Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
What can I say? These are some of the best @$$holes working today:
Howdy, fellow TalkBackers. Cormorant here, and we at the League of @$$holes owe you an apology. In recent months, we've grown increasingly annoyed at some of Marvel's policies and directions, and we may have gone overboard in speaking out against them. In retrospect, it's really not fair. After all, this is the company that, against all odds, managed to take the flagging, unpopular FANTASTIC FOUR and turn it into a fan-favorite for the first time in two decades!
How could we have ever doubted them?!
FABLES #14
Writer: Bill Willingham
Artist: Mark Buckingham
Publisher: Vertigo / DC Comics
Reviewed by Cormorant
FABLES has been through three major storylines now, and a one-shot to boot. One of the cooler evolutions of the series: the leads in the book's ensemble cast have become established enough that they don't necessarily need an event – a murder, attempted coup, or blackmail scheme – to initiate a story. Like all the best fictional creations, their interrelationships have taken on a life of their own and they're now perfectly capable of instigating stories themselves. There's something very satisfying when characters reach that level, so hats off to creator Bill Willingham for creating, or rather re-creating from classic fairy tales, such a likeable cast of rogues. Speaking of which…
Everybody's gotta love Bigby Wolf by now. Magicked into Bogart-esque human form, this former bane of the Three Little Pigs is Willingham's most memorable character in the series (followed immediately by mayoral aid, Snow White). As Fabletown's top cop, Bigby's the classic gumshoe Рcanny, cynical, and pretty damn tough to boot Рbut it's his unrequited romantic interest in Snow White that lends him his humanity. Now we all know that when unrequited love gets requited, audiences start yawning, but I think Willingham will avoid that particular pitfall. He doesn't do storybook romance clich̩s Рin fact, subverting them is practically the central tenet of FABLES Рand I say that Bigby and Snow are the couple to watch in comics.
Ah, but even as Bigby's trying to turn up the heat, schemes are a'hatchin' in the background, and this time it looks like Bluebeard's about to upgrade from scheming rogue to full-blown villain. Bluebeard's great. Physically formidable, sexually aggressive, and enticingly bad, he's just what you want in an antagonist. And he's tired of operating under the thumb of Snow and Bigby. He's even picked up a lady partner this time, the Bonnie to his Clyde, making for a sort of mirror image to the Snow and Bigby duo. I don't want to give away the identity of Bluebeard's partner-in-crime, but let's just that even though her most endearing feature is her golden locks, it's won't be her hair that'll draw guys to this issue's naughty, naughty cover in droves.
Beyond the appealing character interaction of the leads, witty and uncensored as always, there are any number of interesting subplots working. We get an update on Rose Red, currently managing the Fables Farm in the wake of its uprising, hints of growing bitterness towards Bluebeard from a humiliated Prince Charming, and a charming little episode of espionage from a Lilliputian riding a talking, saddled mouse. If this is in any way starting to sound like it resembles too closely the fairy tales from which the characters were drawn, rest assured, the issue has all the sex and violence you've come to love in the series. It'd almost seem tawdry if it weren't so well-written.
Being a Vertigo series, FABLES has the sort of realistic, professional art that's all too easy to dismiss simply because Vertigo's cultivated a house style that really needs shaking up. That said, artist Mark Buckingham does an excellent job of humanizing the various Fables and thus grounding the more fantastic elements of the series in a context we can all relate too. He also draws a mouse-mounted cop as convincingly as a shop-strewn city street, so the man's got range.
I almost skipped reviewing this issue because, after all the accolades the series has received, it didn't really occur to me that folks might not be reading it. A quick trip to Diamond Comics' Top 100 list set me straight, however. FABLES does quite well for a Vertigo book, which rarely enjoy gangbuster sales, but it's still ranked a mere 82 at last glance. That means that more people are buying ROBIN, are buying PARADISE X, are buying goddamn MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE than are buying FABLES! Man, that just ain't right. Isn't the median age of the comic audience somewhere in the early to mid-20's now? Don't you guys want something a little more sophisticated in your escapist entertainment than MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE?! Well, lucky for you, my friend, FABLES #14 is the first chapter in a new story arc, and so makes for an excellent jumping-on point. Check it out. Be a man. The cover is calling to you…
TOKYO STORM WARNING # 1
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by James Raiz & Andrew Currie
Published by Cliffhanger / DC
An Open Letter To Harry Knowles Disguised As A Review By Buzz Maverik
Dear Harry,
How's it going? Seen any good movies lately? I hear they have this HULK thing coming out. I might go see that one on bargain night.
