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September 08, 2005
Subway Reading: Express Line
If you're going to be in Chicago this weekend, and you find yourself in the market for something to do on Friday night, why not hop down to the Rowland Contemporary Art Gallery for the opening of their "Cold Cuts" show? I will be there, along with my wife Amy, whose amazing artwork will be gracing the walls! Follow the link for more information. Speaking of Chicago, I probably won't get to the comic store before I leave New York tonight, so if anybody knows a good Chicago comic shop, please leave a comment and let me know. You don't want me to be stuck without any new comics this week, do you?
I'm going to run through some reviews quick and dirty-like. I'm not even going to slow down long enough to keep the spoilers out, so consider yourself warned...
Astonishing X-Men #12 - The end of this book was the most fan-fictionish moment in Joss Whedon's run so far, and that's no small feat compared to what we've already seen. The forced melodrama was dripping off the page when Cyclops et al turned their backs on Xavier at the end and old baldy hung his head in shame. Hadn't this fem-bot for which they were all so sympathetic spent the last 5 3/4 issues trying to murder them? In fact, hadn't it already killed one of their students? But hey, why let logical, believable characterization get in the way of cheap, manufactured soap opera-quality drama? Just when my eyes couldn't roll any farther back in my head, Whedon finds a few more inches of Chris Claremont's rectum into which he can climb with that last-page reveal. In a way, it's impressive how thoroughly they've undone everything Grant Morrison did with The X-Men in favor of Claremont's 20-year-old ideas. Ugh, ugh, UGH, stop the ride so that I can get off and throw up.
Revelations #1 - I didn't find artist Humberto Ramos' cartoony style to be a bad fit for the tone of the story. In fact, I think it was a good fit because it kept me from trying to take the story too seriously. Paul Jenkins' Vatican murder mystery had a bit of a trite air to it, but the dialogue and pacing were snappy enough to keep me from dwelling on the stock nature of the plot and the characters. Ramos' stylized art sometimes ventures a little too far, giving his figures freakish disfigurements that I don't think he intends. For example, black dots for eyes are fully acceptable. Fully rendered, realistic eyelids and eyeballs are also acceptable. Combining the two by filling a realistic eye shape with black is just plain freaky. The coloring was also maybe a tad too ambitious; on the backgrounds, the lighting and textures do a great job of establishing mood, but the heavy modelling on the figures sometimes clashes with their extremely exaggerated forms. It draws attention to their deformities rather than complementing them, if that makes any sense. At any rate, I'd rather see ambitious failure than timid restraint. If only the story took as many chances as the visuals.
Fantastic Four House of M #1 and 2 - I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I'm enjoying the house of M books that I've read. I haven't read all of them, only this one and the Spider-Man series, but they're both fun "What If...?" stories. The best part is that the nature of the set-up prevents the books from the ultra-decompression that has plagued every Marvel comic book for the last few years. The way that these self-contained stories quickly cover the origins of the characters and get moving with the plot is the thing that I would like to see carry over into the "real" Marvel Universe once this mega-crossover ends. As for the Fantastic Four books themselves, I've never heard of penciller Scott Eaton or inker Don Hillsman II, but the two of them have some serious chops. Some of their panels are a tad overworked, but they draw with a Paul Pelletier-like classic comic naturalism that I find very appealing. It's a shame that the first issue of this series was so blurry and fuzzy; it looked like it was printed, scanned, and then re-printed and that did no favors to the artwork.
Posted by jdonelson_nyc at September 8, 2005 11:07 AM