Static’s back. Have you heard?

Static is one of those series that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s the hands down best updating of Peter Parker thus far, and since Spider-Man is the best expression of a superhero (it’s not Batman, chuckles, Spider-Man is a genuine everyman fantasy character), that’s saying a lot.

Anyway, I was most interested in Static Shock #1 out of DC’s New 52 books that are launching this week. (DCnU looks and tastes like poop when you type it, so chill with that.) It was equal parts interest and trepidation. I mean, DC has managed to screw up everything else relating to Milestone except the trades of previously printed material, you know? What’s next? Ed Benes on Icon?

As it turns out, my fears were pretty much unfounded. Here’s page two of the issue, the moment I decided I would enjoy reading it:

And man, Static is such a goofball and this is exactly what I was hoping to see. Well, not exactly–that’s definitely hyperbole, but as far as the platonic ideal of a comic featuring Virgil Hawkins goes, I’ve got to tip my hat to John Rozum, Scott McDaniel, Jonathan Glapion, and Guy Major. This was a pretty good stab, and enough to make me commit to buying the issues at $3. It’s well worth your time. You can cop it here.

I wrote about Akira Toriyama drawing fight scenes in Dragon Ball, more specifically DBZ for ComicsAlliance. Dude is super talented and I finally figured out a way to say so without just saying “I like how Vegeta effortlessly murks this guy right here.”

I like how Vegeta effortlessly murks this guy right here.

He’s such a thug. ~swoon~

Buy Dragon Ball Z, or just v22 if you want to see this scene.

I wrote a post about how I don’t really dig on steampunk and you know what happened? I went and read a steampunk comic book that I really dug. What’re the odds, man? Here’s a page from it, though, and I think you’ll see why I dug it:

Art team: pencils by David López, inks by Álvaro López, Nathan Fairbairn on colors, and Jared Fletcher on letters. Words team: G Willow Wilson, who I’ve praised before.

This book really clicked for me. It’s a little Cinderella-y, with a twist I saw coming halfway through the book but was still well-executed. I might want to talk about it in-depth later, I dunno, but I liked this page and the book enough to share it. The Lopezes have come a long way since Catwoman, and I remember liking their stuff back then, too. Fairbairn does wonders for their art. It’s like magic.

I’ve been reading/rereading Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto. Five bucks a volume, man. I didn’t expect to be so weak. I’m ten volumes in now. I got to my favorite bit from the cartoon–the Rock Lee vs Gaara fight? It’s either this or this on Hulu, I dunno. (Hulu is down for me right now.)

I loved the Rock Lee vs Gaara fight because it got so bananas in a way I really, really dug. Fast punches, clever gimmicks–it starts with a punch from the front that almost hits the back of Gaara’s head. It’s awesome fight staging. They blew their animation budget on this episode, because everything after looks like crap crapped out of a crap-filled crap butt.

It looks way better in the comic. Here’s three pages that I liked:

From Volume 10, my dudes.

I love page 3, panels four and five. The dust in the air over Gaara’s head in 3, and then Gaara being almost entirely constructed out of speedlines–including his fist, eyebrows, eyes, and mouth–is fantastic. Good looking comic.

I’m writing these while watching Breaking Bad. I download it, so missing it when it airs isn’t really a huge deal, but it’s marathoning this show is crazy. It’s SO tense, but also very, very funny. Walt is so passive-aggressive. Every once and a while he decides to show everyone who wears the pants and whoops look at that, look who’s pants have pee on them. It’s you, Walt. They’re your pants, and you peed in them, because you suck, son.

Jessie Pinkman is incredible this season. Everything he does, man. A+, give that dude some awards.

I liked this bit from Chew 20, now on sale digitally:

Tony’s sister doesn’t curse, you see. Simple, ain’t it?

But quite clever.

I love this image.

Read Good Comics.

