Radiant Comics

Just back from the local comic shop for the week and I picked up two new comics.

Supernatural Origins 3

City of Others 3

Plus I picked up a hardcover.

“Silverfish” by David Lapham. I’m a fan of his “Stray Bullets” and “Murder Me Dead” so I grabbed this new one. I’ll let you know how it is.

Meanwhile here are a few things I’ve been reading.

“Girls” 3&4 by the Luna Brothers

Last week I picked up two trade paperback collections (numbers 3 and 4) of
“Girls” by the Luna brothers. Since I already have TPBs number 1 and 2 then I obviously like the story. How are trades 3 and 4? Just as good.

“Girls” is a “survival horror” story. I don’t know who coined that term but I first read it in conjunction with video games. Now it applies to books and movies too. It basically means that the story is simple. People trying to survive a bad situation. The bad situation in “Girls” is this: in a small town in the USA a hot naked girl suddenly appears out of the woods. She finds a sympathetic young man to take her home and seduces him. Then she lays some eggs that hatch into more hot naked girls. The girls proceed to go around and try kill the women in town and seduce the men. The townspeople figure out what’s happening and try to escape only to find their entire town has been encapsulated in a giant impenetrable energy bubble. Now the townspeople just want to survive this horror. Hence the name of the genre.

The book I would compare this to the most is “The Walking Dead”. Where “The Walking Dead” has zombies “Girls” has girls. The people in “Girls” seem a lot more mean and prone to panic than in “The Walking Dead”. Plus the gender divide of the girls killing only women makes for an interesting dynamic. It’s bloody violent too. The story is simple so it’s really about who lives and who dies.

I must warn you that I’m not really a fan of the art in “Girls”. The “no line weight” style plus the coloring remind me of a badly rotoscoped cartoon. I generally find it ugly. But the storytelling was good and the story interesting and that was enough for me to overlook my distaste for the art style. Don’t be afraid of how it looks if you’re an old school guy like me. I also recommend starting with book one because there are no real recaps as the story goes along. Book four is the conclusion of the story so you can read the whole thing from end to end right now. Give it a go.

Frank Miller’s “Ronin” issues 1-6

Here is another comic that has been sitting on my shelf since 1983. I remember re-reading it a couple of years after it came out but that still puts it at twenty years since I’ve looked at this comic. I must say that the paper it was printed on is great. It looks as crisp and white as the day it was printed. No old yellowing newsprint here.

I always think of “Ronin” as the forgotten Frank Miller work. Sure it has had a recent reprinting in a trade from DC comics to glom off of the advertising for the movie of Frank Miller’s “300” but I never hear anyone mention “Ronin”. It never comes up in conversation with my comic loving friends or any of the web sites or magazines about comics that I read. “Ronin” was published after Frank Miller’s star making run on Daredevil but before his much lauded “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”. I decided to give it a read.

“Ronin” is the story of a samurai who’s master was killed by a demon so said samurai (now a masterless samurai a “ronin”) goes after and kills the demon. But not before the demon curses them and ronin and demon are trapped in a magic sword. Flash forward to the 21st century (which was the future when this book was written) in a dystopian, sci-fi, depressed NYC where the demon and the ronin are let loose again. Now you’ve got it.

In re-reading the series I can kinda see why “Ronin” has been forgotten. The first three issues or so of the series are quite ordinary. Everything is straight forward and all of the characters are one dimensional and act exactly like you think they will. There is not much here. But the story is designed that way. I think that part of the story is supposed to be transparent because it sets up the last three issues.

It’s the second half of the story that things get interesting. Expectations are turned on their heads and characters expand and start to do unexpected things. The story takes some twists and goes to places not evident in the first three issues. This is good stuff.

The problem is that each issue is 48 pages and that is 100-150 pages before things get interesting. I almost stopped reading with the second issue but I was enjoying the hammock I was lying in so I kept going. I imagine many a person has started reading “Ronin” only to put it down because they were bored. This can really make a work forgotten.

Overall there is plenty of nice Frank Miller work in “Ronin”. It’s an interesting story eventually and is worth checking out as long as you know that the second half is much better than the first.

The Ministry of Space issues 1-3

Another series I pulled off of my shelf to give a second read to. The first two issues came out in 2001 but it took until 2004 to get the third issue out. It’s written by Warren Ellis with art by Chris Weston and colors by Laura DePuy.

