marlowe1 | Entries tagged with comic books

13. The Joy of Trash by Nathan Rabin - I've been a fan of Rabin's for a long time and the nice thing about social media is that you can interact with your heroes (especially if they are literary heroes with Facebook groups). And you can also buy their books directly from them (especially if the trad pub world is no longer eager to put their books out into the world). So I bought this book when the Weird Al movie was coming out and then bought two Weird Al Coloring books just because.

And this is exactly what I wanted. While most of the essays are online, it's nice to read them just to feel the joy and the pain of these oddities of pop culture. Name checking Michael Medved's Golden Turkey Awards for Plan 9 from Outer Space is almost required but also lends Rabin some credibility as the current pop culture critic who digs for the trash and finds entertainment (now that Medved transitioned into talk radio host who isn't nearly offensive enough to rise to the top of the right wing pundit pile).

So reading this book I again felt the pain of Jeremy Seville movies - or reading about Jeremy Saville movies - both Loqueesha, the movie that really made him famous for all the wrong reasons, and The Test, a misognynist little shitfest the rewards the hero for torturing his fiancee. Both movies as described are infuriating but also fascinating. Very rarely does a movie with the premise "white man pretends to be a sassy black woman to give talk radio advice" or "man worries about his marriage going bad so he gaslights his girlfriend with a series of vile tests" end with the protagonist being declared RIGHT the whole time. Shitty movie premises like these almost always end with the hero learning a valuable lesson. Like in Soul Man where C. Thomas Howell learns that racism exists and pretending to be black to get a scholarship to Harvard is a bullshit move that actually hurts people.

I feel like this book will have even more value when pop culture ephemera like Rachel Dozeal or the Fyre Festival fade from memory just like some of the other more obscure items like a bad Christian comedian (I wonder if I could pay Nathan to review Mike Warnke stuff) or Joan Crawford's weird guide to living the life of Joan Crawford (don't invite hippies to your dinner party - oh wait, actually that's a pretty good one).

14. Komi Can't Communicate, vol 18 by Tomohito Oda - Ok, this volume is fine. Just fine. Komi and Manbagi are in a rivalry for Tadano and a lot of the shenanigans is both of them trying to figure out how the other one is feeling. There's also a tying a cherry stem with your tongue scene and someone asks Komi the color of her underwear (sigh - I get that if I read Manga I'm going to get juvenile humor but I kind of wish I didn't). But ultimately this is still the sweet series about the girl with social anxiety and the guy who first talked to her and realized that her lack of communication was actually anxiety and not snobbishness (the joke about how she's so pretty that everyone just assumes that she's stuck up is the basis) and while Manbagi the tan and boisterous rival almost exists to be a love triangle road block to the Tadano/Komi love story I kind of hope that the story doesn't go that way.

There are also a bunch of scenes with everyone's siblings. Having Komi's little brother and Tadano's little sister in the same grade with almost the exact same dynamic is cute, but then introducing other little siblings in the exact same year who also act like their older counterparts is getting ridiculous.

4. Falconspeare by Warwick Johnson-Cadwell (characters created by Mike Mignola) - I was going to say that Mignola's art style has really grown on me, but then I looked at the credits page and he's mainly attributed as the guy who participated in writing a previous story and making up these characters. So he gets the name on the cover (also he's a bigger draw than Johnson-Cadwell who I just heard about). Still Johnson-Cadwell is very good at imitating Mignola's style with some personality of his own thrown in. The decapitation of a nosferatu at the beginning is very fun with all the blocky heads.
This is a simple story and it's pretty short. The vampire hunters receive notes from a long lost friend Falconspeare who tells his story about finding a lord who was not a vampire. He's just an asshole. An asshole with rich and powerful relatives who won't let the police investigate or arrest him.
So he becomes a vampire to kill him. Which is definitely a novel solution.
But that's really it. The artwork is great. The story is fun. I may forget about it years later. Hopefully one day I will read this blog and it will bring back a pleasant memory of this thing.

63. Battleworld: Star Lord & Kitty Pryde by Sam Humphries and Alti Firmansyah - Checking out comic books from the library can be a strange experience when you don't keep up with the titles on a regular basis. Marvel comics has gone through a Secret War, Civil War, Civil War II and a story where Captain America went full Nazi just as America elected one of the most odious pieces of shit to the White House (by the electoral college, not the popular vote). So Secret Wars apparently was a combination of Crisis on Infinite Earths and the original. It's Crisis in terms of bringing together all the alternate universe characters in one big story in order to work out some kinks from the original format (primarily for giving Miles Morales to the Marvel Universe proper). Like Secret Wars in that the format is fairly simple as everyone is on one planet fighting it out with Doctor Doom as god emperor (just like the only interesting twist in the original miniseries).

