The Comics Canon Question

PaulT (aka: @placeslost) forwarded me a very interesting article.  Its a discussion of how a canon of known, quality comics is sort of percolating with folks during urbane drawing room conversations (I guess.  This has never happened to me.).  Whether or not there's an agreed-upon core group of classics in comics at this time is an interesting question, especially in a medium so young that seems to change tastes and values about every 10 years.

I'm going to risk some flames here and say the following:

Dear former Lit Major, 

I am so glad you read Ghost World that one time, and that thanks to the movie and profile you read somewhere, you're passingly familiar with Marjani Sartapi.  Because its now "hip", you'd like to talk comics and you know I read comics.  While I appreciate your background as a reader of Jane Austen and The Canterbury Tales, reading two or three comics and having a former boyfriend who was "really into Batman" makes you an interested tourist, and I welcome you, but please be patient (and, yes, we're all already aware of the homosexual undertones of Batman and Robin, so, thanks).   Also, please stop correcting me.  It's rude and weird and that person writing the article you keep referring to about "important comics" was also clearly new to comics to those of us not new to comics.  I am sad to say that what you saw there was a lot of enthusiasm, not the voice of experience.  Pop culture writers suddenly compiling lists online - especially about comics - doesn't actually mean anything.   

Trust me.

There's a lot that's going to go into a comics discussion that will, likely seem befuddling and not necessarily make sense.  Especially when we start talking about the relative merits of Jimmy Olsen comics or talk about Scrooge McDuck as a major literary character.

Comics are not books anymore than oil paintings are sculptures or a photograph of a horse is a horse.  I beg your patience.  Things are going to get weird.

The writer of this article seems like a semi-serious reader and lists his top 5 - seemingly off the top of his head - picks, and its an interesting assortment.

• Maus: A Survivor's Tale
• Preacher
• The Sandman
• Transmetropolitan
• Watchmen

I'm not sure I'm in agreement, but what the list did do was get me to think a bit.

Signal Watch (Finally) Watches: Some Like It Hot (1959)

While your faithful blogger has seen many, many movies and some movies many, many times, we also have huge holes in our mental inventory of flicks.  Not the least of these areas I need to take care of is pretty much everything directed by Billy Wilder.  No, I don't know why.

I especially don't know how I missed something starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.  Anyhoo, I finally watched Wilder's Some Like it Hot.

Yes, this is the one where Lemmon and Curtis (in terms of the film) successfully pass as women for an extended amount of time, and which spawned a million knock-offs like Bosom Buddies or Tootsie.

The pair play down on their luck musicians in 1929 Chicago who become accidental witnesses to (spoiler alert) the St. Valentine's Day Massacre (/spoiler alert).  Fleeing Chicago to avoid the mob, the two find work in disguise in an all-girl band.

Of course Monroe is the ukulele player/ vocalist in the band, and that's just going to be a problem when you're trying to keep anyone from figuring out that you're a dude.

The movie more than earns its reputation, and I can see why its a favorite.  I suspect that when this hit, it pushed as many buttons and was as "edgy" as current comedies like The Hangover that play with social mores and steps just enough outside of the expectations of an audience that the laughs come from the sheer surprise.  Of course, some of that's dated now (there's a bit about "why would a man want to marry a man?"), but actually very little, which is part of why I think the movie holds up well.  Its also plenty risque.

I suspect most of you have seen the movie, but I said I'd talk about every movie I watched in 2012.   I won't go on too long, but if you haven't seen it, I recommend.  Lots of great performances, and an oddball of a happy ending.  Frankly, Tony Curtis isn't someone whose work I know terribly well, mostly just a few viewings of Spartacus, so it was great to see him in top form here, and I'll be trying to learn his accent (you know the one) just to annoy Jamie.  And special props to Joe E. Brown.  He is terrific in this movie.

Monroe is particularly hilarious in this movie, and you can see how (aside from the visual cues) she was at the top of her game in this movie.  But, man, some of the dresses...  I don't know how they pulled that off.  Billy Wilder, you mad, mad genius.

Great movie.

