Author Archives: Drew

Jul 17 2015

Hawkeye 22

 

Today, Drew and Jack are discussing Hawkeye 22, originally released July 15th, 2015.

Drew: Endings are hard. Whether they break our hearts or leave us wanting more, even the most satisfying ending must face the bittersweet truth of being the end. “The End” takes on a peculiar meaning in the world of month-to-month comics (especially where the next volume may already be a few issues in), but whatever we’re saying goodbye to — whether its a paradigm or a creative team — can still have an almost hallowed air of significance. This makes talking about comic book endings in a issue-by-issue format particularly difficult, as its tempting to use the final issue as a platform for talking about the series as a whole. I absolutely want to talk about Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye run as a whole, but I want to first give issue 22 its due respect as perhaps the perfect distillation of what made his run so remarkable. Continue reading →

Jul 10 2015

Archie 1

Alternating Currents: Archie 1, Drew and Spencer

Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing Archie 1, originally released July 9th, 2015.

Drew: Ah, the reboot. Comics have a long history of restarting characters from the beginning (or something resembling it), but new artists reimagining familiar characters can be seen everywhere, from Peter Pan to Macbeth. The recent popularity of rebooting movie franchises, however, has often smacked of a dearth of ideas. Reboots have all of the familiarity of sequels, but without any of the risk of putting characters in new situations. Or, at least, that’s the cynical attitude I tend to bring to reboots. Archie 1 proves to be surprisingly daring, even as it riffs on characters and situations that have been around for decades. Continue reading →

Jul 2 2015

Zero 18

Alternating Currents: Zero 18, Drew and Patrick

Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Zero 18, originally released July 1st, 2015.

Drew: I don’t love fetishizing endings. I resent the idea that the final moments of a work of art are somehow more important than all of the other moments that came before. I do, however, appreciate that it’s not until the end of a work that we can properly understand what it is. It’s not that the last piece of the narrative puzzle is necessarily more important than the rest, it just happens to be the last one added, which makes it the one that completes the image. True to that analogy, most endings are increasingly predictable as they approach — by that late in a narrative, we have a sense of likely conclusions. But then there are those narratives that aren’t so easily tied down. Zero started as a relatively straightforward spy series, but became increasingly postmodern, turning itself into a pointed commentary on the artificial division between “life” and “art.” Even with that trajectory in mind, issue 18 offers a conclusion of such bizarre beauty that nobody could have ever predicted. Continue reading →

Jun 22 2015

Lazarus 17

Alternating Currents: Lazarus 17, Drew and Spencer

Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing Lazarus 17, originally released June 17th, 2015.

Narrative art must be clear, but it must also be mysterious. Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding, a secret. If it’s only clear, it’s kitsch; if it’s only mysterious (a much easier path), it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous.

Stephen Sondheim

Drew: I’m fascinated by the relationship Lazarus has with clarity. It’s actually one of the most clear comics I’ve ever read — I’ve often remarked upon both Greg Rucka’s deceptively organic exposition and Michael Lark’s ability to keep track of every character in a scene — but it also leaves a great deal unsaid. The most obvious piece is the world-building — our focus has remained relatively tight on a small handful of characters, but every detail implies a much larger, more complex world beyond the edge of the page — but I’m much more interested in the things literally left unsaid; the subtle glances and body language that permeate the artwork, leaving the audience to interpret how characters are feeling. This all but forces us to project our own feelings onto the characters, drawing us further into the narrative. Issue 17 opens with what amounts to reversal of this trick, forcing the characters’ subjectivity onto us, and it is incredibly effective. Continue reading →

Jun 19 2015

Secret Wars Round-Up: Issues released 6/17/15

secret wars roundup5

Today, Drew, Patrick, and Spencer discuss Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars 2, Thors 1, Runaways 1, and Old Man Logan 2.

secret wars div

This is an imaginary story…aren’t they all?

Alan Moore, Superman 423

Drew: Comics continuity is a funny thing. We generally understand characters in their broad strokes, but those broad strokes can change from time to time. Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow” was written at one such juncture, saying goodbye to one era of Superman before Crisis on Infinite Earths ushered in a new one. But that goodbye doesn’t have to be permanent; events can be revisited, recontextualized, altered, or even undone. All of those approaches are fair game during Secret Wars, which affords us more time with characters, settings, and situations we might have thought were gone forever. Continue reading →

