I woke up today on the wrong side of the bed and I'm ready for naptime. Last week I read Love & Rockets Volume 9: Esperanza and it was, for some reason, wildly depressing and I wound up leaving work early. I mean, it's terrific. I had mainly read the earlier Locas comics, so I was looking for this volume because I knew about Vivian 'Frogmouth' Solis but had never read a story with Frogmouth in it. (Volume 9 is her debut.) I love Jaime Hernandez so much and I'm not sure why this collection made me so sad. I guess, like Maggie, I am also getting older. I finished the first arc of Fatale, which is kind of an occult horror/crime story by everyone's favorite crime writer Ed Brubaker. I like it all right, but I'm not sure if I will keep going - I probably will just to find out the secret of Josephine - I'm sure that part of this is purposeful, but I have a really difficult time keeping the Characters That Are Not Josephine straight in my mind. Everyone in this book is expendable, and almost everyone dies in some horrible way, so it's hard for me to keep track of which man it is that's dying in that particular issue and why or if it matters. In the first issue, there is a murder in which the murder victim is posed to look like the tarot card The Hanged Man, and there are some other references to blood magic, but unfortunately the occult aspect of the story is kind of vague by the end of the first arc. Maybe all of that will be explained in the next story arc. After finishing that first arc of Fatale I tried to get into some Phantom Lady as a palate cleanser. A lot of people actually die in Phantom Lady, which I guess is the pre-comics-code world for you. I like that she has a little black light mirror that blinds people. I'm surprised that no one recognizes her, especially her boyfriend, because she has no mask or anything to conceal her identity, she just changes from street clothes into her skimpy costume. I guess they're banking on the idea that debutante and senator's daughter Sandra Knight wouldn't wear something that scandalous. And, of course, her outfit is quite scandalous - one of the covers was featured in Seduction of the Innocent. (This is how I know about Phantom Lady - her famous 'headlights', as Dr. Wertham put it). A very cool design element of Phantom Lady comics is the opening page will be in a monotone, either blue or red: It's very striking and beautiful!
Phantom Lady was illustrated by Matt Baker, who is considered one of the first (if not the first) African-American comic book artists. I don't know a lot about him, but it's something I discovered while looking into the history of Phantom Lady! You can read more about him here and here.
0 Comments
I wish Twitter was on the verge of implosion every day so I could log in to weebly and have my metrics say views are up 400%. (I also had someone follow me on LiveJournal, and the thrill of having someone follow me on LJ in 2022 cannot be overstated.)
I finished a sketchbook!
Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman, passed away November 10th, which is why I have been on the Batman kick I've been on. I really loved Batman: The Animated Series, and have been watching/re-watching those episodes (there are some that I haven't seen yet). Mask of the Phantasm was a fun time; I had never seen that one before, either, which is kind of hard to believe, but it's one of those movies I never got around to.
Catwoman is a pretty solid book all around. Every time I pick it up, it's good or even great. I remembered reading this series as it was coming out, because I liked Darwyn Cooke's art - now, on the re-read, I realize this run was written by Ed Brubaker. It's really terrific, down to the lettering. There's an issue where Selina sends her roommate, Holly, out to collect some information, and Holly is looking at the East End of Gotham through a recovering addict's eyes - her thoughts are presented as captions in what I'm assuming is a handwriting font that really pulls the reader in to her point of view. I don't know if it would have been as successful, honestly, without that handwritten element:
Ed Brubaker is great at telling a crime story and he's currently doing Friday, which is a book I talked about back in this post. This particular arc was a sticky situation for everyone involved, especially Holly, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this run. I think there's on more issue with Brubaker writing it, though. I'll have to see what else he's done; I had never paid too much attention to or followed comic book writers until I started reading The Department of Truth. The art has to be good before I can focus on the storyline.
Hello! It has been a long time since I have updated, mostly because no one really reads this blog except for maybe three people. And I am one of those three people.