So Peter Quill and Kitty Pryde are a thing in the Marvel universe proper (as opposed to the film Marvel universe where the multiverse comes down to Universal, Sony and Fox). Only Kitty Pryde is nowhere and instead we get the Kitty Pryde who was an agent for Apocalypse in Age of Apocalypse. There's even an issue from Age of Apocalypse which reminds me of my initial impressions which were - cool concept, love the art and who the fuck wrote this thing? It's awful. Anyhow the main story of Quill and Alternate Pryde in a heist is about as low stakes as you can get and putting them together in the next story with Quill asking Pryde to marry him is just kind of dumb.

64. Sage vol 3 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples - Ok, now this makes a little more sense. Not much since the story mostly could start here with the one-eyed fictional version of Samuel Delaney puking on the baby. Yet, I know the characters a little better. I'm more sad that the author dies and see the stakes a little more clearly. Still love how the opposite of war turns out to be fucking. War & Fucking is a Russian novel we would all want to read.

65. She-Hulk: Deconstructed by Mariko Tamaki & Nico Leon with Dalabor Talajic - She-Hulk without She-Hulk. Just Jennifer as a lawyer with a case of a woman with a monster in her apartment and a landlord that is creepy enough to try to evict her for being not so hot anymore. She-Hulk is fresh off of Civil War II which was the one where Captain Marvel was an idiot, Bruce Banner died and there was a lot of talk of fascism. Anyhow she's got severe PTSD so the whole story is about getting herself right with herself and accepting her transformation into She-Hulk again which is something she does under duress in this case. The story is tight and full of mission statements over what She-Hulk can be, even if I think that the fun She-Hulk of Hell Cat is not really going to be around.

66.The Walking Dead vol 30: New World Order by Robert Kirkman & Stefano Gaudiano - I can appreciate the fact that the Walking Dead is more of a spiral than a circle. I can appreciate the fact that even though it looks like there's only one story going on with Rick and friends finding safety only to lose it, that there's a greater narrative about rebuilding society and bringing us back to the social order. That doesn't mean that I don't find this latest iteration of the gang finding a new place to live any more interesting. Ok, so the new place is a big city of 50,000 people where the issue that arises comes on pretty quickly. If I didn't know that this struggle was the last one and that the whole series just ended, I would have guessed that this is where things were going. In fact, the story of the spoiled brat son of the matriarch was already on the television show. I don't properly remember if it was in the comic as well, but it might have been. Either way Negan kills the brat so a new world order based on what people were like before the fall kind of throws things in the mixer. So this is a pretty dull affair. Negan is gone. The new safe place is bigger but it's got many of the same tensions. The last thing anyone says is to reference New World Order. I suppose the series ending is the best thing for it.

67.Uncanny X-Men: Survival of the Fittest by Cullen Bund & Greg Land - Speaking of boring, this is one of those stories that deals with the fact that Marvel was trying to push the Immortals as the new X-Men in the most blatant way possible. The meta-story of Marvel being pissed that they couldn't do mutant stories in the regular movies while the boring X-Men movies chugged along in the Fox banner is more interesting than any story coming out of it. So that's your answer to "Why isn't Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel just a mutant?" And in universe the teragan cloud goes and kills the mutants and activates the Immortals and in this story we got Magneto fighting to save the mutants with a group trying to kill off the heroes. Also Genosha gets blown up, one of the saddest metaphors for South Africa (then Israel) to ever appear in comics gets a "I planted bombs to kill off these guys" send-off. Oh poor mutants. You will never get another Claremont.

Crossposts: https://marlowe1.livejournal.com/2309438.html

91. Ms. Marvel No Normal by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona - This is the storyline that introduced Kamala to the world as Ms. Marvel and while the first issue is taking great pains to establish the character (she's a Muslim. She likes to smell bacon. Her parents are strict. Her best friend wears a hijab but by choice. Someone gives her alcohol and she gets angry when she finds out) that sometime seem a little overwhelming, all the wonderful stuff about Ms. Marvel was already in that first issue as blatant as the story was about establishing most of her personality (the fan fiction stuff and the fact that she wanted the big boot version of Ms. Marvel costume are wonderful and they never lost their charm under Wilson - although there's a Spiderman comic where it seems forced). So what else is there to say about this comic beyond how much you really should read it? I don't know, but I do think that Marvel is having a bit of a renaissance with character driven story telling instead of the old fashioned fight the bad guy superhero stuff and I rally think that this is the title that started it.