Late edit:  San Diego's famous Coronado hotel does exteriors for a good part of the film, doubling for Florida.  J__Swift reminded me of this.  If in San Diego, I highly recommend a visit out there. 

Achewood seems to have actually returned

Its only hitting when Chris Onstad has energy and time to do a strip, but the results have been worth it.  I am glad to see multiple successive Achewood strips have been published.

Return to Achewood here.

I have a few questions for Mark Waid on "Irredeemable"

edit:  I have recently been informed that my comics conversations have gone way "inside baseball".  I suspect this is one of those.  I apologize in advance.


Also, this thing was riddled with type-o's.  Thanks for not pointing that out.

I just finished Irredeemable Volume 8.

Some thoughts:

As much as Kingdom Come was a commentary on the state of superhero comics in the mad, mad 90's, I have to look at Irredeemable in whole, if not in individual parts, as another bit of Waid's commentary, but (for me) its a bit like trying to hold mercury.  The Plutonian is not exactly a Superman analog, even when he clearly is.  There are hints of Squadron Supreme here and there, which was exactly a commentary on the Justice League, but maybe less so when JMS rebooted the Squadron a decade ago.  Hints of Wildstorm, bits of reflections of reflections of the JLA and DC line of books in Authority or a few dozen other replicas that mistook gloss for edge and grim violence for "realism".  But maybe this book is a reflection of that dark reflection.

In this issue, Irredeemable fights the ghost robot from space!*

Signal Watch Reads: Feynman

A few months ago Jim Ottaviani visited Austin during the promotional tour of his graphic novel, Feynman, a biographical sketch of famed physicist Richard Feynman.  It turns out that Jim's day job is in the field of digital libraries, and he had a sort of informal chat at the library, where it turned out he knew two of my colleagues from graduate school.

Its a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.*

A few things:  

1)  I struggled mightily in high school physics and stuck with geology as much as possible in college when asked to to take science (rocks!).  My investigations into modern physics (stuff they were not teaching at my high school) have been mostly catch-as-catch can through television specials, reading articles online and this, my third comic book on physics in any way, shape or form.  I know some basic principles, I know some names, I understand that light behaves like a wave and a particle, and aside from that, I sort of stop and start with what everyone who has ever owned more than one Pink Floyd album knows about Schroedinger's Cat.  And, as I understand it, what we consider the point of the experiment is incorrect.

2)  I don't pretend like I had ever heard of Richard Feynman before this book hit the shelves.  The pop-culture aspect of science also eludes me, and so I had not read any of Mr. Feynman's books or sat about urbanely quoting the man over coffee served in a small and delicate cup.  

3)  I have a hard time remembering the basic fundamentals of physics.  Every time I return to the material, that part of my brain re-engages, and neurons re-fire, but its not something I think about very often.  Its sort of how I wrote down what the Higgs-Boson is just so I had a place to go look it up every time I needed to know while reading an article on the LHC.

My hat if off to Jim Ottaviani for his handling and structure of a book that could have been an horrendous mess.  The book is really 85% biography, 15% physics lesson in order to explain why Feynman matters to Sally Q. Reader.  As he states in the afterword, I had no doubt that Ottaviani had done his research enough to both understand and not judge the man particularly one way or another, and to internalize what Feynman was on about enough to share it with an audience as clueless about physics as myself.

Signal Watch Watches: The Artist

Yes, The Artist is a silent movie.  Shot in black and white.  A period piece (it takes place during and immediately following Hollywood's silent era).  You will not recognize the two leads.

It comes to Austin on the heels of Hugo, an excellent handshake of a film to The Artist, the two acting as a sort of before-and-after look at the silent era of film, one looking at the earliest days of small film producers and this movie examining life for the stars within the studios as the transition to sound became a reality.

The territory will feel at least a bit familiar to the millions of us who love Singin' in the Rain,  and, indeed, our lead reminds me a bit of a love child of Gene Kelley and Douglas Fairbanks.  To catch you up: while sound revolutionized film, it also meant the end of many careers for working actors and actresses.  In Singin' in the Rain, Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont has a terribly annoying voice that doesn't match her aristocratic screen persona.

