Category: Reviews

Review: This Week in ‘Trinity’ #6

Things started to coalesce in last week’s Trinity #5, and issue six keeps moving in the right direction with DC’s big three coming to realize there’s a big problem building, and they’re at the center of it.

This issue has dueling narratives, one part featuring Tarot now hiding out from Morgaine Le Fey’s wolf monsters. Tarot continues to see weirdness in her tarot cards, but she dives into it, seeing Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman appear on the cards and in her dreams.

There are some obvious elements in the cards — Superman on The Sun, Wonder Woman on The Earth and Batman on The Moon — but also a few more mysterious ones. Batman appears on The Magician, and Superman shows up on The Hanged Man, with the drawing making him look like Christ on the cross. Hmm…

Meanwhile, the big three themselves are up in the JLA space station trying to figure out what’s going on and not having much luck. The brand left on Diana’s shoulder by another of Morgaine’s monsters gives them worry, and again Kurt Busiek’s character moments are done quite well.

The two narratives come together as the heroes and Tarot both talk over the nature of the trinity, and their identities as heroes, how they each represent different faces of the same ideal. One strange aspect is that in Tarot’s dream, the people around each of the heroes have no faces, like the Question. Hmm…

(more…)

Review: ‘Hellboy II: The Golden Army’

Review: ‘Hellboy II: The Golden Army’

If there is one absolute statement that can be made about [[[Hellboy II: The Golden Army]]], it is that this is easily director Guillermo del Toro’s lightest and funniest film — which may just be its greatest downfall. If the first film were to be classified as a “horror/action with comedic relief”, this film is most definitely a “horror/comedy with action sequences,” and that could be what hurts the film the most.

The story picks up about a year from where the first film leaves off: the [[[B.P.R.D.]]] has grown, with the addition of Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), who is now Hellboy’s live-in girlfriend. Tom Manning (Jeff Tambor) is still in charge of the team and is trying his hardest (“trying” being the operative word) to keep it all a secret from the public. There’s all of this, and then there’s also an epic war being forged between a renegade elf prince and mankind.

The film starts off sweet enough, on a military base on Christmas during one of Hellboy’s adolescent years.  A cameo from John Hurt gets the audience excited right off the bat. Hurt then tells a young Hellboy the story of the first Human/Elf war. This is where we set the mood for the rest of the film. The story is told using computer-generated wooden dolls, rather than actual elves or humans. While Guillermo is known for his imagination with monsters and/or children, this may have been a bit much in the direction of puerility. Instead of giving the impression of a childhood story, the CGI comes across as sloppy and unfinished.

(more…)

Review: ‘Ordinary Victories: What is Precious’ by Manu Larcenet

Review: ‘Ordinary Victories: What is Precious’ by Manu Larcenet

Ordinary Victories: What is Precious
By Manu Larcenet
NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95

[[[Ordinary Victories]]], in France, is a series of four graphic novels about a photographer named Marco Louis. They’ve been very successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each book. But those books are each only about sixty pages long, so they’ve been combined for the American market. This volume contains the second half of the series: volume 3, “[[[What Is Precious]]],” and volume 4, “[[[Hammering Nails]]].”

I can’t be the only one to wonder how much “Marco Louis” – a guy in a creative profession in France – resembles his creator with the same initials, but the book itself doesn’t provide much in the way of clues. Let’s just throw this one onto the groaning pile marked “semi-autobiographical” and move on from there, shall we?

“[[[What is Precious]]]” opens with Marco and his partner Emily – it’s not clear if she’s a girlfriend or a wife, but she’s around for the length of the book – visiting Marco’s mother in Brittany in the aftermath of his father’s suicide. Marco needs to clean out his father’s things, which inevitably makes him think about his difficult relationship with his father.

(more…)

Review: ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’ by Joshua W. Cotter

Review: ‘Skyscrapers of the Midwest’ by Joshua W. Cotter

Skyscrapers of the Midwest
By Joshua W. Cotter
AdHouse Books, June 2008, $19.95

If Chris Ware were a few years younger, grew up in a more religious household, and had less of an obsession with comics formalism, he just might have become Joshua Cotter. Or maybe that’s just me being flippant – it isn’t really fair to Cotter; his work covers some of the same emotional terrain as Ware’s, but is otherwise very different.

