June 2010 Archives

Y The Last Man Book 5: Ring of Truth

Vertigo/DC Comics

There are isolated moments in this collection of #24 -31 of the series that I worry Vaughn is going to veer off playing amateur psychologist again, but he keeps it to a minimum, and actually uses such moments to enhance and move this epic on.

There are also a number of flashbacks happening in the story, that feel not so much that they're rounding the back-story but becoming a way to feature males, and possibly add a different set of characterisations. It's a toss-up whether or not that's a necessary evil.

But the crux of the matter is that Yorick runs off to a Catholic church to confess his sins, and goes and commits the one sin romantics thought he'd never do, in between all this we've got renegade secret agents, a reformed sister in Hero (possibly), and a not so surprising revelation that the reason our boy's survived when the rest of mankind hasn't is most likely down to his pet monkey - It's always been a Ross from Friends situation with the critter, and the way the antidote, as it were, was made to work on Y fits nicely with the running jokes about Ampersand's favourite trick all this series.

There are false trails, hidden pasts, and new horizons to be sought. This collection works in isolation and recovers ground lost in Book 4, but it's presumed Book 6 is where the series moves on to a new level.

CLICK ON Episode 23 of Shang Ri La La La below and it will expand to fill your screen.

For more information on the creators visit:

For Paul H Birch: www.myspace.com/paulhbirch

For Gary Crutchley: www.gcrutchley.blogspot.com

For Mats Engesten: www.go.to/engesten

For John Robbins: www.mylifeinshorts.blogspot.com

Y The Last Man Book 4: Safeword

Vertigo/DC Comics

This collects #18 - 23 of the series, with regular artist Guerra taking on the first half with the Safeword storyline and Parlov drawing Widow's Pass. Artistically it's as competent as ever, throughout. Storywise Vaughn's diverging.

It seems that in Book 3 Ampersand, Y's monkey, got injured and the doc and agent 355 go off to get him fixed while they leave Yorrick himself with an agent 711.

From there on for the Safeword part of the book we find Yorrick get drugged and wakes up to find himself half-naked and tied up with agent 711 hovering over him with a whip in hand and scantily clad herself. .. So far, so good, and if it's just a case of seeing if Yorrick will succumb to sexual temptation and betray his heart's desire we're fine if a little too earnest, but it gets into a whole Machurian Candidate thing where agent 711 tries to see de-programme any Freudian psychological hang-ups the lad might have.
Part of it reminds me of some old Gerbers' Defenders comics from the 70s, part of it Grant Morrison's more recent The Invisibles series, some awareness that they remade The Manchurian Candidate this millennium, that spicing things up with potential sexual encounters is easy marketing to get some press coverage on a series, and that this far into a series a writer probably wants to play and experiment in his storytelling.

Okay the last part is fair enough. It's understandable. Alas, the end result doesn't prove much (at least not in this book collection). And it takes too long to get over what little message it does intend to portray. And, such experimentation, as noted in the last paragraph, has been done before, recently and in the dim past, and better.

Fortunately the Widow's Pass story brings matters back in line, where we find a bunch of southern ladies are togged in paramilitary gear, playing the isolationist game and a chief reason for food and medical supplies not reaching the rest of America. The downside being it's all a prequel to Book 5, and unfortunately makes it obvious that this is a part work rather than a full collection that can be read in and of itself.

Having picked up and thoroughly enjoyed volume one of the Rainbow Orchid at BICS last year, I couldn't wait for volume two to arrive.

It was the distinct clear line style, the 1920s setting, the Indianna Jones-style quest and sheer quality of the print that attracted me to the first instalment.

And on reading it did not disappoint with the quest for the mythical Rainbow Orchid with a rich cast including hero Julius Chancer, the assistant to archeologist, a Hollywood actress, greedy businessman, investigative reporter.

Laika

Firstsecond Books

In our current downsizing world it's hard to imagine a time when we really reaching for the stars, and anything seemed possible. The Americans were the first to get a guy to walk on the moon, but that only came about because they were losing the publicity game as the world's head honcho superpower big time to those penny-saving Russians back in the USSR.

The Russians got a rocket up into the outer atmosphere first, their Yuri Gagarin orbited the world before anyone else, and before that they put up the first living creature. It was a dog, and it was known to the world as Laika.

Nick Abadzis envelopes us as readers in a retelling of that momentous event, using facts revealed from now-released top secret documents but moving beyond the dry drama of such dogmatic facts to fictionalise the drama as it might have unfolded, peopling it with characters we come to care about.

Let me state right now, I'm not a dog lover. I don't mind them, but I've never had one, and can get by in my life without ever seeing one. Does that make me heartless to the fact that scientists experiment on them, and as this story shows, used them in space programme experiments? No. I'm not that callous, but neither did I think I'd get sentimental about the dog in this story, but I did come to care for it.

There are a number of people who enter the story, but for the most part it revolves around Korovlev the engineer in charge of Russia's space program and Yelena a technician who trains and cares for Laika.

I soon found myself investing emotional allegiances towards certain characters, but found them changing as the story developed and found them to be much more multi-dimensional individuals and it totally added to the reading experience.

This a tale of egotism, power struggles, public relations affairs, history and fiction, and is worth your spending some quiet downtime with, no matter what your age.