Signal Watch watches: Tintin

As I understand it, Tintin is a global phenomena that somehow never exploded in the US the way the character has entertained generations across good chunks of the rest of the globe.  Its telling that the release of The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn came to the US months later than the rest of the world.  Because it is not "ours", this has meant low-flying expectations for the boy reporter here in the states and a welcome not unlike how we treat foreign exchange students when they arrive at our high schools in clothes not bought at Foley's.

We're talking about the movie here for a number of reasons.  1)  It is based upon the comics by Belgian comics-smith Hergé.  2)  It is a high-flying adventure movie.  3)  Its the creation of a wide-range of geek friendly folks from Steven Spielberg to Steven Moffat.

At the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin, the pre-show rightfully showed clips of adventure serials, Indiana Jones homages, etc...  before the movie.  The comic strips in which Tintin appears actually pre-date Indiana Jones by about fifty years, so I want to make this clear to the legions of Americans who believe that action stars come in either Sylvester Stallone or Jason Statham models and find the idea of a Belgian action hero hilarious:
A)  Van Damme  B) this is the most pure adventure movie to hit the screens in the US in a decade.  And that sort of worries me about American movie-making.

Blog Spotlight - Down and Out: An Austin Love Story

So, some time this summer PaulT and I headed down to the Alamo Ritz to see Babyface because I was promised lots of Barbara Stanwyck (which it delivered in spades).  Prior to the movie, a lovely young woman sat down a couple seats down from PaulT, and because it turns out PaulT, myself and this person are all the sort of person who will talk to just random people, we talked a bit before the show began, and then afterward all wound up at a bar next door for a few drinks.

That lovely young woman was LT.  She's fairly new to town, a world traveler, highly educated, and now unemployed and trying to make a go of it here in Waterloo.  Turns out she can also turn a phrase, so I encourage you to check out her blog Down and Out: An Austin Love Story.

I think you'll find it an interesting read.  I know I do.  I'm personally totally rooting for LT, and it wasn't so long ago I was also unemployed in this town under very different circumstances.  So if you have a chance, give it a read.

Signal Watch Watches: Hugo

When the trailer hit for Hugo, I think a lot of folks were bemused or confused. Scorsese made his bones with some tough subject material, is closely associated with his gangster work like Casino and Goodfellas, and still turns out good stuff, the most recent that pops to mind for me is The Departed and the doc Public Speaking.

Of his contemporaries, Scorsese never went off the rails as much as Coppola and Lucas seemed to after their initial decade or two of success. He's been consistent, usually sticking to fairly mature material even when handling a costume drama like The Age of Innocence.  Thus it may have been, I raised an eyebrow when I saw he was doing a family movie for release at Christmas with 3D, storybook sets, a bright-eyed little boy a lead and dogs.  I still wanted to see what he'd cooked up, but more or less planned to write it off as Scorsese's holiday-film lark.

Firstly, Hugo is not at all the movie I believed it would be from the trailer. Nor the poster. And, I'd argue, its barely a kids' movie. Or, if it is for kids, its not going to slow down for your dopey kids as it goes about telling very exactly the story it has in mind.

Garth Ennis's "Battlefields"

A comic that's gotten sadly too little conversation, in my opinion, has been Garth Ennis' war comic, Battlefields.

Ennis is famous for Preacher, Hitman, Punisher: Welcome Back Frank, The Boys, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade and other over-the-top comics adventure stories aimed squarely at the 17-and-up crowd.  Yes, he knows how to a work a good de-nosing, be-facing, entrail gouge and other such entertaining topics into his work.  And, I admit, when I'm in the mood, I absolutely love that stuff.

But a number of years back now, Ennis did a two-issue, prestige format Enemy Ace story that more or less set up my current fascination with the character (especially after learning Pratt's work on War Idyll and the original Kanigher and Kubert work was so astoundingly good), and I'd highly recommend it as a good "here's a comic without superheroes" comic.

He went on to write some great stuff in his War Stories comics at DC, and, again, I'd recommend.

But a couple years back he started a new banner at Dynamite where he could tell short, 3 issue stories, called Battlefields.

