What I’ve Been Reading 9/23/09

So while I’ve been talking about everything I bought at Comic-Con in these posts for quite some time now, it means that now I’ve got a backlog of new (well, “new-ish”) stuff to talk about now… As well as some more stuff from San Diego that still hasn’t been reviewed yet.

Also, I am planning on going to see “The Surrogates” this weekend. The graphic novels were good and the trailers are promising. Of course, I could wake up on Friday and find out that it has received reviews that make “Transformers 2” look like Oscar material, but that doesn’t seem likely. On that note, look for my thoughts on the original graphic novel and its prequel here next week.

The Boys vol. 4: We Gotta Go Now: Those of you who remember when I talked about the previous volume on the podcast will know that I really liked the last volume. It was the one where the series finally “clicked” for me. Which makes it all the more painful to say that this volume flushes a lot of that goodwill down the toilet. While the idea of having Hughie infiltrate “The Boys’” equivalent of the “X-men” by way of their hard-partying junior team isn’t bad at all, the revelation of the team’s dark secret is probably the biggest miscalculation I’ve ever seen from writer Garth Ennis. While Ennis is usually very good at pushing the envelope to great comedic and dramatic effect, using child abuse the way he does here was disturbing in all the wrong ways and casts a sick shadow on all the other humor in the book. Artists Darick Robertson and John Higgins are on fine form here, but if this is the direction Ennis wants to take the series, then he’ll be doing it without me.

Batman Year 100: After reading this, I want to kick myself for putting off buying it as long as I did. The concept is simple: there’s a Batman in Gotham in the year 2039 fighting a fascist police state that has the city, and country, in a death grip. It’s not a revolutionary idea by any means, but it comes to vivid life in the hands of writer/artist Paul Pope. The fact that he creates an entirely believable future world is impressive enough, but his breathtaking action scenes move like almost nothing else you’ve seen. It’s not often that I credit the art as being a larger part of my enjoyment of a book than the writing, but that’s exactly the case here. If I have one complaint, it’s that the story feels a little slight by the end – like this was intended to be the first part of a trilogy. It’d be great if it was, but this is still an excellent book by itself.

X-Men: Original Sin: Essentially the next volume of “X-Men: Legacy” and “Wolverine: Origins.” After Wolverine rescues his son Daken from the machinations of the mysterious (and eeeeeeeevil) Romulus, he enlists Charles Xavier’s help in breaking the mental programming still in his son’s head. Charles is reluctant to help after the last two volumes of “Legacy” have shown him what a mess he has made of mucking around in other people’s heads, but he finds he has little choice once the Hellfire Club makes its move to enlist Daken in its ranks. If you were bored by those last two sentences, then this isn’t the book for you. As someone who is interested in Mike Carey’s ongoing Professor X story in “Legacy” I thought this was a fine continuation of it. Even though more than half of the issues here were written by Daniel Way, both writers come together to tell a cohesive story that advances the plots of both series. For what it is, this was pretty good.

Black Lagoon vol. 7: Reading the manga that inspired one of my favorite anime series in recent memory has been a somewhat lackluster experience for the most part. It’s not bad, but it’s hard not to appreciate all the little tweaks and changes the creators of the anime made to the manga’s stories to make them work better in a different medium. Now that we’re firmly into stories that haven’t been adapted to anime (yet…) I’m finally eager to see what happens next. While the thrust of this arc was established in the last volume as “Roberta, the killer maid, comes back to kick ass and take names,” mangaka Rei Hiroe takes the time to set things up properly and skillfully shows why her second tour in Roanapour is going to be a much different beast than her first. Even though there’s not a whole lot of action here, there are plenty of verbal fireworks in regards to the revelations of the powers involved in Roberta’s quest for vengeance and why this is probably going to be a very, very bad thing for everyone on the island. As much as I enjoyed this volume, I’m even more excited about seeing how the anime’s creators are going to make it work when the new OVA series comes out next year.

Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei vol. 3: And that’s it for me. There’s no denying that mangaka Koji Kumeta is a skilled artist with an appealing minimalist style and funny concepts – but they don’t actually translate to actual humor for me. I might have smiled or chuckled a few times (with the events of the gross-out tour or the boy who can read anything), but most of the humor just makes me nod my head and think, “Huh, that is a funny idea.” I realize that there’s a huge cultural barrier to a lot of the humor here, but despite the herculean efforts of translator/adapter Joyce Aurino, a lot of that humor remains on the Japanese side of the barrier. When that happens, I figure it’s best to just cut my losses and stop reading now.

Summit of the Gods vol. 1: Here’s a manga equation for you: Jiro Taniguchi + man vs. nature stories = 100% awesome. Don’t believe me? Then go read his excellent short story collection “The Ice Wanderer” right now. It was that equation that had me pick this volume up as soon as it came out. I wasn’t disappointed, but the results are only 75% awesome here, mainly because Taniguchi isn’t writing, but is letting Yumemakura Baku handle those chores as he adapts his own novel. It’s not that Baku is a bad writer, but it’s clear through his numerous text bubbles that he hasn’t quite grasped the “show, don’t tell” conventions of writing manga. Still, Taniguchi’s art is fantastic as always, and the story is inherently compelling. The first half sets up what I’m fairly certain is going to be the overarching plot of the story, as a Japanese photographer finds a camera that might prove Edmund Mallory made it to the summit of Mt. Everest first. It’s interesting enough, but the second half is even more so as it deviates from that to give a fascinating glimpse inside the world of mountain climbing (in Japan, at least) through second-hand accounts of Jouji Habu, a mountaineer whose climbing skills are equaled only by his anti-social nature. Good stuff, and I’m looking forward to seeing where things go from here.

Planet Hulk: After hearing no end of good things about this series, and after reading its “sequel” “World War Hulk” first, I finally got around to picking this up at Comic-Con for half-price. After finally reading it, I was a little underwhelmed. It certainly has a great concept – Hulk is sent away from Earth by the “Illuminati” of the Marvel Universe and winds up on a distant planet where he is first enslaved to fight in its gladiator arenas, but eventually escapes and goes on to lead a revolution. It’s essentially “Spartacus,” “Gladiator,” and a couple dozen standard sci-fi concepts thrown together, yet it’s still fun to see Hulk in an environment where his “HULK SMASH” tendencies are encouraged and a role that he’s generally not that suited to. The problem is that a lot of the supporting cast is pretty bland (especially the emperor, who is so one-dimensionally cruel that he comes off as boring rather than threatening), and there’s this feeling throughout the story that Hulk isn’t really taking an active part in the story, but just reacting to the events around him. Letting the plot shepherd him along, in other words. I realize I’m in the minority on this, but I enjoyed the modern take on “Hulk vs. the Marvel Universe” in “World War Hulk” more than what was on display here.