Category: Reviews

This Must Be the Place by Michael Sweater
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This Must Be the Place by Michael Sweater

This book is one of the few records that a strip called Please Keep Warm ever existed. Well, there are launch announcements and excerpts elsewhere, but the actual GoComics strip has fallen into the memory hole, never to be seen again.

The strip launched in February of 2017; this book came out in the summer of 2017. When did the strip end? I have no idea. So this is probably the beginning, but it’s unclear how much more more might be lurking in creator Michael Sweater’s files, if anything. So This Must Be the Place  declares itself to be A “Please Keep Warm” collection, but my suspicions are that it’s the only one.

Anyway: This Must Be the Place starts with a five-page page-formatted comic – the bit excerpted in Vice – and then turns into a four-tier layout, with each tier (I think) an individual strip, for about eighty pages, and then has a few more page-formatted short stories at the end. (My assumption is that those are from anthologies, either during or after the life of the strip.) The whole thing runs 108 pages of comics, and it’s all consistent and coherent – all the same kind of thing. (That’s not always the case with new strips; creators often write their way into things and experiment, particularly if they’re shifting formats like Warm does.)

Four people live in a house together: the book starts out by centering Clover, who is a kid of unspecified years – probably elementary school, maybe even younger. She lives with her Uncle Stan, who is trying to write a novel; Catman, who I think has some sort of office job and is low-key the Krameresque goofball of the group; and Flower, who doesn’t seem to have any sort of central deal other than the fact that her sleeves are longer than her arms. Stan, Catman, and Flower all seem to be mid-20s, pseudo-slackers, the kind of characters who would probably be stoners if this strip appeared somewhere even slightly more counterculture than GoComics. Clover is mostly the center, and has the typical strip-comic kid’s random enthusiasms, energy, and big body language while her enthusiasms (death metal, skateboarding) are more “adult” coded.

It comes off as a slightly “alternative” take on a standard family comic strip – found family rather than nuclear, all that jazz – and the humor oscillates between those two poles. At it’s best, it finds a sweet spot in the middle, as with Clover’s death metal obsession – she loves it like a kid would, but also makes a demo and worries about promo like an professional. Each of the other characters has similar quirks that I’m leaving out here, including several members of the secondary cast who don’t live in this house.

It’s mostly “nice” with eruptions of “cool,” I guess – it might not have run that long because it is trying to be both of those things regularly, and the two audiences might not be hugely compatible. But Please Keep Warm makes its own consistent vibe, has fun with the way it tells stories, features amusing characters, and does pretty much what it sets out to do. That is all just fine with me.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This Must Be the Place by Michael Sweater
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This Must Be the Place by Michael Sweater

This book is one of the few records that a strip called Please Keep Warm ever existed. Well, there are launch announcements and excerpts elsewhere, but the actual GoComics strip has fallen into the memory hole, never to be seen again.

The strip launched in February of 2017; this book came out in the summer of 2017. When did the strip end? I have no idea. So this is probably the beginning, but it’s unclear how much more more might be lurking in creator Michael Sweater’s files, if anything. So This Must Be the Place  declares itself to be A “Please Keep Warm” collection, but my suspicions are that it’s the only one.

Anyway: This Must Be the Place starts with a five-page page-formatted comic – the bit excerpted in Vice – and then turns into a four-tier layout, with each tier (I think) an individual strip, for about eighty pages, and then has a few more page-formatted short stories at the end. (My assumption is that those are from anthologies, either during or after the life of the strip.) The whole thing runs 108 pages of comics, and it’s all consistent and coherent – all the same kind of thing. (That’s not always the case with new strips; creators often write their way into things and experiment, particularly if they’re shifting formats like Warm does.)

Four people live in a house together: the book starts out by centering Clover, who is a kid of unspecified years – probably elementary school, maybe even younger. She lives with her Uncle Stan, who is trying to write a novel; Catman, who I think has some sort of office job and is low-key the Krameresque goofball of the group; and Flower, who doesn’t seem to have any sort of central deal other than the fact that her sleeves are longer than her arms. Stan, Catman, and Flower all seem to be mid-20s, pseudo-slackers, the kind of characters who would probably be stoners if this strip appeared somewhere even slightly more counterculture than GoComics. Clover is mostly the center, and has the typical strip-comic kid’s random enthusiasms, energy, and big body language while her enthusiasms (death metal, skateboarding) are more “adult” coded.

