B.P.R.D. 1947 # 5
Written by Mike Mignola & Joshua Dysart
Art by Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon & Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics
B.P.R.D. is always pretty good, even when it's slow and kinda boring, everybody knows that. 1947 didn't surprise--it's solid, entertaining shit with great fucking art by the MoonBa crew. Nothing particularly groundbreaking on the story front, and MoonBa being great ain't new information either. But it's worth checking the last couple of issues out, just to get a taste of old school comic book letter column nonsense. The letter columns in the Mignola-verse are usually running at an 80/20 split, with 20% of the letter column being Scott Allie's update on what to expect/purchase from the upcoming line, and the remainder being people writing gushy bits of praise. (Not counting the occasional letter that begs/demands for the never-gonna-happen resurrection of "Roger", a character that died in a story years ago.) But recently, the letters column included a mention of Harlan Ellison, he-of-the-constant-legal-battles, who had apparently called upon Dark Horse to "fix" the overall numbering of the series, as the editors had screwed up some random system that's included on the inside cover for those people who are too stupid to remember what order to read their comics in. In this issue, Scott Allie wrote about how much he disliked the "crossover crap" that is ruining Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America. Praise due for shit-talking. Doesn't improve the comic any, but in this case, it didn't need to.
S.W.O.R.D. # 1Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Steven Sanders & Craig Yeung
Published by Marvel Comics
This is one of those comics that features the little purple dragon that used to hang around with Kitty Pryde getting drunk by himself. You want to read that? (The answer is "yes" if you buy shit like Lockjaw & The Pet Avengers.)
Oh, and this is the art, by the way.
Kind of works if it's for little kids, but...yeah, you know.
Titans # 19
Written by B.T. Krul
Art by Angel Unzuenta & Wayne Faucher
Published by DC Comics
Although there's a lot of shitty Big Two comics all the time, this Titans thing is pretty fucking remarkable. It's just page after page of awful comics, with shitty drawings mashed up against shitty drawings, and yet--you get the sense that the people involved aren't really responsible, like they've been given two days or something, and hey--you've seen two day comics, right? Unzuenta and Faucher probably wanted to go back and make sure the piano in panel 3 had black keys, the way that the piano in panel 2 has black keys, the way that All Pianos Have Black Keys, but it wasn't up to them. The story doesn't read as if it has the same excuse--the series is clearly trying to do "spotlight" issues on each of the characters, which means that there was some version of advance planning here. But that plan ends up acknowledging how under-fucking-served B.T. Krul is when there's so little wheat to focus on, with characters like Beast Boy (no one cares) Red Arrow & his kid (people care even less) and Raven (people actively anti-care). Still, it's not a fucking charity, and this isn't being drawn in a diary, it's being produced for mass consumption. And besides the piano page (Red Arrow used to be in a band called "Great Frog", back in his smack days), there's also the moment where he gets the strength to fight off an assailant by imagining his daughter growing up without him. What's he see?
He visualizes her turning into a junkie. And no, this isn't one of those "i wish my heroes would act like heroes" thing, people who say that are in dire need of a curb to the teeth, those cats are 40 year old weak sauce beeyatches who probably masturbate to the idea of crawling up their mother's legs so as to return to the one warm, wet place where nobody picked on them. But if Red Arrow requires fantasy images of his daughter becoming a junkie just to fight off some no-name Z-grade villain, what's he going to do when he figures out that his daughter can just as easily become a fucking heroin addict whether or not he's around? Look--it's fun and all to be one of those test pilot shit-pillows who believe that drug addicts are solely the products of retarded parents and teenage fuckups, but hey, fun ain't true, sausage baby. And yeah, it's just a shitty super-hero comic, hey, aren't they all shitty super-hero comics? my mother was a shitty super-hero comic--got it, it's chalked up on the board, go and suck some more lollipops. But that's all this has going on in it besides the fight between Speedy used-to-do-heroin and Slutty has-some-fake-tits. All the drama stems out of the idea that--oh shit brah--drugs is scary, and being a dad is hard. Who wants to read that? Check. Lots of people want to read that. What they don't want to read is middle school shit like this, where the seams of manipulation don't just scream creator laziness, but the failure of the enterprise itself to handle the most stereotypical of real-world dramas, the dad-ain't-around story. If you can't get basic real world shit to be non-retarded, how you gonna handle the fantastic?