Anyway, the reason I'm writing to you instead of a reviewing this comic, aside from my huge case of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, is that I want you to invest some money in this movie I'm going to direct. It's called MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT!
It'll be this great, Japanese-style monster movie that opens with a realistic, giant monster being bombarded by the US military. A stream of rockets rips across the monster's body. As it falls dead, its skin splits open to reveal a giant man wearing a suit! This'll be the first ten minutes. We'll figure out what happens after that once I start shooting, ala Coppola.
What I'm going to need from you is about $200 million for the budget. It's very important to me that I have state o' the art CGI to create a realistic MAN IN SUIT! You'll get the title Executive Producer. I figure the Comedian will be the Producer, Moriarty will be Co-Producer, Cormorant will be Production Designer and Superninja will be Art Director. The rest of the @$$holes can write the script after I shoot it. We'll form one of those limited partnership things and call it AICN/@$$hole Films. Aside from ponying up the dough, all you'll really have to do is buy me a custom made Purdy shotgun and a new H2 Hummer packed full of Cuban cigars.
I got the idea for this, as all filmmakers do these days, from a comic book. TOKYO STORM WARNING #1 to be exact. Writer Warren Ellis of THE AUTHORITY fame is revisiting territory from his brilliant PLANETARY series. In an alternate history WW II, the U.S. nuked Hiroshima and Tokyo. Ellis has dealt well with the appearance of giant monsters in Japan before and he does so again. Because of the nuke and other factors, monsters suddenly appear to attack Tokyo from time to time. You may remember that in the PLANETARY PREVIEW, a Banner doppelganger worked a quantum equation in his head as he was caught in a nuclear blast. The result of the equation was a creature capable of surviving The Bomb, a faux-Hulk, if you will. I think something similar is going on here.
Fortunately for the Japanese people, huge robot suits also materialized. They have been dubbed ArcAngels and pilots use them to battle the monsters. Cool, huh? We see everything through the eyes of Zoe Flynn, a U.S. pilot on loan to Tokyo Storm, the agency that operates the ArcAngels. Zoe's a likable, well-conceived fish out of water who adapts well to the situation she's thrown into.
You'd think the art would be manga-esque, but it's not. It's detailed, bold, realistic and yet dramatic. Oddly, for a series dealing with giant monsters and robot armor, this is one of the most human and realistic launches I've seen in a long time.
I highly recommend that you and all the AICN'sters enjoy TOKYO STORM WARNING. It just screams MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT!
Let me know about the $200 million for my movie. I might be out of town, so contact my agent, Dan the Man at Vortex Tours, Sedona AZ.
Your loyal contributing reviewer,
Buzz Maverik
P.S. Come out to LA. We'll do lunch. Ya been to Tommy's? You'd dig it the most. We'll get Quentin to come along. Maybe he can invest in my movie too.
TITANS/YOUNG JUSCTICE: GRADUATION DAY #3 (of 3)
Judd Winick: Writer
Alé Garza: Artist
DC Comics: Publisher
Vroom Socko: Valedictorian
Starting with my second paragraph, there will be spoilers. Therefore, I offer those of you who do not wish to be spoiled a one sentence review:
This is, without a doubt, the worst comic book to be published so far this year.
For starters, we never learn just why this whole mess started. No explanation is given for who this blue android chick is, or why she came here from the future. Apparently her name is Indigo, and to learn that I had to read the promo information for The Outsiders #1. That she’s a member of the Outsiders is surprising, because in this issue she’s seemingly destroyed along with one of Superman’s robot doubles.
Then there’s the appearance of Metamorpho. He shows up for exactly one panel, and is a bit confused as to how he got there. Since he was last seen in the pages of Birds of Prey, I was as confused as he was.
Then there’s the big death, the event on which this whole series was promoted. Well, Donna Troy is the one who dies. And it sucks in more ways than one.
For starters, this is the most pathetic death scene since Magneto was crushed by a giant metal robot. While fighting the Superman robot (who at this point had already had most of its power cells destroyed, and had half its face caved it), Donna takes a laser blast to the chest, killing her instantly. Never mind the fact that I’ve seen her take shots like that before without any trouble. Never mind that the robot was firing this weapon while at low power and from an area of its body that had suffered massive damage.
