Oct
29
2008
The recent Wonder Woman storyline set in Hollywood brought back the Queen of Fables, one of the more interesting villains from Mark Waid’s run on JLA. Gail Simome’s take on the character seemed a little different from Mark Waid’s, but the story was entertaining enough. Reading it did make me want to dig out the Queen’s first appearance, in JLA #47-49, and see just how different the writing on the character was.
The Queen of Fables is a great idea for a villain, especially for Wonder Woman. Incredibly powerful and as cruel as Diana is noble, the Queen is firmly rooted in magic and legend. Continue Reading »
Oct
24
2008
I am quite serious when I say that the back-issue bins feed my habit: I really enjoy searching through the boxes and trying to patch holes in my collection or discover series I missed or never tried. So, when I’m traveling, I keep an eye out for comic book stores, and, as you know if you read Rolling Traveler, I travel a lot. Of course, there are cities with no comic book stores, and I’ve been increasingly finding that stores don’t stock back issues to the extent they used to. However, there are still plenty of places to keep an eye out for. I’d like to take you on a tour of the comic book stores I’ve visited, one every Friday.
Our first stop on this geekish tour of the cities I’ve vistied is Comix in Hannover. I drop in there every time I visit Hannover, if for no other reason than to say hi to the very friendly and helpful owners, who are as far removed from the stereotype Comic Book Guy as can be. Even on a delivery day, they’ll have time for a chat, and most of them do speak English. They are camera-shy, but were good enough to let me take a few shots, as you can see below. Continue Reading »
Oct
22
2008
This week has turned into Top Ten week, although I hadn’t planned on it. After re-reading Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct, the mediocre sequel to the brilliant first series, for Monday’s review, I wanted to remind myself of why I loved Top 10. I intended to just re-read a couple of issues of that original series, and as happens with these things, I soon found I’d read all 12 and was pulling Top 10: The Forty-Niners off the shelf. And here we are with another Top 10 review.
Top 10: The Forty-Niners is a prequel to Top 10 Season 1. Set in Neopolis in 1949, when the city that would become filled with super-humans was just starting out, it tells the story of the rocky beginnings of the Neopolis police force. Continue Reading »
Oct
20
2008
The new comic Top 10 Season 2 isn’t the first sequel to Alan Moore and Gene Ha’s 12-issue super-human cop series, but it certainly seems like a far more worthy successor than 2005’s pedestrian Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct. It wasn’t a bad comic book, and I was more than glad of it when it looked like there would be no more Top 10, but looking back at it now, it was a poor substitute.
Paul Di Filippo and Jerry Ordway did a fair job on continuing the story of the Top 10 precinct and its officers, but missed the mark in a few places. Continue Reading »
Oct
16
2008
There was a three-week break between shipments to my local comic book store this time around, so there was a lot to look through. By the way, have you any idea how difficult it is to avoid spoilers when you get your comics later than people in the US? If there’s a comic or storyline coming up that I don’t want to know anything about, I have to stay away from so many web sites, particularly if it’s a big book. We have the same problem over here with movies. I saw The Dark Knight at its German premiere… a good five weeks after most of my friends in the US had seen it.
Anyway, as always, I spotted quite a few interesting books in the large shipment that had come in, Continue Reading »
Oct
14
2008
As I mentioned on Sunday, I finally found Birds of Prey issue 42, one of he few issues of the series I was missing and actively hunting for. A prequel to the series, it is set after Barbara Gordon’s time with the Suicide Squad, but before the first time she contacted Black Canary, and it deals with events that have been referenced but never explained in other issues of the series. The readers know that Power Girl had gone on a mission, and things had ended so badly that she had sworn never to do any more work for Oracle. Even much later, in issue 100, when Power Girl receives an invitation to join the expanded roster of Oracle’s team, she simply says “When Hell freezes over,” and dumps the invitation. I was always curious as to the details of this mission gone wrong, imagining all sorts of scenarios, and now I´ve finally had a chance to read the story.
Continue Reading »
Oct
12
2008
I’ve been away for a few days, visiting one of the greenest cities in Germany, Hanover. There are many things I enjoy about traveling: meeting old friends and making new ones, discovering new restaurants and cuisines, learning about the history and quirks of the area. Of course, as a comic reader, the opportunity to visit a new comic book store and hunt through the back-issue bins is high on that list. Sure, I could find things online, and it can sometimes be a fruitless search, but I think many of you will know what I mean when I say there’s a little thrill to it. Some cities don’t have any comic books stores, some don’t have any with back issues, but Hanover has two, so I took an hour or two on Friday morning to drop in to both, and I came out with a few good finds.
Continue Reading »
Oct
08
2008
I really wanted to like Paul Jenkins’ Sidekick. I was even excited about it when I saw it in the previews: it was a comedy book at a time when I sorely needed one, DC Comics having torn the Super-buddies to shreds between Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, and it was by an excellent writer. He’d done a great four-year run on Hellblazer, written the memorable Inhumans limited series that made people sit up and take note of the potential in the characters, and co-created the Sentry, an intriguingly complex character. I thought perhaps all that expectation is what killed Paul Jenkins’ Sidekick for me when it first came out, but even re-reading it now, it doesn’t measure up to any of his other work. It’s unremarkable, a little derivative, and worst of all, not particularly funny.
Continue Reading »
Oct
07
2008
Yesterday’s post was canceled by flu, but it would have been a review of an indie book, since it was Indie Monday. I was debating whether to review a really obscure book like Southern Knights or taking on a controversial period in Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise, but since I was feeling so crappy, I shunned the harsh light of the monitor, and curled up with one of my comfort books instead: the first 12 issues of Books of Magic. While reading, I got to thinking that while I would consider the first two titles to be independent, I wouldn’t immediately say the same about the third one, as it is published under the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, one of the Big Two. However, thematically, it has far more in common with indie comics than DC’s traditional output, whereas Southern Knights is basically a super-hero book like any other. What is it that qualifies one book as indie and another not? Is it theme or print run? Does an indie comic have to be creator owned?
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Oct
04
2008
One of the parodies in the 6th issue of Marvel’s old parody comic What the..?! had Marvel’s mute Man-Thang face DC’s eloquent Swamp Thang, who gets burned up in the confrontation because “whatever knows over-writing burns at the touch of the Man-Thang”. Part of the joke of the piece was that DC characters stand around talking over problems, whereas Marvel characters get on with the fighting that the readers want to see, or, interpreting it another way, that DC Comics were more cerebral, whereas Marvel comics focused on action. I couldn’t help but be reminded of that parody when reading today’s comic for the Random Review, 1986’s Justice League of America #257. Wordy and weird, it stars three of the Justice League’s least action-oriented characters, and not a punch is thrown in the whole issue.
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