Teratoid Heights

I finally got my own copy and read this. Matt Brinkman, of Fort Thunder fame, makes some nice pictures although I admit they took me a little bit of getting used to at first. Teratoid Heights is good, but it is the art that is the best part. The stories are too short and not always very interesting or funny. I think Brinkman's best work in this style are his Two Dudes and Skeleton Jelly comics. They can be had for free here which is a great thing since tracking down a copy of the out-of-print Teratoid Heights can be costly: the only copy availible used on Amazon at the time of this writing was going for $44.95!

I consider Jim Woodring's Frank Book to be a much better book in the same vein as Teratoid.

Conclusion: Save the time and money of hunting down Teratoid and just get the two free strips mentioned above.

One thing I must say about the presentation of the book, and most small press/indpt books like this, is that you really can't beat it. Teratoid is something like 6" by 5" in dimension and the UPC is on a sort of wrap-around bookmark on the last page which says "Teratoid Heights" along the other side. The paper stock is fairly heavy and stories are separated by black pages. It's very nice indeed.

Now I leave you with a hilarious frame from Two Dudes.

Holy shit the Black Hole collection is out tomorrow and it's a hardcover!

Get 'em while they're hot.



Hott.

Judge this book by its cover and you're setting yourself up for disappointment

The Residents: Freak Show graphic novel
by

• John Bolton


• Kyle Baker


• Dave McKean


• and some other guys

I love Charles Burns' art. I also loved the first 9 or so issues of Black Hole (the hardcover's out tomorrow, more on that below) that I've read and his Blood Club one-shot. So when I saw Freak Show's cover on Amazon, I had to have it. I didn't even read about it. No researching whatsoever.

If it's Charley Burnsy, it's gottabegood I thought to myself.

Wrong. It's an anthology of boring stories put forth by a band (The Residents) I had never heard of.

The stories are very short and not that great despite the talent behind them. Not unusual for an anthology. And CB only did that very nice cover :(

One Unfunny Duck

Well I've learned my lesson yet again about listening only to people's reviews on Amazon in making a decision to read a book. Not funny. Not clever. Not interesting. Trite crap that only comic book nerds can enjoy (and not the good kind of comic nerds). Had I only checked my old standby, these idiots I would've spared myself the trouble. God bless the guys at 4th Rail for without them I would have no 90% effective method for determining if a book is right for me. Do they like it? Then I probably don't. Do they even award less than a 7 out of 10 more than 5% of the time?

Why isn't it funny or clever? Mocking boy bands sound old? It is. Nothing new or interesting here. Mocking Oprah? *Yawn* None of it is even done in a clever way. All I saw in mind was a fat guy eating fries while leaning against a rack in a comic store and laughing in an annoyingly high pitch.

You want comedy in comics? Go read Matt Fraction's Mantooth. You want clever? Read Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You want biting social commentary? Well...hmmm...I hear Milligan's X-Force has some of that, I never checked though...anyways, point is, none of that is in this book.



Fortunately I didn't purchase this book but rented it from Books Free. It's like Netflix for books, including some 600 comics (of widely varying quality).

This guy ain't skerred'a no pants

Finished reading Frank Miller's "The Man Without Fear" run on Daredevil from the 80s. Gotta say, not totally impressed. Just reminds me of Voltaire's excellent line about how the man who thinks that every work by a particular author is great is a fool. Don't get me wrong, it's not horrible or anything, but for me it's definitely one of Miller's less excellent works. The first thing that I didn't care for was the whole mystical, clandestine group that Stick and Stone are a part of that supposedly influence people and events in the world in an attempt to keep things from going to some obscure dark side. They seem to be outside of the world and are connected to some fundamental truth that the rest of us are unaware of but where do they focus their efforts? New York city and some rich guy's daughter and her love interest. This doesn't make too much sense to me and isn't explained at all. Consequently, the whole 'secret group who controls the world' thing feels very lame to me not only here but most anywhere I encounter it. It's the only part of Brubaker's excellent Sleeper that I didn't care at all for. The next thing that bugs me is the whole theme involving Matt Murdock's inability to break rules. When Matt is pursuing Elektra through the park the narration explains this idea succinctly:

He could flatten the cops/It would be easy/But that would be breaking the rules/that would be breaking the law.

Not only is vigilantism against the law but so is murder, of which Murdock commits plenty of in this book. Where was that ideal at the end of the story where he's taking out large numbers of goons at the dock? I agree that they all deserve to die for trafficking children, but the character doesn't even act within the confines of the system that the author has constructed for him. Although it's still better than most of the superhero crap out there it didn't convert me into more of a Daredevil fan as much as Bendis' recent run on the otherwise silly character has done.

He couldn't escape pants

Seriously, this book blows. I have no idea why Michael Chabon is given so much praise. So he tells some fake history of a comic character he created. No big deal. His execution is boring. The character is boring. His history is boring. This is no work of genius. I didn't like Spiderman 2 very much. Not nearly as much as the first one. I blame Chabon's influence with the script. Seriously, I think he helped to make a boring Spiderman sequel. The first one is so much better.

**sigh**

The Chris Ware-designed jacket is cool though.

If he really wanted to reveal himself, he'd have taken off his pants...

