April 2011 Statistics

Here are some stats for April 2011.

Total Comics Reviewed: 30
Newly Purchased Comics Reviewed: 29
Comics Reviewed From The Backlog: 1
Marvel Comics Reviewed: 0
DC Comics Reviewed: 2
Minicomics Reviewed: 7
Manga Reviewed: 1
Conventions Attended: 1

Highest Rated Comics:

Bisclavret (8.5/10)
XKCD Volume 0 (8.5/10)
Sky Pirates of Valendor Series 2 #2 (8/10)
Higher Ground (8/10)
Timeless (8.10)
The Hot Fudge Sundae Adventure Club #7 (8/10)
Plastic Farm #4 (8/10)
The Amazing Cynicalman #28 (8/10)

Lowest Rated Comics:

Mercy Sparx: Under New Management #1 Free Comic Book Day Edition (5.5/10)
Detective Comics Annual #11 (5.5/10)

Creators With Multiple Reviews This Month:

Rafer Roberts, Nan Roberts, Jake Warrenfeltz

Average Rating For April 2011: 7.23

All-Time Highest-Rated Comics:

Amelia Rules: When The Past Is A Present (9.5/10)
Batman: Gotham Knights #6 (8.5/10)
American Born Chinese (8.5/10)
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed (8.5/10)
XKCD Volume 0 (8.5/10)

What's the Word?

Title: What's the Word? True Tales of a Woman on the Go
Date: 2011
Publisher: Metrokitty
Writer: Cathy Leamy
Artist: Cathy Leamy

Cathy Leamy tries a new approach to her autobiographical comics with this collection from her webcomic (with a few extras for the printed minicomic). Each one-page or two-page entry is based on a single-word theme. The autobiographical aspect is great, largely because Leamy seeks out some really cool experiences. In this minicomic, she attends an acoustic performance by Harry and the Potters. Other destinations include Coney Island's Mermaid Parade, disco aerobics in Cambridge MA, and a pantomime play in England.

All of this is delivered with Leamy's excellent wit and good sense of pacing. Fun book.

Rating: 7.5/10

Comic Book Challenge Showcase: Hero By Night / Gunplay

Another leftover. I picked this up as a freebie at Free Comic Book Day this year, but it's actually one of the 2008 FCBD books.

Title: Comic Book Challenge Showcase: Hero By Night / Gunplay
Date: 2008
Publisher: Platinum Studios
Writer: Jorge Vega, DJ Coffman, James Patrick
Artist: Dominic Vivona, DJ Coffman
Letterer: Shawn DePasquale
Colorist: Jason Embury

Flip book. First up is Jorge Vega's Gunplay. It's an interesting story, although not really the kind of thing I find all that appealing. The main character, a former buffalo soldier in the Old West, has a cursed gun that must be used to kill one person per day. He's teamed up with an adolescent preacher. This introductory piece doesn't get very far in introducing either the characters or the action. Much of the dialogue is background conversation between two minor characters, and the dialogue comes off a bit stilted. A two-page wordless dream sequence doesn't help matters, nor does a sudden time jump. As I said up front, Vega has an interesting idea here, it's just not being executed effectively in this promo.

I liked the plot in DJ Coffman's "Hero By Night" a lot better, but the entire story was a narrative summary. The characters and world seemed good, and I like the very natural thinking that the hero displays. The story itself is a fairly familiar take on the superhero genre which seems to work well thanks to some well thought out characters and a solid backstory. Still, 12 pages of nothing but prose exposition is a bit much.

Rating: 6/10

With The Light Volume 2

This comes by way of the going-out-of-business sales at Borders. I've been reading it over the course of the last two weeks or so.

Title: With The Light: Raising An Autistic Child
Issue: Volume 2
Date: 2008
Publisher: Yen Press
Writer: Keiko Tobe
Artist: Keiko Tobe

There's a lot that I love about manga, but I think that first and foremost I am amazed by the breadth of story types. American mainstream comics seem narrowly limited by comparison, and while American independent comics do better, they often don't get the kind of distribution that manga receives.

One excellent example is Keiko Tobe's family drama, With The Light, centered on Hikaru Azuma, a young boy with autism. Writer Tobe has clearly done her homework, presenting a very balanced portrayal of Hikaru that mostly avoids the stereotypes of autism that are often seen in the media. She has also meticulously researched educational techniques and presents a wealth of ideas as Hikaru engages with his family and his teachers.

