Doctor Who Comics #1

Well that was disappointing. I have to give the people over at IDW credit, it is very difficult to produce something with the Doctor Who logo on it that I don't enjoy. I'd probably have liked The Death of Superman if there was a Dalek cameo in it. But this was just awful.

Perhaps if they had used more than 1-2 panels per page, they'd have had room to tell an actual story.

This was a 30 some page comic without ads, so there was no excuse for telling so little story as they did. Doctor Who magazine gets 7 pages and they pack so much awesome into it that it leaks out the panels. This would have made a passable fan-fiction.

I really gave these idiots the benefit of the doubt too.

Review: Thunderbolts: International Incident.

Once again Marvel has decided that quantity trumps quality and thus has subjected us to another Thunderbolts one-shot written by an unoriginal hack.

The writer is Christos N Gage, which I feel is particularly appropriate because his ability to write the Thunderbolts is roughly in proportion to the number of people who bought an N Gage when it came out. This is the guy who decided that the 3 Issue X-Men tie-in to World War Hulk should be a three issue fight between the Hulk and the X-Men. Way to push the boundaries of the genre there buddy.

What is it with sub-par Thunderbolts writers and their inability to write Venom? Well Mr. N Gage takes it to the next level by being completely unable to write for Norman Osborn either. By now I'm used to Venom spouting clunky exposition and cracking wise in non-Ellis Thunderbolts, but I was compeltely unprepared for Norman Osborn being boring. If you can't think of anything interesting for the Green Goblin to do while in command of a group of government sponsored supervillains then maybe you should return to writing movies about teenaged cavemen.

I've been a fan of the Thunderbolts since before they were good, and let me tell you: the only reason the book is good now is because Warren Ellis is writing it. They might as well call it Warren Ellis featuring the Thunderbolts. Getting a Nokia video-game phone to write a lame one-shot tie-in to the Secret Wars is only going to dilute the brand, scare people off. One-shots are attractive prospects to people who want to try out a new series, so staffing them with Law and Order rejects probably isn't the best business model.

The story is told in the most straight-forward, uninteresting way possible. You would get roughly the same experience reading a Wikipedia summary, except Venom would probably seem a tad more in-character since you wouldn't be reading his dialogue. The book falls somewhere between painfully unreadable and sub-mediocrity. The only way any good could come from it would be if as a result of this comic the Mexican Jesus Handheld Videogame was never given another writing assignment as long as he lives. It also wouldn't hurt to nuke everything he's ever written from orbit. Just to be sure.

Late To The Party: Heroes Online Comics

I was waiting for a new issue to come out before I reviewed these but I have no idea if they've stopped until the new season, so I'll do it now.

If you watch Heroes and don't read these comics, you are missing out. These are professional grade comics being passed out free online. Better, actually. You'd be hard pressed to find a combination of writing and art this good in any currently published book that doesn't say "Vertigo" in the upper left corner. Not only that, but the writers clearly have a good understanding of the comic medium. There are a lot of good writers in comics who just write great stories but who have no idea how to tell those stories with pictures. That is not a problem here.

When I first checked these out, I thought they were going to be little insignificant character blurbs, intersting but largely irrelevant to the real story. I was completely wrong. Remember Wireless, the girl who can talk to computers? She's been in one episode of the show, but in the comics she's already been into outer space. I don't want to ruin anything but suffice it to say she has a number of crazy adventures, some of which will have to have an impact on the TV show.

But it's not just Bit-Part Heroes Excellent Adventures, there is also some very good character development, especially regarding the history of the characters prior to the show. If you read only one of the stories on the site, make it the one about when the Haitian first got his powers (called It Takes A Village). No matter which character is your favorite, you'll be able to find some new insights on them in these comics.

The comics tend to be about 7 pages long each, with larger stories told throughout multiple "issues". I'd highly reccomend reading them using the "printer friendly" version, as their online reader was designed by chimps, for chimps and turned me off of the entire experience the first time I tried to read them. Also in the printer friendly versions, the Nissan ads are much larger than the comic itself in many of the first ones, so you'll have to do some resizing. The comics are free (thanks, I'm sure, to Nissan, whose product placements, you will soon find, are not limited to television) so a little extra effort shouldn't be a problem unless you're an entitled beardo, but if that's the case why are you reading this blog instead of writing angry e-mails to JMS? (If you're an entitled beardo, you know to whom I'm referring)

Normally I would go into more depth, but honestly they're online for free. If you want to know what they're like, read them.

