Category: 2008
-
Is there even a fight this issue? Wait, yes. Davos gets beat up for being a tool last issue. The art chores are apparently getting to be too much for Aja, as Javier Pulido fills in on some of the pages. Pulido covers the stuff with Luke, Misty and Colleen, but also some of the…
-
I feel like I’m missing something. It seems like Yu-Ti (the “mayor” of K’un-L’un) is secretly bad, but I’m not sure if it’s in the comic or if I’m just remembering it. I mean, he seems really bad. But he could just be a sexist jerk too. Some more great Kano art for the flashback,…
-
Once again, Wilson has some really significant pacing problems. I imagine she thinks the reader immediately finds her details as interesting as she does, but the reader is just hearing about them or seeing something briefly related to them. They make very little impression. It’s like she doesn’t quite know how to add personality when…
-
The second issue of Air works a lot better than the first. There’s the terribly overwritten letter the protagonist’s boyfriend writes her and it had me mildly upset, but it only lasted about a page. Instead of forcing the reader to be interested by making things quirky, Wilson is letting the situations she writes engender…
-
Air tries pretty hard to get its quirk on. The book’s a fine read, but hardly monumental. Vertigo has put out series just as wacky its entire history as an imprint–I’m thinking of Gerber’s Nevada. The problem is the Wilson is loading up the quirks at the beginning to generate interest. Maybe the Neil Gaiman…
-
Fan-made extended version–putting in deleted scenes to flesh things out to star and uncredited co-writer Edward Norton’s original intent–suffers from most of the theatrical version’s problems, but does give Norton a much better arc before he bows out to let the CG take over. Some great stuff for him and love interest Liv Tyler. It’s…
-
Maybe I just put it out of my mind, like I didn’t want to believe Brubaker was capable of writing such a stupid reveal. I mean, I knew he was capable of stupid endings–Sleeper provided that one beyond a shadow of a doubt, but…. Really, Ed? Fight Club? That’s the best you could come up…
-
Okay, I’m mildly amused–back when I started reading Criminal again, I misremembered the first arc as this arc. Brubaker’s really running into some pacing issues here. What’s old hat in a film noir–around an eighty minute narrative–does not work in comic book form. Brubaker also doesn’t have enough exposition to keep the reader’s reading speed…
-
Ah, the five minute read. Nothing like the five minute read. For a five minute read, this comic isn’t bad. It’s got beautiful Sean Phillips art and it’s not a terrible all action issue. But it’s really light and really boring. Brubaker’s pacing here is for effect, everything is hurried to get the reader anxious.…
-
This arc of Criminal–I can’t remember if I’ve read it or not, I think I’ve read this issue because it seems familiar, but I’m not sure about the rest–is Brubaker’s first attempt at using a non-criminal as his protagonist. The guy used to be a criminal, but he’s since reformed. And he was never a…
-
I’d like to say Brubaker has some kind of magic where he’s able to escape all the traps of a guy writing female narration. But he doesn’t. It’s still a really good issue and Brubaker doesn’t make the frequent mistakes of female narration–he’s got a really good plot and he sticks to the events and…
-
What Brubaker does here–a sort of prequel to the second arc of Criminal and a concurrent, companion story to the previous issue–is even better than the previous issue… which I didn’t think Brubaker could do. Brubaker had a hard time working out the setting for Criminal in the first arc and wisely left it mostly…
-
Such a good issue…. Brubaker’s able to get more content in because he’s got an increased page count but also because he’s concentrating on doing a standalone story. It turns out it’s not exactly standalone, but the issue has a beginning, middle and end. There’s no messing around with being deceptive in the narrative, to…
-
Finally, the comic starts to get interesting. And how does it get interesting? Allie gets as far away from Kane as possible. Instead, he spends almost all of the expository dialogue scenes–and action scenes (there’s really not much action in Solomon Kane, it’s usually just a bunch of people talking, maybe some trickery if the…
-
I’m not sure I can think of another comic book as reread-unfriendly as Solomon Kane. Allie’s script is all geared for the revealing the mystery. Nothing interesting happens along the way, just the setups for the various cliffhangers. I suppose Kane not being a particularly dynamic character has something to do with, but he’s also…
