Apologies to any of you who check Blog@Newsarama every Saturday morning just to read my linkblogging. I usually try to have this up first thing in the morning (my version of first thing in the morning, anyway), but I stayed up to the wee hours of the night finishing the second season of Primeval on DVD last night and thus sleeping in obscenely late on this Fourth of July holiday. Wait a minute, Primeval’s a British series! Aaaa! I’ve betrayed my country!
Anyway, here are some links to things dealing with comics that I took note of since Wednesday morning…
“Luke did an amazing job of making the Mouse Guard RPG more than jut a typical RPG where you happen to be mice, but where being mice is the RPG”: That’s Mouse Guard creator David Petersen talking about Luke Crane and his work on the Mouse Guard role-playing game, which recently won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game of 2008.
“As far as I can tell, gods and other deities don’t have trademarks that are jealously guarded by lawyers for entertainment corporations”: Paul Constant reviews Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader for The Stranger, focusing on the superheroes-as-modern myth theme in a lot of comics criticism and commentary. The results are pretty entertaining.
This is at least part of the reason I can’t read X-Men comics: Wired’s Geek Dad columnist recently re-experienced the confusing world of the X-Men via the Wolverine and the X-Men cartoon, and in a column on the subject he linked to this completely insane relationship chart at io9. Did you know that Wolverine slept with every single member of every X-Men team ever? It’s true! (It’s not). That’s why he’s on so many teams, has so many books and is the most popular X-person. Dude totally slept his way to the top.
“Although sometimes inaccurately called a graphic novelist, Sacco is a journalist who draws”: The Toronto Star includes Joe Sacco’s upcoming work of comics fiction, Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel, in a round-up of book releases to watch for this fall.
I’m honestly not sure if having every character in a JLA comic shout “Justice!” at the end of their scene is awesome or stupid: James Robinson and Mauro Cascioli’s Justice League: Cry For Justice must be a really special comic book. Retailer Brian Hibbs’ daring highly trained special mission force of critics has been taking it kind of slow on Savagecritic.com this summer, but a half dirty-dozen of ‘em showed up to review JL:CFJ, on the week of the Fourth of July holiday. The comic doesn’t fare too well, but it was honestly pretty fascinating to see the various strategies employed to criticize it. Douglas Wolk was first out the gate with an elegant single doctored-image allusion review (sinle allusion reviews really aren’t something you see every day), Graeme McMillan noticed some Jeph Loebishness and some Brian Michael Bendisocity in the script, Hibbs himself questions the font of the subtitle and the use of the word “Justice,” Tucker Stone calls it “hardcore pornography for train-wreck enthusiasts” while determining that it is “excellent crap” and David Uzumeri offers a pretty straightforward dismantling of the issue while holding out the not-unreasonable hope that it might get better. I’m crossing my fingers that Abhay Khosla will show up before the end of the weekend to deliver a 5,000 word essay full of sex jokes about it.
Speaking of that Justice League comic…: Many of the negative reviews I’ve read of it so far have focused on Robinson’s script while generally praising Cascioli’s art. Let me help balance that out a bit. Yeah, Cascioli’s panels all generally look like nice images in isolation. His figure work is just fine, and he adds some appropriate melodrama here and there. But on a purely technical, below-the-paints-and-pencil level? It’s pretty weak work that fails at some of the most basic stuff. I’m not talking about the fact that 22 entire pages of nothing but talking occurs and yet no one except Congorilla ever actually opens their mouth—although “draw the character talking with their mouth open” is Comics Art 101, isn’t it—but the staging.
What is up with that first six pages or so, where Hal Jordan gets all teenager-y with the rest of the Justice League? The whole scene looks like a dream, with characters appearing and disappearing at random and dramatically shifting positions between panels.
This is my favorite page, as it makes it look like the table dramatically shrinks between panels, or that Wonder Woman and Roy Harper ran all the way around the table super-fast and knocked some chairs out of the way just to get all up in Hal’s face, while he tosses his head dramatically back and forth, so that different people are to the left of him:
Okay, well that’s probably enough complaining about sub-par super-comics for me today. I’m going to kick off my celebration of the Fourth of July in the traditional way, by watching the symbol of our nation punch a filthy communist across the room:
July 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
“As far as I can tell, gods and other deities don’t have trademarks that are jealously guarded by lawyers for entertainment corporations”
That’s what makes them modern. I’m sure if Homer could have trademarked Achilles or Odysseus, he would have.
July 4th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Yeah, I had problems with the art of JL:CfJ too. The anatomy was great, and there was a nice texture to it, but did ANYONE crack a smile in the comic? Was there a single emotion expressed that wasn’t just a stern glare? But I suppose that’s what the script called for, but I’d like to see a little bit of variation. Didn’t we get past the time when everyone was all pissed off all the time back in the 90s?
July 4th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
People (both in our world and in theirs) don’t call Oliver Queen a “filthy commie pinko hippie liberal” near enough.