Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 

What I bought, read, watched, or otherwise consumed – April 2022

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women — and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.” (John Fowles, from The Magus)

COMICS

Decorum volume 1 by Jonathan Hickman (writer), Mike Huddleston (artist), and Rus Wooton (letterer). $39.99, 364 pgs, Image.

With Hickman, it’s not so much the actual story – as Michael Bay famously said, “There are only seven plots, so you might as well have boobs” – but the audacity with which he tells the story. Sometimes this audacity gets him into trouble – Moira MacTaggart as God? – but for the most part, I admire Hickman’s balls-to-the-wall approach to storytelling. In Decorum, the actual story is just okay, with bad guys wanting something that can defeat them so they can stop it, people who appear evil but we know will Do The Right Thing, and a lot of good old-fashioned ultra-violence, but Hickman has a blast telling it, and it shows. He goes huge with it, as galactic empires battle across space and high-end assassins track strange targets through bizarre cities, and there’s some goofy humor in it, which Hickman doesn’t always show and is always welcome (in small doses) in super-serious work like this. His characters don’t have a lot of depth, but they are fascinating, and he does a nice job with Imogen and Neha, the mentor and protégée who form a nice bond. It’s a majestic work, full of Hickman boldness but without the loopiness that some of his work gets into. It’s also maddeningly incomplete. You know how you’re watching a television show, and it gets about three-quarters of the way through, and you think, dang, this is going “to be continued,” isn’t it, and then it is? As the final issue of this began, I kept thinking, “Either he’s going to wrap this up too quickly or it’s to be continued,” and while he does manage to tell a complete story in this volume, it does feel a bit rushed and it does claim it’s going to be continued. Considering the speed (or lack thereof) with which some Hickman projects come out and the fact that this very collection came out almost a year after it was solicited, I’m not holding my breath. But if you do get this, just know that it’s not a completely incomplete story, just not as complete as it could be.

Huddleston, meanwhile, is a huge reason to get this. He doesn’t do as many comics as some, and he’s never done a high-end superhero book, so he doesn’t quite have as high a profile as some, but he’s excellent, and this book is gorgeous. He shifts easily from delicate, beautiful paints to the scratchiest of pencils, depending on the tone of the scene, and his design work is staggering, from the weird cities of this universe to the weird creatures of this universe. He gets to draw all sorts of things – Meso-Americans, steampunk conquistadors, pagodas, Orthodox-style churches, Venetian-style mansions on Venetian-style canals, a large crustacean assassin, God – and he does it all wonderfully. He shifts from “realistic” facial expressions to melodramatic ones in the blink of an eye, and it always fits into the scene. It’s an amazing-looking comic, and it complements Hickman’s gonzo storytelling very well.

As I noted, this is “volume 1,” but you don’t need to worry about that, and while I live in hope, I fear we won’t ever see a volume 2 anyway, so you might as well buy this and not worry about it. It’s not as good as some of Hickman’s work, but it’s a lot better than what I’ve read of his Marvel work, so there is that. Take a look at it!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

As a resident of Arizona, this panel speaks to me

Vinyl by Doug Wagner (writer), Daniel Hillyard (artist), Dave Stewart (colorist), Ed Dukeshire (letterer), and Kevin Gardner (editor). $19.99, 132 pgs, Image.

Vinyl is another ultra-violent comic, far more violent than Decorum, so be warned! It’s about a serial killer, after all, and his serial killer friends, doing a whole lot of killing, often in horribly visceral ways. It’s a strange comic – it begins with an FBI agent meeting an elderly serial killer named Walter, who he’s been tracking for some time and who believes they’re friends. Dennis, the agent, and Walter meet at a park for coffee, and it appears like it’s going to be a cat-and-mouse thing between the two, until suddenly, not too far into issue #1, a beautiful blonde woman wearing a fairly revealing toga shows up. She’s the leader of a cult, and Dennis threw her son in jail, and now she’s luring in Dennis’s daughter as revenge, but Dennis says he’ll go with her if she leaves his daughter alone, and so she does, and he does. The book turns into a rescue mission, with Walter teaming up with Dennis’s partner and a few other serial killers – a Justice League of Serial Killers, if you will – to go into the cult and get Dennis. Things get bloody quickly and stay bloody. It’s quite good, with some nice surprises along the way, as we learn a bit more about the killers and what makes them tick just a little – as with Decorum, the characterization isn’t too deep, but what we do get is effective. It’s not like they’re sympathetic killers, but we do learn a bit about each of them, which makes them a bit more human. The cult is just a scary obstacle, and of course the comic reads like a video game with different levels, but that’s not the worst thing in the world, especially if we do get some fun sidetracks thrown in. Hillyard is clearly channeling Tradd Moore in this book, but he doesn’t quite have Moore’s storytelling chops, so a few sequences where he goes for a big splash with smaller inset panels across it to show action are a bit confusing, as the small panels don’t show us what we need and we have to infer after the fact, but on the whole, it’s very nice art. He does a good job with the gore, and he does a good job showing just how crazy the serial killers are, even as he also does a good job showing how much they love what they do. It’s very unsettling, as it’s supposed to be.