Speaking of that damage, the moments leading up to Donna’s death are frighteningly out of character. It’s not that she’s pounding the living hell out of the robot - it’s the way it’s captioned and illustrated. While Winick is building up the importance of Donna’s Amazon heritage, Garza has her pounding on the robot brutally, while she has a glazed, savage look on her face. The Amazons as portrayed in DC are many things, but they’ve never been barbarians. Yet the events leading up to Donna’s death would have us believe they are. For fuck’s sake, Garza draws her foaming at the mouth.
Then there’s the attitude of those closest to Donna after her funeral, primarily Wonder Girl and Nightwing. Both of them blame themselves for her death, and as the leaders of Young Justice and the Titans, respectively, their first instincts are to dissolve their groups lest this happen again. This is so out of character it’s pathetic. While I’d expect them to show grief, self-pity is something that just doesn’t jibe with who these people are.
But their grief is palpable, and appropriate. After all, Donna IS dead. Or is she? The final two pages show her in the bizarre battlefield she’d dreamt of at the start of issue 1. Is this The Afterlife? Possibly. Has she been reborn in some alternate dimension? Given her history with dimension hopping, it’s likely. Does this conclusion essentially invalidate the heartstring-tugging of the previous six pages? Damn right.
Next week is the launch of The Outsiders, with Teen Titans following on July 16th. The Teen Titans TV show premiers the following Saturday. The cartoon, of course, is the reason this miniseries was created; the better with which to cross promote the team. If this book is an indicator of the quality of storytelling to be found in these projects, you can count me out.
GREEN ARROW #27
Writer: Judd Winick
Artist: Phil Hester
Publisher: DC Comics
Reviewed by Cormorant
GREEN ARROW scares me these days. It scares me because Judd Winick is making it really, really good. That scares me because I've noticed that modern superhero comics are far more uneven than the comics I imprinted on as a kid – Stern's AVENGERS, Simonson's THOR, Byrne's FANTASTIC FOUR, etc. – and it'd be a sad thing if GREEN ARROW, currently matching THE FLASH for best old-school superhero title, were to slip in quality.
But that's just me. I'm still smarting after Bruce Jones' run on INCREDIBLE HULK blew out of the starting gates like the second coming of Jesse Owens, only to trip, crumple to the ground, and be carted off with compound fractures. Cynical worries aside, though, the fact is that Winick's GREEN ARROW is damn well kicking ass right now. It's traditional in all the right ways (cool action, unabashed superhero visuals, snappy pacing), and modern in all the right ways too (smart characterization, genuinely creepy bad guys, and just a touch of sexiness). It's delivering the whole package in the same way as the Batman animated series of the 90's.
In the previous issue we saw that Green Arrow, in his Oliver Queen alter ego, had become the major financial backer of a lawsuit to prevent a sleazy corporation from establishing a massive, fifteen block city center that'd displace a low-income residential area. Further complicating things: the hulking, ape-like monster that killed several construction workers at the site of the in-progress city center. Hey, it's still a superhero book – that shit happens.
As the latest issue opens, Green Arrow and son, Conner Hawke, have their hands full trying to keep tensions between the cops and the anti-development protesters from escalating to violence. As noted in my review of the previous issue, it's a kick just seeing Green Arrow in costume and in action as depicted by series' artist Phil Hester. In the past, I'd have said that Neal Adams and Mike Grell flat-out owned the modern visual depiction of Green Arrow, but nowadays I might have to relegate that ownership to the 70's and 80's. Adams and Grell's multi-light-source brand of heightened realism has given way to Hester's snappy cel-animation style, ably backed by colorist Guy Major. Major's been working with Hester since the book relaunched under Kevin Smith, and his punchy, flat-color shading is a breath of fresh air from the overly-rendered airbrush look that impresses the rubes. He also maintains a perfect balance between the moody colors of Green Arrow's urban setting and the vibrant "superhero colors" that pop so nicely when someone from the capes 'n' cowls set enters the stage.
