Category: 2010
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For a “revealing the secrets of a small town” thriller, Moss has a number of problems. The first one might just be me. The town has six residents. It’s not a town in my American understanding. A viewer with more cultural knowledge might experience it differently. Second, and more to the point, it’s just too…
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Colleen Coover does another lame intro for issue. It seems better than usual, probably because of the atrocious first story, from Marjorie Liu and Sara Pichelli. It’s a Wolverine and Jubilee talking heads story; Liu’s dialogue is indescribably bad. Next is another stupid Power Pack story from long-time writer Louise Simonson. June Brigman and Rebecca…
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It’s another terrible issue. Is Marvel trying to say all female creators can do are trite stories? Colleen Coover annoys with her opening… Oh, wait. The Jill Thompson Inhumans story is fine. It’s predictable to the point I think I’ve read it somewhere before (Lockjaw getting a bath) but the art’s good and the writing’s…
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The Boogeyman seems like it should be better, but maybe only because the short’s deficiencies are so obvious and director Lough’s ambitions so clear. Lough layers the narrative, using an absurd psychologist appointment as a frame. He really should have watched some “Bob Newhart” for some realism. But his composition is okay and the film’s…
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Marvel should have tried harder with Girl Comics. It’s way too easy just to say, Girl Comics is bad comics. The opening from Colleen Coover is weak. It’s so trite, the story featuring Nightcrawler getting saved by a nameless woman (writing by G. Willow Wilson, art by Ming Doyle) doesn’t seem so bad. The writing’s…
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The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is almost too precious for its own good. It’s so enraptured with the world it creates–Paris in 1911, where pterodactyls and mummies can come back to life–it sometimes forgets to get the viewer as involved. Besson does a fantastic job bringing that world to life and a lot of…
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So in this issue of Rescue—oh, wait, no, it’s the only issue of Rescue, which is a travesty (if that description doesn’t give you an idea of the book in advance…)—is set during an Invincible Iron Man arc where Pepper hallucinates talking to her dead husband. Her dead husband is, for those who don’t follow…
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I was kind of curious how the makers of Tell-Tale got such a fantastic cast-not Carla Gugino, who’s terrible and seemingly cast only for her willingness to strip down to lingerie (as usual), but Adam Arkin and Clifton Collins Jr. Even Jesse Spencer is way too good for this kind of thing. Turns out it’s…
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Beneath the Veneer of a Murder is so atrocious, if it weren’t for the rampant misogyny and mild racism, I’d think it was a joke. The majority of the film is actors talking over motionless (or maybe Ken Burns-effect) text. All of the actors with speaking parts, Eric Scheiner, Mark Grant and Jennifer McCartney, are…
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Tron: Legacy is a little better than the first one (though the first one is so bad, it would be hard not to be). It does, however, share a very common trait–it’s best when the music is blaring. The Daft Punk score is wondrous and when the music’s going, Tron: Legacy works. Another asset is…
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What’s so amusingly sad about the final issue of Deadly Origin is Cornell’s pop psychology to explain the villain’s intentions. I think if Cornell had sat down and watched a bad episode of “Another World,” he would have come off with a deeper understanding of the human condition and how to apply it to the…
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So all of (well, most of) John Paul Leon’s flashback art this issue is when Black Widow was a superhero in the seventies and eighties. It’s all this fantastic, bright Marvel superhero art, only by Leon. It looks amazing. I wonder if he could sustain it or if just doing a few panels is the…
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I wish I knew who had the idea suggesting Black Widow and Mockingbird were lesbian lovers, Cornell or his editor… Because unless the next issue reveals Natasha’s only into guys for country and it’s girls for self, it’s the lamest writing move I’ve read since Jeph Loeb had a fifteen year-old girl make out with…
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I thought I liked Paul Cornell. I would have reexamine that affection, or I can just finish reading Deadly Origin and it’ll do it for me. Apparently, Natasha’s really old. Like pre-WWII old. And she’s been artificially de-aged and she used to know Wolverine and Bucky when he was Winter Soldier for the Commies. This…
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Get Along, Little Dogies is Lain’s rumination about accepted as a tomboy growing up to being expected to be girly as a teenager and woman, all because she grew a pair of breasts. Unfortunately, Lain doesn’t speak for herself—she lets narrator Simon Dixon talk over all the footage. The film mixes Lain and other actors…