I haven’t read Plastic, the first Wagner/Hillyard collaboration, but now I’m intrigued. Vinyl is a B-movie hacker flick with some nice, humanizing touches, which makes it more fun than your average gory book. So that’s cool.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Yes, mass slaughter often is!

A Thing Called Truth volume 1? by Iolanda Zanfardino (writer/letterer), Elisa Romboli (artist), and Melanie Hackett (editor). $16.99, 110 pgs, Image.

I’m sure this is volume 1, although there’s no indication of it on the spine or at the end (“To be continued!” or “We will return in volume 2!” or anything like that), because we begin in media res and we never get back to that scene, which is odd, and the main plot of the book isn’t even close to being resolved, so there’s that. I don’t mind that it’s not labeled as volume 1, you understand, I’m just warning you.

Anyway, this is a charming adventure that, like far too many books, is weakened a bit by adding romance to the equation. I do find it fascinating that if you put two women together, there seems to be an implication that their sexuality is fluid – the woman on the right on the cover, Magdalene, gives no indication that she’s a lesbian until she kisses the woman on the left, Dorian, who’s very much a lesbian. I wonder, if two men, one of whom has never given any indication of being gay, had been put in this story, would they eventually kiss? Beats me. Maybe I’m wrong, but it does seem that creators believe a woman’s sexuality is more malleable than a man’s. Maybe I just don’t read the right stuff.

Magdalene is a doctor in Germany who’s working on something (we literally never find out what it is) for a pharmaceutical company that will, as more than one person puts it, “change the world.” When the company finds out, they confiscate her work and fake her resignation (she had a proposal to sell the “device” for far below market value so everyone could afford it, which of course her bosses could not abide), which leads to her getting drunk and sleeping in her car. When she wakes up, her car has been stolen (she left the keys in it) by Dorian, who’s going on a road trip across Europe to fulfill her dead brother’s desires – he wanted to re-enact famous movies scenes at their locations, but died before he could, so Dorian is doing it for him. So, for the most part, this is a madcap adventure, with Dorian trying to get Magdalene out of her tightly-wound shell and Magdalene, eventually, trying to get Dorian to get tested for the disease that killed her brother and mother (we literally never find out what it is). Neither woman wants to do what the other wants, although Magdalene eventually does come out of her shell (see: kisses Dorian), while I imagine Magdalene’s device will somehow be relevant to Dorian’s condition. In this volume at least, it’s a relatively low-stakes adventure, but Zanfardino does a very good job making these characters interesting and likable and giving them weird things to do that reveal more of themselves and their feelings toward each other. Romboli’s frenetic, slightly melodramatic linework makes everything feel heightened, as if it were happening inside a movie, which helps when Dorian and Magdalene re-create the scenes (some of which I know, but others I don’t, but it doesn’t really matter all that much). Her work with body language is very well done, too, as for much of the book, neither Magdalene or Dorian wants to say what they’re really thinking, so Romboli needs to show it through their non-verbal interactions, as she does it very well.

I hope we get another volume soon enough, as there are some cliffhangers to be dealt with at the end of this one! I will be there for the second volume!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Don’t say no to topless, world-saving doctors!

The Department of Truth volume 3: Free Country by James Tynion IV (writer), Elsa Charretier (artist), Tyler Boss (artist), John J. Pearson (artist/colorist), David Romero (artist/colorist), Alison Sampson (artist), Jorge Fornes (artist), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Roman Titov (colorist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Aditya Bidikar (letterer), and Steve Foxe (editor). $16.99, 154 pgs, Image.