92.One Punch Man vol 2 by Yusuke Marata - In between reading this book and writing this review, I caught the show on Netflix and damn, it's great. Can't believe I missed this book until now but that's fine. I get to catch up on it. So this starts out with the story of the secret genetically modified group that Saitama just trashes and then realizes that he missed bargain day at the supermarket. Also the anti-work terrorist group makes up the end and they seem like broad parodies of student groups and a little too broad. It's fascinating in the same way that watching old 70s shows about "women's libbers" is fascinating. The conversation is entering society but people are purposefully missing the point (and this is the conversation about why we all have to work so fucking much. And apparently China is getting into the game as well as Bojack Horseman is popular among the "funeral culture" that considers Pepe the Frog in his original peeing all over himself form as an icon). Anyhow there's a super awesome killer dude who destroys that group and then Saitama just wants to stay out of it. That's the plot. The big faced crazy bug eyed fighting is also the draw but you can get that in a lot of manga. This is special.

93. Moon Knight: Lunatic by Jeff Lemire & Greg Smallwood - Just because I said that Marvel is going through a bit of a renaissance doesn't mean that they aren't putting out shit. This one came out last year and it's that old fucking trope of the main character waking up in a mental institution and being told that he's totally schizophrenic and everything in the series is just bullshit. It can be done well I think or I suppose or maybe theoretically you can see all the characters in a different light, but it's fucking old. It was old when Buffy did it and disgustingly inane when Smallville did it and there was a superhero vs. zombie series where it was kind of fun but only because I hadn't read the rest of the series. And this time I don't give a fuck about Moon Knight. There are some comic book characters that are established as part of the universe but weren't really famous when I was reading comics. When I was a teenager I think there was an attempt to start a Moon Knight comic and I think it was in the cool trippy shit genre of story telling that Marvel liked to do alongside Moonshadow and Blood, or maybe it was just normal. Anyhow I don't remember Moon Knight so this is supposed to sell me Moon Knight.

Instead it gave me some bullshit about Moon Knight being a dude who had a very elaborate fantasy life but is really a mental patient. But oh no, wait, he's actually Moon Knight and he's being fooled. Because that's the way these things always go.

94.Spiderman: Miles Morales by Brian Michael Bendis & Sara Pichelli - Like Steve Moffat, I sometimes defend Bendis but it's usually a weak defense that goes along the lines of he's not THAT bad. In both cases, there are enough great moments and stories to appreciate him when he's good. Bendis was great with Powers but utter shit with Civil War. I think that Miles Morales was his character when he was doing Ultimate Spiderman and it's fun to see Miles Morales in the Marvel Universe but please for the love of G-d LET SOMEONE ELSE WRITE THIS CHARACTER!!!!

I didn't mind this titles until the grandmother showed up. I even liked the fat friend who knows his secret identity and is his best friend. That seemed to be the character from the new Spiderman movie like revamped Peter Parker went and stole Miles Morales' best friend in the movies. There was even some great stuff about him trying to balance school and work and even the changes in illustration styles from realistic to cartoony were pure joy, especially when Morales meets Parker Spiderman and wants approval.

Only these good points made the crappy parts that much crappier. A blogger gets really excited that Morales is black because his costume ripped and while that echoes the diversity discussions we've been having about genre, it still seems like it's way too obvious to really be done well. Ok ok ok Bendis, you are writing a minority superhero and you've been doing it for a long time. Take your cookie and make the story work.

And then we get the broadly stereotypical Hispanic Grandmother who is trying to whip her grandson into shape with tough love. She could have been a decent character in another writer's hands but Bendis just feels lazy like she's completely one note and just there to get in Miles' way. Even when Kamala shows up to see if he wants to patrol (a clumsy cameo if there ever was one since what the hell is she going all the way out to Brooklyn to "patrol" with Miles? And no, nothing I've seen in either characters makes it believable that she's got a crush on him and wants to date him) she's just kind of there to support his Tough Hispanic Grandmother. And then she disappears - back to Jersey City. I read another story with Kamala in Spiderman that's even worse when it comes to capturing the character but I think that Bendis' weakness is even more obvious when you realize that Morales comes off as a much more interesting character when he shows up in Ms. Marvel than he does in his own title. Not even going to compare cameo Morales to cameo Kamala because cameo Kamala is the worst, but G. Willow Wilson should find many equally talented writers and just take over the whole damn company.