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The Ward takes place in an Oregon mental institution in the late 1960s and doesn’t have a single good Cuckoo’s Nest reference. I’m not sure one would have helped—writes Michael and Shawn Rasmussen are fairly tepid (they play toward director Carpenter’s eighties weaknesses in fact). Maybe if they’d modeled the film on Cuckoo’s Nest, things…
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Other Atlas members get limited series from Jeff Parker, but Namora just gets a one-shot. It’s not even Atlas branded, it’s “Women of Marvel” branded. It seems like a sexist move (I’m sure it’s just a business one—female characters don’t sell enough to have their own series at Marvel). It doesn’t help Parker doesn’t exactly…
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Well, Tischman proves me wrong and wraps everything up nicely. The issue ends with a beautiful page from Bond and Hahn—not extraordinary content, just extraordinary execution—and all is right. The characters each get their moment, though I suppose Tischman does have some major pacing issues. He inserts a year into the present action at the…
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In an apparent attempt to spite my compliments, Tischman turns in his weakest script. It’s not bad, it’s just not as good as it should be. He finished the previous issue with an earth-shattering reveal… this issue he moves along as though it’s not important. So maybe it isn’t. But by making it unimportant, pretty…
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Oh, look at Tischman go—he totally turns Red Herring on its head at the end of this issue. He might have turned it on its head a few pages earlier too, but it’s too soon to tell. This issue does make clear the situation with the aliens. He finally goes close third person with the…
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For the last issue, Torres decides he needs a twist ending—no spoilers, but it’s the weakest of all possible twist endings. The ending I was hoping for, one setting up an awesome sequel, does not come to pass. Ryp returns for the final two page spread. It would have been nice to have him the…
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Nancy in Hell loses Juan Jose Ryp… and, really, it doesn’t make much difference. Oh, the art from Malaka Studio (no one is singled out) and Antonio Vasquez is fairly bad, but they follow Ryp’s initial ideas. Busty girl, big buff surfer dude, lots of gross stuff in Hell. In some ways, the art this…
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More than a third of this issue is a history of Lucifer in the Nancy in Hell universe. Torres raises some interesting points—Lucifer’s just a spoke in the wheel because he never had free will. It’s an interesting moment when he realizes no matter what he does, he can’t really make a decision for himself…
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So is the title, Nancy in Hell, a reference to Nightmare on Elm Street? Torres opens with that the titular Nancy in the middle of a monologue comparing herself to an eighties horror movie star. Maybe I’m over thinking it. Because Nancy in Hell does not offer much in the way of story or inventiveness.…
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You know, when I saw B. Clay Moore’s name on the cover, I was horrified at the thought of reading the issue. Then, as it turned out, Moore’s absolutely capable of writing a mediocre war comic. Chad Hardin and Wayne Faucher apparently aren’t capable of illustrating one, but Moore fills it with so much of…
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I would have expected Our Army at War a few years earlier. I had no idea the Obama administration was paying companies to create pro-war media. I thought only Bush did it. This issue proves me wrong. Well, that or DC’s just pro-war. It’s hard to say. Marts’s script juxtaposes a soldier in WWII with…
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I don’t know if Justiniano and Tom Derenick draw exactly alike or if Andrew Mangum is just a really strong inker. If it’s just Magnum, he’s got have been going crazy to make it all fit. The issue is a slick espionage story set in occupied France. There’s a decent twist at the end and…
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While I do love me some Phil Winslade, he doesn’t draw distinct enough faces for a war comic where the tank crews all wear around headgear. I mean, he’s got this scene where its two tank crews standing around and it’s absolutely impossible to tell who’s who. Even from the dialogue, it’s confusing…. Otherwise, it’s…
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Weird War Tales features something I never wanted to see… weak Darwyn Cooke. His story is idiotic—famous war figures have a party—and his artwork is barely there. It’s a bunch of skeletons and stuff, so maybe it’s the subject, but it’s all so incredibly lame I couldn’t believe it was really Cooke. It’s not even…
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This issue reverses the usual trend. Oh, Billy the Kid is still pretty strong—Hotz’s artwork is magnificent—and Buzzard still has some rough, unfinished art from Powell, but the writing’s actually stronger on Buzzard here. Powell moves fast through the Buzzard story, only really pausing when it gets to the big showdown. But he turns around…
The Stop Button 