Author: Michael Rawdon

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 6 September 2007.

  • Countdown #34 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Keith Giffen & Jesus Saiz (DC)
  • Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes: Dominator War TPB vol 5, by Mark Waid, Tony Bedard, Barry Kitson & Kevin Sharpe (DC)
  • Metal Men #2 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
  • Armageddon Conquest: Wraith #3 of 4, by Javier Grillo-Marxuach & Kyle Holz (Marvel)
  • Ms. Marvel #19, by Brian Reed, Aaron Lopresti & Matt Ryan (Marvel)
  • The Incredible Hulk #110, by Grek Pak, Carlo Pagulayan & Jeffrey Huet (Marvel)
  • Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #1 of 5, by Mike Mignola & Jason Armstrong (Dark Horse)

Weirdly, Saiz & Palmiotti’s art on this week’s Countdown seems very reminiscent of Kevin Nowlan’s art, or maybe Nowlan over Brian Bolland. Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s always weird when art so closely resembles the style of another creator that I have to check the credits to see whether he’s the one who really drew it.

The Incredible Hulk #110The Incredible Hulk is tying into the World War Hulk storyline by focusing on Amadeus Cho, the seventh-smartest person in the world, who is also a teenager who believes in the Hulk. This week’s issue cuts to the core of Cho’s belief in the Hulk, despite the Hulk’s past as a rampaging beast and his current stated desire to kill the heroes who sent him into space. It’s a little hard to swallow, although it does suggest an ability that the Hulk’s had all along which seems to explain his behavior at times over the years. It’s the sort of thing that could open up some new avenues in the Hulk’s character, but I bet it will mostly fall by the wayside. I also wonder if Pak has written himself into a corner so that he won’t be able to resolve World War Hulk in any satisfying manner. Which would be a shame.

Pak does a terrific job of writing Cho, who’s always a couple of steps (or more) ahead of everyone else, who’s insightful as well as clever, and who’s a lively and sympathetic character. I’m still just a little suspicious that he’s not quite as selfless as he’s portrayed, but I’d certainly be pleased if he were. (He sure beats J. Michael Straczynski’s characterization of Reed Richards all hollow.)

I haven’t been following the other World ar Hulk tie-ins, just this and the main series, but really I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. These two series are opposite sides of the same coin, complementing each other nicely. It’s tough to write a tie-in when the book’s main character is the star of the main series, but after an awkward start Pak’s really made it all come together.

Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus #1Lobster Johnson is Mike Mignola’s latest mini-series in his Hellboy universe: LJ is a pulp-style hero working in 1937, and The Iron Prometheus concerns his efforts to protect a man in a powerful electric suit from the evil ambitions of (of course) Nazis. Chris Sims picks it as his best of the week, but I was less impressed.

Although still enjoyable, these days Mignola’s books seem like a shadow of what they were back in the early Hellboy days. Mignola rarely draws anymore, although some of the artists he does employ do a good job of aping his style, as Jason Armstrong does here. I realize Mignola isn’t a very fast artist (when was the last time he draw a monthly ongoing book? Alpha Flight in the late 1980s?) and this is therefore his way to tell more stories on a semi-regular schedule, but these days he’s not even drawing the Hellboy: Darkness Calls mini-series. Still, at least he knows the trick of hiring good artists when he’s not doing the chores himself.

More serious, though, is the increasingly repetitive feeling I get from the stories: None of them really feel “special” anymore, and each one feels less distinctive than the last. Moreover, neither the Hellboy nor the B.P.R.D. series seem to be going anywhere. It seems like both have lost the heart of he early Hellboy series, and Lobster Johnson feels like more of the same.

I think the problem is this: Hellboy is the heart and soul of Mignola’s stuff – everyone else is too ethereal or too mysterious or too self-doubting or just too damned creepy to get behind as a character, while the beauty of Hellboy is that he’s this giant devil-thing with a stone hand who basically just wants to go kick some alien ass to make the world safe for freedom and apple pie. (The only character who could really equal Hellboy was Roger the Homunculous, who shuffled off the series’ immortal coil a while ago, alas.) In his own series Hellboy’s turned into a character who’s just being pushed around by various godlike figures, and no one else can fill the void in the other books.