R.E.B.E.L.S. # 10
Written by Tony Bedard
Art by Andy Clark & Jose Villarrubia
Published by DC Comics
It'll be interesting to see if the sales bump caused by plastic rings turns into an expanded audience for R.E.B.E.L.S. It's a pretty comic, with a weirdly sterile art style that looks like Barry Kitson gone French. (Making it that much fucking weirder that the penciler and inker can change and still produce, basically, the same thing.) It's not really about anything specific beyond Vril Dox, who acts like a prissy version of the Sub-Mariner, and the people/aliens that Vril Dox surrounds himself with for the purpose of using. The series thus far is supposed to be about the conflict between Dox--a control freak who manipulates people's free will constantly--and Starro, a mind-controling alien who takes over one's free will completely. The series probably wants to ask questions about the two approaches of a couple of manipulative assholes, yadda yadda, but instead it just turns into a show about how much of a prick Dox is. That's not really a bad thing.
Cable # 20
Written by Duane Swierczynski
Art by Gabriel Guzman, Mariano Taibo & Thomas Mason
Published by Marvel Comics
This comic book has one of those old school cross section drawings, where they show you that the little girl and the little boy are minutes away from being eaten by the Giger rip-off Aliens, and at the end of the comic, it jumps two years into the future. (Based on the next issue cover in the back of the comic, this is so that the girl can grow up to have a pretty Cable-esque lower body. She'll probably still look like a porn star in the actual comic, but the cover makes her look like your regular old white chick with big ass. That's what they call "ground-breaking".) The rest of the comic is the same as the previous issue, and it was apparently the same as the ones before the last issue, meaning it was about how Bishop wants to kill the girl, Cable wants to protect the girl, and that's all. Oh, and some kid blows himself up at the end to kill the aliens, but it doesn't totally work. The idea of self-sacrifice by way of suicide bombing is always awesome, but the best part of the comic is that the story's title is "Checkmate", which means that Swierczynski thinks chess analogies can be approximated by having two steroid fantasy men beat the shit out of each other with space weapons, endlessly.
Booster Gold # 26
Written by Dan Jurgens
Art by Dan Jurgens, Mike Norton & Norm Rapmund
Published by DC Comics
What the fuck is that supposed to be? Is that a fucking Dreamcast controller?
It's sort of like a Xbox controller, except for the square Dreamcast inset box--ah, who gives a shit.
1. Contains a funeral for some character that died in an old event comic.
2. Contains a nagging wife stereotype forcing her husband to spend time with her at some stupid girl stereotype thing called "the cat show" instead of letting him stay home and play video games. Bonus: it's the middle of the day and really bright outside, but it's actually nighttime. Nobody bothered to color the first three outdoor panels correctly, so you have to play it by ear, i.e.: apologize for it.
3. Depending where you bought it, may contain a fucking plastic ring.
Red Robin # 6
Written by Chris Yost
Art by Marcus To, Ray McCarthy & Guy Major
Published by DC Comics
The best part of this comic is when Tim Drake's poor planning (alternative description: no planning) immediately results in some random dude dying right in front of him, and him saying "that man's death is on me. just like my dad's." That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because his dad died fighting a super-villain named Captain Boomerang, and this random ninja assassin died because Red Robin figured that "hire assassins to kill people but show up with other assassins to stop assassination of hired assassins by other, as-of-yet unknown assassins" would somehow result in a no-consequence outcome? All he had to do, if he didn't want anybody to die, was write down his plan before he put it into action. An illiterate wino could've pointed out the flaws.
Daredevil # 502
Written By Andy Diggle
Art by Roberto De La Torre & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Marvel Comics
Daredevil 501 ended with Daredevil pulling out one of those Turner & Hooch moments, with Matt turning to the old drunk guy all Craig T. Nelson style and dealing out his "actually, I'm the one who put the money in the fish-ice" confession, and then shit got all crazy, Daredevil comic style. (That means ninjas.) The hook was pretty straightforward: will Daredevil actually kill somebody? In 502, that question is dispensed with immediately (of course he isn't! old drunk guy has magic silent heartbeat!), making it the first time in a while that Daredevil could honestly be referred to as being less ballsy than that Bruce Wayne: Murderer story from a few years ago. And then, at the end of 502, the exact same story beat is played out again--some dirty cop gets his hand cut off, and Daredevil shows up and says "shoot the dog" or "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled" and the hook is...the exact same hook as the last issue. Is Daredevil actually going to kill somebody? And yeah, it's not uncommon for Daredevil to play the "once more, with/without feeling" game, see all those stories about Matt's Danger Penis. But seriously, two issues in a row? Same cliffhanger?
Shit's just lazy.
Deadpool # 17
Written by Daniel Way
Art by Paco Medina
Published by Marvel Comics
See, Deadpool's singing "Electric Avenue" while on top of a train car, and the train car is powered by electricity, so it makes sense, because he's really on the Electric Avenue. And he's planning to kill somebody, which is his job, so when he says "work to be done", it's got layers of meaning--electric avenue, work to be done, now in the streets there is violence--hell, that last line even has a quadruple meaning, because there's the violence of people trying to escape the train station, and then there's the mild violence of Wolverine bumping into Domino's ass because she's scared of chickens, and there's the violence of somebody putting somebody in a headlock, and then there's the expectation of more violence, because, Remember, Deadpool is on top of a subway car! Big doings here. Deadpool comics mean lots of shit.
