Brief li’l comics roundup:
Bill Sherman reviews Trouble, the teen-romance series written by Mark Millar as an attempt to break into the teen-girl manga/Sweet Valley High market. I myself will just say that a story in which Millar can’t throw around words like “adamantium” and “black ops” and “I’d suit up and take out those terrorists myself, but I’ve got a date with Shannon Elizabeth” reveals a certain weakness in the dialogue department, and that a comic that ends with a line that’s basically a thirty-year-old in-joke is an unlikely candidate for jumpstarting a new audience. But it was a good idea to try, and the art by Mr. & Mrs. Terry Dodson is suitably sexy.
Jess Lemon at the Pulse reviews Alias, Brian Bendis’s bleak and evocative mature-readers ex-superheroine private-detective series. It’s somewhat controversial whether “Jess” is actually the complete comics newbie that “she” claims to be, but regardless, the review neatly summarizes how to make a comic new-reader-friendly. Bendis (with the help of the incredible artist Michael Gaydos) knows how it’s done.
NeilAlien ought to be pleased that Vikings, the upcoming grand-guignol Thor tale by Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry, will apparently guest-star Dr. Strange. They may not be the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, but they come from the land of the ice and snow…
Also at the Pulse, there’s a nice little article about Battle Royale, the genuinely fucked-up manga about a dystopian future Japan in which classes of 9th graders are forced to kill each other gladiator-style in a Running Man-esque TV program. This is the first manga I’ve really ever read, and I’m enjoying it, even more so because it was printed right-to-left which makes it this weird head-trip to read.
Finally, yesterday Dirk Deppey gave his most well-reasoned argument yet against superhero comics and movies. Conceding that the genre is capable of greatness, he simply argues that this means there’s all the more reason to call superhero crap “crap.” He’s right, of course, even if he’s being way too hard on the really cool X2 movie. It’s also important to remember that the superhero crap chokes out EVERYTHING good, superhero and non-superhero alike. I think we all realize we’re at the point where when you try to tell your in-laws, for example, about a comic like Blankets, for example, the first thing out of their mouths is, “Wait, it’s a comic, but not about superheroes?” People are hardly aware such comics even exist. That ain’t good for anyone.