Getting back to the story: you have to be impressed when a book has so many scenes that bring a smile to your face. An oily new villain is introduced, for instance, and Winick has a ball in both celebrating the cliché of the eccentric killer-for-hire and in cheekily having the killer aware of all the clichés. I like this new fella. Then there's the scene where Ollie notices that Joanna Pierce, attractive niece of former hero, Black Lightning, seems to have more than a professional interest in him. There are some nice May/December sparks, and when Ollie notices that she's wearing a surprisingly short dress for a lawyer, artist Phil Hester rises to the occasion with a lovely panel running bottom of the page to top, revealing the easy-on-the-eyes curves under her business clothes. It's the kind of sexy visual that appears on every third page of a Top Cow book, but Hester actually uses it appropriately. It's the visual cue that Ollie has suddenly noticed this woman on a physical level. "Oh, stick to crime, Oliver," he thinks to himself, reflecting on the danger of a relationship with a close friend's niece.
And, indeed, crime is next on the book's agenda as Green Arrow confronts the mysterious monster from the previous issue. Battered and tossed around, Ollie snarls, "I just went through this $#*% with Solomon Grundy!" Ah, I really do love it when a book has a sense of fun. It's a good fight, too, and I especially dug the panel where Ollie's been pitched by the monster and even as he's still skidding in the dust, he's already raising his bow, arrow nocked and ready! It's the Robin Hood equivalent of Chow Yun Fat vaulting backwards with guns a'blazin'. Action scenes are underrated these days, with readers pretending they're too hip to enjoy a good beatdown, only to plunk down their money in the tens of millions to watch Keanu and his PVC-fetish pals kick the crap out of CGI bad guys for two hours. Hey, it's okay, guys! It's part and parcel of the adventure genre that there will be some sort of physical confrontation. Embrace it, people. Action isn't synonymous with bad writing, and guys like Geoff Johns and Judd Winick are here to remind you how to do it right.
What more can I say? A great frigging book. I dropped the series midway through Brad Meltzer's lightweight run, but Winick's follow-up looks to be the real deal. It's bow-slingin' action at its best, and unless the quality slips down the line, I don't have a single negative thing to say about it.
ULTIMATE THE ULTIMATES #1
Written by Ianliam St. Ottoman-Jones
Art by Pablo Wang
Published by Ultimarvel
An @$$Hole Exclusive by Jon Quixote & Buzz Maverik
Sometimes you hear rumors of a new comic, one that’s going to arrive on the scene with such authority that it will rock the foundation of the four-color world. A comic shrouded in secrecy, and only spoken of by the quivering fanbase in hushed, whispered tones. A comic that could truly give our pathetic lives some real meaning. This year, that comic is Neil Gaiman’s 1602.
But lost in the buzz of that event are persistent rumors that Marvel has been thinking of Ultimizing the Ultimate Universe. Two years of continuity have created a dense barrier that new readers just bounce off of, falling bewildered into the self-help section at Barnes & Noble. What's more, the fact that most of the characters’ landmark stories have already been re-used has resulted in creative entropy.
In what can only be described as the greatest @$$Hole scoop since we told you what we thought of the Daredevil movie the week after it opened, @$$hole scribes Buzz Maverik and Jon Quixote have not only had a chance to check out an advance copy of ULTIMATE THE ULTIMATES #1, but have also landed an exclusive interview with the creative team charged with ushering comics into the mainstream: Hot Welsh wordsmith Ianliam St. Ottoman-Jones, and penciling sensation Pablo Wang.
BUZZ: First, I’ve got to say…wow. I’ve never read a comic like ULTIMATE THE ULTIMATES before. What was the impetus for you to undertake something as difficult – and controversial – as updating the Ultimate Universe.
ST. OTTOMAN-JONES: Continuity has become a crutch that too many writers are relying on. I know I can’t be bothered to remember that Captain America is the one with the shield and Giant-Man is the one who grows. And what’s with the claws on that Jackman character? Have you ever seen anyone with claws like that in real life? No, of course not.
WANG: We’re trying to keep ULTIMATE THE ULTIMATES in what Ianliam likes to call "The Theatre of the Real." I know that if I was going to fight crime in real life, I wouldn’t use claws or a shield. I’d use a gun and a radio and join the police force. Costumed heroes? It’s just silly. We’re trying to get away from that.
QUIXOTE: It was hard get a feel for the direction, because the bulk of the first issue was devoted to describing Steve Rogers’s bathroom. Are you saying that there won’t be any crimefighting?
