I wrote some comic reviews over at my blog, but I’m cross-posting here. Because - er - this thread needs more comments, sez I.
BAYOU Vol 1: Jeremy Love’s Bayou is being serialised on DC’s web initiative Zuda, so there’s no need for you to buy it to read it. You probably will anyway. Chatting to a London shop-staffer, and he talked about how Freakangels was the Avatar book which got most people coming in and asking after it - despite the fact you can get it for free. I think it’s even more so with Bayou, which is a book which demands a physical artifact. Set in the American 19th Century South, it’s kind of an earlier-period Alice with the parlour-game concerns of the English Upper/Middle Classes replaced with a fantasy woven from the South’s history of slavery and civil-war. It’s emotionally direct, beautifully cartooned and pretty much essential.
YOUNG LIARS, Vol 2: MAESTRO: Or the point where The Young Liars turned its engine up from pretty mental to FULL BORE MENTAL! HANG ON! IT’S COMING APART IN MY HANDS! I’ve bought in the trade despite having the issues, which I burned through the first 13 issues off in an enormous rush and then proceeded to immediately lend out to a friend so I could have someone to talk to about it. I don’t even know if it’s any good or not. In the classic sense, it’s gone beyond being merely credible, to being actively incredible. It’s alive and beautiful and - perhaps inevitably - it’s been announced that its been cancelled and will wrap up at Issue 18. Lapham promises an ending, but even if it just stopped, it’s worth buying into this. Hallucinogenic pop comics which reminds me of a lot of the odder Vertigo material which has become scarcer in recent times, in favour of more grounded material. The best of which are as good as Vertigo has ever been, but not literally as mad. It’s… hell, put it like this: It’s telling that Peter Milligan wrote the intro for this baby. In short, Young Liars is like an orgasm, but cleverer.
CROSSED 4, 5: I caught up with a bunch of Vertigo I missed. Things aren’t quite as grim as the opening three - the third, especially, was about as Dark as even Ennis ever gets. Still brutal, volume-up post-apocalypse post-zombie-genre horror, but setting up more detailed character work.
ABSOLUTION 0: Cheap introduction to Christos Gage’s long-awaited Avatar Superhero comic. As the interview material has put it, the Superhero as Serial Killer. Compelling and driven. As I like to say when watching the SHIELD, “No Good Can Come Of This”.
ANNA MERCURY 2: ULTRASPACIAL DREADNOUGHT VANAHEIM 1: When I write that title, it does sound like the world’s best football game. Anna Mercury is Ellis hitting that Smart Action-Movie itch. No-one writes fight scenes as visceral as Ellis in the anglophile market, and Mercury’s a place to play with that, some cross-spacial space-fun and the phrase “Ultraspacial Dreadnought Vanaheim”. Mercury’s the star, of course. I think she’s a genuinely clever pop-character design, in how she walks a few lines which are terribly easy to fall over.
IGNITION CITY 1,2,3: Finally got hold of a copy of 1 so I could actually read this. Deadwood with Pulp Science Fiction heroes, as implied. Downbeat, vicious, sad. I may write more on this anon, but Ellis in disappointed-futurist mode is always something that resonates.
UNWRITTEN 2: Forgot to pick this up, despite asking where it was. I got distracted by lasers or something. Bring up because the first issue was probably the strongest introduction to a new Vertigo series since Y: The Last Man’s. Carey’s last Vertigo book, Crossing Midnight, always seemed slightly overlooked, which is a shame as it was deeply atmospheric. I suspect that may have partially been due to its slow first issue. THE UNWRITTEN, conversely, motors. And it motors for a dollar for the first issue. Good nature-of-stories fantasy.
INCOGNITO 3: Man, I forgot this one too.
KG
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