The comics blogiverse is an increasingly diverse network of comics pundits, fans and fanatics — not to mention professional creators themselves — where one can find a variety of fascinating and/or obnoxious opinions to suit any taste, or lack thereof. Every Saturday (more or less), I’ll offer up excerpts from five of the more interesting, thought-provoking posts I’ve come across over the past week, for better or worse. Enjoy!

What I bought – 25 April 2007
Comics Should Be Good

Rogers even makes the book relatively accessible for a new reader, as Jaime writes in his journal (only chicks keep diaries, people – boys write manly journals!) about his problems with aliens called the Reach and gives us a nice overview of what’s going on. When Guy Gardner shows up, we get more exposition, as Rogers even manages to get in a short definition of what the Green Lantern Corps is. Guy also explains more about the Reach and their relationship with the Guardians. The two heroes go to Antarctica to deal with a Reach installation, but the only reason it seems to be in Antarctica is so that they can get attacked by lightning-bolt-creating, laser-targeted … penguin missiles.

I should just shut up right now so you can run out and buy the book. Yes, PENGUIN MISSILES! How neat.

Make Mine Amazonian: A Brief Review of Wonder Woman #7
Arrogant Self-Reliance

She killed Maxwell Lord because that was the only way to protect those she was sworn to protect. She may experience regret, she may believe that she needs to understand humanity in order to return as its savior, but in the end, She Is Not Human.

And therein lies the rub, Gentle Reader. I don’t want a human Wonder Woman. Make mine Amazonian. Make mine Other. Make mine Princess Diana.

Why do we, as a society, try so hard to make the Other One Of Us? Why do we try to normalize, insist, yes, insist that there is a “Normal” in the first place? Why do we pretend that Wonder Woman is less alien than Superman, when in fact, she’s not? Or even that just because Batman happens to be Bruce Wayne, that he is human, and therefore “Normal”?

Why do we need our heroes to be Just Like Everyone Else?

Graphic Novel Review
Supermarket by Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson

From a certain point forward, though, you find yourself watching a third-rate Quentin Tarantino film on paper, this agonizingly choreographed action sequence after that agonizingly choreographed action sequence, and then another and another, each ratcheting up the artificial “Oh My Fucking God” factor one mechanical notch at a time. There’s a lot of raw material here — the kind of High Concept Hollywood pitch fodder that works well when described in the most nugatory way, but only then. The Yazuka with a Samurai sword who poses, and says, calmly, “Submit to me,” before he charges, not waiting for a response. The bloodthirsty underworld gang comprised of Swedish porn models. Etc. Blah. High Concept can’t always carry the day. High Concept can’t ever carry the day. Just ask the guys who made Snakes on a Plane. It’s always about the execution.

Don’t get me wrong: on a moment-by-moment basis, every page, every panel, is eye-poppingly well-crafted, even the most violent ones (maybe especially those). The fatal flaw here is hardly a lack of what we call, in the technical parlance, chops. Wood and Kristian have both, assuredly, got chops, and chops to spare. On the strength of his other projects, Brian Wood is one of my favorite writers. Kristian Donaldson, whom I’d never heard of before this, knocked me out. That’s an artist I’ll be watching in the future, for sure. If the last chapter or two of Supermarket had been stretched out into, say, three or four more, allowing for better character development and more thoroughly extrapolated stakes-raising, if the slam-bang action sequences had been less archly imagineered, if the ending hadn’t been entirely too easy and abrupt after all that rigamarole, etc., then I’d probably have been able to recommend this book to you with enthusiasm.

Buddy Guy, Part 3
A Trout In The Milk

Then again, that’s what Archaia is all about, it seems: riffs, and not thinking so hard about them that you spoil the magic. For all the explanations of and enabling details about Robotika’s world, it’s not an extrapolation but a jump: it’s a universe that our own universe implies, but doesn’t require…it is, in the best tradition of 1980s dystopian adventure, the product of a vacuous shimmer between our world and its, the product of a particular species of imaginative inference. Fantasy, of course, with the trappings of comic-book science fiction. It’s allegory, I guess, or anyway it’s not not allegory. And I’ve seen it a hundred times, I think. Maybe more.

But maybe it knows this: things happen fast in it, refreshingly fast, as fast as an ex-Marvel Jim Starlin story — the samurai buries his holy sword in the floor by the end of issue #1 (which knocked me out, by the way), his brilliantly-covering rice-paddy hat is gone in an accidental stroke in issue #2…he becomes symbolically sexual, and symbolically impotent, and smiles about it (like I wanted Matt Murdock to!) two panels later. And meanwhile we have a new character who eerily mirrors our speechless, sexless, self-destructive master: who’s had his eye removed, and replaced, in a horrible backup-feature scene, but who’s somehow become the long-haired, laughing, apparently freely-emotional favourite character who’s sure to die in an issue or two.

Except, he doesn’t.

We mean it, man: Graeme doesn’t love The Queen.
The Savage Critics

There’s something really kind of sad about GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, the new Vertigo graphic novel by Mike Carey and John Bolton. Not necessarily in the content of the book itself, although it’s hardly the greatest thing that you’ll read this year – or even this week, arguably – but just the fact that it’s being published at all in 2007.

…this is clearly a grab for the fantasy dollar (and, in particular, the Sandman dollar; the press release that accompanied this – because, yes, I got this as a preview copy from DC themselves – begins with a pullquote by Neil Gaiman, and the back-cover copy states that the book “echoes the epic scope of The Books of Magic and The Sandman.” Mind you, the back-cover also claims that Bolton’s art “perfectly captures …the lurid underbelly of modern London,” even though there’s nothing particularly lurid about the art, and especially nothing that suggests any specific place never mind London, so perhaps YMMV, as they say), but it’s such a non-inventive one, literally retreading old ground and trying to recreate old glories, that it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. Never mind that Vertigo has, for better or worse, kind of moved past its Sandman-corpse-fucking days (with the obvious exception of Fables, although Fables is, unlike this book, good. Mind you, wasn’t the Fables anthology the last hardcover OGN that Vertigo pushed out…?) and yet this book reaffirms all the stereotypes and cliches about the imprint – What made Sandman so good when it started was that there wasn’t really anything else like it available. It had a sense of identity and uniqueness – a reason to exist – that this entirely lacks. As melodramatic as it sounds, a book like this doesn’t just rip-off Sandman, it’s almost disrespectful to the series in doing so.