It comes off as a slightly “alternative” take on a standard family comic strip – found family rather than nuclear, all that jazz – and the humor oscillates between those two poles. At it’s best, it finds a sweet spot in the middle, as with Clover’s death metal obsession – she loves it like a kid would, but also makes a demo and worries about promo like an professional. Each of the other characters has similar quirks that I’m leaving out here, including several members of the secondary cast who don’t live in this house.

It’s mostly “nice” with eruptions of “cool,” I guess – it might not have run that long because it is trying to be both of those things regularly, and the two audiences might not be hugely compatible. But Please Keep Warm makes its own consistent vibe, has fun with the way it tells stories, features amusing characters, and does pretty much what it sets out to do. That is all just fine with me.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire’s friends
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Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 1 by Jeff Lemire’s friends

My standard complaint about the Black Hammer comics is that they’re mostly static, locked into an initial premise that wasn’t all that exciting to begin with. I suppose that’s in distinction to “real” superhero comics, which rely on the façade of change – someone is always dying, someone’s costume is always changing, someone is always making a heel-face turn, and worlds are inevitably always living and dying so that nothing will ever be the same – but it’s not self-reflective enough to count as irony.

But some kinds of stories aren’t supposed to change anything – the whole point is that they don’t, and can’t, change the things we already know. Jam comics by entirely different creators tend to fall into that bucket: they’re sometimes “real” and sometimes not, but even if they’re canonical, they don’t push the canon in any direction.

Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 1  is a book like that – it collects four of the eight issues of the title series, each one of which was a separate adventure, by an entirely different team, set in the Black Hammer-verse. It’s all sidebar, all “I want to do this story” by people who will do only one Black Hammer story and this is it. So it’s self-indulgent in a somewhat different, more inclusive way than the main series.

Since the four issues here are entirely separate – and half of them have no credits within the stories themselves, making me wonder what comics editors do with their time if they can’t handle the most basic parts of their jobs – I’ll treat them each in turn.

Issue 1 has a story, “Transfer Student,” written by comedian Patton Oswalt and drawn by Dean Kotz, which is supposedly about Golden Gail but really is a light retelling of Dan Clowes’s Ghost World – I’m 99% sure Oswalt knew it was a comic first, and not just a movie – in the context of the pocket universe. This is pleasant and well-told and has decent emotional depth, but… We the readers know that the Enid character can never get out of this town: there’s nowhere else to go. She can’t go to college, find new friends, and have a different world to fit into. She is stuck in small-town hell, in the background of someone else’s depressive superhero story.

Oddly, the narrative doesn’t seem to know this. And that knowledge makes the reading of this story a substantially different experience than I think Oswalt wanted: this is a dark, depressing story with bone-deep irony, saying one thing and meaning the exact opposite.

The second issue sees Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins bring us “The Cabin of Horrors!”, a Madame Dragonfly-hosted horror tale. It features what could have been the sensational character find of 1996, Kid Dragonfly, and a nasty serial killer getting his comeuppance. This one feels the most like an actual random issue that could have been part of a larger comics line at the time – well, more like a Secret Origins retelling, cleaning things up maybe a decade later, but still in the same vein.

It’s a perfectly acceptable horror/superhero comics story, entirely professional and hitting all of its marks.

In the third installment, Chip Zdarsky writes and Johnnie Christmas draws “Uncle Slam,” the obligatory “I’m too old for this shit” story. The person too old for the shit is of course Abraham Slam; that’s been his main character note for the entire series. Here, he’s sixtyish, retired, running a gym and dating a woman who I think is meant to be a little younger than him but looks childlike (much smaller, very thin, drawn with a young face). But of course a new, more violent hero “takes his name” and he Has To Stand Up for Punching Evil the Right Way (Without So Much Death), which goes about as well as it ever does. He does not die, since he’s a superhero-comics protagonist, but other people do, and he loses a lot. The ending tried to move away from And It Is Sad, and would have been OK if this were a standalone story, but we know Abe gets back into the costume like five more times after this point, so it’s mostly pointless.

And in the last of these stories, Mariko Tamaki (of all people!) tells a story with Diego Olortegui art that I don’t think has a title. It’s a fun bit of metafiction, with our core heroes seen in multiple universes, as the viewers of and characters in and actors behind a popular TV show, with different relationships and interactions on each level. It is amusing, a fun exercise in moving the chess pieces around in unexpected but pleasant ways, but it doesn’t really turn into a specific story – it’s just a sequence of riffs on these characters and their interactions.

On the other hand, that’s the most successful and interesting thing in the book, so I can overlook the not-going-anywhere aspects.

