Ok, here's the second post.
*Anime Addendum Dept: Here are the first two teasers for Evangelion: 1.0 You Are [Not] Alone, the initial installment of the upcoming four-part Rebuild of Evangelion anime movie series. In Japanese theaters this September! The writer and ‘chief’ director is Eva creator Hideaki Anno, and the plain vanilla directors are FLCL mastermind Kazuya Tsurumaki and Gainax mainstay Masayuki (Yamaguchi). It certainly looks… like Eva.
Booster Gold #1
Pretty good.
It’s very much a thematic follow-up to the Booster Gold segments of 52, which you'll recall climaxed with the idea of a marginal superhero participating in an event so fundamentally world-quaking that nobody’s quite aware that the fabric of reality (or, realities) is different. Indeed, they can’t know. This new ongoing series runs with that idea, positing Booster Gold as such a goofy, irresponsible superhero that nobody would dream of seeing him as a keeper of time and dimensions - the grand multiverse itself. By existing on the margins, he’s capable of tackling the most sensitive challenges. In a way, it’s kind of the opposite of Seven Soldiers - while 52 team writer Grant Morrison suggested that fringe superheroes are those with most potential for personal evolution, 52 team writer Geoff Johns presents the fringe superhero as ultimate guardian of the status quo, although he’d dearly like to change a few things for himself.
But it’s not just Johns in here. Actually, co-writer Jeff Katz (whose experience seems to be mostly in film - he was an executive producer on Snakes on a Plane) is apparently being groomed for the permanent writing slot, with Johns pitching in for the first few issues. I can’t evaluate Katz’s scripting on its own, but I can say that the story seems a bit more tongue-in-cheek than Johns will usually get with his scripts, with plenty of pokes at recent DCU storylines and goofy bits of internet humor thrown in with the premise-setting plot, along with a cute continuation of the famous 52 timer (Week XX, Day XX) and the return of Rip Hunter’s exciting plot thread chalkboard.
Really -- and I know I'm going 52 comparison crazy here -- if there's any other current DCU book this reminds me of it's 52 team writer Mark Waid's revival of The Brave and the Bold, a dense but fundamentally light-hearted romp through various corners of the shared universe, given a certain classical flavor (and extra volume) by the contribution of a popular artist from a while back. I'm certainly not saying that Booster creator Dan Jurgens (who provides layouts for Norm Rapmund's finishes) is any George Pérez, but his (their) work here evidences a similar interest in tightly packing pages with superhero business, albeit in a more workmanlike manner. It's like the comic is trying to grasp the whole of a superhero place; given the time/universe-traveling structure of this series, this book may be the 'vertical' answer to Waid's & Pérez's 'horizontal' series.
It also shares in the danger of leaning too much on arcane character knowledge, although I was able to keep up with good issue well enough, having only read 52 (now, if you haven't read even that...), and the tighter time curves are explained smoothly. It's a slick thing, pretty inviting. Maybe I'm just responding to the concept, since all this issue really does is lay out the concept, or maybe I'm just piqued by a new series that seems more interested in expanding on recent 'big' works than charging toward the next sales monster. But yeah, it's pretty good.
Booster Gold #1
Pretty good.
It’s very much a thematic follow-up to the Booster Gold segments of 52, which you'll recall climaxed with the idea of a marginal superhero participating in an event so fundamentally world-quaking that nobody’s quite aware that the fabric of reality (or, realities) is different. Indeed, they can’t know. This new ongoing series runs with that idea, positing Booster Gold as such a goofy, irresponsible superhero that nobody would dream of seeing him as a keeper of time and dimensions - the grand multiverse itself. By existing on the margins, he’s capable of tackling the most sensitive challenges. In a way, it’s kind of the opposite of Seven Soldiers - while 52 team writer Grant Morrison suggested that fringe superheroes are those with most potential for personal evolution, 52 team writer Geoff Johns presents the fringe superhero as ultimate guardian of the status quo, although he’d dearly like to change a few things for himself.
But it’s not just Johns in here. Actually, co-writer Jeff Katz (whose experience seems to be mostly in film - he was an executive producer on Snakes on a Plane) is apparently being groomed for the permanent writing slot, with Johns pitching in for the first few issues. I can’t evaluate Katz’s scripting on its own, but I can say that the story seems a bit more tongue-in-cheek than Johns will usually get with his scripts, with plenty of pokes at recent DCU storylines and goofy bits of internet humor thrown in with the premise-setting plot, along with a cute continuation of the famous 52 timer (Week XX, Day XX) and the return of Rip Hunter’s exciting plot thread chalkboard.
Really -- and I know I'm going 52 comparison crazy here -- if there's any other current DCU book this reminds me of it's 52 team writer Mark Waid's revival of The Brave and the Bold, a dense but fundamentally light-hearted romp through various corners of the shared universe, given a certain classical flavor (and extra volume) by the contribution of a popular artist from a while back. I'm certainly not saying that Booster creator Dan Jurgens (who provides layouts for Norm Rapmund's finishes) is any George Pérez, but his (their) work here evidences a similar interest in tightly packing pages with superhero business, albeit in a more workmanlike manner. It's like the comic is trying to grasp the whole of a superhero place; given the time/universe-traveling structure of this series, this book may be the 'vertical' answer to Waid's & Pérez's 'horizontal' series.
It also shares in the danger of leaning too much on arcane character knowledge, although I was able to keep up with good issue well enough, having only read 52 (now, if you haven't read even that...), and the tighter time curves are explained smoothly. It's a slick thing, pretty inviting. Maybe I'm just responding to the concept, since all this issue really does is lay out the concept, or maybe I'm just piqued by a new series that seems more interested in expanding on recent 'big' works than charging toward the next sales monster. But yeah, it's pretty good.
posted by Jog at 10:52 PM
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