What else? October 9th why not

My buddy told me something that’s really gotten me unhappy. Naturally, I told him everything was fine. Does he even know he told me anything? Like all our big conversations, he was drunk while we were having it.

If I haven’t made it clear, I really hate alcohol and the excuse it is to people. There, now you know ONE of my values. Please don’t assume the rest.

Okay, sorry, enough of that. I’ve got a ton of library books that I want to at least mention, but I’m pretty sure the majority of them are due back today… AND I’m not exactly in the mood for anything in depth. So I’ll take each book as it comes.

First up, Marvel’s “Strange Tales II” the second anthology of more independent creators taking a fun crack at Marvel stuff. The Kate Beaton stuff is naturally the best, but she’s got the home team advantage, as well as being plain amazing. Not surprising, the Silver Surfer is a big player in these stories. People love the Surfer (as an idea). The book was dedicated to the memory of Harvey Pekar, who in fact has a story in it about The Thing asking Harvey to hook him up with a government job. It’s awesomely splendorous.

Jeff Smith’s RASL volume 1… did I already talk about this one? I forget. It’s really cool, and I love the creator, AND the fact that it’s sort of a cartoon Sliders (I finally bought season 1 and 2 of that !) but I do wish the story covered more ground in this first collection. So my complaint is that I don’t have volume 2 to read.

The Irredeemable Ant-Man by Robert Kirkman is great. The guys a slime ball, but you still get to like him. It’s almost lucky that this is the entirety of the series, that it got cancelled, as it allowed the character to branch out into the Avengers Initiative book and then onto Secret Avengers. I don’t know where he is now, but it’s still cool the amount of legitimacy this supposed joke character has attained.

Speaking of irredeemable, here’s the sister book (brother book?) to Mark Waid’s “Irredeemable”… “Incorruptible”! It’s not as accomplished a story as Irredeemable, since that one gets to cherry pick from a host of Superman conventions to tear down. This one has the worst bad guy decide if the world’s hero is going to now be a genocidal crazy man, Max Damage was now going to be a hero. The motivations are sort of there, but it’s still a little hard to swallow. Still, I like the concept, especially since, you know, this is at the end of the day a book about a good guy (mostly). Well, he tries to be good. He mostly succeeds anyways.

X-Men: Original Sin- a crossover between Wolverine Origins and X-Men: Legacy when it starred Professor X, it’s a lot of rewriting history that you get a lot of these days because a lot of comic creators are, you know, creatively bankrupt. Eh, skip it.

Already talked about the Goon.

Did I talk about Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana? Well, if I didn’t, long story short is there is no story. It’s a bunch of stuff that sort of happens, but the writer is so intent on putting the pieces together of “how would you go back in time to advance society so things chugged along a bit quicker than they did?” that he completely misses the point of storytelling. Except as a ‘what not to do when writing a story’ there’s no point to reading this. Plus, it’s a killer on the eyes to get through.

Two Generals by Scott Chantler- a well researched and sweet story about this Chantler fellow’s grandfather in WW II, with an excellent animated art style. Someone should get this made into an animated film, that’d be a real coup for Canadian culture. The comic is good too, but no one is really going to hear about it if it isn’t a movie of some sort. Unfortunately.

The first volume of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s award winning 100 Bullets. A mostly rotating cast of characters are used to answer the question- if you could get away with murder, especially against someone who wronged you, would you? The form of the story is so strict that it stretches the creative muscles to answer differently with each new character- but they would completely answer differently, of course. It’s like writing a sonnet, it’s restrictive to not write in free verse, but it also gets your brain working, and there’s a flow to it all. I didn’t think I’d like this book, but now that I know what it’s all about I really see the appeal.

