I guess the comics creators of the world should thank their lucky stars that The Return of the King isn’t eligible for Ignatzes, Harveys, and Eisners.
On Friday I reviewed Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights, a book that deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten. If you missed it, click on that link and check it out.
Alan David Doane interviews Johnny Ryan, creator of the incredibly offsensive and hilarious humor series Angry Youth Comix. A lot of people think that publishing this title calls everything else Fantagraphics does into question. Those people are probably right, which is exactly what makes this stuff so goddamn great. If you’re looking for proof that humor comics can actually be, you know, funny, look no further.
David Allison of Insult to Injury sings the praises of Jeffrey Brown’s Clumsy, astutely pointing out how well Brown navigates material that in lesser hands could be either self-indulgently maudlin or voyeuristically creepy. Even if autobio isn’t usually a turn-on for you, I think Brown’s stuff will be.
Rich Johnston makes with the gossip about Marvel, saying that new kid-friendly directives are forcing all the New Marvel mojo that remains into the Marvel Knights and MAX imprints. Johnston also reports that Captain America writer Bob Morales, who did a great job with the concept in the miniseries Truth and a not so much job in the actual series, has been axed. As the two-year experiment with a Marvel Knights-style Cap comes to a close, I think it’s safe to say the concept failed, which I just don’t understand. It just shouldn’t be that hard to come up with a vaguely realistic fictional milieu for the character (i.e. one where he isn’t fighting Avengers-style supervillains) while simultaneously avoiding the sense that the writer is vaguely embarrassed to be writing the character. Right?
David Fiore continues to make up for what he’s wrought on the Comics Journal messboard with some excellent Dark Knight blogging:
Bruce asks us to accept his version of things: he’s just a man, ready to battle God (“There’s just the sun and the sky and him, like he’s the only reason it’s all here.”) if he must, in the pursuit of justice. But I think that there’s a way to enter this text in the guise of Superman (through Clark’s “nuclear epiphany; or, how I learned to cease striving for the sun and love the earth”, in Bk 4)–and it’s a reading which offers a very interesting critique of Batman’s Promethean/Ahabian project…
I’d never thought of Miller’s Superman in those terms before. Great stuff.
J.W. Hastings submits capsule reviews of various titles that I’m interested in but, for primarily financial reasons, am not buying, which really are the best kind of capsule reviews. Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, Punisher, Wanted, Y: The Last Man. Enjoy.
Christopher Butcher reports that Del Rey has backed down from its decision to preemptively censor its imported manga, thanks in large part to what Franklin Harris calls “The Power of Reasonable Bitching.”
Mike Sterling defends Grant Morrison from the more-pretentious-than-thou criticism he’s been getting from certain quarters of the artcomix commentary world lately. But I’d suggest that after reading a few of the threads from the board where these folks hang out, the stuff refutes itself….