A Devil and Her Love Song: New Love Triangle

I read A Devil and Her Love Song, Vol. 9

I posted a review at the ComicBookBin (which has free smart phone apps and comics).

I Reads You Review: BATMAN '66 #1

BATMAN ’66 #1
DC COMICS – @DCComics

WRITER: Jeff Parker
ARTIST/COLORS: Jonathan Case
LETTERS: Wes Abbott
COVER: Michael Allred and Laura Allred
VARIANT COVER: Jonathan Case
36pp, Color, $3.99 U.S. (September 2013)

Rated E (Everyone)

Batman ’66 is one of DC Comics’ digital-first comics.  These digital comics are initially released in a digital format to be read on computers, smart phones, and other handheld devices.  Print editions follow digital publication.

Batman ’66 is inspired by the classic American TV series, “Batman,” from 20th Century Fox Television and Greenway Productions.  Batman was a live action television series based on the DC Comics comic book character, Batman, and starred Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin, the two crime-fighting heroes who defend Gotham City.  “Batman’s” original run on television lasted for three seasons, from January 12, 1966 to March 14, 1968, for a total of 120 episodes.

Batman ’66 #1 is the print comic book edition of the opening story, “The Riddler’s Ruse,” from writer Jeff Parker and artist Jonathan Case.  The story opens in Gotham Park, where millionaire Bruce Wayne and his “youthful ward,” Dick Grayson, are on hand for the awarding of the Lady Gotham statuette to the Gotham Police Department.

The festivities are interrupted by The Riddler, who is determined to steal the Lady Gotham, professing a need to protect the work of the statuette’s creator, the late artist, Oskar Villkoop.  Is he really an art lover?  The Dynamic Duo will need the help of another arch-nemesis, the slinky Catwoman, to solve The Riddler’s latest baffling crime conundrum.  Holy Strange Bedfellows, Batman!

I first discovered the “Batman” TV series ages ago when a local television station began airing the show in syndication.  I instantly fell in love with the series, and that the show did not resemble the Batman comic books I was reading at the time did not bother me.  I was surprised to discover that quite a few comic book fans hated “Batman.”  The editors of the Comics Buyers Guide, a weekly publication of comic book news, features, and collectibles, once claimed that “Batman” was the primary reason the public at large did not take comic books seriously.

With DC Comics’ recent announcement of Batman ’66, a comic inspired by the series, I had the opportunity to discover that there are many comic book fans who loved the show.  And we have reason to cheer.  Batman ’66 is the decades-old TV show embodied in comic book form.

Batman ’66 is not a great work of comic book art, but it is a great comic book.  Please, allow me to explain.  Batman ’66 is not Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in terms of its impact on Batman the character and on superhero comics (as TDKR has been for the last quarter-century).  However, for me, Batman ’66 and TDKR are alike because the latter was the kind of comic book that was so much fun for me to read that I read it over and over again.  The first time I read TDKR, it so stunned me that I immediately read it again.  My copy could not be in “Mint” or “Near Mint” condition just from the wear I put on that comic book through repeated readings.

I can’t stop flipping through Batman ’66.  I had so much fun reading it.  That it is so much like the old TV show makes me think Jeff Parker and Jonathan Case are in need of an exorcism.  Surely, they made a deal with some kind of supernatural entity to pull this off.  The witty asides, the droll humor, the campy style, the colorful milieu, the corny moralizing, and Batman’s let’s-all-follow-the-rules approach to everything:  it’s all here; “Batman” is back.

I love Jonathan Case’s eye-popping, pop art aesthetic.  It references “Batman” without being slavish to it.  The composition and graphic design form a wild style that recalls Neal Adams and also the angular photography of the television show.  The art moves and grooves, and Case makes the coloring mimic an old-fashioned two or three-color 3D comic book.  Give that man an Eisner nod.

Jeff Parker and Jonathan Case have put fun first in this new comic.  Digital or print: Batman ’66 is a winner.

A

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux

Strobe Edge: ...but you say he's just a friend

I read Strobe Edge, Vol. 5

I posted a review at the ComicBookBin (which has free comics).