This volume of The Department of Truth isn’t quite as good as the first two, mainly because these are the issues that Martin Simmonds couldn’t draw, presumably because he was catching up with the main narrative, so these are “fill-in-the-blanks” issues, which doesn’t mean they’re bad, just that they feel slightly less essential. Tynion gives us the histories of Lee Oswald and Doc Hynes at the Department, most of which we could infer from the main story, but they’re fun nevertheless, mostly because of the details, like Frank Capra being head of the Department during the 1960s. My favorite issue, however, is the first, in which Oswald reads a story set in A.D. 1000, in which a monk comes across an old woman in the forest. I love it because it brings up the “Phantom Time Hypothesis,” a theory which states that Pope Sylvester II and Otto III, the Holy Roman Emperor, faked the dates of Jesus’s birth so that they would be ruling during the special year of 1000, and they made up 300 years of history, including Charlemagne. I just learned about this theory not too long ago, and I love it. It’s so batshit and so Eurocentric (so all of Islam’s founding period didn’t exist?) and so far removed from reality that of course Tynion knows about it and put it into his batshit (in the best possible way) comic book. The historian who came up with this published in German, but I’m dying to read an English translation. It’s all hogwash, of course, but the fact that it’s in The Department of Truth made me smile. Plus, Tynion got some excellent artists to draw his book – Sampson’s hallucinogenic art is not seen often enough, and Tynion gets her to draw Oswald’s adventures in 1960s San Francisco, so she nails that – and it’s just a fun book to read. I hope it will become more essential as the book goes on, and I imagine it will, but it still feels a bit less necessary than the “main” narrative of the series.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Well, that’s unsettling

Poser by Matt Miner (writer), Clayton McCormack (artist), Doug Garback (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer), and Hannah Means-Shannon (editor). $16.99, 96 pgs, A Wave Blue World.

In the early 1980s, a geeky kid tries to hang out with some punks, who mock him as a “poser,” and things get bloody. In the present day, a record store owner is raising his daughter, who’s also a bit of a punk, and at a club one night, one of her friends is killed by someone who writes “poser” in blood over the body. Oh dear. It’s a slasher comic! Miner does some fun things with the genre – we think it’s easy enough to figure out what’s going on, but he keeps throwing up things that make us doubt ourselves, which is nice. In most slasher fiction, we are either sympathetic to the victims or weirdly charmed by the killer, and Miner definitely falls into the latter camp, even though the killer is more of a personality-less killing machine. Still, “Poser” is just so efficient and a bit joyful, plus the “normal” folk in the book are so easy to root against, because they’re all kind of assholes. It’s still horrifying to see them hunted, but deep down, we don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world that they’re dead, and Miner does a nice job mining that emotion. The solution is the tiniest bit hackneyed, but it’s not terrible, and when you go back and look through the book with that knowledge, it makes some scenes far more interesting. McCormack does a nice job with the artwork – I’ve never been to Redondo Beach, but McCormack does a nice job making it look like a seedy suburb, which I gather it is, and he does a nice job designing the characters, as they look like grungy teens. His killer is creepy, too, as you can see from the cover and the panel below. It’s a pretty interesting comic – not great, but an entertaining read.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Certainly the pertinent question!

April was turning out to be a “meh” month until the final week, as the early part of the month was filled with decent comics, but nothing special. I mean, Kaare Andrews’s gorgeous Amazing Fantasy is gorgeous, no doubt, but it’s just a bland sword-‘n’-sorcery/superhero mash-up that continues to showcase Andrews’s weird hatred of Spider-Man. It’s worth it for the art alone, but the story is just kind of “meh.” Mister Miracle isn’t bad, with Fico Ossio’s art a highlight, but Brandon Easton tries to shoehorn race into it, and while Shiloh Norman being a black man is fairly important, it feels like an odd fit, plus he has to do some weird retconning to get there. Gun Honey is a pretty good story about a woman who gets weapons to people in tight situations so they can use them, but of course she eventually needs to pick a side. Vermilliön is a surprisingly effective horror story with very cool art, but it either doesn’t make enough sense or I’m not too bright (probably the latter), so I don’t like it even more, and We Only Kill Each Other is a fun adventure story about two Jewish gangsters who are forced by the DA to team up to fight American Nazis in 1938. It’s a solid story with solid art. Radio Spaceman is drawn very nicely by Greg Hinkle, but it’s another monster story by Mignola, and while they’re fun to read, they don’t really offer much that’s new. Everything else is just kind of there: Apache Delivery Service is a treasure hunt during the Vietnam War, and it’s fine; The Unbeatable Blue Baron is another entry into the superhero world that SitComics is doing, with Ron Frenz providing solid artwork and the story feeling like a throwback to the 1980s, and it’s fine; the Elektra #100 one-shot has two Elektra stories, and they’re both fine; Errand Boys is a less nasty version of Space Bastards, and it’s fine; Hellblazer: Rise and Fall is about John fighting a demon, and it’s fine; Jim Starlin’s Midnight Rose is about a woman who can control plants, and it’s fine; The Secret History of the War on Weed is a wacky satire set in the 1980s, so we get a Schwazeneggar/Stallone type killing hippies until he gets some marijuana in him, which chills him out, and it’s fine; and Time Before Time continues the time-traveling adventures of the first volume, and it’s fine. See? Everything’s fine. Let’s move on!

