Cannot actually wait for this. Having seen Cornell in action at a very sombre Birmingham Comic-Con panel where Diggle played the part of Cynical person, and Alan Davis looked extremely annoyed that he was even there, Cornell was very, very Charismatic. The fact he is now taking the Britishness up to 11 and writing Knight and Squire is perfect. I can honestly not count the number of ways American writers just DONT GET Captain Britain and what it is to be English, or Welsh. Good on him.
Ah, Boom! once again you provide me with a comic book experience that doesn't leave me wanting to punch myself in the genitals. Thankfully, that role is reserved apparently for any Dr Strange appearance post HoM. Lucky for me nobody apparently likes Doctor Strange anymore, and wants to concentrate on establishing Doctor Voodoo as Sorcerer Supreme, despite the fact he was always a psychologist, and the fact he starts off using dark magic, which is what got Strange sacked off in the first place. Alas, my whinging is detracting from the point of the post.
Hexed, by Boom! Studios, is really bloody good. It's a bit like taking your basic magic based character, and then giving them actual magic instead of mumbo jumbo laser hands. Again, like with Dead Run, this actually appears to be a functioning world, where things have happened before this series. There are history between the characters, and they seem to work around each other and function together.
It's nice to see Emma Rios' artwork here, before she got snatched up by Marvel. Her line work isn't as smooth as it is on Runaways, but I feel it actually looks better for it. There's a lot of energy to her artwork, and a lot of power conveyed with the more sketchy elements that she lost when she moved to Marvel. I think, a bit like Olivier Coipel, when he lost the scratchy lines he had when he was drawing Legion Lost, he lost a lot of the power of his work.
Anyway, the basic premise of the series is following a young girl called "Lucifer", thats right, who is an occult thief. The series really hooks around some bastard from her old life turning up, and threatening to kill the only person Lucifer gives a toss about, unless she goes ahead and grabs this mystical item for him. Seem's really obvious, it is. It's nice a simple, but simple enough for the writer to play with and use different concepts to give the story a bit of a twist and shout. The magic in it actually seem's as though it's a proper world, something fully formed, rather than "We need to give this something that's got a slightly different hook".
Basically, it's a great comic. The central character is interesting, without being a bit bland, or over the top. One of the things I really dislike about female centric character series is that they're often not portrayed as real and proper people. You end up with stereotype character number 67 who likes bags and shopping, and really sticks out because the writer can't write a convincing female. In this series, the writer can, and she's interesting and engaging. Not like Twilight Guardian (Actually, I mean Genius. Upon further reflection, I got the title's mixed up. Who'd have thought mr. comics man could do such a thing) or whatever that won pilot season (By the way, where the Hell is that? Not that I want to read it of course. BORED, but you know, where. is. it.)
So, I've read two Boom! Properties so far, and they've both been great. What will tomorrow bring in terms of reviewage? Perhaps Jeremiah Harm shall we read. It looked interesting enough!
Hexed recieves 9 out of 10, because I will never give 10. I am an angry english bastard and ten does not exist in my world.
Boom! Studios, has been making waves recently. It's publishing some nice books, actually, it publishing some brilliant books. It's becoming a bit of a media vehicle in terms of the fact that it's whacking out these kiddie comics like Incredibles, the Muppets, and lots of Pixar related stuff, but also, it seems to be Mark Waid's little car of brilliance.
While it seemed at first Irredeemable was going to be a retreading, or a bloody close approximation of Empire, it's actually really rather suprisingly good. I must admit, I got on the band wagon rather late and ended up going back and reading about six issues, but it's a very good read every month, and there's some nice self aware bits in it where he acknowledges past super elements that'd got lobbed into the book - For example, when the only black character in the surviving superhero team laments on the fact that it was hardly very original that he was a black guy with electrical powers. Kind of nice to see that sort of self aware referential stuff without it bordering on the parody/crap satirical platforms that normally come with breaking the forth wall, even if this wasn't strictly breaking it.
Anyway, this comic I wanted to talk about was Dead Run. It's the sort of comic where i am SURE that i've seen the concept elsewhere, and it's a concept that's proliferated comics currently, with the dystopian future element/zombies, but it seems to work really well. In fact, it's got a rather Ellisian central character. That lovable bastard who's good at his job, and has a heart of gold.
The Central concept is that this main guy, Nick Masters, is a courier, and he's neglected to deliver something to San Francisco. That's pissed off his employer, who has beaten the crap out of someone close to Nick and stolen his sister. Good setup for a story? There's more. This Drug Baron wants to send Nick to San Fran with another parcel, and will release his sister once he's done so. The Catch? San Fran is the other side of the city walls, and the America you all knew and loved is now a massive pile of radioactive arse flecks.
So, now our Courier goes and gets a boatload of guns, knifes and other violence causing accouterments, and visits another old Courier, who provides bog all in the way of hell. Now, his daughter, on the other hand, offers to be the Navigator, and thus we get the crux of the human story in this comic.
I won't give away much more, but what a story it is. It's rather action packed, and engaging. It doesn't blow out the boat, and reinvent the wheel, but it doesn't have to. The Wheel works really good on it's own, has ever since we done gone invented it. This comic is really very good. It's engaging, action packed, and filled with character interaction, that lets you get to know the character,and allows the characters to grow a bit. Not a lot, we don't end up with two entirely different characters at the end, we just know that the bastard isn't as much of a bastard as we thought, and the girl isn't quite the annoying "hi, i'm annoying but necessary" character that was needed in the plot. There's twists, intrigue, and the world seems to be pretty well developed. We're given information when we need it, rather than a character at the start going "Well, first there was this big bomb" and then sixteen pages of exposition and talking heads. It's concise and clever, and sometimes, less information is more. If America is a steaming pile of nuclear yogurt, what is the rest of the world like?
The art, as well, is nice. It's got a sort of gritty look to it, and to be honest, I was a BIT disappointed that it wasn't Eric Canete who did the interior work, like he did the covers. However, I can live with it because it was nice art. It flowed well, I could understand what was going on, the character designs were well formed and basically, while it didn't immediately make me go "WOW!" it was nice, solid art, and I wouldn't be sad if I had to look at it again. In fact, i'd be rather pleased if we got another Dead Run series out of this. It was left "open", and really, it was a good series.
All, in all, Boom has put out another good series. Go and read this, and if you don't, I'll go into your room while your asleep, and move your stuff around.
But wait, was there any bad bits, you ask? Well, nothing glaringly bad, to be honest. Technically, and artistically, it was nice looking. I just couldn't shake the feeling that...well, this was something I'd seen before. I don't know where, i don't know what on or whether i read it or something but it was...familiar. A bit like waking up next to your girlfriend, only, inexplicable, she has a beard. It's familiar , but you're pretty sure there is something in it thats different.
I am an avid, and somewhat crap but prolific Fanfiction writer as well as a fan of Comics from around the world, from the major and minor Publishers. So, What I aim to do, with this little blog which I will try to keep updated as regularly as possible, is to give you all a taster, and by you all i am under no illusions that it is literally no-one, of what I am working on.
Currently, I am working towards a massive game plan for DCI Animal Man, and Blue Beetle. Though there are loads of other titles there that are well worth checking out, have a look at mine first, because I directed you there. Put simply, Animal Man is my first fanfic and will always be prime in my heart. Blue Beetle only came recently when I took over after the previous writer.
What drives me and makes me create are completely different ideas. My Animal Man series and Blue Beetle aren't driven by recapping previous storylines from DC, they're forging their own continuity based from a cut-off point, which is Infinite Crisis. What I can tell you without ruining the series, is that you'll not read something like it anywhere else in fanfic. My ideas are pretty different, and not always in a good way.
You can also see that I've grown, at least a bit, as a writer from the beginning issues to the most recent one, though still with occasional blips - spot the undeliberate mistake leading 14-15?
Sorry, Same reason why I'm against the Death Penalty and all that other Jazz.
There is no way you can justify humans as higher beings when We and Primates make War with each other, and theres no way you can tell someone what they're doing is wrong, and then end their life. it doesn't teach any lessons, it has repurcussions sure, but people still do it.
If you had some mentalist running around with an AK-47 strapped to his wrist, shooting fare dodgers and murderes and rapists and the like, you're inviting hypocrisy into the mix. The law shouldn't be biased, you shouldn't have one persons revenge/vigilance whatever governing things because people as a singular organism are wrong, and governed much more by emotions, and their environment then any kind of quantifiable ability to exact justice. My opinions are completely different to someone elses, and thats why neither of us should be given a gun and said "Go clean up the streets."
Remember when Ultimate Comics used to be good? The that negative space Bars down the side of the covers used to be a seal of something different. Where you'd get a different Universe with a more modern and realistic approach. Where Super Soldiers used to roam, and America was the best country because it had the biggest weapons, and the biggest bastards?
Yeah, I remember it as well, now we have a love letter to the 90's and poorly written Avengers comics that'd be NAFF if they were in continuty in 616, instead their force fed down our throats as THE NEXT BIG THING when in reality, the only thing BIG about them is the failure rate.
Ultimates Volume Three; Loeb deliberatly wants to take away any sort of Uniqueness of this universe and impose what HE wants to do on the title. Aren't there editors that are supposed to say "Hey now, Thor was a Nurse with mental problems, not a dude built like a roman poo-villa and a smaller hammer." Or "Tony stark was ALWAYS drunk, thats not a problem in the Ultimate Universe. If you strapped yourself to a full-body rocket suit that you control with your face, you'd want to be drunk off your face to do it as well."
But no, instead we have this horrific car crash of a comic that reads like fanfiction gone bad. It's poorly written, with dialogue that makes me think Loeb got a load of 90's films, threw them together and then tried to write something "Really Cool."
What happened to reinvention? Innovation? Creativity. Oh yeah, clearly, thats not required for Ultimates all you need is a bit of swearing and some guns and you've got it.
Well, actually, no, then you have 90's Punisher/Cable cross-over books, not Ultimates. Not a comic who's layers unveiled subtle hints about Millars political views. Where the closeness of the Maximoff twins was creepy, but not out-right incestuous. Comics are supposed to be GOOD, not poorly written dross.
Lets look at Ultimate X-Men, Kirkman made it die, by bringing in as much 90's pap as humanly possible. Cable, Bishop, Onslaught, Apocolypse as something other than Sinisters Delusions, and now we have Banshee, a drug made from Wolverines DNA.
How exactly does that work, incidentally? Does that mean i can get myself whacked up by doing a line of my Mums HRT tablets?
Incidentally, why does Colossus need it. Oh right, because hes made of metal, but that doesn't make him super strong. No, Banshee does that. Thats why he was able to take it during the Weapon X thing, when they broke everyone down, changing them on a fundamental level. They thought it'd be fine to let him take it, or better yet, not even know. Incidentally, if he doesn't know who he GETS the drugs off, why did he meet the person NEAR A WINDOW WHERE CYCLOPS COULD JUST LOOK OUT?! Honestly, im fairly certain there was very little editing involved in this.
And the Annual that came out this week, good to see the Heroes writer is stepping away from the cliches that plagued the series. Oh wait, Dystopian Future, People coming to the past to try and prevent it? Isn't that the plotline from the TV series? Congrats. Break the mold. Show us what the Ultimate Universe is about.
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