WHAT IS IT whats in there like a butterfly tongue dick?
I picked this up too and was shocked by how lazy the last story was. The twist was unexpected but, as you said, still banal somehow. The worst part of it to me was just the continuity seemed impossible to work out between panels. Very poorly structure in composition and ultimately in content too; the humor of it was kind of tough to see through the cramped plot and action. Just a bad inclusion in a pretty bad collection of stories, but an astoundingly bad pick as the concluding and cover piece.
I’ll read the rest out of curiosity, and hope more about the other series like you.
End to end story creation!
Seriously, did he get hacked or what?
just the regular capitalism brainworms
It was kind of cool for the first issue of this reboot to be a story about someone killing another to claim their art, which was also the plot of the first story in Issue #1 of The Vault of Horror.
Boys talk: Season 4 was still watchably ok to me but it was def a little to cartoony and obvious by previous seasons levels. A little wheel spinny and I’m getting tired of how all plot critical supes just also happen to be bulletproof and mildly strong while also including the one gimmick power they might have.
The first issue of the second new EC Comics series, Cruel Universe, starts out very strong I will say. It felt like an actual EC Comics story to me. And, just flipping ahead, the art looks really good here too.
I’ve been drawn back to local comics stores recently. As I was picking up these two new EC Comics issues, I started to consider maybe getting into something else that was new, something that would hopefully compel me to come in weekly or monthly. But looking through the racks… I realized I have a lot of hangups. It’s hard to get into new comics when you are someone who loves genre, doesn’t care about canon, and is absolutely repulsed by anything that stinks of Whedon/Television writing, or that comes across like its being written to get picked up and made into a shitty Netflix movie. I also don’t really care too much about mumbley soft alt-comics these days either, though I can on occasion be persuaded by a personal a recommendation.
Good thing there are so many comics from previous decades still for me to read! Still, I’d like to enjoy a superhero book again. It looks like Marvel is issuing tons of old [Noun] Comics, which could be interesting to pick up. But I don’t wanna be exclusively a reader of comics made in the 50s lol
Yes, Cruel Universe is significantly better than Epitaphs from the Abyss, as I had hoped it would be.
I keep buying comics and then not posting about them. because I don’t read them? hush
I picked up Batman/Superman World’s Finest #25-29 (another Bat-Mite+Mxyzptlk team-up) because Dan Mora posted some of the art & I thought I’d like to see more. great colouring
the rest of it is fine too, writing mostly bathos with a little pathos.
ended kind of in a rush, and with a weird ‘sight’ ‘gag’ that Batman found funny at least
disappointed that the art I saw Dan posting was more of a cameo than a full part of the plot
so be smart and do what I should have done and get a Zatanna trade instead.
wait, the Dini trade costs how much?! actually this was fine
cw: gore mentions in spoiler
so like, i don’t think namae no nai kaibutsu is all that good, but towards the end theres some romantic mutual cannibalism so, you know, pretty worth it. she just scoops up his eyeball with her teeth and then swallows it, that’s so beautiful. he’s screaming in pain but his brain is fucked up from spider hormones or whatever so he’s still having fun.
tbh i thought the girl form of the spider was supposed to be an illusion, and i had fun imagining this guy living with a dog-sized spider that makes him hallucinate a mute girl while she’s vampirizing him every day. too bad, it’s a full transformation.
new tech unlocked: putting a book in with the judo kit so I have something to read that’s not my phone while waiting for the end of the lesson
Sand Land reads just like Toriyama was asked to fill 12 issues with stuff that would sell & be funny for 12-year-olds. “in retrospect, I made the tank too hard to draw”. I appreciated the dumb jokes
especially the bandit gang who wear swimming costumes in the desert and yearn for a body of water deep enough to learn how to swim in
I haven’t bothered continuing with Epitaphs from the Abyss after the lackluster first issue but I read the second issue of Cruel Universe last night and that title continues to be entertaining. The art is good and the little stories are fun.
Going to pick them both up later, Epitaphs just out of curiosity. Even as I read a bunch of original EC, I kind of find the horror books to be the less interesting than the scifi/fantasy books.
For the first time in my life I’m sitting down to read watchmen as moore intended (don’t like coffee or have a fireplace so sorry about that) but I’m unfortunately reading after seeing the snyder movie in my early 20s so it’s not completely novel to me outside of the art on paper. I’m only 3 or 4 books/floppies/chapters in. How much of this is banking on you reading it with in a few years as it was printed? Because of the movie I already know the bones of this tale but reading it in the moment it just kinda feels like a lot of noise flowing through my eyes. It just feels like it expects you to already be intimately familiar with the headlines its trying to reflect and I feel just a little to distant from. I can’t help but feel like I want to read the version where everyone was the charlton characters because then their histories would be a little more built in and I could probably run with the set up as fast as the book is going with stuff.
It’s a little odd going in knowing the plot structure on the first read but I found it surprisingly rewarding on subsequent rereads or just jumping to a random point. It hangs together very well and the panel layout in particular is just pleasant to unpick.
I think Watchmen still proves to be very rich to read closely. Take your time with it, if you’re already familiar with the plot. What Synder’s film does the worst (well, among a huge collection of things done worse) is he doesn’t create the space and time for his audience to take in all that he has wonderfully rendered for them to view and pick up on. No one could really criticize him for having made an unfaithful version of Watchmen exactly, because he really should have done even more work to adapt things to film as a medium. But now that you have the book in front of you, I recommend stewing in the details, flipping back to pages you’ve already read (or maybe even pages you haven’t!), and reading the excellent supplemental stuff that is included at the end of the chapters like the in-universe interviews, magazine articles, comics. Watchmen is all about chronology and form. The comics really are the best way to absorb its fictional history and its plot, and to really reflect on and run into the weird experience of time afforded by a serialized, panel-based visual story.