let me guess, this guy’s a robot too
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Just a wizard, I think : D
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My copy of The Tower came in the mail today. I’d been a little disappointed that it wasn’t a hardcover edition, but I wanted a physical copy anyway and it turns out that the cover is actually pretty heavy, like doubled-up card stock. The book is also a nice size, a little larger than letter-size paper. This is a book that Tulpa introduced me to, and it’s a good one.
I ordered Shadow of a Man (from the same series) as well because it was surprisingly cheap. And it’s even in full color. It’s one I haven’t read before, though. I hope it’s good.
Looks like several others are coming later this year.
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somehow I’ve read like 6 comics this month. I don’t have the energy to write about all of them all at once so here’s one: I had an attack of bravery and read Zero Girl by Sam Kieth (The Maxx).
I’ll level with you: we got a sicko here. Amy’s superpower is reality-altering juice that gets excreted from her… feet when she’s … humiliated. yes that’s right toeslayers, we got a few wet pinkies in these pages.
it’s somehow salacious and untitilating at the same time? Amy is 15
but with the fashion sense of a 60s British sex comedy extra and the looks of a wine mom
Kieth’s style is built on exaggerated caricatures but I felt like the reference model for Amy’s face was different for every dramatic close up. those caricatures hit the mark when Tim is being interviewed by the cops
the gag is, that’s just the shapes their heads are. Kieth draws em like that for the rest of the scene, from other angles+perspectives
another frame I enjoyed is this one of leader of the mean girls who bully Amy, after smearing herself with foot fluid and transforming into her Jungian animus (with a square motif to oppose Amy’s circles)
Tim is talking to ‘Uncle Carl’, the world’s worst depiction of a slater (pill bug/wood louse/roly-poly/‘sow bug’?) in a comic book
did I mention that Tim is the guidance consellor at Amy’s school? provides her with a place to stay, a wardrobe of revealing-but-not-smutty outfits, ditches work to help her out? but they are Not Fucking, no siree, everything clean and by the books. thus this Very Important Plot Point in the fourth issue:
it’s bad in a boring and creep way, don’t make any effort to check it out!
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you can really tell when sam kieth became the solo author of the Maxx because that’s when the boring creepfest kicked in.
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I think I’ve said this before but I’m pretty sure the Tower is my fav comic book of all
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Super Doctor K - medical themed fist of the north star knockoff featuring Doctor K, “THIS MAN WITH THE BODY OF A BEAST AND THE MIND OF A GENIUS” according to the second page. is he even an official doctor? it’s uncertain, but most of the stories involve this 9ft tall guy in a leather vest striding into hospitals and announcing “LET ME PERFORM THE SURGERY” and then all the doctors go “o… okay…” and then just stand back and let him go at it. instead of using anasthesia he does acupuncture instead. he is on the lam because the rich want to use his powers for evil, the villainous organization for most of the first stories is “ONE OF JAPAN’S TOP UNIVERSITIES” which is pretty funny, like imagine clint eastwood being chased down by emissaries from Yale, there are like 300 chapters of this somehow but unfortunately i ended up falling off when the villains announced a plan to evilly encourage abortions so they could use the fetus tissue to extend the lives of the rich. where does Super Doctor K stand on abortion? i’ll never know, and maybe it’s for the best. they say to never meet your heroes…
Tokyo What-If Girls / Jellyfish Princess - good romcomics, a thing i enjoyed about them is the sense of the author’s own annoyance at the situationally handwavey attitude often adopted by romance plots, where the outside world just exists to underscore the main character’s feelings and once those feelings are sorted out everything else just falls into place. so like in jellyfish princess a plot about nerd girls trying to save their apartment block via a fashion line has all these digressions trying to square that romance plot with the economics of fashion, cheap outsourced labour, material costs, the japanese economic bubble etc, it’s not full Zola or anything but there’s texture for the main plot to grind against and get diverted by and the swerves into full romance hit harder as result. i haven’t seen people talk about tokyo what-if girls as much but it’s a kind of self-appointed sex and the city-like (!) featuring enjoyably wretched protagonists in enjoyably wretched situations.
Orochi - umezu horror comics with kind of EC ish plots made better by having them framed around this weirdly apathetic, amoral supernatural protagonist girl who just wanders around moving the plot along and acting as chorus to whatever is going down. there are also some good swerves where it felt like the author just wanted to indulge in some subsidiary carnage to the relatively slow burn main plots in ways that feel deliriously offputting next to the classicism of those stories. for example, a story about a woman being slowly pursued by her corpse husband has an aside about a child locked in a basement being eaten alive by wharf roaches and nobody even notices or cares!