So: all in all, it’s amusing and is pretty much what you would expect – random quirky takes on these characters and situations by other people, who each get to have one good idea for this setting and then go back to their real careers.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Monet: Itinerant of Light by Salva Rubio & Efa
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Monet: Itinerant of Light by Salva Rubio & Efa

There are people who can keep all of the Impressionists straight – who can even say which of those famous 19th century French painters are really Impressionists and which aren’t. They can quickly and easily explain the differences between Manet and Monet, have strong opinions on Renoir and Degas, and their minds contain at all times an accurate timeline of the major exhibitions.

I am not not one of them. I know I’ve seen Monet’s paintings here and there, and can nod appreciatively at them, but if you showed me a big sheaf of unlabeled Impressionist paintings and asked me to match them with painters, I can confidently say I would attribute most of them wrongly in defiance of all laws of probability.

So I come to Monet: Itinerant of Light , a 2017 graphic novel written by Salva Rubio, painted by (Ricard) Efa, and translated by Montana Kane, with the attitude of a student or a dilettante. I will not be able to tell you if Rubio – a historian by training – got the facts and dates right, though I assume he did and his notes tend to back that up. I will not be able to give any deep explication to the many times Efa references or mirrors a famous painting – by Monet, or by others – as a panel or full page in this book, though there’s about a dozen pages of notes and images in the back of this book pointing out many of those.

I’m pretty sure this is definitive and true, visually as well as factually. Efa does the book in what I think are full paints, and his pages are gorgeous, full of color and energy and of course delighting in the play of light where appropriate. But I do have to assume all of that.

It’s organized as a fairly standard biography, starting with an aged Monet getting a cataract operation and then flashing back, through his memory, to tell the vast bulk of the story in normal sequence, starting with Monet as a young teen first starting to paint. The Impressionists were upstarts and rebels, which means a lot of the story is about poverty and strife, as Monet spent years painting things that made only a little money and got only scorn from the critics.

We all love that story, since we’re reading it a century later, and we can be on the side of the eventual later critical consensus without any effort. The fact that it’s a true story makes it even better, of course.

Monet is gorgeous and interesting and I have to assume true. It is best, I think, as an introduction, and a graphic novel is, in my opinion, the very best format for a biography of a visual artist, since it can show what the work looks like in a natural, organic way. I hope some of it will stick, and I will be slightly better at Impressionist-spotting going forward, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Fungirl: You Are Revolting by Elizabeth Pich
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Fungirl: You Are Revolting by Elizabeth Pich

I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading individual comics issues – because I first got out of the habit of buying them. There were a lot of factors there, but an already-ebbing stream turned to nothing after the 2011 flood destroyed all of my existing floppies. Since then, if it’s not in book form, I basically don’t read it.

But my library app – Hoopla , another silly name because everything Internetty is required to have a silly name – includes individual issues, all mixed in their general “Comics” section in a way that sometimes makes it hard to tell if something is a book or a floppy. (Well, they all have page counts: that’s a big clue. When I forget to check that, it’s entirely on me.) So I now can read floppy comics, at least some of them, about as regularly as I want.

I still haven’t really done it much.

But I did read the big collection of Fungirl  comics by Elizabeth Pich recently, and noticed there were two other newer “books” – both fairly short – and decided to give this one a go on a recent busy Saturday.

Fungirl: You Are Revolting  is 32 pages, so I’m pretty sure it was a floppy comic in its corruptible, mortal state. It calls itself a “one-shot,” which is mostly a floppy-comics term. (Books can be in a series, but rarely see the need to announce that they’re not.) And it, like the first book and all things Fungirl, is resolutely not for younger or more impressionable readers.

There’s one story here, following from the end of the big book. Becky, Fungirl’s roommate, is off at med school in another town, so Fungirl is looking for someone to rent Becky’s old room. Quirkily, Peter (Becky’s boyfriend) is both lampshaded as “not living here” – so he’s not going to take over the sublet – and also there all the time, including first thing in the morning in his sleeping clothes, looking like he is living there. But that’s the premise, so no complaints.

A potential roommate arrives, after a portentous dream of Fungirl’s. She’s dressed all in pink, Fungirl immediately lusts for her, she takes the room, and she never gives her name. The plot from there is mostly sex and jealousy: Peter is trying to quell his worries about Becky, away in a distant city with people who are not him, and Fungirl starts screwing New Girl, who is crazy, or has a big secret, or something like that.