Truthfully, I'm not sure if I've discussed his work on Battlefields here before or not.  But it bears discussion.

Unlike most of comic-dom that plays with facts, refuses to do so much as a Google search on even the historical figures or events they're talking about, or grossly misrepresents facts in order to "tell the story", Ennis clearly does his research.  He clearly knows his topics, from New Zealand army bombers to British tank commands during WWII.  And on top of that, he tells brilliant, human stories in the grinder that is war.  Sometimes sentimental, sometimes less so, but never with the varnish of a John Wayne war movie, nor the melodramatic flair of Platoon, Ennis actually carves out a pretty straightforward way of relating his stories, and that makes the tragedy surrounding the characters all the more grim.

If you get a chance, at least pick up that first collection.  Its of 9 issues, 3 separate stories on 3 separate fronts, and all chillingly well told.  I'm pretty sure it'll mean you go ahead and pick up Volume 2.

While Ennis most definitely gets a nod of respect, there's so much more internet ink spilled (and I suspect sales are much higher on) his books like The Boys.  And that's great, but its missing what a tremendously talented and versatile (and damned smart) writer Ennis really can be.

Nice Holiday and Muppets

Hey!  Welcome back from the Thanksgiving Holiday.

We had a very nice weekend.  For a brief rundown:  Thursday we didn't actually do Thanksgiving.  

I got up, watched the parade as much as I could, and thanks to a very busy schedule for the next few weeks, figured I better hang our Christmas lights.  So, that's done.  Dug and K arrived around 3:30, so we had a nice, oddly-timed meal (not quite lunch, not quite dinner), and then they headed down to San Marcos.

We watched the UT game at my folks' with some family friends, and, of course, enjoyed that outcome.

Friday I really didn't do a lot.  Austin Books and Comics was having a Black Friday sale on back issues (and who am I to not support local business?), so I headed down for 1/2 off on back issues between 8:00 and 10:00 AM, and then picked up 4.5 lbs. of back issues at the ABC Sidekick store, where they were literally (and hilariously) selling comics by the pound.

I have a lot of 70's-era Superman comics to get through.

My workout schedule was destroyed during all this, so in the afternoon I headed to the gym and did a few extra minutes on everything.

And then Friday evening I caught up with longtime pal ShaunaC and her husband, Fred.  It was terrific catching up.  Too long inbetween seeing each other, but what are you going to do?

Saturday we had Thanksgiving Dinner at Judy & Dick's in San Marcos.  My brother and folks also came down, along with longtime League-pal Heather "Daredevil" W.  

We capped off Saturday by coming back to the house and watching a slew of short subjects, many of which were Holiday themed, all of which were awful, including 1980's syndicated Superboy episodes and the now-infamous-at-our-house We Wish You a Turtle Christmas, a cynically, cheaply and quickly produced series of videos featuring live action turtles from the touring production, clearly with no script or real rehearsals.  There's something bizarre and dream-like about the entire production, with nothing making sense and everything sort of geared to drive you mad.  I'll leave it to Cinemassacre to explain the video as best one can.  

Anyway, that (and maybe a festive cocktail or two) is why this happened:

I should mention we were also screwing around a lot this weekend with the iPhone App that The Dug is currently employed to develop. It's called Vlix, and its actually really neat. They just released a holiday-themed version you can download for free. Just search for "vlix" on your app store.

The Holiday App and Vlix deal in short videos, so the Holiday app is really an easy way to make a video Christmas card.

Kid Friendly comics! Snarked and Donald Duck

Snarked!

I finally read the first two issues of Roger Langridge's Snarked.  Well, I read issue 0 and issue 1.

Playing off the public domain status of Lewis Carroll's stories, Langridge has grabbed the briefly mentioned Walrus and The Carpenter and decided to spin a story from what we know of them from the poem (told by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking Glass).  If you can still track down issue 0, its pretty chock full.  Not just of story, but of the source material Langridge will hope you're familiar with as he mines Carroll's material for his own purposes.

