More like Models, Stink...Am I right?

I was going to bitch about Models, Inc last month, but I decided to let the hubbub about this comic settle a little, and allow for the SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT.

Watching Tyra dress up a bunch of skinny girls in crazy outfits and yell at them about "smizing" is basically the best part of my week, so I feel I'm pretty inclined to like a comic book about models. Really, all I wanted from this comic was to see Millie the Model, Patsy Walker, and their model pals, dress up in cool clothes and have some wacky photo shoots. They could even fight a little crime here and there. I just wanted it to be FUN.

For a comic that's undeniably girly, and presumably aimed at a non-comic-reading female audience, there are some problems that maybe could have been solved by having a lady as a part of the creative team. (Paul Tobin writes this, couldn't Colleen Coover draw it? How great would that be?)

 Like this: 

 

No! Those aren't tights!

These are tights:

 

If you don't want people to see up your tiny dress and spy your lady-junk, all thigh high stockings are going to do is give them a better show. Tobin had it right, but then I guess the artist, Vicenc Villagrassa, wanted to draw a sexy picture, so he went with the thigh highs.

I'm aware that it's a minor detail, but I feel like it just draws attention to the fact that Millie putting on tights is just a plot device, so she'll go into the woods and (***SPOILER ALERT!***) find murder weapon and a dead body.

And let's talk about the fashion in this fashion-centric comic. I guess it's not as bad as say, Teen Titans or something. There are no thongs. But c'mon.

Belly tops? Comic artists need to stop drawing women in belly tops! It's not 1995. I remember Bryan Lee O'Malley once saying that he'd look at fashion blogs and UrbanOutfitters.com for inspiration on how to dress his characters in Scott Pilgrim, and I think that really showed. His characters always look cute, and current. Do some research, Villagrassa.

But at least Models, Inc is FUN, right? Right? Actually, issue two is oddly depressing: Millie the model has been accused of murder, so she spends some time in prison.

Uh, wheeeeeee?

I'm not feeling it. My Wednesday nights are going to spent with ANTM, thanks.

"Come Out To The Coast, We'll Get Together, Have A Few Laughs..."

A few months back, when Boom! Studios announced their plans for a Die Hard comic book, I did a post about the perils of licensed comics. This week, the first issue of Die Hard: Year One was released, and it only seems fair that I follow up on my initial blatherings to see how they did. Die Hard is not only one of my all-time favourite movies (my girlfriend Hillary and I make a point of watching it every Christmas, and usually one other time throughout the year as well), but probably one of my favourite film franchises as well—the only entry in the series I don’t like is the second one (I'm even in the minority of folks who think Live Free or Die Hard was actually pretty awesome). The adventures of John McClane are very near and dear to me, and I was pretty wary of seeing the character mishandled in a new medium. Fortunately, after some consideration and a second reading, I find I enjoyed Die Hard: Year One #1 quite a bit, and I think subsequent issues will smooth away any trepidations I had about the debut issue.

It’s July 4^th, 1976, and rookie beat cop John McClane is patrolling the streets of Manhattan in preparation for the Bicentennial celebration. As McClane tries to maintain order among the various tourists and pickpockets, some sort of scheme is brewing across the city. We aren’t given too much of the big picture yet, but it seems to involve a couple of crooked cops, a pretty young coed named Rosie who’s new to the Big Apple, a rich jerk and his shrewish wife, a creepy guy named Ira, and a hilariously mulleted and butt-cutted jogger. It’s a slow build, to be sure—mostly, we get quick introductory vignettes, and a few conversations to indicate that it’s all connected somehow. A pickpocket scam involving a female flasher and her male accomplice seems to mirror the larger plot, as the aforementioned Rosie is apparently being paid to wear some kind of revealing outfit as a distraction from...whatever the caper turns out to be, I guess.

 

The pacing of this first issue may seem positively glacial compared to most comics these days, but keep in mind that a comic adaptation of the first Die Hard film probably wouldn’t have much happening in a first issue either. I imagine Hans Gruber and his team would be just pulling into the Nakatomi Tower’s parking garage around the 24-page mark. I enjoyed the slow setup, though. The shuttling back-and-forth between the various parties was well handled, and I’m interested in seeing what the larger plot turns out to be. Presumably, some sort of daring robbery made to look like a terrorist attack is usually how these things go, right? Comics veteran Howard Chaykin (who, like McClane, would have been a rookie himself around the time this series takes place) handles the scripting duties here, with maybe a few too many narrative captions—most of the characters’ backstories and personalities are explained by an omniscient narrator, which you don’t get a lot of nowadays. Still, it sort of weirdly adds to the period setting—after all, this is how comics were written at the point the story takes place. There is some fairly off-putting misogyny on display here—one of the corrupt cops blithely slaps his wife around, while rich cad Walden Ford threatens his wife with a shocking comeuppance if she brings up the word ‘divorce” around him again—but, this isn’t a huge surprise, since a) it takes place in what might charitably be called “a simpler time”, and b) it’s written by Howard Chaykin, who is kind of notorious for writing about that sort of thing. Stephen Thompson’s art brings a lot to the whole package as well; it’s a bit reminiscent of Michael Gaydos or John Paul Leon (who, along with Dave Johnson and Jock, provided one of the three variant covers) in its practiced roughness. He does a great job with the period setting’s vehicles and hairstyles, and his Bruce Willis likeness isn’t too shabby either. He takes the actor’s look and makes it his own, rather than just tracing stills from his movies and drawing a cop uniform on him.