Crossposts: http://marlowe1.livejournal.com/2280008.html

61. Sex Criminals Vol 3: Three the Hard Way by Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky - It's very strange to call a book sex criminals these days. Back in the 70s, you could be transgressive with the phrase because a sex criminal could be anyone from Oscar Wilde to Roman Polanski and since the 70s came out of a repressive 50s and challenging 60s, there was a great deal of confusion over what was accepted as a sex crime. This remained pretty much the same into the 80s where the flip side of the equation happened where all the sex crimes were terrible. AIDS paved the way for a lot of acceptance of gay people only after Reagan murdered them by not taking the AIDS crisis seriously. But the 70s was a time when NAMBLA could make an argument that they should be accepted into Pride Parades and outright predators like Jimmy Savile joked about all the teenage girls that he was raping in a wink wink nudge nudge manner.

So now even Rush Limbaugh gets that the difference between sexuality and sex crime is consent. Of course, he doesn't outright accept that belief.

I write about the title because I don't remember much of the book beyond the fact that these people can stop time by having sex. And then they commit crime, so they are sex criminals. The only memorable chapter is about an agent who is asexual and how lonely that felt growing up since everyone else was having a great time and she just couldn't be bothered.

62. Terrible Virtue by Ellen Feldman - I did not think that I would like this book as much as I did. Margaret Sanger is still a divisive figure even among people who love her overriding mission. There's that combination of ignorance and the certainty of her enemies that has tarnished but even though 90% of the "Margaret Sanger was a genocidal Nazi creep" talk is bullshit there was the kernel of truth in the fact that she did like eugenics and she did promote it. Not all eugenicists were the psychopaths that inhabit historical dramas these days who are busy sterilizing teenagers and denying health care to black people (can I mention right here that The Knick is a slog through a hellish cultural judgment where all the assholes win every time?). So even though she is being political when she asks for black leaders to help her distribute birth control and birth control information throughout the black community because she doesn't want to be accused of genocide and that got taken out of context (as in she really is in favor of genocide and just wants to cover her tracks) there are other things that can't be taken out of context.

This book doesn't necessarily give us both sides of the Sanger debate but it does change perspectives to the point that one perspective is Sanger telling her story and the other one is her family, friends and lovers grinding an axe at everything she's done wrong. Her lawyer mocks her for wearing black dresses like a nun even though he admires the strategy of hiding her free love tendencies. Her children are neglected and her husband is left by the wayside. And yet it really makes for a compelling narrative even as it circles around the plot.

63. Radioactive Spider Gwen: Greater Power by Jason Latour & Robby Rodriguez - This one plays more with the alternate universe Spidermans. Peter Parker is still dead in her world but Harry Osborne became Green Goblin in order to take revenge. Spiderwoman shows up and is pregnant (and really fun). Daredevil is an evil lawyer for Kingpin and Frank Castle is in the cops but he's still obsessive. There are also more lizards. The part that I really liked was how she actually has a heart-to-heart talk with Harry Osborne about how they are both guilty over Peter Parker. It's really pretty damn good and finally Gwen gets a personality.

64. Sandman Dream Country by Neil Gaiman - Sandman still holds up. I do have less affection for Gaiman these days because I read his short story collections and they were clever but not decent. But the Sandman comics are still amazing. This is the one with Calliope being held prisoner as the muse of a horror writer who experiences great literary success from raping a muse in his attic. There are some very pointed bits about how he always thought of himself as a feminist and the question "where do you get your ideas?" floating around. It's a writerly fantasy from a writer who was still a fun cult writer at the time. The beats of the story of the success almost overwhelm the horrific aspects, but then again that fantasy of writing anything you want including epic poetry and screenplays and being successful and richer at everything with everyone asking how you did it is a fantasy in every amateur writer's head. Anyhow there's also teh Midsummers Nights Dream story and the cat story. There's also the one where the character from Doom Patrol is very sad. And dies. I didn't like that one.

Crossposts: http://marlowe1.livejournal.com/2277558.html

32. Ufology by James Tynion & Noah Yuenkel - I liked this book. I didn't get this book. I liked this book but it felt like Lost in the middle when there were all these great mysteries and like fuck if you were ever going to figure them out. There are aliens who keep wearing the bodies of humans and there are a lot of fires and something has something to do with the past. I find it very strange mostly because it appears like it's a standalone book even though there seems to be some kind of a long series with a bunch of sequels to explain it. I think I would have liked it better if it felt like a complete story and not some attempt to create a multi-part series.

33. The Flowers of Evil, vol 3 by Shuzo Oshimi - I see this one as having potential even though it does present the classic male fantasy dilemma of two gorgeous women just totally want to be with him. One is really sad and not fleshed out at all and the other one is pissed off. The pissed off one is the more interesting one of course, and so when he decides to leave town and go over the mountain, she's the one he goes with. But then the boring crying one comes along to bring him back. The back cover blurb says that this is much more true than most books where teenage boys are tortured by angry over-sexed teenage girls. I did not know that this was a genre.