Ryan
This was really enjoyable. Kate continues to be the best thing to come out of the Bat family in decades, if not ever, and it was interesting to see how she related to and interacted both with Wonder Woman and with a supernatural threat that was clearly over her head.
Also, no spoilers, but the last page made me happier than any comic page has in a long time. I might stop reading Batwoman and treat that as a proper ending.
This was a hoot. There's no other way to describe it. Hiassen tells a dark, hilarious tale about idiot criminals, corrupt amusement parks, and environmental extremists, and makes all of the larger-than-life characters seem perfectly reasonable when set against one another.
In some ways the book's horribly dated - fax machines! Carbon paper! The death of John Lennon as a recentish event! But in the end they only add to the book's charm.
This was an incredibly frustrating book to read. On one hand, there's a lot of great stuff here - the setting is fascinating, as is the idea of Rai, which lets David Micheline explore those themes of fatherhood, legacy, and the nature of heroism that he does so well. The art is lovely, as well - Valiant had this house style at the time that was crisp, and clean, and really lent itself to visual storytelling.
What was frustrating, though, was how much this book was constrained by the time it was published. Shooter's attitudes about serial storytelling can definitely be felt as an influence, and I couldn't help but wish that it was allowed to develop its story in the slower, deliberate way that a book like Saga gets to operate. Add to that a completely horrible ending - Rai getting jobbed out to a super villain as part of a mega crossover - that you could argue is “ironic”, but only in the sense of someone coming and stealing half of your meal while you're eating dinner.
I've come to really dislike massive, cross-title crossovers as a genre; this one was fun because it mostly sidesteps that to tell a story focusing on Carol, rather than telling a story about a Skrull invasion that Carol just happens to be present for. Reed's version of the character is strong, principled, and unafraid to kick ass. She's a fun character to read about.
The one thing that took away from this was the art. I knew what I was getting in for (Greg Horn on covers with some dude from Witchblade on interiors), but it was hard to take the story seriously at times when it's full of the hero posing like a pin-up model in the middle of a fight scene.
Great stuff. Fraction realizes that the idea of Hawkeye as an Avenger-type superhero is kind of ridiculous, and he runs with that idea, telling a story that works on a dramatic level, but also refuses to take itself seriously. Because if you take yourself to seriously, you'll never make it out alive. Bro.
Also, Aja's artwork is phenomenal. Future generations of artists are going to study this stuff, the same way they do Steranko's Nick Fury, or Gibbon's Watchmen.
I was disappointed in this, given the bona fides of the creative team involved. Violence and cynicism in the pursuit of telling a story that's nothing but violent and cynical doesn't strike me as being a story worth reading. Because it's Morrison I keep trying to think of some deeper meaning to imbue the story with, but I got nothing.
A nice little collection of short fiction from Saladin Ahmed. Like his other work, it's mostly fantasy, and features concepts drawn from Middle Eastern myth NAND folklore. Sometimes poignant, sometimes wondrous. always entertaining, Engraved on the Eye is one of those rare short fiction collections where I enjoyed every single one of the stories. Bonus: the first meeting of Doctor Abdouhl and Raseed bas Raseed!
Cliffhanger endings are horrible. They're made much worse when the first third of the book felt drawn out, like the author was stalling and trying to make sure they would end on said cliffhanger.
Aside from that, this was enjoyable, I guess? Much of what I liked about the earlier parts of the series was still there. The Africa plot/worldbuilding was really fascinating; it was great to see more of hue he dragoning world.
If you're a fan of Veronica Mars, this one's a no-brainer. It's a seamless extension of the Veronica Mars story, written by the man who created the character, showran the series, and directed the movie. So it's more like transmedia than traditional “tie-in” fiction. Veronica was always one to narrate her adventures, as well, so it's easy to jump into this without any adjustment.
As far as the story's concerned, it's a pretty straightforward mystery - a teenaged girl has gone missing on Spring Break, and Veronica's hired to try to track her down. The action's pretty tightly plotted, and we see some development of Veronica, as well - I felt a lot more comfortable with some of the choices she made in the movie after having this as additional context for them. If you're unfamiliar with the character of Veronica Mars, this might not be the best jumping-on point for you, but if you're in the tribe already, it's a story well worth your time.
This was more fun than I had expected it to be. I was curious to see Armstrong take on a non-supernatural genre, and she did it fairly well. It would have been easy for Nadia, the ex-cop turned hitwoman protagonist, to be cliche, but she's crafted into an interesting, likable character. If anything I'd say that's a running theme with the book in general: fairly pedestrian plot elements, but a level of craft and artistry behind the characters that more than makes up for that.
The Four Horseman are always depicted as a solid team, metaphorical forces that always seem eye to eye. What if they didn't, though? What if the rest decided that Something needed to be done about one of their own? It's a fairly unique idea, and one that Jonathan Hickman is able to build a story out of that can only be described as a “rippin' yarn”.
Something I've noticed in a lot of Hickman's work is that he doesn't really care for exposition - you're dropped into a story and he assumes you'll be able to follow along until everything makes sense. That works well in his capes books, because they take place in worlds that readers are already familiar with. Here it's a little unsettling, because there's so much that we don't know about. I'm sure eventually that unsettled feeling will go away, but for now it's something to be aware of.
