Archive for the 'Features' Category

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Pretty Girls: Kenichi Sonoda

August 27th, 2010 Posted by david brothers

Kenichi Sonoda: Wiki, imdb, a pretty good summary of his career, and an impossibly ancient shrine
Books: Gunsmith Cats, Gunsmith Cats: Burst
Why? The thing about cheesecake is that there’s exactly two types. There’s the trite, ugly, boring, unattractive, and lame stuff–your Ed Beneses, Zenescopers, and the like. They take a by the numbers approach to sexiness that actually saps any sexiness from the image. Two Boobs + Two Butt Cheeks+ Flimsy Thong Plus Arched Back = Any Given Issue of Birds of Prey. The other kind, the stuff that comes from your Frank Chos, Adam Hughes, Amanda Conners, and Adam Warrens, has a certain care and spontaneity that the other stuff doesn’t. The difference is that the latter group actually cares about what they’re doing. That care led to them really pushing and getting good at what they do.

I’d put Kenichi Sonoda in the latter group. He has his quirks/fetishes/interests (they are guns, cars, girls, and girls who wear pantyhose, in that order), he has his downsides (the occasional flagrant panty shot, prizing sexiness over sensibility, Minnie May), and he is absolutely technically proficient, but what raises him above artists like Benes is that he’s clearly put a tremendous amount of thought into what he’s doing. His style is probably exactly what you think of when someone says anime or manga (big eyes, small mouth, big boobs, small waists), but he’s not as generic as he might seem at first glance. He’s got a great grasp of body language (ks-sleepy.jpg, look at her slump!), he can actually work facial expressions (look at that saleslady in ks-asteal.jpg and tell me you can’t see the “cha-ching!” in her face), and the women wear actual, if occasional impractical, clothes (Rally in ks-copkilla.jpg, for example). He’s not just an artist drawing empty T&A. He’s making an effort to make his characters real. He’s drawing typical cute stuff, but with just a little more talent and care than you’d expect.

An aside: Gunsmith Cats is really, really good stuff, but Minnie May, and what she represents, makes me real uncomfortable. Without her, it’s a rocking manga about girls, guns, and fast cards. With her, well… you’re gonna get some funny looks if you read this funnybook in public. (no pedo)



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Pretty Girls: Sara Pichelli

August 25th, 2010 Posted by david brothers

Sara Pichelli: Twitter (defunct), blog, black and white art
Books: Runaways: Homeschooling, X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back
Why? Pichelli is an Italian artist who recently blew up in America with a number of Marvel series, usually with Kathryn Immonen (another person who deserves to be a superstar). While her Marvel books tend to feature teen characters, something she’s pretty good at to be fair, but she’s also good at drawing adults. If I had to pick two things that make her great, I’d say it’s her attention to hair, something mainstream comics artists generally render as a big block of ugly, and the way she nails body language. Look at Poison Ivy’s hair in any of the drawings, particularly the Cruella de Vil buns, Emma Frost’s tangle of hair, or Zatanna’s tangles. For body language, look at Batman’s open mouth and Poison Ivy’s arched back in sp-bat-ivy.jpg, the relaxed but sad look in sp-sunday02.jpg, everything in sp-womandriving02.jpg (someone please get Pichelli to draw a crime comic), and the hands wrapped around the man’s head in sp-fuck.jpg.

Streetwear Snow White is great, too. I’d read a whole book about that.




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Pretty Girls: Cameron Stewart

August 22nd, 2010 Posted by david brothers

Before we get into the proceedings this evening: I was poking around on the internet once a couple weeks back, maybe the first weekend after San Diego Comic-con 2010, and saw something terrible. It was a drawing of a topless woman, legs spread, sitting in a, what, a meat locker? A restaurant? I don’t know, but everything around her was filled with poked out eyeballs, severed heads, butchered bodies, and entrails. The woman in question was rendered like a copy of a copy of a copy of Jim Lee’s sexier ladies. Simply put: it was gross on several levels, and it was supposed to advertise a comic book. I’m all for liking whatever you like, man, but the way this juxtaposed creepy sex and lazy gore just really got under my skin. I’m as interested in the way that sex and death interact and coexist as any other English major, but c’mon. Consider this series a bit of counter-programming. There are several artists who are crazy talented at drawing women, and I want to show off some of my favorites or ones who are particularly good at one aspect. I’ll be doing a few this week, and I think it’ll be weekly beyond that.