This is the second volume, and it covers Hikaru's later elementary school years. The main plotline is the impending transfer of beloved teacher Aoki-sensei, who has worked very hard to find innovative ways of teaching Hikaru. Along the way, Hikaru helps plant a garden, gets into conflict with the local shopkeepers, and ends up on a train ride with an emotionally distraught fellow student. There is a fair amount of melodrama, but Tobe's characters are always multifaceted. Even the teacher who takes over for Aoki-sensei, and is originally presented as a villain, ends up being revealed as complex and ultimately sympathetic.

The art is beautiful, especially in the depiction of Hikaru himself.

What I love most about With the Light is that it is not just a book about a condition. It's a book about parenting. A really great book about parenting, and about how Hikaru's parents must fight for their child's place in the world. This is a story that's well worth reading.

Rating: 9/10

Donald Duck Adventures #16

I didn't get much at the recent Granite State Comicon. I was running my table and never had a chance to do much shopping. My son did pick up this as a freebie from a dealer who had a box of free comics for kids.

Title: Donald Duck Adventures
Issue: #16
Date: 1991
Publisher: Disney
Artist: Vicar
Editor: Len Wein

Two stories. First up, incompetent meteorologist Donald gets assigned to a remote weather station on a mountain in South America. He's convinced it's an important assignment, when really the weather bureau is just looking for a way to get rid of him. The nephews tag along for fun.

But the fun turns perilous when a giant roc bird (straight out of the Tales of the Arabian Nights, or possibly from the D&D First Edition Monster Manual) makes off with the entire weather station shack for use as nest-building materials, with Donald and his nephews inside!

The second story has Donald getting into the house-painting business. The house is haunted, of course, and the nephews can't wait to sneak in and play some ghostly pranks. But in the end, they're the ones getting spooked.

Both stories were fast-paced, and fun without ever feeling like they were talking down to the audience. There were plenty of plot twists, and a nice balance with the Donald Duck character. He wins some and he loses some here.

This was nothing groundbreaking, but it was some good fun that really is enjoyable by kids and adults.

Rating: 7/10

Mouse Guard / The Dark Crystal Preview One-Shot

Title: Mouse Guard / The Dark Crystal Preview One-Shot
Date: 2011
Publisher: Archaia
Writer: David Petersen, Brian Froud, Brian Holgun, Jim Henson, Jim McCann
Artist: David Petersen, Alex Sheikman, Lizzy John, Janet Lee
Letterer: Dave Lanphear

Flip Book. There are actually four features here, and they're all good. I'm a huge Dark Crystal fan, so I was skeptical about adding new story, but the Dark Crystal prequel that's presented here captures the flavor of the film beautifully. It focuses on the character Aughra, who sees all but allows herself to be blind to the flaws in the character of her only son, flaws that will eventually lead to the downfall of the world of Thra.

Flip the book over to find a grim and clever fable from the world of Mouse Guard, about a mouse who uses his wits to defeat three predators who had been terrorizing the land.

Also in this volume is a gorgeous four-page Season of the Dapper Men story, and a feature on the upcoming graphic novel A Tale of Sand, which adapts Jim Henson's only completed but unfilmed screenplay. Although they're very different properties, all of these stories have a nice fantasy feel to them, and the result is a very satisfying collection that left me interested in reading more of all four features.

Rating: 8/10

The Adventures of Marky #3

So... Wagon... Totally fell off it. Blogger had an outage last Wednesday, which was a convenient excuse to skip a day. Somehow that turned into skipping six days. Ugh. I'm going to try double duty until I catch up.

I was at the Granite State Comicon in Manchester NH on Sunday. I didn't do much purchasing there because I've still got books from SPACE and from FCBD to review. In fact, I found this minicomic from SPACE tucked between pages in the notebook I use to record sales.

Title: The Adventures of Marky
Issue: #3
Publisher: Dimestore Productions
Date: March 2011
Writer: Madison Shires, Ian Shires
Artist: Madison Shires, Ian Shires

Marky goes all the way to Italy and ends up ordering pizza (with brains on it!). He also meets a fellow brain juice connoisseur named Matilda. Could this be true love? Daughter/father team of Madison and Ian Shires delivers the silly in this $.50 quarter-sized minicomic. Cute and fun.

Rating: 7/10

The Fluffs Escape

Squarecat creator Jennifer Omand had a table at the Rochester NH Free Comic Book Day Festival, and she was giving out this freebie minicomic.

