November 9, 2005

june cannery

Holy cow, NaSoAlMo is getting written up!

I'm midway through reading Ed Brubaker's run on Catwoman right now, and mostly enjoying it immensely. Disliked the first half of Relentless: Cameron Stewart trying and failing to imitate Darwyn Cooke, plus one of those gruesome torture-and-murder/everyone-goes-through-the-wringer plots that trigger my Why Can't Comics Be Fun Dammit? reflexes. But I loved the second half, drawn by the previously-unknown-to-me Javier Pulido in a style that takes Cooke's abstractions as a starting point and then goes even further with them, almost into Alex Toth territory. The story's actually about the psychological fallout of the first half: everybody who got put through the wringer is still terribly messed up by it, and making things worse for each other. Also love the way Brubaker writes Holly, an ex-junkie who still sees the world in "junkie-vision" and wonders if it'll ever go away--one of the few things in Brubaker's superhero comics that reminds me of his old Lowlife comics. And the explanation (at the end of Crooked Little Town) of why Holly, having been killed off in some other comic years ago, is now alive and well in Catwoman is beautiful: a little Jaime Hernandez homage (by Eric Shanower) to the effect of "we didn't know; oh well."

Also on the Why Can't Comics Be Fun Dammit? front: it looks like Infinite Crisis is meant to be a metacomic after all--the last few pages of #2 are an all-but-explicit lecture on The Last 20 Years of Mainstream Comics: What Went Wrong? If the DCU is indeed going to return to Silver Age values, I will not complain, but I'm not sure that Johnny Thunder's gonna fit back in that pen, if you know what I mean.

Karaoke tips: "Go Wild in the Country" is not a song that anybody but Annabella Lwin should ever attempt. "Ashes To Ashes" is also problematic (starts in high falsetto, meanders all over the registers, sputters out). "Forgot About Dre," though: now, that's a crowdpleaser. If only I'd been the one to try it.

Posted by Douglas at November 9, 2005 10:31 PM | TrackBack
Comments

one of those gruesome torture-and-murder/everyone-goes-through-the-wringer plots that trigger my Why Can't Comics Be Fun Dammit? reflexes

I thought this was one of the rare occasions when then writer actually pulls off the whole "grim 'n gritty" thing, without that campy portentousness that seems to effect most comic writers.

Posted by: Paul_I on November 13, 2005 10:34 AM
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