utilitymonstergirl | Entries tagged with comics

At a recent white elephant gift exchange, I got eight comic books that my colleague thought looked interesting but didn’t like enough to keep following their respective series. After reading them all I agree with his assessment, but they have a neat range of both triumphs and failures, so let’s dig in:

Future State: Catwoman #1 (Ram V and Otto Schmidt et al., DC)

So we’re in “Alleytown, Gotham, Several Years From Now” with some authoritarian faction herding people onto trains, one guy speaks up and gets brutalized, a bunch of the others have a slogan and a salute gesture but are still loaded onto the train. (It’s very weird to have a comic that’s fine with depicting fascism but won’t let the writer say “fuck.”)

We then cut to Catwoman and co. plotting out a train breach, and shoutout to this Cheshire Cat character with a fun goofy mask, I hope they get more of a spotlight in future issues. Catwoman breaches the train with the help of accomplices on the inside, and then frees a guy named Onomatopoeia who narrates all his own sound effects, which rules - you can tell they had a lot of fun delving the vaults of weird Batman side characters.

Throughout the issue there’s been some chatter about Batman being allegedly dead, and one of the guards breaks off to go inspect their highest-security prisoner, so of course she’s Talia Al Ghul and the prisoner is Bruce Wayne. The comic has a nice moody deep-blue-and-red palette, though the actual story was pretty bland - given that this was starting off a weird future timeline, I was expecting at least one jarring shakeup, but the plan worked fine and the status quo is on its way back. Oh well.

Sudden Death #1 (Alexander Banks-Johnson and Robert Ahmad et al., Scout Comics)

We’ve got some cool stylized, monochrome art on a story I don’t really get. We’ve got a dismal slice-of-life for the first two-thirds of the story, about a depressed suicidal man trying to reform himself enough to regain visitation rights for his daughter. Then he gets hit by a truck, nearly dies, but makes a full recovery in five hours, drawing crowds cheering him on as an immortal superhuman. Then we cut to a woman coming home from work whose husband explodes in his chair, she sees a news report about the immortal man, To Be Continued.

While I get that the intrusion of the supernatural needs a status quo to disrupt, I don’t think the two halves of this were integrated very well, but I hold out hope that future issues will delve into how much powers and attention can fuck someone up and why the hell that guy exploded. A promising, if rocky, start to a series.

Fall of X: Astonishing Iceman #1 (Steve Orlando and Vincenzo Carratù et al., Marvel)

A helpful blurb on the copyright-info page brings you up to speed: there was some event called the Hellfire Gala attacked by some anti-mutant group called Orchis, and now all mutants are either in hiding or presumed dead. (I get the sense that this is a fairly normal X-Men plotline, but it’s made much funnier by having a villain faction whose name means “testicles.”)

We open with an Orchis (heh) nanomachine attack on the Castro District, because Mr. Orlando knows that subtext is for cowards. We focus on a guy who used to take a drug that mimics mutant powers but still gets targeted by the X-gene-seeking drones, which is honestly a pretty neat angle of even temporary, commercialized mutations drawing the wrath of Orchis (heh).

Iceman shows up, stops the drones, kisses the guy (though since he doesn’t even get a name, I have no idea if Iceman has any history with him) and disappears. Cut to Orchis (heh) in their space-station base, with a bit of office-politics banter and Demanding Results.

Iceman returns to his Antarctic ice fortress, expositing to his ice-minion about how he nearly died at the Gala but was painstakingly reassembled by his mutant boyfriend Romeo. We get a cute scene of him being concerned for Iceman, and end with Orchis (heh) planning another trap. (With one page of just a plaintext email, formatted like the copyright page was? Damnedest thing.)

I like the range of ice-blues and Orchis (heh) reds, even if the art style doesn’t blow me away. It’s a good setup with some quality gay dysfunction, though I can’t say I’m craving to see where this goes.

Children of the Comet #1 (Damian Connelly and Gabriel Kikot et al., Sumerian Comics)
My copy apparently has ‘Cover A,’ and I’m not convinced it’s a good idea to start out an indie series with the expense and identity-dilution of multiple covers. Cover A is perfectly fine, anyway - we’ve got dark grayscale characters in profile against a red thunderstorm sky with a cool descending-slope composition. We open with an alien-headed guy at a typewriter, and two God-damned pages of plaintext exposition. Mr. Connelly. Please. I liked Watchmen too, but that prose was much smoother, more plausible as in-universe media, and came after the compelling story hooks. Come on now.

TL;DR: it’s 2025. Halley’s Comet grants a few people superpowers (with drawbacks) whenever it passes Earth. The most infamous of them was Armando Kinkaid, who could absorb the souls of other Children of the Comet. The narrator tried sheltering two of them, but Kinkaid still devoured one of them and the other one defeated Kinkaid at a great price. Direct quote: “a new comet society (an evil one)”. The narrator is a Professor X-type mentor and quasi-sellout. etc. etc. etc.

