Into the Long Box
What a good week.
- Love and Rockets #20
- Saying bad things about Love and Rockets is kind of hard to do. The art’s beautiful and the characters are all familiar and well written. It’s strange to be writing that nothing happening is the biggest down side of this thing, after just finishing saying how watching nothing happen in Captain America is a good time. I really should go to the graphic novels.
- Grendel: Behold The Devil #0
- Another 80’s weakness of mine is Matt Wagner’s Grendel. This is a preview for a series due out in November featuring the Hunter Rose Grendel – that is the original Grendel – perhaps revealed through the research of the Christine Spar Grendel. The framer here is as nice an intro to Hunter as one could expect. I even jumped and I’m a veteran Grendel reader. Nice lead in. I’ll look for the series.
- Black Summer #1
- Warren Ellis’s new superhero project for Avatar gets off to a cracking start. The preliminaries set the stage nicely for this issue’s confrontation between Tom Noir and the forces stirred up bu John Horus’s assassination of the President. It’s a fast-paced episode where we hit the ground running with Tom. There’s also just the right amount of backfill to tease the Seven Guns’ history. This is a rarity:a first issue that one would have to buy the next issue. I’m committed already, but I think readers who pick this up will have a hard time putting it down.
- Doktor Sleepless
- Warren Ellis is touting this as his next effort in the vein of Transmetropolitan, and I’m interested in that. There’s a lot in here that people who read his blog (guilty as charged) have heard snippets of and his vision for the title is broad and exciting. He’s aggressively tying the print material to an evolving wiki and other web resources and generally trying to create an example of a new media. I’ll be sticking around for it, but I’m a little concerned that the first issue wasn’t terribly effective as a narrative. It’s clear that our man Sleepless is up to something, but it’s very unclear what he’s up to or why I care. OK, I care because it’s Warren Ellis writing as a futurist, but why someone else cares is open to question. I’ll be around to find out, though.
- Sig file fodder: “Electricity can only be replenished by whisky. This is actual physics. Do not argue with me. I am a Doktor.”
And I haven’t even gotten to Crecy yet.