I’m reading 99 Days by Matteo Casali and Kristian Donaldson and it’s sort of driving me crazy. It’s not bad, exactly. The cover’s great, and the art is pretty good. There are just a few minor things that are crawling under my skin and making me put off finishing up the book.

I’m 40 or so pages in, and the word/phrase “knowwhuti’msayin'” keeps popping up and it’s always italicized. Setting aside my feelings on seeing that phrase in print aside–psyche, all of my opinions must be expressed lest they be lost to the ages. “Nahmean” and “namsaying” scan a lot better in written dialogue (and speech, arguably) and they mean/represent just about the exact same thing in terms of cultural/location/demographics. Close enough for gov’t work, at any rate, right?

The italics and compressed nature of the compound word makes it annoying to see in text. It’s like a full stop when reading. It kills the momentum of the dialogue dead, and it’s so generic and… graceless, I guess. The gold standard for natural black dialogue (dialogue in general, really) in comics is easily Garth Ennis, with Azzarello taking the crown for lyrical dialogue. There’s a flow and rhythm to their dialogue that pushes you deeper into the story. You dance from character to character. In 99 Days… you don’t. As soon as you hit this cat saying “Estelle was mah bitch, so what? I loved her, nigga. She was cool with me and I was cool with her, knowwhutI’msayin’?” or whatever, you just stop dead.

It’s boring, it’s graceless, it’s dunn language for dummies. You’re overdoing it, when the post path to take is to give us a little and let us fill in the rest. “Estelle was my bitch, nigga!” still doesn’t scan quite right, it doesn’t feel right, but it feels better than what we got. I dunno, maybe I expect too much, but I don’t think so. If you overdo the vernacular, you make it more likely that it’ll feel less real, and that’s murder on a comic.

So’s this, from a character a bit earlier in the book: “¿Cómo puedes estar parado a este individuo, ese? Qué tonto–”

And I get it, she’s talking about how another hispanic cat can ride around with as stereotyped of a white racist cop as you’ll see (he rants about quotas or affirmative action, butt kissing, blah blah talking points). But the Spanish is wrong, isn’t it? It’s been a few years, and I don’t really speak Mexican Spanish (¡Vamos, Madrileños!), but I’m like 99% sure parado doesn’t work like that. Parado/parar has to do with stopping or being stopped. Google Translate tells me that it comes out as “How can you stand this guy?”–which makes me think that “estar parado” should’ve been rendered as some form of soportar–support/endure. Unless “estar parado” is something specific to Los Angeles Spanish, but I sorta doubt it.

Bam: yanked right out of the story.

More verisimilitude killers: Casali overdos the specificity of the dialogue, rendering each inflection and non-traditional syllable, but underdos it when it comes to talking about the Crips and Bloods. There are several references to “the Crips leader” and “the rival Blood gang” for example, and my thought was… which Crips? Which Bloods? It’s not one giant organization. There’s not just one giant Crips gang with one cat sending down instructions like a CEO. There’s a ton, sorted by neighborhood or group or history or whatever whatever.

Here is where specificity, or going real specific with a fake gang, would’ve been a boon. “Word on the street is that the Eight Deuce Inglewood Crowns are out for blood because some fool from the blah blah blah set did blah blah blah.” Instead, we’ve got… I can’t even think of a good comparison here. “Talk to the European leader before all these Europeans kill all these Africans!” I guess. (This racism is killing me inside.) Anyway: Make up a gang! It worked for The Shield and Grand Theft Auto (and probably a lot of rappers).

99 Days isn’t a bad book, judging by the little I’ve read, but apparently this stuff was bugging me enough to a) put it down for a while and b) write about it on my lunch break.

Art’s real nice, though. Check out the first four rows on Donaldson’s site to see some pretty black and white images. I pulled the one at the top of this post from that page because I liked the faces.