For more information visit: www.firstsecond books.com

CLICK ON Episode 22 of Shang Ri La La La below and it will expand to fill your screen.
For more information on the creators visit:

For Paul H Birch: www.myspace.com/paulhbirch

For Gary Crutchley: www.gcrutchley.blogspot.com

For Mats Engesten: www.go.to/engesten

For John Robbins: www.mylifeinshorts.blogspot.com

Betlegeuse Book 2: The Caves

Cinebook

Curious this collection. The first 25 pages or so are all basically about Kim and her fellow travellers trying to find their way out of some caves and facing ever more absurd alien beasts along the way - I'll accept that there's a tragedy along the way, but for the most part visually it feels like Leo's just looking for an excuse to draw some creatures he's made up.

Once the group eventually get out into the fresh Betelgeusian air matters continue in a tick-box approach for how to write an adventure strip except Mai Lan and her Ium panda-like friends now enter the picture too.

The Iums take Mai Lan and Kim to yet another cave where within it we find the Iums live in symbiotic nature with a strange gigantic creature whose form inhabits the cracks between the cave. The girls separate but on remeeting Mai Lan reveals she's been fed the little blue pastels that Kim had received back in the Alderban series that make her near immortal, and so the giant creature is revealed to be a mantris, but so did another creature appear to be earlier in this book. A mystery arises but as to its nature we can only presume it will be revealed in the next, and presumably final, book. There's a lot to conclude.

I'm not convinced this book needed 48 pages to unfold its events.

As a stand-alone collection this isn't the best one to get into the series with. But then, with a trio of them, the middle book always has a bridging factor between beginning and end.
Leo's work has a landscape approach - not only do his visuals tend towards that manner but his stories stretch out in an ancient epic tradition; they're traditional in that sense despite their science fiction dressing, but it's the socialist morality of his actual themes that give him his voice, not quite unique in European comics but certainly distinctively his.

For more information visit: www.cinebook.com

AL WILLIAMSON, the celebrated and award-winning comic book and newspaper strip artist, passed away yesterday at the age of 79.

Al Williamson's career began during the American comic book industry's golden age of the 40s working for various publishers and assisting on the Sunday Tarzan newspaper strip.

The artist was to make a name for himself during the 50s as part of that illustrious E.C. Comics crowd of creators whose work remains critically acclaimed to this day.

E.C. was the place where Williamson honed his draughtsmanship on books like Weird Science to become the consummate artist and the go-to guy when publishers needed heroic adventure in the science fiction mould.

That's why King Features invited him to draw Flash Gordon in the 60s, then the following decade for Marvel he began adapting Star Wars and subsequently drew the newspaper strip serial of the George Lucas saga,

A frequent collaborator during those features was the late writer/editor Archie Goodwin. Other notable creative works they produced together included strips for the Warren line and the Secret Agent Corrigan newspaper strip serial.

Later decades found Williamson working primarily as an inker for Marvel, DC and Dark Horse. Whatever he worked on he never overshadowed the pencil artist, but always gave them style and class.

Al Williamson will be sorely missed. He was a great talent in his own right who continued to influence other artists through the decades of his life, and no doubt will continue to do so even with his passing.

Y The Last Man Book 2: Cycles

Vertigo/DC Comics

The Daughters of Amazon head for Marrisville, Ohio. They're women who hate men, some for legitimate reasons, but mainly because it's easy to get caught up in some cult thing when you're starving and homeless. They're after a man in Marrisville, he's Yorrick, possibly the last man alive after some genetic plague went wild across the world killing off mammalian males. The Amazons want to kill him. It's what they do to men.

Yorrick, or Y, is stuck in Marrisville with his two travelling companions - Dr Mann who's going to try and study him to work out why his genetics made him survive, and Agent 355 who the government sent to bring them both back to Washington. Marrisiville itself is quite lovely, a white picket-fenced little town with charming neighbours all around - kind of like the plus bits in Stepford Wives without the need for men's machismo interference. The fact that the women are all escaped convicts from the local county gaol brings with it its own genuine charm.

This story is primarily about the Daughters of Amazon and the women of Marrisville meeting, and the consequences of that confrontation. It's not quite what I expected, and that's a good thing for a reader.

This collection features four issues of the a regular US comic and an awful lot more events are packed into them than is usual these days; in fact I'd say there's twice as much story value given, with little padding.

Guerra's artwork is more confident and assured but also still evolving in this book and while some of the turns of phrase sound, and presumably in-jokes, require a better familiarity with American popular culture than I'm familiar with, Vaughn's ear for dialogue that captures a mood and pushes the story on.

The first collection can now be re-evaluated whereby we can see the creators were busy putting the building blocks of their epic together, whereas here they're in the process of developing a serial into what will be viewed by fans as an epic.

CLICK ON Episode 21 of Shang Ri La La La below and it will expand to fill your screen.
For more information on the creators visit:

For Paul H Birch: www.myspace.com/paulhbirch

For Gary Crutchley: www.gcrutchley.blogspot.com

For Mats Engesten: www.go.to/engesten

For John Robbins: www.mylifeinshorts.blogspot.com

For Andrew Dodd: www.timebombcomics.com