-
I’ve read Solomon Kane before, but wanted to reacquaint myself before reading its sequel (I’ve also since seen the movie, which I have an affection for). I remember the series goes downhill. Or it goes uphill. I guess I don’t remember it very well. I did remember the Mario Guevara artwork pretty well… how it…
-
Aww, the Iron Man helmet on the last page looks so sad. It’s a bad issue, to be sure, and a terrible way to end this story arc–it’s way too compressed–but it’s only the third worst issue so far in the series (and, I’m hoping, the last bad one in the series). I think there’s…
-
Well, this issue’s pretty lousy. Not much in the way of people in it–mostly just Iron Man versus Iron Monger Jr.–so Larroca does all right. The fight scene isn’t exactly exciting or engaging, but it’s a competent action scene. But the writing–not even the entire issue, just the end–is awful. See, if Tony Stark’s supposed…
-
I’m of two minds about this issue. Maybe three. On one hand, it’s a talking head book. There’s almost no Iron Man armor appearance (with Tony in the armor) and, even when there is an appearance, he’s talking to someone. In other words, it’s a Salvador Larroca talking heads book. It’s exceptionally ugly. But the…
-
Bring on the expository dialogue, I haven’t heard enough from Zeke Stane about his stupid skin getting burnt up by his organic Iron Man setup. Is his name supposed to sound like a synonym for track marks? Because it kind of does; it’s appropriate, because he’s a crap villain. This issue reads, again, like a…
-
What’s with Larroca and faces? Hasn’t anyone told him his digital art for faces looks just plain awful? The issue has really solid art for the first eight pages or so and then I realized why–he’d only drawn like one or two faces. Once the faces are there, it looks awful again. I can run…
-
I’ve read this comic before. I don’t like it. It’s half sequel to the Iron Man movie and half adaptation of that movie’s distinct action sequences. I also don’t like Larroca’s artwork here. Maybe I don’t like him in general, but I know I don’t like him here. It’s plastically slick and photo-referenced. To describe…
-
Juxtaposing the two stories–the young male Nazi soldier and the young female Russian flier–might seem like a standard approach, but it produces some unexpected things. The German fears the Russians, who the reader sees most personified as this young woman. She’s cheerful, mostly chipper and very good at her job. Her comrades are similar, caring…
-
I don’t know if I appreciated Braun enough the first time I read this series. He can do the complex expressions (ranging from unsure Nazis to zealot ones, not to mention the Russian female fliers who feel alienated and overwhelmed) and all the action and all the equipment. He adds a sense of innocent to…
-
I may be a little naive, but I think one of the aspects of adapting materials between mediums is to encourage (or at least tacitly imply) someone to look at the original material. I find it particularly odd in the case of Speed Racer. Being somewhat aware of the cartoon but never having seen it,…
-
I may be a little naive, but I think one of the aspects of adapting materials between mediums is to encourage (or at least tacitly imply) someone to look at the original material. I find it particularly odd in the case of Speed Racer. Being somewhat aware of the cartoon but never having seen it,…
-
The most striking thing, reading Unknown Soldier again, is how much Dysart gets done in the first issue. I know where it goes, so reading it for the first time I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it as much as I do this time. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was great after…
-
I just went back and reread my response to the theatrical release of Rambo. I haven’t seen it since the theater and, while I could pick out some added scenes (Stallone’s director’s cut, titled John Rambo, runs about ten minutes longer), I couldn’t remember if my problems with the director’s cut are the same as…
-
I Come with the Rain is a strange one. I doubt I can even give away how weird without spoiling the… surprise (it’s one of the two surprises to take the problematic but brilliantly made–not shot, bad DV–picture into the dumps). But there’s enough weirdness without spoiling. First and foremost… the movie’s in English. There’s…
-
I love this movie. Seriously. Not just because it features the most idiotically jingoistic song since Grease 2‘s “Do It For Our Country.” There’s a fair amount of political commentary (instead of going for the easy Bush jugular, Neumeier’s a lot more complicated, particularly when it comes to how religion is sellable as war propaganda)…
The Stop Button 