I Reads You Review: WOLVERINE Volume 1

WOLVERINE VOL. 1
MARVEL COMICS – @Marvel

WRITER: Chris Claremont
PENCILS: Frank Miller
INKS: Josef Rubinstein
COLORS: Glynis Oliver (#1-3), Lynn Varley (#4)
LETTERS: Tom Orzechowski
COVER: Frank Miller with Lynn Varley
EDITOR: Louise Jones
REPRINT EDITOR: Ann Nocenti
ASSISTANT EDITOR: Terry Kavanagh
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Jim Shooter
ISBN: 0-87135-277-X; paperback (1987)
96pp, Colors, $4.95 U.S., $5.95 CAN

Wolverine received his first solo comic book in the form of a four-issue miniseries, entitled Wolverine, which was originally published from September to December 1982.  Written by Chris Claremont and penciled by Frank Miller, Wolverine tells the story of Logan/Wolverine’s mission to Japan to learn why the love of his life has rejected him.

For the last decade or so, readers have become used to trade paperbacks arriving shortly after the publication of the story arcs and miniseries that they collect – sometimes as soon as a month after a story arc or series conclusion.  Once upon a time, trade paperback collections were not common.  Wolverine, which collected the miniseries, Wolverine (Vol. 1 #1-4) was published almost five years after the original miniseries first appeared on newsstands and in comic book shops.  Even the indicia for the trade paperback was nothing more than the indicia for Wolverine #1 with a few changes to indicate new dates and prices, as well as the change in Marvel Comics’ ownership.

I suggest that before jumping into this series (and it is worth jumping into) that you read Chris Claremont’s introduction to you story.  That introduction appeared in the original version of the Wolverine trade paperback.  I must note that I am reviewing Wolverine from a 1987 first printing of the trade paperback.  I don’t know if the introduction has appeared in subsequent collected editions of the miniseries.  Claremont explains how he approached the story and why he used it as an opportunity to redefine Wolverine.

For a time, this book was a personal favorite, one I subjected to numerous readings, but I think it has been close to two decades since I last read it.  Reading it for the first time in a long time, I found that (1) I still love this story and (2) there is something about it that has been nagging at me.  After finishing my recent read, I figured out what that something is.  Chris Claremont and Frank Miller were working together to tell the same story, but they were telling it by using different genres.

First, the plot of the 1982 Wolverine miniseries:  Wolverine is spending time away from the X-Men in Canada.  He discovers that all the letters which he has been sending to Mariko Yashida, the Japanese woman he loves, have been returned unopened.  She does not respond to his telephone calls, nor will anyone connected to Mariko help him make contact with her.

Wolverine travels to Japan, where he discovers that Mariko has entered into an arranged marriage to Noburu Hideki.  This arrangement has something to do with a debt incurred by Mariko’s father, Shingen, Lord of Clan Yashida, whom Mariko once believed to be dead.  Wolverine confronts Shingen only to be easily bested in combat by the clan lord, and then, finds himself marked for death by The Hand, an organization of ninja assassins.  Wolverine’s only ally may be Yukio, a mysterious woman of questionable motivations, who is crazy in love with Wolverine.

Claremont states in the introduction that he and Miller “wanted to utterly, ruthlessly and seemingly irrevocably destroy” Wolverine.  They would use their story to make the character better.  Neither creator was interested in the Wolverine that, at the time, was so popular with readers.  That was Wolverine the “pint-sized, hell-raiser with a hair-trigger temper.”  Claremont wanted a character that was more complicated.  Why just play Wolverine as a “psycho-killer” and an animal when he could be a human who struggles with his killer/animal nature?

Claremont reveals in the introduction that he saw Wolverine as a “failed samurai.”  Thus, he wrote a story in which Wolverine struggles to attain pride, self-respect, and honor, while circumstances require him to be a berserk killer.  By exploring this conflict and struggle, Claremont uses character to drive the plot rather than have plot drive the character, which is what would happen if the story was simply about Wolverine killing his adversaries and other assorted people who want to kill him.  Basically, Claremont tells Wolverine’s story as a samurai drama with a side of existential crisis.

Meanwhile, Frank Miller tells Wolverine the character drama as a kind of crime thriller and martial arts ninja movie.  Miller’s popularity with comic book readers isn’t just because of the many unique and varied drawing styles that he has employed over the better part of forty years of drawing comic books.  Miller captures readers with his graphical storytelling – using graphics and illustrations that are connected to tell a story, but Miller does this in an especially visually arresting manner.

Miller has mastered design, not just in the way he presents pages, but also in the way he composes content within panels, connects one panel to another, and how he uses and manipulates space.  He uses the comics medium to suggest, to evoke, to prod, to provoke, and even to challenge his readers.  He goes beyond simply engaging imagination; he goes after the reader’s emotions, and that is what his pencil art does in Wolverine.  Miller tells this Wolverine character drama by visualizing the struggle between man/samurai and animal/killer with bracing depictions of battle, duels, violence, and tests of will.  Whereas Claremont uses dialogue and exposition, Miller uses visceral action.

