COMICS: Talkin' Trades

I won't be able to make it in to the comic shop today -- mudslides have made getting out of Ojai Valley a nightmare. Monday the road was totally closed; Tuesday it was opened, but they were only letting five cars through at a time with a police escort -- not even the owner at the place I work tried to make it through that mess. Today I thought it would be better, but after it took me about an hour to drive one mile this morning, I turned around, called work and told them I couldn't make it.

So no new comics (assuming the comic shipment wasn't delayed by the mudslides, too -- which it probably was), so I'll write about the trades I picked up last week.

After reading and liking the first ps238 TPB (as I wrote about here), I decided to give Aaron Williams' other series a try -- Nodwick, a comic fantasy centered on four inept Dungeons & Dragons-type adventurers. So I picked up The Nodwick Chronicles, a collection of the first six issues. In some ways, I liked it better: it made me laugh more, for instance; I got more than a few big laughs out of the anachronism-filled hijinks, like when the wizard pulls an ICBM out of a magic chest (it comes with instructions: "One: Push red button. Two: duck and cover. Caution: side effects may include roving bands of bloodthirsty mutants"). In other ways, I didn't like it as much: the characters are underdeveloped, especially the dumb fighter character. And the series relies on gaming and fantasy in-jokes a little too much. Overall, I liked it enough to consider picking up the second volume.

I also got the second trade of Ed Brubaker's Catwoman. Man, this is good stuff. Hard-boiled detective Slam Bradley is such an excellent supporting character; his banter with Catwoman is the best part of the book. (And I learned in the notes to this trade that the character of Slam Bradley pre-dates Batman! He was introduced in Detective Comics #1, 26 issues before the Bat. Wow. Is Brubaker the only writer to have used Bradley since those days?) Brubaker does a great job in combining the superheroic with the street-level dirt and political corruption of Gotham; I'll be picking up his Gotham Central TPB next, which promises more of the same.

Also also, I picked up an old copy of PvP: Striptease, a collection of the early years of the online comic. This is one of my favorite strips, on or offline. Great characters, simple but charming art, great comedy.

COMICS: Wed. 8/4/04

I'm late on this week's comics reviews, but I have a valid excuse: I was absolutely overwhelmed with the sheer volume of new comics I purchased this week. I truly went overboard. I mean, here's the list:

1) Y: The Last Man

Oh, I guess that's it. So really, I have no excuse, and I'm just a lazy bastard.

Here's my review:

I liked it. Naked butts are funny. The end.

Okay, wait, I've got one or two other thoughts. Number one is, of course, what a great ending it was. After 25 issues, it's about damn time we saw what Beth was up to in Australia! Now, I just hope they don't drop her for another 25 issues. I get the feeling the next arc will feature Beth in a big way, though Dorian, for one, does not -- he tells me that solicitation info for the next issues indicates it's more adventures with Yorick, this time in San Francisco. Well, Vaughan can switch back and forth from Yorick to Beth, can't he?

Also, I get the feeling a lot of people were a little unhappy with this two-part story, but I enjoyed it, both for Yorick reaching a big milestone (the last man on Earth finally gets laid! Geez, Abe Vigoda would've gotten lucky before this guy), the shots Vaughan (via Beth #2) took at the Left Behind books in part one, and just the overall feel that this was a breather between bigger stories. It was a fine change of pace -- but I'm ready for something big to happen next.

Other stuff I bought:

Ultimate X-Men: The New Mutants TPB, which I haven't read yet. It's Bendis, I had to get it. It's a sickness.

PvP at large, which I have read, and which had me laughing out loud many times. Kurtz has a great cartooning style (although I noticed in this book that some of his lines look a little rough-edged, possibly due to transferring the strips from computer to print; I don't know for sure if he does all his art directly on the computer, but I kind of assume he does, which unfortunately results in a little pixellation-blur in the printing process), and the jokes are funnier for the characters' facial expressions (sometimes just a raised eyebrow works) and well-developed personalities.