ST. OTTOMAN-JONES: Oh heavens, no. That sort of absurdity keeps new readers away. We’re trying to embrace as much realism as possible, in order to make the book more palatable to those who find comics, frankly, stupid. That means cutting out all of the crazy stuff that only held the industry back: costumes, code names, superpowers, word balloons, pictures, etc.
BUZZ: I noticed that. One of the most striking aspects of the comic is its lack of… art. It’s really just a big block of text. That must have made your job easier, Pablo.
WANG: Not really. Not only did I draw all the letters by hand, but I took photographs of letters from other books for reference. It was pretty arduous, but when you believe in your writer, you put up with it. It’s all in the name of greater realism.
And 'realism' is the key word in ULTIMATE THE ULTIMATES. Issue number one centers around Steven, an 80-year-old WWII vet living in a small apartment house in New York City. In an example of decompressed storytelling at its best, it takes Steve the first 6 pages to turn off the JAG rerun he’s watching and get out of his recliner to go down to the mailboxes.
Halfway there, Steve has to use the bathroom. "With my white blood cell count, I can’t get too far from the crapper," he tells 15 year old Wayne Pym, upon stopping at Pym’s apartment to use the loo. Wayne’s parents, Hank and Janet, are adjunct faculty at a number of community colleges in the NYC area and must work all the time to make a livable wage. The younger Pym informs Steve that he’s embraced hip hop culture, and now wants to be called T-Challa.
Once he gets to the mailbox, Steve encounters Nick. Steve doesn’t know whether or not he hates Nick because he’s black or because he’s gay. In a masterstroke of imagery, St.Ottoman-Jones describes Nick as "just like Don Cheadle in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Only taller, like Morgan Freeman. Or possibly Denzel." Nick’s dialogue crackles with so much urban energy, it’s as though St. Ottoman-Jones not only owns 8 MILE on DVD, but has actually watched it: "Smack-a-dack, Daddio," he tells Steve, "Robert Downey Jr. and the nose candy? Shit. My homes Johnny Deep do the bling bling at the Viper Club and his pretty face get all Tommy Lee’d like Fabio on a FIGHT CLUB night. Ja Rule and the 411, y’dig?"
The issue ends with Steve realizing he forgot his mailbox key, and must face the long walk back up the stairs to his apartment.
QUIXOTE: Now, the big question on everybody’s mind is, what happens to THE ULTIMATES. Personally, I quite enjoy it, and I want to know what’s going to happen there.
OTTOMAN-ST.JONES: Well, they’re all over now, aren’t they? Time to move on.
WANG: People don’t actually realize that Bryan Hitch retired a year ago. For the last three issues of ULTIMATES, they’ve just been cutting pictures from TIGER BEAT magazine and having Mark write on top of them.
OTTOMAN-ST.JONES: Trust us, you won’t miss them. It’s just like Gandalf says to Jackman in our next book, ULTIMATE ULTIMATE X. "We are the future, not them."
THE KINDAICHI CASE FILES: THE OPERA HOUSE MURDERS (TPB)
Writer: Yozaburo Kanari
Artist: Fumiya Sato
Publisher: Tokyopop
Reviewed by Cormorant
Here's a pleasant departure from the teen angst and schlock fantasy that dominates manga imports these days: a good, old-fashioned murder mystery. As with most Tokyopop titles, the teen hook is still there – the lead character being a slacker high-schooler who's the son and successor of a famous detective – but thankfully the relationship schmaltz is all but absent. Instead the emphasis is on establishing a creepy mood and a labyrinthine plot in the classic "whodunit" tradition. In tone and target audience, it resembles nothing so much as the Alfred Hitchcock-edited Three Investigators books I read as a kid, staples of juvenile mystery fiction from an era before the "Goosebumps" marketing machine ground the competition in its cogs.
Our leading man is one Hajime Kindaichi, a goofy but affable underachiever who also happens to have a genius IQ and a penchant for solving mysteries (there are at least ten other books in the series). His best friend from childhood is Miyuki Nanase, class president and a member of the high school drama club. From what I gather, she ends up being a partner to Kindaichi in subsequent volumes, but this time around, she's just the device by which he's drawn into the whole murder mystery. Her drama club is about to enter a national contest where they'll be performing THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, and Miyuki convinces Kindaichi to join the club on a training retreat where he can help out as a stagehand. Ah, but it's the location that sets the stage for the fun: a small island marked by a single resort whose wealthy former owner had a theater constructed within it. All well and good, right up until (brace yourself!)…
ONE OF THE KIDS GETS KILLED!!!
Okay, not such a shocker, but a step or two above the mysteries of that sissy-boy, Encyclopedia Brown. Hell, we even get a gory shot of the dead girl, killed by collapsing stage lights and leaking a good deal of blood. And she's not the last death, either. At this point, you're probably thinking that the place would be instantly swarming with cops - but NO! - a raging storm has encircled the island, conveniently cutting the players off from the mainland and, more importantly, establishing a suitably spooky atmosphere for the events to come. And so, as they say, the game is afoot. Who would want to kill these kids? What's with the bizarre PHANTOM OF THE OPERA motif of the murders? WILL THEY FIGURE IT OUT BEFORE EVERYONE'S DEADER THAN THE STONERS AND SLUTS IN A FRIDAY THE 13TH FLICK?!!
Well, yeah – duh - but getting there is pretty fun.
Although THE OPERA HOUSE MURDERS has plenty of plot twists and turns in its 230 pages, I'd have to say it's the atmosphere that really makes it stand out. Like all manga, it features very cinematic direction, and as such, is able to capture an unnerving and dangerous tone in a way that most American comics can't. Alan Moore's SWAMP THING features undeniably brilliant horror stories, but did you ever actually get a chill reading them? I didn't, but I did in reading THE OPERA HOUSE MURDERS. Moore's stories are more far sophisticated, but even he can't match the visceral effects of long-form manga with its extensive attention to setting and pacing.
The whole affair is rendered in an appropriate, but fairly typical manga house style. That is, the characters are somewhat cartoony (actually, kinda helpful for a whodunit with over a dozen suspects) and the backgrounds are rendered in great detail (very important). The production is weakened slightly by an overblown melodramatic style – manga fans will be used to it, but Western comics readers will get a sense of "overacting." I also found the translation slightly stilted, with a few too many characters failing to use contractions, giving their dialogue a stiffness you'd never see in real high school students.
Nevertheless, a fun read, especially because it's so different from anything I've ever encountered in American funnybooks. The mystery isn't one of those whodunits that can be solved by the reader, but the revelations are satisfying and there's even a "parlor scene," that classic detective tradition (okay, clich̩) in which the investigator gathers the suspects in a room in order to unveil the murderer in front of them. It's tense and enjoyable. There's also a very clever "locked-room" mystery, another genre staple in which the killer somehow manages to off someone in a seemingly barred room. These hooks might be old hat to adult mystery fans, but the target age group of this book РI'd say 11 to 15 Рwill doubtless have a lot of fun with 'em.
About the only reason I'd hesitate to recommend this to younger ages is that the murders are, relatively speaking, a little on the grisly side. I'm not talking SE7EN here, but the kids do find a naked woman dead in a bloody bathtub. No naughty bits shown, but the artist didn't skimp on the blood. Different country, different taboos. I think a ten or eleven-year-old would probably be fine with it, though, and TalkBackers with kid brothers and sisters or young nieces and nephews could do a lot worse than giving them something like this. At 230 pages, it's got a nice bit of meat to it, but it's also self-contained, and saints preserve us, it's gotta be better than the ultra-girly, weirdly androgynous, teen angst manga that's gaining popularity.
KINGPIN #1
Writer: Bruce Jones
Art: Sean Phillips and Klaus Janson
Publisher: Marvel
Reviewer: Sleazy G
Man, I’m really starting to hate this. I mean, I read comics cuz I like ‘em. I really do. Which is why it bums me out when I read one crappy book after another and review 'em here. I hate to seem like I’m down on comics, but I feel obligated to warn you. Like with KINGPIN here, for example.
Talk about a totally wasted opportunity. Here’s the deal: we’re introduced to a young but still fat, ugly and bald Wilson Fisk. We’re introduced to a small group of people whose lives intersect with him. By the end of the issue he’s manipulated them all and they’re all dead. Whoopee. We don’t get to know any of them long enough to give a shit, and the only one who came close to making me care is gone already with me thinking nothing about it except “whatever”. And maybe “what a waste” from a storytelling perspective. There’s a brief attempt to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Fisk is smart, sophisticated or has a soul—but it’s pretty brief. Fisk is responsible for at least ten deaths by issue’s end, but they have zero impact, and let’s face it—if he keeps that pace up, there’s no way we can believe he’s still walking the streets in current continuity.