And if you like that other stuff… more power to you, man. Whatever floats your Flying Dutchman staffed with half-naked zombie girls, you know? You’re still gross, though, B. Sorry.

Cameron Stewart: Twitter, blog, Comic Art Community gallery, webcomic
Books: Apocalipstix, Batman and Robin 2: Batman vs. Robin
Why? Stewart’s style is one that appeals to me in part because he knows how to pay attention to the little details and has a good sense of comedy. I love the cover to Catwoman 20 because of the way that Holly’s lip is being pulled by the back of her hand. The real boots on cs-Robinchair.jpg are fantastic. The relaxed posture in cs-girlfridays7.jpg is great. The cliche says that every picture is worth a thousand words, and it’s clear that Stewart’s girls have a story behind them. You can intuit personality at a glance.



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Fear of a Black Panther Part Four

August 21st, 2010 Posted by david brothers

Tucker kicked it off, I followed up, and then Tucker went and raised the stakes again. I’m wrapping up the story of Don McGregor and Billy Graham’s Panther’s Rage story in Jungle Action, covering issues fifteen through eighteen.

Here’s the end of the story: T’Challa makes his peace with his mistakes, in part by rejecting a certain portion of them, rediscovers his self-confidence, and goes after Erik Killmonger for his sins. They battle, and a rejuvenated T’Challa definitely holds his own… until Killmonger reasserts his dominance, explains that he was just playing with T’Challa, and easily lifts T’Challa’s body over his head and gets ready to snap his spine. That’s right: the hero makes his peace with his conflict, rediscovers himself, and does all the things that people are supposed to do before going off to fight the dragon, and he still loses. The battle isn’t even in question. Killmonger toys with him and then prepares to make a show of destroying him. No chance. There is no dignity, no honor in violence. Hey T’Challa, how’s failure taste?

But there’s one thing that Killmonger, T’Challa, and the other larger than life characters in superhero comics forgot, and forget, about: the little guy. You know, the normal humans who provide so much flavor to superhero stories, and dead bodies when the need arises. In this case, Kantu, the son of the man who was killed by zombies, is the one that saves the day.

T’Challa had a brief meeting with Kantu on his way to battle Venomm for the last time. It’s brief and depressing, as Kantu is mourning his father’s death and T’Challa has no answers for him. McGregor’s typically florid prose has T’Challa asking “if there is any hope left at all.” Kantu, however, “does not know the words to ask such a question, but wonders the same thing.” After this meeting, T’Challa, like Spider-Man on a bad day, gives himself over to being the black cat, which “does not ask any questions. It needs very few answers or truths.” Violence is an escape.

Kantu is a casualty of T’Challa and Killmonger’s war. T’Challa gave birth to Killmonger’s rage. Killmonger’s rage resulted in the revenge scheme that killed Wakandans by the dozen, including Kantu’s father. Kantu is therefore, in the end, the ultimate representation of the effect of Killmonger and T’Challa’s conflict. The back and forth chess match, the tug of war of intellects between these two men are what formed all of the exciting scenes and drama. Kantu is a reminder that nothing happens in a vacuum. When a villain knocks down a building or idly kills a bystander, it counts. When a hero mows down dozens of bad guys with a machine gun and a one-liner, that is dozens of orphans being introduced into the world.

The idea of collateral damage being something that isn’t meaningless at all is an idea that Grant Morrison explored in The Invisibles in “Best Man Fall.” King Mob killed a nameless foot soldier early in the series. Issues later, Morrison dedicated an entire story to that nameless foot soldier, showing his life, his history, and the tragedy of his death.