Lobster Johnson falls into the “too ethereal” category, a ghostlike figure who comes and goes and speaks mysteriously, and occasionally fights a giant gorilla. I have little doubt that this will be an enjoyable series, but also that a year from now it will feel liks just one more cog in the giant Hellboy machine, and that someday I’ll look at the stack of cogs sitting on my bookshelf and wonder when the payoff to it all is coming.

Jim Shooter to Return to Legion of Super-Heroes

Wow, it’s for real: Jim Shooter is going to write the Legion for the first time in 30 years.

Read an interview with Shooter on Newsarama.

When I started buying the Legion, way back in 1976, Shooter was on his way out (he’d soon become Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics), but he wrote the first three Legion comics I ever bought (including his last two). It’s been a while since he’s written any comics, I think, so it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

A-Little-Labor Day

We had a good weekend, thank you very much.

We saved a lot of our fun for Labor Day itself, yesterday. We got up early(ish) and went for a bike ride, stopping for breakfast along the way. The awful heat we’ve had for the past week broke yesterday and we had a nice cool breeze for the ride, along with sun.

After we got home and read the paper, we prepared for Subrata and Susan to come over and hang out. We went a little overboard: I replaced the cats’ litter, swept the back patio, prepared cucumber sandwiches, and added herbs (parsley, onion, rosemary and thyme – the “slightly twisted Simon and Garfunkel herbs”) to hamburger meat and made patties out of them. Debbi prepared corn to grill, checked the potato salad she’d made the night before, vacuumed, and did dishes.

S&S came by around 3 – and Subrata promptly turned around again because they’d thought we had a copy of Clue which Susan and Debbi wanted to play. Which is to say, Debbi thought she had a copy in the house, but it must be in storage – I’ve never seen it in the house. Once he got back we got down to some not-at-all-serious gaming: Two games of Clue (I won one), and two rounds (of 7 games each) of dominoes. Subrata and I both prefer “skill” games, while I think Susan and Debbi like much more casual games. Clue and dominoes are kind of in-between, with a lot of luck but some skill, too. I hadn’t played Clue in probably decades; it was pretty fun, as a change of pace. Dominoes actually is fun, but it works best with 3 or more people; 4 is a good number, because there’s lots you can do. Oddly, Subrata turns out not to be very good a dominoes, something he knew ahead of time. I don’t know why that is, as I felt like I picked up the nuances of it fairly quickly when I learned on our trip to visit Debbi’s family last spring. I won both rounds of dominoes, but certainly not every game (and I had one game where I committed a real boner play).

We grilled hamburgers, sausages and corn around 7 pm, and it all turned out quite well. The potato salad was excellent! I managed to get almost everything off the grill at the same time, and certainly close enough for our purposes. We topped it off with Computer Chip ice cream from Rick’s and another round of dominoes before calling it a night.

So a fun time was had by all. Even the cats had a good time, with Blackjack and Newton hanging around with us all day, and Roulette perking up her ears when Susan pulled out the treats. It was a little work to put it all together, but it was worth it.

Feelings of Inadequacy

I went to Superstars today for their noon Magic draft. Only 4 other people showed up, so one employee played so we could do a 6-person draft.

Ugh, it went astoundingly poorly. I started off drafting white/green/blue in Time Spiral, then got a flood of white in Planar Chaos and abandoned blue, and ended up with a green/white deck. I didn’t really draft any bombs at all (just three Lucent Liminids), didn’t have enough removal, and lost all 6 games I played. A couple of them were close, but my best games involved getting off to a fast part, stalling, losing my creatures to various kinds of removal, and not drawing any answers to my opponent’s stuff. I could have played a little better, but probably not enough to win any of the games.

On the one hand, it was terribly discouraging. On the other hand, the other players told me that they’d all been playing (and drafting) for years, so it was actually a tough field. I might do better sticking to Friday nights, when they have a larger field and probably more people closer to my level. Also, I went through this with poker a year ago, feeling like I was stuck and not getting any better, but I think I have gotten better since then.

My play is getting a little better, but my drafts are decidedly mediocre these days. I need to figure out how to draft better. One guy there suggested trying a site called BrainBurst.com, which it looks like is an alias for TCGPlayer, which appears to have free single-player draft. So maybe I’ll give that a try – it couldn’t hurt (much), right?

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 29 August 2007.

  • Countdown #35 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Sean McKeever, Keith Giffen, Manuel Garcia & Mark McKenna (DC)
  • Ex Machina Masquerade Special by Brian K. Vaughan & John Paul Leon (DC/Wildstorm)
  • Manhunter: Origins TPB vol 3, by Marc Andreyko, Javier Pina & Fernando Blanco (DC)
  • Hellboy: Darkness Calls # 5 of 6, by Mike Mignola & Duncan Fegredo (Dark Horse)

I think Greg Burgas nails it in his review of the Ex Machina special: It’s not a story of any great consequence, and the sentiment driving the plot doesn’t ring true. Plus, I’ve never warmed to John Paul Leon’s pencils, as the renderings aren’t to my taste, and his layouts never seem to really tell the story, they just sit there. The earlier 2-part special, drawn by Chris Sprouse, was much better than this one in every way.

(And why did a Halloween comic come out in late August? Especially strange since we’re in the middle of a brutal heat wave here on the west coast.)

Manhunter: Origins TPB vol 3Manhunter really hits its stride with this third collection, which focuses on Kate Spencer’s “origins”, both her gear and her personal history. She also continues to battle the dregs of the DC Universe’s array of supervillains (wow, I’d completely forgotten about Punch and Jewelee). I suspect the reason it’s been struggling to gain readers is that it has taken so long to hit its stride; the first twelve issues (that’s a whole year of issues, folks) thrashed around like the series was trying to establish itself rather than trying to finds its voice, which is rather putting the cart before the horse.

Anyway, this series of federal-prosecutor-turned-vigilante stays down-to-Earth, while being strangely conflicted: It deals with some intensely personal issues, yet always seems to keep the characters’ emotions at arm’s length, always being a little too matter-of-fact for its character bits. That we only get brief glimpses of most of the supporting cast doesn’t help. The adventure bits are a lot of fun, though, and present an unusually unglamorous view of superheroing – reasonably enough, since Manhunter is truly a vigilante and not a traditional hero.

Manhunter has been a fan favorite on the Internet for a while. I don’t think it lives up to the hype, but if it truly comes back from its current hiatus then I’ll probably add the monthly book to my saver at my local store.

And now, a slightly different tack: Comments on books I didn’t buy:

I thumbed through the first issue of the new Brit series. Brit is another of Robert (Invincible) Kirkman’s Image Comics heroes: A middle-aged man who’s completely invulnerable and decidedly sardonic, who works for the government. I picked up the collection of the earlier stories, Old Soldier a while back: The stories are basically big “smash-’em-up” ones, which means they’re okay, but not deep. A nice occasional diversion, but not something that holds up over time. This new series I guess is supposed to be somewhat deeper, but the first issue looked like more of the same. Brit isn’t as appealing a lead character as Invincible, so I decided to pass on this one. (Often I decide not to buy a series which is going through a revival because, as I put it, “I’ve been on that train before and I don’t really want to get on again.”)

I also glanced at The Mice Templar #1, from Michael Avon Oeming, whose art on Powers is quite good, but I’ve never warmed to anything else he’s done. The art here actually made me cringe (take a look), so I took a pass on this one. I’m already reading Mouse Guard, and I think it’ll fill my need for rodent adventure stories on its own.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 22 August 2007.

I should push this entry on last week’s comics out the door before this week’s comics come out, huh?

  • Countdown #36 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Tony Bedard, Jim Calafiaore & Jack Purcell (DC)
  • Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #33, by Tony Bedard & Dennis Calero (DC)
  • Starlord #2 of 4, by Keith Giffen, Timothy Green II & Victor Olazaba (Marvel)
  • Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 #1 of 6, by David Petersen (Archaia)
  • Invincible #45 by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)

The problem is that I didn’t have a lot to say about this haul. Countdown muddles on, Supergirl and the Legion and Starlord are both okay, Invincible is a lot of fun.

Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 #1The most significant book here is the first issue of the new Mouse Guard series. For a change, I’ve been on board with this surprisingly popular series since issue #1 of the first series, and I do enjoy it. The first series concerned a traitor trying to overthrow the Guard and the ruler of the mouse nation, and the second opens with the mice trying to survive a particularly harsh winter, with a band of our heroes making the trek to one of their outer towns to procure some supplies for the main city of Lockhaven.

The big flaw in the series, I think, is that it’s hard to keep the characters straight: For the most part, all the mice look the same, albeit in different colors (the coloring is actually quite lush and carries the artwork at times). And characterization tends to range from simplistic to nonexistent. This makes the book a slightly more challenging read, and not in a good way. But Petersen’s depictions of the landscapes and the mouse townships are the art’s strength, evocative of Mark Oakley’s Thieves & Kings, Mark Smylie’s Artesia (from the same publisher), or even David Macaulay‘s books about history and architecture. Although I don’t think it’s a “visually stunning comic book” like Brian Cronin does, it’s still a fun read. I just feel that there’s room for development on both the writing and the art side.

You can also visit David Petersen’s blog.

Stardust

Review of the film Stardust.

I remember when Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess‘ book Stardust was published in the 1990s: It first came out as a series of 4 squarebound comic books, and I looked forward to it eagerly, having greatly enjoyed the couple of issues of The Sandman they’d done together. But I was bitterly disappointed in the series.

First, rather than being a graphic novel, it was instead a prose novel with illustrations by Vess. Moreover, it felt like a step backwards for both creators in its quality. Thumbing through it today, Vess’ illustrations often are of very simple design and execution, and don’t illustrate the moments that I’d most have liked to see illustrated. Gaiman’s text seems extremely weak: The characters have none of the strength or humor he employed in Sandman as a counterpoint to the (intentionally) dreary title figure, and the narrative style is plodding. Gaiman seems to have a tendency to start by writing a “travelogue”, taking the reader on a tour of the ideas in his head, but without much actually happening. Stardust has this problem in spades, and with a decidedly anticlimactic ending. It’s my least favorite of Gaiman’s novels.

So I wasn’t enthusiastic about a film adaptation of the book – until I saw the previews for it. A good cast, and the scenes looked more dramatic than I’d recalled from the book. So I decided I was interested in going to see it, and I’m glad I did, because Stardust the film is much better than the book.

The story takes place in the 19th century: Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) is in love with Victoria (Sienna Miller), but she doesn’t love him. One night, they spy a falling star, and Tristan promises to find that star and bring it back to her. But it falls beyond the wall for which is town is named, and the guard won’t let him through. Tristan learns from his father that he was born beyond the wall, and a gift from his mother allows him to head beyond the wall to the magical world of Stormhold on his quest.

The star turns out to be a young woman, Yvaine (Claire Danes), who had been pulled to earth as part of a test by the dying King of Stormhold to choose his successor. Yvaine carries a jewel which will allow the successor to ascend the throne, and the jewel is pursued by the King’s sons Primus (Jason Flemyng) and Septimus (Mark Strong). Yvaine herself is sought for nefarious purposes by a trio of aged witches, in particular the evil Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer). Tristan finds her first, and they set off on paths to adventures as they make their way back to Wall, complicated by Yvaine’s dislike of Tristan as well as their pursuers.

Director Matthew Vaughn (who, like Charlie Cox, is entirely unknown to me) has assembled a terrific cast in support of a fine script which tightens up the novel and jettisons a lot of the boring stuff, while punching up the dialogue. Cox has an amiable-yet-bewildered nature which reminds me a bit of Matthew Broderick. Pfeiffer – as usual – is a thoroughly loathesome villain; a few more years of this and she’ll join Glenn Close among actresses I think are perfectly fine actresses, but they play so many roles of hateful characters that it’s hard to get behind her in any other role. Danes does a good job being by turns grumpy, resentful, insightful, lovestruck, and crushed, and she and Cox not only seem to have a good rapport, but they appear to build that rapport as their characters get to know each other.

Stealing the show is Robert De Niro as Captain Shakespeare, tyrannical commander of a lightning airship who isn’t all that he seems. He looks like he’s having the most fun he’s had in years, chewing scenery and acting like – well, you’ve gotta see it, it’s worth the price of admission all by itself.