Batman # 693
By Tony Daniel
Published by DC Comics
It's been a little while since they had a writer/artist doing double duty on Batman proper, so there you go, there's something this is giving. Trivia answers, in case you haunt the worst bar in the universe. Otherwise, it's not giving much else. There's the continuing saga of comics about how women shouldn't flirt with Dick Grayson when his bitchy ex-girlfriend is around, there's the Kubert metal workout suit from Batman Vs. Predator (a comic that now exists as a "when Batman was fucking awesome" example by comparison), and at the end, some black skateboard kid gets killed for snitching in Batman's arms. And hey, that's comics--"stop snitching" t-shirts were pretty popular a few years ago, they've probably trickled down to whatever mall store it is that Tony Daniel gets his idea of youth culture from...but there's really no excuse for the kid wearing a Newsies cap. That's pushing it. Time Warner must publish a Tiger Beat style magazine, the editors should just comp it as a research expense.
Green Lantern Corps # 42
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art by Patrick Gleason, Rebeccas Buchman, Tom Nguyen, Randy Mayor & Gabe Eltaeb
Published by DC Comics
They kill Green Lanterns all the time in these Green Lantern event stories, but it's usually just the black ones, never the white guys. Wait, aliens. They usually kill the aliens, not the white people. People lanterns! They don't kill the people lanterns. But in this issue, they killed one of the people lanterns. Technically, he decides to suicide bomb himself into a forcefield he made on his own, sort of a gigantic Cumshot Extreme version of a soldier throwing themselves on a live grenade, but either way, he's comic book dead, and all the hopes and dreams of a generation die with him. Well, not really. That's not really true. He's just some legacy character that worked pretty well for a while, and then it became more profitable to replace him with the version of the character that the people writing these comics liked the most, and it took a while for those writers to come up with a way to move him off the playing board. This is that way, for now, but he'll come back as a zombie really soon. (Mostly because he's got a girlfriend, and if Blackest Night has taught the world anything, it's that the most awesome thing ever is when zombie characters make ex-relationship partners cry, some version of that scene is in every one of these fucking stories.) Oh, and Wikipedia says the dead guy was half-Mexican? If that's true, somebody is going to add this bitch to their thesis about racism in pop culture. That's cool.
Batman & Robin # 6
Written By Grant Morrison
Art...well, something, by that Tan guy, you know--look, it's not My Lai or something, but holy snakes this ain't exactly pleasurable
Published by DC Comics
Hey, that Jog guy reviewed this thing at Savage Critics, so yeah, go look at that if you want to. Then that Caleb guy mentioned how the coloring instructions were left on one of the panels, so check that out too. You've got the comic, too. It's not very good, and it's so blatantly obvious why this time--there's this guy that Frank Quitely draws on the cover, he's basically Hugh Laurie in a pink matador's costume, and then there's this guy that Philip Tan draws inside the comic, who looks like Solomon Grundy, or a broken robot, or a gigantic beef product that doesn't know it's supposed to wait at the end of the buffet line until you've gotten some watery green beans. Those two guys are supposed to be the same guy, and artistic interpretations aside, playing to one's strengths ignored--one of those guys looks like he might make for an interesting story. The other guy just looks like shit. Of course, so does the rest of the comic. Some of it doesn't make any sense when you look at it. People move in ways that don't make sense, or they don't move at all, they just appear and disappear at random, and...so on. Of course, having bad art does give one a chance to just obsess on the story, and hey, look at that! It's about a Magog type! It's about how Damian says funny things and super-violent super-heroes are bad, and non-super-violent super-heroes aren't bad, but are awesome! Maybe that's not boring yet. It seems like it would be. But maybe it's not.
Differences of opinions still occur in 2009, even between men & women. Sure, most of us have joined the herd, engaging only with those within our cluster of agreement--after all, if she's a Democrat and I'm a pigfucker, what do we really have in common? Really. She probably likes Lady Gaga in a style that isn't ironic and hidebound. That will never do. Of course, it's been argued that clustering with those of like-minds actually works against us, as it becomes easier to view those we disagree with as "the other", and that's how you end up calling for their women to be beheaded over the shortwave. (It happens!) And while that's true and all, the real thing is this, baby girl: you start hanging out with people who feel the need to pretend they give a shit about what the Supreme Court does, or who the Secretary of Transportation is, or subsistence farming, or whether or not Grant Morrison's Batman stories have gone test pattern since Club of Heroes and that wacked out perfect 666 issue, and then you're going to start pretending you give a shit too, and ya'll end up a bunch of tired dipshits, because really, what you wanna know, what we all wanna know.