Sometimes I get identified on this site as being a Marvel guy as compared to Esther being all about DC and while I’d like to argue against it, my latest buying habits in the past year don’t back me up. I seem to skew more on the Marvel side with only a handful of DC stuff on my plate. It wasn’t always that way. I seem to remember that in the mid-00’s, I was either pretty even with it or maybe even more on DC’s side. Thinking back, things were actually pretty exciting during the lead-up and follow-up of Infinite Crisis. It was really Countdown to Final Crisis where the company started to slope downwards in my regard.

As of a month ago, the comics I was reading under the DC banner were as follows: Batman and Robin, Batman Inc., Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Booster Gold and Secret Six. And you know what? I didn’t even like Secret Six that much by the time it ended. I liked the promise more than what happened. There’d be a good one-shot story in there every once and a while, then it would go into six issues I didn’t care about. At least it gave us the happy-go-lucky characterization of King Shark. At the same time, I feel guilty reading that when I should have gotten off my ass and started reading some of the series that I kept hearing were good like the latest run of Detective Comics, Batgirl, Action Comics and Doom Patrol.

When I first heard about DC’s reboot/relauch I raised an eyebrow and initially had the same, “Can they do that?! HOW CAN THEY DO THAT?!” reaction as everyone else. I just used my inside voice. Then I looked back and decided that maybe this is for the best. Oh, sure, it can and may be a failure in the long run. That’s their problem and the problem of whichever readers got screwed over by the big change. Me? I was only reading six comics by them. 52 new comics are being thrown against the wall and if even seven are still there when gravity kicks in, who am I to hate? Yes, this could definitely work out for the best.

I think back to when we got One Year Later and how enjoyable it was, despite how a lot of it returned back to the status quo. While it did turn me onto a couple good comics I wouldn’t have otherwise read, it did also allow me to join in and laugh at some of the stupider moments with the masses, like everything in that first Nightwing comic. Hey, remember when Nightwing is fighting this guy and he kicks him and practically shits himself while going, “Y-you’re a *gasp* m-metahuman…” as if he had only heard of such a thing before and never met one? Ah, man, that was the dumbest thing. I think the balls-out drive behind this new initiative can lead to an interesting six months at the very least.

So since I’m genuinely interested in this editorial stunt and I owe my comic guy for always having me at his place for wrestling PPVs and never having me pay for the show or food, I decided that I’d go headfirst into the new 52. I’m reading every single one of those fuckers. Yes, even the Liefeld one. Every week, I’m going to give my thoughts on them and decide whether I’m going to stick or drop it. Since these are all supposed to last six issues at the least, I’m going to try and keep going throughout that time so we can see what I’m still reading by the end of February. Who knows, by then I might just be doing an update about what I thought about that week’s issue of Blue Beetle because it’s the only thing left I care about. Though in the beginning, I’m giving every #1 a fair shake. You have my attention, DC. Wow me.

Read the rest of this entry �

I hate everything tonight for some reason. Maybe it’s because I made the mistake of seeing how many posts I’ve done on this site (1100+) right at the moment that the site was threatening to implode for four hours last night, I dunno. (“I’ve spent HOW much time doing WHAT now?”) Probably. But seriously, right now?

Rather than salt your day with my thoughts on all your favorite comics, though, here are some things that I do like right at this moment:

-I bought Tupac’s All Eyez On Me on vinyl this weekend. I like Makaveli a whole, whole lot, but All Eyez is still no joke. It’s so commercial, but still so personal. It’s a perfect storm on wax.

-And “I Ain’t Mad Atcha” might be his best song:

-I’ve been thinking a lot about Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm” after it popped up on a mixtape I downloaded. It’s such a good song, and the intro is one of my all-time favorites for a song:

-And that remix featuring Kimberly Jones before she burned out:

-Mobb Deep at their best… it’s that nihilism, that bleak outlook on life, that makes Prodigy so compelling. Getting that feeling across to the listener, that’s his strength. From The Infamous… to now, his voice has always sounded a little strained to me, like he’s tired. Not tired like “Just ran up and down some stairs like Young Jeezy does before he raps” (ha haaaaa), but tired like he’s tired of life. It’s been too long and too painful. He’s got that Gil Scott-Heron creak to his voice.

