Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo's Hellboy: Darkness Calls #2. I never care about the story -- Hellboy always stands around while things happen to him, then he makes a Whedonesque quip. I love the design on the character and the world, however -- for me The Art of Hellboy is the only indispensable Mignola work. Duncan Fegredo is doing a good job keeping me hooked on this one though, so I will continue to pick it up.
Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham's Justice Society of America #6. There are literally more main character heroes in this issue than there are pages, and I don't know most of them. It is all sort of fun in the way Infinite Crisis was fun -- I am a sucker for superhero insanity just smashed together and to hell with anyone who does not know all these guys. But this issue seemed like filler: the Legion distracts the JLA and the JSA with some nonsense threat so they can complete their secret mission, but they are really distracting the reader from the fact that this is a four issue plot and not a five issue plot.
David Peterson's Mouse Guard Hard Cover Graphic Novel. I have not read this yet, but I wanted to try something new. It had mice with little tiny swords. It looked fun.
Nothing in the news jumped out at me. Review, recommend and discuss this week's comics and comics news.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Grant Morrison's New X-Men 149
[This post is part of a series of posts looking issue by issue at Grant Morrison's New X-Men run -- for more of the same click the New X-Men label at the bottom of this post].
Magneto rejects the comparison between the Nazi's who killed his family and his own plan to lead humanity into a crematoria. The Beak points out that Magneto's plan is nothing new, which is Morrison's point about Magneto, but that does not make for good storytelling. It just gives us a one-dimensional Magneto. Later we will learn that Sublime is behind Magneto's insanity, but Morrison gives us a detail that I find frustrating: Magneto wrote an article that humans do not feel pain like mutants do. That is an absurd racist cliche -- and, again, that is Morrison's point -- but I have a very hard time seeing this version of Magneto sitting down to write something like that. I have a harder time believing that these students, with their fart jokes, would find it and read it -- he did not give it to them, since one student had to tell the others.
This all becomes much more pathetic as Beak objects that every living thing feels pain, even dogs and carrots, at which point there is a debate over whether the carrot is a fruit or a vegetable -- Magneto ends the conversation by declaring it a vegetable and hitting Beak in the face. Then he kills Basilisk over a fart joke. Morrison does a great job here at creating at atmosphere of total horror -- people are getting killed over nothing, but it is frustrating as a reader that this is the Big Bad for this arc, and not some idiot bully lackey. Again, Beak calling him a bully -- which is Morrison's point -- does not save this aspect of the story.
In the last post I asked how the special class could stand tall with psycho-Magneto. In this issue it turns out that Esme was influencing everyone's minds with Martha's super-brain. Again, frustrating. This has replaced any need for Morrison to characterize the special class, just as the Sublime reveal will allow his Magneto to not require characterization either -- no one acts like human beings, not because Morrison is a lazy writer in these issues, but because everyone is being controlled by someone else. The Martha reveal feels tacked on, in part, because there is no explanation as to why it has stopped working just now, for the rally back. It is a bit like Harry's convenient amnesia in Spiderman 3 -- it made the lives of the screenwriters easier.
Esme asks why Magneto is taking so long to switch the poles of the earth -- is he waiting for the X-Men to stop him? In this issue he also tells the comatose Xavier that he misses their struggles. That is actually good writing I think -- I like the idea that there is something in a villain like the Freud's death drive, a desire to be captured.
Ernst calls Magneto boring and old-fashioned at the end of this issue, and she says no one likes what he is doing and it is all coming to an end. This is the third such complaint in the issue, and -- again -- Morrison's point. Thematically this should make sense: the NEW X-Men versus OLD Magneto. But attacking old-fashioned monsters like Magneto to restore the status quo makes the X-Men the oldest and most traditional kind of superhero, not an inch away from Uncanny X-Men number one from 1963. Morrison's vision of a post-human outpost from the future in the here and now -- of a team who only called themselves superheroes because it was something the world could understand -- cannot sink lower.
At least Morrison has a great ending to his run prepared.
Magneto rejects the comparison between the Nazi's who killed his family and his own plan to lead humanity into a crematoria. The Beak points out that Magneto's plan is nothing new, which is Morrison's point about Magneto, but that does not make for good storytelling. It just gives us a one-dimensional Magneto. Later we will learn that Sublime is behind Magneto's insanity, but Morrison gives us a detail that I find frustrating: Magneto wrote an article that humans do not feel pain like mutants do. That is an absurd racist cliche -- and, again, that is Morrison's point -- but I have a very hard time seeing this version of Magneto sitting down to write something like that. I have a harder time believing that these students, with their fart jokes, would find it and read it -- he did not give it to them, since one student had to tell the others.
