flaggthecat

July 14, 2008 7:14 pm @RobAbsten: is there any reason you picked up Captain America White, but don't get the regular series?

July 10, 2008 7:19 pm I'm going to check out the trades myself, but I'm really sceptical.  A couple months ago when I started looking at Marvel, I read about ten issues each of Mighty and New Avengers once I had figured out what Secret Invasion was based out of, and the dialogue was so incredibly clunky and amateurish on almost every page that I wondered how Bendis became such a big name.  I've dropped both those titles, and I got the first three SI but don't plan to get the fourth--at least not now.  It's been a while, though, and now that i have more understanding of mainstream comics, I'm planning to reevaluate Bendis sometime.  I'm guessing Powers is a good place to start.

July 9, 2008 11:04 am Oops.  "is going to work" should have been "isn't going to work", as in, the big reveal will seem mundane because all of the readers are expecting it.

July 9, 2008 11:02 am I've been reading these pretty much only because I decided to follow X-Men titles coming out now, but they've been pretty disappointing so far.  They don't feel rooted in the X-Men world, and the story seems to be pretty transparently setting up a big "hey guys, fooled you!" reveal which is going to work, because none of us are fooled.  I'm just wondering if anyone pulling this believes that this is going to be worth reading in the end.

July 9, 2008 10:09 am Very nice review.  My wife picked this up at my LCS, which is so small that they just put indie and mainstream on a single wall of shelving in alphabetical order, but which also has such good taste that they order unexpected stuff like this.  Ubu makes me happy that fun stuff with a bunch of new ideas, written and drawn in black and white by the creator, not following a popular style, is still being created and can still be put out by a smaller indie like SLG, even in today's comics climate.  It's the only thing of its kind on the shelves right now.  Quite reminescent of JtHM, and even more so of Invader Zim, but hey, what's wrong with that?  There's a cute kitten jumping in a perfect little arc to catch and eat a butterfly and then throw up far more mass than it's little body can hold, unleashing a pestilence demon that runs around town making people everybody vomit.  Right on, Jamie Smart!

July 7, 2008 6:34 pm

I actually bought the first four issues of Resurrection before I had read anything else by Guggenheim, because I was just getting into comics, it was at the LCS (which just places things alphabetically rather than by publisher), it had cool covers, and the concept looked interesting.  Ironically, Ressurection is the book that I most recently put on probation.  The art is pretty great, but I actually thought the writing was frustratingly close to being good: close enough that I despised it for not actually being good.  The concept is great, and I like a lot of the setup.  Every element, though, had something that very much didn't sit right.  As an example, I thought that having the military leaders focus on the civilian line of secession was an interesting concept, but that the characters in those scenes were  written in a heavy-handed, clunky, stereotyped manner, and it seemed in danger of allowing Guggenheim's probably libertarian politics and worldview to color the story too much.

Issue five was the make-or-break issue for me.  The title's still on probation, but I liked five enough to give it, say, two more issues before reassessing.

 

July 3, 2008 12:10 pm

Please not that I would have made this a review instead of a comment, but I dont' know how.  Can anyone help?  Anyway:

I caught up to Walking Dead with issue 48.  Walking Dead was actually the first current comic I started buying, way, way back in what seems like a previous eon, but was actually March of this year.  The idea of buying comics that were actually coming out now had been brewing for a while, with a confluence of events, and I picked Walking Dead because the LCS employees said it was really good, and because I had always liked the zombie concept.  I started slow with comics.  Walking Dead was the only one I read for about a month, and I read it everywhere: on a bus in my home city of Santa Fe and on another bus in Albuquerque, in the break room at work, in the back seat of a friend's car on a road trip, in my living room.  I was steeped in the world, and it inspired me to rent a bunch of zombie movies and even go on a crawl of the dead (about a hundred people dressed as zombies walking down the streets of Albuquerque to a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead).  Then I caught up, to issue 48 as I said, and the events were so shocking that I decided to wait a while before looking at it again, particularly since it was the first time there wouldn’t be another one for a month.  In the meantime, I had started buying comics like they were a miracle drug that would save my life, diving into DC and Marvel with abandon, figuring out that wow, both of them have a shared universe of characters, learning about the careers of the creators, trying to figure out what other indie comics were good.  And so, whereas between Walking Dead 1 and 48 I read nothing else, between 48 and 49, I read about fifty other comics.  Coming back to Walking Dead, the biggest thing I noticed was the art, the fantastic art.  It made the whole thing feel so real, so stark and possible.  I also noticed how Kirkman has taken this so far that even with almost no words (in both 49 and 50), I knew where these characters were in their minds.  Frankly, these last two issues have probably been better for not having dialogue, both because it suits the story, and because Kirkman's dialogue is . . . well, sometimes kind of shamefully bad, and only serviceable at best.  But as these last few issues show, Kirkman’s talents lie in his dedication to storytelling, doing all the work necessary to set up a world, grow characters, build tension and then, like a bat connecting with a baseball, wham!  It all takes off.   Now with this issue I see him starting the process again.  The tension here is just spectacular, and the character building with Carl is working really well.   I'm definitely impressed, and even inspired as an aspiring writer. I’m glad this is the book that welcomed me to comics, and I hope it goes on for a long time.

 

July 3, 2008 11:23 am I've been wondering what people at iFanboy think of Kirkman's writing ability.  Not the stories--the consensus seems to be that they're exciting and well done, and I agree--but the dialogue and characterization.  Personally, when I read anything by a writer who does dialogue well like, say, Warren Ellis, and then look back at Kirkman's stuff, I laugh at how inept Kirkman looks.  The characters are often saying things worthy of daytime soaps.  It "sounds" like they're reading off of teleprompters, laying out their emotions and reactions like they're journalists reporting on their own thoughts.

July 1, 2008 6:53 pm

I'm really concerned by the commenters claiming refusing to listen to people who say they're having trouble following FC in general and this issue in particular.  No, it's not some sort of weird internet meme.  They're saying that because they're having trouble following things. 

June 26, 2008 4:09 pm @TheNextChampion: Yeah, a Wonder Woman movie would definitely be helpful in spreading knowledge of her character, but I guess I'm not sure it would make her more popular since, as you say, her origin is a bit muddled.  Seems to me it's also just plain weird, but then, that doesn't hold Supes back.