Meanwhile... Back at the Comic Book Blog

G-Man: Learning to Fly
By Chris Giarrusso

Chris Giarrusso is the creator of the Mini-Marvels comics that used to come out from Marvel. They were often the best part of the comics they were printed in and I remember just reading the Red/Blue/Green Hulk backups he drew in the current Red Hulk series.

Mavel, in all their brilliance, decided to stop publishing Mini-Marvel comics, in case they were confused with the not-nearly-as-good Super Hero Squad. Thanks Marvel.

Still, Giarrusso hasn't given up on creating awesome, funny superhero comics. Instead, he's returned to characters he created in the back pages of Savage Dragon.

G-Man (the G stands for G), and his friends, Billy Demon, Suntrooper, and others, fight crime! Well, sometimes. After school. Or at school. Maybe.

G-Man pokes fun at a lot of super hero tropes, but it's also obvious that Giarrusso really likes super hero comics, despite their occasional (or even frequent) stupidity. I'd say he even embraces the stupidity.

The heroes have to help a wizard find his golden chalice (it was in the sink). A Christmas tree comes alive, steals a car, and ends up working for Santa Claus ("Evergreen want to take responsibility for actions and make amends.").

As the comics were orignally backups we see Giarrusso using his limited space in a way you don't see that much in comics anymore. He packs panels into the pages. 16 per page is not uncommon, and 12 is more regular. There is lots of talking in this comic, but it's all good.

G-Man never fails to cheer me up, and I hope that the current mini series is successful enough for Giarrusso to continue making these comics.

Labels: comics, Image

This is another of the free comics that the Guardian gave out to its readers, and it's far more like the ones I used to read (the Beano, the Dandy, the Topper, and the Beezer) when I was a little kid.

One of the neat things about this one is that it actually is two different comics combined into one. Whizzer has the front page, but inside you'll find another front page, this time for Chips, and instructions on how to take out the staples and have two different comics. The front and back pages of Chips are in full colour, like the front and back of Whizzer, and unlike the rest of the comics which are either in black and white or have a single colour. Chips even has its own joke page!

Some of the comics inside are kind of weird. Most of them are just your average one or two page humour comics that I remember, but then you get the more adventurey ones that had apparently been phased out by the time I started reading comics. "Whizz" Wheels is about a "super-cyclist" who in this issue saves a villainous land agent from a forest fire while riding a penny farthing. Seriously.

There's also "Thingumajig!" which features a rather odd looking alien who, of course, says things like "Gg-uu-uuuh...my head spins and stomach tubes churn! This must be what Earthlings call sickness of the sea!" Oh aliens!

My favourite comic in it is also the only one I've ever seen before (or at least I think I've seen it before): Harry's Haunted House. It's about a ghost who doesn't like haunting people, and I thought it was fairly funny.

Or maybe I just really like the idea of a ghost sleeping in a bed.

Labels: comics, ipc

Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator
Written by Mark Schultz. Art by Ariel Olivetti.

Fuck me, this was terrible. Just incredibly, incredibly bad in almost every way a comic can be.

Well, I suppose that is not true, here are ten ways in which it could have be worse:

1. It could have been drawn by many different artists with completely conflicting styles. Olivetti is far too reliant on digital painting or whatever, but his scenes in the Daily Planet office are pretty good.

2. It could have not featured any aliens of any sort at all (instead of barely featuring them) and just been about Batman and Superman exploring some empty caves.

3. Lois could have been killed along with every other non-superhero in Peru, causing Superman to have to travel back in time to save her.

4. Batman's costume could, somehow, have been stupider.

5. The badguy humans could somehow have been more vaguely defined (this one would be tough, as they didn't even have names, just an organization, I guess you'd have to not even name the organization.)

6. The Aliens could have been even less dangerous, and not even been able to damage Superman's costume.

7. Lois could have been completely useless, instead of saving Batman by having a "basic working knowledge of Kyptonian mechanics."

8. There could have been more tiny, annoying robots.

9. It could have had Aquaman in it.

10. I don't know. It could have been twice as long, that would have been pretty awful.

Labels: comics, Dark Horse, DC

Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge's Man
Written by John Wagner. Illustrated by Will Simpson, Colin MacNeil, and John Burns.

Last time I wrote about 2000ad I said I'd wait until the next "all part ones" issue. But you know what? Screw that. Because for slightly more than the price of the average issue of 2000ad (£1.80) I can just buy collections from bookshops that sell everything for £2. Awesome!

Of course, unfortunately I start with one of the least interesting Judge Dredd comics I've read. Most of what I've read has been in random American reprints, so I really don't remember what I actually have read. Necropolis? with Judge Death? That was pretty good.

This, however, wasn't. It starts off with someone killing pro-democracy citizens of Mega-City One, and while Dredd isn't the biggest fan of democracy, he also doesn't like people breaking the law, so he goes after him.

Now, from the title you can probably guess that something fishy is going on with this killer, he's being told to kill these people by the Chief Judge. And I guess that's where my problem with this arises, I have no idea who any of the Judges that aren't Dredd are. There's a bunch of other Judges in this comic, and, presumbly, I'm supposed to know who at least some of them are? I know Dredd is an ongoing series, and has continuity, but I think this is only the second Dredd story from the last decade that I've read, so I really don't know. Is this in character for the Chief Judge? Iunno.

Anyway, there's some other stuff, and the prison's just outside of Mega-City One show up again (I last saw them in the most recent issue of 2000ad that I read), and it seems that those scenes are moving some larger plot forward.

There's also a kind of bizarre bit which seems retconned in. Maybe it was the intention from the beginning, but the killer suddenly having cockroach DNA just seems utterly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, in the art department, Colin MacNeil does a really good job on his part.



It's a bit static, and thus doesn't show movement/action that well, but that's frequently a problem with painted art. I think it looks pretty awesome. Maybe I should have bought that Devlin Waugh trade he did the art for.

Labels: 2000ad, comics

Jackie No. 580
Feb 15th, 1975

Earlier this year the Guardian newspaper gave away reprints of old comics published by IPC.

I used to read some of the comics they published back when I was a kid living in the UK, though, needless to say, I didn't read this one. Both because I wasn't born when it came out, and because it is for girls. Ick.

In fact Jackie is hardly a comic at all. There's only about six pages of actual comics in the whole thing. The rest of it is letters, short stories, agony aunts, pop star things, and other stuff that makes me glad I was not a girl who grew up reading something like this. Aiee.

The comics that are featured are both weeeeeeeeeeeird. The first one is all about how awesome and dreamy Donny Osmond is, though it features some nice art when it's not trying to replicate celebrities.


Just ignore her creepy, pupil-less, eyes.

The second one is even worse, and all about a girl trying to steal her best friend's boyfriend, leading to her friend's death. What a dick! Girls!

Jackie is strange, and I hope to never read it again. It does let me show this video though, which is pretty ace, and I feel a pretty accurate representation of this magazine.

Labels: comics, ipc

Never Learn Anything From History
by Kate Beaton

Oh man, these comics are awesome. I keep meaning to write about webcomics I read, but I never do. Clearly once they've released print books is the time to talk about them.

I will say once more, Kate Beaton's comics are awesome. So awesome I was willing to buy a book of them when I can (and did) just read them for free on the internet.

Beaton's comics are, mostly, comics about history. And while that doesn't sound very exciting, she is able to make it really funny. Mostly by taking real events, condensing them down to just a few panels, and making pretty much everyone act like an idiot. They are hilarious. Honest.

So this volume collects...a bunch of the comics from her website. Not all of them, I think due to quality problems and the like. Still, there's a lot here, and there's some commentary and the like. Though I think it's just the same stuff that was online.

So while the content is awesome, I had a couple of issues with the actual physical object. First it is expensive. Aieeeeee. $25? It's only like 80 pages or something. (Thankfully I got it at more than half off during a huge sale. Hurray!)

Also, I don't like the paper stock and the binding seems flimsy. I don't know if it is or not, but every time I open it, I am very careful because I am afraid the spine is going to break and all the pages are going to fall out. I don't want that to happen on a $25 book.

With this book Beaton decided to go the self publishing route (it kind of shows, there's not even a copyright notice in the book), and I'm guessing went through some sort of print-on-demand service, which a lot of webcomic people seem to use. I kind of wish they'd put more thought into this stuff. Or, alternatively, try to get someone else to publish it for them. Some publisher must have wanted to put this out right?

Anyway, here are links so you can go bask in her glory.

http://beatonna.livejournal.com/


http://www.harkavagrant.com/

!!! She's just put up a new one. Exciting.

Labels: comics, webcomics

Touch #1-2
Written by John Francis Moore. Illustrated by Wesley Craig and Prentis Rollins.

"Get ready for DC Focus, a new line of gritty, character-driven comics that take place in a world separate from the traditional DC universe."

Or don't. That was the info DC released about the Focus line of comics (way back in 2004). But it quickly became apparent that people were going to take the second option and just ignore them entirely.

Touch was apparently the one least interesting of all, as it debuted with sales of just over 11,000 (#151 on the charts), before sinking to just 5000 (and #223) with the sixth, and final, issue. Admittedly, it was barely behind another Focus title, Fraction, but that just shows how poorly this line was received.

Part of me wonders what DC were thinking with this line. There were no big creators, and while there was a push for the line, it didn't seem like there was any reason for it to exist.

Going back to 2004, when this line launched, we can see DC making a lot of these sort of strange publishing decisions, and putting out piles of comics not necessarily interesting to their typical superhero-comic-reading fan. This was, after all, when the ill-fated DC/2000ad and DC/Humanoids imprints were launched, and CMX, which somehow still exists despite putting out (to me) mystifying manga series.

It all kind of seems to indicate a period when DC was flailing around seemingly completely at random in an attempt to find something that would sell. It didn't work, so now they just put out more Green Lantern comics.

Still, who was the market for the Focus comics supposed to be? Based on the covers by indie comicker Tomer Hanuka, and the drab and murky colouring, I can only assume that the intended audience was indie/Vertigo readers.

Except that doesn't make any sense, because if you want to attract those readers, you should give the books to people that already have followings. Don't just get the guy that wrote X-Force and Doom 2099 (as good as it might have been) to write your titles*.

There's also the strangeness behind launching an entire line of comics (which I'm not sure has ever really succeeded before, it's not like Vertigo just showed up one day), with line-branding, similar covers, style, and colouring, fairly generic names, and yet not have any information inside the comics telling you about the others. The house ads are all for other DC comics, and the back of issue two just tells you about a bunch of DC universe titles. Had DC already given up on the line by that point? I don't know.

The colouring on these comics is another mystifying idea. The entire line supposedly had a drab, washed out look, which doesn't sound like the best idea but could work. It doesn't though. Well, that's unfair. There are scenes where it works, the opening pages of issue one are at the bottom of a mine shaft, and the dark colours work pretty well there. When someone breaks through to rescue the miners he's backlit with brighter colours, and it looks pretty good. The rest of the issue is coloured with the exact same colours (grey-blue and grey-red), no matter if they characters are walking down the street, in a bar, in a hospital, inside, outside, wherever. It's like the movie Dark City, where everything happens at night, except with no point or reason. It's the rare comic that has more colour on the cover than the insides, but this is one of them. Issue two seems even worse, with the red becoming even greyer.



It's like there was a coloured ink shortage.

The comic itself is alright. A guy has superstrength, and helps people. Well, for the right price for him and his manager. The first issue ends with you learning that the hero isn't the main character after all, he's just been given his powers by someone else. And what can be given can be taken away. It's a decent twist, and it actually makes me appreciate the cover (which I thought was pretty good to begin with) a lot more.

The second issue goes into this a bit more, and I guess the point of the series was sort of like Dial H for Hero, except with the mystery of how this guy got his powers. And who that crazy dude in the second issue was. Were either of these mysteries solved? I dunno. And I kind of doubt I will ever actually find out. It does not however seem like the plot for an ongoing series.

One final thing to mention is that only five years ago DC launched an entire line of comics at $2.50 each. It's kind of hard to believe that in the five years since then we've gone from that price up to the $3.99 that so many comics now launch at. Still, I'm sure I'll be able to buy them from a quarter bin in five years time no matter how much they originally cost.

*That's who wrote (and created, and even, according to the indica, had some of the copyright of) Touch, by the way: John Francis Moore. And that's true up above too, I did generally enjoy his run on Doom 2099. It wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but I thought it was pretty fun comics.

Labels: DC, Focus, I will spend 25 cents on anything