Category: comics

too many (digital) comics

I’ve been trying to be careful about buying too many comics from Comixology and via Humble bundles lately, but it hasn’t been easy. At this point, I have enough digital comics that I could really stop buying them altogether and still have enough stuff to read for the next ten years, I think.

But I gave in and bought the Garth Ennis bundle from Humble today. I have mixed feelings about Ennis. Some of his stuff is a bit too violent for me, and honestly The Boys may well fall under that category. But Battlefields looks interesting. The Beat just posted an interesting article about the way Dynamite has been using bundles. They’ve been more active than any other publisher with them, and I guess the economics work out well for them. I’ve bought a few of the past Dynamite bundles; some of their stuff is great, but I think a lot of it is mediocre and/or just not interesting to me. But with the bundle pricing, even if half of it is crap, it’s still a good deal.

Meanwhile, Comixology just introduced a subscription service called Comixology Unlimited. You can read as much as you want for $6/month, but it looks like the selection is somewhat limited. I think I’ll stick to buying single issues from them when they have a good sale. I don’t think the $6/month option would work well for me.

I’ve occasionally thought about signing up for Marvel Unlimited, but at this point I have so many unread comics (both physical and digital) that paying for a monthly subscription service just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Darwyn Cooke

I’m definitely going to miss Darwyn Cooke. His New Frontier series was just great. I have his Parker books in Comixology, but haven’t read them yet. Ditto for his Catwoman issues. Maybe it’s time to read those. Or reread New Frontier.

I saw him at conventions a few times, on panels. He always seemed like a friendly and thoughtful guy. He left behind some great work, but I sure wish there was more of it, and more to come.

Civil War

I went to see Civil War yesterday afternoon. (I took a half-day off from work.) I enjoyed it a lot. I like that the Marvel film universe has matured to the point where they can just throw a bunch of heroes into a movie and not feel like they need to recount everyone’s back story. The film is loosely based on Marvel’s Civil War series from about ten years ago. (I was surprised when I checked that and realized how long ago it was. Time is just flying by…)

I had read that series, and some of the tie-in books, when they came out, and I had mixed feelings about the event as whole, though parts of it are quite good. In particular, I liked J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man tie-in. There’s a really good sequence that’s referenced in the movie, though in a different context and with the dialog coming from a different character. There’s a good article about it here, with the original comic pages included.

Spider-Man is included in the film, on loan from Sony, which is kind of neat but also kind of ridiculous. There’s an article from the LA Times about how this happened, and how hard it was to arrange to “borrow” the character from Sony. Spider-Man’s appearance does actually add something useful to the movie: the perspective of a new, young, hero who hasn’t interacted with all the “big shots” in the Marvel universe, like Cap and Iron Man. And of course some typical light-hearted Spider-Man banter.

The movie is quite long, almost two and a half hours, but it holds up pretty well over that length. I think that’s a little too long for a superhero movie. A tighter two-hour movie would have been better. It will probably work well on home video though, where you can pause it and take a break, or watch it in two or three sittings.

FreakAngels

FreakAngels was a web comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield that ran from 2008 to 2011. I was aware of it while it was running, and took a look at it at some point, but I never got around to reading it all the way through, from the beginning.

Over this past weekend, I was looking for something different to read, and decided to start in on FreakAngels. It’s a really good series. It’s all free to read on the web. It’s also collected in six trade paperbacks. I was thinking about picking those up on Comixology, where they’re $10 each. But today, I was browsing through the discount trade paperback boxes at my local comic store, and found all six volumes in there for $5 each! So I picked them all up and now I have a nice collection of the whole series.

I got almost halfway through it last weekend, so maybe I can finish it this coming weekend. It’s a post-apocalyptic SF series where the main characters all have special abilities, and somehow caused something very bad that’s pretty much destroyed civilization in England. (It’s unclear exactly what that was, or what happened in the rest of the world.) The series is set several years after the event, when they’re trying to rebuild. It’s got some interesting social and science/engineering stuff in it relating to how they’re rebuilding, and how they all relate to each other, and how they use their powers. And it’s long enough that there’s room for a lot of character development and nuance.

I’m finding myself getting very involved in the story and invested in the characters, so that’s a good thing. I’ve been following Warren Ellis for a long time, and I’ve read a lot of his mainstream comics work, but very little of his more oddball creator-owned work. I should probably read more of that. And I should read his prose novels too. (So much to read, so little time.)

Bat-Books

I went on a bit of a bat-binge last week, reading a bunch of Batman comics. I read Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin 1-6, Paul Dini’s Streets of Gotham 1-7, Scott Snyder’s Batman 8-13, and Tim Sale’s Tales of the Batman hardcover.

The first two were in hard-copy, single-issue form. These were some of the last comics I bought from Westfield before I stopped buying monthly comics in 2009. The Snyder books were digital single issues from Comixology. And the Tim Sale book was a hardcover that I picked up at a convention some time ago.

Batman and Robin and Streets of Gotham were coming out at the same time, and dealt with the same characters: the Dick Grayson Batman and Damian Wayne Robin. Neither book really covers Dick’s decision to take over as Batman; I imagine that was covered somewhere else, though I’m not sure where.

Morrison’s Batman and Robin book was a fun read. The Frank Quitely art on the first three issues was great; I wish he could have done more. I’ll probably pick up the rest of Morrison’s run on this book.

