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Superman / Batman (2003) #73
Just like last issue, Levitz has a perfectly good handle on all the narration (it’s Superman, Lois and Batman again). Unfortunately, the plot doesn’t make any sense. Apparently, Lex Luthor is funding the Superman cult in order to get them to kill Lois Lane, but only if they get caught. Somehow, all of that business… 📖
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Superman / Batman (2003) #72
Interesting new art style from Ordway. It approximates the look of painted and has all the same problems of static figures and figures not matching their backgrounds. It starts well though, so when it quickly tanks (especially during conversation scenes), it’s a surprise. Levitz splits the issue between Superman, Batman and Lois. Superman’s off in… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #9
The issue ends with the good guys (at least, it seems like they’re the good guys) setting sail for Troy. I can’t say “finally,” because Shanower never really gave a timeline for when the war was to start. This issue is the first where the long lapses in time seem to affect the characters. It… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #8
Shanower needs to include two things. First are maps. He moves all over the place; each issue should end with a map. Second is a cast list. He’s got this one character returning after being gone three issues. It’d help if a cast list reminded the reader of characters and their histories. Otherwise, it’s a… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #7
Shanower fast forwards approximately nine months and opens with the birth of Achilles’s son. No one knows about Achilles and the girl, everyone still thinking he’s a girl too. It’s somewhat extraordinary and doesn’t work in Shanower’s realistic retelling. Achilles is such a jerk, it’s also unlikely sometime in the nine months he wouldn’t have… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #6
Well, certainly by Republican standards, Achilles is not a rapist. The issue ends with him, dressed as a female, forcing himself on a girl. They’re presumably about thirteen. Between him and Paris, Shanower seems to be implying men’s errors tend to be due to desire for women (in Paris’s case, Helen). I imagine it’s in… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #5
The combination of everyone looking alike and Shanower being deceptive for emphasis really plays in this issue. He opens with Helen’s two brothers coming home to find her missing. They look like Paris, only with facial hair. At least their identities are quickly revealed. The problem comes with the rest of the issue, which doesn’t… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #4
Shanower constructs the plot of this issue well. It keeps the reader engaged–the focus moves from the unidentified Helen to Paris to other people around them, only becoming linear at the end. Shanower saves the big reveal–Paris is disobeying his father out of selfishness and is about to start a war–for the last couple pages.… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #3
Shanower seems to have worked past his problems now. The protagonist is no longer Paris, who is developing more into a villain (due to lack of intelligence) and the issue is better for it. Having Paris, with his fantastical history, works against making the book feel real. Instead, Shanower moves the focus–for some of the… 📖
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Amos & Andrew (1993, E. Max Frye)
The problem with Amos & Andrew is the execution. Frye has a good concept—a black professional moves to an island community filled with guilty white liberals and suffers thanks to their community interest, finding he has more in common with a two bit criminal than his neighbors. And the stuff between Samuel L. Jackson and… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #2
Well, Shanower took a lot less time to get to the revelation than I thought… turns out Paris is a prince of Troy. That scene, the one where Paris gives up his old life for his new (he really doesn’t have a say as it turns out), is rather awkward. This issue features Kassandra going… 📖
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Age of Bronze (1998) #1
Shanower sets up Age of Bronze somewhat traditionally in the heroic sense. The protagonist, Paris, is secretly—or so it’s implied—of higher birth than his farmer parents. He’s bored of life as a cattle farmer and when the king’s men come to take away a prized bull, he sees the situation as wrong. So he sets… 📖
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The Invincible Iron Man (2008) #500.1
I think I like Larocca’s art this issue than any one in the past. It’s literally a talking head (no one has dialogue except Tony), but Larocca does flashbacks and in these flashbacks, he relies a little less on the flash and just draws. The issue is a retelling up to now of Tony’s life,… 📖
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Guns of the Dragon (1998) #4
Truman finishes Guns of the Dragon indistinctly. His Bat Lash is such a strong character, it mostly works. Unfortunately, Truman’s art is weak again—which answers whether I had just grown accustomed to it. I had not. He also doesn’t use dialect here, so clearly he was making choices with the series. The issue is, again,… 📖
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Sounds from a Town I Love (2001, Woody Allen)
Allen did Sounds from a Town I Love quickly, for the “Concert for New York City” benefit. It’s very short clips—about ten seconds—of (uncredited) people walking around New York on their cellphones. The snippets of conversation are all played for comedic effect, while still maintaining a mild sense of reality (some of the snippets are… 📖
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Guns of the Dragon (1998) #3
I must have gotten used to Truman’s art because there’s nothing here I found particularly objectionable. It’s too bad he hurries on some faces and takes his time on others, but it’s generally fine. His dialect for Bat Lash is a little distracting though. I can’t believe he started it in the third issue, so… 📖
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Trees Lounge (1996, Steve Buscemi)
I suppose it would be possible for Trees Lounge to be more depressing. It’s a character study; the epical part of the narrative forces the protagonist (writer, director, star Buscemi) to realize he does not just dislike himself, he’s never really liked himself, and he’s not just hurting people now, he’s always been hurting people.… 📖
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Guns of the Dragon (1998) #2
Truman’s art remains frustrating–especially this issue when he’s got this great comic strip-like sequence, but there’s just not enough detail to the work. Other panels are fine, like he hurried some, took a minute more with the rest. Still, Guns of the Dragon retains its significant charm. It opens with a double homage, first to… 📖
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Guns of the Dragon (1998) #1