This all becomes much more pathetic as Beak objects that every living thing feels pain, even dogs and carrots, at which point there is a debate over whether the carrot is a fruit or a vegetable -- Magneto ends the conversation by declaring it a vegetable and hitting Beak in the face. Then he kills Basilisk over a fart joke. Morrison does a great job here at creating at atmosphere of total horror -- people are getting killed over nothing, but it is frustrating as a reader that this is the Big Bad for this arc, and not some idiot bully lackey. Again, Beak calling him a bully -- which is Morrison's point -- does not save this aspect of the story.
In the last post I asked how the special class could stand tall with psycho-Magneto. In this issue it turns out that Esme was influencing everyone's minds with Martha's super-brain. Again, frustrating. This has replaced any need for Morrison to characterize the special class, just as the Sublime reveal will allow his Magneto to not require characterization either -- no one acts like human beings, not because Morrison is a lazy writer in these issues, but because everyone is being controlled by someone else. The Martha reveal feels tacked on, in part, because there is no explanation as to why it has stopped working just now, for the rally back. It is a bit like Harry's convenient amnesia in Spiderman 3 -- it made the lives of the screenwriters easier.
Esme asks why Magneto is taking so long to switch the poles of the earth -- is he waiting for the X-Men to stop him? In this issue he also tells the comatose Xavier that he misses their struggles. That is actually good writing I think -- I like the idea that there is something in a villain like the Freud's death drive, a desire to be captured.
Ernst calls Magneto boring and old-fashioned at the end of this issue, and she says no one likes what he is doing and it is all coming to an end. This is the third such complaint in the issue, and -- again -- Morrison's point. Thematically this should make sense: the NEW X-Men versus OLD Magneto. But attacking old-fashioned monsters like Magneto to restore the status quo makes the X-Men the oldest and most traditional kind of superhero, not an inch away from Uncanny X-Men number one from 1963. Morrison's vision of a post-human outpost from the future in the here and now -- of a team who only called themselves superheroes because it was something the world could understand -- cannot sink lower.
At least Morrison has a great ending to his run prepared.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
From Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words 8 (Commonplace Book)
Pyrrhic victory is not, as is sometimes thought, a hollow triumph. It is one won at a huge cost to the victor.
Razed (to the ground). The ground is the only place that a building can be raised, and so the phrase is redundant. [By the way, just to show what kind of a dork I am, raze is one of my favorite words in English because its antonym is also its homonym].
Reason... is because. This is a redundant construction. "The reason she left New York is because..." would be better written "She left New York because...".
Replica is an exact copy built to the same scale and with the same materials, so you cannot say things such as "the exhibit contained a replica of the Taj Mahal made entirely out of toothpicks". Model, miniature or copy is often better. Exact replica is also redundant.
Respite. Brief respite and temporary respite are redundant, since respite contains the meaning of brief. Also respite rhymes with cesspit, not with despite.
Revert back: redundant; delete back.
Shakespeare: the Oxford English Dictionary, perversely and charmingly, but unhelpfully (Bryson's phrasing), insists on spelling the name Shakspere, a decision it bases on one of the six spellings Shakespeare himself used. It does acknowledge that Shakespeare is "perhaps" the commonest spelling now used.
Razed (to the ground). The ground is the only place that a building can be raised, and so the phrase is redundant. [By the way, just to show what kind of a dork I am, raze is one of my favorite words in English because its antonym is also its homonym].
Reason... is because. This is a redundant construction. "The reason she left New York is because..." would be better written "She left New York because...".
Replica is an exact copy built to the same scale and with the same materials, so you cannot say things such as "the exhibit contained a replica of the Taj Mahal made entirely out of toothpicks". Model, miniature or copy is often better. Exact replica is also redundant.
Respite. Brief respite and temporary respite are redundant, since respite contains the meaning of brief. Also respite rhymes with cesspit, not with despite.
Revert back: redundant; delete back.
Shakespeare: the Oxford English Dictionary, perversely and charmingly, but unhelpfully (Bryson's phrasing), insists on spelling the name Shakspere, a decision it bases on one of the six spellings Shakespeare himself used. It does acknowledge that Shakespeare is "perhaps" the commonest spelling now used.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Grant Morrison's New X-Men 148
[This post is part of a series of posts looking issue by issue at Grant Morrison's New X-Men run; for more of the same click the New X-Men label at the bottom of this post.]
Wolverine opens this issue by noting that he did not even smell Magneto till now. I think that is a metaphor, but what about its literal since? Why didn't he, with all his fancy hyper senses, detect that Xorn was Magneto? Morrison's twist just raises more questions than it answers. Magneto tells Ernst -- who misses Xorn, which is terribly sweet -- that he created Xorn with help from supporters in China. Well, I think I am going to need a little more than that -- did he create Xorn with help of undetectable supporters in China who can rig things to fool the most powerful psychics on Earth, and Wolverine?
