I’m not so nuts about the most recent story arc in Mark Millar’s The Ultimates. Normally I’m peachy keen on the “decompressed” storytelling style, in which big events are stretched out over several issues, but this alien-invasion plot seems reeeeeally stretched to me. A couple of issues ago, we spent an entire installment watching the Wasp get chased around a base being told, repeatedly, that there was no escape; meanwhile, her compatriots Thor, Iron Man, Nick Fury and Captain America spent their half of the issue putzing around an abandoned island that might as well have had a big Hollywood-style sign that read “DEATH TRAP” on a mountaintop somewhere. This issue felt like more of the meandering same to me, with some Authority rehashing thrown in for good measure. Besides, I’m kind of soured on Millar’s dialogue, as I’m fond of pointing out. Still, I’m holding out hope for a good conclusion, and of course Bryan Hitch’s art is always pretty much stunning. Anyway, point is that Johnny Bacardi liked this last issue just fine, and in his review he emphasized the book’s main strength–the delightfully sleazy reimagining of these iconic characters’ personalities. That makes the book worth picking up even when other aspects of it are driving you nuts.
Johnny B. also presents his own “Top Twelve Comics Everyone Should Read” list, a la Dave Hill (and myself, incidentally). It’s a really idiosyncratic list–his and mine have literally no overlap. Check it out.
Over at Rich Johnston’s column… well, I think “yeesh” is the word for it. Still and all, it’s pretty entertaining to watch Marvel work us online rumormongers like the rented mules that we are.
Dirk Deppey has a round-up of some of the recent wave of very public Fanta-bashing, including an update on the Rick Veitch vs. TCJ grudge match, and a breif foray into mocking humorless Pro-Gay Comics Creators who spend their time and energy attacking equal-opportunity offenders like Angry Youth Comix creator Johnny Ryan instead of the Taliban wings of Roman Catholicism and the U.S. Congress, who present a much clearer and more present danger to the lavender set right about now.
In the “ADDTF today, Journalista tomorrow” department, here’s a link to a purportedly anti-Semitic cartoon, drawn by Tony Auth for the Philadelphia Inquirer, that’s making the rounds in the warblogosphere lately (courtesy of LGF). Initially, I thought, “That’s not really anti-Semitic, just knee-jerkingly stupidly anti-Israel, which sadly isn’t so rare a breed of editorial cartoon. The Star of David is Israel’s political emblem, after all, so I guess that makes it less ‘offensive,’ though it certainly doesn’t make it any less ‘dumb.'” That’s all I thought was going on–until I discovered that Auth swiped the image from the goddamn Nazis. Check it out. Everything old is new again, eh?
(Not to digress too much from the comics stuff, but I remember reading, and I often repeat to others during discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that anti-Semitism seldom occurs without some ostensibly “real” political greivance to give it some street cred: “Those Jews are all Communists!” “Those Jews are all capitalists!” “Those Jews are agitating for war!” “Those Jews are agitating for peace!” “Those Jews are spreading the plague!” “Those Jews are waging genocide against the Palestinians!” Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you, and just because your complaints about Israel may have some validity don’t mean you’re not, for all intents and purposes, an unreconstructed Jew-hater.)
Finally, a quick musing on something depressing about Tim Sale’s recent exclusive contract with DC, and his refusal to work with any writer other than Jeph Loeb: Having seen some of this guy’s original pages at San Diego, I feel like he’s an art-comics creator struggling to be free. The elegant line work, the expressionistic composition, the sheer languid beauty of his stuff–this guy could be the next Dave Mazzuchelli, if he wanted to be.