We read stories and the only people that matter are the heroes and villains. Joker breaks out of jail, kills dozens, and then Batman pops him on the jaw and sends him back to jail. Six months later, it happens again. Stories that actually deal with the repercussions of that are rare compared to the ones that indulge in wholesale slaughter for the amusement of the audience.

Kantu, then, is what gets lost in the action. His father died something like eight issues ago, forever for a character created to die, and yet, here he is, taking center stage. Kantu demands attention, and when a young boy says, “I could kill him!” and speaks of hate, you should be paying attention, because something has gone horribly wrong.

The real world, the place that hates you for existing and where people are cruel because that’s the only way to get results, came to Wakanda and took Kantu’s father away. When Kantu slams into Killmonger’s back, saving T’Challa’s life and knocking Killmonger to his death, that’s the end of his battered innocence.

With two pages to go in the chapter, Kantu reappears and becomes the most important, and most tragic, figure in the book. T’Challa will go on with his superheroing, suffering larger than life wins and losses, but Kantu is normal. He doesn’t get to have the big wins that boost your confidence, the impossibly attractive temporary girlfriends, and the team of friends who smile and let you ride around in their jet. No, he’s just got his father’s remains, which T’Challa’s failure left out in the sun for two whole days, and his grief.

Now: Billy Graham.

I like a lot of artists. Both Romitas, Jack Kirby, the entire Kubert family, Jim Lee, Chris Bachalo, Kevin Huizenga, Akira Toriyama, and dozens more. With his work in Panther’s Rage, Graham is solidified in my mind as one of the greats who has been sadly forgotten. He has inventive layouts that run counter to traditional comics thinking but are instantly understandable, grotesque and burly heroes, and a fantastic use of type.

(The last true chapter of Panther’s Rage features the word “Epilogue” integrated into the sky on three pages. It doesn’t bring any new angles to text or push a certain theme. It’s just an artist who knows exactly what he’s doing flaunting his skill, and more power to him.)

Graham can flipflop from Kirby sci-fi to hard realism between panels, and manages to make it all look cohesive. Embracing lovers, a broken marriage, a desperate run, and a little boy getting caught crying by the bank of a river all look exactly as they should.

He uses scale to great effect, he draws detailed backgrounds, his people look like actual people, his black people look like black people, and Kantu in particular is that kind of awkward and gangly mess of arms and legs that kids tend to be.

He drew the first seventeen issues of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire before moving onto Jungle Action. That’s the first issue of the first, or one of the first, ongoing comics starring a black American.

Billy Graham’s black, too. Comicbookdb suggests that he left comics after the ’80s. He died back in 1999. Check out his Wikipedia entry for more info.

Pay attention, because black history is everywhere.

Next: It’s not over.

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The Cipher 08/18/10

August 18th, 2010 Posted by david brothers

Stuff What I Wrote: SLG needs legal help, Deathlok demolishes, and BPRD brings Hell to Earth.

Music What I Bought:
Curren$y – Pilot Talk: I like Spitta, but dude seriously needs to start switching up his flow and subject matter some. I like weed, slow flows, and other people’s (pause) as much as the next dude, but an album full of it was unexpectedly draining. Curren$y varies from into it to lethargic from song to song, and sometimes the production vastly outshines him. This one isn’t bad, but I’m not sure if I’ll still be spinning it in a couple weeks. I think what it is is that I don’t like it as much as How Fly, his mixtape with Wiz Khalifa. Still, the production is dope, the guest spots are ill… this album is straight. Video: King Kong.

Kassin+2 – Futurismo: I’m fully unqualified to actually discuss this album in terms of technique or artistic merit, but The +2s are dope and make this kind of really funky, relaxed, hype, dance music. That doesn’t make any sense, but listen to “Ponto Final” and a few other cuts. You can sit around reading to this stuff, or shake it like a salt shaker. Kassin+2 also did the music for Michiko e Hatchin, one of the dopest shows out that has yet to actually get licensed for release.

