March 1, 2013

      Dave's Unspoilt Capsules and Awards
      Intermittent Picks and Pans of Comics and Related Media

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups.  Recommendation does
not factor in price.  Not all books will have arrived in your area this week.
An archive can be found on my homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 
 Didn't get the Georgia Southern job, but two more site interviews in March.
     
     Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): My Little Pony
Friendship Is Magic #3.

     In this installment: The Dark Knight Returns Part 2, Double Barrel #8,
Gygax Magazine #1, Gold Digger #145-146, My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic
#3, My Little Pony Micro-Series #1 (of 6), Young Justice #25 (FINAL ISSUE).


"Other Media" Capsules:

     Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e.
comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be
available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this
section when I have any to mention.  They may not be as timely as comic
reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two
(or ten) to get around to.

     Update: there's a sequel story for Seraphina that will be included
(along with other bonus material) in later printings of the novel.  The story
can be found at http://www.scribd.com/doc/97577759/Seraphina-Prequel-WEB
(with the usual caveats about link rot).


     Dark Knight Returns Part 2: DC/Warner Premier - Issues 3 and 4 of the
original miniseries are adapted here.  While there's a few tweaks here and
there that update it a little (i.e. getting Conan O'Brien to voice David "Not
Letterman" Endochrine with Rob Paulsen doing a pretty good Andy Richter
impression as the sidekick), it's still firmly a "1980s in the future" story,
complete with a President who is essentially Reagan and a strong Soviet Union
as a background threat.  Or perhaps it was supposed to be a "what if Batman
had aged normally since 1938" setting, I haven't really delved into the
scholarship surrounding DKR.  But the specifics aren't that important,
really, the point is that we have a satirically exaggerated version of the
time in which the story was written, within which an aged vigilante and
representative of a bygone time has to find relevance.  Or, as the
Shortpacked webcomic pointed out, scared old white men trying to convince
themselves they're still in charge and the world isn't slipping away through
their fingers.
     Some elements were a lot more effective as animation, with musical
support, than any static images on a page could be.  Most notably, the
sequence where Superman deflects the nuclear missile and nearly dies.  Where
Miller used the sort of narration that quickly became a much-parodied cliche,
the cartoon avoids voiceovers.  Everything is gotten across through movement
and music.  Similarly, we never hear Batman's internal monologue of
"mustn't...black...out", it's all pained posture and grunting.  And I think
it works better this way.          
     I wrote and deleted a lot of stuff about the political implications of
the story, but I think I'll just leave it at this: what had read like anti-
establishment agitprop when it was written now feels like reactionary fear of
the underclass.  Same story, different day.
     Well acted, well-directed, and it's still a powerful story even if it's
aged in odd ways.  Recommended.  $15-20 depending on store, I got the basic
DVD.  

     I got book 3 of Quest for the Spark, but haven't read it yet (saving it
for on-the-plane reading for one of my job interviews).


Digital Content:

     Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so, I won't be turning
this into a webcomic review column.  Rather, stuff in this section will be
full books available for reading online or for download, usually for pay.  I
will often be reading these things on my iPod if it's at all possible.

     Double Barrel #8: Top Shelf - These are apparently the penultimate
chapters for both Heck and Crater XV.  With Heck, that much i spretty obvious
just from reading it...he reaches his contractual goal, finding Amy's husband
in Hell (if not where he expected to).  While there's some introspective
conflict this time, it's a lot more about Amy and her husband, and how no
matter how good someone else seems to have it, they probably think you're
better off than they are.  One might expect Hell to be utterly depopulated
above the Envy level, the way things seem sometimes.
     Crater XV, on the other hand, doesn't really feel like it's about to
wrap up.  Shanks and Pravda spend most of their time this issue in
reminiscences about his childhood, while the moon shot plotline hits a
barrier of apathy.  If anything, it feels like the next chapter will be
setting up the sequel.  While Crater XV is the second Army Shanks story, it
was a "several years later" sort of sequel...the next one will be "several
seconds later", unless I miss my guess.
     Penny From The Front pulls a Serious Plot out of its trenches, making me
wonder if the whole thing is being written totally on the fly.  The How To
column is mostly about the technical side of making a minicomic so that you
can distribute samples of your work easily at conventions (and the example
minicomic is one of the stories in this issue).  Even in this day of
ubiquitous webcomics, a physical minicomic is still good advertising, because
you've put something concrete in someone else's hands, and they have to look
at it at least one more time, if only to toss it in the trash.  A beamed URL
may never get a second look, likewise a card with an URL on it.  Never
underestimate the "fiddle with" factor of a minicomic.
     Recommended.  $1.99 at ComiXology.

     Gygax #1: TSR - The spirit of the old Dragon Magazine (and the title
font, and a lot of the columns and writers) has come back as Gygax.  As per
the opening lines of the editorial, "Welcome, and thank you.  It's 2013, and
you just bought a print magazine.  Print!  Wasn't that supposed to disappear,
along with land-line telephones, broadcast television, wristwatches, and
Twinkies?"  Of course, I bought it as a PDF, so...yeah.  But it still retains
a very retro feel, from the layout to the subject matter to the old school
full page ads (banner ads are ignored, pop-ups are a nuisance, but a nice
print-style full pager can be "content" if done right).  Because it's
intended for print, there's a few hiccups in transition to PDF.  But
reformatting it for a CBR-style reader would fix the problems with two page
spreads (it's probably possible to make a seamless two page spread show in a
typical PDF viewer, but SimpleComic does it automatically for you), and Order
of the Stick just seems to be the victim of a whoops in importing.
     Oh, and new What's New with Phil & Dixie, woo.  Anyway, with a $8.95
cover price it may be a bit of a hard sell once the initial nostalgia wears
off, but I'm okay with $4.95 for a PDF via DriveThruRPG.com (it also helps
that I have a little store credit built up from the royalties on my own sales
there).  And there's a good spread of games covered, like Dragon used to do
in the early days before it turned into an almost pure house organ.
Recommended if you are, or used to be, a tabletop gamer.  And if you have
small children, you might find Cory Doctorow's "DMing your Toddler" article
useful.... 

