My Motives Are Pure
*Tomorrow is the start of a beautiful new day on this site, people. I’ve decided that it’s time for a little change. Maybe a message too. Too long had this site responded to the demands of weekly pamphlet releases, favoring the quick and the new to the detriment of those books built for the shelf, built for staying power. Well not this week. This week, this site will stand up, and strike a blow against the rhetoric hegemony of weekly pamphlets. I will call this effort:
BURN IN HELL, NEW COMICS.
Maybe it’ll last a few days. Maybe it’ll last all week. Either way, I will review absolutely no new comics, instead covering books that I’ve had sitting around for a while, hoping to one day get to. So please, mark me down on your internet calendar, and log on for the velvet revolution of reviewing things I’ve had stacking up, which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my car’s in the shop and I’m at the mercy of city bus schedules to get to my job and back and have no way of getting to a comics store anytime before Saturday at the earliest.
*Review Nuggets Dept: I still have a pair of comics sitting around from last week I should finish off.
- Issue #2 of Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor concludes the first of the series’ four storylines, all of which were cut from Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface after the work’s initial serialization when Masamune Shirow decided that there was probably too much humor and traces of recognizable human emotion around, totally spoiling his chilled panoramas of jargon and spread legs. So if you’ve been missing things like laughs and quasi-natural character interaction, this book manages them. Hell, there’s even a moderately amusing recap page filled with superdeformed characters poking fun at last issue, which admittedly doesn’t go that long a way for covering the fact that there’s only 18 pages of actual story in this thing (counting the recap and a pin-up, it’s up to 20), nor does it erase the plot’s typically Shirow resolution, with a vague build of suspense climaxing in a moment that might have been surprising had anything about it been remotely clear. And then characters sit around and explain what just happened for the last few pages of the story. This would seem clunky even if the rest of the story was irresistibly thrilling, which it’s not. Still, Shirow’s who-cares-what-decade-it-is stylings continue to exert a strange, nostalgic appeal to me...
- I really enjoyed David Aja’s art in The Immortal Iron Fist #1, though I should mention how nice it was to see a prologue sequence by a totally different bunch of artists (Travel Foreman & Derek Fridolfs). I have no idea why it was there, but it actually segues into sooty playfulness of the main book quite nicely. What I appreciate most is how funny the visuals manage to be, despite the grimy realism of Aja’s style; really, the sight of yellow bubbles drifting up from a man’s head is maybe a bit funnier for the otherwise non-comical approach of the style. Nice sound effects too (that FWAK! in the board room), kind of rare for a contemporary Marvel comic. Ed Brubaker’s and Matt Fraction’s plot is fair enough first issue fodder, mixing a lot of fighting with a lot of character introduction and action spanning multiple eras and several Iron Fists - it’ll be a task to keep this all straightened out, but it seems like a good idea as of now.
BURN IN HELL, NEW COMICS.
Maybe it’ll last a few days. Maybe it’ll last all week. Either way, I will review absolutely no new comics, instead covering books that I’ve had sitting around for a while, hoping to one day get to. So please, mark me down on your internet calendar, and log on for the velvet revolution of reviewing things I’ve had stacking up, which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my car’s in the shop and I’m at the mercy of city bus schedules to get to my job and back and have no way of getting to a comics store anytime before Saturday at the earliest.
*Review Nuggets Dept: I still have a pair of comics sitting around from last week I should finish off.
- Issue #2 of Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor concludes the first of the series’ four storylines, all of which were cut from Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface after the work’s initial serialization when Masamune Shirow decided that there was probably too much humor and traces of recognizable human emotion around, totally spoiling his chilled panoramas of jargon and spread legs. So if you’ve been missing things like laughs and quasi-natural character interaction, this book manages them. Hell, there’s even a moderately amusing recap page filled with superdeformed characters poking fun at last issue, which admittedly doesn’t go that long a way for covering the fact that there’s only 18 pages of actual story in this thing (counting the recap and a pin-up, it’s up to 20), nor does it erase the plot’s typically Shirow resolution, with a vague build of suspense climaxing in a moment that might have been surprising had anything about it been remotely clear. And then characters sit around and explain what just happened for the last few pages of the story. This would seem clunky even if the rest of the story was irresistibly thrilling, which it’s not. Still, Shirow’s who-cares-what-decade-it-is stylings continue to exert a strange, nostalgic appeal to me...
- I really enjoyed David Aja’s art in The Immortal Iron Fist #1, though I should mention how nice it was to see a prologue sequence by a totally different bunch of artists (Travel Foreman & Derek Fridolfs). I have no idea why it was there, but it actually segues into sooty playfulness of the main book quite nicely. What I appreciate most is how funny the visuals manage to be, despite the grimy realism of Aja’s style; really, the sight of yellow bubbles drifting up from a man’s head is maybe a bit funnier for the otherwise non-comical approach of the style. Nice sound effects too (that FWAK! in the board room), kind of rare for a contemporary Marvel comic. Ed Brubaker’s and Matt Fraction’s plot is fair enough first issue fodder, mixing a lot of fighting with a lot of character introduction and action spanning multiple eras and several Iron Fists - it’ll be a task to keep this all straightened out, but it seems like a good idea as of now.
posted by Jog at 11:59 PM
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