Gorillaz – Plastic Beach: I bought this one on Graeme‘s recommendation and was left pretty pleased. I liked the Gorillaz in high school (though apparently the song goes “I ain’t happy,” not “Iiii’m happy”) and this kicked off this whole thing where I’m spending all of my time listening to the Gorillaz and figuring out what I like about it. Right now, it’s “I like the range and versatility.” Later, it may be something else. I’ll tell you what, though. I’m really interested in theatricality and gimmicks and narrative, and Gorillaz are all of that rolled up into one. Video: Stylo (with Mos Def and Bobby Womack [!!!!])

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack): Do you know how often I buy movie or tv show soundtracks? Almost never, that’s how often. I liked the music in the movie enough to grab the soundtrack, though, and I left pretty dang pleased. I hadn’t heard Metric before, but I like the way that sounds. The in-movie stuff, the Sex Bob-omb songs? Those sound great, too. “Garbage Truck” is fantastic. I could do without the chiptunes song, tho. Bleah. Black Sheep (featurette)

Stuff What I Been Reading: Shade (finally started book 3 after a few false starts), other stuff

Stuff What We Gonna Buy:
David Days: Amazing Spider-Man 640, Atlas 4, Hellblazer 270, King City 11, New Mutants 16, Thunderbolts 147
Esther Planet We Reach is Dead: Tiny Titans 31, Streets of Gotham 15, Power Girl 15
Don’t Gavin Lost In Heaven: Authority The Lost Year 12, Azrael 11, Green Lantern Corps 51, Age Of Heroes 4, Atlas 4, Avengers Academy 3, Avengers And The Infinity Gauntlet 1, Deadpool Corps 5, Deadpool 26, Marvel Universe vs The Punisher 2, New Avengers 3, Secret Avengers 4, Shadowland Power Man 1, Thunderbolts 147, Darkwing Duck The Duck Knight Returns 3

Stuff What Is A Drag:
This OMIT story in Amazing Spidey. Extremely pretty, but extremely who cares. Should’ve just kept on going with the status quo instead of explaining something boring.

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Fear of a Black Panther Part Two

August 14th, 2010 Posted by david brothers


Tucker spent some time talking about how Panther’s Rage is about T’Challa’s failure as a leader. There’s a good reason for that: it’s the glue that holds Panther’s Rage together. You can’t not talk about it.

Except now that we’re fully into the story and all the preambles are out of the way, McGregor starts to stack the deck against T’Challa. In part four, the one drawn by Gil Kane, T’Challa wrestles a rhino to the ground to rescue a child. He kills the rhino in favor of the child’s life, which is a pointed statement in and of itself, I think, but the way in which he does it is what’s important. He wrestles the rhino to the ground and snaps its spine, something he learned by watching westerns. T’Challa’s buccaneering habits are learned. The Black Panther, with initial caps and constant swashbuckling, is an act. He saw them on tv, or read them in books, and have adopted them as his own.

T’Challa easily and casually remembers the name of a farmer, stunning him. (Grant Morrison would use this technique thirty-some years later for Bruce Wayne in his run on Batman.) The farmer’s wife is unimpressed, focusing on his “outworlder” girlfriend. She sees the Americans he has emulated and the fact that he has brought back an American girlfriend, Monica Lynne. She feels the pain of desertion. Her husband feels the love of his king. Both are correct.

The conflict is easy to see, but McGregor doesn’t stop there. Before the farmer and his wife appear, Panther slumps over the rhino’s corpse and says, “No loss this time, Monica. This time I won.” He’s four issues into this story and he’s already cracking under the pressure.

T’Challa’s constantly struggling, and not in the way that heroes struggle against villains. He’s fighting to not actually choose between American culture and Wakandan culture. He’s fighting to keep his kingdom, despite the fact that he left it behind at will in the past. He’s fighting to keep both Monica and W’Kabi. He’s fighting Killmonger and he’s fighting the results of his own swashbuckling. He wants it both ways, and even though he knows he can’t have it, he’s still fighting for it. He’s selfish. When the pressure becomes too much, what does he do? He goes to the river to brood alone, like a child.

Panther’s battles manifest themselves in several ways over the course of Panther’s Rage. At the heart of each of them is the question of Wakanda versus America, in one way or another. Sometimes he outright fails. Sometimes he triumphs. He never actually wins, however. His victories are caked in loss.

The farmer who T’Challa recognized was killed by zombies that very same night, leaving his wife and child alone. When the wife comes to the palace, requesting that the king go find her husband, T’Challa immediately goes to investigate. He runs afoul of those zombies and is beaten easily. He eventually escapes and runs back to the castle. He doesn’t win. He doesn’t even retrieve the farmer’s body. In fact, the farmer’s body sits there, baking in the sun, until the next night when T’Challa gets his nerve up to go back to the graveyard. The wife doesn’t find out that her husband is dead until later because T’Challa is preoccupied with his own problems. Result: failure.

Yes, there are zombies and monsters in Panther’s Prey. The villains have names like Baron Macabre and Lord Karnaj. Yes, their names are goofy and stupid, about as generically superheroic as you can get. Except: Macabre is a mask, someone playing a role. Karnaj emphasizes that Erik Killmonger, the villain behind the villains, gave him that name. The zombies are rebels, dressed up with fake talons and ghoulish makeup.

This is Killmonger’s plan, and it’s a doozy. He’s using T’Challa’s language, superheroes and faked up gimmicks, to terrorize Wakanda. He’s playing on the superstitions of the populace to get the job done, and he’s using the very thing T’Challa deserted Wakanda for to do it. It’s America vs Wakanda, but viewed through a twisted mirror.

Monica is accused of murder partway through these chapters and exonerated in the final one. Just before proving Monica’s innocence, T’Challa approaches his prey and idly makes a reference to Alfred Hitchcock in his thoughts. “Damn! he thinks. Must all of his reference points be so foreign to his native land?” Wakanda attacked his American woman, and even in the middle of that, he’s fighting Wakanda vs America on the inside.

Panther’s Rage puts me in mind of Ann Nocenti and John Romita, Jr’s run on Daredevil, where every act of violence was a sign of Daredevil’s shortcomings as a hero. A hero can solve problems without making mistakes and without anyone getting hurt. T’Challa, however, has already made his mistakes, and now the only thing that’s left is the pain.

What’s sad about that is that T’Challa won’t be the focus for all of the pain. The farmer dies and his wife and son suffer. Monica is harassed and imprisoned. W’Kabi has lost faith in his king. Wakanda is being battered by Killmonger’s Death Regiment. Taku, T’Challa’s good friend and a definite pacifist, is forever tainted when he experiences the horrors of the war against Killmonger firsthand.

T’Challa? Some people just kind of point out how much he’s screwed up and he gets beaten up every once and a while. These three chapters lay the consequences for his actions on everyone but T’Challa, which in turn serves to increase his burden. Everyone around T’Challa ends up twisted and distorted by the pressure of the situation. Monica is miserable. W’Kabi is furious. Taku is understanding, but even he’s losing his patience. This is T’Challa’s fault.


Taku is the saddest casualty of this war, for my money. He’s quiet and sensible, seeking only to help where he can. The narration describes him as a man who “listens instead of inflicting his personality upon others.” Despite this, he’s not afraid to call T’Challa out on his crap. When T’Challa is pulling his ‘woe is me’ act beside a river, Taku sits beside him and they speak. T’Challa laments the fact that he has lost W’Kabi, and Taku says, “Part of it is Killmonger. Surely you know that?” T’Challa, clearly misreading Taku, goes off on how Killmonger only wants to govern Wakanda according to his own desires. Taku, though, brings the ether and asks T’Challa if he has been any different.

