Graphic Novel Review: Babel, Blood, Common Grounds

I've been meaning to write this for a while, now. But Askville has been eating up my time (I'm level 1 in 21 categories now, and am almost half-way to level 2 in several of them).

These aren't going to be long reviews, because let's face it: I don't know if anyone is going to bother taking my advice about this stuff. I'm just doing this for the record, more than anything else.

Onward:

JLA: Tower of Babel - yet another installment of one of those endless 1990s DC story arcs. Batman made a boo-boo with secret data. Whatever will the rest of the JLA do? Apparently act like dumb-ass teenagers. "I don't trust you anymore!" "But he was there for you when you needed him!" Whine, whine, whine.

Okay, it's not absolutely terrible; it's competently written, I guess. But it's boring.

The Flash: Blood Will Run - Sometimes when I finish a book I find myself saying angrily "What the hell was that?!?. Meet The Flash: Blood Will Run. It's the most disjointed so-called graphic novel I've read in quite a while, apart from those dumps DC takes on their fans by putting out huge collections of "bests" which are totally unrelated to each other - half of which are from the 1940s and 50s, with characters who don't look anything like what they're supposed to and spend all their time worrying about pulling "boners".

The Flash maybe had a baby with a dead girl, oh wait, maybe he didn't...yawn. And don't expect any sort of resolution here. It feels as if they left off the beginning AND the end!

No wonder Wikipedia didn't have an entry for this wretched so-called "graphic novel".

Lastly, something very different:

Common Grounds by Troy Hickman

I tend to be suspicious about comics from small publishers (unless they're written by Alan Moore of course). Too often they've turned out to be gross, or lame. But the library doesn't charge anything, and I'm starting to run out of graphic novels. So I gave this one a shot.

It was surprisingly well done! At first I was very impressed; looking back, I did see some flaws, but Common Grounds was still outstanding. It's a set of mostly-unrelated stories set around a chain of coffee shops which cater specifically to superheroes - 13 stories in all. Some of it was a bit cutesy, and there were one or two stories that I thought were a bit weak, but the characters were strong, the writing was funny and imaginative, and the whole thing was refreshingly different.

There was a strong flavor of realism, but not in the angsty way - the characters were much more believable, very much as you'd expect people in the real world to be if they had powers. How many comics have you read in which 90% of a story takes place as a conversation between a superhero and a supervillian in a coffee shop bathroom? Or at a meeting for overweight supers?

If this series were still being published I'd subscribe to it. Unfortunately it was a six-issue limited run.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Steampunk: Manimatron. Unreadable. When you use weird lettering throughout to make your comic book look "cool", you'd better also make sure that it's "legible". A waste of time.

Happy reading, comics fans!

Graphic Novel Review: Babel, Blood, Common Grounds

I've been meaning to write this for a while, now. But Askville has been eating up my time (I'm level 1 in 21 categories now, and am almost half-way to level 2 in several of them).

These aren't going to be long reviews, because let's face it: I don't know if anyone is going to bother taking my advice about this stuff. I'm just doing this for the record, more than anything else.

Onward:

JLA: Tower of Babel - yet another installment of one of those endless 1990s DC story arcs. Batman made a boo-boo with secret data. Whatever will the rest of the JLA do? Apparently act like dumb-ass teenagers. "I don't trust you anymore!" "But he was there for you when you needed him!" Whine, whine, whine.

Okay, it's not absolutely terrible; it's competently written, I guess. But it's boring.

The Flash: Blood Will Run - Sometimes when I finish a book I find myself saying angrily "What the hell was that?!?. Meet The Flash: Blood Will Run. It's the most disjointed so-called graphic novel I've read in quite a while, apart from those dumps DC takes on their fans by putting out huge collections of "bests" which are totally unrelated to each other - half of which are from the 1940s and 50s, with characters who don't look anything like what they're supposed to and spend all their time worrying about pulling "boners".

The Flash maybe had a baby with a dead girl, oh wait, maybe he didn't...yawn. And don't expect any sort of resolution here. It feels as if they left off the beginning AND the end!

No wonder Wikipedia didn't have an entry for this wretched so-called "graphic novel".

Lastly, something very different:

Common Grounds by Troy Hickman

I tend to be suspicious about comics from small publishers (unless they're written by Alan Moore of course). Too often they've turned out to be gross, or lame. But the library doesn't charge anything, and I'm starting to run out of graphic novels. So I gave this one a shot.

It was surprisingly well done! At first I was very impressed; looking back, I did see some flaws, but Common Grounds was still outstanding. It's a set of mostly-unrelated stories set around a chain of coffee shops which cater specifically to superheroes - 13 stories in all. Some of it was a bit cutesy, and there were one or two stories that I thought were a bit weak, but the characters were strong, the writing was funny and imaginative, and the whole thing was refreshingly different.

There was a strong flavor of realism, but not in the angsty way - the characters were much more believable, very much as you'd expect people in the real world to be if they had powers. How many comics have you read in which 90% of a story takes place as a conversation between a superhero and a supervillian in a coffee shop bathroom? Or at a meeting for overweight supers?

If this series were still being published I'd subscribe to it. Unfortunately it was a six-issue limited run.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Steampunk: Manimatron. Unreadable. When you use weird lettering throughout to make your comic book look "cool", you'd better also make sure that it's "legible". A waste of time.

Happy reading, comics fans!