“Your mind right now — reeling!” [Godland]
February 7th, 2012 by david brothers | Tags: joe casey, rakugaki, tom scioliWhat I like most about Joe Casey & Tom Scioli’s Godland is just how unbelievably happy it is to be a comic book. I remember reading the first trade years ago and not really getting it. The Kirby influence put me off, I think, and I wasn’t quite a full-fledged member of the Joe Casey Fanclub yet. I read the series front to back recently, though, and greatly enjoyed it.
A big part of the reason why Godland is so delightful is stuff like this from issue 18:
Casey’s dialogue pretty much never stops being straight out of the modern comics industry. The inconsistent censorship makes me think of that first wave of Image books back in the day. For the most part, he’s putting a 21st century spin on concepts that have their roots in things like Stan Lee’s verbose and tortured Silver Surfer or Kirby’s remarkably petty Darkseid.
The captions keep drawing my attention, though. Sometimes, he plays it straight Stan Lee, with a lovable huckster nudging you in the ribs and pointing out how genius he is. At other points, he goes straight Jim Starlin, throwing cosmic language at you and expecting you to keep up.
And then, right here, he splits the difference between the two and comes up with something sublime.
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Huh, thanks for this. This is a book I’ve been interested in, but never really hear much about, and what I do seems to be incredibly varied so I’ve never gotten a good read on it.
@Endless Mike: It’s wildly uneven and raw and Joe Casey-y, but I dig it a lot. I didn’t talk a lot about Tom Scioli’s art, but he evolves over the course of the series in a really interesting way, too.
That book really is delightfully overt. I’m looking forward to grabbing all the hardcovers and going through it again once the series finishes in two issues.
What Brian said: I’ve been collecting this in floppies all along, but once it ends I’m buying it all again in hardcover. Absolutely sublime in its craziness.