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alexsarllThe weekend started with a bang at Black Plastic, but was subsequently a fairly quiet one. How terrifyingly grown up of me. Admittedly, Sunday's walk felt considerably less virtuous once we met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
msdaccxx coming the other way from Hendon when we were only going to Ally Pally, and any health benefit we might have derived from the project was probably lost somewhere between the wine and the trifle...but I have now done the whole Parkland Walk. Because, in spite of knowing the Finsbury Park to Highgate stretch backwards (whichever direction that might me), I've never done the whole of the rest, not until this weekend. Which meant I'd missed out on one particularly stunning view/potential suicide spot in particular. The Palace itself was playing host to a make-up artists' convention, the crowd around which had more goths and fewer orange people than I would have expected. Also, one person dressed as Johnny Depp in his Alice role.
Thursday wasangelv's birthday, the first time I'd been into town in a while and the first time I'd ever had lovely, lovely strawberry and lime cider. On the bus afterwards, I was sat reading a comic when I was accosted by a stranger. Now, I often daydream about the potential meetings which reading material on public transport might unlock - I blame The Divine Comedy's 'Commuter Love'. But the only time anything ever came of it before was when I was reading Houllebecq's Atomised and, just as we got off the train at Derby, had a brief conversation with a girl who had recently read it and agreed that it was a massive disappointment. And this was no better, though in some ways more interesting, because Thursday's stranger was a psychologist, and having just come from some form of professional function, she was off her bloody face. She asked me whether I identified with any of the characters, and I said it wasn't so much about that as about a form of ritualised conflict, circumscribed yet open-ended and thus always available - much the same as some people find in sport. She asked whether I thought there were superheroes in the real world, and I said no, though there are supervillains - I instanced Dubya and the way he stole the thunder of the DC storyline about Lex Luthor becoming President by being real, and worse (then worried that this answer might sound a bit Tony B Liar, but decided against the balancing example of bin Laden as R'as al Ghul because even after Batman Begins, nobody ever recognises his name). Whether she even remembered any of this the next day, I have no idea, but it was definitely a higher calibre of conversation than one normally gets with drunk randoms on buses.
And because of that, because I haven't really got much else to post, because I needed some warm-up writing to do over the weekend and because I was vaguely thinking about doing something like this after my last general moan about the topic, here's what may or may not be a new regular feature, starting with the title which so interested the drunk psychologist:
Justice League: Cry For Justice: I mainly steer clear of the DC Universe these days, because it's a mess, but in spite of being enmeshed in it, and by no means a consistent writer, here James Robinson is producing some of his best work, and has two key advantages. One: ultra-villain Prometheus, back to the bad-ass levels at which Grant Morrison wrote him (even if some of the brilliance now seems to reside in the suit rather than the man), right down to the fatal flaw. Two: The Shade, still immortal and laconic and morally ambiguous and now looking like Vincent Price to boot. It's not high art but it is almost exactly what I want from a mainstream superhero book.
Starman: more James Robinson Shade! He looks a little younger and less saturnine here, even with Billy the Sink inking. In spite of owning all eight Lantern Corps rings, this is the first comic I've read with a Blackest Night banner, and the whole evil-zombie-heroes-eat-hearts motif is exactly as silly and miserable as I expected, but Robinson works around that as best he can. I only got about halfway through the original 80 issues of Starman, so there were some spoilers in this one-off return - but it was intended as a flash-forward even for regular readers, so I coped.
Batman and Robin: reads a little like Seaguy, as you'd expect from Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart (who had better bring us Seaguy Eternal ASAP). A tapestry of unknown superhumans is glimpsed and implied as, with Batman, we drop in on Britain (drawn properly for once, thank heavens - it's amazing how many comics get it wrong, but this is London) and the war between crimelords King Coal and the Pearly King. However...from there it heads in the direction of evil zombie versions of heroes, and I'll have to see whether Morrison takes that somewhere interesting next issue as he failed to do with the Red Hood story, but there are simply too many evil zombie heroes around right now so it won't be easy.
The Walking Dead: not that I have anything against zombies, you understand. I just think there's a time and a place. The most relentlessly grim comic going offers a moment of hope this month. In The Walking Dead as in life, hope should normally be regarded as a warning that things are about to get even worse, in part because of that seductive moment of respite.
Joe the Barbarian: as I mentioned previously, I wasn't looking forward to this as much as I should be looking forward to a new creator-owned Grant Morrison series. The preview just read like Imaginationland minus the laughs...and to be honest, so does the comic. But when you get all 40 pages instead of six, when you get the pacing and the visuals and the real *texture* of Joe's real world set against his fever dream, that's suddenly no bad thing.
Kick-Ass: well, at least it eventually finished before the film came out - a film which was optioned, cast and made between the first and eighth issues of what was meant to be a monthly series. Kick-Ass had one very good idea (what if a real-world comics fan tried to be a superhero?), and a couple of subsidiary ones (killer small girl!), which just wasn't quite enough.
Ultimate Enemy: I see they've abandoned the attempt to rebrand the line 'Ultimate Comics' and gone back to what everyone still called it anyway. Essentially, Bendis here appears to have started a new Ultimate Fantastic Four miniseries but realised that said title had little residual loyalty (I always described it as a benchmark: the least good comic I bought). Decompressed to the extent that I don't really know what the story is yet (and it's only a four issue miniseries), but it fits a lot of good character scenes into that space. Plus some explosions, of course.
Dark Avengers: contrary to the cover, seems to have nothing to do with Siege. Instead, it's about how mental Superman analogue The Sentry is in fact a meth-head who took some drugs which tapped him into the same power source as Moses. This is quite daring when you think about how Rick Veitch's Swamp Thing run was derailed after editorial wouldn't let him have Swamp Thing meet Jesus in a respectful context, but it's also slightly pointless.
The Authority - The Lost Year: our heroes (if they're even still heroes) are trapped in the void between worlds in their shiftship, the Carrier. It's running on auxiliary power and they have no clue how to fix it. They escaped from the doomed, low-energy Earth where they had crashed (our world), but doing so killed the man who helped them, and maybe the world too. Now a swarm of parasites have started devouring the Carrier...and all of this has art by a man named Jonathan Wayshak, whose name means nothing to me, and whose style is cartoony. Gritty cartoony, sure, but cartoony. This would suit some Authority stories - the slugfests with Lobo, say - but ruins what could otherwise have been the most moving issue of this sonce Morrison stopped scripting. I think I'm out after next issue (where the collections will break).
Dark Reign: Hawkeye: I assumed this was delayed by several months because it revealed some crucial detail about how Dark Reign ended. If it ever did, it's been rewritten to buggery (and Anthony Johnston has been brought on to co-write with Andy Diggle, as is happening soon with Daredevil too). They're both good writers and nice guys, but this is a disappointment for a series which started off with one of the smartest, nastiest issues to come out of the whole Dark Reign set-up of The Day Evil Won (where have I heard that before?).
Daredevil: now this is more like it, Diggle-wise. Everyone's favourite blind superhero is now running the ninja death cult which has been after him for years, and using it to hit back against the bad guys who are now running the system. There's a certain disconnect in him saying they will resist "ruthlessly" while he still tries to maintain the old, idiotic superhero code against killing...but the spectacle of a ninja army versus bent cops and HAMMER troops in the streets of Hell's Kitchen is still glorious.
Glamourpuss: Dave Sim's idiosyncratic history of strip cartooning and parody of fashion mags (or, this issue, car mags) remains pretty much unreviewable, but it's worth mentioning that he's done some of the lettering himself this issue - for a bit where a car shouts Teutonically. Obviously.
Hellblazer: every now and again writers decide to take John Constantine out of his comfort zone (for a given value of 'comfort' when you consider his life in Britain) and send him overseas. With the exception of Garth Ennis' brilliant Damnation's Flame - a trip through the American Nightmare - it never *quite* works. But even though Peter Milligan already did the West's encounter with India better in the psychedelic 'Rogan Josh', this comes closer to working than most.
Thor: Gillen has now worked his way free of the worst of the 'I wouldn't start from here' situation in which Straczynski left him, and can mainly concentrate on Thor and Doctor Doom trading great lines as they fuck each other up. This is what we like to see. Meanwhile, Balder's sub-plot sees him forced into terrible positions which really capture the icy and terrible feel of Norse myth, the absence of happy endings. Good stuff, and it bodes well for the Siege crossover issues coming next.
