Sep 22, 2008

Book Reviews @ The Temple

Well jesus, this has apparently turned into a comic book review section.  I'm almost only reading great books cuz they are all recommended from one source or another, so all my reviews are glowing!  And there's so many more on the list to read and they are so much quicker than a real book!  I'm like 1/4 of the way through a great book called The Blank Slate, I'll finish it some day I swear, until then...

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Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud - I heard about this comic, which is about comics, from a comic book video cast, and even these guys who knows all about this stuff said it blew their minds when it first came out 15 years ago.  I gotta say, I feel the same way.  I think there is some fundamental art theory in here that I just didn't know, so was surprising to me.  Just different things about style and emotion and purpose and language vs. symbols and things that didn't occur to me in comics that are sort of amazing!  I think it's pretty important reading for anyone who is into comics, 's cool.

Queen & Country - This is a good one, I guess.  It's about British spies, basically, focusing on a particular one.  It's the kind of story I don't really care that much, which tells me that it was written well because I was pretty interested to read each following issue.  The art is cool too, the style changes dramatically (with the artist) from mission to mission, which is neat.  I guess it has a lot of cross over with a couple spinoffs and even some prose novels.  I don't like it that much, but I enjoyed reading the main book.

We3  by Grant Morrison - Wow, what the hell.  This is a very short 3 issue series, but it sure does pack a punch.  The premise sounds silly, three animals (bunny, cat, and dog) bio & tech engineered into soldiers, the story of their break out.  It's rather violent, very quick, and very powerful.  It's not like its some grand moral statement - don't mistreat things, don't make dangerous weapons.  But wow it is so awesome in its short breath.

The King by Rich Koslowski - Um, ok.  This is the same guy who did Three Fingers, which I loved.  It's a story about a new elvis impersonator who is changing people's lives and maybe isn't an impersonator after all.  It's a fun book, a quick read, but I think maybe its thesis has been done better.  I think its more about mystery, as it calls it, or the purpose of faith.  It was okay, but if you want a good story with the same theme, go read The Life of Pi, which is an amazing book about faith, and that's coming from a very unreligious person.

Scud The Disposable Assassin  by Rob Schrab - Meh, this isn't for me.  It's about this robot assassin that goes rogue.  It's super crazy over the top surreal cartoony.  It's got a ridiculous sense of humor.  Don't know, I had heard good things, just didn't do it for me.  I can see how it would appeal to some, but not to me, I only got 4 issues in.

Surrogates by Robert Venditti - Quick little read about a different kind of future, where everyone controls robots to act as them in the real world.  No one uses their real bodies anymore.  It's a good story, nothing fancy, quick and effective.

Y the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan - This title is pretty well known, it got a lot of press recently when it finished its run.  Its a rarity in comics in that it had a defined length that wasn't a few issues.  It was 60 issues and the creator had that in mind throughout.  The basic story is all male mammals on earth suddenly die except one guy named Yorick and his male monkey.  The first few issues are just amazing.  It's able to point out some facts about our world that boggle the mind.  The last page of the last issues gives some stats about the % of certain professions that died with men, its amazing and sad.  I'd say the book didn't keep up this amazingness throughout, it got a little "normal" as the same sort of miniplots happened over & over.  But then they would throw in random throw away issues that were really great.  It ended strong, though the last issue is a future thing that I don't really need.  But if he didn't do it, people would complain about that too, so it's fine.  Over all, great book.

Fray & Astonishing X-men by Joss Whedon - I'm grouping these because of the author, obviously.  Fray is a buffy spin-off set a couple hundred years in the future.  It's an 8-issue thing.  Mostly fan service to buffy fans, I think.  I haven't watched buffy (its on the long list of shows to get to), so it didn't hold anything for me.  It's a good short story though.  The X-men run ended recently (ellis took over) and is Whedon's take on the team.  It's kept purposefully apart from the rest of the x and marvel universes.  It's a good story, but at the end of the day its just more x-men.  I mean, it's a big story, and dramatic and all that, but EVERY story in marvel (or dc I assume) is huge and its all the heroes and its the fate of the earth and people die and come back and die.  That stuff kind of lost its drama around age 13.  Anyway, both stories, plot wise, are just good, nothing great, but the writing is fun.  It's interesting to see Whedon in written form.  His dialogue is often quick and quirky, which you end up reading into the written dialogue, so that's interesting.  He is really great at transitions, moving from scene to scene or character to character in subtle and dramatic ways.  I also notice in both books when he does two parallel scenes or conversations.  In fray it was for comic effect, in x-men it was for dramatic effect, both worked great.  So these stories aren't blowing me away, but they are a great excuse to see whedon in a different form and notice some of his tricks.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis - Okay, I should not like this book.  It's set in the future, and its about a famous reporter, 5 years in isolation, who returns to the city and to reporting.  By the numbers, I should hate this comic.  The future is exaggerated, almost surreal, something that bothered me with Scud.  Technology is essentially unlimited, vice is commonplace, almost anything is possible.  The main character is a psychotic ranting over-the-top drug-addicted misanthropic shit-stirring asshole.  I usually hate characters like this.  I feel like creators use them just to be drunken pissants and yell at the world and their audience like their precious cranky perspective is so original or valuable.  Clearly, however, all this is a big setup to say that I really like this book.  I don't love it, anymore.  The first, like, 15 issues I was flipping out for it.  Then it started to drag and I got a little sick of his insanity.  Then it picked up again with some political stuff, and in the end is mostly about free speech, government control, and most importantly journalism.  Ellis uses this awful character (with an admittedly fantastic visual design) and society to go after not-yet-so-crazy shit in our own lives, of course.  And though I might not call it super insightful (advertising culture, vice, government control, freedom of press, religion, etc), it still manages to be a really effective exaggeration of those issues.  I have no problem with someone saying they can't handle this book, I'm surprised I can.  And I'm not douchey enough to think its so smart that if you don't like it you "don't get it."  But if you can dig the character design and world aesthetic, I think it is quite a ride.

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