Taku befriended Venomm, a villain from chapters one through three, and refers to him by his first name, Horatio. While Venomm did side against Wakanda, he is still a human being, and Taku manages to pull that out. When it comes time to strike back against Killmonger, Taku must betray his friend. When he expresses that thought, W’Kabi reacts with shock. What betrayal? They don’t owe Venomm anything. Taku knows the truth, though. He says that by betraying “a confidence,” he has “betrayed [himself] as well.” Being true to yourself means being true to yourself at all times. Bending your rules just shows how little you believed in those rules. Taku is a man of integrity, and T’Challa’s actions have forced him to break with that integrity in a way that he is not comfortable with.

While W’Kabi is eager to do battle against Killmonger, Taku simply did the best he could to intellectually prepare for it. It didn’t work. When Lord Karnaj kills a child as a side effect of trying to kill Panther, Taku loses it. In a killer and mostly silent Billy Graham page, Taku approaches Karnaj, shrugging off two sonic blasts. He drops his spear, because certain jobs just require the satisfaction of working with your hands. He beats Karnaj near to death, ranting at him all the while, before Panther stops him. Even W’Kabi, who believes that everything that Killmonger’s lackeys get is what they deserve, is troubled by this new change.

I feel like there weren’t a lot of superhero comics working in this mode back then. You can trace every terrible thing that happens in Panther’s Rage can be easily traced back to T’Challa’s betrayal, which places a certain measure of responsibility on his shoulders for the entire situation. Amazing Spider-Man flirted with it during the death of Gwen Stacy storyline for about three pages and a half (also in 1973), and Green Lantern had the hamfisted “What about the brown skins, Mr. Charlie?” scene, but this is an extended takedown of a hero and a deconstruction of him at the same time.

McGregor, Graham, and Buckler are going hard at who T’Challa is and what he represents, and the result is a story where the superhero doesn’t look so superheroic any more.

Next is Tucker, with parts seven, eight, and nine. It’s got a winter wonderland, dragons, and marital strife.

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The Cipher 08/11/10

August 11th, 2010 Posted by david brothers

-Hey, I wrote some stuff. Maybe you missed it. I reviewed the Scott Pilgrim game, heaped some pro-black/pro-fessional praise on Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Afua Richardson’s Genius, and wrote a surprisingly well-received piece on manga piracy.

-I didn’t do it, but this comic about a bee by Raina Telgemeier is fantastic.

-I’m still reading Shade (I’m up to volume 3, which I’m starting this weekend), but I also picked up Chi’s Sweet Home and Peepo Choo from Vertical, Inc. Jormungand 4 gets in today, I think, and it’ll probably remain my favorite funny action comic book about child soldiers.

Unforgiven on Blu-ray for eight bucks? That was Purchase On Sight. Wow.

-The countdown isn’t over. There’s one left. 1 Reader, maybe, or 1 Love.

Oh, what, comics come out today? Okay I guess we can talk about that.


David Easterman: Who cares about comical books? (but if that Green Lantern book Gav is buying is The Shield in Space, I might have to start picking that up).
Esther Cobblepot: Definitely: Batgirl 13 Maybe: Birds of Prey 4, Zatanna 4, Doc Savage 5
Jacob Gavin, Jr.: Buzzard 3, Booster Gold 35, Green Lantern Emerald Warriors 1, Justice League Generation Lost 7, Welcome To Tranquility One Foot In The Grave 2, Dark Wolverine 89, Invincible Iron Man 29, Steve Rogers Super-Soldier 2, Ultimate Comics Avengers 3 1

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This Week in Panels: Week 46

August 8th, 2010 Posted by Gavok

Welcome to a very special Too Much Goddamn Deadpool Edition of ThWiP. Why too much? Even though I didn’t even read Wade Wilson’s War this time around? Simply put, Deadpool #1000 has way too much going for it for me to choose a single panel, so I figured I’d give a spot to all eleven of its stories. Adding that to an already stacked week and we have a hefty set.