I’ve never warmed to traditional views of Faerie; I find them depressing and capricious – maybe depressing because they’re capricious. So I was pleased that the film takes all of those elements out of Gaiman’s Faerie, as well as making several other changes, such as adding a climactic confrontation among the interested parties, something which was sorely lacking in the book. All the plot elements get neatly tied up in a much more satisfying manner than the book, especially in the epilogue.

The movie isn’t perfect: It still drags in places, especially in the first half. Yvaine’s behavior when they reach Wall lacks motivation (Debbi pointed this one out to me), and seems intended simply for cheap drama, which is too bad since plenty of expensive drama occurs immediately afterwards. But it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, and all-in-all it’s a fun, exciting, and romantic film which is very well executed. I’m glad I saw it.

Friday Night Magic

Although some of our other friends organized a poker game last night, Subrata is closer to my frame of mind and is more interested in playing Magic, and he suggested that we go last night to play the Friday Night Magic booster draft at Superstars (I found a list of their tournaments, although the URL of that page makes it look pretty temporary). Neither of us had gone before, but it was all pretty easy: We showed up around 5:30, signed up for DCI membership, and at 6:00 they seated everyone (18 players) for two drafts and we began. Subrata and I ended up in separate drafts, but that was fine.

The draft was in the Time Spiral block, which I mostly enjoy, although I find Future Sight somewhat disappointing. I had a mediocre draft, partly due to mixed signals I was getting: My first two picks were from mediocre packs, but I ended up solidly in green through the first pack. Planar Chaos – as it often seems to be – was my strongest pack, although I ended up moving into black and then blue during it. Then in Future Sight I didn’t seem to be getting many interesting cards.

Well, there was a reason for all of this: The player to my right was drafting white/blue, and the player to his right was drafting red/green, and the player to my left was drafting black/white. So I did well when there was a surplus of green and blue coming around, but poorly when there wasn’t. I ended up with green/blue deck more heavy in green. I drafted a few good black cards and one good red card which I therefore didn’t use (which was too bad mainly because I always enjoy playing cards like Enslave).

Tarmogoyf.jpgAfter the draft we play three matches as chosen by the store organizers. My first match was against a green/black deck, and other than my getting smoked in the first game, we were pretty evenly matched. In particular, Frozen Aether totally shuts down combat tricks using Flash, or one-shot creatures like Groundbreaker. Unfortunately, my mind had trouble getting into the mechanics of the game, and I could have won the third game had I played slightly differently, but instead I lost 1 game to 2.

(This opponent did point out that the Tarmogoyf I drafted, which is currently selling for over $20 on the secondhand Magic card market, so in theory I could turn around and sell it ad recoup my entry fee for the tournament. How about that?)

The second match I played against a boy who was there with his father, also their first event at the store. (Subrata ended up playing the father in his draft.) I suggested that they should check out the columns on the Wizards web site for tips on drafting and playing. Anyway, he was playing a black/white deck with a number of tricks, and he got some help from one of the observers at the store (which I tried to be a good sport about). I turned out to have just enough answers for his threats (three Utopia Vows saved my bacon a lot) and won 2-0.

The third match was against a green/blue/red deck, and again we were pretty evenly matched, but he ended up with somewhat better draws then I had, and I went down 0-2. He had a lot of green cards that I had really wanted (I still don’t have a Nacatl War-Pride, sigh), so now I know where many of those went in the draft.

So overall I won one match, and it turns out that players get one free booster pack from one of the blocks in current Standard expansions, so I took a Planar Chaos one. Subrata also won one match in his game. We were both fairly competitive, but not among the top players. But we had fun!

The store is actually quite nice to play in, with plenty of tables, and it’s clean and bright (a lot of specialty stores in the gaming and comics areas can tend to be a little dark and dingy, and it’s always nice to visit a store that’s working hard to be pleasant and welcoming). All the other players were nice, too.

I still need to work on my card evaluation, and also getting better at reading which cards are being filtered out to my right. There’s a lot of randomness in the packs, which makes the latter difficult: One pack might make it look like blue is open, while the next make it look like blue is closed. Obviously I’ve got some work to do there.

Plus, now I know I have another outlet for playing Magic when I have the itch!

But I promise not to relate the details of every draft I do. 🙂