Walking on the Moon

My review of Ralph Steadman’s The Joke’s Over is up at Bell, Book and Candle.

• Moon Knight #12
  • I’m outta here. This is the end of an arc, and my collector’s mentality will let me stop buying this title now. The arc ended with a muddy attempt to run a multi-timeline tying up of a couple climactic threads, but the tension just wasn’t there for me. I think the Moon Knight crew deserves better.

Reviews of Rory Stewart’s The Prince of The Marshes and Max Shulman’s I Was A Teen-Aged Dwarf are up at Bell, Book and Candle. The Stewart book is a must.

• Jonah Hex #23: Another perfectly reasonably executed western tale. The thing about Jonah Hex that’s going to kill the series is that there’s no story. Every month something bad happens to some one, Jonah’s involved (and a cipher) and he rides off. There’s no inkling that there’s a story behind it all, or that anything different is going to happen in the book. It’s Gunsmoke with slower moving pictures. To an extent, that’s fine, but I may have seen enough Gunsmoke.

• Doktor Sleepless #2: Now, things are moving along. I found issue #1 not to be very enticing, but this issue’s worth it for the Transmetropolitan-esque commercial on page 1 alone.

  More importantly, Ellis and Rodriguez are starting to build a complex world up where it seems not even our protagonist understands it all. Seeing a villain’s face doesn’t hurt the dramatic tension level, either. There’s still a lot of scene-setting and exposition, but the creepy, incongrous bits are starting to burrow into my subconscious and look for things to connect to. I expect I’ll be surprised by what they find.

  Reading Doktor Sleepless is starting to feel like reading The Invisibles did; like Grant Morrison was distilling a mad worldview into pictures and beaming it into your brain. That beam, and I suspect Ellis’s and Rodriguez’s, was like a locked missle. After a certain point escaping it was impossible. Issue 2 may be that point for Doktor Sleepless.

  I don’t really understand how Ellis and Rodriguez picked up so much speed between the end of issue #1 and the end of issue #2, but it’s got the ugly feel of an exponential curve. If this title keeps getting stronger at this rate, the first trade paperback will be classified as a munition.

My review of Slaughterhouse-Five is up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

A actually put stuff into the longbox this week, so comics aren’t strewn across the room.

• The Flash #231 – After Bart Allen got the shaft, we’re rebooting the Flash proper. I basically picked this up because it’s a Mark Waid Flash book, and I usually enjoy his take on the character. So far things are starting slow, which isn’t a great sign in a book about speed. Daniel Acuña is doing the art, and while it’s beautiful, it’s also a little static. Maybe I’m just longing for some Mike Weiringo art, which Acuña can hardly be blamed for. If it weren’t Waid, I’d be tempted to drop this, but I’m willing to let him find his feet.
• Black Summer #2 – Warren Ellis’s Black Summer continues to be a wild ride. We’ve met most of the surviving Seven Guns now, and the different viewpoints on John Horus’s deeds and their general position as the hunted are starting to come out. Still, the pace is fast and there’s not a whole lot of jawing yet. Definitely a thriller with something to chew on. Honestly I’m hoping to see a little more thinking before this is over, but there’s no reason to believe Ellis will disappoint.

That’s up in Bell, Book and Candle.

I finished The Vintage Bradbury. A review is up on Bell Book, and Candle.

I mentioned a while ago that I’d bought but not read Warren Ellis’s and Raulo Caceres’s Crécy. Leaving it unread didn’t last very long, but I haven’t written anything about it.

It’s quite phenomenal, actually. Scott McCloud is fond of talking about the uses of comics beyond entertainment, and Crécy is an example he should point at. Exactly what it’s an example of is hard to describe pithily, but it’s certainly excellent.

Crécy is a little bit of historical fiction, a little bit of dramatic sociology, some military history, a discourse on the longbow, and a lot of Warren Ellis ranting. The focal point of all this is the 1346 Battle of Crécy. You can read all about that battle on Wikipedia some time, but frankly, unless you’re a big fan of 14th century history, you’ll be hard pressed to finish the article. I guarantee that if you sink the seven bucks to buy this comic, you’ll be able to describe the battle, its technology, and its implications for weeks afterward. You may just corner random people and start ranting about it. It may be difficult to shut you up about it.

Ellis tells the story from the perspective of a fictional archer in the battle, but one who is aware he’s talking to 21st century readers and is cognizant of the intervening history. It’s more effective than it sounds. He deftly manages to keep the reader in the 14th century slogging through the mud to what any contemporary would assume will be a slaughter and connecting the dots between that world and ours with humor and insight. Humor and insight are only two of the techniques, actually, but they’re the strongest.

Ellis is a formidable voice, and an artist could be overwhelmed by him; Caceres is more than up to the challenge. His art is beautifully detailed and cleanly laid out. He gets a fantastic amount of detail on to the page without cramping it. Furthermore, in service to Ellis’s far-reaching goals for the work – part tactical and technological study, part illumination of the human condition – Caceres has to communicate everything from detailed drawings of demonstrations of 14th century armaments, to comprehensible maps of the battlefield, to vivid images of human beings in close combat. He spans these styles with an aplomb that trivializes their difficulties.

The result is an illuminating, entertaining, thought-provoking description of an event that I’d assumed only held interest to the D&D crowd.

Get a copy and enjoy.

I’ve posted reviews of Wealth and Democracy, Babbitt, and Don’t get Too Comfortable on Bell, Book and Candle.  Been a long time coming.