet Book Two: The Stonekeeper's Curse , Kazu Kibuishi - Get volume 1: The Stonekeeper, if you haven't read it already. I was very excited to see this book in the library. I had been waiting for it, and new it had come out, and it was finally on the shelf the last time I went. This continues the story of a girl and her younger brother who inherit a powerful magic stone from their grandfather, and find themselves on a quest in a land of magic to save their mother from a deadly poison. The art is beautiful and brilliant, the story and characters are varied and fun, each with personality and depth. The story combines elements that make it reminiscent of other works like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Howl's Moving Castle,Narnia, and many others. A young girl with a good heart and a strong sense of duty to her family is the main character. She is strong willed and resourceful, and although she has some doubts and fears, she does not succumb to the great temptation of the powerful and sentient artifact she possesses. Her brother is separated from her in this book, and put into the role of commander of his own army of strange volunteers from the world they are in. A new character steps forward in the form of a fox who is sort of their Aragorn, a creature they are suspicious of at first, but who later shows himself to be beyond reproach. This is epic fantasy with robots and walking mecha-like houses and evil elves and animal-people and magic stones, talking trees, good versus evil, the works. It is something that could be read to a child, or by a child, or fully enjoyed by adult fans of the genre.

The Good Neighbors, Book 2: Kith - Another volume 2 here. Holly Black is the author and Ted Naifeh is the artist. I love Naifeh's art and this has very much the same sort of feel and similar subject matter of his Courtney Crumrin books, while not being his creation in this case. A teenage girl begins seeing strange things that no-one else seems to see. A world of Fairy and magical folk is suddenly unveiled to her and she doesn't know why. The first book takes us through that, and some mysteries regarding her mother and her creepy grandfather, and uncertainty about her father's actions, etc. The second book continues the story and continues to set her at odds with her grandfather and his plot against the town she lives in, and humans in general. There is a good cast of characters, and I would think that this is a book that Teen fans of supernatural fiction would enjoy. My 16 year old daughter liked it.

The Last Unicorn #1 - My daughters and I love the movie the last unicorn. I loved it long before I ever thought I would be married or have any kids. This comic is a stunningly beautiful adaptation. Not a great deal happens in the first issue(of 6), but the scene is set, and we learn a good bit about the Unicorn, and the world it is in. Honestly, the art sells this one as much as my love of the subject. I set it down then bought it the next time I was in the shop, and both my 10 and 16 year old daughters have read it already and raved about it.

Mercury - Hope Larson. Another fantastic book from Hope Larson. I love this trend of female creators making graphic novels that feature realistic settings and real personalities, with very real seeming young female leads in them, and a touch of the fantastic that does not seem to alarm or surprise anyone all that much. I am calling it a trend, even though in this case I am really just referring to Faith Erin Hicks' War at Ellsmere(also excellent), although not actually comparing the two. Mercury ties together two stories of two different girls across centuries. They share a bloodline, and a common location, and a mysterious piece of jewelry. Both face difficult situations in their own ways, and both encounter strange occurrences without thinking them to be particularly alarming. This is a sweet story with a bit of creepiness to it, and what I would interpret as a fairly happy ending. It is a good size and a great price at 9.99

All of these would be great recommendations for young readers, perhaps female teen readers in particular. I am neither of those things and enjoyed each of these completely. I recommend them in the following order of awesome:(1 being the highest)
1.Amulet
2.Mercury
3.Last Unicorn
4.Good Neighbors

Free Comic Book Day, The Holiday Made for Me

I believe that the Friday before FCBD should be a national holiday. I also think it is bad form for anyone to schedule non-FCBD events on FCBD. I should tell that to my 10 year old daughter I guess. She was hosting an event today for her Bronze Award for Girl Scouts. She was teaching a decent sized group of Girl Scouts and their Mothers to make knit hats so that by winter time they can donate them to a local shelter. It is hard for me to argue with that, but I did make sure my oldest and I got to slip out for an hour after it started so that we could hit up my LCS for the festivities. Unfortunately the festivities were just some free comics (three per person), and nothing else. Not even a sale to coincide with the day, or even, say some concerted effort to showcase comics for kids, or the wide variety of comics available, etc.