I get the sense that the author has been building up this world for A While, is uncertain how long he’ll have this series, and blew his entire load right off the bat. Tragically, this makes me much less invested when I already know so many plot beats and have this little faith in his storytelling skill. The art has a similar problem of theoretically-cool ideas with bad execution. Kikot is clearly fond of Mike Mignola, and the character designs are good in isolation, but my eye keeps sliding off the dark, muddy compositions. I want to like this book, and it has some real potential, but as-is it’s just deeply underwhelming.

Fall of X: Jean Grey #1 (Simonson and Chang et al., Marvel)
This is in the same continuity as Astonishing Iceman, but there’s hardly any trace of Orchis (heh). I like this change of focus - it gives more space to the mutants’ own strife and other political threats, which is fitting for the X-Men’s messy dynamics. The recap blurb tells me to read X-Men: Hellfire Gala #1 before this issue, which I resent - this is the first of its series, you already have a recap blurb, I have every reason to expect a reasonably self-contained storyline.

The comic itself is some neat psychodrama with Jean using her powers in dubiously-ethical ways to ostensibly help mutantkind. I like the grappling with the moral horror of nonconsensual psychic power usage, especially how it intersects with debates of appeasement versus rebellion. The art is still firmly Marvel House Style, but with a nice red- and metallic-leaning palette that makes it feel distinct from Iceman. I like the thorny infighting on display, even if I don’t know the full context and haven’t been hooked.

Drips (Chad Taylor et al., Uni5i Comics)

This is the most indie of the bunch by a long shot. It’s 12 pages in all, including outer and inner covers, with art on par with semi-amateur webcomics. Still, there’s an admirable set of paneling choices and action shots that make me excited to see what this artist can do with a couple years more practice. It’s not a bad premise, either, but it just isn’t communicated that well either. Oh well.

eJunky (Nicholas Tana and Kyle Faehnrich et al., Scout Comics)

Not groundbreaking, but a fun cyberpunk romp about recording and selling experiences and the risks of willfully entering Plato’s Cave. I like the art style, but the compositions can be a bit too dark and over-detailed to read clearly. The philosophizing is on the level of high-school rambling, but the art and story were both just compelling enough to keep me invested. Good use of sudden palette shifts, too.

Fall of X: Uncanny Avengers #1 (Gerry Duggan and Javier Garròn et al., Marvel)

Jesus Christ. So, the Big Two’s main advantage over indies (beyond, like, the buckets of Warner Bros/Disney money) is having enough cultural reach that pretty much everyone already knows the gist of Batman and Superman and Spider-Man, letting authors shortcut exposition or mess with expectations. This comic squanders that. Issue 1 of a series and we’re already waist-deep in lore, politicking, and intrigue that I find exhausting to even contemplate. The recap blurb doesn’t assign homework, because the comic itself does in a footnote just six pages in. Deadpool is here, making some limp gestures toward comic relief. There’s a guy who may or may not be Cyclops. Though there are some neat panel layouts, the palette is all over the place. For anyone who thinks of cape comics as incomprehensibly inbred, this won’t change your mind.

When I went to see my family for Thanksgiving I was reunited with my omnibus copy of Jeff Smith's masterpiece Bone. I'd read it all previously, but it was great to return to it with much more experience in art and life, and I devoured it all over again during my two-day trip. In no particular order, here are some comments and observations:

-I love the efficiency of storytelling: the first page lays out the three Bones’ personalities and predicament, and by the end of book 1 we’ve seen Kingdok, the Hooded One, and Thorn’s recurring dreams.

-The publication structure feels a lot like the common format for manga: chapters were published as individual issues, then collected into nine volumes, then bundled into an omnibus. I wonder if that was a deliberate influence or just convergent evolution.

-Jesus Christ, this ran for thirteen years, spanning huge changes in the art and business of comics and publishing writ large. Kudos to Jeff Smith for sticking with it and wrapping it up in a satisfying way.

-Ted the Bug absolutely has the voice of Coach Z.

-The distance models for the characters are thoroughly charming and distinctive. I need to do some composition/rendering studies of these panels, goddamn.

-I like how the genre and style mashups keep stretching further back in time, from the modern civilization of the Bones to the valley's pre-electric pastoralism to Atheia's ancient fantasy. There's a great sense of the world's layers both peeling back and intermingling, before colliding spectacularly. (The return of Smiley's campaign balloon is extremely funny in a way that doesn't undercut the horror, but instead builds up the sense of everything being out of place and wrong.)

