« Subway Reading: Stray Bullets and Young Avengers | Main | 100 of my favorite artists »
February 14, 2005
Subway Reading: Ultimates and Vimanarama
I've been going through a brief period of ambivalence towards comic-blogging lately. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm getting worn down by the steady stream of comic-blog hate. Why do people find it necessary to disparage fans for being vocal and sharing their opinions? When it's creators or publishers, I assume it's because they have a financial stake in silencing negative opinions about their work. When it's pundits from the "legitimate comic press" (a phrase so laughable that I hesitate to use it), I think it comes from insecurity. The ease with which anybody can set up a virtual soapbox for their opinions forces these writers to justify their own presumed authority. It's always easier to tear your competition down than to improve the quality of your own work, after all.
You know what? I feel better already. If that many people are upset about us, we must be doing something right! And hey, I feel free to crap on other people's hard work all the time. Turnabout is fair play. Self doubt aside, let's get to some reviews:
Ultimates 2 #3 - This was an enjoyable read, with a "surprise" twist at the end that actually worked. While the plotting was solid, I'm not sure how to evaluate the characterization in this book. Each of the heroes seems to have the emotional depth of a thirteen-year-old. Maybe that's intentional? I can't decide. Either way, the result is a story that works in a guilty pleasure, prime-time soap opera kind of way.
Bryan Hitch's art continues to impress. The panel where the aforementioned plot twist begins was especially effective. There's still a little too much reliance on giant head shots for my taste, but I suppose there's nothing wrong with an artist playing to his strengths. Maybe I'm softening in my old age, but I'm really enjoying this series. 3.5 stars.
Vimanarama #1 - Everybody loves Grant Morrison, and not without good reason. While most of the praise is devoted to his seemingly endless store of crazy ideas, his refusal to dumb down his writing with unnecessary exposition, and his mad scientist approach to the mechanical conventions of comic storytelling, one of the things that seems to get overlooked is his dialogue. My burst of hastily-concealed laughter in reaction to this exchange earned me some of the most irritated subway looks that I have received in quite some time:
Sofia: Okay. I think we just released the forces of darkness by mistake.
Ali: Good thing I brought my dad's hammer.
Maybe you had to be there. More specifically, maybe you need to see Phillip Bond's art to get the full effect of the joke (luckily for you, I scanned it and included it at the top of this post). His expressive faces and body language flesh out the characters. The combination of his deceptively simple forms and his fastidious, hand-cramping line style is very pleasing to the eye. The thing that stood out the most in this book, though, was the way Bond went to town on the compositions and layouts. The opening 2-page spread with Ali on his bike, the volleyball girls in synchronized dance-poses, and the townspeople leaning out of their windows lent a fun Bollywood dance-number quality to the story. But the way the bike leapt out of the foreground and the careful visual arrangement of the other elements were the things that really nailed that scene.
[While I'm on the subject of Phillip Bond, I am going to echo Cognitive Dissonance's call for a collected edition of Bond's "Vertigo Pop: London" miniseries. I read one issue of that and liked it so much that I made the fatal decision to wait for the trade. Two years later, I'm still waiting!]
I feared that this series might be a little too steeped in Indian cultural references for me to really enjoy it. I trusted Morrison anyway and went for it. I'm so glad that I did. Accessibility was not a problem in the least. While Morrison gives us the expected doses of sci-fi, horror, and superhero action, it seems that he is pulling a new surprise out of his bag of tricks: spot-on, schmaltz-free, character-driven romance. 4.5 stars.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at February 14, 2005 02:58 PM