I think it's a shame to miss an opportunity like this. My LCS tends to be pretty conservative as I have said before in their ordering, etc., but as I have hopefully pointed out equally, it is owned and staffed by some pretty great guys. Regardless of what the shop was doing, everyone had their kids there as far as customers were concerned. As I was walking up to the shop, a dad was pushing a stroller with a toddler in it reading a comic. When I went in, there were two little girls with their dad (I would say both were 6 or under) and they were looking at heroclix naming and discussing all the heroes and villains. The dad was just as proud of his girls as I was of mine when they were little and did similar things. It was heartening to see so many kids excited and feeling welcome in a shop.

I asked to make sure it was ok, and my friends there let me pick up freebies for my youngest as well. I also tried to tell as many people at my daughters event about fcbd. Hopefully at least a few went and checked it out.

Here is what we picked up, although I don't have opinions about them yet:
Atomic Robo (they set this one aside for me)
Iron Man / Nova
Doctor Solar / Magnus
War of the Supermen
Looney Tunes (not labeled fcbd)
Mouse Guard / Fraggle Rock
Shrek / Penguins of Madagascar
Archie
Toy Story
Fractured Fables

So what did I miss out on that was awesome?

Hope everyone had a great day

Underground - Jeff Parker & Steve Lieber

On Valentines day I received an email from Steve Lieber. Last week I actually got off my figurative butt and read the comics he had sent a link for. I understand that this was probably not exclusively for me, and that perhaps everyone else in the world with a blog may have received the same thing, but guess what doesn't matter one bit to me...

Underground, a graphic novel in 5 issues, is written by Jeff Parker, and illustrated by Steve Lieber. If that alone doesn't get your interest up then you are reading comics wrong in my opinion. The really good news is that this comic is very good, and really pretty different as well. You would expect solid writing, good characterization and an underlying sense of humor to be found, given that Parker is a master of that. You would expect the art to be solid, with a good deal of comic realism without seeming heavy or stiff or overly photo referenced, etc., because Lieber is pretty great at that. You would expect those things, and you would not be disappointed. Where there is different for me, is that this is a very small, self-contained story set in a park in Kentucky, and it is, for lack of a better word, a thriller.

I use the word small here, but only to describe the relative scope and timeline of the story. It takes place within a day, and is mostly limited to a relatively closed environment. It has a solid beginning, middle, and end, and shows us for the most part, rather than just telling us, but pretty much everything is explained and resolved within the five issues.

This is a cinematic sort of work, and could make for an excellent movie. The sort of surprising thing is that as a comic that features two park rangers in a mostly unexplored cave system, running from a group of men that need to stop them from getting out of the caves, it works brilliantly as a comic.

I really don't want to spoil one bit of this thing, so I won't give away much more than what I have said already. This title does something that is really difficult in my opinion to do in comics. I have said before that horror is something that is difficult to pull off in this medium, but another thing that I think is equally difficult, perhaps more so, is suspense. This series, manages to create edge or your seat, uncomfortable suspense expertly as it draws toward the climax. As uncomfortable as it was, is a testament to the quality and abilities of the creators on this.

It accomplishes this in a story that contains no particularly extraordinary people or situations. There are people with specialized skills, and the awesome wonder and unpredictability of nature is present, but this is all real world stuff in the claustrophobic confines of a real world setting.

This is a title well worth picking up. The base concept is not really a new one, but this isn't exactly 'Die Hard in a Cave" either.

Release The... Robot 13 !!

R13 - Colossus (Thomas Hall, Daniel Bradford) Blacklist Studios: I received an email in late February from Thomas Hall. I had received one from him some time earlier and stupidly had not given it the attention I should have. I had access to a digital version of Robot 13 #1 since June of last year, and I had looked at it, but not really tried to read it. By the time I got the second email, There were three issues available to me, the entire first story arc, and I decided I really needed to read it.

A bit of my issue, I guess, was probably that it looked absolutely beautiful, but absolutely looked like something Mike Mignola had done. This is not a bad thing, as I am not sure i have met anything Mignola has done that didn't range from 'very good' to 'brilliant' in my opinion. Whatever my feeble reason was (probably laziness), it was a dumb one, and my loss for not having dived into it sooner.

Issue 1 starts with a fishing boat off the coast of Spain. They pull a metal, man-shaped object out of the water, It turns out to be a robot of sorts with a skull inside of a glass dome for a head. This is also something that we have seen before more or less, but that doesn't preclude this from being original or good, in the same way that it doesn't guarantee it will be as cool as that concept sounds. (This comic is every bit as cool as the concept of a 'being with a skull floating in a glass dome for a head' sounds.) 13 Doesn't remember anything or know where he is at first, but it doesn't take long for him to figure out he is pretty adept at the fighting of giant monsters. He is also immediately sympathetic. His interactions with people are all done in such a way that you know that despite the evil looking floating skull thing, this is a hero of some sort, and a decent sort of character that you are dealing with. Fortunately he is not exclusively met with fear, and in the course of these three issues you learn a good bit about his history while still leaving vast amounts that can be filled in, and limitless questions that can be answered.

