world in progress...: Books & comics Archives

Books & comics Archives

American Virgin: Head 2006/10/11
American Virgin, despite the preponderance of protuberances, is actually more about faith than sex.

Between Hell & a Hard Place 2006/10/14
Brian Azzarello writes comics like I think they should be written ...

Comics roundup 2005/05/08
Fables: The Mean Seasons � Supreme Power: Powers & Principalities � Fire � Daredevil: Golden Age

Comics roundup 2005/05/21
Ultimate Daredevil/Elektra � Books of Magick: Life During Wartime: Book One � Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame

Daredevil: Redemption 2006/10/08
Daredevil: Redemption reads very much like one of David Kelley's death row episodes on The Practice.

Daredevil: Yellow 2006/10/23
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale recount the early, more innocent Daredevilling days, quietly contrasting the these with the grit of today's hero.

Doctor Strange - The Oath #1 2006/10/06
The tone Vaughn adopts reminds me of Roger Stern's memorable run in the early 80s.

Doctor Strange - The Oath #2 2006/11/14
The banter and down-to-earth dialogue continues with one literally-laugh-out-loud variation on the doctor's venerable oath, "By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!"

Elektra: The Scorpio Key 2005/05/31
I'm not sure how I feel about Brian Michael Bendis using someone so closely modelled on real life. I guess Hitler has made plenty of appearances in comics and I doubt Bendis was able to foresee what a defining actor the real Saddam was to become in 2001.

Ex Machina: The First Hundred Years, Tag, Fact v Fiction 2006/10/21
Politics and superheroics in one title don't quite gel for me (except perhaps thematically in these post-9/11 days), but the mix is unusual enough, and Vaughn's writing certainly intelligent and literate enough to make it a series worth reading.

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall 2006/11/17
Get it for the same reason you get Playboy: for the pictures.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Master Builder 2005/06/08
Wright saw architecture as a means of serving society starting with the most basic unit - the home.

Hanging Out with the Dream King 2005/03/21
The interviews are short and readable, though new ground remains largely uncovered. The exceptions perhaps are the chats with Colleen Dorran, who makes no bones about her displeasure about the ink job done to her pitch-in A Game of You pencils and Sam Kieth's forthrightness about the reasons for his early departure on the title.

Iron Man: Extremis 2006/10/29
I've never been an Iron Man reader, but do know that Tony Stark is the most high profile conservative, capitalist hero in the Marvel universe. To use the demons that attend this success to drive the personal story in Extremis is clever because it's so specific to the character.

Next Season 2005/05/03
Blakemore has a gift for descriptions that are inventive but not pretentious and of dramatising scenes that ring true but never cliched.

Powers by Bendis and Oeming 2004/09/26
The plotting is smart and inventive and the dialogue flows crisply. The art is stylised to the point of being "cartoony" which you'd think plays against the serious treatment of the subject matter ... but maybe there's something to Scott McLeod's thesis that the more abstracted a piece of art, the more universal and accessible it becomes.

Powers: Legends 2005/06/17
Powers is my favourite current comic and while this arc doesn't have the oomph of some of the other volumes it's still worth reading.

Pride of Baghdad 2006/10/17
Talking animal comics appear to be making a quality comeback.

Realworlds: Justice League of America & Batman 2006/10/10
The reason why the JLA book doesn't work has nothing to do with the premise, but with the execution. In contrast, the Batman story does work.

Shadow of the Giant 2005/03/25
The Bean books place the geniuses squarely in the real world of adults and global geodynamics. After a while it just becomes ridiculous to see these kids literally running the world. Not necessarily because they're children, but because he imbues them with an aura and effect that verges on the supernatural, something that clashes with the political/military SF paradigm of the books. And because often the adults around them are forced to act like idiots for the sake of the plot.

Sin City 2004/12/28
It was during the "Born Again" arc on Daredevil or Give Me Liberty (whichever came earlier) that I first became aware how often Frank Miller re-used certain themes or devices. The violent, yet weirdly sympathetic, pill-popping psychopathic killer obsessed with...

Supergirl: Power 2006/11/26
Maybe if I was still a teenager ....

Superman & Batman: Generations 2006/10/19
Overall Generations works. The inevitable follow-ups don't.

The Da Vinci Code 2005/05/16
The Da Vinci Code by and large lives up to the hype. It's a thriller, a murder mystery, a conspiracy theorist's wet dream, a lesson in history, art, religion and cryptography. But above all, it's a compulsive page turner.

The Hours 2006/11/27
Cunningham's elegant, circuitous sentences place you simultaneously deep within the subjective life of the characters and also objectively outside them. I'm intensely jealous.

The John Varley Reader 2005/03/21
The John Varley Reader: thirty years of short fiction collects eighteen of Varley's stories and prefaces them with short biographical notes. To be honest, I find myself disinterested in Varley the person. I tended to skip the bits where he talks about his life and moved onto the bits where the talked about his work. That said, Varley can invest as much in autobiographical sketches as he does in his fiction, and to the same devastating effect.

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