Tag Archives: graphic novel

The Walking Dead: Made to Suffer

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If you’re wondering why I’m so out of my standard rotation on graphic novels, one reason is that the Marvel stuff reads very quickly and another is that the Stick book was borrowed. But you were probably talking about the actual rotation, not all this side stuff, right? Right, you pay attention to that as closely as I do, so of course you were! Well, the answer to that is that the newest Walking Dead volume has been delayed for months. (And the next one will be delayed even further, as Wikipedia Pete informs me there are only two out of the standard six that have even been published as single issues, thusfar.)

But the important part is, the aptly named Made to Suffer finally did publish, and then I got it and read it. Yay! For values of yay that mostly relate ironically to the title, because, damn, that was a brutal book. The two civilizations we’ve seen in the series have been on a collision course for about half of its length, and this book marks the payoff. The zombies have a front row seat to a mini-armageddon in which nobody is safe, not least because said zombies forgot to bring their popcorn, if you know what I mean. (And I think you do.)

Made to Suffer may also mark the first time I’ve seriously considered the forthcoming zombiepocalypse as an extinction-level event. But if people act like this (and if there’s one thing I can say Kirkman seems to have access to in spades, it’s the human psyche), we’re all doomed, no matter how well prepared we may feel. I guess the moral of the story is “Don’t be a dick,” which would be more comforting if people who are dicks were so easily able to recognize that about themselves while also trying to stave off the end of the world.

The Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness

OOTS99_7in72dpi_RGBdsFirst of all: if you now or have ever played Dungeons and Dragons, why aren’t you reading the Order of the Stick? It’s a long running webcomic that combines humor based on the role-playing game, actual humor, and a globe-spanning epic quest to save or destroy the world, depending upon what character viewpoint any given comic is following. And the art, you will be retrospectively unsurprised to learn, is based around stick figures. So now you know, and you should read it!

But you probably already are, and like me, you probably never got around to buying the prequel graphic novels that are only available in published book form. Luckily for me, I know people who did, and I performed a borrowing of opportunity while at a fireworks show a couple of days ago. Start of Darkness is a quick (if not light) read chronicling the rise of the douchebag lich and the sympathetic but ultimately flawed goblins who follow him in his quest to destroy some gates that will in turn destroy the world. You know how these evil mastermind plans go. The point is, though, the stories here are just as funny, though a bit grimmer than the online version. It is about bad guys, and all. And the stories are definitely as affecting as the online version. (Did I mention that between the humor and the D&Dness of it all, there’s a genuine story here, with emotional highs and lows? My hand to God.)

Plus, secret bonus for long-time readers: Rich finally turns a spotlight on the scary monster that’s always hiding in the dark!

Ultimate Spider-Man: Double Trouble

For the most part, the third volume of Ultimate Spider-Man is more of the same. But when you consider what a high watermark that is, the phrase turns out to be praise rather than pejoration. Pete’s got a handle on his powers, he’s sort of got a handle on how to use them, and he has a solid ally in his corner. Naturally, therefore, the stakes get ratcheted up commensurately with his new stability. Not only is there a person at school who believes he’s seen though Spider-Man’s secret identity, not only is a philosophical, attractive, and anti-bully switch-blade wielding Gwen Stacy causing tension between Peter and Mary Jane; on top of these, one of the people who worked in the lab where Peter was bitten by the genetically-modified spider that started all the upheaval in his life has awakened from a coma with strange new powers and a grudge, and Australian Animal Planet personality Kraven the Hunter[1] has decided that a defeated Spider-Man would make an awesome trophy, not to mention bolster a flagging career.

As usual, though, it is Spider-Man’s gradual ascent towards genuine super-hero talent, Peter Parker’s lightning-quick banter, and Aunt May’s struggle to keep rein on a boy about whom she knows far less than she thinks (though far more than he thinks) that combine to steal the show. (I seriously cannot say enough good about May Parker in this series. With appearances in fewer than half of the twenty-one individual comics I’ve read over these three volumes, she has managed to redeem a character that I expected to dislike forever.)

[1] If this sounds kind of familiar, well, I expect it’s supposed to.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: N-Zone

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As we rejoin the youthful, modern Fantastic Four, they are still trying to determine how to reverse the changes that have been wrought upon them.  Well, at least those who actually want to go back to normal, which number is shrinking as they begin to realize that the potential for the future outweighs whatever burden they may feel. Since I’m not that big a fan of the reluctant hero, this is pretty much fine by me. In any event, in this volume, they plan a trip back into the N-Zone that was the source of their new lives, for science!

The story was basically fine, with all the sci-fi trappings that attached to the original FF moreso than any other old-school Marvel comic, including a spooky extra-dimensional universe with inexplicably giant skeletons and a bad guy named (roughly) E-Vil. I don’t know if the problem lies with the objective quality or with my just having read a much superior Ultimate Spider-Man book, but this one left me mostly dry. The good news is that the character interactions among the four of them that have been the best aspect of every book so far are just as solid here and if anything continuing to grow in quality. There’s nothing worth skipping, but if it was what I had to recommend the series from, I probably wouldn’t bother to.

Ex Machina: Fact v. Fiction

The third volume of Ex Machina is essentially more of the same. Which is to say, it contains odds and ends of political discussion[1], bits and pieces of Mayor Mitchell Hundred’s past, both before and after he gained his power over machinery of all kinds[2], and, most interestingly to me, continued gradual reveals about the source of his powers and other related incidents around the world[3]. Also, there’s a rival vigilante superhero in New York City! Plus more drama within Hundred’s past and present support systems!

I’m just saying: still a solid story, about which I have little of substance to say at this point. But I have a feeling that it’s all going to come together someday, and I’ll be, like, wow. It’s a theory, anyway.

Oh, and also, the occasional skyline shots with the remaining World Trade Center tower portrayed prominently? Still just as chilling as they were in the first volume.

[1] Well, really a lot less than usual, but replaced by civic responsibility in the guise of jury duty. Which falls in the same bucket, I guess.
[2] Including a bit of a family bombshell, something I’m starting to realize that Vaughan is pretty good at; I should pay attention to his episodes of Lost and issues of Buffy Season 8 and see if the trend holds there, as it has in this and Y: The Last Man.
[3] See, without going into spoilers, there’s an event that seems related to Hundred’s powers, but which is later revealed to have been a mislead. Except, I’m pretty sure that reveal was the real mislead, and that this information will be very important later.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: Doom

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I haven’t found any Ultimate X-Men yet, the upshot of which is that I’ve already looped around on these quick reads to volume 2 of something. I don’t mind so much: there’s a goodly pile of things available, and so far they’ve been uniformly entertaining. That is not, as they say, nothing. The second Ultimate Fantastic Four picks up essentially right where the first one left off. Fresh from their first victory, Reed Richards and company[1] are still working to find a way to become normal people again. And the key to that is discovering what happened to the fifth person affected, Victor Van Damme. He, after all, was the one who changed the experiment’s parameters that caused the accident in the first place. The downside to the plan is that he already knows where they are. Being under effective house-arrest courtesy of the United States in the same Baxter Building where all of their schooling and late night studies took place makes this kind of easy, you see.

I’m definitely still liking the series. The comedic timing is improved over an already funny previous run, and the elements of government control over what is not yet a famed superhero group, but just a quartet of college kids? That’s a story with a lot of depth behind it, if they choose that direction to go in. Plus, y’know, Doctor Doom is there now, and we all know he’s a great adversary.

[1] My historical knowledge of the group, predating any actual reading, leaves me with only his name at the tip of my tongue. So my instinct is to assume that the other names wouldn’t mean a lot to most people. However, I feel compelled to come out in praise of how Sue Storm has been handled thusfar. She’s a modern love interest, in that he seems as much like her prize as she seems like his. And on top of that, she’s a gifted biologist in her own right, every bit as skilled in her field as Reed is in his. It’s a very pleasant contrast with the 1960s version; and make no mistake, even then she was a pretty strong female character for her genre and time!

Ultimate Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility

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A thing that is rapidly striking me as odd about the Ultimate Marvel universe is how unrelated the stories are, compared to 1960s Marvel. I mean, I’ve read three origin stories now, and all of them refer to events that are mutually exclusive of each other. As though they’re all actually set in mildly disparate realities from one another. This is not something that troubles me particularly, just an oddity. I mention it in part because it struck me last time and I never said, but also because it’s one of the many aspects informing my reading of the first Ultimate Spider-Man.

Other aspects include the initial Spider-Man movie, which appears to have been heavily influenced by this volume, my readings of the first 31 issues of the Amazing Spider-Man comic[1], and my expectations relative to the other Ultimate series in which I’ve dabbled that this one would be the most kid-oriented. And indeed, our Peter Parker is a mere 15 years old, with a fair bit of modern angst to him. So, on the whole, it really feels like I should be feeling a little meh about the whole thing. Instead, I enjoyed myself a lot. My guesses about this are that I’m even more of a sucker for high school angst than I thought (and, come on, get over it already, man), or that lowered expectations were just right for the book, or that the original story Stan Lee put together in 1963 has such a heaping helping of mythic resonance that any given retelling will affect me just as much as the first time I saw it. I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s that last one.

[1] I’ll be reading #32 pretty immediately after this review posts, in point of fact. Mary Jane Watson has been the elephant in the corner for at least 25 issues now, which is kind of hilarious to me, given my knowledge of what the future holds. I have to believe that Stan Lee had her in mind as the real deal all along; the set-up is too perfect to be coincidence.

Y: The Last Man – Kimono Dragons

For the first time in a really long span, I’ve broken the rotation of my graphic novels reading. It’s very much not my fault, though. See, the current Walking Dead book was supposed to have been out in January, and then April, and now in a few days. But “in a few days” pushes well beyond the time I was supposed to read another one, you see. So I had to skip ahead to the nearly concluded Y series. Well, okay, not very near, since I’ve got two books to go after this one, and one of those doesn’t release until June. But it feels pretty near, right now.

Kimono Dragons, by title, is about a bunch of Yakuza chicks in Japan. (I mean, they would be chicks, right, since every warm-blooded male on the planet died years ago. Aside from Yorick and his monkey, obviously. I mean, are you even reading these things? Come on!) But by plot or theme, I’m not really seeing much in the title to interpret. In short, Yorick and company continue their hot pursuit of Ampersand the capuchin monkey who holds the key to humanity’s survival, Israeli super-soldier Alter continues her hot and frequently deadly pursuit of Yorick, cold though the trail has grown, and Doctor Allison Mann continues her hot pursuit of the truth behind mankind’s extinction. (Well, and of some choice Australian tail. A woman has needs.)

Along the way, all of the usual cultural and gender explorations take place, the plot is shifted one step closer to what still feels like a solid resolution, and a few remaining characters have their backgrounds explored. The series has reached a point where (as most long-running series do) the individual pieces no longer feel quite as profound as they did early on; like I said, if there’s a central theme to book 8 here, I missed it. But the quality remains consistently high, the story engrossing, and the artwork by turns exotic, sexy, and visceral. I can’t ask for more that that out of anything that isn’t Sandman.

Ultimate Fantastic Four: The Fantastic

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As I believe I have mentioned from time to time, I’ve been reading a lot of Marvel Comics from the 1960s. The Ultimate series of Marvel Comics (a reimagining of the best-known characters from that period as though they had never been created and only appeared in the last 5 years or so instead) is not, alas, on DVD. However, I can find large swathes of the serieses in graphic novel form at my local used bookstore, and hey, why not? I’ve read enough of the original titles to know that I like the characters and the world, and enough to catch at least a substantial number of the references. Plus, I could conceivably catch up on this some day and read it sort of live, which is something that will never happen with the regular Marvel universe and its 45 years of bloat. That’s pretty cool, I guess.

So, anyway, The Fantastic provides the origin story and first major enemy faced by the Fantastic Four, who you’ve possibly heard of before, here if nowhere else. In this version of the story, the team is formed largely of precocious students who have been gathered together at a magnet school with government funding to invent the future, and the accident that provides their powers is the result of a teleportation experiment rather than flying through cosmic rays in space. In fact, my one complaint about the story is that the ‘What caused this?’ subplot was left unresolved in an unsatisfying way. I’m assuming they’ll make up for it by continuing to search for answers in future volumes. But the problems and personalities are spot on, the Moleman is far better realized than he ever was in the original comics (at least as far forward as I’ve read), the in-jokes were occasionally hysterical, and the art…

Well, I know it’s probably heresy, but I’m a lot more fond of the current art than the original stuff, and for a couple of reasons. The really heretical part is that I’m just not that big a fan of Jack Kirby. His backgrounds are great, yes, but his people have always left me cold. The other part is that the big, full-page art is very nice. It admittedly slows the story way down, explaining why what took FF #1 in 1962 about 20 pages to tell took the modern people 100 or more; but I don’t mind that the story slows down a bit, as continuity between issues is far tighter even than it was then. (And one of my most consistent praises of old era Marvel is how continuity-minded they were, and how high above my expectations the writing has been as a result.)

My point in all of this, I guess, is that I certainly liked what they’ve done with the reboot, and anticipate liking the other Ultimate titles as well. But since in a roundabout way I’ve been reviewing the old comics and the reboot concept more than this particular story, it’s probably fair to say that any future Ultimate reviews will be shorter than this. I mean, if that’s the kind of thing that worries you. (Which it probably would me; it’s a short graphic novel in the scheme of things, and not chock full of symbolism and enigma like most of the non-superhero comics I tend to read more often.)

Ex Machina: Tag

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When I read the first volume of Ex Machina, I wasn’t very impressed. The story just failed to grab me, which was a pity since I like the author so much. But it got reasonably good reviews in the comments, plus my graphic novel buddy liked it, so I proceeded apace, which pace is more akin to a crawl these days, but I digress. The important part is that I’ve read the second volume, Tag, and now I’m sold.

It still has all of the high-level (and very occasionally, the nitty-gritty) politics of running New York City that Mayor Mitchell Hundred has to deal with, that I found simultaneously so well-written and so non-involving last time. But instead of a somewhat lifeless origin story holding the politics together, they threw in a solid plot with far-reaching ramifications that I’m excited about seeing further investigated, and the moreso since this is the same author as the superb Y: The Last Man series. He’s pretty well proven his ability to have a destination in mind for his world-spanning mysteries, which would be my only remaining concern at this point, the art having been solid. (Well, I could take or leave the faces, but everything else is dandy.) The mystery in question, interspersed among Hundred’s dating life and dealings with school vouchers and gay marriage, goes to the heart of his power over machines. Because whatever it was that gave him those powers appears to be cropping up in other places in New York now, and affecting other people in dire and possibly diabolical ways. Mysterious!