It all escalates quickly, and New Girl is not what she seems. I’m not sure what she is – after the dream opening, the whole thing might even be a dream – but she is something, and Fungirl has to Stop Her. I won’t spoil the way Fungirl does stop her, but it’s both very on-brand and very adult.

Fungirl is still wild and wacky, her stories boundary-pushing and frantic. I’m glad to see there’s one more book: this is like nothing else and very funny in its demented, deeply female-centric way.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Wednesday: The Complete First Season
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REVIEW: Wednesday: The Complete First Season

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe.”

When Charles Addams was helping turn his amusing gothic New Yorker cartoons into a television series, the little girl needed a name, and he used a line from an old-time children’s poem. He’d been at the drawing board with these characters since 1938, although Gomez and Morticia’s daughter didn’t arrive until 1944. At different times, she was older or younger than her sibling, Pugsley.

Ever since her arrival, Wednesday has been a fixture, her pale skin, pig-tailed black hair, and solemn expression imprinted on future generations of Goth girls. From Lisa Loring to Christina Ricci, the live-action look has endured as the character has aged from her purported six years old in the original series pilot to 18 in the 2010 Broadway musical adaptation.

Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, no strangers to teenage angst after a decade-plus at Smallville, settled on a 15-16-year-old incarnation for their delightful Netflix series Wednesday. Removing her from home, she is sent to attend school at Nevermore Academy, where she intends on honing her detective skills but makes friends, finds young love, and far more than she bargained for in eight captivating episodes.

Tim Burton’s macabre touch is seen throughout, and he finally gets a chance to work on the property since he was first circling the 1991 film adaptation. The off-kilter characters and set decoration all feature his hallmark touches, making the show visually compelling.

At first, she doesn’t want to make friends, fall in love, or interact with anyone, but as she gets to know her roommate, Enid (Emma Myers), she finds herself drawn into the lives of others. Then, when someone dies, she begins to investigate, bringing her in contact with the Vermont locals who have an uneasy relationship with the school.

This is Ortega’s show, and she is front and center, called up to be brilliant at almost everything, mental or physical. Today, mention the show, and you immediately think of her memorable dance sequence, which apparently exhausted the actors. She shines here, enlivening every scene she is in, and communicates so much through her deadpan expression.

She’s ably surrounded by a fine supporting cast, including Gwendoline Christie as Larissa Weems, the principal, who was once a roommate with Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones, when they attended Nevermore; Ricci as Marilyn Thornhill, the botany teacher/dorm mother to Wednesday and Enid; Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay, a siren; and Percy Hynes White as Xavier Thorpe, an art student. Wednesday is also accompanied by Thing (Victor Dorobantu), the disembodied hand that she has grown up with, maybe the only being she truly cares about.

The series has been renewed for a second season, and a spinoff focusing on Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) was recently announced. This single-disc Blu-ray is a great way to see the series, with a sharp 1080p digital transfer and fine DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track. Sadly, no Special Features were included.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai
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Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai

We all have holes in our reading, some more surprising than others. I started reading “comics” seriously about 1986, when I went off to college to a town (Poughkeepsie) with a good shop (Iron Vic’s) and bought mostly the weirdest stuff I could find on the racks at that time. There’s a lot that I’ve read since then, sometimes by following the same creators and ideas, sometimes by deliberately paying attention to new things (manga! YA! Eurocomics!). But no one can read everything – no one wants to read everything, to begin with, and it’s not physically possible now, if it ever was.

So I’ve known who Stan Saki was almost since that first trip to a comics shop in 1986 – maybe even earlier, since my kid brother might have already been reading Groo before then – but I’ve never sought out his central series Usagi Yojimbo, which started in anthologies (the old-fashioned kind, single issues published on a semi-regular schedule) in the mid-80s. As I’m writing this, I looked up the details , discovering that there are thirty-eight Usagi collections to date – well, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the end, but let’s see if I can read at least a few of them.

To make clearer my ignorance: I think the only Sakai book I’ve read – I have read his stuff in anthologies and collections, and works he contributed to but doesn’t own, to be clear – was The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy , a pre-Usagi short series of stories I saw a decade ago.

So this is a thing I could have paid attention to, and maybe should, but didn’t. And, nearly forty years later, I finally got to the beginning: Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin .

It collects eleven stories, originally published in random single issues, mostly the anthologies Albedo and Critters – all of the scattered Usagi stories from before the main series began in 1987. (This book was also published in 1987, back in the era when trade paperbacks were random and occasional rather than the expected next step of every series. That’s a sign of the initial interest or importance of Usagi, I think.)