[[[Skyscrapers]]] is difficult to describe; it’s made up of many short stories – sometimes as many as three to a page – that mostly focus on a family in the small town of South Nodaway, somewhere in the vast American Midwest in 1987. There’s also the robot Nova Stealth, who is both the human-sized hero of a Marvel-ish comic the elder boy of the family loves, that boy’s robot toy, and a gigantic god-figure stalking across the landscape, sometimes in imagination but other times clearly real. And then there are the stories that get into really weird stuff.

The stories mostly focus on the family’s ten-year-old son, who is never named. Neither are his father or mother, though his younger brother Jeffrey has the same name as Cotter’s own younger brother (to whom the book is dedicated). And Cotter was born in 1977, which would make him ten year old in 1987 – the same age as his fifth-grade hero. So we do know a name for this boy, even if that name never appears in the book.

(more…)

Review: ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ Animated Series

Review: ‘The Spectacular Spider-Man’ Animated Series

Seriously, folks — [[[The Spectacular Spider-Man]]] animated television series on the “Kids WB” network is one of the best superhero adaptations I’ve ever seen (and trust me, I’ve watched more than anyone will probably consider reasonable). It’s fun, it’s smart, it’s mature, it’s witty and every episode leaves me wanting more.

Supervising Producer and Story Editor Greg Weisman brings the same level of intelligence to the program that made his acclaimed Gargoyles cartoon series so succesful. Teamed up with him in developing the series for television is Producer and Supervising Director Victor Cook, whose resume includes working on the Hellboy animated film Blood and Iron, Darkwing Duck and producing the animated series based on the popular [[[Lilo and Stitch]]] animated feature film. Together, they have brought us a series that is updated for the modern-day audience but is completely faithful to the spirit and atmosphere of the first several years of [[[The Amazing Spider-Man]]] comics.

How does it compare to Sam Raimi’s interpretation of [[[Spider-Man]]] as someone who whines, mopes and cries a little more often than I’m comfortable with? Forget him. This animated incarnation of Peter Parker is a true New York teenager, cracking jokes on instinct — even when it’s not necessarily the wisest move.

For example, let’s talk about a brief scene from the first episode. The high-flying villain known as the Vulture grabs businessman Norman Osborn and tosses him to his death from a great height. Spider-Man shows up, catches Osborn in mid-air and remarks, “You guys play hot potato hardcore!” The Vulture screams that the skies belong to him, forcing Spider-Man to concede, “He may be right. I only rent.”

Now that’s the kind of dialogue and Bugs Bunny-like attitude I wish I’d seen out of Tobey Maguire.

(more…)

Review: ‘PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On’ by Scott Kurtz

PvP Vol. 5: PvP Treks On
By Scott Kurtz
Image, June 2008, $14.99

Image is a comic-book publisher, and sees everything through that lens. So, for them, this is a book “collecting issues 25-31 of the hit comic strip series,” as the cover proclaims. For most of us, though, PvP (http://www.pvponline.com/) is a daily comic strip on the web, so what’s important is that [[[Treks On]]] collects strips from June 12, 2005 through April 9, 2006. (Possibly not all of them, since several seem to be added at the beginning and others are missing at the end – and there were some duplicates in the middle, too – but most of them, at least.)

Image might think that referring to comics – which cost money – instead of to a free webcomic might increase the perceived value of their book, but are there really people – even in the inbred, hothouse environment of the comics shop – who would be a) interested in a daily comic strip about computer gaming and b) unfamiliar with webcomics?

My complaints about Image’s publishing strategy aside, this is a handsome package, with the strips shown at a nice large size, two to a page. We’re running about two years behind the current strip, so Brent isn’t even engaged to Jade yet – though he comes darn close in one storyline here. The other character relationships are close to where they are now: Francis and Marcy are friendly but not quite dating, and Robbie & Jase win the lottery in these strips.

(more…)

ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending July 6, 2008

ComicMix Columns & Features for the Week Ending July 6, 2008

When exactly did July 4 suddenly become “[[[Independence Day]]] Weekend?” Are we as a nation so addicted to three-day holiday weekends that we lose the original meaning of what we’re celebrating? Won’t someone think of the children? And the flags? And the sales? And what about all the ComicMix goodness we’ve brought you this past week, huh?

