Continuing with a theme of comics-heavy procrastination, I read (or reread) things like the second volume of Injustice, Batman TPBs, Marvel TPBs, quite a bit of Valiant, quite a bit of the Black Sky and Project Superpowers worlds, some Gold Key, Injection, and a fair of other stuff, including a couple of one-offs ( Read more... )

... means, as usual, an ill advised comics binge: The Life and Death of Toyo Harada 1-4, Li'l Gotham in full, The Complete Doc Unknown, The Steam Man, and a reread of v1 and 2 of Umbrella Academy. Some rhymes of structure and theme, unsurprisingly. Loops and crumbling near-utopias and holding the line or failing to.

Except Li'l Gotham, which is ( Read more... )

Leaving aside probably more relevant reasons of changing personal and social contexts (let's call some of it the tribology of accumulating nostalgia, mostly because I love the word "tribology"), one reason I find comic events increasingly off-putting is the way their meta-cosmology keeps getting not just more involved, but doing so in bizarre and ( Read more... )

Detective Comics #1000 was unexpectedly not bad. The general tone of the stories was hopeful (or at least as hopeful as Batman stories can get), and a couple were Very Batman ones, for personal values of Batman.

Also, courtesy of Wikipedia's daily email, the Names of Istanbul page. It turns out that the official renaming from "Constantinople" to " ( Read more... )

Both Cemetery Beach (an Image comic) and Finality (a weekly webtoon) are pretty much standard Ellis fare: secret history, shadowy groups, and violent, foul-mouthed hypercompetent characters prone to dry and yet hyperbolic wit, and also full of shit.

Cemetery Beach, in particular, has a very interesting premise, although I don't want to spoil the ( Read more... )

( Vague spoilers. )

I just caught up with Marjorie Liu's Monstress, and it's definitely an interesting comic. Female-centered in a way that's both critical to the story and not what the story is about, unsparingly horrifying when it should be (trigger warnings for violence and torture, some of it involving children, although never for shock value or unsympathetically ( Read more... )

Just met (metaphorically speaking, although wouldn't that be fun) Raimondo di Sangro: XVIth century Italian noble, inventor, and translator. Had his own printing press. Rumored to have done experiments on... problematically fresh humans. He destroyed his own scientific archive before he died. After his death, his descendants, under threat of ( Read more... )

Just reread Dixon and Grant's Robin v1, aka The One Where Tim Gets His Newsletter from the Sherlock Holmes Society but Has His Basil Rathbone Movie Preempted By Bad News, Kicks Ass In A Suit, Wears A Red Hood, Gets Into Dick and Jason's Short Pants, Has His Butt Kicked in Paris, the French Countryside, and Hong Kong by An Exponentially Worsening ( Read more... )

The Shadow / Batman #6: The end of a not uninteresting mini about a deeeeeep mega-conspiracy. It's a nice one, and I'm psychologically unable to not like the ending, but it only works as an Elseworld, in the sense that it's too big to leave much space in the Batman universe for anything else. That's a common issue in universes with long ( Read more... )