Battlefields: Happy Valley: I'm not normally much for war comics. Nor is the rest of the comics market, as a rule, which is why they've pretty much died out. But Garth Ennis writes them well enough that he's pretty much singlehandedly resurrected the genre, for the industry and for me. This time out it's Australian bomber crews over the Ruhr valley in WWII and, as ever, much of the appeal is in the simple details; nobody writes male camaraderie like Ennis.
msdaccxx coming the other way from Hendon when we were only going to Ally Pally, and any health benefit we might have derived from the project was probably lost somewhere between the wine and the trifle...but I have now done the whole Parkland Walk. Because, in spite of knowing the Finsbury Park to Highgate stretch backwards (whichever direction that might me), I've never done the whole of the rest, not until this weekend. Which meant I'd missed out on one particularly stunning view/potential suicide spot in particular. The Palace itself was playing host to a make-up artists' convention, the crowd around which had more goths and fewer orange people than I would have expected. Also, one person dressed as Johnny Depp in his Alice role.Thursday was
angelv's birthday, the first time I'd been into town in a while and the first time I'd ever had lovely, lovely strawberry and lime cider. On the bus afterwards, I was sat reading a comic when I was accosted by a stranger. Now, I often daydream about the potential meetings which reading material on public transport might unlock - I blame The Divine Comedy's 'Commuter Love'. But the only time anything ever came of it before was when I was reading Houllebecq's Atomised and, just as we got off the train at Derby, had a brief conversation with a girl who had recently read it and agreed that it was a massive disappointment. And this was no better, though in some ways more interesting, because Thursday's stranger was a psychologist, and having just come from some form of professional function, she was off her bloody face. She asked me whether I identified with any of the characters, and I said it wasn't so much about that as about a form of ritualised conflict, circumscribed yet open-ended and thus always available - much the same as some people find in sport. She asked whether I thought there were superheroes in the real world, and I said no, though there are supervillains - I instanced Dubya and the way he stole the thunder of the DC storyline about Lex Luthor becoming President by being real, and worse (then worried that this answer might sound a bit Tony B Liar, but decided against the balancing example of bin Laden as R'as al Ghul because even after Batman Begins, nobody ever recognises his name). Whether she even remembered any of this the next day, I have no idea, but it was definitely a higher calibre of conversation than one normally gets with drunk randoms on buses. And because of that, because I haven't really got much else to post, because I needed some warm-up writing to do over the weekend and because I was vaguely thinking about doing something like this after my last general moan about the topic, here's what may or may not be a new regular feature, starting with the title which so interested the drunk psychologist:
Justice League: Cry For Justice: I mainly steer clear of the DC Universe these days, because it's a mess, but in spite of being enmeshed in it, and by no means a consistent writer, here James Robinson is producing some of his best work, and has two key advantages. One: ultra-villain Prometheus, back to the bad-ass levels at which Grant Morrison wrote him (even if some of the brilliance now seems to reside in the suit rather than the man), right down to the fatal flaw. Two: The Shade, still immortal and laconic and morally ambiguous and now looking like Vincent Price to boot. It's not high art but it is almost exactly what I want from a mainstream superhero book.
Starman: more James Robinson Shade! He looks a little younger and less saturnine here, even with Billy the Sink inking. In spite of owning all eight Lantern Corps rings, this is the first comic I've read with a Blackest Night banner, and the whole evil-zombie-heroes-eat-hearts motif is exactly as silly and miserable as I expected, but Robinson works around that as best he can. I only got about halfway through the original 80 issues of Starman, so there were some spoilers in this one-off return - but it was intended as a flash-forward even for regular readers, so I coped.
Batman and Robin: reads a little like Seaguy, as you'd expect from Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart (who had better bring us Seaguy Eternal ASAP). A tapestry of unknown superhumans is glimpsed and implied as, with Batman, we drop in on Britain (drawn properly for once, thank heavens - it's amazing how many comics get it wrong, but this is London) and the war between crimelords King Coal and the Pearly King. However...from there it heads in the direction of evil zombie versions of heroes, and I'll have to see whether Morrison takes that somewhere interesting next issue as he failed to do with the Red Hood story, but there are simply too many evil zombie heroes around right now so it won't be easy.
The Walking Dead: not that I have anything against zombies, you understand. I just think there's a time and a place. The most relentlessly grim comic going offers a moment of hope this month. In The Walking Dead as in life, hope should normally be regarded as a warning that things are about to get even worse, in part because of that seductive moment of respite.
Joe the Barbarian: as I mentioned previously, I wasn't looking forward to this as much as I should be looking forward to a new creator-owned Grant Morrison series. The preview just read like Imaginationland minus the laughs...and to be honest, so does the comic. But when you get all 40 pages instead of six, when you get the pacing and the visuals and the real *texture* of Joe's real world set against his fever dream, that's suddenly no bad thing.