What else can I say?  I loved going back and reading Wolverine in anticipation of the movie, The Wolverine.  This film is apparently based in part on Claremont and Miller’s seminal Wolverine miniseries, and the filmmakers could not have made a better choice.

A

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux

Oresama Teacher: History of Nonoguchi and Nogami

I read Oresama Teacher , Vol. 14

I posted a review at the ComicBookBin.

Book Review: THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE
WILLIAM MORROW/HarperCollins – @WmMorrowBks and @HarperCollins

AUTHOR: Neil Gaiman – @neilhimself
ISBN: 978-0-06-225565-5; hardcover (June 18, 2013)
192pp, B&W, $25.99 U.S.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a 2013 fantasy novel from author Neil Gaiman (American Gods, The Graveyard Book).  This short novel is Gaiman’s first novel for adults since the award-winning Anansi Boys (2005).

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is set in modern day Sussex, England and focuses on an unnamed male protagonist who is approximately 47-years-old.  He has returned to his childhood home to attend a funeral.  Although the house he lived in as boy is gone, he is drawn to edifice that is still there – the Old Hempstock farm at the end of the lane.

There, forty years earlier, at the age of seven, he met a remarkable, 11-year-old girl named Lettie Hempstock.  Lettie lived with her mother, “Ginnie” or Mrs. Hempstock, and her mother, Old Mrs. Hempstock.  The protagonist had not thought of the Hempstock farm and its residents in decades.  Sitting before the pond at the back of the farm, a pond Lettie said was an ocean, memories come flooding back to him.  Now, he remembers a past that was strange, wonderful, and dangerous.  He also remembers the darkness unleashed that resulted in something terrible happening to him.

I have taken to calling The Ocean at the End of the Lane Neil Gaiman’s Alice Walker novel.  As I read this book, I often thought of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple (which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction).  In different ways, Celie of The Color Purple and the boy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane both experience (and share with us) the uncomplicated and triumphant joys of childhood, even when faced with a world that seems determined to deliver terror in a fickle manner or with a capricious nature.  There is heroism in these young characters’ nature because they survive and they love – even when it would be easier for a childhood to be simplistic and selfish.

I often see Gaiman being described as the “Prince of Stories,” which is so fan-ish and fawning.  If anything, Gaiman is a prince of imagination because of the imaginative ways in which he grapples with the real world and with genuinely human themes by setting them in fantastic places, points that exist on the periphery of our world or just out of reach in the corner of our vision.  This novel’s central theme – of a disconnect between the worlds of adulthood and childhood – resonate because what Gaiman has to say makes sense even when he tells it in his own unique and unusual way.

And heck, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is just a damn good read.

A

www.NeilGaiman.com

DC Comics from Diamond Distributors for July 24 2013

DC COMICS

MAY130189 ALL STAR WESTERN #22 $3.99
MAY130116 AQUAMAN #22 $2.99
MAY130207 ARROW #9 $3.99
MAY130147 BATMAN SUPERMAN #2 $3.99
MAY130150 BATMAN SUPERMAN #2 COMBO PACK $4.99
MAY130167 BATMAN THE DARK KNIGHT #22 $2.99
APR130228 CAMELOT 3000 TP $19.99
MAY130174 CATWOMAN #22 $2.99
MAY130112 CONSTANTINE #5 (TRINITY) $2.99
APR130255 FAIREST TP VOL 02 HIDDEN KINGDOM (MR) $14.99
MAY130122 FLASH #22 $2.99
MAY130192 GREEN TEAM TEEN TRILLIONAIRES #3 $2.99
MAY130107 JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #22 (TRINITY) (NOTE PRICE) $3.99
MAY130186 LARFLEEZE #2 $2.99
MAY130244 MAD MAGAZINE #522 $5.99
APR130225 NIGHTWING TP VOL 02 NIGHT OF THE OWLS (N52) $14.99
MAY130176 RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #22 $2.99
MAY130142 SUPERMAN #22 $2.99
MAY130138 SUPERMAN UNCHAINED DIRECTORS CUT #1 $5.99
MAY130157 TALON #10 $2.99
MAY130202 TEEN TITANS #22 $2.99
MAY130252 UNWRITTEN #51 (MR) $2.99

DC COMICS/DC COLLECTIBLES

FEB130261 GREEN LANTERN 1:1 SCALE POWER BATTERY PROP W RING $199.95