Title: The Fluffs Escape
Publisher: Squarecat Comics
Writer: Jennifer Omand
Artist: Jennifer Omand

The fluffs are little animate clumps of fuzz that reside in the kingdom of Moe, a cat. They just want to be free, but the cat considers them traitors to be devoured and then hacked up as hairballs. Cute sixteen page quarter-sized minicomic freebie that gets in a good dose of the humor and surrealism that Jennifer Omand puts into her Squarecat wwebcomic.

Funny stuff with some cute takes on cat behavior.

Rating: 7.5/10

War of the Supermen #0

Another leftover: This is from last year's FCBD, but I picked it up this past weekend.

Title: War of the Supermen
Issue: #0
Date: June 2010
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: James Robinson, Sterling Gates
Penciler: Eddy Barrows
Inker: J. P. Mayer
Art For Second Story: Julian Lopez, Bit, Aaron Lopresti, David Finch, Joe Weems, Gary Frank, Cafu, Ethan Van Sciver, Diogenes Neves, Vincente Cifuentes, Blond
Colorist: Rod Reis
Letterer: John J. Hill
Editor: Matt Idelson, Will Moss

If (like me) you're clueless about the storyline that leads up to this "war", you should read this book in reverse order. The second story is basically a recap, told in the form of Lois Lane's notes for her story on New Krypton. Or you could just let me fill you in. New Krypton is what became of the classic bottle-city of Kandor of Silver-Age fame. The bottle-city was a Kryptonian city shrunk down to micro-scale, which the writers would find various reasons for Superman to be unable to find a way to restore to full size.

Well, someone finally realized how silly that was. Actually, what happened was that someone realized that the concept was silly, and instead of leaving it where it belonged (as a nostalgic memory along with Jimmy Olsen as Elasto-Boy), they decided that the story would be less silly if they went ahead and un-shrunk Kandor.

Nope. Still silly.

So now you've got an entire population of super-persons on an artificial planet, presumably on the other side of the sun from Earth. And they've gone and elected Christopher Reeve era villain General Zod as their supreme leader. Superman, suspecting that Zod has evil intents, has infiltrated the General's forces. But he still acts shocked when it turns out that, yes, the evil villain who was exiled to the Phantom Zone turns out to really be an evil villain. Shocking, I know.

Superman comes crashing through the wall, but everyone's got superpowers. Ursa (last seen losing her powers and then getting taken out with one punch by Margot Kidder at the end of Superman II) has a kryptonite knife. Really. A kryptonite knife. Apparently just so they can show a bit of blood, because we all know that you can't have a really good Superman story without blood.

The most annoying thing about this, really, is that Superman behaves like an idiot through this entire scene. A lot of people have gripes about the Superman character, but what I've always liked about him is that when he is written well, he thinks his way out of problems rather than slugging his way out. This is not one of those stories.

And even the attempt to replicate the "I destroyed New York twenty minutes ago" bit from the Watchmen fails to make Zod into a particularly compelling villain. He brags that Ursa is going to show Kal-El what a "precise" strike is, and she proceeds to inflict, well, only a flesh wound. He also does all of the usual villainous gloating and revealing of plans.

I liked the Lois Lane recap bit better than the opening story, but it was still only a recap. There's only so much you can do with that.

Bad concept to begin with. Badly executed.

Rating: 4.5/10

The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz Sketchbook

This was a leftover freebie from 2008 that Jetpack Comics had in their selection of freebies this year.

Title: The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz Sketchbook
Date: 2008
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: L. Frank Baum, Eric Shanower, Scottie Young
Artist: Scottie Young
Editor: Arune Singh, Ralph Macchio

This freebie introduces Marvel's adaptation of L. Frank Baum's classic, a flagship title of Marvel's latest incarnation of the Classics Illustrated concept (called "Marvel Illustrated"... to distinguish the series from the rest of Marvel's offerings, which lack illustration, I suppose).

The opening introduction discusses the history of adaptations of Baum's work other media, particularly comics, and describes the background of the new Marvel adaptation. From there we get the concept art for Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow, the Good Witch of the North, the winged monkeys, and Toto, all with commentary by the artist.

The book finishes up with the first issue cover (and artist commentary), followed by three pages of completed art without the dialogue.

The illustration style is interesting, and it is clearly meant to evoke the original illustrations from Baum's first edition. The concept art samples do a nice job of showing the transition from early ideas to final concepts, with substantial changes made in most of the characters. The accompanying commentaries give some good insight into the design process, as well as the challenges involved in adapting a classic.

The three pages of finished art are gorgeous and tell the story nicely even without the dialogue in place. This series clearly has some impressive work in it, and this preview does a nice job of showing it off.

Rating: 8/10