You gotta love those English and their love/hate relationship with their government and empire. Ministry of Space is an alternate history tale in which a World War 2 visionary S.O.B. English air corps officer uses betrayal and deceit to capture all of the German rocket scientists at the end of the war. With these scientists and a secret black budget he creates the British space program that far outstrips any other space program. Is that good or bad is the question that hangs in the air throughout this series.

That is about the extent of the plot but this comic is about much more than plot. It’s about the glory of the British Empire and the price paid for that glory. It’s about borderline madmen who push the empire forward despite the costs. It’s about showing in a step by step way how individuals effect history (the “Great Man” hypothesis). And it’s about the rich visuals that Weston brings to illustrate all those cool spaceships and their evolution. Hell, even the guys standing around in uniforms and suits look cool.

Everybody brings their best work to “Ministry of Space” and I like it a lot. I’m a big fan of history so this is right up my alley. It is just a lot of fun. Recommended.

Back from a trip to the local comic shop. I picked up one comics and two trades:

Walking Dead- 38

Unlike some of my friends I am not getting bored with this comic. Sometimes when a book is consistent people get bored with it. I think people like when a book goes from good to bad to good around and around. It make them feel like there is more to get excited about. Anyway this has ben a consistently good comic.

Girls “Survival” TPB (3)

Girls “Extinction” TPB (4)

I liked the first two trades of this series so I went and bought two more.

And now for some reviews of recent stuff.

Phonogram “Rue Britannia” TPB

Those British love their music and their youthful days of going to clubs and listening to live bands. I’ve seen quite a few movies and read quite a few comics that deal with this setting and subject. I think it’s a genre now. Nostalgia is always big in these types of stories and Phonogram is no exception.

I have always listened to music and own hundreds of CDs (plus hundreds of albums in other formats before CDs and now hundreds in mp3 form) yet I was never into going and seeing live bands. So even though this type of story is usually drenched in nostalgia I kinda miss out on the emotional resonance. But I like such tales anyway because I enjoy stories about people and their passions.

Phonogram sets itself apart from the rest of the genre by dealing with magic. Not a “we duel each other with ectoplasmic blasts” kind of magic but an “Earth Mother magic that takes place outside of a normal person’s perception but still affects the world” kind of magic. In the world of Phonogram magic influences music and music influences magic. The two are tied up in this tale.

Phonogram is the story of a “Phonomancer” named David Kohl. He’s as much an aging hipster as a magician and is really more about music than magic. He used to be big into mid-ninties Brit-Pop and those are the days he’s nostalgic for. But his memories are being changed and he now likes bands he never did before and can’t remember some others he used to like. Someone is magically messing with time and music and he wants to find out who and why. He also does not want to lose the nostalgia for his favorite bands. All the normal “is nostalgia good or bad” stuff is dealt with as he progresses on his journey.

Usually this isn’t the type of magic I like to read stories about. I like my magic to have well defined rules. I find that magic stories without any rules tend to be amorphous and the magic suits whatever purpose the author wants at that moment regardless of logic or storytelling. There was some of that going on here. By that I mean there were times when I just didn’t know what the author meant by all the magic mumbo jumbo. But y’know what? The ending made it for me. I really appreciate a good ending and Phonogram’s pulled all the vague magic stuff together and made sense of it.

All in all I liked Phonogram. I think it might be one of those stories that gets better with the second read. So if your into comics, nostalgia, music, or magic give it a read.

Tricked by Alex Robinson

And speaking of things that get better with the second read I pulled this off my shelf this week. I am a big fan of “Box Office Poison” by Alex Robinson so when “Tricked”, his second book, came out last year I immediately picked it up. And I was disappointed with it. Not that it was bad I just didn’t like it as much as BOP. But I suspected my own expectations might have colored my perception of “Tricked” so I decided to reserve judgement until I could read it again sometime in the future. Welcome to the future.

Tricked is a 350 page comic with multiple running narratives. BOP was a loosely structured story that meandered and seemed to go where ever on a whim. BOP imitated life. I liked that about BOP. Tricked is very tightly structured and that took me by surprise the first time I read it. It has four running narratives:

1-A poor little rich rock star who is miserable, can’t write songs anymore, and has a hard time dealing with life despite his wealth and fame.

2- A young waitress and her coworkers who are living their lives and looking for love.

3- A semi-slimey guy who works in a baseball card store and forges autographs for a living.

