Read This Week 6/28

Nellie McClung, by Charlotte Grey
Penguin
6/10








Wasteland #1-17, by
Oni
7/10







Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse
9/10







Final Crisis #2, by Grant Morrison and JG Jones
DC
7/10

Read This Week 6/21

5 Is The Perfect Number, by Igort
Drawn and Quarterly
7/10

In 1950s Italy a retired mafia hitman takes up arms against his former bosses who have killed his son. Igort's use of fine lines, heavy blacks, and a duotone colour palette create a rich, moody, and evocative atmosphere. Unfortunately the story is hampered by awkwardly translated dialogue, occasionally sketchy pacing, and an weak final act.

Point Blank, by Ed Brubaker and Colin Wilson
Wildstorm
4/10

Starring former WildC.A.T. (Covert Action Team, doncha know) Cole Cash (Ooo, 90's cool, baby!), aka The Grifter (A handle that never made much sense, since he shot more people than he ever conned), Point Blank is a stylish whodunit whose reach exceeds its grasp. Drinking his life away in a seedy superhero bar, Cash is recruited by his old war buddy John Lynch (Ooo, 90's badass!) into a vendetta against a mysterious foe. Soon Lynch is in a coma with a bullet in his head, and Cash is on a mission to find out the who and the why. Along the way he encounters several old friends and foes, all with secrets, even stupider names, and several canceled series to their credits.
Brubaker's problem is the same one Warren Ellis had after taking over StormWatch, in that the vast majority of toys in the WildStorm sandbox are a batch of lame ciphers. Ellis' solution was the cull the herd and create the wildly popular and influential The Authority. Brubaker gamely attempts to shoe-horn cardboard cutout characters into a taut noir thriller, but the story is undermined by its ties to what has come before and comparisons to Sleeper, Brubaker and Sean Phillips' acclaimed follow-up.

100 Bullets #92, by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
DC/Vertigo
7/10

Things continue to fall into place. While Azzarello sometimes gets a little too clever, his skill overlaying dialogue onto unrelated actions and tying them together in a thematic mash-up is as sharp as ever.



Batman: The Cult, by Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson
DC
3/10

A fatuous rip-off of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, Starlin's shallow tale of the Batman broken by a false messiah is just what Alan Moore (Who makes an appearance, sorta) meant when he said comics in the post-Watchmen/DKR world were "[N]ot gritty, just glum." Master of the macabre Wrightson has his moments, but the art is often static and laughably over the top.

And there's a monster-truck Batmobile.

Read This Week 6/14

Due to Domestic Vacation 2008, I didn't get around to reading anything this week.

I'll have time to read next week, when I go back to work.

It's a good life.

Domestic Vacation 2008, Day One: Happy Little Vacation

Due to high gasoline prices, airline mendacity, and my irrational hatred of most places, le common-law wife and I are gamely attempting to wring whatever entertainment and fun there is to be wrung from the wretched stinkhole in which we live.

Welcome to Domestic Vacation 2008, or, The Non-Roamin' Holiday!

DV2K8 began with heavy rain which quickly turned to light rain, then back to heavy rain, with a strong chance of more rain to come. But it did not quell the pioneer spirit of your intrepid vacationers, no sir! We sallied forth to the wonderland that is WalMart and picked up the items we needed for the day's adventure: paintbrushes, canvas, and Coca-Cola.
Yes, dear reader, we were painting! And drinking Coca-Cola!

The weather wouldn't permit us to create oil masterpieces en pleine air in the manner of the Impressionist school, but this slight impediment, as well as the fact that neither of us had ever painted before, was rendered moot by our secret weapon: the late, the great, the one and only, Bob Ross of the Joy of Painting!

We set up our studio (Otherwise known as the living room coffee table) by propping our small canvases against boxes and placing our paints and brushes between them for easy access. An old metal end table I salvaged from work provided a perch for the laptop, the medium through which our sensei would impart painterly wisdom from beyond the grave.

Unfortunately we didn't think to take photos of the paintings in progress, as we were busy wavering between blinding panic, bellicose despair, and blistering enthusiasm, but roughly five hours later, we completed our paintings.

Behold!

I'm not thrilled with the indistinct forest and waterline on the left, but we ran out of the white paint needed to tidy it up. I'm quite proud of my clouds, though.

All in all, it was a great day and a fun activity, and we'll definitely be doing another painting day this week as we celebrate... Domestic Vacation 2008!

Tomorrow: Cut my hair and bleed me dry! We're going to the zoo!

Read This Week 6/7

Human Target #1-10, by Peter Milligan, Javier Pulido, and Cliff Chiang
Vertigo/DC
6/10

Private investigator-bodyguard-decoy Christopher Chance draws a paycheck and gunfire by assuming the identities of his clients. But what effect does never being yourself have on a man's psyche? Milligan has often played with the theme of identity in his work to great success, but Human Target misses the mark. The Quantum Leap-like gimmick ("Who's Chance going to be this issue?") makes it difficult to connect with the series, which in some ways feels like an anthology - the first arc is about big bad business and 9/11, the next about corruption in baseball, then weatherman-style radicals in hiding, with only a protagonist whose premise is his absence of a concrete identity, a cipher, to anchor them all together. Nearly all the other characters are reduced to plot devices, incidental and sketchy caricatures, and despite a strong and stylish sense of design, Pulido's art is often amateurishly bad.

Northlanders #1-5, by Brian Wood and Davide Gianfelice
Vertigo/DC
4/10

Exiled viking prince Sven returns to the cold land of his birth, the desolate and backwards Orkneys. He just wants to claim his birthright and return to the glittering city of Constantinople, but is drawn into a conflict with his uncle, the usurper Gorm. Think a hipster Hamlet with 300-style violence, jarringly anachronistic dialogue, and, most gallingly, a glacial pace with little character development.

Read This Week 5/31

Straight Man, by Richard Russo
Vintage
5/10

Empire Falls without any heart, the glib and facile Straight Man was written before Russo's wry and humane award-winner, and it shows.




All Star Superman #11, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
DC
8/10

Superman dies this issue, so be sure to buy an extra thirty copies of this sure-fire collectors' item! As usual, Morrison and Quitely's penultimate issue of ASS features everything that's made previous issues so enjoyable, but I'm curious to see if the series as a whole will stand up to an extended reading once the curtain's drawn.


The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth
Vintage
5/10

Roth's tale of an eager young writer's encounter with a reclusive eminence grise is a well-written but overlong rumination on both stories on the page and in our lives.



Final Crisis #1, by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones
DC
5/10

Final Crisis' downfall isn't that I don't care for it - though it is discordant, jumbled, and choppy - as I just don't care, period.





The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Seal Books
8/10

I don't care what anyone says, Margaret Atwood is funny.
Granted, her story of an America in the grip of a viciously oppressive theocracy isn't full of lols, but does have brilliant displays of incisive wit. Under the pen of a lesser writer it would be used as comic relief and undermine the story, but Atwood uses humour - as well as her considerable talents as a poet - to create an entirely realized world on the page. An entirely too-familiar world, our own.

Read This Week 5/24

Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation Of A Kind, by Joel Yanofsky
Red Deer Press
0/10

Wretched and whiny.