 

Maybe I’m being too forgiving, because I love the franchise so much. Or it could be that I was bracing myself for an outright disaster. It could even be that my love of 1970s New York as a setting is colouring my judgment (on my day off last week, I watched Across 110^th Street and Saturday Night Fever back to back, by way of example). Maybe it’s just that slick Dave Johnson cover. Whatever the reason, I enjoyed Die Hard: Year One a lot more than most of the superhero comics I read last week. Let’s hope the second issue is better than the second movie!

Archie Sunday: Going For the Lowest Common Denominator

The main story of Archie's Pal, Jughead No. 189 is ostensibly a simple tale of technology gone awry, as Archie and friends pay a visit to Dilton Doily to pick up a bit of technology:

But wait:

Yep, the device ends up inside of Jughead, with Reggie holding the remote, thus ensuring that hilarity will ensue. A fine story in the classic Archie mode, I admit, but I prefer to think that it is a pale, rewritten shadow of its former majesty, that it was once a cautionary tale showcasing the horrible repercussions that Jughead's years of poor eating have wrought on his gastrointestinal tract.

And so, gentle readers, I give you a series of out-of-context fart gags:

Of course, this being Riverdale, everything works out all right in the end, with Jughead's flatulence saving a crowd from a falling scaffold. Power to the pigger-outers! don't let the nutrition-savvy Man get you down!

Happy Sunday, everyone.

A Public Service Announcement From Task Force X

Summer in Paris! Task Force X, the celebrated Suicide Squad, are enjoying their first vacation in months, when suddenly:

An assignment! Children, it seems are unaware of the dangers inherent in common grocery-style plastic bags! Our heroes spring into action!

Demonstrating the quick thinking that has made them the toast of the civilized nations, the Squad quickly commandeered a gigantic helicopter and headed toward the nearby and snake-infested Eiffel Tower.

And then: deployment! Jess Bright, Dr. Hugh Evans and Squad leader Rick Flag manage to hold their love for teammate Karin Grace in check long enough to guide a gigantic plastic bag over the head of the similarly gigantic snake! But will it hold long enough to teach the children of the world a lesson?

Yes, desperation lends strength to their hands as they cling to sweat-slickened ropes! Will it hold? Will it?

Every television camera in the city is focused on this dramatic scene! Across the planet, millions of children pause, their heads mere inches from plunging into the depths of smothering, petroleum-derived funeral shrouds, their very future hinging on the outcome of this titanic battle between the forces of Man and Nature!

Finally, incredibly, the beast falls! Pudgy hands the around the globe lift plastic sacks from about their ears and dash off for a celebratory snack of paint chips! Task Force X has done it again! Yet more laurels are heaped upon their brows, until they can scarcely lift their heads!

Truly, this is a Golden Age, when such men and women are so dedicated to public service.

NEXT WEEK: The importance of not playing with matches.

A New Product at the Spa of Haunts!

Hey Teens! 

Do you suffer from unsightly acne? Do the other kids call you Crater Cranium, Butter Face or Just Plain Ugly? Now you can get clear skin in four easy steps!

1. Mix a Mint Julep.

2. Throw the drink in your own face (with vigor).

3. Turn into a horrific monster.

4. Finish with a cleansing toner.

What's that? Yes, I said "monster."

You'll turn into a ghoul who sucks the souls of living, or a zombie who hungers for warm, young flesh or even grotesque Frankenstein!

But with smooth, clear skin you can take anyone you want to the drive in (and murder them!)

A Creaking Door. A Scream! A Waxen, Blood-Caked Visage! John Has Risen From the Dead and Bought Comics!

Hello, folks! Welcome back to Living Between Wednesdays, the blog written by four busy people. This week was especially filled with events for all us Living Wednesdateers, but our usual semi-regular updates should be back on track shortly.

And now: the reviews!

Green Lantern No. 46

Flip-flop time! I have unearthed, I think, the root of my dissatisfaction with Blackest Night. There was a bit of hashing out in the comments section of my last post and I eventually came to the conclusion that I should stop reading the spin-off titles. And I feel light as air, having skipped Blackest Night: Titans this week, not that I was going to buy it anyway. Most of my problems with the whole event can be very firmly located in the adventures of DC heroes as they scrap with their innumerable deceased friends and enemies. By contrast to that very-quickly-boring scenario, the drama in Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps revolves around the interactions between the various corps rather than being solely reliant on dreadful corpse reveal after dreadful corpse reveal  – witness how cool the Sinestro/Hal/Mongul stuff is this issue. Heck, even the costume thing isn’t a problem, since almost all of the deceased characters involved started out as Lanterns of one sort or another and that’s a pretty compatible aesthetic. Sorry to imply that your story sucked, Geoff Johns – turns out that it was just piled up with a lot of similar-looking stories that did suck.

So screw you, Blackest Night spin-offs! You’re terrible and I hate you!

Batman: The Widening Gyre No. 2 (of 6)

As I said last time, I have no personal experience with the supposed soul-wrenching badness of Kevin Smith’s comic writing, so I’m going into this without expectation. That being said, this is the SECOND ISSUE, so I suppose that it’s time for some JUDGEMENT.

Hell, I don’t know. This is a really hard second issue to judge. I can’t decide whether Smith is setting up three or four themes that will be important later or just had half a dozen cool Batman moments that he wanted to write. Like, Superman shows up: will he be back? Is this meant as an illustration of Batman’s trust issues? Is it just a chance to have Superman call Robin “little shaver” (any points smith got for that, by the way, were negated by Robin saying “Wow. Just… wow.” in the next panel. “Wow. Just… wow.”, in my estimation, is one of the most contrived, overused, irritating and smugly deployed [witness how transported I am! I am a highly sensitive person!] expressions ever coined. Never, ever use it, I implore you)? Likewise, the issue opens with Batman tracking Fun Land, the obese serial killer from the pages of Sandman. Not that it’s not nice to see Fun Land finally get caught after getting off so easily in his last appearance, but is there any real purpose behind it? I have no idea!

I guess that I’ll go ahead and gamble the twelve dollars and get the rest of this series, and for these reasons: 1) That goat-headed guy has an unusually interesting costume for a Gotham vigilante. 2) I want to see if it does indeed get really bad, or if all people are blowing this way out of proportion. And 3) I just can’t deprive my fellow bloggers of the joy that I am currently providing them. Seriously, the comic shop was like a friggin’ comedy club yesterday. Tiina, Dave, Cal, Ben… everybody was pulling out their A material for this one. I think that a couple of kids who wandered in looking for Pokemon cards managed to crack wise at my expense. I feel like the Santa Claus of cheap laffs!

Astro City Special: Astra No 1 (of 2)

Ah, the one- or two-issue Astro City story, how I love you. Dark Age is a great time, don’t get me wrong, but it was the self-contained tales of Silver Agent and Jack-In-The-Box and the like that I fell in love with, way back when. Busiek and Co. have an enviable knack for telling tales that manage to hint at a whole heck of a lot of history to both their characters and their world, and this story more than many because it hearkens back to an earlier yarn, the one in which Astra Furst, of the super-hero team First Family, runs away from home to go to school and learn about hopscotch.

Now, having evidently aged roughly in real-time, Astra is graduating from university college, so it looks like she kept up that “going to school” thing from the last time we saw her. And… aw, all of my examples of how things have obviously been going on in the meantime are a little to spoilery for my liking. Let’s just say that a hundred or so issues of whatever nonexistent comic the Fursts normally operate in have gone by in the meantime. Of course, Busiek will never spell out precisely why things are the way they are, so I shall spend my declining years in an increasingly frantic quest for information on why there are three more members of the First Family now.

*SOB!*

The Last Days of Animal Man No. 5 (of 6) – I know that I would eventually get tired of the whole thing, but I kind of want “The Last Days of…” to become the next “Year One”. I could really stand to read more miniseries set in an indefinite and not-guaranteed-to-occur future and only beholden to the continuity that the writers feel like including. Sure, some of them would be terrible, but if only one in five contained something as fun as Whale Green Lantern then it would be worth it. No matter how it ends, this series was a great idea, well-executed.

Superman No. 692 – Flip-flop numba two: Remember how bored I was getting with the extended Superman family of titles? Well, I’m interested again. Now, if the pattern holds, this World Against Superman sub-story will go on about two issues too long and I’ll get bored again. Let’s see if I’m right!

I was, by the way, almost physically shocked to see the original Outsiders in a comic book again. Good show, I think.