He includes pictures by John Tenniel, Carroll's artistic accomplice, in appropriate places, but the art is the same mad cap, cartoony style I really liked in his work on The Muppets comics (also from Boom).

I suspect that, with issue 1, Langridge plans to make this a closed story, that has a beginning, middle and end.  Originally, I'd believed it would be a gag book, or have one-off stories per issue, but instead it seems we're headed off on a bit of an adventure.

You see, the Red Queen has passed, leaving two children Princess Scarlett and Prince Russell IV (aka: Rusty), but now the Red King has disappeared whilst on a sea-faring voyage.  And the kids (a) would like to find their father and (b) get away from the folks who want to seize power.  Our friend The Cheshire Cat has an idea who can help them, even if The Walrus and The Carpenter seem to be, by all indications, cheaters, liars and cons.

The Walrus, The Carpenter and the offspring of the Red Queen & King

Good stuff.

The writing is sharp, the characters archetypes but cleverly done, and its a book that you can hand a kid, but I suspect you'd want to sit and read it with them.  Its pretty fun, and the language is very well thought out.

And if you have a picture of what a "snark" (the much discussed but unseen beastie) looks like, you may send it in.

I think this is one of those books you're going to wish you'd jumped on early.

Walt Disney Treasury: Donald Duck Vol 1. and 2 (and more)

Oh, so!

Yes, I've been reading Donald Duck again.  I know, I know.  I came to Disney comics so late, I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do.

I've had both these volumes for a while, but I just dug them out of my stack of comics I haven't yet read, and I plowed through them with pretty great speed.

I don't think Boom! will be carrying on printing these books now that Disney owns Marvel comics (a shame, because Marvel's collections edition has never seemed as together as I'd like) and Boom! was just really getting themselves together on their Disney collections front.  AND it was a nice compliment to the really fancy (but expensive) work Fantagraphics was doing on their archive collections.

Hubris, thy name is Donald

The two Donald volumes are pretty reasonably priced ($14.99 cover for a lot of comics) and contain pretty good stories in both.  I finally got to read a Plain Awful story in Volume 1, and the Uncle Scrooge/ Donald go into space to collect satellites story in Volume 2 had me rolling.  Both volumes contain work of the American creator, Don Rosa, who is one of two comics creators associated with Disney's ducks that all comics people should know (along with Carl Barks).  And coming off reading the Disney Four Color Treasury, it was nice to transition to the more modern Ducks era.

Its tough to explain the appeal of a Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge comic to the uninitiated, except to say that Duckberg is a very well realized place of goofiness and big hearted skinflint trillionaires and good-hearted crooks like the Beagle Boys, and its fun to see Donald in one story wrestling with space flight and in another trying to get the nephews to school.

Don Rosa is, in my estimation, one of the most creative talents in comics, with great understanding of narrative, gags, character, etc... and its just a huge pleasure to read his work.  And I suppose it says something about how under the radar the comics must have been for Disney for this to be one of the areas where any single creator was able to make a name for themselves.

 

Signal Watch Reads: Star Trek/ Legion of Super-Heroes Crossover

To begin with:  I've been utterly compromised.

In order to retain whatever passes for journalistic integrity around here, I should mention that Saturday night I had a couple of cocktails with Ms. @Allisontype and her husband, writer of this comic, Chris Roberson.  Excellent people.  All the stories are true.

Also - ask them about their Halloween cookies.

I had intended to do my review of this book prior to the evening, and failed.

So, here's more of an informal discussion of what I'll say up front is a really fun comic.

I am totally okay with Phil Jimenez doing nothing but drawings of Uhura and Saturn Girl forever

Signal Watch Watches: Drive

By this time you've likely read a good review or two of the recently released Drive.  Don't expect me to contradict those reviews.  Of our party, I believe four out of four participants (all of varying movie tastes) seemed to agree that Drive was a pretty darn good film.

I make jokes about certain movies being to my taste, and, yes, I am more likely to go see movies about superheroes, etc...  But I also like well thought-out, taught crime movies, and Drive is most certainly one of these.  