Kick-Ass! Finally read the book that the movie was based on. Yes, it is much different from the movie… not necessarily in what happens, there are only two things that are particularly different, but those two things greatly change the tone of the story. I prefer the film one, it’s both more off the wall AND more realistic, and the main character is a better person than in the comic. That’s because all the changes for the movie are to change the central thesis of the comic book: that only an asshole would be a super hero. That’s evident in how the movie version doesn’t even consider how his father would be devastated if he got killed, where the comic version realizes it, but then does it anyway because he’s addicted to it. Then there’s the Big Daddy conundrum- in the comic he just becomes a super hero and ruins his daughters childhood because… again, asshole, wanted to be special. The film version actually did have a wife that was killed- movie Big Daddy really was everything he said he was. The other big difference is that movie Kick-Ass gets the girl in the end, and comic book one gets made fun of by the girl and tormented a little. I felt the movie version was more accurate- the kid becomes a world wide sensation, lame though it was he was a hero, sure he’ll get the girl. However, now that I’ve read the comic I do get why comic Kick-Ass doesn’t get her… because he doesn’t deserve to. He isn’t a good person, again, that was the whole thesis of the comic. I’m not surprised that he isn’t popular. He kinda sucks. Anyways.

Volume 5 of Tom Strong, I’ve actually read this before, but I forgot that when I picked it up at the library. Whatever, it’s still good. The best, and saddest (I mean saddest for us real people/most snaptacular) is the last story where Tom’s world is changed so that his adventurous life and family was all a delusion, and he’s just some normal guy in the real world. He snaps out of it when, as he tells us in the epilogue after the fact, “The world that Morovia created, the world I was imprisoned in… it was a terrible place. The skies were always gray, the politicians were all liars, the people lived in loneliness and fear. There was no sense of adventure or wonder… and my life was so empty. Without you and your mother, without our friends. And I just realized no place like that could actually exist… outside the mind of a madman, that is. And that realization broke the spell. Simple as that.”

Volume one of Kill Shakespeare. It’s cool, my buddy Owen has a story in the back as illustrated by J. Bone, which is an awesome fact. It’s alright.

Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America, the first volume of the second Invisibles series. It’s all magicy stuff, mostly nonsensical, but at least the author avatar is a bit less of a Mary Sue this time out. It’s not really my thing, but I love Morrison, so I have to read through it regardless.

Victorian Undead: Sherlock Holmes vs Zombies. It’s Sherlock Holmes, making none of the usual dumb mistakes associated with zombie stories (lucky for Watson, eh what?) and there are huge side burns everywhere. What’s not to love about this? Could use more deer stalker cap, even though that’s an affectation added by the film serials or somewhere.

Volume 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. I think I already talked about this one.

Filthy Rich by Brian Azzarello. It’s a crammed black and white book which makes it hard to tell what’s going on and who’s who sometimes, but pretty good all in all. You have to remember the protagonist isn’t a good guy… or maybe you should forget. That way the Stephen King/Twilight Zone ending won’t bother you. Not that it’s supernatural at all, just that the guy is determined to kill this one woman who wronged him at the first opportunity. By that point he’s become her driver, so I don’t know what he’s waiting for, but whatever. It’s pretty good, kind of a lame mystery, and again, I prefer good guy protagonists.

Patsy Walker: Hellcat. A bubble gum comic. It’s alright, though you have to be really well versed in “comic-ese” to understand a bunch of it. It’s fast and silly, kind of too silly for me, which is, you know, REALLY silly. The main story of two (both written by Kathryn Immonen) is ultimately anti-climactic. Ah well.

I don’t mean to shock you, but “After the Golden Age” by Carrie Vaughn is actually a novel, not a comic. What?!? Isaac can read books too?? Yes, I’m a man of many talents. But don’t get too excited, it’s still about super heroes. Anyways, I applaud the effort, but there are a lot of missteps in the story here, the universe is too small to make the mystery that difficult, and the ending straight up sucks. We spend the whole novel seeing what a jerk the superman analogue is to his powerless daughter, and then at the end he swoops in, saves her just in time, but is killed in the process, and then, two or three years later, she’s talking about what a good grandfather he’d have been. INncorrect. There was little evidence to support that he was even a decent father, so the entire ending is sappy and disingenuous. A couple of flashbacks to him BEING a good father would’ve cleared that up nicely though.

And yeah, that’s all the books. Now they can go back to the library and I can hopefully not get fines.