Avengers Prime #2
Brian Michael Bendis and Alan Davis

Avengers: The Origin #5
Joe Casey and Phil Noto

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The Cipher 08/03/10

August 4th, 2010 Posted by david brothers


“I’m tryna get to this place that my grandpa told me bout as a child/ Told me only a few could make it and the fakest aint allowed/ Be a star out your game and aim above the clouds/ and if you miss, youll at least be amongst your own crowd”

Slightly different this week! Music recommendations, none of which are probably endorsed at all by Gav and Esther (Est?). Amazon is doing this 1000 albums at $5 deal, and I found some stuff I like. Here’s some recs.

Lauryn HillThe Miseducation of Lauryn Hill: L Boogie is nice, and this was probably her peak. A little more R&B than rap, but a rap album nonetheless. Before I wanted to marry Erykah Badu, I wanted to marry Lauryn Hill, and this album is pretty much the reason why. Samples: Doo Wop, Ex-Factor, Everything Is Everything
D’AngeloBrown Sugar: Way before he dropped his naked video and instantly made an enemy of every young black male around my age and gave every young black girl around my age whiplash, D’Angelo dropped Brown Sugar, a dope R&B album that was profane, beautiful, and pretty much immaculate. Also: “Brown Sugar” is about smoking weed. Samples: Cruisin, Lady, Brown Sugar
NERDIn Search Of…: I’ve loved this record since high school. It’s upbeat, melancholy, has some ill punchlines, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to do the entire album at karaoke at some point. “It’s the kinda high that got me leanin’, 120 speedin’ in the rain, meaning of a hydroplane.” Samples: Lapdance (NSFW), Rock Star, Provider
A Tribe Called QuestMidnight Marauders: One of the top five greatest albums of all time. If you don’t like this, we can’t get along. If you like Low End Theory over Midnight Marauders… we’re gonna fight, but we can be friends. Samples: Award Tour, Electric Relaxation
The RootsHow I Got Over: It’s only five bucks. Go watch Dear God 2.0 and then just buy it already. You need this in your life.
OutKastStankonia: Awright awright awright arrararawright… OutKast is the greatest rap group of all time and this is one of several high watermarks for the group. Toilet Tisha is another ill spoken word/instrumental track, Stanklove is heavy, So Fresh So Clean is a certified classic, and all the music videos rule. Plus Kast is one of the few groups that’ll let a song breathe, just because it sounds dope. Samples: B.O.B., Ms Jackson
Blu & ExileBelow the Heavens: I like Blu a whole lot. I think he might be the rapper most in line with where I’m at right now, if that makes sense. Atmosphere defined one era of my life, Cannibal Ox/Company Flow/Aes Rock another, and so on. There’s probably some examination that needs to be done in there. Anyway, dude should make more music more often. I’m a big fan. Samples: Blu Collar Workers, So(ul) Amazing (maybe it’s the MOP sample, but this jawn reminds me of Premo a whole lot)


David David David David Banner: Amazing Spider-Man 639, Hellboy: The Storm 2, Baltimore: The Plague Ships 1, The Boys 45
All Eyez on Esther: Definitely: Secret Six 24, Red Robin 15 Maybe: Batman Odyssey 2, Superman: The Last Family of Krypton 1
Gavinmatic: Magog, Secret Six 24, Avengers: The Origin 5, Avengers Prime 2, Captain America 608, Deadpool 1000, Doomwar 6, Gorilla Man 2, Hawkeye and Mockingbird 3, Hit-Monkey 2, Punisher vs. MU 1 (maybe), SHIELD 3, Secret Warriors 18, Young Allies 3, Irredeemable 16

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This Week in Panels: Week 45

August 1st, 2010 Posted by Gavok

Welcome back to another week of showing the gist of the comics we’ve read from this week. Not an overly fantastic week, but my personal picks for the better comics are Franken-Castle, Punisher MAX and Generation Lost.

Authority: The Lost Year #11
Grant Morrison, Keith Giffen and Brandon Badeaux

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4
Grant Morrison and Georges Jeanty

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