The movie doesn't just know exactly what it is, its hyper-aware of its roots both narratively and stylistically in the late-70's, early-80's and works both within and marginally outside the framework of those movies.  Perhaps suggesting there are no new stories, it also reaches back to certain elements that those 70's and 80's movies could trace back to Noir, and crime movies like The Big Heat or 1947's Kiss of Death (edit:  upon reflection, I'd be remiss to not mention This Gun for Hire as a sort of primordial influence), wherein the manipulations of criminals and the needs of those outside their worlds get crossed.

Yeah, the driving in the movie is pretty great, but I think its the storyline and performances that sell it.  Its an oddly understated movie for the first half, actually giving you a reason to care - something movies like Too Fast, Too Furious couldn't begin to wrap their mutton heads around, or that the average Jason Statham vehicle misses by a country mile.  

When the violence does erupt, director Nicolas Winding Refn doesn't shy away from the brutality of what's happening.  There's no romanticized "ballet of violence" as we've become accustomed to in most American movies over the last 15 years (nor the "kids playing guns" approach of the Schwarzenegger era).  It could be said to play for shock value if every act of violence didn't just up the stakes of the story and push our lead, played by Gosling, further and further into a corner.

Refn's vision is complete in a way I don't see out of many younger directors these days, with everything from the color of traffic lights telling part of the story to the choice of titles and musical selections winding throughout the film.

The movie clearly cost nowhere near what a Transformers film or even a Fast & Furious franchise installment would set back the studio.  I'm not naive enough to think studios will take note of the narrative success of the film, or to think the marketers have done enough to get the word out that this isn't a standard actioner.  It likely won't kill at the box office.  But you can hope for the best.

The cast is very good, of course.  Ron Perlman, Albert Brooks, Christina Hendricks, Oscar Isaac, and both Carey Mulligan and Ryan Gosling (whom I'd never seen) were pretty great.

Anyhow, I'm recommending those of you who can deal with some blood in your movies check this one out while its still at the theater. 

We3 Deluxe Edition Arrived in August (Morrison and Quitely)

I get nervous when I come home and Lucy, Scout and Jeff are all sitting around in their armor.

If you were to tell me that I would one day read a very Rated-R comic book about cyborg house pets armed to the teeth and on the run, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely (the team behind All Star Superman and Flex Mentallo), I would start wondering exactly how long you'd been scanning my brain while I slept to learns all my hopes and dreams.

But after Morrison fled Marvel back in the mid-00's, he returned to DC/ Vertigo where he went into a creative tornado, spinning out stuff I absolutely loved like Vimanamara.  But more importantly, he and Quitely created We3, likely one of my top ten or so favorite comics.  

August saw the release of a new, Deluxe Edition of We3, which I recently read.  It has more pages than the original collection or issues, fills in a bit more of the story, and it made me cry a little bit again, even if this is at least the 12th time I've read that comic.

Not only is the story terribly heartbreaking, but to me, Quitely is one of the brilliant artists working in any medium right now.  We're just lucky to get him working in comics.  I don't know who designs these pages, but... man.

For such a great package, the We3 book is very reasonably priced.

 U R a Gud Dog

Signal Watch Watches: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Anyone who brings up the Planet of the Apes franchise around me is going to regret that slip of the tongue. I love the Apes. I love not just the premise of Cheston landing on a strange planet where Apes evolved and man did not (ahem, SPOILERS) but the twist ending that lets you know this was a Rod Serling Joint.

I love that there are four more Apes movies of varying quality with a bizarre and twisted time-travel logic to them. I love Roddy McDowell as Cornelius and Caesar, and Kim Hunter as Zira. I love Cheston as Cheston on a planet full of intelligent Apes. I love the fact that Beneath the Planet of the Apes stars James Franciscus, who is sort of a mini-Cheston AND Cheston.

I'm not old enough to have participated in the Apes phenomenon the first time around, and while I watched the movies as a kid (and liked them), it was in college that I became obsessed. Like all good sci-fi, it was a terrific inversion of our world and our way of looking at our fellow beings.