The New Frontier, issues 4 and 5. I'd gotten the first and second issues because of all the wild praise they were getting, and I wasn't blown away. I dropped the book, but then Ian and Corey were raving about it at the store on Wednesday, so I decided to give it another shot -- no copies of #3 were to be found, though. I read #4 last night, and liked it better than the first two, but still, I'm not feeling the overwhelming love for it everyone else is. Maybe when I get all six, I'll appreciate it more. This is a lot of money I'm investing in a hunch (that I will gain appreciation for it); I mean, it's seven damn bucks a pop! I am looking forward to reading #5 tonight, because I know Hal Jordan is finally getting his Green Lantern ring, and I've heard all about the Wonder Woman/Invisible Jet sequence, which sounds really cool.

COMICS: Pretty sneaky, sis

Yesterday, at the comic shop, I bought the new PvP collection:



There was something oddly familiar about the cover. I stared at it for a long while, until it finally hit me:



If I hadn't already been a fan of Scott Kurtz, I would be now. That's just pure genius. And there can't be more than one person out of a hundred who would get that. I'm extremely proud of myself, in a kind of ashamed way.

COMICS: PvP vs. the World Crime League

I love comics. But I love comic strips even more. I'd gladly trade away Spider-Man for my daily fix of Doonesbury. If it came down to Batman or Dilbert, Batman would be out the door so fast his freakin' cowl would spin. If I had to choose between Peanuts and... well, no need to even finish that sentence. I would give up every comic ever for Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

What's got me thinking about this is one man's plan to renovate the comics page: Scott Kurtz's post about comic strip syndication. Kurtz, as you may or may not know, is the creator of the fine and funny online comic strip PvP. And in a few short paragraphs, he's put forth an argument for a comics page business model that's so radical, so revolutionary, so crazy, that it just might destroy the comic strip syndicates, and completely change the world of comic strips.

I'm not going to go into his plan here; if you're interested, he explains his ideas much better than I could. He's got some sound logic and some grand ideas. But he also has some holes in his proposal; primarily, he totally fails to consider that, even if the newspapers want the syndicates to fall, many of the comic strip creators will not. Even with the promise of ownership of their own creations, as well as 100% of the profits from the books and assorted other merchandising the strips may spawn, many creators will still prefer the safety and security of the syndicates to a free market. For one thing, not every strip has a lot of merchandising, nor even the possibility of it; for every Garfield, there are dozens of Mr. Boffos or Drabbles or One Big Happys, for which there's barely a market for the books, let alone the kind of greeting card/birthday hat/plush toy merchandising that would generate enough money to make abandoning the syndicates worthwhile.

I said he fails to consider that fact, but perhaps he has considered it, and discarded it. For one thing, he is presupposing that the comics page is ready to self-destruct on its own, that newspapers are already close to rejecting the syndicates and shutting down their comics pages altogether. And it sounds like his plan is for a younger, newer crowd of strips to take over the comics page, to hell with what came before. And while it may be fine for Get Fuzzy to suddenly be in competition with hundreds of free (or much cheaper) new comic strips, and while it may also be fine for relics like Dennis the Menace, The Family Circus, Marmaduke, and so forth to be permanently retired, what about those established but deserving strips that suddenly find themselves unable to compete in such a market? For Better or For Worse might be a good example here. I think it's still a decent strip, though clearly of another generation. Would it suddenly be lost in the shuffle?

All this is idle speculation, obviously; it may even sound like I'm against Kurtz, but I'm not. The truth is, it's more than likely that Kurtz won't change anything with his plan, and even if he does, it will be in slow and minute increments. But I admire him for proposing such an ambitious plan. And I'm hoping that if he (and hopefully other online cartoonists) and the newspapers successfully take a stand against the stranglehold the syndicates have on the comics page, that one of my fondest dreams may at long last be realized:

Cathy will finally die.