In reading interviews and things that are available out there, it is a fact that the story changed somewhere between the character design and actually getting things on paper. I think the direction that Hall and Bradford took with this is really perfect. There is a heavy Greek mythology tie in, with big monsters of greek mythology tie-ing in to the story as the villains (at least so far), and I thought it worked really well. I am a big fan of mythology and the creatures and characters that figure into the myths of various cultures, etc. and I like it when things are put together that use those things in a neat way.

The art as I said is beautiful. It really is perfectly done within the style it is done in. Like the cover to issue 1 that I have posted, there are pages from the first issue of tentacles that are absolutely stunning. I am not necessarily a big tentacle fan or anything, but the color and design and layout are really just perfect.

It is extremely fortunate that this project has an artist as capable as Bradford on it, as Hall's writing is excellent graphic narrative writing. This series does not shy away from dialog when it is needed, but it uses it efficiently, and the story is successfully told in the panels more than in the balloons and boxes. There are plenty of pages that are nearly wordless, and even if you don't read the dialog, and focus just on the images presented, you can have a good sense of what is going on, and a strong feel for the emotion and pacing, etc.

I almost passed up reading this, and certainly didn't go into it predisposed to like it, but I am very glad that I did read it, and it certainly ranks among the best comics I have read this year.

Champions Online

I have said this before, but the idea of a really good superhero role playing game for the computer is really the perfect thing for me. It's a dream I had long before I realized it. When City of Heroes first came out, it felt like my salvation was at hand. It was exciting and wonderful, and honestly, aside from someone to make babies with (which I surprisingly achieved, no seriously, I am the last person who ever thought that would happen), the only thing I really wanted in life (there may be some hyperbole here). I liked the game, I enjoyed playing it, I found some nice people to play with in game, and had a good time with it before burning out on it. The game wasn't actually perfect, but it did give me a lot of stuff that I really wanted in a game, in a way that other games just hadn't.

I have been a fan and player of Role Playing Games since middle school. I played D&D mostly, but collected and obsessed over a lot of other titles. If I could, I would have a giant wall of role playing games and books and materials. A friend of mine picked up a game called V&V (Villains and Vigilantes) it was a slim volume and had pretty straight forward rules that covered just enough mechanics to let me fill in everything else and make a perfect comic book superhero role playing experience. You have to have a GM(game master) that you trust with your leisure time, but I am a big fan of playing games with good storytelling and plot, regardless of whether everything is really random or not.

That aside, the game I owned, and was most impressed by, but never played, was the game Champions. If you are not familiar with the roleplaying game Champions, it is a level of Math beyond Calculus and Trig. It is a law degree in one book. It is awesome and allows such craxzy customization that there is no way you won't end up with a truly unique and specialized character of your own if you want it. For me, it was also unplayable. I made a lot of characters, but in my gaming group, no-one really ever wanted to spend a whole session just trying to work up a character at the expense of play. It also seemed super bulky and confusing. This is all wrong of course as it is an awesome game that my friends and I are too dumb to play... that's clearly on us.

Champions online has the feeling of customization akin to that of the pen and paper game. Not the same, but there really is a lot of space to create characters in a way that suits you, and to play them however you'd like as well. It doesn't seem perfect, but it's pretty decent. It suffers from some of the same things that City of Heroes did, which is sort of depth of play experience in a superhero setting, and a lot of powers and things seeming very similar, but the customization is strong and the character design options are pretty vast. The play is pretty good, even on my crappy computers, but not perfect. A lot of that is probably due to my hardware, so I am not ragging on them.

Missions seem to be almost interchangeable, and almost none of the story and plot and descriptions need to be read at all. I pretty much just read the mission requirements when they pop up on my screen in shorthand after I accept them. It's a lot of fun, though, and just like Champions back in the day, creating characters may be the most fun for me. I still get a kick out of being a good guy and running around saving people and fighting bad guys. I am not sure that I will decide to keep baying the steep 15 bucks a month subscription cost once it kicks in, but we'll see.