Signal Watch Reads: Brubaker and Phillip's "Last of the Innocent" - pure noir on the rocks

Holy smokes.  This week saw the release of another issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phllips' creator-owned but published by Marvel title Criminal.  Criminal is an ongoing series, but Brubaker tells different stories every few issues with new characters, etc...  in short, its not an ongoing series following a single character.

I picked up the first issue or two and about that time i was changing comic shops, etc... and lost track of the title.  With issue 1 of the recent story, Last of the Innocent, I decided to pick up the comic again.  And I'm absolutely pleased I did so.

As someone who enjoys his crime fiction as much as his heroic fiction, Last of the Innocent hits all of the noir criteria, following stand-ins for the Riverdale High gang of Archie comics in familiar faces such as Archie, Jughead, Veronica, Betty, Moose, Reggie and others.  But to see Jughead's gluttony explained as part of an addictive personality, Veronica's rich-girl self-centeredness taken to the logical extreme, etc... by the character's 30's sets up the perfect noir scenario.

I'm making this sound like something it isn't, which is an unoriginal, cutesy exploitation of the original Archie material.  Instead, the story reads much more like straight noir with flashbacks and reflections of Riley Richard's past remembered through rose colored glasses.

The series has a few more issues to go (this week saw issue 3 hit the stands), but each chapter does what a good noir does with each twist, and ratchets up the tension around Riley and the supporting characters.

The artwork, flipping between Phillips' now trademark rough-and-tumble style and a cartoony, kids'-book feel for flashbacks, is a huge pleasure.

Highly recommended.

Signal Watch Watches: Attack the Block

A while back SimonUK mentioned he'd somehow already seen Attack the Block at a festival, and vouched for it, stating that when it came to Austin this summer, we really needed to go see it.  Some of the producers and talent involved are from the group that brought us Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, some loving takes on familiar genres, infused with smart-alec humor and a fan's know-how enough to both play with conventions and know what's important about retaining some of those conventions.  But all without getting too precious, I think.

Attack the Block does not, I repeat, does not feature Simon Pegg, but I promise you it is still a very good movie.

Signal Watch Reads: Power Lunch (by J. Torres and Dean Trippe)

Power Lunch
First Course
by J. Torres & Dean Trippe
lettered by Ed Brisson
designed by Keith Wood
edited by James Lucas Jones

So, one tough thing about running a comics blog is that sometimes we are asked to preview materials and write a review.  And sometimes we read something and we try to be as fair as possible, even when we know that the item we're reviewing isn't something we'd normally read because of genre, topic, etc...  or worse, sometimes its something we didn't like.

I'm happy to say that I just don't have that problem here in any way, shape or form. I just straight up dug this fun, well written, well designed/ drawn all-ages book. 

Signal Watch Reads: Superman 713

Superman 713
Grounded: Part 11
Written by Chris Roberson
Art: pages 1, 4-10: Diogenes Neves @ Oclair Albert
pages 2 & 3: Eddy Barrows & JP Mayer
pages 11-20: Jamal Igle & Jon Sibal
Colorist: Marcello Maiolo
Letterer: John J. Hill
Cover: John Cassaday & David Baron (Jeff Smith, variant)
Editors: Wil Moss & Matt Idleson

Two notes before talk more about this issue: 
(1) This is the issue that follows the kitty/Muslim controversy that got Roberson's issue #712 frozen and replaced with an inventory story from Kurt Busiek's post-Infinite Crisis run on Superman. 
(2)  This is the penultimate issue of the Roberson run on Superman, and while we've got one more issue, I'm a little bummed that there's only 20 more pages of Roberson's work (for now).

Just as its annoying when networks show episodes of a TV show out of order, we could have been very, very lost with the release of this issue had Roberson not done so much to make each issue episodic.  We may have missed a few story and character beats, but we're not utterly lost as Superman wanders into Oregon.  We've just missed a leg of Superman's walk, and we can only hope that the division running collected editions will see fit to include the missing chapter in the collected run.

Its unfortunate that we have to keep an odd editorial decision in mind in approaching the story, but (as we say almost daily at my office) "it is what it is".  And what it is is a really fun issue, and an appropriate one to lead toward a conclusion of Grounded, but to put a bow on the conclusion of this volume of Superman.