Am I getting laid soon? Am I getting laid tonight? Am I getting laid right fucking now?
Everything else don't fucking matter, cupcake.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
I actually agree with you on B/R this time, it was kind of ass. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't everyone in a dark alley last issue? Why are they all up on a rooftop all of the sudden?
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2009.11.16 at 02:44
CONSIDERATION THE FIRST:
"If you can't get basic real world shit to be non-retarded, how you gonna handle the fantastic?" is a drop-dead money quote that should be embroidered on tea cozies and sent to every freelancer at the Big Two.
CONSIDERATION THE SECOND:
Actually, it's not just been "a little while" since a writer/artist was on Batman, as far as I can tell it's been that way since at least #300 - not even for a single issue. Closest it got was when John Byrne wrote, but even then he didn't pencil and Aparo did it instead.
CONSIDERATION THE FINAL:
I guess that's what disagreeing about Batman and Robin #6 is all about? I feel like Philip Tan's turning it into a dirty back-alley fucking that'll probably give me an STI but at least it's fun, while you're wondering where the hell that bitch went with your coat.
Posted by: David Uzumeri | 2009.11.16 at 02:44
If you value 'old school' letters pages, you need to read Groo
Posted by: tam | 2009.11.16 at 02:57
Ha, you're right about the Batman, I was thinking of Lapham's run, but that was in Detective. Runs together in my mind, these things.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.11.16 at 02:58
See, I really liked the first arc of Batman and Robin. Flying car! Frog crook guy! Crazy action scenes! It wasn't cerebral stuff, but it was zany and somewhat kinetic.
This arc just seemed like a jumble of ideas mixed together with bad, bad dialogue. And I love Grant Morrison, but even I know that dialogue isn't his strength, but man, this was something else. Having Jason Todd yell die four or five times gets a little boring, y'know what I mean?
I disagree with you, Tucker, in that I think RIP was very good. However, I definitely agree with an earlier review you had done for B&R. Remember when we had Bat-men and crazy demon villains? How about more of those, Grant?
And man, Phillip Tan's art...yikes. Bring on Cam Stewart and Frazier Irving.
Posted by: Jacob | 2009.11.16 at 04:08
Sorry for the lack of proofreading with that post...
Posted by: Jacob | 2009.11.16 at 04:10
S.W.O.R.D. was terrific. You're too cynical.
Posted by: Mory Buckman | 2009.11.16 at 04:44
S.W.O.R.D. was pretty fun, I'll second that.
You know who has quietly turned into one of my favorite characters? Domino. Yeah, no shit. An odd thing happened with her in the last decade: after not really having a personality besides being Cable's on-again/off-again Girl Friday fucktoy, they started putting her in stories that didn't have Cable in them and suddenly she had a personality. Kind of wry, very deadpan, and despite the fact that she's an albino mutant mercenary (I don't think she's a "real" albino, just chalky white), more or less grounded. She's got OCD, too. It's one of those odd spandrel moments when a bunch of writers working more or less independently just managed to heap a pile of random attributes together in such a way that it cohered into an interesting character - the fictional equivalent of Dr. Manhattan's thermodynamic miracles.
Posted by: Tim O'Neil | 2009.11.16 at 10:56
Good god, did Speedy have to imagine his junkie daughter from such a low angle? Why's he so obsessed with her ass? It's like creepy old-man Adam Sandler in that movie with the magic remote.
Also, yes, SWORD was quite enjoyable, and hey, cartoony art is fun. What, does Beast have to look like a Wendihulk to make you happy?
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.11.16 at 12:21
The best way to read most of today's comic book stories is from the end of a particular story-arc and then work your way back. It adds a Memento-ish craziness that the creators are subconsciously wired to achieve. Or maybe not. Anyway, it works for me. Batman and Robin #6 was crazy-fun, and I can't wait to read #5 and #4.
Posted by: Jim Kingman | 2009.11.16 at 12:57
There's good "cartoony" art and then not so good. Look at that women's head from the first panel to the second. And did she somehow get taller?
Posted by: Jacob | 2009.11.16 at 17:43
I feel like Sanders' art has more than enough personality and distinction to make up for some perspective failings. I thought the same thing about Philip Tan too, until this latest issue where I literally couldn't even tell what was happening.
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2009.11.16 at 21:58
Also, what did you think of the new Jason Aaron Punisher?
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2009.11.17 at 01:03
Do you think Morrison just decides to write terrible stories when he knows he's going to have a terrible artist?
Posted by: Mario M. | 2009.11.17 at 02:41