The best way to imagine the books in this series is to think of them as big, wide-screen, summer action blockbusters. About a steampunk version of the Avengers (the Emma Peel Avengers, mind you, not the repulsor rays and star-painted shield ones), and directed by Sam Raimi. Some people will look at that description and ask why, others will look at it and ask why not. If anything, this one was even more fun than its predecessor, as it could avoid all the niceties and introductions and get right into the two-fistedness.
Come to think of it, Ted Raimi would make an excellent Books.
I find Morrison's superhero stuff is always kind of an odd duck - he gets tonnes of credit for how “crazy” and “original” his ideas are, but what he really does is take old ideas, dust then off, and give them a psychedelic coat of paint. The result is still good stuff - not only here, but in his X-Men, for example - but I usually end up finding his superhero work lacklustre compared to the rest of his material.
The problem with that here is that the ideas he's dusting off are all fairly silly - I've never been a fan of 5th dimensional imps, or Krypto, or the Superman Revenge Squad - and while he makes them tolerable, they're still not ideas I can get excited about.
To be honest the stuff that I found most emotionally rewarding were the Sholly Fisch short stories included at the end of the book. Neil Degrasse Tyson training telescopes on the light from Rao at the exact moment Krypton exploded was a fantastic moment.
I'm torn by this. On one hand, there's an absolutely epic plot that definitely lives up to the Star Wars name, and some great individual moments (especially seeing the rise of Reluctant Jedi Nomi Sunrider). On the other hand, the story at times felt like it lacked a lot of emotional/character depth. With the fall to the dark side of Qel-Droma and Exar Kun, especially, it felt like it was happening because the plot demanded it rather than it being a logical step for the characters to take. Maybe I've been spoiled by other versions of that story, like the novel Traitor from the NJO era, but it really kept me from enjoying the story as much as I'd hoped to.
Still, if you're a fan of Star Wars, I'd definitely recommend reading the TOTJ omnibi, out of historical interest if nothing more.
While I was reading this, a friend of mine posted a comment on twitter that the issue with reading Mieville is that it takes 100 pages to really understand what's going on. This was that, but in reverse - at first it seemed to be a straightforward revamp of an (admittedly ridiculous) superhero concept, but then around 50 pages in he flings us off the cliff of understanding, and it becomes a story that uses superheroes as a thought experiment for existentialism, Nietzschean philosophy, and the transient nature of both identity and reality.
DC has a strong history of taking superhero concepts and using them as vehicles in this way - Dial H is the latest in a long line of titles like those that Moore, Gaiman, Morrison, and Delano produced in years past, both in terms of style and quality.
The other week I picked up one of the Tales of the Jedi omnibuses from the library, on a whim, and it's got me fully drawn back into the Star Wars universe. As part of that I've decided to become more familiar with the era before the films, as it's something I've been mostly ignorant about. This volume, set 25,000 years before the saga of the Skywalkers, is about as far back as you can go.
This volume is mostly just introduction, but at this point I almost feel like that's expected from a mainstream longform comic series; other Star Wars comics might be able to get away with piggybacking off of other media that readers already know, but in this case the creators don't have the luxury. They're set far enough in the past that there is no connection to any other Star Wars material, and have to create a universe whole cloth. They do it well, though, and by the end it feels like all of the pieces are in place for a crackerjack followup.
What I think is interesting about both this and the TOTJ series is how far apart their depiction of the jedi (or je'daii, in this case) are from the vision that Lucasfilm presented in the prequel trilogy. If I were feeling generous I would say that this was intentional, and that the unspoken truth of the prequels is that Count Dooku was right - the Jedi had strayed from their path and philosophy, becoming a venal and corrupted group of hermits and ascetics who needed to be brought down. There's a good chance that's not what they intended, but I think it's a fascinating reading of the world and saga.
You would have to be fairly invested in the Star Wars universe to even want to pick this up. Which, luckily, I am. And if you're bought in, it's great. This is a collection of stories that feel like authentic parts of the Star Wars universe, and which help provide intriguing amounts of context to the original movies, but which also tell interesting, compelling stories that don't depend on the SWOT to create an emotional connection to the audience. The people that made the prequel films could have learned a thing or two from this collection when making that set of movies.
This was everything the first volume in the series was, but moreso. Which, given how much I enjoyed that book, is saying something. At the very end of Saga vol 1, Marko's parents showed up, and dealing with their appearance is one of the main drives of this volume. The plot's on a super slow burn, but I think that all of the work being put into establishing these characters and making their relationships real is going to pay off huge the further we get into the saga.
Whenever I read something by Beukes, I'm always reminded of Gibson's first rule - that “The future's already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed”. That's definitely the case in Moxyland - it's set in a dystopian future, but between the role mobile phones play in the narrative, the commercialization of art and “cool”, and the presentation as a tool of liberation and oppression, it feels more like an amplified version of today than it does tomorrow.
Moxyland is sleek, it's hip, it's hard to put down once you're into it.
I absolutely loved the high concept of this one - that the Fair Folk are still alive in our time, and they have latched on to modern elements of our culture, with the light elves wanting to just hang out, listen to rock and roll and modify racing cars, and the dark elves being drawn to the tools of modern organized criminal rings.
When we get into the plot of the novel, it falls off a bit, going into after-school special territory, but it's told with enough joie de vivre that it stays entertaining throughout.