Marvel Illustrated - The Illiad

Click to read the word boxes

I had heard about but hadn't read anything from this series, but I read the first issue of The Illiad today and it was very good. It's a fairly close adaptation of the poem, with beautiful art and mostly authentic sounding dialogue (some of it gets a bit thou and didst during one speech). I really dig classical mythology and this is exactly the sort of comic I want to read. Bravo to Marvel for getting over their superhero fetish in a very limited and non-commital (limited series) way.

My only complaint is a petty and personal one. They skip over the bit about the gods having a party and the golden apple and the whole reason Aphrodite gives Helen to Paris, which is my favorite. It's a stupid nitpick, it's mostly due to the fact that I'm a Discordian and wanted to see Eris. I can't really see why they skipped it, they sure weren't shy about using the Gods after that. But really, who gives a shit?

Anyway if this single issue is any indication, the Marvel Illustrated line is looking pretty good.

Buffy comics should only ever be written by Joss Whedon

I've always hated the Buffy and Angel comics (except Fray which, shock horror, was written by Mr. Whedon anyway) due mostly to the fact that they were terribly written. None of the writers seemed to be able to capture all the elements of the show, although admittably some of them did a decent job with the ones they did grasp. It also didn't help that the art was garbage. It had the kind of ackward anatomy that would make Rob Liefeld blush. I seem to be overusing the word ackward to describe the art of the old Buffyverse comics, but that's only because it's the most appropriate one to describe it. Adding insult to injury, none of the characters looked anything like the actors who play them. Normally this doesn't bother me, but the art wasn't stylized enough to justify it. The art style of the early comics also looked like the inker was LITERALLY just tracing.

However, recently I've been reading both a Buffy series and an Angel one. That's because these are the comics Buffy fans have been waiting for since the shows ended. For some reason, the dark gods of comics have decided to bless us with a Joss Whedon written comic-book new season for both of the shows. And they're both excellent, the spirit of the shows has finally been captured in comic form.

Buffy: Season 8
Not every issue of this is written by Joss Whedon, but then again not every episode of the show was written by him either. He's running it, they keep referring to him as the "executive producer" because he plays a role more commonly found in television than comics. But it's working for them.

The last thing you'll notice about the book, since it takes many issues to become obvious, is that Joss Whedon once again uses his mastery of plot arc to his advantage. They way this book tells self-contained stories which bleed together into a larger overarching narrative should be used as an example for all serialized genre comics.

The first thing you'll notice is: holy crap, the characters actually look like the characters. Check this out:


I spent a long time looking for a picture of Willow from "Once More With Feeling" where that dress thing is from for comparison, but I gave up. I'm assuming if you're reading this blog you know who Alyson Hannigan is, and that the above picture looks like her.

The comic skips months occasionally, but it schedules them ahead of time so when they say the book is going to come out, it's going to come out. And it'll have had the necessary time spent on it to be top-shelf.

If you liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer and can even tolerate the comic-book medium, this is the book for you.

Angel: After The Fall
Far more than Buffy, Angel had some 'splainin' to do if the story was expected to carry on past the last episodes, in which all the main characters that didn't die rushed into a suicidal battle against an army of demons and one dragon. Without ruining the experience for you, I can safely say that Angel: After The Fall has an excellent 'splaination. The way they brought back Wesley was especially well handled, but three issues in the whole core cast is back, although many of them in significantly altered forms.

This book is also not written entirely by Joss Whedon, although this time he has a collaborator I've never heard of instead of delegating some of the stories like he did with Buffy Season 8. Apparently said collaborator wrote some otehr Buffyverse comics, which is probably why I've never heard of him. I'd look his name up, it would literally take less time than I'm taking to type this aside, but I know you don't care. As far as anyone reading this book is concerned, he's "the guy who isn't Joss Whedon".

Without ruining the plot too much, I can tell you that the story takes place in a post-modern post-apocalypse: Hell on Earth, in LA. It hasn't gotten as far as the Buffy comics yet (3 issues so far to Buffy's 8) but the story thus far has been thoroughly absorbing. I think I can accurately convey the feel of the book with one panel. Watch me go:

You're going to have to click it. Lazy.

As you can see, the art is also very good. There are some drawings of the cityscape of a demonic apocalypse... wait why am I trying to describe this?