It would be nice if Truman could draw better figures. The first three pages of this issue are excellent, with Truman establishing the 1920s China setting. He even gets through one page with figures on it and then it all comes apart. He gets looser and looser with faces and anatomy. It’s particularly unfortunate because… 📖
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Supergirl Annual (2009) #1
Dagnino’s art isn’t bad–in fact it’s good a lot of the time–but why does he draw Lana Lang like she’s about thirteen years old? She looks the same age as Kara or younger. Gates tries to come up with an affecting story but it’s pretty pat. Supergirl foils a bank robbery and inadvertently outs some… 📖
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Supergirl (2005) #50
Yay, Igle’s back. And he’s back for an issue where Gates gets around to doing everything. Unfortunately, Superwoman and Sam Lane are back too. Apparently one can never get rid of Johns’s worst ideas for the Superman line of books. There’s a great moment where it seems like Lane might dissect his daughter. Then he… 📖
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Supergirl (2005) #49
Camp does a fine job, but I’m really missing Igle. Gates does two things this issue. First, he resolves the Silver Banshee cliffhanger and does a great job with it. He’s able to do a relatively concise action sequence, get in some character development for the police inspector friend of Supergirl’s and introduce the possibility… 📖
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Supergirl (2005) #48
Gates finally gets to the Lana thing–her nosebleeds and everything else. Turns out she has an unknown form of cancer (or something). I understand the need for drama, but Gates handles it poorly. He doesn’t handle it badly, he just handles it unrealistically. Supergirl’s anger about Lana not telling her is overblown and her concern… 📖
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Vincent (1982, Tim Burton)
I’ve probably known of Vincent since Batman but I’ve never seen it. It also turns out I didn’t know much about it–I though Vincent Price starred in it (he narrates) and I thought it was live action (it’s stop-motion). Price reading Burton’s narration–it’s a beautiful bit of rhyming, reminding a little of Karloff and The… 📖
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All-Star Superman (2011, Sam Liu)
All-Star Superman, the comic book, is maybe the best Superman comic book. Based on empirical observation (i.e. the other animated DC Comics movies from Warner Premiere), I assumed All-Star Superman, the animated movie, would be awful. I was wrong. It’s wondrous. It’s not without its problems, of course. The movie is based on the comic,… 📖
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Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (2000) #3
Ennis brings Rifle Brigade safely home for its delightful conclusion. It’s a somewhat busier issue than usual, as it opens with the boys still in the SS prison. They get out quickly, sabotage some German laboratory and head off for their escape. Actually, most of the issue is action–they’re escaping in a stolen plane and… 📖
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Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (2000) #2
The lunacy continues. And maybe amplifies a little. While the boys in the Rifle Brigade are being questioned by a busty SS woman, the regular army guy who caught them is bickering with the SS commander. Basically, Ennis just uses the structure to get in as many Nazi jokes as possible. There’s a beauty to… 📖
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Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (2000) #1
Rifle Brigade might be Ennis at his funniest (this first series anyway). He mixes absurdly graphic violence with constant humor here. There’s nothing going on but his attempt to get a laugh out of situations. He even takes the time to set up jokes, like the gay soldier trying to get a dying kiss out… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #7
Gillen mildly redeems himself–not really, he avoided the most interesting characters in Singles Club and filled three issues with malarky, but somewhat–with an almost wordless issue featuring Kid-With-Knife, another supporting cast member from the first series. He ends up with the girl from the first issue, the one we’re not supposed to like. Otherwise, the… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #6
Wow. Gillen wants the reader to through pages and pages of poorly written text with bad punctuation. The writing eventually gets so bad I had to give it up. Here, instead of a bad person in Phonogram, Gillen wants the reader to enjoy making fun of the loser. I’m not sure why he included this… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #5
Here we get the story of another depressed girl–she opens the issue cutting herself–and she tells most of her story in quotes from songs. While it’s admirable how much work Gillen put into finding those quotes and making them work in the narration, it’s not good writing. His first person narrator is talking directly to… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #4
Whether Gillen intends it to be or not, this issue is more a concept issue than anything else. The protagonists are the two DJs at the club and we pretty much don’t see anyone but them for the entire issue. There’s a lot of affected dialogue, but Gillen can get away with it because of… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #3
Not sure how you’re supposed to read this one. Gillen’s protagonist this issue is Emily, a supporting cast member from the first series. But it ends with her having casual sex with a complete stranger in order to forget her past. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to judge her for it–Gillen would probably argue… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #2
Oh, wait, the girl from the first issue isn’t really that terrible and didn’t deserve to be treated so meanly? Gillen is apparently doing a night at the club from everyone’s perspective, so this issue we get to see how some other guy spent the night. Basically, it was him being depressed over some foreign… 📖
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Phonogram: The Singles Club (2008) #1
The issue has three stories in it. The most successful is the two-page one, illustrated by Ellerby. It’s just a little, amusing strip… but it manages not to have the problems the others do. The second back-up should be a blog post discussing the casual misogyny of indie music, using a suffering woman as an… 📖
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Phonogram (2006) #6
I’m going to regret making this statement… The last issue of Phonogram is great. Gillen retroactively pretends the series was about people and he sells it effectively. Instead of all his music-based “modern fantasy” special vocabulary, he just tells a story about a egoist who ends up doing something good and helping people. It’s fantastic.… 📖