TELEVISION

Hightown season 2 (Starz). This show is bleak as fuck, and it gets on your nerves after a while, but it’s compelling, too, thanks to the excellent performances of its two leads, Monica Raymund and James Badge Dale (I’ve never watched a lot of stuff with Raymund in it, but Dale is always good, even though he’s never become a big star). The other actors – Riley Voelkel, Amaury Nolasco, Atkins Estimond, Tonya Glanz, and Luis Guzmán – are very good, but it’s Raymund and Dale who anchor the show, which is about the drug trade on Cape Cod. Raymund is a Fishery cop who begins working with the State Police this season, as she knows a lot of the players in the drug trade all too well – she’s a recovering addict. Dale is a Statie who, in season 1, tried to get close to drug kingpin Nolasco by having sex with his wife, Voelkel, while Nolasco was in prison (and with Nolasco’s knowledge, as he wanted her to get information out of Dale as well), which didn’t work out for him too well. He spends the entire season 2 trying to get his job back, while Nolasco is out, Voelkel is back with him, and Guzmán, playing Nolasco’s cousin, is managing his strip club and making life hard for everyone thanks to his prodigious sexual and drug appetites. As I noted, it’s fucking bleak – no one seems to like themselves or anyone else or the situation they’re in (I know why this happens, but it cracks me up that no one on television ever thinks of moving the fuck away, especially when they’re not married and don’t have kids), and that makes for difficult viewing, but Raymund’s attempts to stay clean and Dale’s sad need to stay relevant are really fascinating to watch, and the show looks great – apparently season 2 was filmed in Wilmington, NC, but it still looks like a shitty Massachusetts winter. It’s not a great show, but it’s not bad.

Peacemaker season 1 (HBO). I had heard good things about this show, and for the most part, it lived up to its reputation … until the very end, but that’s okay, I guess. I still haven’t seen Gunn’s Suicide Squad yet, but that’s fine, I suppose, as this show does reference it, but not too much. Cena is fun, it’s very ribald, they really, really use the 1980s hair metal soundtrack to maximum effect (I’m not complaining, but dang!), Danielle Brooks is excellent as Amanda Waller’s daughter, who’s sent to join the team to spy on everyone, Jennifer Holland is very good as Harcourt, the tough-as-nails spy, and it’s generally fun to watch. Gunn and team go for some deep cuts (Matter-Eater Lad, for instance), have fun making fun of the DC icons, and do a good job showing why the Justice League isn’t involved. I didn’t love the ending, because Gunn knows he’s doing a television show, so some characters survive that probably shouldn’t have. I know that’s a weird thing, wanting more bloodshed, but it just seems like the serial nature of television kept Gunn from going to the logical extreme. It’s a minor complaint, though. If you like bloody, bloody violence, lots and lots of cursing, naked fighting, and a shit-ton of tasty guitar licks, this is the show for you!

