You’re standing in the lobby of the cineplex. Do you choose the wildly improbable action-fest or the quirky chick flick? I couldn’t decide, so this week’s Flipped looks at both Samurai Commando (CMX) and Translucent (Dark Horse).
Survey says
I got an interesting e-mail from someone involved in the development of an on-line comic shop, looking for feedback from potential customers and willing to pony up the swag to get it. According to Katherine Thoresen, Heavy Ink will feature…
“…a user interface full of innovative features, good customer reviews to help folks find material they like, and great prices. The initial version of our service will carry the full inventory of comic books from Diamond, but with in a year, we intend to start doing outreach to smaller/independent publishers that aren’t carried by Diamond or most existing stores.”
Sounds like a good idea to me, and they’ll be giving about $100 bucks worth of graphic novels to one survey participant and a buy-one-get-one-free subscription offer to everyone else who fills it out.
Bites
I’m still not watching this season of Top Chef with any regularity; I catch re-runs or marathons when nothing else is on, but it isn’t “destination television.” But I did see that interview show, and it’s left me with a couple of questions.
1. Tom Colicchio has become an icon among the bear community? Seriously? For shame, bear community. Dude has a soul patch.
2. Was that Padma Lakshmi fashion fanservice sequence really necessary?
3. Rocco DiSpirito is a guest judge? Is he going to offer people advice on how not to be a celebrity chef? Did they actually see The Restaurant? (At least he seems to have washed his hair.)
Potter cons
And here are five things I didn’t love about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Again, seriously, if you haven’t read it and are planning to, DON’T PROCEED TO THE JUMP. There are big honking SPOILERS. I MEAN it.):
1. Forgetfulness: This one’s probably caused by two factors. One is that Rowling’s books are generally so fluid and tightly plotted that I’ve never really noted any continuity errors. The second is a lifetime of nitpicking through Marvel and DC comics and developing highly defined but ultimately useless continuity muscles. Anyway, in an early chapter, Hermione explains what she’s done to her parents to get them to safety, which included significantly modifying their memories. Later, she says she’s never performed a forgetfulness charm before, even though she’s made her parents forget they had a 17-year-old daughter. I finally wrote it off as a difference between memory modification and simple forgetfulness, but I did spend a fair amount of time assuming that Hermione was under the Imperius curse or something.
2. One locket to irk them all: I know the books are packed with homage and that they’re basically a patchwork of children’s fantasy literature, but this Lord of the Rings stuff was such a direct lift that I half expected one of the characters to reference it. Hermione reads everything; surely she’s gone through some muggle literature? She seems like the type to have read the complete works of Austen by the time she was nine.
3. Career women are bad: This might be an overreaction, but all of the women characters who favor work over marriage and family are really, really evil (unless they’re nurses or teachers, who are basically acting in loco parentis). Rita Skeeter, Umbridge, Bellatrix – all of them suck without mitigating factor, and it strikes me as too coincidental that they’re all focused on their work. (Yes, being a Death Eater is a job.)
4. Moms are great: This is essentially just the flip side of that, but fortune favors the fertile in Rowling’s novels. I strongly suspect that Mrs. Weasley (the best mom ever) got to take down Bellatrix (the worst of the career gals) just as an object lesson that, even the most enthusiastically sadistic of Death Eaters is no match for a mama lion in a rage.
5. That epilogue: I really wanted to learn what the kids were doing with their lives, beyond being married and having kids. Aside from Neville, there was no suggestion that any of them had jobs or interests or things to occupy their time other than being married and having kids. I suppose it’s unlikely that we’d have found out Hermione was running the Department of Mysteries and Ginny was an internationally famous quidditch player while Ron and Harry were happy, stay-at-home dads, but come on. Throw me a bone.
Potter pros
Here are five things I loved about Harry Potter and the Deatlhy Hallows. (Do I even need to specify that there are spoilers after the jump? Seriously, if you haven’t read it and are planning to, DON’T CLICK. I MEAN it.):
1. Luna’s eulogy for Dobby: I’ve made no secret of my abiding fondness for Ms. Lovegood, and this little scene just typifies everything I admire about her. She’s such a wonderful combination of dottiness and unexpected emotional insight. She just breaks my heart.
2. Hermione’s stylish accessory: Is there a major character in the Harry Potter books who wouldn’t be dead were it not for Hermione’s cleverness? That traveling bag of hers is kind of the supreme example of her intelligent competence and preparedness. I would also like to note that, while Ron seemed to learn absolutely nothing in six years at Hogwarts and Harry seemed to focus on disarming, stunning and shielding to the exclusion of everything else, Hermione did the reading and learned how to apply the knowledge in day-to-day life. I hope she got an honorary degree.
3. Just about every moment with Neville: I sort of wish that there was a companion book to Deathly Hallows that showed what was happening with Neville, Luna and Ginny at Hogwarts while everyone else was off recreating Lord of the Rings. Catching up with Neville late in the game, we didn’t really get to see the last bits of his evolution from ineffectual, good-hearted nebbish to can-do, good-hearted nebbish, and I frankly feel a bit cheated by that. The bits he did get were absolutely golden, though.
4. Very little Hagrid: There were a number of teachers I missed in this installment, but that big, lumbering, secret-blabbing, friend-endangering idiot wasn’t one of them. He’s essential absence from the proceedings was really, really welcome, and it probably kept a cap on the body count. Nothing’s more dangerous than Hagrid trying to be helpful. The big dolt.