This One Too

Yeah. The art is a real high point of this book, and that's saying a lot considering how good the writing is.

Interestingly enough, despite the similarity of the projects, they're both being published by different companies (Buffy by Darkhorse and Angel by IDW Publishing). I'd reccomend either of them, not just to fans of the shows but to any comic fan who enjoys a tightly plotted, well written story. Unless you don't like Thunderbolts, then you'll hate it.

P.S. I spotted a cameo by the Doctor, interestingly enough in the Buffy book, not the one being published by the people who are also doing a Doctor Who comic:

Oh it's him alright.

HOLY CRAP

So I was reading Angel: After The Fall #1, which is a really good comic by-the-way, I usually hate the Buffyverse comics but, surprise surprise, the recent ones that were actually written by Joss Whedon have actually been able to recreate the feel of the show, whereas the old ones were just a bunch of ackwardly forced dialogue with more ackward positioning of characters in the ackward fight scenes that cause the ackward story to drag. Ackwardly.

This isn't about Angel comics. I'll start again.

So I was reading this comic, the exact one doesn't matter, and I was sort of idlying flipping through the ads in the back, and all of the sudden BAM!



Which is a much bigger deal to me than most people because I am a rabid Doctor Who nerd, and I love Tennants incarnation of him. The 7-whatever page comics in Doctor Who magazine are a joy, so I'm sure longer stories will be even more welcome. And as I'm getting all excited, I notice

THAT'S RIGHT NOW! This happened under my nose and I somehow missed it. How did that happen? I've even seen all the episodes of Sarah Jane Adventures. As both a comic-nerd and a Doctor Who nerd I should have been blathering on about this for months before it came out. And here I am, sitting at my computer typing this and I still haven't read it and other people have and it's driving me nerd crazy. So I did what any nerd would do in this situation.

I blogged.

Edit: And the blog just kept on blogging.

So I looked into it and the comic doesn't physically exist yet, so I suppose I can be forgiven for not owning it then. I did manage to scare up a preview:


The other four pages are here. The preview didn't dazzle me, the writing is kind of dry and mediocre, but hardly anything happened yet. This isn't a 7-pager where they have to start in media res. I'm willing to give anything with "Doctor Who" written on it the benefit of any doubt.

Also it looks like they've got a rather broad Doctor Who liscence, since they're also doing Tom Baker era stuff. It looked marginally better. These people also publish Star Trek comics apparently. It's a good thing they somehow got the Angel liscence from Dark Horse because otherwise I'd never have heard of them.

If you don't like Thunderbolts then you're part of the problem

One of the problem with the comic medium is it's overreliance on the superhero genre.

One of the problems with the overreliance on the superhero genre (other than the general stagnation that comes from limited any medium to any single genre) is that superhero comics appeal greatly to morons.

One of the problems with appealing to morons, is that morons buy lots of superhero comics, so superhero comics try to appeal to morons even more, to get a larger chunk of the moron market share.

The result: comics today. Have you ever read Infinite Crisis? I mean really sat down and read that thing? (if you're a Marvel fan, you can replace "Infinite Crisis" with "the recent Spiderman stuff")

This picture was boss before Blogger got ahold of it. Click for proof.

That said, Thunderbolts is everything that's being done right with comics today. It's like a shining paragon of the genre. I could make this entire post about the degree to which Thunderbolts rocks, but I won't. Despite the objective perfection of Thunderbolts, I know a lot of comic-fans dislike the title. These are the enemies. The aforementioned morons.

These gibbering, mouth-breathing simpletons don't like complex motivations for characters, (they consider character development to be the sole pervue of Soap Operas) they don't want surprise or novelty (they feel change is inherently wrong) and they despise morally grey situations ("Heroes should be heroes" they'll tell you). What they want is an exact recreation of a half-remembered issue of Justice League they read when they were 7.

And they have more say in what ends up on the comic shelf than you ever will. But at least we have a good way of identifying them.

You: Hey, I see you're reading The Green Lantern. You into Thunderbolts at all?
Judgeee: No, I think superheroes should be heroes.
You: Oh I get it. You're one of those religious fanatics.

As you can see, you just avoided a potentially trivial conversation with some jerk who thinks his opinion matters, when we all know only my opinion matters.

Tune in next week when I'll tell you what to think about Superman.