Say what one may about Alan Moore's current ongoing role as The Genius Who Hates Everything Including His Own Genius, he is widely lauded for his past work and rightly so. He also has a ton of work that has not yet been dragged into the mainstream and of which the comics fan in your life might never have heard. I had never heard of Promethea, anyway, when The Boyf pulled out a TPB of the first volume and said, "Oh, here's a book you might like." Like? I burned more midnight oil on this book than on any other in the last decade. I'll go ahead and link to all the books right here: Promethea: Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 and Book 4.
Promethea is about a woman who finds herself possessed (or channeling, or manifesting, or perhaps graduating into) a super-powered alternate persona and struggling to understand how and why this is happening. In some ways it's a retelling of Wonder Woman and in others it's a spiritual/psychological mirror held up to the bulging physicality of Thor. It's got everything: action in the streets, cross-dressing, a slightly dystopian future, previous incarnations shoving their way onto the page and chapter upon chapter of spiritual journey. Best of all, it's all intricately and hypnotically illustrated by none other than J.H. Williams III.
I'd argue that Williams' art on the new Batwoman book is more mature in some ways, yes, but when I read that current title I can easily see his work on Promethea reflected in the big two-page spreads. I can't imagine a better gift for the Kate Kane fanatic in your life.
You're reading Hark! A Vagrant, right? It's in your RSS feed or your Atom feed or maybe you just sit there refreshing the page obsessively, day after day, with a calendrical reminder in case you forget, right?
OK, maybe that's just me.
My first semester of grad school is over and NaNo is over and that means back to reading and thinking about comics, online and off. It's also time to spend money as a demonstration of affection and that means the return of Stocking Stuffers at Pink Kryptonite! Behold as I combine them all by recommending Kate Beaton's most recent collection of new and previous work: Hark! A Vagrant.
Beaton's work is "cartoony" in the very best sense: evocative and expressive and deceptively simple. It's also incredibly sharp and literate, a bit like Bugs Bunny with an advanced humanities degree. I cannot get enough of it - some favorites are here, here, here, here and here, though this one is also pretty freaking great and more than a little delightfully queer - and this book features work we've seen before and work that is totally new! I am especially pleased when some brilliant corner of the Internet colonizes fleshspace. Give it, now, to the person on your shopping list who wryly smiles when you allude to Nancy Drew.
My local comics shop is so ready to rob me blind in September: they got their hands on some beautiful, colorful order forms for the DC relaunch and have made them available to customers so that suckers like me can give them all our money next month. I am extremely glad they've done so, too, because there are some comics I seriously want - and some comics I seriously want to avoid.
After the jump, I list all the comics to which I'm subscribing in the new world of DC comics and why. Am I missing anything good? For that matter, am I dissing anything good?
I am woefully behind on my comics. I don't know any other way to say it: I am so behind that I am full of woe. Can you hear my lamentations? No, but you can read them. The bottom line is that I am a staff member at a university which is a bit like working tech in a stage production: when the lights are up the and the curtain is down is when things backstage are positively bustling. My point here is that summers are a busy time and this summer especially so. I did find time to sit down and steal an hour the other day during which I read the most-dated unread issues of my current favorite comics: American Vampire, Detective Comics, Ruse and the absolutely magnificent Xombi.
Does that last title make your pulse quicken? Does it bring a flush of desire to your cheek? It should. Good gods but it should. It is absolutely this year's American Vampire: a bolt-from-the-blue shock of stark quality. It's a comic so good it makes one look at the other books on the shelf and wonder what the hell their creative teams are doing all damn day. Issue #3 came out in May and issue #4 is sitting on the shelf right now and if you have anything like a soul you will go buy them from a store that deserves your dollars to show some pittance of gratitude for what we're being given in its pages.
I am also absolutely terrified for Xombi's future. I don't mean I fear the contents of its narrative; I mean that a part of me is pretty sure it's getting quietly cancelled in the September reboot.
According to Big Shiny Robot!, six more DC reboot covers have been revealed by someone fiddling with URLs to see what they could see. Included in their list is a cover for Batwoman #1, which they take as confirmation that the J.H. Williams III co-penned ongoing is really going to happen after all. Given the theories I've seen in which people claim the reboot is an opportunity for DC to kill this title while no one's looking, I think that would be mighty nice.
One problem: isn't that the cover we've already seen for the various earlier launch dates of Batwoman #1? It's also distinct from the others by virtue of having credits and the logo already on the page. Yes, it shares some design elements with the (really beautiful) cover for Detective Comics #1 and there's a way to read that as a hint or tribute or allusion or other signal of some sort, but I think that's drawing an exceptionally long bow. I hate to break it to BSR and their friend with the probing fingers but I don't think that image is news; I think that image is old news.
I would love nothing more than to be wrong about this and I will celebrate my error in the streets if this title gets confirmed and launched.
["6 More DC Relaunch Covers Leaked!" - www.bigshinyrobot.com]
The latest issue of Grant Morrison's highly enjoyable Batman Incorporated is out and everyone I know who's reading this comic has said of it, simply, "Finally, I feel like I know where this story is going!"
