« Subway Reading: Ultimate FF, The Losers, Black Widow | Main | A Word To My Enemies »
November 29, 2004
Subway Reading: Sleeper, Tom Strong's Terrific Tales
You are hurrying down the stairs, eager to catch the Manhattan-bound F train that has just entered the station. Upon your arrival at the platform, you note that this train is already packed to the gills. You'd never be able to read a comic book in that sardine can. Your only hope is that the delays that caused this train and the platform to fill up also bunched up the traffic behind it. If so, there will be a near-empty train pulling into the station moments after this one leaves. You decide to roll the dice and wait.
Sure enough, another train rolls into the station 90 seconds later, nearly devoid of passengers! Excellent. Your instinctive feel for the rhythms of the New york City subway system has earned you a comfortable seat. You smugly board the train, select a seat by the window, and decide to reward your cleverness by reading that Peter Bagge story in the latest issue of Tom Strong's Terrific Tales.
Tom Strong's Terrific Tales #12 - The aforementioned Peter Bagge story is almost as much fun as you anticipated. Alan Moore must have enjoyed scripting this brief tale of the Strong family's dystopian suburban future; he mocks not only the characters but the book itself with quips about Eisner Awards and cold-cast figurines. Bagge's art seems a bit looser than usual, though it's still lots of fun. The second story is a Jonni Future tale, drawn by Chris Weston rather than Art Adams. It's enjoyable enough, though sort of one-note. Its middle of the road quality proves to be the perfect bridge to the last story, though, which is one of the most forgettable of recent memory. The art, by Alan Weiss, was shockingly amateurish. The "plot" is non-existent. To be fair, you've never cared that much for Young Tom Strong. But even by those low standards, this was a major dud. It left a bad taste in your mouth that prevents you from giving this book more than 2.5 stars.
Your smile has been wiped away. You could have weathered the Tom Strong disappointment, but the dark side of your "wait for the train after the crowded one" strategy is rearing its ugly head. A crowded subway train takes longer to board. Helpless folks trapped in the middle are trying to swim through the crowd to exit at their stops. Meanwhile, the knucklehead masochists on the platform are trying to force their way into the dense wall of humanity inside the car. This leads to more time at the stop, which leads to bigger crowds at the next stop, and so on and so on. Your empty train car and seat are nice, but they have to be because you are stuck in the tunnel waiting for the whole mess to lurch forward to the next interminable delay. You need to get your head out of the situation before you get consumed with impotent rage. Flipping through your dwindling stack of last week's comics, you find just the thing. The new issue of Sleeper.
Sleeper Season Two #6 - After 18 issues, you're starting to wonder when it's going to get old. It happened with The X-Files; one week you were on the edge of your seat wondering what was going to happen to Agent Mulder, what were the secrets of his past, etc... then the next week you found that you couldn't care less. After about three pages of Sleeper, though, these concerns always melt away. The 3-way manipulation showdown between Tao, Lynch, and Holden gets more and more tense each month, and this issue is no exception. The brief origin-flashback in this issue provides a welcome (though dark) bit of comedy relief in an otherwise grim and suspenseful tale. On nearly every page, artist Sean Phillips leans on the Will Eisner technique of a full-page panel for the main action, with supporting inset panels that move the story along. But he does it so deftly that you don't even notice it until you flip back through the issue after reading it. This is the kind of comic book that reminds you why you love comic books. 4 stars.
Brubaker's spell broken, you pull your head up. After two comics plus a backwards-flip through one of them (you do this to evaluate the art without getting caught up in the story; you're particularly proud of this little technique), you should be at your stop. But what's this? You're only at 34th Street? Gah. And now the conductor is announcing something about the train ahead of you being stopped because of a door malfunction. Stupid train-crowders. Always ruining it for the rest of us. You hop on the express train across the track, which is too crowded to pull out another comic. So you pass the time by dreaming up a silly gimmick for today's blog entry.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at November 29, 2004 04:02 PM