Finished reading the recent Daredevil arcs Underboss, Hardcore and King of Hell's Kitchen (volumes 7 and 9 respectively) and I am surprised to say that they are very good. I know a lot of people are loving Bendis' run and I kept hearing about it so, intrigued by the hook of Daredevil's identity being out in the open, I finally read it. I was advised to start after David Mack's time on the title by my local comic shop weasel and rightly so. The part where Murdock kills the Kingpin and declares himself King of Hell's Kitchen was so great. The sequence where DD is giving the (i'm assuming 'usual') 'how many times...' monologue and the art goes from goofy to current stuff is great. I'm assuming this was done to accentuate the impact that DD is going to kill him after decades of only beating him up only for things to go back to the way they were again. And don't try to tell me he's not dead. That is such bullshit. I don't like how in later issues (within vol. 9) the Kingpin is only referred to as being 'gone for now' or something like that. Clearly, in Bendis and my mind the Kingpin was killed at the end of Hardcore. To have him come back would be purely Marvel's perogative at the chagrin of Brian Michael.

Despite how cool all of this is, there is too much time spent on drug dealers and the like. This 'war on drugs' crap in superhero comics has got to go. I hated how it was used in Will Pfeiffer's H-E-R-O and it bothers me here. Surely the Daredevil exists for more than that. But at the same time, the small point of 'drug dealing is bad' is felt a tiny bit. But overall, man, this is some weak stuff. That speech where he commands those in the bar, with Kingpin's dead body at their feet, to never deal in his neighborhood again is pretty hardcore though. I especially liked the touch with how he was wearing all of the costume except the mask. Nice.

In King of Hell's Kitchen there is again some silliness but it is so minor compared to the very personal and touching relationship between Matt and Milla. I really liked how Bendis conveyed that. It was especially poignant with Milla's description to Ben Urich of what it was like for Matt, as a blind person, to not be able to recognize his dead father's face. I had not made the connection between how blind people feel faces to recognize someone and his father's disfiguration. Seeing your father's face all fucked up must be one thing, feeling it has to be another entirely. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and admit that I did cry a little at this part. Still gets me.

So, overall, I really liked it and am looking very forward to volume 10: Matt Murdock's Murder Mayhem Mega-Arc: My Pants, Mister, My Pants.

Oh, and as always, Alex Maleev's art is great and particularly suited to Bendis' writing for the big red guy.

Madroxxxxxxxxxx

Picked up Madrox #1 tonight. Bought it without even knowing who the hell he is and what the story's about. I just saw that the good folks over at Ninth Art recommended it as book of the week.

I'm glad I grabbed it. It's actually pretty good. And interesting. I hope it only gets better. I am just gonna wait for the trade and check reviews periodically in the meantime.

In case you didn't know, as I didn't, Madrox is a character Peter David wrote in a 20-issue run on X-Factor sometime in the past. I've never read any Peter David before, and if this issue is any indication, I like what I see. The comic guy from Sci-Fi City spoke volumes of Mr. David back when he was relaunching Captain Marvel. I got one of those issues and I hated it. It really was crap. So, somehow, either I got dumber or he got better.

Probably the former. I bet that if I keep reading superhero comics I'll eventually accept any old crap re-christened "New Hat." It's inevitable. Everyone's saying it. Everyone? Who's everyone? You're eight, you only know your parents.

The Flash - Lightning in Captain Cold's Pants

I don't like The Flash. The idea is ridiculous, he looks ridiculous, all things Flash seem completely...silly. That said, I was bumming around Amazon and the Interweb in general and noticed people complaining that The Flash was too dark and not kid-friendly. I though to myself, by his very nature The Flash is a very bright and sunny kids comic. So this intrigued me and I noticed someone complaining that Johns was defiling the squeaky clean image of The Flash with things like lips being sewed shut and faces being ripped off (or something like that) in the stories. This made me even more curious. So I downloaded the Lightning in a Bottle arc (issues 164-167) to check it out.

Silly me, it isn't that dark or interesting. Very typical superhero stuff actually.

That said, what did surprise me was Geoff Johns' ability to tell a convoluted story clearly. Despite my realizations of the above within the first issue, I kept on because the writing had me hooked on the plot. I was drawn in and finished the arc even though I thought so much of it was so silly. That's a testament to the writing and I can see why Geoff Johns' is a fan favorite. He doesn't dwell on the goofiness of The Flash's rogues (which are entirely far too stupid and outdated to still be around -- in fact they are the biggest evidence of this title's deep need to be re-tooled), he just has them showing up and doing stuff. It is done well with a 'take them or leave them' attitude. There's no heavy-handed attempt at justifying or rationalizing their existence in our modern minds.

The plot itself involving a mirror-world, basically opposite of our own would've been much sillier (that word looks wrong) with someone like Waid (the writer GJ replaces starting with 164) at the helm. I give Geoff props for making it as interesting as he did.

One thing that really stood out were the similarities to some late 80's comics of a darker tone. For instance, the whole superhero-in-jail scenario felt a lot like Batman's situation in Dark Knight Returns, although I can't think of specifics. Also, the face of the head cop looked so much like the bad guy in Sin City's Family Values. Otherwise the art was overly cartoony where it worked well like when Flash's face gets slammed against stuff. I suppose the way this is done today isn't too much different but it is just so much more annoying when the current titles do it. Probably because most of Marvel's stuff nowadays contains so many teenagers. That didn't make any sense. Sorry, can't really explain it I guess.

Overall it was actually a quick and kinda fun read. My first and last The Flash comics. I guess I had to at least give them a chance...errr wait, I guess things get "darker" later and the character is reinvented...or something, I guess I'll have to get those to see what they're like. Expect an update...sometime.

Persepolis

Just started reading Marjane Satrapi's widely popular Persepolis. I actually was never interested in the book but I spied it on the shelf of my library and started it just out of curiousity to see what all the fuss was about. Well, I'm now almost finished and the book is great. The storytelling reminds me a lot of Rick Geary's style. That is to say, it is very accessible, informative, and entertaining. Perhaps she was influenced by Geary. I won't go into any more detail since there's so much information out there on it and whoever reads this will most likely have heard of it.