The stories are episodic, but the world and backstory is clear from the beginning – it’s an anthropomorphic version of late Edo-era Japan, with different clans and groups drawn as different animals. Our hero is Miyamoto Usagi, a rabbit samurai formerly in the service of an (I think unnamed) lord who was betrayed by one of his generals at the battle of Adachigahara and died there. Usagi now wanders the country, working as a bodyguard (Yojimbo). I gather Lord Hikiji, the evil feudal leader who betrayed Usagi’s master, is the major background antagonist of the series, and he shows up here, both in person and through his minions.

So this book is a mixture of early world-building – the very first story tells us the story of Adachigahara in flashback – and random wanderings, which I gather stays the pattern of the series throughout, with longer stories that seem to fall into both categories (“mythology” and “monster of the week,” to use not-quite-accurate borrowed terms).

The art is crisp and clear from the beginning, though some angles (especially Usagi looking up) and some of the smaller panels of battle scenes are not as clear as I might like – these are shorter stories, that likely had page limits, and Sakai was trying to tell expansive stories from the beginning. 

I often have a quizzical reaction to anthropomorphic stories – wondering why that style was chosen, and if there are world-building hints buried in the choice of creatures – but this seems to be the old, traditional style of anthropomorphism: the creator’s style aims this way, he’s leaning into it, and that’s all it means. The style is slightly disjoint from the bloody, mostly serious and mostly historical matter, but that doesn’t seem to be meant as a source of irony: it’s just the way Sakai tells stories.

These are good stories, though they seem somewhat derivative (of samurai movies, mostly) at this point in the series’ history. That’s not a fatal flaw – lots of things are derivative, maybe most things – but it is pretty central. On the other hand, going in any reader knows this is a long-running comic about a rabbit samurai, so all of the potential deal-breakers are right up front. The good news is that it was strong and assured from the first page: if you are interested in rabbit-samurai stories, you can start with Book 1 very easily.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Phenomena: Matilde’s Quest
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REVIEW: Phenomena: Matilde’s Quest

Phenomena: Matilde’s Quest (Phenomena Book 2)

By Brian Michael Bendis and André Lima Araújo

Abrams ComicArts/156 pages/$24.99

It has to be said that writer Brian Michael Bendis rarely, if ever, repeats himself. His Ultimate Spider-Man is unlike his New Avengers, which is nothing like his Legion of Super-Heroes, his self-created Takio, or Murder Inc. He is incredibly prolific and highly original, with a gift for dialogue and character that always makes his stories engaging.

Here, he and André Lima Araújo have created a new science fiction world and populated it with all manner of organic and technological wonder. In 2022, we first met the trio of hotheaded Boldon, the outcast Matilde, and Spike and their exploits on a nearly unrecognizable Earth. An event dubbed the Phenomena, something shrouded in mystery, resulted in a towering wall separating two warring cultures.

In book one, The Golden City of Eyes, the protagonists meet and unite for the common good despite their drastic differences. They have traveled through several villages, and with each adventure, their legend begins to grow. As they arrive at Valentia Verona, once London, they must confront their legacy, and here, Bendis explores just whose story it is. Boldon complains that storytellers are stealing his story, but its enduring nature provides some new lessons.

The first volume was a little off-putting and confusing with the races and worldbuilding. Here, everything is put in its proper context, a neat feat considering all the new characters introduced. From the title, you know it’s Matilde’s story, and she proves to be an endearing figure, especially after she crosses the wall and confronts the enemy with a simple question.

Araújo (A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance) provides impressive black-and-white artwork that switches from the intimate to the magnificent, opening up this new Earth in interesting ways. All the characters are well-delineated, and his line work is intricate and appealing.

This clearly is the second volume in a trilogy, with Boldon’s story yet to be explored. This volume works fine on its own, but is a strong second chapter in this series.

One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka
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One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka

It’s tough to be a fan of someone when you’re not quite sure what aspect of their work you’re a fan of. I read a big bunch of Osamu Tezuka books, mostly published by Vertical, more than a decade ago – MW, Ayako , Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, a few others – and liked them all a lot. They were smart, sophisticated, serious books for adults, with a striking depth of expression and focused imaginative power.