The Thing About Pam (NBC). Renée Zellweger (that’s TWO-TIME OSCAR WINNER RENÉE ZELLWEGER TO YOU!!!!) stars in this nasty little mini-series, giving a superb performance as Pam Hupp, whose best friend was murdered in 2011 in a small town in Missouri. The woman’s husband was convicted of the murder, and Pam had a great deal to do with that, apparently, as she was the star witness for the prosecution. However, the case fell apart because it was clear Pam was lying about some things and that the DA and police were either corrupt, incompetent, or both, and Pam is currently imprisoned for a different crime. Zellweger dominates the show, overwhelming her husband, played beautifully and meekly by Sean Bridgers, matching Josh Duhamel’s defense lawyer, and finding a kindred spirit in the district attorney, played with flustered brilliance by Judy Greer, who’s in over her head and quickly begins to regret hitching her wagon to Pam. What’s most bizarre is that they show a little bit of the real Pam at the end, and it’s amazing how well Zellweger nails her speech patterns and mannerisms, because you can’t believe, while you’re watching Zellweger, that someone could act in this way and get away with it for so long, but apparently she did. The show is really about America and our obsession with fame and wealth, and Zellweger does a superb job getting to that without being too obnoxious about it. It’s a pretty cool show.

Secrets of Playboy (A&E). This ten-part documentary (with two hour-long interview segments after it) is interesting, not because it will change anything (Hefner has been dead for almost five years and his family is no longer involved in Playboy Enterprises, so it’s not like anyone is going to hold him accountable), but because it’s interesting to see how cult-like Hefner’s empire really was. People sympathize with victims of cults, but many people have not sympathized with these women, and the documentary becomes more about what we as a country think of women than what Hefner did (and, to be clear, I believe these women, mainly because I’m not stupid enough to think a rich, powerful man with access to thousands of women who want to please him wouldn’t be a horrible human being, plus it’s not like this is an isolated woman speaking up – it’s dozens of them), as most people who don’t care about what Hefner did, even if they think he did it, would say that the women shouldn’t have been there in the first place and that they were posing naked, so what did they expect? To a degree, I get that, especially for the women in this series who went to Playboy later in Hef’s life. Miki Garcia, a Playmate in 1973, and Sondra Theodore, a Playmate in 1977 (and Hefner’s #1 girlfriend for five years), might not have known what they were getting into, but Garcia testified in front of Congress in the 1980s, and many people wrote books about the atmosphere at the mansion, so by the time Holly Madison came along and starred on The Girls Next Door or Karissa and Kristina Shannon showed up (Karissa got pregnant by Hefner and had an abortion without his knowledge, she says in one of the interview shows), it’s harder to sympathize with them because it’s not like it was a secret anymore. But you can and should still sympathize with them, because it’s clear that Hefner knew how to groom young women and how to select young women who were easily groomed – Susie Krabacher, a Playmate in 1983, says that her grandfather raped her when she was a child, and she had no father figure, so Hefner was a father figure, and she wanted to trust him, so it was easier for him to rape her because she was so vulnerable. So I get it: on the one hand, you’re going to a place where they want you to pose nude, and perhaps that should be a warning sign. On the other hand, it’s horrible what happened to these women, and the stories are credible and widespread, so people defending Hefner sound a bit silly. Some women have tweeted that he never raped them, so how could he be a rapist? Do these people think serial killers kill everyone they meet? Hefner employed a lot of women, so how could he be such a monster? Lots of sexual predators do that, and unfortunately, a lot of women play along with them and a lot of women, it seemed, helped enable Hefner’s proclivities. Theodore, who’s at the center of the show, even makes the point that for years, she helped Hefner procure women for his orgies, and even after she broke up with him, she went back to the mansion a lot, because she didn’t want to admit to herself that anything horrible had happened because she partly blamed herself. While a lot of the documentary doesn’t exactly break new ground, and when it does, it skirts over it (the Don Cornelius rape story is zipped by, as is Hef’s male lover and possible bestiality), but again, it’s more about how we view women, especially those who do things we don’t approve of, and the answers, sadly, is still: not very well.

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It’s time for the “classic” reprints section of our post!

Marvel keeps doing their thing, with a bunch of big omnibuses of old and not-so-old stuff. So this month I picked up the Doctor Strange by Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo Omnibus, which seems self-explanatory; Moon Knight: Legacy, which collects the Max Bemis run from 2017 or thereabouts; the Savage Sword of Conan Omnibus volume 7, in which your favorite barbarian (probably) cleaves many skulls and (probably) swives many women; the Thor by Jason Aaron Omnibus volume 1, which is the first half of his run; and the Weapon X Gallery Edition, which is absolutely gorgeous. Good pickin’s from the House of Ideas!

DC didn’t bring out much, but the Gotham Central Omnibus is a sweet package collecting the entire series. I already had this in trade, but I know some issues were missing (I could be wrong, but whatever), so I picked it up in this nice hardcover, and I already buzzed through it, because it’s so good. Go read it!