-Quiet Storm: “You try to stop mines from growin’, I’ll make your blood stop flowin'”.

-Sudden flash connection: Mos Def on “Astronomy (8th Light)”:

Black like assassin crosshairs
Blacker than my granddaddy armchair
He never really got no time to chill there
Cause this life is warfare, warfare

-And “Life is warfare, warfare” bounces me right to “Shook Ones Pt II”:

I got you stuck off the realness, we be the Infamous
you heard of us
official Queensbridge murderers
the Mobb comes equipped with warfare, beware
of my crime family who got ‘nough shots to share
for all of those who wanna profile and pose
rock you in your face, stab your brain wit’ your nose bone

-I dunno, maybe this is how kontinuity kop komics kollectors feel when they spot Kang or something in comics.

–My friend Steve wrote the shortest of short stories on his tumblr. I like it a whole lot, and it’ll take you fifteen seconds to read.

-John Rozum wants to do an Annotated Xombi post. Please support his efforts!

-I wrote a thing about steampunk and hardboiled fiction, and why I prefer one over the other:

Steampunk provides writers and artists with a way to take hold of the past and fix it, molding it into a much more interesting, and perhaps even healthier, shape than it possessed before. It lets you wash away the unpleasantness of yesterday and replace it with something majestic. It’s nostalgia for a time that never was.

-I dunno. It’s probably an okay read. Esther edited it into a readable shape, which was verrah nice of her.

-I love Decapitate Animals. That link gets nsfw at a few points.

-I love at least six photos in each new post, minimum, and I like way more than that. It’s one of my favorite things on the internet.

-It’s a photoblog and there’s always a few themes running through each image. What’s fun is figuring out the themes and how they connect or fade into one another as you scroll down the page. It’s one of those things like–I love the three pictures of people laughing here. And the pictures come after weed, sunken ships, horrible wartime death, and terror. It’s a release. Of course, it’s followed by an image from Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead (speaking of things i don’t have kind words for) where something horrible has happened, so maybe it’s a brief respite, a nervous laugh.

-Maybe it’s intentional, maybe not, but the author’s intent doesn’t really matter here.

-I feel like I’m explaining the joke, and I don’t want to do that. Poke around their site. There’s a lot of beauty there. There’s a lot of terror/comedy/smiles/melancholy/beauty there.

-Anyone who tells you colors don’t matter in comics is an idiot. Look at that transition.

-I actually bought a lot of vinyl this past weekend, but I had a coupon.

–Dogg Comix are the best comics.

-Comic books… give me a couple days.

-No, that isn’t true. I’ve been reading a lot of Kishimoto’s Naruto lately. Seven volumes? Might could be eight.

(Note: update is a little late due to the website having a fit last night. Need to remember to send David a fruit basket for his troubles)

Kind of an update and a half this time around. Since last week’s show was a failsafe in case I lost power from the hurricane, which ended up happening, I didn’t get to include the panels from David Brothers and Space Jawa. So here they are from last week, mixed in with this week’s batch. I also have Was Taters on the drums.

My pick of the week is the Goon and if the creative team and panel don’t convince you to check it out, I just don’t know what to say.

Deadpool MAX #11
David Lapham and Kyle Baker

Fear Itself: The Deep #3
Cullen Bunn and Lee Garbett

Read the rest of this entry �

Well, I needed a bit of a writing break to recharge my batteries and that pesky hurricane gave me little choice in the matter. Anyway, I’m back and I’m ready to finish what I’ve started. In other wrestling news, Rifftrax has released a new video on demand where they tackle the Jesse Ventura early 90’s movie Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. It’s like a cross between Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, only completely and utterly boring. And with Jim Belushi as a principal only because the lead woman was his wife at the time!

Highly recommended.

Now back to the list.

Read the rest of this entry �