My reaction to that, having read the book yesterday, is... really? You do? I definitely picked up a sense of momentum having begun to build but I still don't know exactly what's going on.
Peter David is absolutely one of my favorite writers in comics at the moment and X-Factor has been a consistently entertaining book for years now. It's one of the books I'm most excited to see show up in my bag: like, bounce up and down and make squeeeee noises levels of excited.
Issue #217 was well outside of what one might expect of an action-y comic such as this but it was absolutely classic Peter David: that mix of retro soliloquy and modern sensibility that leads iconic characters to remind us that when the present was still the future it was supposed to be a lot more interesting and advanced than it is. Throw in that great scene of Monet taking on the protesters to remind them that plenty of Muslims are on their side, too, and it became about as fun as a soapbox comic can get.
It was pretty into that soapbox, though, and that made the surprise ending all the more shocking. Peter David didn't just use it to present another great progressive perspective on recent events; he let the delivery of that perspective lull us into reading for ideas instead of actions and then, blam (literally), he pulled a fast one and hit us with a cliffhanger.
So what about #218? I only care about two things in that whole issue - just two! - and one of them is as spoilery as it gets but it's all I've got room in my brain to think about.
My reactions to these two titles, which kick-off Marvel's big summer storyline, Fear Itself, couldn't be more different. I closed Fear Itself: Book of the Skull and thought, "Damn! That Brubaker can write the hell out of some crazy Nazis! Also, nice of Namor to stuff his bikini for us."
When I closed Matt Fraction's Fear Itself #1 I had two conflicting reactions: "Oooooh, pretty..." vs. "Hurrah. Another Thor book. Hang on, I'm sure I've got a party hat with little horns on the side around here somewhere. Oh, that's right, I still have the one I bought last year for Siege and never bothered to take out of the package."
Read on for more thoughts on two very different comics!
I was browsing the shelves of my local shop last week and happened to notice Charismagic because of its beautifully illustrated cover. I picked it up and a member of the staff nearby said, helpfully, "Real magic exists and it involves Las Vegas." My mind immediately latched onto it as a successor to my favorite doomed-too-young title of recent years - Spellgame - and I bought issues #0 and #1 to dive in with both feet.
To be honest, there are ways in which the writing is really mangled - literally, sometimes the words on the page don't seem to add up to language - but the art in this book is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I've added it to my bag anyway. In a lot of ways it struck me more as the new Elephantmen than the new Spellgame but that's based purely on its lush, dark, dense visuals and its sense of characters who are aloof and brooding and aware of their status as Others in our midst.
Yet again it's super-easy for members of the queer communities to see themselves as the shunned and powerful outsiders on the page and - yet again - that just totally works for me.
I can hear you now, and I know what you're saying: Surely, you say, Klarion cannot be reviewing a comic that just came out yesterday. He's supposed to be reviewing something that came out, like, seven weeks ago. Well, cats and kittens, the simple truth is that I am all over some Young Avengers - The Children's Crusade and the moment I saw that in my bag on Wednesday evening I carted it home and read it immediately.
So what do I think? The short, non-spoilery version is that I think shit is about to get exceptionally real and I am thrilled. Allan Heinberg delivers some great stuff in this book. It changes things - or at least seems to change them - for the whole Marvel universe, not just this one team of youngsters. This is the kind of crossover event I like, where the putative stars are the ones driving the action in a way that impacts the overall narrative rather than just unleashing some big names to stomp around for a while, sell some tie-ins and leave without much of anything happening. It's a solid read and it builds to an inevitable ending that still makes an impression.
For the spoilers-heavy review, click the shiny blue candy-like button.
Watch this now as I have no idea how official it is, or how long it will be up. It's actually a bit more smoothly edited and longer than the footage we saw last night at the Green Lantern movie panel.
A few weeks ago my local comics shop posted on Facebook a photo of the first in a four-issue mini-series they had bought from a patron looking to unload some old books: a 1991 revival of the old The Wild Wild West television series. Please do not make the mistake of associating this comic book with the horrendous film from 1999. Don't get me wrong, I will take literally any opportunity to admire Will Smith, for whom I've always sported a weakness, but that movie was bad and misinterpreted, ignored or otherwise squandered everything good about the original show.
This comic book, from the now-defunct Millenium Publications, is based on the original 1960's TV show, a unique mishmash of old west, science fiction and knockout finishes. That show was more like a comic book than any other property original to television that I can readily name - something the makers made explicit with the illustrated bumpers around commercial breaks - and it turns out the adaptation to comics is a genuine treat, a last episode to be savored by the part of me that's still eight years old and watching reruns on the old console TV.
Review: Stormwatch #1
Stormwatch #1, the first of DC's new 52 to feature LGBT characters (before the reboot, at least) is out to add a new cosmic dimension to the post-Flashpoint universe. There isn't much to be said for our beloved broship yet (though the last page shows a handshake between Apollo and Midnighter and promises a "Big Bang"), but the issue is a great gauge for whether or not you'll want to stick with the series to see the romance purportedly unfold....