Aliens Vs Predator, misc comics - why did i read these? listen… i’m not going to finish that sentence. but i guess there can be a weird repetitive pleasure in watching people take repeated whacks at a heap of familiar iconography and then either giving up and just recreating parts of the movies or occasionally managing to hit some kind of nerve that bounces things off in a new direction. and even the bad comics can act as time capsules for people’s hazy sense of what would be worth doing, for example “aliens vs predator eternal” being an enjoyably rote and preposterous heap of cyberpunk cliches that falls apart immediately after the two title characters actually come into play. also sometimes you get some weird people working on these. i’ll never not think it’s very funny that jim woodring did an aliens comic.
the surprise MVP of the ones i read this time, very surprising in that i feel like i totally bounced off it at least once before, was “Deadliest of the Species” by none other than chris claremont. the wikipedia summary for the book has a quote by him talking about the unexpected level of creative freedom he had for this one and it sure feels like it. i don’t want to hype it up because this is almost certainly not a good comic, and maybe it can only be enjoyed as part of an anthology filled with dour stories about space marines, but it definitely has the flavour of someone’s erotic inner life firing on all cylinders in the unlikely context of an avp licensed comic, some feverish quality, it’s all a stew of mean girls and recurring dreams and brainwashing plots, the main lady is a genetically engineered trophy wife with at least TWO plot-important “previous lives” that i couldn’t keep straight and she’s friends with a girl predator called Big Momma and also enemy-friends with an alien queen who she sometimes seems to think is her mom in dream sequences about pulling her skin off to show an alien body underneath but that part doesn’t come up again and later she gets erotically encased in alien goo and becomes a nude, bald golden woman (because of the goo?) who i think can fly and maybe deflect bullets, and at a different part she drives around in the car from Thema And Louise running over robots on a spaceship and then the whole last issue is some kind of psychic fight with an all powerful AI and also: it’s 12 issues long, like 300+ pages, maybe to let us empathize more with the main character’s perspective of being stuck in a fever dream that never ends. as i say i don’t think this comic is “good” and i skimmed parts of it for my sanity but basically the only thing you can really hope for from an aliens vs predator comic is some unexpected moment of psychic charge while someone’s playing action figures with regurgitated IPs and on that basis i have to claim it as a magnificent though unreadable success. anyway there have been weirder things people wanted to do with these characters.
predator no 
wait, apparently this is a predator story written by andrew vachss?? just when i think i’m out…
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Also read Tokyo Tarareba Girls / what if girls a couple months ago. I quite enjoyed the wretched 30 yr old women but rly didnt like where it ended up, thought that young hot actor model guy kinda ruined the entire thing.
Been meaning to make a megapost in here for about 6 months, ive been reading more comics than i ever have in my life, but idk if i will ever be bothered writing it
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Read some Trigun a bit ago. It was my first manga I ever read, mainly because it seemed weird but generally inoffensive. It’s just as incomprehensible to me now as it was then. Back then I just didn’t know much better and accepted that manga plots would just go around kind of arbitrarily.
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Off the cuff remark: Trigun is a mess carried by fun character designs and action (well, at least the Anime)
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I picked up Gaiman’s The Books of Magic from the library, started reading while waiting for everyone else to check out, then remember “hey I can just take it home and finish it!”
I’m not a big Gaiman fan. but I liked Sandman and I liked this? I liked how he can take the extended DC roster + folklore myths and combine it into something evocative without requiring any context, and believable dialogue for characters.
so why don’t I like Gaiman’s work? the sum of the work is far more than its parts, so looking at the parts shows how flimsy its construction is. the stories are wonderfully told and entertaining, but what they’re telling is pathetically meaningless. less moral content than a soap opera
to wit, The Books of Magic is (very reductive) about a bunch of DC magicians playing the ghost parts of A Christmas Carol for Harry Potter as they show him that magic can be scary
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books of magic (and its ongoing series, and the ongoing series’ books of faerie spinoffs) is one of my favourite big two comics ever. gaiman only wrote the original miniseries though iirc. an entire third of the ongoing has never been reprinted in trade paperback!
that original miniseries was originally pitched as just a “who’s who of magic users in the dc universe”, but was turned into an actual story with tim hunter invented as the reader stand-in being introduced to all this crazy stuff.
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The workers at Seven Seas just unionised
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as a freelancer, so excited for when the benefits of the union trickle down to me
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I’m pretty excited about this, and so far all the fan reception seems positive. I just hope they wrap up the one arc and then basically move to the endgame of it all.
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