     Gold Digger v3 #145-146: Antarctic Press - The the footsteps of the Baen
Free Library, simple PDFs of Gold Digger issues are being put online as part
of the #200 celebrations (all 50 issues of the B&W series, all of the color
issues, but not the original miniseries that I've been counting as v1).
Subscribers to the AP Blast mailing list got an early link (sorry, won't
spill the beans on it, wait for it to go public), so I went ahead and read
the two issues I hadn't yet bought.  As bare-bones PDFs they're not as
readable as a ComiXology conversion or a paper comic, but they'll do for now.
:)
     #145 suffers from the sort of Wrong Cover Syndrome that plagues the
series.  It actually follows logically from the FINAL PANEL of the issue, but
shows an event that hasn't even happened yet in #146.  #146's cover is at
least thematically correct, although the specific event shown on the cover
doesn't happen.  Yes, I know that for solicitations Perry has to have the
covers done much farther ahead of time than he has to get the issues
themselves done, but this close to the 200th issue Big Event Thing, it
undermines the reader's confidence that he knows what he's doing when the
covers are so badly off.  At a guess, #145 was running long with all the
fight scene stuff (which was pretty good fight scene, mind you) and didn't
quite make it to the scene from the cover.  Rather than push #146's events
back, he just cut to that story, but the final battle went rather differently
than the original notes.  Given how long this has been a problem, I'm kind of
surprised Perry hasn't just switched to fairly generic covers so that he can
make these last minute changes without the dislocation.
     Cover problems aside, the actual final stories work pretty well, and the
abundance of simple fill patterns in the backgrounds is at least used to good
visual effect so it doesn't feel like a time-saving exercise.  Recommended.
$3.99 in paper versions (ComiXology is only up to about #100, but charges 99
cents a piece for the issues it has).


Trades:

     Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, pocket manga, whatever.
If it's bigger than a "floppy" it goes here.

     Nothing this time.


Floppies:

     No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they
*are* floppy, yes?  And like floppy disks they may be a doomed format.

     My Little Pony Friendship is Magic #3: IDW - They definitely seem to
have hit their stride here, and it's equally clear that the target audience
is more at the brony end than the little girl end.  As evidenced by this:
http://www.dvandom.com/images/ponynature.JPG  Almost every turn of the page
brought more laughs, whether from Cook's writing, Price's art, or a
combination of the two.  Strongly recommended.  $3.99

     My Little Pony Micro-Series #1 (of 6): IDW - A parallel series,
one-shots focusing on a single "Mane 6" character.  Naturally, it leads off
with Twilight Sparkle, and the story is written and drawn by Thom Zahler of
Love and Capes.  He does a decent job of staying on-model for the existing
characters, but his regular style tends to creep in on the new character this
issue (a glasses-wearing archivist pony who I keep expecting to go check up
on Darkblade's Equestrian equivalent) and some of the backgrounders.  The
story itself is one of those mysteries that's obvious to anyone who knows
literary conventions, but still has clues here and there so that any kids
reading this might be able to figure it out from those (I didn't even see
half the clues on first read-through, but that's because I wasn't really
looking...the solution was obvious even from the solicitation).
     While set before the S3 finale, it does share some thematic elements
with that story.  Namely, that if there's a mismatch between the destiny
determined by your cutie mark and what you're able to do, you tend to be
pretty unhappy.  And it doesn't matter if the mismatch is because of a failed
spell, or because of a loss of confidence in the abilities you do have.  It's
one of the more disturbing bits of Equestrian cosmology: you're not
considered grown up until you find your destiny, and once you have it there's
no changing it.  If anything prevents you from following it, you're going to
be miserable...elderly ponies with cutie mark destinies tied to physical
prowess are bound to be pretty much out of luck.  Yeah, kinda deep for a
kiddie show, and certainly not something the writers intend to be front and
center, but the setting hangs together well enough in general that this sort
of analysis isn't totally groundless.  (i.e. a totally shallow and stupid
show wouldn't invite this kind of thought, disturbing implications would be
dismissed as being accidental results of sloppy writing.)
     Oh, and speaking of reading too much into things, the denounment of the
story could be taken as the first quasi-canonical confirmation that there was
a sort of League of Extraordinary Equestrians predecessor group to the
current Mane 6, and that Twilight Sparkle isn't the first pony Celestia took
under her wing in the 1000 years since losing Luna.
     A pretty good story, although it moves a bit slowly in places and it's
built around an anti-climax.  Recommended.  $3.99

     Young Justice #25: DC - FINAL ISSUE.  I don't know if the decision to
cancel the comic came before or after the decision to not renew the series,
but at least they wrapped up the intermezzo here.  Weisman resolves the
Kylstar thread pretty much the same way he did it originally back in the
early 90s Captain Atom comic, but puts an interesting new twist on the
Brainiac idea.  The rest of the issue is setting up elements for season 2,
like how Bibbo got replaced by a Krolotean, and the specifics of how Queen
Bee engineered the death of Beast Boy's mother (thereby making some subtle
revelations about Marie Logan).  Also, Dick Grayson is a slut.  ;)
Recommended.  $2.99


     Dave Van Domelen, "Oh no, the vampiric jackalope and the chupacabra are
natural enemies.  They'll fight for dominance over the rights to eat us.
(horrifying off-panel violence that nearly makes Pinkie Pie vomit) Nature is
so fascinating..." - enrapt Fluttershy, My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic #3