A few comic types that passed before my eyes, more recent than most of my reading, courtesy of the Toronto Public Library
MONSTERS by Barry Windsor-Smith
DRAGON HOOPS by Gene Luen Yang
THE DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH vol. 1 by Martin Simmonds & James Tynion IV
THE WICKED + THE DIVINE vol. 1 by Jamie McKelvie & Kieron Gillen
BATMAN/FORTNITE - ZERO POINT by Christos Gage, Reilly Brown, Christian Duce, etc.
PAUL AT HOME by Michel Rabagilati
This is a long-in-progress book by Windsor-Smith which began as a Hulk story for Marvel back in the 1980s, eventually growing into over 360 pages in this mess published earlier this year. You can still see the super-hero story in the genesis of it, and in fact it's hard to see how major parts of the story make any sense if you don't know it was a Hulk story, which the book itself (and any of the official publicity material) doesn't mention. Absent the Hulk backstory the "modern" framing sequence (set in 1964/1965) it a bit incongruous with the bulk of the book, told in flashbacks within flashbacks set in the 1940s. There's also an uneasy mix of Nazi genetic science-fiction mixed with some Stephen King style fantasy horror straight out of The Shining, which might work in a Marvel Universe story where by definition all those things can co-exist, but not as well in a stand-alone book.
Not that there isn't a lot worth looking at in the book. At his best Windsor-Smith is an innovative stylist with an intricate pen-and-ink style that really rewards slowing down and spending time poring over each image. Unfortunately in the long gestation process for the book, those parts are spread out in the book, and there are parts which feel more like one of the many artists he inspired over the years. Still attractive for the most part, but with detail that feels more like noodling without really adding too much. The writing is also stretched a bit thin, with scenes going on far too long, repeating points that have already been made. It's not hard to see this thing being winnowed down to a much stronger 100-page book.
Overall worth taking a look at at for the parts that succeed, as they reach quite a high level, but hard to recommend the overall book.
This is the latest major solo book published last year from Yang, following AMERICAN BORN CHINESE in 2006 and BOXERS & SAINTS in 2013 (he's done a lot of other comics as writer only in the interim, both original concepts and work-for-hire). For the most part it's a documentary look at a season of a high school basketball team. Of course, like most modern documentarians, Yang makes the story a lot larger, both by extensive digressions into the history of basketball and by making the story about himself, both as a teacher at that high school and as the creator of this book.
I had mixed feelings about this book. For the most part I'm like Yang in the early part of the book, not really caring about sports. He comes around based on his personal connection to the team in the process of creating this book, but for the most part I really don't. So the history of basketball sections I really didn't care about, while the story of the team did have some points of interest in the personal stories of the players, too much of it was taken up with the actual play on the court, which was hard for me to follow. So as easy as it is to make fun of the documentarian for making the story about himself (something Yang himself attempts to diffuse by confronting it head-on) the only part of the book I found consistently engaging was the autobiography, set around the time Yang began to write super-hero comics for DC on a regular basis.
All in all worth taking a look at. My memories of his earlier books are a bit faint, I'll have to go back and re-read them some day, but I think I liked it better than BOXERS & SAINTS but not as much as AMERICAN BORN CHINESE.
This collects the first five issues of the still on-going book that started last year. Looks like it's doing pretty well, so it'll probably keep running for quite a while. I might check back in when it's got a more satisfying chunk to experience, five or six books in. What we get in here is okay, but nothing too groundbreaking. The story is about conspiracy theories, with the twist that while they aren't true, enough belief in them can turn them true. So far it's just second rate X-Files stuff, but it has the potential to turn into much more. The artwork is pretty good, so far just 1980s Sienkiewicz with the more excessive bits filed down, but that's a pretty decent style, and not one which Sienkiewicz is using much these days.
This is the first of nine collections of a series that ran from 2014 to 2019, with 45 regular issues and a number of one-shot specials. I read this early on, and put it on the list to check out when it was finished and all available. The high-concept of this one is that there are a dozen beings with god-like powers, who reincarnate every ninety years, living for just two years. The latest reincarnation takes place in the modern age of social media and pop culture, dragging various mortals (most notably teenage girl Laura) into their machinations.
It starts pretty strong with the first few issues collected here, although I found the middle of the book a bit of slog, picking up again towards the end. I have the next few books sitting here, but haven't been motivated to start on them for a few weeks.
This collects a recent six issue series featuring the Bill Finger created Batman sucked into the world of a popular video game. Personally I lasted about five minutes into the game the one time I tried playing it. I assume that was set in the Loop world Batman is in the first half of the book, where he fights random characters, resetting every 22 minutes (I must have always died long before reaching that mark). Of course, being Batman he's able to pass messages to himself across resets, getting himself and Catwoman into the next level, where they team up with various other colourful characters to escape.
It's all kind of mindless, but pretty fun. It doesn't need to be six issue (which, spoiler alert, all end up being just a prequel to more Batman/Fortnite stories in the future), one of which is just devoted to Batman fighting a member of G.I. Joe, but it's readable. The over-rendered art style isn't my ideal for Batman stories, but does the job. I ended kind of surprised that I might actually read more of this someday. Probably not for a while, until it looks like the whole thing is finished, but someday.
This is the latest book in Québécois cartoonist Rabagiati's series of semi-autobiographical tales of his alter-ego "Paul Rifiorati". The character ages with the cartoonist, so while the earliest stories in the series were about his summer job, now we see a cartoonist in his 50s, dealing with health issues, an aging mother, a teenage daughter, pesky neighbours and all the rest of modern life. Been a while since I've read the series (I don't think I've read the previous two books), but I enjoyed this one a lot, so I'll have to go back to the start and catch up.
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