Vertical might have published everything Tezuka did in that vein; I really don’t know. But I haven’t seen anything else similar from Tezuka in my scattered reading since then. The latest attempt was One Hundred Tales , originally published in Shonen Jump magazine in installments in 1971 under the title Hyaku Monogatari and translated by Iyasu Adair Nagata for this 2023 Ablaze edition. (It was part of a series called “Lion Books” that some awkwardly-worded backmatter in the this book attempts to explain, but doesn’t do a great job of – they don’t seem to have been “books” in the first place, but multiple-segment manga stories published in SJ; the narrative slides from talking about this series to other manga projects to anime projects without a whole lot of clarity; and there’s no explanation of what “Lion” is meant to mean in this context.)

Tales is, I think, part of the main flow of Tezuka’s career, the huge flood of stories mostly for teen (and younger) boys that he created for so long at such volume. There are elements that resonate with adults, but it’s mostly an adventure story with minor pretentions of philosophical depth, with the usual random Tezuka comic relief and contemporary cultural references thrown in willy-nilly.

The title makes it sound like a retelling of the Arabian Nights, but it’s actually a loose retelling of Faust, set in a vaguely historical-fantasy Japanese setting. The main character is a mousy accountant/samurai (shades of “Office? Submarine!” ), Ichiru Hanri, sentenced to commit ritual suicide for his very minor role in a coup plot against his feudal lord. He doesn’t want to die, and offers his soul if he can survive – so a demon (yokai, more accurately) in the form of a beautiful woman, Sudama, offers to buy his soul in exchange for three wishes.

Ichiru wishes to live his life over again, to have the most beautiful woman in the world, and to rule his own country and castle. And so the episodic story moves forward – first Sudama makes Ichiru young and handsome, then he visits (in his new face and under an assumed name) his horrible wife and lovely young daughter, then he chases his choice for most beautiful woman (Tamano no Mae, a powerful yokai) with no good result, then has the requisite training montage to become a stronger and better sword-fighter, and finally spends the back half of the story working for another minor feudal lord, massively enriching that lord and then overthrowing him.

It’s all pretty zig-zag. It does add up to a coherent story, but it only maps to the wishes fairly loosely. Sudama is also vastly more “helpful attractive supernatural woman” than she is “powerful scary demon” – the Faust parallels are mostly superficial, and drop away for the required happy ending.

Tezuka was an energetic cartoonist – sometimes too much so, to my eye, since this book starts off with Ichiru in full comic-relief mode, all goofy panic and silly faces, and the tide of comic relief comes in several more times as the book goes on. But, if you think of this as an adventure story made very quickly for publication in a massive weekly comics magazine for boys – which is exactly what it is – it’s admirable and pretty accomplished in that context.

Whether that context is enough to overcome the negatives is up to every reader to decide. Tezuka is a world-renowned creator of stories in comics form, but his standard mode is very idiosyncratic and very tied to the specifics of the Japanese market and audience at the time.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Contagion
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REVIEW: Contagion

In 2011, I watched Contagion and found it a gripping thriller with an all-star cast–Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Sanaa Lathan, and Gwyneth Paltrow–then promptly stopped thinking about it. I was, though, reminded of it in 2021 when the global pandemic became a reality.

And yet, Warner Home Entertainment skipped the obvious 10th anniversary in favor of finally releasing the 4K Ultra HD edition. It’s a stunning disc and well worth your attention.

From director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns, we have a now-eerily familiar situation that a weary world is hardly prepared for. As the camera casually pans across the empty spaces and we see only masked faces, it feels more like memory than fiction. We can admire how accurately they projected what a modern pandemic might be like and you would have thought more people would have paid attention back then and made us all better prepared for what is now clearly the inevitable.

PR executive Beth Emhoff (Paltrow), returns from Asia, and brings with her a disease that was already spreading. A flashback at the end shows how it all innocently started with…a bat. Her husband, Damon, is the character we follow through the various lot threads as the world rapidly spirals out of control. Dr. Leonora Orantes, Cotillard’s WHO epidemiologist, comes from Europe to study the disease and her outsider status rubs people the wrong way and also is discordant with the rest of the narrative.

We’re far enough away from our real-world life-changing circumstances to once again watch the film, but with fresh eyes and knowing nods of the head. Overall, it’s a compelling story with many strong performances.

The studio’s 2160p/HDR10 transfer is superb and an improvement over the previous Blu-ray edition. The DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix is fine, although can’t keep up with the visual. Not that most of us would notice.

The release offers just the 4K and a Digital HD code, repackaging the 2012 special features while adding nothing new, which is a missed opportunity.  For the record, these include The Reality of Contagion (11:00), The Contagion Detectives (5:00), and How a Virus Changes the World (2:00).

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