Kick-Ass: well, at least it eventually finished before the film came out - a film which was optioned, cast and made between the first and eighth issues of what was meant to be a monthly series. Kick-Ass had one very good idea (what if a real-world comics fan tried to be a superhero?), and a couple of subsidiary ones (killer small girl!), which just wasn't quite enough.
Ultimate Enemy: I see they've abandoned the attempt to rebrand the line 'Ultimate Comics' and gone back to what everyone still called it anyway. Essentially, Bendis here appears to have started a new Ultimate Fantastic Four miniseries but realised that said title had little residual loyalty (I always described it as a benchmark: the least good comic I bought). Decompressed to the extent that I don't really know what the story is yet (and it's only a four issue miniseries), but it fits a lot of good character scenes into that space. Plus some explosions, of course.
Dark Avengers: contrary to the cover, seems to have nothing to do with Siege. Instead, it's about how mental Superman analogue The Sentry is in fact a meth-head who took some drugs which tapped him into the same power source as Moses. This is quite daring when you think about how Rick Veitch's Swamp Thing run was derailed after editorial wouldn't let him have Swamp Thing meet Jesus in a respectful context, but it's also slightly pointless.
The Authority - The Lost Year: our heroes (if they're even still heroes) are trapped in the void between worlds in their shiftship, the Carrier. It's running on auxiliary power and they have no clue how to fix it. They escaped from the doomed, low-energy Earth where they had crashed (our world), but doing so killed the man who helped them, and maybe the world too. Now a swarm of parasites have started devouring the Carrier...and all of this has art by a man named Jonathan Wayshak, whose name means nothing to me, and whose style is cartoony. Gritty cartoony, sure, but cartoony. This would suit some Authority stories - the slugfests with Lobo, say - but ruins what could otherwise have been the most moving issue of this sonce Morrison stopped scripting. I think I'm out after next issue (where the collections will break).
Dark Reign: Hawkeye: I assumed this was delayed by several months because it revealed some crucial detail about how Dark Reign ended. If it ever did, it's been rewritten to buggery (and Anthony Johnston has been brought on to co-write with Andy Diggle, as is happening soon with Daredevil too). They're both good writers and nice guys, but this is a disappointment for a series which started off with one of the smartest, nastiest issues to come out of the whole Dark Reign set-up of The Day Evil Won (where have I heard that before?).
Daredevil: now this is more like it, Diggle-wise. Everyone's favourite blind superhero is now running the ninja death cult which has been after him for years, and using it to hit back against the bad guys who are now running the system. There's a certain disconnect in him saying they will resist "ruthlessly" while he still tries to maintain the old, idiotic superhero code against killing...but the spectacle of a ninja army versus bent cops and HAMMER troops in the streets of Hell's Kitchen is still glorious.
Glamourpuss: Dave Sim's idiosyncratic history of strip cartooning and parody of fashion mags (or, this issue, car mags) remains pretty much unreviewable, but it's worth mentioning that he's done some of the lettering himself this issue - for a bit where a car shouts Teutonically. Obviously.
Hellblazer: every now and again writers decide to take John Constantine out of his comfort zone (for a given value of 'comfort' when you consider his life in Britain) and send him overseas. With the exception of Garth Ennis' brilliant Damnation's Flame - a trip through the American Nightmare - it never *quite* works. But even though Peter Milligan already did the West's encounter with India better in the psychedelic 'Rogan Josh', this comes closer to working than most.
Thor: Gillen has now worked his way free of the worst of the 'I wouldn't start from here' situation in which Straczynski left him, and can mainly concentrate on Thor and Doctor Doom trading great lines as they fuck each other up. This is what we like to see. Meanwhile, Balder's sub-plot sees him forced into terrible positions which really capture the icy and terrible feel of Norse myth, the absence of happy endings. Good stuff, and it bodes well for the Siege crossover issues coming next.
Battlefields: Happy Valley: I'm not normally much for war comics. Nor is the rest of the comics market, as a rule, which is why they've pretty much died out. But Garth Ennis writes them well enough that he's pretty much singlehandedly resurrected the genre, for the industry and for me. This time out it's Australian bomber crews over the Ruhr valley in WWII and, as ever, much of the appeal is in the simple details; nobody writes male camaraderie like Ennis.
