Random Chunk of Comics Blog

Hello there.  It has been a while since I’ve updated this here blog but I am hoping to change all that.  Every year after NaNoWriMo I pledge to write more and blah blah blah and I never seem to manage to do so.  All of that momentum gets converted into excuses and then I end up just not doing it.  Instead I get wrapped up in 20 billion different things I want to do and I end up dabbling in about a dozen different things but sticking to none of them.  For example currently:

I want to work on my game again I am coming back to it with freshness and vigor
I want to finish painting my tomorrow’s war stuff
Play more Mage Wars/Netrunner/Malifaux
Play/Beat a JRPG current I want to do FF4 again but there are other contenders, Chrono Trigger is looking awefully nice
I did want to finish The Honerable School Boy but I just did that previous to writing this.  Now I want to start a new book
Dr. Who.
Figure out how to work a Yoga routine into my schedual

…you know now that it is in a list like that it doesn’t seem so overwhelming does it?  I mean some of those things are pretty easy to accomplish others aren’t so bad.  Some of them definitely fall in on the leisure time side of things, and a few of them can be done on portable media.  So it looks like  I need to set up a war wall.  This is something I did for my first couple of NaNoWriMo books and it is something I very much needed to do for my last book to keep my on track…but I didn’t.  I will do that when I am done here.  The idea is to type at least 1500 words.  Right now I am going to let my mind wander and see what comes out of it.  I just started there and poof I came up with all sorts of solutions and I feel better about the stuff I both need to and want to do.  Break lists into sub lists and take things both on and down until I win great victory.  Life doesn’t have to be a mess.

So I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently.  I just reread all 9 volumes of Preacher finished the last 200 pages of Honorable Schoolboy, all the new 52 Green Lantern stuff, and the new 52 Superman trade.  I’ll admit I wasn’t taken by the Superman trade the first time I read it.  I wanted more All-Star ultra mythic superman and not Superman year one.  Upon rereading though I got over my case of the grumpies and I grew to love it dearly.  Holy crap that’s a good book.  I think the mythic stuff is coming.  It’s interesting, right now in both of the big two we are seeing a changing of the guard.  On the Marvel side Jason Aaron and Hickman are taking over.  On the Dc side it is Lemire and Synder.  All of them, cept for Hickman got their start with Vertigo.  Just sayin.  Anyway it is nice. 

    I kinda wish they still had Grant Morrison working on three or four books at the same time but right now it is just Superman and Batman Inc and that’s coming to an end.  Soon Morrion’s multi year Batman Arc will come to a close and what a massively amazing good time it was.  It is kinda astounding that they would let one writer have so much freedom with such an iconic character.  Over the course of Morrison’s Batman run we got, Batman’s son Damian, a reason behind the Joker’s madness, Batman being pushed past the boundaries of sanity, Batman being lost in time, Nightwing becoming Batman, and Bruce Wayne setting up a “bat franchise”.  The whole thing is massive, fun and you can see its reverberations in the other bat family books.  I think they will be around for years to come.  Just like his run on the X-men.  A lot of people criticise marvel because immediately after Morrison left the X-books they started undoring what he did, Magneto came back, the Stepford Cuckoos were given a stupid origin, and yet some of the stuff he did stuck.  Jene Grey is to the best of my knowledge still dead.  Cyclopse and the White Queen have stayed together forever, and the whole dynamic is just a little bit different.  I still don’t have the time, patients, or  desire to get into the x-books even if Jason Aaron and Bendis are writing them.  There is to much background mythology stuff that I just can’t bother with.  That being said I do mean to give the Avengers vs. X-men a read.

Speaking of which its funny.  Ten years later comic fans are still wringing their hands like children over the Marvel civil war.  I personally think it was a brilliant event.  It brought me back into reading Marvel comics and as soon as the Dark Reign was over with I lost interest.  For just a few minutes the Marvel universe had this fascinating, sweeping, narrative that has such an important and interesting message.  Of course no one could be bothered to see it for what it was.  They were to busy wanking their favorite character to see the bigger picture, bunch of crap.  Anyway the whole thing ended with Siege and once again the Marvel universe became books about people hitting each other and interpersonal drama. 

Now we have the Avengers vs. X-men arc and hey it seems like it is pretty much the civil war all over again doesn’t it?  But since it’s the dark phoenix returning and not super hero registration and the moral ambiguity surrounding that whole issue I guess it is easier for people to get their heads around or something.  I dunno it all seems like a bunch of crap to me.  I’ll give it a read sometime soon so then my moral judgement will have some weight behind it.

A lot of people seem to be shitting all over DC and it’s new 52 but I really bloody like it.  Instead of having one big fuck off universe they broke all the books up into little familys.  There is the bat family and all those books are interconnected.  There is the Aninmal Man/Swamp Thing books and they are basically, at this point, one book.  The superman family and the green lantern family both stand on their own and the green lantern books in particular are a hell of a lot of fun.  Before the new 52 they were getting to be a little bit to ridiculously grim.  At any rate I like this approach.  The writing across the line is pretty uneven but hey Marvel has its stinkers too and what I like of the new 52 I really REALLY like. 

So there’s that then.  There are so many comics I want to buy right now that its pretty mindboggling.  In particular I need the last two volumes of  Scalped, the last volume of Sweet Tooth and the next Delux hard back edition of 100 Bullets.  On the one hand I am furious that I have to replace 100 bullets.  On the other hand I am getting nice deluxe hard back copies which is nice.  Some of the bindings on my 100 bullets trades weren’t the best and it is one of those things I will never get tired of rereading.  In fact I haven’t even cracked open my first two volumes because I know once I start reading them I will go ape shit unless I can read the whole thing.  If they do the same thing for Preacher I might sell my old trades to finance the purchase of the deluxe books.  That would be snazzy.  Preacher is one of those things that deserves a deluxe treatment.

I still think Preacher is Ennis’s best work.  His run on the Punisher is great.  The stuff he’s written for Crossed is the best stuff written for Crossed by a mile and some of the best survival horror I’ve seen this side of Walking Dead.  But somewhere during The Boys he just kinda lost it.  Ennis loves to subvert tropes I get that.  He did it with glee in Preacher and he did it with grace in the Punisher but somewhere during The Boys he just got lost in what he was doing.  I own the first 4 volumes and I read the rest.  It is good.  It does that thing where he goes and explains everyone’s origin story.  I fucking love that it is one of my favorite things about Preacher and yet The Boys just doesn’t have the same heart and soul and without the heart and soul the over the top fuckedupery just doesn’t hold any salt with me.  Preacher?  That’s a different story.  Every time I reread Preacher I feel like I am a better person.  I don’t always agree with everything I read but I like it.  I like the idea of living with honor and conviction.  I like the idea of being good because there is just to much bad in the world.  I like the idea of owning up to your failures and learning.  We see Jesse Custer grow and change over the course of those books in such a way that we don’t usually get to see in fiction.  Preacher is long, and every issue is jam packed with text.  We see Jesse try, fail, try harder, get shafted, he literally goes and tries to figure things out for nearly half a year before getting back on course.  He feels like person.  Not just any person but a good one.  His flaws are not his limitations.  They are something for him to overcome so that he can be a better person.  It is just that simple.  I love those books and I can’t imagine reading them in any way other than a whole unit. 

Alright well I have a war wall to set up and on a whim I bought GTA 4 and I am really enjoying it so I might do that some more.  Bye kids!