Better than never: the late review
June 26th, 2008
Other comics that came out LAST week.
Terminus – a weekly comic strip
June 25th, 2008
Iranians can be cartoon characters too
June 24th, 2008
Persepolis, graphic novel and movie reviewed.
Autobiography has become the life blood of mid-ground comic books. Sometimes the lives recalled are woven into the fabric of dramatic and horrific events of global historical importance, sometimes the events described are decidedly quotidian. In American Splendor (Vertigo, 2008 ) – which often immortalises lives of no particular consequence other than the fact that they are being lived by human beings – author Harvey Pekar rants, ““I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life I’m not proud of but at least…” and then lists such non-acts as “never got high and shot my wife in the head” and “never conned my country into a needless war to boost my ego”.
Mindless news: so that’s what you’ve been up to…
June 22nd, 2008
Check this out. One of the greatest icons in the Mindless Hall of Fame and Mirrors writing a teeny-Beebies cartoon, with interactive online games and super-psychic timetraveller vampire detectives in a flooded future London.
It’s called Meta4orce, and you can watch the whole lot here (possibly. I gather some geographical limitations may apply to BBC stuff.) The intro graphics and that are nice, but the animation’s kind of flat and cheap, not going much beyond stand-blink-talk. However, the inevitable themes are all present and correct: gorgeous gamine adolescents unsure of their bizarrely sprouting new abilities and the wrenching existential crises wrought thereby. Violent introspection and doomed identities sure to follow, as well as some witty wordplay, a few crushing put-downs, and a lovely, tragic-romantic sensibility.
In case you are truly mindless and that didn’t give it away – it’s written by Peter Motherfuckingilligan.
This old YELLOW EYE has seen it all before
June 22nd, 2008
Comics bought and read on Saturday the 21st of June 2008.
Terminus – a weekly comic strip
June 19th, 2008
Always crashing in the same tank: Tank Girl returns to comics
June 18th, 2008
It was with surprisingly little fanfare that Tank Girl made her return to comics last year. I guess being such a zeitgeist shagging style icon of the 90’s might dilute her current hipster status and subsequent fiscal worth. Not to mention having an absolute mega-bomb of a movie hanging around like a a stinking albatross. (Seriously, I don’t understand how a movie featuring Ice-T as a Kangaroo could be bad, but that piece of cinematic dogshit achieves it in spades). But when IDW resurrected the franchise I for one was glad to see her and the gang back (relatively) unchanged and unscathed.
Collected irritant soundtracks vol. 1
June 15th, 2008
Oh good, a new hobby horse to savage with my bugbear: No sooner have I finished blogging about how annoying I find a current half-trend of imposing pick-and-mix music decisions on the otherwise private stereoheads of readers, when it starts appearing all over the place. Okay, well, in one place only so far, maybe two if what I’m told about Lapham’s latest is right, but little bloggy subcategories have been built out of far less.
HULK!
June 13th, 2008
Critic smash stupid Hulk movie
Those of you who saw the first Hulk movie back in 2003 will no doubt recall how Marvel’s less-than-jolly green giant was developed into a sensitive family drama in which Oedipal conflicts were fought out between an irradiated Bruce Banner and his amazing absorbing Dad who climactically transformed into a large translucent green green jellyfish as if to demonstrate the diffusion of phallocentric power in the face of sensitive new age masculinity. Or something like that.