I know, this isn't a game, and the one person who stumbles across this accidentally might be mad (sorry, Dad), but I've been swamped at work.
I sold my first commercial, yayyyyy.
So as such, I haven't been able to justify sitting on the couch and blowin' up aliens. I wish I were. That sounds rad. But instead it's mostly been working and hangin' out with the girlfriend and the friendfriends.
When I finally manage to crawl into bed with my achey, occasionally wine-drunk (less so now that Bachelor is over tbh) self, I've been hittin' the comics, and I've been hittin' 'em hard. So, instead of writing a games piece (I think I'm about 4 games behind now, I'll make it up over the summer), I'm going to do another comics piece. Because fuckin' a - I love comics.
1) New Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis / David Finch / Steve McNiven / Mike Deodato Jr.
This was one of the three comics that got me into comics. It was 2004 and I had just moved back from South America, where I couldn't do much about reading comics except for read weekly reviews online. But getting back home, I went to Comics Plus in Ellsworth, ME and there on the shelf were three #1's - Green Lantern, Ultimates 2, and New Avengers. Reading this book isn't tha different than blasting the bands and songs I was obsessed with in high school, and largely still listen to now. This book is my comfort comics, mashed potatoes for my eyes.
The story is pretty simple: The Avengers had a really, really shitty day and disbanded, until fate would bring certain key members of the original group and a few new faces together to fight the foes no single hero could face. Classic characters like Iron Man and Captain America were met with unlikely inclusions such as Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, and an entirely new character named The Sentry.
Bendis's New Avengers run buttressed the Marvel Universe for the next several years, providing an awesome place for comic events to get a little breathing room as well as additional context, and occasionally birthing its own events like Secret Invasion. It was a must-read for anyone hoping to stay up to date with the Marvel Universe.
Bendis's penchant for Sorkin-paced dialogue with a Tarantino-tone were always matched by some of the top artists Marvel had in its stable at the time, including David Finch, Steve McNiven, Mike Deodato Jr. (his debut Marvel work), Leinil Francis Yu, and Stuart Immonen. The book sounded great, and always looked gorgeous. The book managed to pay plenty of respect to what the team had meant to the MU at large, while also carving new territory for itself with a tone and place in Marvel history all its own.
Super fun book that's well collected in neat volumes as "New Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis", which are also incredibly cheap at instocktrades.com .
No, I'm not getting paid to advertise for either, but fuuuuck, read these books if you can 'cause they're more rad than two monkeys skateboarding.
2) Silver Surfer by Dan Slott / Michael Allred
Turns out any book by Michael Allred is going to be fucking gorgeous, and with a script as cosmic and weird as Silver Surfer, you've never known out there could be so beautiful.
I'm only 10 issues or so into this book so I can't wax too poetic about it that much, but I can try. I've always liked Dan Slott's writing but found it kind of derivative. You don't have to work very hard to find the influences he's drawing from, and in this case, Silver Surfer is straight up Doctor Who. The Surfer is called into protect a planet that shouldn't exist - that should by every right be impossible. Worried that he won't have enough motivation to protect the planet out of the goodness of his heart, they abduct a woman from Earth who won't be released until he succeeds. This woman, Dawn Greenwood, thought she was lucky enough to be born in the most beautiful place in the world and never wanted to leave her hometown (obviously in New England, duh, because it's great), but this rip out of time and space made her realize just how big the Universe was and the two begin adventuring and exploring together.
The book is completely in its own little pocket corner of the Marvel Universe and it's better because of it. It's not continuity-laden or drowning in references to other books, so it's a pretty solid jump on point if you want to read a Superhero comic that isn't really about comics, and is pretty gorgeous thanks to Allred's pop art pencils.
3) Fathom by Michael Turner
I bought every comic book Michael Turner ever did the cover of because that dude is just that good - he was my generation's Jim Lee. So, it's something of a crime that I never read the dude's creator owned work, but thankfully amazon two day shipping and the Fathom Definitive Edition were there to put me in my place.
Fathom is this insane book about a cruise ship that's been missing for ten years and when it comes back to port. Aboard the cruise ship is the entire original manifest but one additional passenger in tow - an eleven year old girl named Aspen who doesn't remember a goddamn thing before arriving on the ship.
Now an adult, Aspen is a marine biologist who specializes in underwater propulsion. She's brought a science lab called the Deep Marine Discovery - DMD - at 1200 ft. below sea level, where she's introduced to a craft that defies humanity's current understanding of... well, everything. It belongs to a race of humans capable of living underwater, who seem to have a deeper connection to Aspen than she knows, but one I'm fucking dying to keep reading.
This book I'm only a few issues into, but holy crap is it awesome. I started writing a sci-fi story last week because I needed to write something that wasn't a headline or a script or a manifesto for once and I feel guilty writing stuff that's not a game blog but I'm finding Fathom as a huge, huge influence and inspiration for what I'm doing.
It's really nice, and increasingly rare, to find a book that's written and drawn by the same creator - but it's always so interesting to see someone who only has to interpret his own story rather than try to understand someone else's and do their best to translate. When you're the author and the artist, you can blend things together in a way that two-people teams simply can't, and you're given more room to explore the medium, kinda like Turner is.
So far there are three main characters, and there have been several points where the same moment has been analyzed from all three perspectives and it kinda blows my mind that I haven't seen that more in the medium, but the dude, rest in peace, had made a book that was pretty far ahead of its time for 1998.
Not to mention the book is just oozing everything I love about 90's comics - messy line figures making them look like more like sketches than portraits, saturated colors, some pretty early looking digital color and inking techniques that make everything look so smooth, and some real fuckin' cheesecake character designs. The women are so out of proportion it's hilarious and the dudes are even worse. This comic is a moment in time that's captured forever on paper and I'm thrilled beyond all-hell that it'll stay like that forever.
4) The Boys by Garth Ennis / Darick Robertson
If Planetary, a book I mentioned in a previous post, is a critique of superhero comics and a meta-analysis of comics at large, then The Boys is a middle finger to superhero comics while shoving an airhorn up its ass.
If that sounded crass, don't blame me, blame the book. It's some of the most outrageous, dark and depraved shit I've ever read, and not just in a comic. Imagine the rat/pvc pipe scene from American Psycho but for 60+ issues and all, the goddamn, time. I can only read a few issues before taking a break but it's super fun and crazy shit.
The book premise is pretty simple - in a world where there are over 200,000 super heroes, there's also a CIA team created to keep them in check, because it turns out the powers, the fame, and the lack of accountability has gone to their fucking heads and they're monsters because of it. There's a sex-addict version of Batman who literally fucked a cup of coffee. There's a version of the Teen Titans where a dude was keeping a hamster in his pants.
This is a fucked up book but it's a gripping read, because you're trying to see the next superhero you loved since childhood distorted to the nth degree, but still within recognition and you get that sobering moment of acknowledging "Yeah, in real life, they probably would be this fucked up".
I had to stop reading it on the bus. That's how bad it can get. But fuck is it satisfying seeing a real piece of shit get the stuffing stomped out of him. Robertson knows just how much viscera is enough viscera to make you uneasy without making you throw up.
5) Ultimate Thor by Jon Hickman / Carlos Pacheco
Pseudo Prequel/pseudo super-prequel to Marvel's The Ultimates, this four issue series talks about the last days of Asgard and whether or not Thor is actually a Norse God reincarnated on Earth or just crazy.
There's some powerful imagery in the beginning and end of the book - it's pretty rad seeing the SS team up with frost giants and try to invade a realm of Gods, there's no denying that. And there's some clever loose-end-tying that goes on in the end, but ultimately (heh), I found this series to be a bit superfluous. It comes out after we've already established that Thor absolutely is a reincarnated Norse God, so what was the point?
The art leaves me a bit conflicted, because on one hand, how the hell can you not love the pencils Pacheco turns in? The dude is a master of making fun, kinetic panels that jump off the page and might just be one of the best "comic book" artists out there. The dude is just such a great example of the pulpy nature of the books, while offering clean, beautiful lines that allow plenty of color to pop.
That said, it feels like a bit of a mismatch for the Ultimates Universe. Founded to be a bridge between the movies Marvel was producing in the early 2000's and the rest of Marvel's publishing line, Ultimates comics, especially the first two volumes of The Ultimates proper, felt so fucking cinematic it's still hard to believe those issues are 10+ years old. They look like jpegs someone ripped from a movie and laid out carefully on a page. This book however feels like what happened to the rest of the Ultimates line - just another book.
It's still a goddamn gorgeous book, but tonally off. Though it feels reductive to sit here and criticize a guy who isn't Bryan Hitch for not drawing more like Bryan Hitch, it's more a of a presentation problem than an execution problem. And again, I can't stress enough - it's gorgeous, just off.
I'm lucky enough to live near a pretty cool shop that threw this into a purchase just to get rid of it, so as far as free books go, it's not bad, but unless you're trying to fill out a collection of everything Hickman has done, or every story from the Ultimate Universe I'd probably pass on this one.