The Specials

This movie wasn't based on a comic, I don't think it was even based on a desire to make any money. Ok, I'm kidding there, but it is a strange mix of spoof, homage, super hero deconstruction, and... inaction to be a movie that anyone thought would go anywhere in 2000 in my opinion, plus I have seen more than a few reviews and comments (as I was preparing to write this) that share my experience of never having heard of the movie before seeing it on Netflix. I had seen images of Jamie Kennedy in the blue makeup he wears in this movie, but I never knew what it was from.

The Specials focuses on a slow day in the life of the 6th or 7th best super-hero team. There is no fighting in the movie, no villains, and only really one display of powers for the most part, and it comes at the end, when the group is getting ready to go fight some giant ants (that we only hear about). None of these absences are an issue, because the film isn't about those things. It's about super-heroes and fame and expectations vs reality and about how people interact and regard each other, and about how 'families' are formed and interact, etc. I applaud it for being exactly what it is, and not trying to be more, or even less, in order to be more commercial.

Rob Lowe plays the most popular and charismatic of his group. He is the Weevil, a second generation hero, and a giant douchebag. Rob Lowe's super power is his douchebag ability, so this fits him perfectly. He plays it very well, when his character has sex with a teammate who is married to another teammate, and when he cheers up the 'new girl' only to sell her out and cruelly make fun of her on television. Jamie Kennedy plays the blue skinned Amok, who looks a lot like nightcrawler, and cusses like the reformed bad guy he is. Thomas Haden Church is The Strobe, the teams leader with a highly inflated sense of self, regardless of his good intentions.

I think the casting was done well for this, and everyone plays their roles. The team contains a good mix of types that borrow from comic book standards, and is shown with its strengths and weaknesses right out in the open. This is a comedy, so I am not trying to act like it is too deep, but it isn't the shallowest thing either. There are some neat concepts in it, like a hero called 8 who has 8 bodies but shares one interconnected mind, a being they call Doug, who's official name is Alien Orphan, and acts as a sort of remedial Martian Manhunter. There is a funny and tragic commentary on 'stretchy powers', and a good theme about the toy business being a primary measure of super hero stature.

A Map In The Dirt - Jess Smart Smiley

I recently received my second email from Jess Smiley. The first came at the beginning of this month, and included a digital review copy of his 15 page comic: A Map In The Dirt. I read it right away. When I first saw it I wasn't sure what it was, and when I first read it I was no less confused. There were aspects of it that I thought were pretty great, but there were a lot of questions that were generated by it. I have read it again more than once and I have read some other reviews of it, and I have watched a video by the creator that I will talk about later, and I am more comfortable reviewing it now.

The comic is about a group of animals fleeing a common threat. In this regard there is a bit of simplicity and heavy handedness in the use of man as a sort of menacing soulless killer of animals. In this, Man seems to be hunting all of the animals equally. There is a bear and a fox and a bird and a snake and a deer, and the men seem to be doing a sort of Sherman's march to the sea of animal killing. That could be viewed as a major thing, but in this work it is just incidental, and almost excusable.

The style is pretty clean and simple. It is brush and ink on Bristol board and has a sort of 'wilderness' feel to it. The illustration style would be at home in an old scout manual or field guide in my opinion and it is very good, and builds up what is the real strength of this story. There is a real sense of a folk tale in this. It read to me like a sort of Native American myth. I could almost hear Joseph Campbell reciting it. The animals are all a sort of kin to each other. Some, but not all of them are portrayed as human forms wearing animal masks. This made the sense of allegory even stronger to me. The real gem of this story is the theme of the story teller, in the form of the deer that narrates it. The idea is put across that the story teller may die, but the stories are in its body and its body returns to the earth and water and air, and therefore so do the stories.

The ultimate take away from this after my second reading of it is that I really enjoyed it. There are aspects of brilliance in here. It is different enough, and interesting enough, while at the same time feeling timeless and familiar, that I think it works and merits a read.

The other thing of interest to me, and something I think that is worth pointing out, is the use of Kickstarter dot com as a way of raising money to get the story published as a book. The site is an interesting way to go, and allows the creator to set up a place that people can pledge various amounts of money toward the project as sponsors. There is a video there that is pretty funny, and neat. It is like a PBS pledge drive, but it is informative about the project as well as some of the benefits of KickStarter as a way of getting your work out there.

Jess seems to be really putting some effort into getting his project out there, and into getting support and funding for it. DIgital reading copies are definitely a way to go.