4- A fan of the rock star who has gone off his meds and is becoming deluded.

Each story was separate but you know they are all going to crash together in the end. There are even chapter numbers that count down. I was totally distracted by this plot structure the first time through and had a hard time paying attention to the little things as I went along because I just wanted to see the inevitable crash. The second time through I could enjoy the ride.

Most of the large cast of characters have their own journeys going on unrelated to the inevitable crash at the end. It was these journeys that were more enjoyable the second time through. I still didn’t find the poor little rock star character too interesting but some of the others were and I could take my time with them.

One strange thing about this book is though it is a story that takes place in the real world and is about real life all the names of places and people are made up. Unlike Phonogram which references real music and musicians all of the names of musicians, songs, athletes, and places in Tricked were fictional. And a lot of time is spent discussing these music and athletes. I found this odd and not very effective. It took me out of the moment because although I didn’t get a lot of the music references in Phonogram I knew they made sense to someone. All of the talk about sports figures and musicians in Tricked made no sense to anyone. Why was it there at all? I always found it strange. Small quibble.

I’d say the second time around is the charm for Tricked. I still like BOP better but what does that matter? Tricked stands on its own as a nice piece of work. I even recommend reading the climax first if you think you’re going to be as distracted as I was by wanting to see the crash at the end. You can make your first read your second read that way.

Another Wednesday night trip to the comic shop this week. I picked up two comics and a trade:

Ex machine – 29

Rex Mundi Vol 2 – 6

Phonogram “Rue Britannia” TPB

The trade is from Image comics and I don’t really know what it is about. It’s in black and white and from what I gather from the back cover has to do with music and magic. I’ll let you know how it is.

Episode Twenty Two of my reviews of recent DC Comics.

Secret Six: Six Degrees of Devastation TPB – I’ve heard it said over the years that “The villain is usually more interesting than the hero”. I’ve never agreed with this. I usually find villains dull, unbelievable, and often ineffective. They just get to chew the scenery more often than heros and that can be fun. Villains also get less face time in a hero’s book so they can be more open to interpretation and a reader can read more into a villain if that reader is so inclined. Have you guessed? This book is about villains.

I found it mediocre and uninteresting. I only made it forty pages in. The Secret Six are a group of bad guys who take assignments and steal to make money. They are also at war with another bigger group of villains. All the villains seemed the same to me. They were all constantly hamming it up to establish their villainous bona fides. I didn’t find a single character interesting nor was I interested in the plot. If you like stories about villains you might find something interesting here since it is not a badly crafted book but I didn’t.

Crisis Aftermath: The Battle for Bludhaven TPB – Man these DC epic crossover stories make a mess of things. Suffice it to say that Bludhaven is a city next to Gotham (who knew?) that got hit by a chemical bomb and now is walled off and out of bounds. So now we have a government super team kicking people out of the city, some kind of evil government plot to make more super guys, the Society of Evil sending teams into the city for some reason, the Atomic Knights trying to help people get out of the city, other people outside the city walls trying to get in, one super hero outside the walls trying to go in and figure out the governments evil plan, and the Teen Titans not doing anything. And when the various groups aren’t killing each other they’re debating each other!

At least I made it sixty pages in this time. It was a two page debate between Firebrand and the Teen Titans over whether the Titans should actually do something that broke me.

There is some good stuff in here. The actual super hero action was well done. It was all the secret government conspiracy and debating stuff that I thought was awful. I gotta go read something good now.

On this week’s trip to the comic shop I picked up two comics:

StormWatch Post Human Division – 8

Strangers in Paradise – 90 (The last issue of the series!)

Plus hardcover madness continues with:

Scarlet Traces: The Great Game

I bought Scarlet Traces: The Great Game as a mini-series last year and liked it a lot. So I went and got the first hardcover “Scarlet Traces” book. Now I have the second series in hardcover to match. And it was only fifteen bucks minus my discount. Good show.

Last week I bought a hardcover graphic novel called “Exit Wounds”. It’s author, Rutu Modan, is from Israel and that is where the story is set. The plot stars a taxi driver who is contacted by a woman. This woman tells him that among the dead in bombing is an unidentified man who may be his estranged father.

That’s the plot but the book is really about our protagonist and his relationship to his father. It’s not a good relationship but he begins to see things a little more through others’ eyes as the book progresses. Others begin to see things though his eyes too.

