Comment Policy
Offensive, harrassing or baiting comments will not be tolerated and will be deleted at my discretion.
Comment spam will be deleted.
Please leave a name and either a valid web-site or e-mail address with comments. Comments left without either a valid web-site or e-mail address may be deleted. Atom Feed LiveJournal SyndicationLOLcats feed
Friday, June 03, 2005
New Comics Day Joy
I got to explain to someone how to read manga. He literally had to have the method of reading from right to left explained to him step-by-step. But that's not the weird thing. The weird thing was that he came in and asked specifically for the "most violent manga you have." He left with Battle Royale, Arm of Kannon and Faust.
For some reason, Patrick Stewart's career was a subject of much concern in conversations yesterday. At first because, after determining that the world really would have been a better place if the Star Trek franchise had stopped after Wrath of Khan, we determined that the only good thing to ever come out of Star Trek was Patrick Stewart's career. Basically, if it hadn't been for Star Trek, we never would have gotten Patrick Stewart's brilliant performance as Sterling in Jeffrey.
And then Pal Corey had the most brilliant idea ever. Clearly, Patrick Stewart is ideal to play the lead in a film adaptation of Warren Ellis' Red. Just imagine Patrick Stewart doing horrible things to people's eyes with a spork.
There was a real easy way to spot which DC books had shipped late this week. They still had the old logo. It was even easier to spot the late shipping Marvel books. They said "Marvel" on their covers.
So, House of M came in, and I'm not surprised that it has started out as a slow seller. I expect it will eventually move, but I don't expect the kinds of sell-outs we've been having on DC books lately. I wanted to say a couple of things about it, based on my quick read-through. First, those covers. The variant of the Scarlet Witch's face coming apart in chunks was kind of creepy. And the regular cover, well...I suppose pastel-colored chunky super-heroes standing and looking off to the side is an approach to cover design you don't see very often. And I liked how the cover was very specific about the fact that it's the Astonishing X-Men who appear in the issue. Not the regular X-Men or the Uncanny X-Men. No, it's the X-Men from the book with the adjective that's actually selling and that most people seem to like.
Oh, and twenty pages of people standing around talking about the events of the Avengers: Disassembled story-line doesn't really strike me as the most dynamic way to kick off your company's big summer cross-over. Also, the progression of Scarlet Witch from subject to object has been very interesting to watch. She's gone from being a character with a distinctive personality and long history in the franchise to being the Macguffin of Magneto's latest plot to take over the world.
In the "In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue" department:
Comic books, and the films based on them, can appear to be creepy and misogynistic to non-comic book fans. I'm not really going to dwell on this one, partly because the piece is so poorly researched and bears an obvious pre-existing agenda that it really isn't worth paying much attention to. I'm actually more amused by the attempts to respond to it that others have written. I'm getting much entertainment out of them. Mostly they've been of the "Comics are NOT sexist trash! Why, I can think of, oh, at least two or three women who do comics," as if the mere existence of female comic creators negates any accusations of sexism in the comics industry, or of misogyny in Sin City in particular. (And I would go so far as to say that on a certain level the misogyny in Sin City is partly satirical. No one ever seems to get Frank Miller's jokes...) The only worth-while response to the piece I've seen has been Heidi MacDonald's article, which also has a focus on the responses and makes some very good points about comics fans not taking kindly to criticism from "outsiders," even when they're making the very same points that comic fans themselves make.
Atom Feed
