Crappy Comics
Jul. 31st, 2002 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramNo gym today. I went to Paragon and priced heart rate monitors (the cheapest were around $80, so I’m gonna keep looking; I could get ’em cheaper on the ’Net, but I’d like to have one by Sunday), and met Teresa on the way out. Tagged along to Odd Job where she was going to buy a pair of full-body pillows; “Dutch wives” Fritz Leiber called them in “Our Lady of Darkness”, and that’s where we’d both learned the term.
Today’s comics haul was disappointing. I picked up Cerebus #280 (twenty more issues to go!), volume 20 of Ranma 1/2, and the third and final issue of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Back.
This issue of Cerebus has a mildly amusing Woody Allen parody — not as good as the Marx Bros. parodies Sim did way back when, but at least he is (as far as I can tell) writing new jokes in the style of Allen, and not just ripping off existing material like he did with Oscar Wilde. The down side is that text Dave is swallowing up comics Dave. A big chunk of this issue (not including the latest part of the essay on Islam that occupies the latter half of the physical comic) is devoted to a rambling and tedious commentary Cerebus is dictating on the Torah. Yes, the literal Torah, or rather, an archaic English version of it. I have no idea why such a book should exist as part of Cerebus’s world, but I’ve long since abandoned any hope that any sense can be made of Dave’s choices of when to use a parody of a real-world thing and when to use the literal thing. Estarcion (and how long has it been since that name’s been used in the comic?) just makes no sense as a subcreative construct.
Moving on to the other disappointment, I’m glad that The Dark Knight Strikes Back is over and I feel dirty for having bought it. This sucked, big time, and I say that as a big fan of the original Dark Knight Returns. The art is graceless and primitive, the coloring garish and distracting, the characters brutal and thuggish, and most of the humor unfunny. A few moments stand out, but not enough to make this series worth buying.
It’ll be a few days before I get to the Ranma book. I don’t expect it to be crappy.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-08-01 06:31 am (UTC)Ranma vol (US)20?
Date: 2002-08-01 06:55 am (UTC)It shall be VERY far from sucking.
It's right about here (Just after the Shishihokodan story) that things REALLY start to pick up.
We're only about 4-5 yrs from American publication of Phoenix Mountain. Start counting the days.
Sorry to hear about Dark Knight. It's crude, it's often overly violent, but it's meant to be. Even more so than the original, it's a dark and thuggish world that they live in, and even though the heroes, freed from whatever bondage they were in, are trying to make it less so, they've been tainted by living in it. To me, it seems as if it's mean to shock and annoy, and it does a god job of both.