I liked this book. It didn’t start out that way. I found the initial, I dunno, forty pages (it’s a 172 page book) clumsy and awkward. I wasn’t fond of the storytelling or drawing and was having a hard time getting into it. But then it got better. Not in any dramatic way that you can notice just by flipping the pages but in a subtle way. The drawing and storytelling improved and I got absorbed into it. I think this is the author’s first long comic work and that could easily explain how she got better as she went along. If she didn’t do the pages in numerical order than I have no explanation for you.

There is nothing typical in our protagonist’s relationship with his dad and his dad is never actually in the story. Just the wake his dad leaves in the world behind him. Our hero wanders through this wake trying to figure out is his father is dead or alive. He sees some things that confirm his opinion of his father and other things that don’t. His father’s character is still a bit of a mystery at the end of the book to both his son and us. This is a good thing. The story came to a satisfying emotional ending without any simplistic wrap up of our hero’s father woes.

If you like real life stories check it out.

I finally got around to reading “Conan: Hall of the Dead and Other Stories”. The fourth volume in the Dark Horse Conan series. No real life here as this book chronicles the adventures of Conan’s youth. Conan is about 18 and living as a theif in a city. He’s arrogant, brash and a lot of people don’t like him. I wouldn’t even call him a hero in these tales. But they’re good stories.

I liked them because they’re fun, rollicking, and wide open. There is an enthusiasm to these stories that was missing in Conan’s final days at Marvel comics. The printing in this hardcover edition is absolutely great too.

Now I’m going to take a few moments to sing the praises of the “color artist” on these stories: Dave Stewart. It’s his work that really pulls the book together and makes it work. There is no inker on the book so the colorist is finishing the pencils with his coloring. This is not easy to do because usually a penciler doesn’t think about his work as finished (normally that’s the inker’s job). Due to the sketchiness of some of the penciled pages in this book I know it wasn’t always easy to make them look “finished” but Dave Stewart’s coloring succeeds in doing just that nearly all of the time. He makes it not only look finished but look good. Kudos.

So if you haven’t checked out any Conan in a while this is a really nice volume to pick up.

A little bit better week at the comic shop I picked up three comics:

The Lone Ranger 6 – A nice western.

Buffy Season Eight 4- Let’s see how the first story wraps up

Supernatural Origins 2 – I liked the first issue.

Plus I picked up a hardcover.

Exit Wounds” by Rutu Modan

It’s published by Drawn and Quarterly. It looks good. I’ll let you know how it is. I still haven’t read the Conan hardcover I bought last week. Sometimes I like to let a book hang around unread for a while. It gives me something to look forward to reading.

Week Twenty One of my reviews of recent DC Comics.

Manhunter “Trial by Fire” TPB – This collects issues 6-14 of the series “Manhunter”

After reviewing comics for which I only have a few parts of the whole story I’m glad to read nine issue in a row. Manhunter is a new version of an old super hero. Now Manhunter is a woman and a federal attorney working out of LA. Plus she doesn’t mind killing the evil people she battles.

All in all a good series. The first story in the book mixes super heroics with courtroom drama. It doesn’t have the detail of an episode of Law and Order but captures the flavor in an interesting way. The second story deals with some others who used the Manhunter name in the past and leads into DC’s Omac project story line that happened a couple of years ago. That was the less satisfying part of the book but it wasn’t bad.

Manhunter uses a special staff that has super powers but she doesn’t know where it came from or what it can do. It surprises her with new powers every now and again. An old plotter’s trick to create some mystery for sure but not used as a crutch.

Being a DC comic and collecting nine issues there are, of course, four pencilers and three inkers. But they are all competent with similar styles so the story telling doesn’t suffer. The coloring is also solid and helps to unify things. Over all Manhunter is a nice effort and offers some solid super hero action.

Warren Ellis: Blackgas 1-3 – Not a DC comic but an Avatar comic this was passed on to me by a friend. I bought the first issue last year when it can out but not the other two.

Blackgas is a zombie story that takes place on a small island off of the New England coast. There is lots of gore, violence and flesh eating zombies but it left me a bit cold. There is nothing wrong with it I just found all the explosions and gunshots dull. I liked the first issue best before all the action happened as they were letting us get to know the characters. After the zombie action started the characters no longer mattered as they were just fighting for their lives as in every zombie movie you’ve ever seen. For zombie fans only I say.