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November 03, 2004
Subway Reading and Wallowing
Seems like the entire comic blogoshpere is alive with misery and woe about the election. I can't say that I feel any differently. But I am going to try to soldier on with a brief comic book review, hopefully taking my and everybody else's mind off of the revoltin' developments of the last 24 hours.
JLA #107 - As I've said before, Kurt Busiek has written an unprecedented string of amazing comic books this year. I kind of like reading JLA though I don't do it that often. I think it tickles some dim memory in my brain of the classic Superfriends TV cartoon. I watch that cartoon now and I'm stunned by the depths of its crappiness. But as a child, I didn't know any better, so I ate it up like a fiend. Anwyay, back to this comic book. Busiek and JLA seemed to be a can't-miss. Unfortunately, I think it did miss.
Many voters chose Bush because of his supposedly Christian values. This leads me to wonder: Where exactly in the Bible did Jesus declare that the rich should have their taxes reduced? Did I miss the chapter where he advises the faithful to slaughter 20,000 civilians in an unnecessary war? I guess I need to go back to Bible school.
Sorry about that. I intended to keep politics out of this review and by gosh I'm going to succeed from here on out. Comic books. That's what I want to think about today. Comic Books.
The cover of this book seemed to imply that this would be a story about the JLA fighting their extra-dimensional evil counterparts, the Crime Syndikate. Instead we got 21 pages about The Flash and Martian Manhunter on routine Monitor Duty aboard the Watchtower. Don't you hate it when you are lied to? I hate when a supposedly authoritative source leads me into a course of action by deceiving me. It's sort of like a president telling the country that we need to invade a sovereign nation for the first time in US history because this other country is about to attack us with nuclear, biological, and/or chemical weapons. Man, I would be PISSED if I later found out that there hadn't been any such weapons in that country for the last 12 years!
Ugh. There I go again. Well, all I have to do is make a couple of points about the art in this story and I will be finished. I will no longer be tempted to write something about the SICK feeling in my gut while I watched this lying fool stand up in my city and invoke the worst day in my city's history ad infinitum just to frighten a bunch of small-minded bigots into granting him the power to continue to trample human rights, destroy our environment, bankrupt our country, and fatten the wallets of his rich cronies at the expense of the very working men and women who put him in power in the first place.
The art in this book was lame. Unexciting. Uninspired. Isn't this supposed to be one of DC's flagship titles? If so, then why couldn't they get something more than a journeyman effort for the art? In the sequence where the electromagnetic avatars of Flash & MM enter into the electronic spectrum or whatever the heck that was, the special effects consisted of a handful of ink-drawn squares hovering in front of them. Whoopdie-do. All in all I was underwhelmed by this book. There are other comics out there that deserve my 3 dollars. Next month I think I am going to look for one of them instead. 1.5 stars.
Oh, and I give the election 0 stars! So there!
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at November 3, 2004 12:47 PM