I have been reading a lot of comics lately, so let me tell you about what I've been getting into. ♡ My coworker loaned me a hardcover biography of Jack Kirby, which has been very inspirational but also kind of sad in terms of how much Jack Kirby got the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I started reading superhero comics in the '90s, but also bought vintage comic books from the antique store (mostly '70s era Wonder Woman and the third volume of Marvel's Red Sonja), so the Kirby influence was evident in what I was reading - I mean, I was renting the VHS tape of How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way from Blockbuster, and Marvel was reprinting the old Kirby comics around the late '90s as well. The art in the biography is terrific so I picked up a secondhand copy to use as a reference and I'm waiting for it to get here. Jack Kirby was wildly prolific and there were several projects that he was involved with in one way or another that I wasn't familiar with - one was a comic called Black Magic (or True Amazing Accounts of Black Magic) and another was The Strange World of Your Dreams. I love comics from the 1950s, and these two titles are okay, but they do not compare to another comic that I was reading pretty recently from the '50s whose title now escapes me. Many of the titles are very similar, so it's hard to remember if it was Strange or Weird or any number of synonyms combined with Tales or Stories or another similar synonym. ♡ Hoopla recommended Batman:Noel, which had very lovely art and opened up beautifully with a snowy Gotham city scene. The art was more realistic for a Batman book, which is something that I don't always care for, but it was very well done and I think that having a realistic style contributes to how horrifying Batman villains can be. Both the artist and the colorist deserve every accolade. It was an interesting take on A Christmas Carol. I liked that Batman was gradually coming down with walking pneumonia because he is, after all, a human being who gets sick. Not enough sick days in superhero comics in my opinion. ♡ After Batman:Noel, I read Catwoman: When In Rome, which was fine. I liked that the artists were inspired by fashion illustrator Rene Gruau when making this book - I really love Rene Gruau's illustrations, and it goes well with the mood of the character of Catwoman and her glamorous lifestyle. The book looks as though it was done either with watercolor or ink wash - there was a little feeling of not quite being comfortable with the drawing style, which is more of a vibe and difficult to explain. Because it's based on this illustrative work of Gruau, things are a little more stylized, but not as stylized as the art of, say, Darwyn Cooke. The storyline was all right, a little mob story, a little weirdness with the Riddler. I read that first and then went on to Batman:Hush. Batman:Hush was terrific. I was trying to piece together who did it and why the whole time and never got it until the end. It really involves all these different villains in amazing ways without feeling too forced (this was how I felt about Wonder Woman & Justice League Dark: The Witching Hour), is just a wonderful detective story, we have some very good spicy moments with Bat & Cat, it's a great story by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's art is fine. Jim Lee is someone I definitely looked up to in the 90s when he was super popular with the run on X-Men and then with his work at Image, but today I'm just like, Oh this is Jim Lee and everyone looks the same. The only way you can distinguish between Jim Lee characters is basically the coloring, everyone has the same body structure and facial features, especially the ladies. They are all babes, but they look exactly the same. Anyway, if you like Batman, this was a really good one. I don't even think you would need a firm grasp of continuity - things are pretty well explained if some of the context is unclear. ♡ Even though I have been reading all these fun Bat & Cat comics, I have also been doing some indie reading. Hoopla had the Madman collection and I started on that because I never had read Madman back in the '90s. I knew of it, but had never actually picked it up. It's very much a fun indie comic of its time, just a zany romp with competing mad scientists and Madman himself, who is a reanimated zombie in a superhero costume who uses weapons like lead-filled yo-yos and a slingshot. It's fun. You can't take it too seriously. ♡ I REALLY LOVED indie comic Hell Phone by Benji Nate. I can't wait for the next installment! I must know what happens. Cute art, engaging storyline, fun friends in adorable grave robbing outfits. It's a must. It had a blurb from Liz Suburbia, and it's in a similar vein to Suburbia's comic Sacred Heart, which I also really liked. I read Hell Phone on hoopla, but it is also available to read on WebToons. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|