-Bone is a fascinating case study in building up a Nonsense Limit - the valley's humans aren't shocked by the existence of the Bones, the Bones aren't shocked by talking animals, and the valley's disbelief in dragons feels like an outlier until we learn that the dragons want to stay hidden. This nicely sets up the reveals of how dragons interact with the world's politics and religion, and along the way we've got things like "snow falls in one thick layer at once" to ease the transition into more structured fantasy.

-Kingdok is so fucking shaped, and I love how it’s never explained what his taxonomic relation is to the other rat creatures.

-I love Roque Ja as an exploration of "what if a key geopolitical actor had the personality of a surly, asocial cat?" Also, I'm not sure if this smug macro mountain lion with visible testicles is a detectable part of why I'm the person I am today, but I can't rule it out, y'know?

-Years ago I was annoyed at how much of the story's middle was taken up by characters getting lost and making bad decisions, but now I understand that it's a war story and that's the point. Once the war breaks out, this has to be a story of communication failures, forced and unforced errors, infighting, power grabs, shaky coalitions, insubordination, and random coincidences for better and for worse. Sure, Rose handily wins Atheia's power struggle when Tarsil acts like a chest-thumping idiot and dies, but Lucius dies too for tackling Briar at exactly the wrong moment. So it goes.

-I would die for Bartleby.

Foreach (also discussed here) has just concluded its second chapter, shaking up its whole narrative structure as we stand on the precipice of much weirder disruptions. I sat down with its chief creator, Lum, to discuss the story's genesis, planning, and future.

( Spoilers for the whole comic through chapter 2, and also Inscryption: )

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Batty's comic Hello from Halo Head does a lot that I love: arguments between different facets of the self, thematic foils falling in love, matter-of-factly mixing cute and gruesome tones, and buffer-overflowing divine grace purely because you can.

It's that last one I want to focus on today, and the story's broader theme of the horror and futility of trying to build utopia. (Bear in mind, I am making no claims about this being a definitive analysis; Batty has written about wanting to keep her work thematically open-ended, which I respect and admire.) However, this essay will spoil the whole story up to now, so I'd recommend getting caught up before proceeding.

( Now, then: )

With my birthday in three weeks, I wanted to compile a list of the media I've found in the past year that's lodged itself in my brain the most - not necessarily the best, or even things I would widely recommend, but whatever's done the most to shape how I create and think about art. (Starred entries are explicit.)

( So, without further ado: )

What Happens Next is an absolutely brilliant comic about web culture, trial by media, cascading abuse and trauma, and the question of whose pain gets avenged at whose expense. A full analysis of its plot and characters will likely have to wait until it concludes (and would require massive spoilers), so in the meantime I want to talk about the aesthetics invoked by the greatest prestige drama that HBO will never air.

The story spans roughly eight years so far, from the initial murders to the "present day" - exact dates are never given (as far as I can tell) but it is clearly from the early to the late 2010s. Through fashion, screenshots, and cultural reference points, the comic radiates the awkward queer teenager nerd culture of the era.

From my observations, the widely-accepted Nostalgia Threshold of web culture is currently around the mid-to-late 2000s: scenecore, Windows XP, Newgrounds games and animations, Gaia Online. The past decade-and-change is still undergoing the digestion necessary to establish a canon - letting the embarrassing bits fade from memory, playing up the best parts, slipping in some anachronisms. (Within places like Tumblr there are cheeky references to Dashcon and Superwholock and the Onceler fandom, but these are more like psychic-damage-inducing in-jokes than burnished nostalgia.) What Happens Next is a piece of pre-emptive anti-nostalgia; it expects a lot of familiarity with the time and culture, and if you have it, you'll feel fondness towards some details and get gut-punched by others.

Even without firm dates, What Happens Next still has anachronisms. One of Griffin's victims was a big fan of Undertale, which came out in 2015, and the comic's present day clearly isn't 2023. (There's no mention of COVID anywhere, which the story would definitely make use of, and the comic itself only began in 2021.) My read of this is that it's meant to add a sense of unease to a story with such rigorous attention to detail, sliding in untruths that feel right alongside accurate details that feel wrong. The era - including the characters' pasts - has started to become a set of lies agreed upon. Nuance and uncomfortable truths get washed away, speculation turns to fact, and history begins to weigh heavily on these people only in their 20s.

The comic will only get more valuable as that process happens in reality. History will bury and exalt what it will, shaving off any inconvenient details, making these unsparing stories vital for understanding a time before that process finished. What Happens Next provides a warts-and-all look of the era when it became impossible to deny that the internet was walled off from "real life," with spot-on recreations of its worst and most dated details. It doesn't let you draw easy conclusions, either - just like its characters, it's awkwardly uncertain, easy to mock, but more familiar than you may want to admit.