5. The Snape revelations: They weren’t surprising, and I felt they got short shrift, but it was satisfying to be ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. (I always love that!) Okay, I didn’t suspect the childhood friendship or anything, but I was very glad to see that my beliefs about his essential nature were correct, and that Rowling resisted the urge to over-sentimentalize them in any way. He was still a bastard, but he was doing the right thing. (I’m reluctant to admit this, but I often found myself agreeing with Snape about Harry. He really was mediocre, lucky and profoundly disrespectful.)
Next, red carpet coverage from E!
Even NPR is getting in on the San Diego Comic-Con act, giving a preview of the Eisner Awards. I almost hopped a curb when I heard that. But it’s a nice piece, with interviews with judges, past winners, and an appreciation of Will Eisner’s influence on the medium.
This isn't a review
When reviewing a graphic novel, I sometimes struggle with distinguishing between evaluating what the book actually is as opposed to a comparison with what I’d like it to be. It’s the difference between asking myself whether something is good on its own terms or wondering what I’d do to make it better (i.e., more to my tastes). Basically, it’s a case of reviewing versus going into fantasy editor mode.
I’m not having any luck swinging myself back into reviewer mode when it comes to Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened (Villard). I’m too busy making mental notes of what I would have done differently.
My central problem is that, while I share editor Jason Rodriguez’s fascination with these found objects, my fondness for them comes from a different place. To me, postcards represent the promise of adventure or temporary escape from routine. They’re reminders that there are more interesting places out there waiting to be seen when the day-to-day gets to be too much. No matter what’s written on the back of them, they’re messages from a less mundane place.
Rodriguez seems more interested in what postcards can say about the lives of their senders –turbulent, often grim stories that have little to do with the cheerful or elegant images that inspired them, extrapolating instead on the terse , oblique messages they carry. In the worlds Rodriguez’s creators have found lurking behind these scraps, families are torn apart, love fades, lives end, and dreams die. Only one or two stories employ what could really be described as a lighter touch. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the stories are generally executed well, but there’s such a gap between my hopes for the anthology and the creators’ priorities that I just can’t bridge it.
I blame the elephant on the cover. He’s bursting out of his frame, casting off shackles and stomping towards new experiences. He’s not stuck in an isolated farm town or waiting for death to reunite him with his one true love or forging an uneasy connection with his unstable stepmother. He’s out and doing, and it may not end well, but it will be different, and it will be memorable. I guess I just was hoping for the elephant.
(This non-review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)
Yen for ICE
In the just-arrived Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Kai-Ming Cha answers all our questions about the future of ICE Kunion: they’re joining forces with Yen Press, who will be picking up the current roster of ICE Kunion titles. That’s good news for people who’d been enjoying them. (I had wondered precisely what former ICE editorial director Ju-Yuon Lee’s presence on the SDCC Yen Press panel meant, and I’m glad to see she took their titles with her when she joined Yen.)
Well, okay, maybe all of our questions aren’t answered:
“Fans curious about the promises of free manhwa on the ICE Kunion Web site should note that the site will soon redirect people to the Yen Press Web site, where they can find all of ICE’s series now under the Yen Press label. Although [Kurt] Hassler said there was some confusion over who owned the URL, he said the matter is being resolved.”
Anything that keeps me in Goong…
Upcoming 7/25
The ComicList is showing up a little funky on my monitor, so I’ve headed back to the wellspring to look at this week’s shipping list.
The easy pick of the week is CMX’s new release of Mashashi Tanaka’s Gon. I’ve looked at a preview, and it’s as gorgeous as I expected. Just look at what Katherine Dacey-Tsuei has to say over in her Weekly Recon column. (I’m in complete agreement with her review of Pretty Face, too. Between this and Strawberry 100%, I’m thinking Viz might be on the verge of announcing a new fanservice brand.)
It’s a good week for CMX, as they also release a new volume of one of my favorite shôjo series, Sakura Tsukuba’s Penguin Revolution. Sure, it’s gender-bending pop idol silliness, but it’s genuinely funny and features great characters.
I’m a little leery of the title of Friends of Lulu’s The Girls’ Guide to Guys’ Stuff. What kind of “guys’ stuff” are we talking about here? If it’s all team sports and Radio Shack and gas grills and boxers versus briefs, I couldn’t conceivably care less. And what kind of guys are under consideration? Straight guys? Enlightened or troglodytic? Gay guys? Bi- or metro- or pansexual guys? All of the above? There are so many unanswered questions, which leads me to conclude that it’s… kind of a bad title, not unlike Sexy Chix.
I’m horribly behind in my comics reading, what with one distraction or another, so I haven’t waded too far into another anthology, Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened. I absolutely share the fascination with these cultural artifacts, though, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book. I kind of hope editor Jason Rodriguez pulls back a bit on the rest of his introductory pieces, which show a tendency to gush in the early going.
Padding
What do you do when the book you’ve chosen to cover in your weekly Flipped column is delightful but doesn’t quite demand an installment’s usual length? Pad it out with blurbs about some of your pet favorites, of course! This week, it’s Run, Bong-Gu, Run!, with a quick run-down of stand-along books I’ve known and loved.