The Summer Hikaru Died vols. 1-5 (2o21-2o25) - The anime version is dogshit, but this, this is great. Gonna read as long as it runs.
Tom Strong Compendium (1999-2oo6) - Begins with love. Ends with a lack of imagination. 2/3rds readable, 1/3rd slog. A semisuccessful exercise in worldbuilding that defaults into genre boredom. For me one of the most stinging casualties of the Wildstorm buyout by DC. Lee did Moore dirty and this book died on the vine as a result.
Adventureman vol. 1 (2o2o) - Wtf is this self-aware wannabe ironyboy winky business. No. We already have Casanova, if we need hard genre tropes. You want an Adam Hughes cheesecake book, just buy an Adam Hughes cheesecake book. Nobody cares what you bust to, fan-worm. I won't judge you for busting. Unless you're busting to this.
November vols. 1-4 (2o19) - Rocksolid. Charretier is the bomb. I want to read more of her comix.
The Nice House By The Sea vol. 1 (2025) - I liked 9/10s of The Nice House On The Lake, and then the ending was just "We're gonna hit the reset switch like it's a clit" then we're told there's going to be another "season" because comics are done in Seasons, now, and I kind of fucking hate the way the television model has tainted everything. I'm not even sure this book needs to exist as a comic, considering James Tynion IV clearly WANTS to be in teevee, and make spinoffs...! This particular comic's initial sexiness is down to how it looks like an HBO show in comic form, which is some disappointing shit. Because, look, I loved the first season of Westworld. What ruins Westworld is that it keeps fucking going. Yeah, I got some sour grapes. But read and tell me I'm wrong.
Batman vol. 3: Death of the Family (2014) - Snyder is such a tryhard. I wish I could understand his popularity. It's a mystery. It's the only mystery. There's no goddamned mysteries in these bat-comix, unless it's how Joker + Marilyn Manson was a hot mod NRG back in the twenty-teens. This edgelord shit is embarrassing. Also why the fuck is Jock's art so lazy. He's already using a computer!
Milk Wars (2o18) - This could have been something. But it wasn't. Mainly notable for forcing me to explain Danny The Street to my husband. The art had its moments. I guess I'll pour a 40 out on the curb for Young Animal. DC gave it a sincere shot. Gerard Way is like one of those little stinky fertilizer sticks you push into the soil of the potted plants DC keeps in the lobby of their L.A. office. He keeps the flora alive, if not exactly well-fed. It sucks that he gave up working on His Own Comic, Umbrella Academy, so he could make an inferior teevee adaptation of his own work, and do this. It's no wonder he looks like Neal Young now. Can you stage an intervention for mutton chops?
DanDaDan vols. 1-3 (2o19-2o21) - I am team Turbo Granny. She is a chaotic force for good and casually diabolical. I guess yokai stuff is my jam generally. Plugs into my folk horror tendency. There's nothing horrific about this book, but the character design is fab and the artist draws the fuck out of everything. Easy to see how they came from Chainsaw Man. The ride pays for the price of a ticket, if you're reading these from the library. Pretty cracky.
Dimwood by Richard Corben (2024) - Exeunt as you came in, I suppose. There are some of what you might call Corben's classical themes here. Hypersexualized male physique. His legendary enthusiasm for busoms. There's also (let's be kind) some very wonk drawing. Of Corben's curious mode of wonk, where he is actually using model reference. He makes his own strangely shaped heads for his strangely shaped characters, so when he does odd perspectives of the mashed-down and exaggerated planes of faces it's deeply... unsettling. There's also some really clever page layouts & action setups, all the visual storytelling you expect from the Lege that gave us a bazillion horror comix and some of the more baller Hellboy spin-off stuff... The story? It's tropes on tropes, in a way that doesn't make much sense, there's no emotionally satisfactory payoff, and the story repeats its own action twice too many times. It didn't have to be 120 pages. It could have been 80. But hell, it's one last entry from the man hisself, and it's a family affair. Everyone helped with the colouring and inking and pre-production. That brings a little tear to the eye, albeit a tear complicated by the amount of heaving busoms there are in this throbbingly horny-yet-repressed comic a-bulge with grotesque subtext. I'm def. glad to have seen some colours that aren't Villarubia's-- it's nice to see Richard doing his obsessive Thing with line thickness and layered, delicate graytones one final time. All that said I'm probably never going to re-visit this particular work. I'll hit Hellboy again, for sure. Maybe that deeply problematic Hellblazer comic Azzarello did where Constantine gets himself committed to an american prison. (Checks library.) Got it on hold now, in fact. I'll probably try to properly Read the Den saga. Isn't 'Murky World' part of that...?
re-read: John Constantine, Hellblazer #51 (1992) - An all-timer. Sean Phillips at his blocky best, and John Smith spot-welding the pre-vertigo DCU mature readers' title together. There's a bit of incidental dialogue where John reminisces about the time he & Willoughby Kipling took on the Lapsed Martyrs in Bangkok-- Willoughby Kipling being the Richard E. Grant version of Constantine from Morrison's 'Doom Patrol'. I quite like that panel. It serves no real dramatic purpose other than to suggest that the D.P. and Constantine aren't that far from one another, on the display racks. One of my favourite things about this ish is the suggestion that if you're ever possessed or dealing with malevolent spirits, the worst possible move you could make is asking J.C. for help. Working with Johnny Con-job is as like as not to transmogrify your soul into Satan's own underpants.
The Color Of The End: Mission In The Apocalypse vol. 1 (2023) - I dunno what's with the subtitle trend in manga these last few years, but it's superfluous. Redundant, even-- he said, making a point for no-one, no-where --but that's pretty much the sole flaw here. The art's impressive, the graytones spectacular (when's the last time you saw an artist actually using graytones to Exciting! Visual!! Effect!?!) and the tale itself is an ambient joy. A couple decades ago, when I was re-reading 'The Time Machine' by Wells, it occurred to me that my favourite form of SF is The Walk: The narrator discovers the world of the future at the same pace as the reader; they're both on the same amble, matching pace, so the reader makes the same assumptions & errors in judgment as the narrator. This book does that, more or less. It's a contemplative thing. Sadly, like much of contemporary ambient music, The Color Of The End is not treading new ground, and the wistfulness therein makes me less engaged in discovery. C.o.t.E. is a mood piece, but I'm less in the mood. It's not the book's fault. Maybe it's having survived covid, or having lost (estranged) family along the way, that's to blame. At one volume I'm okay. Still, I'd like to taste some other SF manga in this mode. I hear 'Girls Frontline' is a Walk in a similar vein...
Hello, Sunshine (2025) - Keezy Young is a new name to me, but the art & storytelling are straight-up Michael Lark circa Terminal City. Better, really. Better because the tale isn't borne from nostalgic futurity, but from the stuff of teen misadventure & themes of personal horror. The cartooning is sharp as hell, the colours are crisp and flat as your memories of being into the wrong people at the wrong time. It's provided some legit startles, which, hell-- when's the last time a horror comic was immersive enough to do that to me? Tidily realized characterization and charming as birdsong. A keeper. My husband will love this.
No comments:
Post a Comment