Epicenter has Mister No: The Temple of Maya, which is an Italian comic from the 1970s. It looks keen. And PS Artbooks keeps glacially bringing their books out, with Classic Adventure Comics volume 2, featuring more Golden Age Goodness!

Now it’s time for my favorite part of the post: the money!

6 April: $141.39
13 April: $384.33
20 April: $181.30
27 April: $383.49

Money in April: $1090.51 (April 2021: $651.46)
YTD: $3853.38 (Last year at the same time: $2290.90)

Let’s break it down by publisher!

Ablaze: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Abrams Comicarts: 1 (1 graphic novel)
AfterShock: 1 (1 single issue)
Behemoth: 1 (1 single issue)
Dark Horse: 5 (1 graphic novel, 2 single issues, 2 trade paperbacks)
DC: 3 (1 “classic” reprint, 2 trade paperbacks)
Dead Reckoning: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Epicenter Comics: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
Fantagraphics: 1 (1 single issue)
Gallery 13: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Graphic Mundi: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Graphix: 1 (1 graphic novel)
HarperCollins: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Holiday House: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Humanoids: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Image: 11 (1 graphic novel, 4 single issues, 6 trade paperbacks)
Marvel: 7 (5 “classic” reprints, 1 single issue, 1 trade paperback)
NBM: 1 (1 graphic novel)
PS Artbooks: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
SitComics: 1 (1 single issue)
Titan Comics: 3 (2 graphic novels, 1 trade paperback)
A Wave Blue World: 1 (1 trade paperback)

The totals for the year so far!

Ablaze: 3
Abrams Comicarts: 1
Action Lab: 1
AfterShock: 10
Ahoy Comics: 2
Amulet Books/Abrams: 1
Antarctic Press: 1
Archaia: 3
AWA Studios: 3
Behemoth: 1
Black Panel Press: 1
Boom! Studios: 5
Caliber Press: 1
Centrala: 1
Clover Press: 1
Darby Pop: 1
Dark Horse: 27
DC: 11
Dead Reckoning: 2
Drawn & Quarterly: 2
Dynamite: 1
Epicenter Comics: 1
Fantagraphics: 7
Floating World Comics: 1
Gallery 13: 1
Graphic Mundi: 3
Graphix: 1
HarperCollins: 1
Holiday House: 1
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 1
Humanoids: 6
IDW: 4
Image: 35
Invader Comics: 1
Little, Brown and Company: 1
Marvel: 26
NBM: 1
NoBrow Press: 1
Outland Entertainment: 1
Papercutz: 2
PS Artbooks: 3
Rebellion/2000AD: 2
Red 5 Comics: 1
Scout Comics: 6
Second Sight Publishing: 1
SelfMadeHero: 1
SitComics: 2
Source Point Press: 1
Titan Comics: 5
Top Shelf: 1
Udon Entertainment: 1
Vault Comics: 1
Viz Media: 1
A Wave Blue World: 1
Z2 Comics: 1

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I never really have much idea about what I’m going to ramble about underneath the second set of asterisks in these posts, but I do see things during the month that I think I ought to, and sometimes I forget to do them. Jason Copland, who’s a good dude and a good artist and is busy trying to finish what looks like a superb comic book, posted this on Facebook last month, and I forgot to post it here:

Jason is keen on Slurpees, and I know he only has one a week as a treat, but he knows what he’s talking about. I just love that Canadian Slurpees are different from American Slurpees (which I did not know until I saw this), and I love that 7-Eleven in Canada has its own Twitter account and that they responded to him. I even love that they spelled “connoisseur” wrong! This made me chuckle.

Speaking of Twitter, there’s Matt Gaetz:

I made the point on Facebook: This might be the most asshole collection of words ever strung together in human history, and that’s an achievement. I can’t even with this guy. People voted for him!!!!! Sheesh.

As you might recall, 18 April is the anniversary of my daughter’s accident, and I always post an annual update about how she’s doing. Here’s this year’s. Weirdly, I can’t access her old blog anymore (it’s still there, I just can’t write on it), so I simply started a new one. In case you’re wondering what I’m doing with a lot of my time, it’s taking care of my daughter!

I’m still posting photos from 30 years ago, and in April of 1992, I was still in Melbourne studying. I had a busy month – it was Fall Break, and my parents were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, so they came to visit me. We spent my week off touring around Victoria, and then they went off for two more weeks all over the damned country. We drove along the Great Ocean Road and saw the Twelve Apostles, we went to Ballarat to check out the gold fields, and we went to the Healesville Animal Sanctuary, as well as zipping around Melbourne. Prior to that, I had gone to an Australian Rules Football match (Carlton vs. Collingwood), and we had a grand time hanging out at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. You could still go down on the field (pitch?) back then!

So that’s that for this month. How is everyone? I hope you have a groovy weekend!

20 Comments

  1. tomfitz1

    BURGAS: I agree with you on HIGHTOWN, it’s depressingly bleak and well acted. Enjoyed PEACEMAKER.

    I’ve read and liked DECORUM, sometimes the art reminds me of Ashley Woods.

    A question about MIDNIGHT ROSE, Jim Starlin only writes but not the art?

    1. Greg Burgas

      Starlin does not do the art on Midnight Rose. It’s not terrible, but a bit too much “early-Image-trying-to-draw-like-the-founders” for me.

      Ashley Woods isn’t a bad comparison, but Huddleston either has more range than Woods or Woods simply doesn’t choose to draw with more range.

      1. Eric van Schaik

        Because Erik Larsen is falling behind with Savage Dragon no comics in april. Hopefully the Parker Martini Edition will arrive in Holland.
        Decorum looks interesting as does vynil. Let’s see if I can findit here.

        I got some new cd’s at the Prognosis Festival in Eindhoven. Specially Cellar Darling had a great concert so I got there first album.

        I saw the news about the abortion rules getting back to the stone age. There are a lot of protest here too. Why should a woman make a choice, if man can do that so much better.
        I just don’t onderstand… Will those pro life people still think the same of there daughter gets raped?

        We’re in the middle of a large home improvement. We have to camp at the attic for 3 weeks until we have our new kitchen. Yeah!!! 🙂

  2. Rantel

    “Connaisseur” is actually the modern French spelling of the word, “connoisseur” being an old borrowing of a now-archaic spelling. So the 7ElevenCanada twitter account was just being a good bilingual Canadian citizen!

  3. Corrin Radd

    I had zero interest in Suicide Squad or Peacemaker, but I watched them, mostly out of boredom, and I really enjoyed them both. I complained to my buddy about the long, overly dramatic hair metal interludes in every single episode of Peacemaker, and he said those were the bits he liked the best and that they leaned so far into it that it became hilarious. They became too much for me, but I think he’s right that that’s what they were going for.

    1. Greg Burgas

      Yeah, I tend to agree that they were more like Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake, so I didn’t mind them as they became surreal and absurd. Whether you like them or not (I still don’t love Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake!), I do agree that that’s what they were going for.

      1. Call Me Carlos the Dwarf

        Suicide Squad is genuinely excellent (and has far less hair metal than Peacemaker, because Bloodsport is the POV character).

  4. Der

    Technically, I got a comic this april yay!

    A friend got me a gift card for my birthday(it’s in March, he forgot, then he remembered) and I got Under the Air, from Tezuka. I said technically because I ordered it, then when it arrived it arrived to an older address, then I had to cancel the order(that took a while) and then wait for the refund(that took even more) and then order the book again and it arrived like two or three days ago.

    I’m currently in a rereading mood, so this month I just reread a bunch of comics, most of them are as good as I remembered them: Swamp Thing, Zot!, yotsuba, etc etc. Also we are going to move from Mexico City to Queretaro(a small city close to Mexico City) by the end of July, so we are preparing the move and if you have moved, then you know that moving is a big pain in the ass.

    Also, I got a job!!

    Yay me!

    I’m going to work in a call center or something like that, but whatever, some money will start flowing and that’s good(the bad part: If I take my part-time job and this job, then I will earn around a quarter of what my wife was earning. And she still has not a job. Ouch)

    And I’m not going to even talk about the US supreme court shitshow, man, that’s(in theory) just a USA problem(in theory. You guys get a flu and then we have to amputate a leg due to the backlash of the flu) but it just makes my blood boil. Politicians are the worst

    1. Greg Burgas

      I’m glad you got a job, sir. I know how stressful it can be without regular income, so I hope things keep looking up for you!

      The only silver lining I can see with the abortion thing is that people who have become complacent about voting realize that’s not going to work anymore. Most people disagree with most of the things conservatives love, but the Republicans have been able to get people out to vote more, so they win elections. Sad, but true.

  5. I grew up in Ballarat! In April ’92 as you purchased some boiled sweets, swatted flies out of your face in the bakery, rolled some five pin, and found NO gold in that creek 😉 you would have been literally just down the road (albeit a long one) from a 13 year old me starting a new school for year 8.

    Man, Jason has been creating Full Tilt for a long time. I have enjoyed his constant berating himself over his own choices for, what, ten years now? It’s going to be something else, judging by what he’s posting. I picked up Kill All Monsters at a Vancouver show probably over 10 years ago and his art was awesome way back then. Who knows how great it’s gonna be now?

    1. Greg Burgas

      Ha! Excellent! I remember liking Ballarat quite a bit – it’s not as fancy as Melbourne, of course, but it was a nice town.

      I know Jason began doing it full-time about 4-5 years ago, but yeah, he was working on the script long before that. It does look phenomenal!

  6. Bright-Raven

    I honestly don’t know where you get the money or the time to do all this, Burgas.

    Only two items I’ve bought here (but haven’t read yet) are ERRAND BOYS and TIME BEFORE TIME Vol. 2.

    As for the rest, I tried DECORUM in singles, didn’t get past issue #2. Not surprised he couldn’t get the damn story done in a single collection. Hickman just screams “overrated” to me.

    I passed on MR. MIRACLE because even though I like Brandon Easton as a writer, I knew it was a new guy in the role who would be black and if that was going to be the hook, Brandon was going to end up with a weaker story. When Brandon just writes, he kicks ass. When he plays the race card, he can’t get out of his own way.

    I almost bought MIDNIGHT ROSE, but then I realized it’s basically just Jim Starlin doing his take on Poison Ivy, and that just seemed “meh” as a concept for me, so I passed.

    1. Greg Burgas

      Louis: I sell my organs! I don’t have any kidneys left! 🙂

      I think Hickman is rated about where he should be. I don’t think he’s the greatest writer in comics right now, but he’s a very good idea and design guy. I still think his creator-owned stuff is so much better than his Marvel work, so I wish he did more of it!

      The frustrating thing about Mister Miracle is that a lot of it has nothing to do with race, and it’s an entertaining comic. Even the race stuff isn’t terrible, but it just feels off in the context of the book. Easton almost makes it work, but doesn’t quite!

  7. John King

    on a thing called truth
    It’s my understanding that the creators know more about lesbians and women’s sexuality than i ever will so I wouldn’t dispute their vision.

    On the ending – I know in the past Image has sometimes only allowed series to launch as mini-series, If they sell well the story is continued with further story arcs, if not then only the first run is ever published (e.g. Storm Dogs).

    My guess, and it is just a guess, that something like that happened in this case and the creators rushed a potential end point into issue 5 in case they don’t get a second run (possibly not knowing or not thinking about the limit when plotting the first 4 issues)

    1. Greg Burgas

      That might be it – it does seem like a second volume is planned, but who knows if we’ll ever see it. I certainly hope so.

      I don’t love the romance in the book, but I can live with it. As with all romance, it just always seems like the creators start with physical attraction and think that equals true love. It doesn’t, whether it’s a man and a woman, two men, or two women, so it frustrates me when people think it does. But that’s just a pet peeve of mine. I still wonder about the fluid sexuality of Magdalene, but I do hope they address her thoughts in a second volume, because I’d be curious to read that. We shall see.

  8. John King

    The characters in A thing Called Truth were created with the idea of them getting romantically involved with each other – so it’s not like Iceman who was heterosexual for decades before writers decided to turn him gay.
    or like Element Lad
    so it seems that comic book creators believe a man’s sexuality to be malleable

    1. Greg Burgas

      That’s perfectly fine, but then why give Magdalene an ex-husband? I get that people do hide who they are, but the creators never give us any indication that Magdalene is interested in Dorian until the very end. It’s just something that bugged me. It’s not that big a deal, just something I thought of while I was reading the comic. It’s honestly more of an annoyance that people in fiction can’t be platonic friends in a couples situation (it’s usually a man and a woman, but not always, as we see from this book) than anything about them both being women.

      I don’t count corporate characters whose change in sexuality was “forced” on them. Iceman’s sexuality isn’t malleable – he was staunchly heterosexual until he wasn’t. That’s fine, but it’s not the same thing.

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