The Streets of Gotham book was more of a mixed bag. Paul Dini wrote the first few issues, then there was a fill-in written by Christopher Yost, then Dini came back. And there’s an interesting backup featuring a new Manhunter character. The art on this book is by Dustin Nguyen. I loved his work on Wildcats 3.0, but he has a different inker here and the whole look of his art seems a bit different. It’s still good, but I was hoping for something more like his Wildcats work. I might pick up the rest of the run of this book, but I’m not sure.

Both of these books ran from 2009 through to the New 52 relaunch in 2011. I don’t really know if either book has a satisfying conclusion, or if they were just cut off in mid-story, leaving dangling plot threads. If it’s the latter, then it might be an exercise in frustration to pick up and read the remaining issues. I’ll have to read some reviews first and see if I can figure that out.

I’ve read only a few books from the New 52. I think the whole idea was interesting, and many of the books were well-received, but it’s all a bit too much for me to follow. I did pick up the first year of Scott Snyder’s Batman book some time ago, when it was on sale at Comixology. I read the first storyline a while back, and the second one over the weekend. I had mixed feelings about the first story, “The Court of Owls,” but the second one, “The City of Owls,” was pretty cool, and finished out the overall “Owl” story nicely. Greg Capullo’s art on this book is great. And the conclusion to the Owl story is fun and fast-paced. It’s really more of an action-movie Batman than a “detective” Batman, but that’s OK sometimes. I’m not sure if I want to read even further into Snyder’s run though. The next story would be “Death of the Family“, and that one sounds like it might be too grim for me. And I’m not that fond of cross-over stories. (The Owl story had a bunch of cross-over issues, but I skipped them, and still understood and enjoyed the story.)

I also listened to an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour today, discussing Glen Weldon’s new Batman book. It sounds interesting. I might pick this one up. (Though of course I already know more than anyone needs to know about Batman’s history.)

In other Batman-related news, I still haven’t seen Batman vs Superman, and I’m OK with that. I’ll get around to it eventually, but I may wait until it’s out on DVD.

The Care Package – by Jack Ohman

The Care Package is a short comic series that was posted to the PBS NewsHour web site last year. It was a really well-done series about the author’s father’s final years and death. I had read one part of it, and bookmarked it, but never got around to sitting down and reading the whole thing until yesterday. It’s quite touching, and reminds me of some of the stuff that happened in my own parents’ final years. (Stuff like spending so much time in the hospital that you know where all the good vending machines are. And dealing with c. diff.)

Here’s are links to all five parts:

Long-term care is a tough problem. My Dad spent a lot of time thinking about it, and weighing options, and in the end, for him, he didn’t need it; he went from home to the hospital, and died there. My Mom was another matter, though also, in the end, she didn’t really need long-term care. She went from home to assisted living, but died after only a few months there, and was in and out of the hospital that whole time. But I learned a lot about long-term care in that time, since I did a lot of legwork and research in trying to find a place that was a good fit for my Mom.

no SDCC for me this year

I went through the motions yesterday, but unsurprisingly, badges sold out in an hour, and I didn’t get one.

Today, I went to New York and paid a visit to the Met and MoMA. There wasn’t much going on at MoMA, since the Picasso sculpture exhibit has closed, and the Edgar Degas exhibit hasn’t opened yet. There were other exhibits going on, of course, but nothing much that was of interest to me. I think the Degas exhibit is the only one coming up that I’m really interested in.

At the Met, I really enjoyed the Power of Prints exhibit. There were some really great prints on display, from a wide variety of artists, including Edward Hopper and Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s not a high-profile exhibit, and I really just stumbled into it, but it was a pleasant surprise.

The Vigée Le Brun exhibit seems to be the big thing right now; it was pretty crowded. But I didn’t really get much out of it. It’s not the kind of art that really does much for me, generally speaking. The historical context is interesting, of course. Maybe I should go back and give it another look when it’s less crowded.

SDCC 2016 open registration

It’s just one more day until open registration for SDCC 2016. I last went in 2012, and haven’t been able to get in since. So I think I’m due, right?

The 2012 con, now that I think of it, was pretty much the last time I went on a real vacation, not counting occasional overnight stays in NYC and a couple of short trips to Georgia and Florida that really weren’t vacations. If I don’t manage to get in and snag a ticket for SDCC this year, I should probably plan some other vacation, just to keep myself sane.

logging comics on Goodreads

How Do You Count Comics on Goodreads?

Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s a little obsessive about logging stuff on Goodreads. If I’m reading individual issues, I try to find the corresponding trade paperback collection and log it as though I read the trade. (And I put in a note to myself that I read the individual issues, so I don’t wonder why I can’t find the trade on my bookshelf, at some point in the future.)

Oh, and I just counted, and 71 out of 96 books I logged this year were comics. So 25 non-comics books, which isn’t too bad. Some of those were novels, some were programming books, and a few were other non-fiction books.

Not at New York Comic Con

New York Comic Con is starting up tomorrow. I won’t be going this year. I was a little sad about that last week, but I’ve caught a little stomach bug this week, so now I’m glad I don’t have tickets. The Javits Center is no place to be if you need to use the bathroom every 30 minutes.

If I’m feeling better next week, though, maybe I’ll see about going to the “Superheroes in Gotham” exhibit at the New York Historical Society.