The Unholy Dragon

Just read Harmless by James Grainger and it's a really solid piece of horror. Very much a story about the perils of toxic masculinity told in a way that has some real tension along the path. The ending is suitably big in both an emotional stakes and a physical stakes way. Big recommendation.

So uh. This may be a tell.

The only good thing about that Punisher run is that it got me interested in Luke Cage (and led to a Cage relaunch whose quality I cannot remember)

I'll give some credit here: Once it hit second gear, the book was GREAT and I was hooked. It's just that it happened 300 pages in or so and I can't imagine the first 300 couldn't have been condensed down to 100 with some good editing. It makes it a book on the whole that's hard to recommend, because there's enough important establishing stuff in the first half that you can't skip it but oh my god that first 300 is a slog. Really fantastic back half though.

So, I'm all in for the X-Line. Thought both series started strong. That said, it felt like every five minutes there was a setup for a big reveal that didn't happen and that's FRUSTRATING. Powers in particular had at least three or four things and getting to know one of them at least would have helped. The fact that Prof X has in many ways turned on his dream, paired with the number of dead X-Men revived and the weird...grown ones in Krakoa? Makes me continue to feel something is off about the whole deal. Whatever it is, I find the concept and execution so far interesting enough to hype me up which is all I could ask for at this stage.

Yeah, Pegg is pushing 50. He doesn't even look much like comics Hughie anymore. I respect him for knowing his limits there. Watched the first episode last night and gotta say, this may be a new gold standard for adaptations. Gets as much of the tone, grit, and satire as you want while making changes as appropriate to both serve the format it's in, make it less viscerally unpleasant at times, and expand upon key characters to overall make the work more balanced. If we can get to most of the same key notes along the way, I'm excited to see how it all plays out.

I'm a bit of an outlier, in that The Boys as a comic is my favourite Garth Ennis series, moreso than Preacher. That said, it has more to do with how the endgame stuff lands. The opening where it's more slapstick is okay but doesn't wholly land for me, but the later hits? They get me. Really excited to see how they remixed it here.

Seems like his brother has the rights now and doesn't share those principles. His nephew was there for the announcement and apparently got very uncomfortable when Ditko's wishes on it were discussed. Basically confirmed that he never changed his mind about collections, but the family feels differently. Cited legacy stuff although I'm sure money stuff is a factor as well. But holy jeez, for them to be at the stage where it's announced already they cannot have waited long after the executor distributed stuff to start negotiating this.

Reading No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill and uh. It's a slog. The stupid thing is, so far it's got a lot of things I like. Horror as device for social commentary (trapped in a haunted house with outright scary people because she's too poor/money is too precarious to be mobile), supernatural elements as backdrop for human horror, compelling villains, eerie setting and emphasis on creeps more than jumps. But it's just not done all that well. The creepy elements start at the jump and basically just repeat without much variation. In general there's a lot of that. Both the human and supernatural elements are expressed in very blatant form in the same way, over and over. For like 200 pages. I'm nearly 300 pages in and it's picked up as of like, 200-250 but there's easily 100 pages of filler in the opening stretch that's blatantly there to just pad the thing. Also, you know how sometimes dudes get criticized for how they write women? Yeah. By the point in the novel I'm at, someone's been straight up murdered and the lead keeps alternating between terrified silence and the kind of white woman indignance you'd expect from a lady demanding the manager because her fries weren't crispy enough. To the villains. It's bad. At this stage I'm going to finish it because the good that's there (Great and terrifying villains, when things get moving the tension gets there) are worth it and it seems to have hit its stride but the fact this thing won an award for best horror novel is...concerning.

Yeah the DC collections this month were just all around great looking. I'm also pumped more non-Kirby Fourth World is getting collected.

I'm not saying DC knows how to get my money, but Absolute Fourth World is a pretty good way to do that.

The complete Mr. A by Steve Ditko vol. 1 coming from IDW in 2020. That uh, didn't take long. Complicated feelings, because Ditko didn't like graphic novels as a format and didn't want his work republished as such. However, Ditko doesn't feel much of anything about it now and this will make his work available to fans who weren't able to access it previously. It also allows his later work to be better observed by history, for better or worse. Complicated.

Tini Howard, Vita Ayala, and Leah Williams (the last two announced for unnamed wave 2 books) are great. Brisson has been writing X-Books for a few years now and is good at it, all said. Hill gets a lot of hype, but I find him hit or miss personally. See also Duggan. Ben Percy is terrific and wrote easily the best Green Arrow run in years for Rebirth. Also, the previous run had a lot of acclaimed/talented creators on it for Disassembled and Rosenberg is not 100% at corporate stuff yet, but has an incredible talent. Basically it's all talent who are relatively hot, whether that be in a currently trending or up and coming way. And honestly, I don't think the X-Books have been failing due to a lack of good creative teams since the period you mentioned either. They've had Eisner winning creators on them at times (Lemire notably) but have definitely been suffering from corporate dictates over creative direction for a while now. Also consider, Gillen and Remender kind of made their mainstream names on those runs. Gillen moreso for Young Avengers, but Remender especially went from kinda hot hand indie guy to superstar on the back of his X-Force run. None of the guys you mentioned were A-List talent at the time (and as much as I'd love his work, I'd argue Carey never really has been)

Something is hinky here. Between a bunch of VERY recently dead mutants being inexplicably alive and a lot of villains on heroic teams, I feel like there's going to be some kind of chicanery afoot.

The irony in Dan "Gonna bring all the Silver Age iterations back to prominance!" DiDio complaining that folks prefer nostalgia to moving forward is...pronounced.

Can't wait for the series to finish and the paperback to drop sometime in 2023.

I liked As Above, So Below a lot actually. Part of it is that the Catacombs are amazing and creepy intrinsically (I wish I'd been BEFORE seeing it rather than after). But I also appreciate the dedication to the inversion, with the experiences on the way out mirroring the ones on the way in. It makes the car bit (which is a GREAT visual, admittedly) stick out to me as something which fails to fit into the framework established by the rest of the film.

DC launching Tales From the Dark Multiverse in October. Basically Elseworlds meets What If? Each issue will be 48 pages Prestige Format (I presume squarebound) one shots for $5.99. First two are Knightfall (written by Snyder/Higgins) and Death of Superman. Knightfall is what if Bruce Wayne failed to retake the mantle and has Jean Paul continue as Batman, turning Gotham into a fascist state and murdering criminals until he faces down the Son of Bane. Sounds very cool. Death of Superman is what happens if Lois was possessed by the Eradicator after his death which is...not uninteresting, but definitely less exciting than Knightfall. Infinite Crisis, Blackest Night, and Judas Contract announced as concepts to come as well.

God, I got a slight improvement this week but I'm still in the bottom shelf BEFORE Lion King's RT tanks me more. Maybe I'll hit the actual bottom! YAY!

Noted it in the Marvel thread too, but the entire Nick Spencer Spider-man run to date barring this week's issue is in a limited bundle on Comixology right now for $20. That's 28 issues so if you think it may be your thing, it's a heck of a deal.

Relevant to this, Comixology has a bundle right now that gets you every issue of Spencer's run up to #24 for $20 USD. That's 28 issues total (counting the included .HU issues) and, all things considered, a heck of a deal given that the last five issues alone would cost that much otherwise.

Sook does bits and pieces but usually not sustained runs. Probably the work that most of the forum will have seen is #5 of Return of Bruce Wayne. He also did the art for Kamandi in Wednesday Comics, Seven Soldiers: Zatanna, and the Batman Beyond Rebirth special. I dig his style but I can't imagine he'll actually be anything resembling a 'regular' artist in more than name on this.

The first VHS this was a problem for, mostly because every short tried to get its shit in, in terms of horror staples. So each one found a way to objectify a woman in under 20 minutes. Given that the framing sequence involved sleazebags forcibly and coercively getting footage of tits, it felt... sleazy in a bad way. Particularly if, like me, you saw it in a theater full of horror fans who cheered when a crying woman's chest was exposed. Not awesome. 2 was a MASSIVE improvement, with only one real cheesecake scene to speak of and being handled more respectfully as well as using the framing bits to kind of acknowledge the fuck up with 1. As far as I remember, Viral didn't have anything egregious but I can't say for sure because to do so I'd have to remember Viral. Some neat ideas there but what a horrible way to end the franchise, all said.

Yeah, if you don't count the replacement Batmen or the weird one off variants (which like, no rainbow Batman from the 50s or anything so) then it drops to 6 for Bruce.

I'd hardly call it light competition. Us, Dumbo, Shazam, and Pet Semetary all dropped within a month of its release. Endgame has had slightly heavier competition, but CM held out at higher levels while competing with some of the same stuff and Endgame itself.