I’m going to do something I’ve always been reluctant to do and apologize for the sparse blogging over the past couple of months–not just to you, beautiful reader, but to myself as well. I don’t like not blogging. God willing things will change for the better soon and I’ll be back to the blog with a vengeance.
Let’s do this quick-like–my mother-in-law’s in town:
David at Insult to Injury reviews Grant Morrison’s Seaguy #1, pointing out among other things what a great name for a villain the Anti-Dad is (considering how nearly every superhero ever has serious absent-father issues–to say nothing of those heroes’ creators) and what gorgeous, inventive art Cameron Stewart provided for the book (compare it to Stewart’s fellow Catwoman artist Darwyn Cooke’s lovely but relatively staid work on New Frontier, for instance).
Graeme, also at ItoI, reviews Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men #1, and makes it sound interesting enough for me to change my mind and pick it up. At least someone is taking advantage of Morrison’s three-year-long act of deadwood clearance, rather than gathering the deadwood up again and dumping back in again. But watch out if you go there, because there’s a BIG SPOILER for Amazing Spider-Man, goddammit.
Dave Intermittent just kills some tedious anti-suburbia screed from writer Joe Casey, and throws in a dig at the awful, fraudulent American Beauty while he’s at it. Remember when I worried aloud about Brian Wood’s take on suburban life in Demo? Dave spells out exactly what I was worried about. Oh, it’s just lovely to read.
Speaking of Demo, Dave Fiore offers up the most interesting review of the series yet. Is Demo about wanting to break free, or wanting to fit in? Or does doing the latter enable you to do the former? Fascinating stuff.
I finally got around to buying the two most recent volumes of Battle Royale today, so I got a kick out of Kevin Melrose‘s report that a bunch of Tokyo schoolboys were sufficiently inspired by the film to beat up some of their teachers.
Kevin also links to a very thoughtful Publisher’s Weekly review of Brian Azzarello’s Batman run, which pretty much confirms many of the fears I had about it after reading the first issue way back when.
Paul O’Brien has the ugly truth about Marvel’s sales–with the exception of relaunches, almost every title is trending downward. Now, that’s almost a truism in this industry–that’s why there are so many relaunches, after all–but still, it’s depressing, and it’s got to make one wonder why Marvel has (apparently) abandoned the relatively iconoclastic moves that revived their fortunes to chase the shoulder-pads-and-vestigial-straps dollar. (Link courtesy of Graeme McMillan.)
Until those no-goodniks at Broken Frontier set up permalinks for their columns’ latest installments, I’m just gonna link to the people who link to them. For example, Graeme McMillan links to Shawn Hoke’s column about Chris Ware’s comics edition of McSweeney’s. Long story short: It looks AWESOME. No Gloeckner, though. (This tends to be my barometer for these things.)
Marc-Oliver Frisch reminds me that I wanted to check out Mark Waid’s Empire. It’s nice to find someone else who admits to liking Kingdom Come too, by the way.
And that’s it. Good night friends! Sweet dreams, kids!