When you pick up King City, you’re getting a comic that’s been stuffed with content. Every single page features some fresh joke or great action. And the back cover? Same thing.
I have no idea whether it’s true, but a lot of stuff in King City feels like something that was included because it made Brandon Graham or someone he knows laugh. Maybe it’s the strain of puns and dumb jokes that litter the series, or absurdities like this one, but that’s just the feeling I get.
-It’s Christmastime! So what better things do we have to talk about beyond:
-Superheroes!
-and!
-Religion!
-We dig into adherents.com for a free-ranging conversation about superheroes, religion, realism, yadda yadda.
-But first, Gavin got Esther a present.
-Later, we mention this cover:
and Talib Beni Khalid from Greg Rucka’s pretty good Checkmate
.Subscribe to the Fourcast! via:
–Podcast Alley feed!
–RSS feed via Feedburner
–iTunes Store
What I like about Joe is that he’s not some super heroic guy out to do what’s right. He’s not Captain America. He’s a regular fella who has a good idea of right and wrong, and works toward that, but he’s also a guy who can’t resist a big butt and a smile, for better or for worse. He gets distracted and thinks about sex in a way a lot of comic characters don’t.
Guys say and do stupid things for girls sometimes, no matter how much we psyche ourselves up or tell ourselves otherwise.
Real life is awkward. I was at the movies the other day and waiting on a friend. He was going to show up late, so I was keeping an eye out. I saw someone who I thought was him walk in, so I waved him over. He waved back and came to sit down. When he got about a seat away, we both realized that we didn’t know each other at all. He sat one seat down from me and we both quietly decided not to acknowledge what happened.
Basically, mere seconds after you do something cool like a cat flip? You’re going to do something perfectly normal and awkward like float down a hallway. You can’t have the awesome without the mundane.
How often do people eat in comics? According to my friend Chris, not often enough. I agree. So much of our entertainment is geared toward big things happening, whether explosions or laser eyes, that we miss the small things that make the big things matter. Case in point: Joe is about to do something, so he eats. What do you do in real life before doing things? You eat.
And dig that “no stabbing” sign.
black is something to laugh about. black is something to cry about.
created: It’s Digital December at ComicsAlliance, and we’re gawn in. So far, I’ve got interviews up with Boom!, IDW, and Dark Horse. On Thursday, DC Comics hits. On Friday, ???. Next week… something more. 2010 is the year that CA put the boot to your favorite comics news site.
It’s also music countdown at the Factual Opinion, so I’m pitching in to help out Marty Brown and my Joe Casey Fan Club brothers Sean Witzke and Tucker Stone figure out what was good this year. You can check the entire category here, and check out the first of my contributions on the top 50-31 songs list. More to come, of course, including a bit of writing that I ended up being really happy with. That’s rare for me, so stay tuned.
black is serious. black is a feeling.
consumed:
–Charlie Huston wrote a short story, The Impossibility of a Diaphanous History Machine, on the Mulholland Books site. I like Huston’s work. He writes dialogue like people talk, where punctuation may not mean what it traditionally means, and I dig that a lot. This story is about bombs, and I like the gag about mental ones.
-Here’s a piece he wrote about children, poverty, and fuel for stories. I generally don’t like people writing about writing. I think that you should just shut up and do it, because “This is how I write” is one of those things that’s just awfully boring, but this is practically a statement of intent. It’s hype. A voice coming out of a dark alley that says, “I have a gun.” Needless to say, I’m hyped for this new book. Drops in 2012, though.
–Huston’s website is here. Get familiar.
–Matt Seneca goes in on a Wonder Woman piece by Bill Sienkiewicz. It’s from an aborted series written by Frank Miller and drawn by Sienkiewicz called Wonder Woman: Bondage. I would trade every issue of Wonder Woman and JLA published over the last five years to see this series. That creative team is one of the best in comics. Every time they get together, somebody needs to sit up and take notice.
-I liked this comic by Sloane, especially the way the grid explodes toward the end.
-Ron Wimberly posted a dope story, too.
-Did y’all hear that they killed Brother Voodoo?
-I read Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo 3
-Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! 9
-The translation really and truly sandbags the book. Stop explaining and just show us. They did well with a dinner scene that would have been tough to translate without notes, but for every one of those, there’s a “Fuuka-onee-chan” to wade through.
-New music: on pause. Been listening to old stuff and have been too busy to buy new joints. Gotta get a lot of stuff did before the Christmas break, and that means doing a couple weeks of work in a few days. Gross.
-But while we’re on the music tip–one of my favorite lines this year is from Evidence, on Copywrite’s Three Story Building. At the end of his verse, he goes, “Started to rap, told my mama I’d be Common/ She thought I meant normal/ I said, “Let’s be honest.” Something about that stuck with me, it’s just ill from top to bottom.
-Copywrite is responsible for another line that I think about a lot. It’s from “Fuck Soundcheck,” off his T.H.E. High Exhaulted
-I’m not saying that I believe that it’s a fair statement or anything that you should say in polite company. But it’s probably true.
-You hear that Steel might be dying next year in this Doomsday event? I should probably care more, but I could care less, instead. Sorry, John Henry.
-New issues of Chew, Bulletproof Coffin, and Atlas hit ComiXology today. Be nice to catch up on the first two and to ditch a few floppies of the last one.
-I keep trying to think through why I’m uncomfortable with “fun” being a crap descriptor of a comic. I’m trying to purge it from my vocabulary because it’s become vague and meaningless. I think Tucker came closest to how I feel with his review of Batman & Robin 17, a book I thought was mediocre at best. Something else I need to think through, clearly.
black is us, the beautiful people.
David: Amazing Spider-Man 650, Thunderbolts 151
Esther: Batman and Robin 18, Birds of Prey 7
Gavin: Batman And Robin 18, Green Lantern 60, Green Lantern Emerald Warriors 5, Green Lantern Plastic Man Weapon Mass Deception 1, Time Masters Vanishing Point 5, Avengers Academy 7, Chaos War 4, Chaos War Thor 2, Strange Tales 2 3, Thunderbolts 151, What If Spider-Man, Darkwing Duck 7
You ever have somebody you can talk to freely? That kind of free wheeling, free association, talking just to talk and maybe be a little clever sort of thing? Where you can have a conversation where you’re both saying a lot of nothing, but it’s still time well spent? Graham is really good at writing those conversations.
I said I wasn’t gonna talk, but I changed my mind.
A lot of the power of King City comes from the fact that Graham is writing about relationships. Everybody has them. This one is about Joe and Earthling, his cat. Have you ever had pets? Then you’ll understand their relationship. There’s a definite childbirth subtext here, too, isn’t there? Introducing a new father to his child.