When Magneto's speeches fail, Toad tells him that the crowd wants sound-bytes not Shakespeare. At first it appears Morrison wants to attack Magneto for being old-fashioned and un-imaginative -- for re-using old ideas like switching the poles of the earth -- but Morrison also seems to be making a claim that everyone has degenerated, including the people of New York. We never really get to see them here, which is unfortunate.
Magneto's "special class" seems surprised that he wants to exterminate humanity, but what kind of guy did they think he was -- they were posing with him like rock-stars after he destroyed Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. This story is hard to like because its main characters are written badly -- we do not understand them as people -- we do not understand how they got from the Special Class to here -- so when Morrison calls on us to sympathize with them, it fails.
The sequence with Jean and Wolverine, trapped on a rock in space heading into the sun, on the other hand, is great. Jimenez does a wonderful Jean in these issues -- realistically beautiful with her ponytail and sweat, and perfectly normal bra (in stark contrast to the embarrassing super-boobs he gave her in "Murder at the Mansion"). Morrison's writing for the two of them is spot on as well. The Phoenix Force burns away what does not work -- which is wonderfully Emersonian, and my favorite description of the Phoenix force. Wolverine tells a story about surviving without food by eating chunks of off his own arm, which grew back thanks to his healing factor, a great story that shows a great understanding of this character. Finally Wolverine kills Jean to activate the Phoenix Force moments before we see them both die. This is one of the most powerful images in the run, and thankfully we are given a full five pages -- the final three completely silent -- to absorb it. We need the time and we get the time, and it works.
This kind of swerve between bad writing and great writing is what makes this run so maddening, and worse, in some ways, than something consistently badly written. You keep seeing what Morrison can do, and then you have pages and pages of him simply not doing it. It would be a mistake to drop a book with so much good, but it still feels like a mistake to keep buying it when so much of it is so bad.
Wolverine opens this issue by noting that he did not even smell Magneto till now. I think that is a metaphor, but what about its literal since? Why didn't he, with all his fancy hyper senses, detect that Xorn was Magneto? Morrison's twist just raises more questions than it answers. Magneto tells Ernst -- who misses Xorn, which is terribly sweet -- that he created Xorn with help from supporters in China. Well, I think I am going to need a little more than that -- did he create Xorn with help of undetectable supporters in China who can rig things to fool the most powerful psychics on Earth, and Wolverine?
When Magneto's speeches fail, Toad tells him that the crowd wants sound-bytes not Shakespeare. At first it appears Morrison wants to attack Magneto for being old-fashioned and un-imaginative -- for re-using old ideas like switching the poles of the earth -- but Morrison also seems to be making a claim that everyone has degenerated, including the people of New York. We never really get to see them here, which is unfortunate.
Magneto's "special class" seems surprised that he wants to exterminate humanity, but what kind of guy did they think he was -- they were posing with him like rock-stars after he destroyed Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. This story is hard to like because its main characters are written badly -- we do not understand them as people -- we do not understand how they got from the Special Class to here -- so when Morrison calls on us to sympathize with them, it fails.
The sequence with Jean and Wolverine, trapped on a rock in space heading into the sun, on the other hand, is great. Jimenez does a wonderful Jean in these issues -- realistically beautiful with her ponytail and sweat, and perfectly normal bra (in stark contrast to the embarrassing super-boobs he gave her in "Murder at the Mansion"). Morrison's writing for the two of them is spot on as well. The Phoenix Force burns away what does not work -- which is wonderfully Emersonian, and my favorite description of the Phoenix force. Wolverine tells a story about surviving without food by eating chunks of off his own arm, which grew back thanks to his healing factor, a great story that shows a great understanding of this character. Finally Wolverine kills Jean to activate the Phoenix Force moments before we see them both die. This is one of the most powerful images in the run, and thankfully we are given a full five pages -- the final three completely silent -- to absorb it. We need the time and we get the time, and it works.
This kind of swerve between bad writing and great writing is what makes this run so maddening, and worse, in some ways, than something consistently badly written. You keep seeing what Morrison can do, and then you have pages and pages of him simply not doing it. It would be a mistake to drop a book with so much good, but it still feels like a mistake to keep buying it when so much of it is so bad.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Announcement: Possible LOST Book in 2010
I have been approached by a publisher (can't say which one yet) about putting together a book on LOST whose release will coincide with the end of the show in Spring 2010; we are working out details now, including word count, and format. It is really too early to announce this, but everyone is talking about LOST right now, and there won't be any new episodes until January, so I thought I would let people know about this while it was still a hot topic. As soon as I know more, you guys will know more.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