It’s never been any secret that I don’t much care for the show “Smallville”. There’s one thing that show gets right, though, and that’s Lex Luthor. We see a smart, dangerous individual, but he’s a good guy underneath it all. He’s a guy we care about, and knowing where the character ends up makes us keep wondering what the hell goes wrong to twist him so much. If Jones had taken that approach—gradually seeing Fisk forced to make decisions that led him down the road to what he’s become today, it would have been interesting. The problem is, Jones starts the story off too far in. He starts it with Fisk already mobbed up, already making deals like he’s O’Reilly on “Oz”, already being utterly ruthless and heartless. Why? Why is he like this? Was he this way in high school? In grade school? Did he kill his mother at birth like Lobo? When and why did he go badass? That’s what coulda made this book a compelling read. Instead, we get a bunch of crime story clichés and a character that is in no way compelling or interesting.
The art is the best thing about the book. The painted cover is a beaut, and the interior art is well handled. I’ve always kinda liked Sean Phillips’ work, and you can really see how far he’s come over the last decade. It’s a good-looking book; the expressions really let you know how characters are feeling, and I like the dynamics in the action scenes. Unfortunately, I’ve never been somebody who buys a book based on art alone, and I really don’t know if I’ll be back for issue two on this one. I know somebody’s gonna say I should give it more time to see if any of my issues are addressed, but really, shouldn’t a first issue make you wanna keep reading to see what happens?
TALES FROM THE CREVICE: BOOKS THAT FELL THROUGH THE CRACK
By Vroom Socko
Well, last time I was down here in the ol’ Crevice, I said that we’d be back on a regular schedule. That was two months ago. Where have I been? Well, it turns out that Biff Socko, my big bastard of a father, had a nice little tumor growing next to his prostate. He’s had the tumor removed, and his doctors say there’s no sign of cancer in his system, so good for him. Meanwhile, I was stuck emptying Dad’s catheter bag. Eeeeewwwwww. But thankfully he’s now back on his feet, and I’m back at the keyboard.
My first Tale back is a bizarre little mystery called Murder By Remote Control. Written by Dutch novelist Janwillem van de Wetering and illustrated by the great Paul Kirchner, the story begins with a wealthy oil tycoon fishing off the coast of Maine. The area he’s enjoying in between beers and bass is one he’s contemplating for an off shore-drilling platform. Someone apparently doesn’t think that’s such a good idea, so they decide to fly a radio controlled model airplane into the man’s skull.
Enter detective Jim Brady from Augusta, and with his arrival Kirchner starts to cut loose. While waiting for the sheriff at the local airport, Brady strikes up a conversation with one of the locals. While this old man tells the detective about the local history, the art starts to take a rather surreal bend. It only gets weirder when the sheriff arrives and instantly transforms into a giant boar.
Eventually Brady narrows his focus onto four suspects. First off is Mr. Kane, an old farmer whose family has lived in Maine since there were Indians around. Second is Valerie Curtin, a mysterious young woman the locals believe to be a witch. Next is Joe McLoon, a Brandoesque rebel with no feeling below his waist and a chip on his shoulder. Finally, we have retired actor Steve Goodrich, a Clark Gable look-alike who carries out his many eccentricities with the help of his butler, Erich von Stroheim.
I first read this book when I was in the sixth grade, and it truly fucked me up good. Sandman was a good three years away, and Promethea wasn’t even a gleam in Alan Moore’s eye at this point, so the dream-like disassociated artwork threw me for a loop. One scene in particular, which involved Valerie drugging the detective and entering his subconscious, where the two of them take on astral form and have sex, was especially wild. (What? I was eleven, okay!)
This book is odd with a capital O. Also, I don’t want to give any more away, but the last eight panels are funny as hell, especially if you have a deep-seated general distrust of the police. But mainly, it’s one to read for the quirky artwork. It might be a bit hard to find, but I have seen it available at Powell’s as well as online at Amazon.com. Trust me, it’s well worth looking for. But if you can’t find it, don’t come complaining to me. I’ve got a bag full of piss here, and I’m not afraid to use it.