At least my neighbors seem to have used up all their fireworks on Friday, it’s been a blessedly quiet weekend…

Review: ‘Lobster Johnson, Vol. 1’ by Mike Mignola and Jason Armstrong

Review: ‘Lobster Johnson, Vol. 1’ by Mike Mignola and Jason Armstrong

Lobster Johnson, Vol. 1: The Iron Prometheus
By Mike Mignolla and Jason Armstrong
Dark Horse, June 2008, $17.95

Lobster Johnson is the mystery man of the Hellboy universe – an enigma wrapped in a riddle folded around a right cross. He’s turned up in [[[Hellboy]]] and B.P.R.D. stories several times, but about all we’ve learned about him is that he was some sort of pulpish hero from the 1930s and that he punched a lot of evil things.

So here we finally get Lobster Johnson’s own story…in which he’s a mysterious, pulpish hero in 1937 New York who punches a whole bunch of evil things. The Lobster does have a secret lair, which gets some on-page time, and a group of [[[Doc Savage]]]-esque helpers – but we still don’t know who the Lobster is, why he fights evil, or even the point of his lobster-claw emblem.

On the other hand, we do get a vril-powered (look up your Edward Bulwer-Lytton) super-suit; its wearer, ex-lab assistant Jim Sacks; his kidnapped scientist employer Kyriakos Gallaragas; and the doctor’s requisite lovely daughter Helena, also kidnapped. Not to mention their kidnapper, an evil Asiatic villain.

(Said villain looks very familiar from other Hellboy stories, but he’s not named here, so I’ll leave it at that.)

(more…)

Review: Will Smith in ‘Hancock’

Review: Will Smith in ‘Hancock’

With comic franchises pouring from Hollywood’s every orifice this year, something like [[[Hancock]]] would normally be considered a breath of fresh, creative air. This can be said for the film on paper, but it fails to deliver in the latter half of the film. That said, Hancock is still good fun in a theater, and delivers with all the things we wanted to see Superman Returns do time and time again, but never came through.

The plot follows an unruly asshole (not being vulgar, this term is important to the character) of a superhero who resides in downtown Los Angeles, attempts to keep people safe from the ever-rising crime rate, but ends up causing more damage than he prevents. This makes Hancock (Will Smith) the ultimate antihero, being hated by just about everybody in the world (or at least L.A.) He crosses paths with an up-and-coming Public Relations guru (Jason Bateman) who thinks Hancock can become the hero that the world needs, but with a little bit of help.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The text of this review posted after the jump contains descriptions of significant plot points, so consider this your official SPOILER ALERT. -RM]

(more…)

Review: This Week in ‘Trinity’ #5

First things first: I actually, gasp, liked this issue.

For the first time ever, Kurt Busiek pulled the storylines together and gave a sense of the big things ahead. Not perfect, but much better than the past few.

What happened?

The fight against Konvikt finally reached an end, as Batman’s smarts helped the big three devise a clever knockout punch. Batman was the star of the issue, also nabbing one of Morgaine Le Fey’s underlings (which look like the rat creatures from Bone), after it had branded Wonder Woman with an omega symbol.

During a brief interrogation (ended by the rat creature self combusting), it says, "You are the trinity. But you are weakened. Breaking. Soon, you will fall." Buh, buh, BUM!

There’s a little character moment that shines, as Batman and Superman are reluctant to advise Diana to see a doctor, and she points out the inconsistencies of gender relations. It makes her character a little more interesting, which is something plenty of other writers have failed to do.

In the backup, a trio of lame villains (Whiteout!?!) try to kidnap Tarot, who has started to see the trinity in her cards (as justice, strength and the devil — guess which hero goes to which card).

They fail, not unpredictably, in large part thanks to the reappearance of Gangbuster. Which, I’ve got to say, is pretty awesome. At the end, we see Morgaine Le Fey’s creatures after Tarot.

Like I said, everything’s coming together nicely, and we have dire warnings galore. So, hope returns, although I’m still curious as to why Busiek feels the need to include only the lamest villains.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) comicmix (dot) com.

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks