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| Comic book reviews by Last 05/05/2009, 3:23pm PDT | ||||
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| Kingpin - This is a 2004 miniseries showing his rise from the street to power. It's like the movie American Gangster in that it shows Fisk in 1960's Harlem uniting black dealers against Italian suppliers. The Kingpin is awesome and the story is a (mostly) plausible and realistic depiction of criminal life.
Hitman - Garth Ennis is a short-sighted hypocrite. Every month he writes 20 pages of incredible stories with interesting, plausible characters. Then, he writes 4 more pages of mutant trannies shitting in the Pope's ear and he crams these pages back into the original 20. He obviously thinks that he is too good for the comic book industry and therefore he is terrified that people might think that he cares about his job, so he has to shit up a bunch of pages every single issue just so that if his friends read one of his books he can point to the shit parts and pretend that he's only having a laugh at DC's expense. Screw him. As soon as he dies the first thing we'll do is remove his 15% shit contributions from every comic and put his name down in history as a guy that LOOOOVED comic books and was SOOOOO PROUD to write them. Also he loved showtunes and dressed like a clown. Anyway, Hitman is written by Garth Ennis and is 85% excellent. It's about a hitman named Tommy Monaghan living in Gotham who only wants to hang out with his pals in a sleazy neighborhood bar. As part of a previous DC story arc Tommy got x-ray vision and telepathy, although using either power gives him a splitting migraine. These limited powers are still enough of an edge to allow Tommy to take contracts on superbeings, aliens, demons, etc. The best part of the comic is the dialogue. Tommy and his friends act like actual friends, and when they are just hanging out playing cards or having some beers they are constantly screwing with each other and it really works well. Tommy is a genuinely funny character, which is rare in comics. He mostly just uses his powers to hit on chicks or to look at Catwoman naked. There's also some action and stuff but that's usually where Garth Ennis gets his gay on - Tommy fights zombie trouts! Tommy fights a mobster that can't stop pooping and someone falls down and lands in the poop and the poop splatters into someone's elses mouth and they eat the poop! Tommy teams up with a guy that welds dogs to people! IS THIS ZANYTOWN OR WHAT? Yaaaaawn. The Boys - This is another comic written by Garth Ennis, but here's the good news! After Ennis completely shat up the first four issues, his label assigned him to an editor that reigned him in. As a result issues 1-4 are ass and issues 5 and above are excellent. I say 'his label' because this comic is produced by some independant whozit that nobody never heard of nor cares about. The Boys are a group of operatives that use dirty tricks to keep the superhero community in line. In this universe, superheroes act like a rich Hollywood megastars in that they are selfish assholes that just run around drinking and whoring and snorting cocaine and getting into fights over bullshit and breaking a bunch of shit with their superpowers on accident. They have little to no training which means that when they go to rescue someone they are likely to end up killing as many people as they save. The public loves the heroes because the comic book industry whitewashes the heroes' drunken rampages by pretending that they were actually fighting an alien invasion or maybe they were mind-controlled and their powers went bezerk or something. Sometimes, however, the heroes will screw up big time and that's when The Boys come in to set things straight. The Boys are no match physically against a superheroes so they rely much more on blackmail, divide-and-conquer tactics, and guerilla warfare. It's pretty dark but also pretty fun to read, ESPECIALLY after the editor cut out all the baloney. There's also some genuinely funny jokes and situations in this comic, which is amazing considering how terrible comic book "jokes" usually are. Side note: In the comic, the main character is Billy Butcher. He's always talking about how much he hates superheroes for being arrogant assholes that use their powers to shove around normal innocent human beings. In fact, one of the heroes even raped Billy's wife! So, we're on Billy's side of course. However, even in the first goddamn issue Ennis writes Billy Butcher as an arrogant asshole that uses his powers to shove around normal innocent human beings, and a running sub-plot is that Billy is fucking another guy's wife. I don't think Ennis is saying anything deep about the nature of power corrupting or 'we have met the enemy and he is us' or anything. He just thinks we'll root for Billy Butcher because that's the main character. Gotham Central - This is a police procedural showing the Gotham homicide division. It's really great because these are normal cops are trying to solve crimes in a hopeless city where The Joker and Scarecrow and company run wild in addition to the normal assortment of murderers and crooks. The cops mostly resent Batman because he makes them all look like chumps and because he attracts all the crazy villains to their town. It feels like Homicide or The Wire except replace Stringer Bell with Two-Face and Kima Greggs with Renee Montoya. The writers are actual writers (not just comic book writers) so they actually write well. The best story arc is the one with the sniper. Bullseye limited series - This one is not good. Bullseye is Hannibal Lecter taunting Clarice Starling I mean S.H.I.E.L.D agents cleverly from inside a prison cell. What they forget, though, is that the interesting thing about Bullseye is not his CLEVERNESS. It is his MURDERING. Bullseye is actually the opposite of clever; his M.O. is to take whatever object is nearest and use it to murder whichever person is nearest. That's it. If he's near a horseshoe he'll murder you with a horseshoe. If he's eating a popsicle he will murder you with a popsicle. If you make eye contact with him, he will murder you with either your eye or your contacts. If the writer was dead set on ignoring the most interesting part about Bullseye in favor of something less interesting then what he should have done is write four issues about how Bullseye can quack and it really sounds like a real duck. It's insane this guy's quack. Fables - There's no reason for any man, woman, or child not to read Fables. It is the single best story written in any medium in the past ten years and is completely accessible and enjoyable by every person. If we lived in a just universe it would have twice the fanbase of the Harry Potter books. You will like it, your grandfather and nieces will like it, anyone will like it. The story is that fairy-tale characters are living in a secret neighborhood refugee camp in our modern-day New York City. The characters have adopted human jobs in order to blend in, although they also have a lot of magic spells and such to keep humans from seeing them. They are in refuge from The Adversary - a combination of Napolean, Alexander the Great, and Ghengis Khan. The Adversary's armies are marching through storybook realms from Kipling to Baum to Aesop conquering and enslaving those populations and preparing to invade our reality next. The fables hiding in here are our only real defense and the tricks and plots they use to fight overwhelming odds are really exciting. There are dozens of Fables and every one has a unique voice and character and is interesting and three-dimensional. It works as a war story, a love story, a bedtime story, and a horror story. The Walking Dead - It's a zombie story and for the first 15 issues the survivors were on the run from farmhouse to farmhouse looking for shelter. It is awesome. Nobody is safe and there are a lot of deaths. Then, in the next 10 issues they find an abandoned prison and secure it (clear out the corpses and garbage, mend the fences, get plenty of rest). They have strong fences to keep zombies out, arable ground to grow vegetables in, a well-stocked infirmary, plenty of water, a generator, weapons, armor, and ammo. Long spoiler here: Then, for the next 25 issues the survivors take turns making incredibly stupid, reckless decisions and then having those decisions bite them on the ass while you scream "STOP. THINK. YOU ASSHOLES." into the book hoping they'll hear you. "Ok, we're safe. Now, let's start hiking to God knows where even though it's already starting to get dark and we're surrounded by zombies who will eat us! Oh no, they're eating us!" "Ok, we're safe. Now, let's leave our sworn enemy alive and thirsty for revenge. Also give him plenty of time and opportunity to murder most of us! Oh no, he's murdering most of us!" "Ok, we're safe. Now, let's leave our goddamned fence open overnight even though that will allow all the zombies to walk inside to eat us! Oh no, they're walking inside and eating us!" "Ok, we're safe. Now, let's have a few of us go for a walk around outside without telling anyone even though that means zombies will eat them! Oh no, the zombies are eating them!" "Ok, we're safe. Now, let's bring one of the zombies inside the gate as a pet even though we all know it will immediately eat us! Oh no, it is eating us!" "Ok, we're safe. Now, let's start hiking around AGAIN even though it's already starting to get dark AGAIN and now were surrounded by zombies PLUS armed soldiers loyal to our sworn enemy! Oh no, of course we're fucked because we make terrible decisions!" repeat, repeat, repeat... I think what happened to this story is the writer got the characters to the prison and that was a perfectly safe and reasonable place for them to end up and the series should have ended there (the end). However, the writer decided late in the game that he didn't want to end it at twenty-five issues when he may as well get paid for another fifty issues. So, he had to figure out a way to continue the zombie story past the point when all the humans are perfectly safe from zombies by simply forcing every survivor to act like a complete noob asshole for another 15 issues and completely disregard everything they had ever learned about zombie safety until finally they had made enough terrible terrible retarded out-of-character decisions that they were forced to head out on the road again since the prison was now completely ruined directly due to their stupid decisions that even Amelia Bedelia would object to. It's worth reading up to issue 25 and then skip to issue 54 where it looks like things might get good again. The problem is that you grow to like the characters for the first 25 issues, so it's kind of infuriating to see them act like such assholes for the next 25. Now it seems that they are acting normal and smart once more but I don't really care now because the writer will just turn them retarded again at the drop of a hat when he paints himself into the next corner. :end spoiler The Invisibles - Fucking fantastic! A gang of low-level guerilla anarchist mages attempt to overthrow Big Brother/Black Magic/Royalty/Megacorporation/Shadow Government ruling class. It's an equal mixture of Gaiman-style British magick fantasy and Gibson-style futurism nanotech lightspeed quantum physics. It's just fucking great. Every issue introduces three or four batshit crazy new theories from the fringes of science and superstition and weaves them together until you can't tell which is weirdest. I also like this (and Fables for the same reason), which is they both set up these completely overwhelmingly powerful enemies that make you think "this is impossible, the good guys are fucked unless the writer cops out" but then when the good guys triumph it is due to their own cleverness and scheming and you think "Oh, well actually that makes perfect sense and kicks a lot of ass!" The good guys win through superior planning, not luck or fate or some other crazy deus ex machina. The next things I'm reading are Queen and Country (straightforward British spy story ala LeCarre and actually is written by Greg Rucka) which is great even if the art is a little cartoonish, and Marvel's Dark Reign crossover event. In conclusion: Kingpin is good without reservation. Hitman is pretty good but you have to look past a lot of crap in order to see it. The Boys is crap for four issues and then gets pretty excellent. Fables is completely awesome. Gotham Central is really terrific. Bullseye miniseries is bad. Walking Dead is somewhat tolerable. Invisibles is completely awesome. |
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