Jun 16 2015

Saga 29

Alternating Currents: Saga 29, Drew and Spencer

Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing Saga 29, originally released June 10th, 2015.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Drew: Written in the wake of the first World War, “The Second Coming” features some of the most vivid images in modernist poetry. The second stanza takes on a more biblical tone, name-dropping the titular second coming, but the first stanza, quoted above, features no hint of the divine — this is pure horror of war stuff. Of all the concepts Yeats evokes, the notion that “the best lack all conviction” might actually be the scariest to me. If war can change our values and convictions, what are we actually fighting for? Curiously, we talk about becoming a parent in similar ways: our values and priorities shift around when we have a child to care for. Saga has always existed at the weird intersection between war and parenthood, but issue 29 makes its exploration of the values we sacrifice in the name of either a bit more explicit. Continue reading →

Jun 12 2015

Gotham Academy 7

gotham academy 7

Today, Drew and Taylor are discussing Gotham Academy 7, originally released June 10th, 2015.

Aren’t you two just the most precious, holding hands like that?!

Professor MacPherson

Drew: There are few experiences in life more alien than navigating your first crush. Fairytales and Disney movies insure that we’re all familiar with the idea of romance long before we ever feel those feelings ourselves, which makes them all the more bizarre when they start happening. With so much of childhood filled with understanding our emotions, it’s almost cruel that we’re thrown a totally new one just as we enter the most awkward stage of our lives. Indeed, that we don’t know how to process those feelings is exactly we tend to be so bad about acting on them, pulling pigtails or standing sheepishly at the middle school dance. It takes a while for kids to gain the confidence to push past that awkward confusion. Unless, of course, you’re Maps Mizoguchi, in which case a magic quill will take care of that for you. Continue reading →

Jun 9 2015

All-New X-Men 41

Alternating Currents: All-New X-Men 41, Drew and Michael

Today, Drew and Michael are discussing All-New X-Men 41, originally released June 3rd, 2015.

…it was a good metaphor for what was happening with the civil rights movement in the country at that time.

Stan Lee on creating the X-Men

Drew: The X-Men’s role as a metaphor for the civil rights movement is as well-known as it is obvious — a group of people, marginalized by a coincidence of birth, struggle to be accepted by a society that fears and hates them. With so many institutions codifying racism with backwards rules, from school boards to lunch counters, it didn’t take much exaggeration to blow up that marginalization to comic book proportions. As those policies fell out of use, though, the X-Men came to stand in for other groups that were institutionally marginalized. As society continues to discard bigoted policies, however, the struggle for civil rights becomes less and less about fighting institutional rules that can be pointed at, and more about combating smaller day-to-day injustices. By their very nature, those smaller conflicts don’t lend themselves as well to superhero action: exaggerate them, and you lose the insight into how they affect people every day; don’t exaggerate them, and you don’t have anyone for your hero to shoot eye-beams at. Brian Michael Bendis and Mahmud Asrar opt for exaggeration in All-New X-Men 41, and may lose their message along the way. Continue reading →

Jun 8 2015

The Wicked + The Divine 11

Alternating Currents: The Wicked + The Divine 11, Drew and Spencer

Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing The Wicked + The Divine 11, originally released June 3rd, 2015.

Mr. Ross: Firestorm, that’s a hell of a picture. Remember when they had the helicopter land on top of that car —
Frank Costanza: Hey! I haven’t seen it yet!
Mr. Ross: It has nothing to do with the plot!
Frank Costanza: Still, I like to go in fresh!

Seinfeld, “The Rye”

Drew: I wouldn’t say my girlfriend has a lot in common with Frank Costanza, but she also prefers to “go in fresh” to narratives. For her, any information beyond the barest gist of the genre and mood constitutes a spoiler. Of course, I’ve always been on the opposite end of the spoiler spectrum — because I’m most interested in how the story is told, knowing plot points ahead of time can’t “spoil” the experience. Every so often though, I’ll encounter a twist so shocking that I have to admit I’m glad I didn’t know it was coming. Which is to say, when I say that you should only read on if you’ve already read The Wicked + The Divine 11, I really mean it. Seriously: spoilers after the jump. Continue reading →

Jun 5 2015

Secret Wars Round-Up: Issues released 6/3/15

secret wars roundup3Today, Drew, Patrick and Spencer discuss Secret Wars 3, Giant-Sized Little Marvel AvX 1, Future Imperfect 1, Years of Future Past 1, and Secret Wars Battleworld 2.

secret wars div

Drew: There’s nothing like comics continuity — and I mean that quite literally. Virtually no other narratives feature the same kinds of questions about whether something happened, how so and so exists if that didn’t happen, whether or not characters remember events that did happen before they didn’t, or if all of the events we’re reading will somehow be undone in the future. I’ve never been particularly interested in what is and isn’t canon (as far as I’m concerned, the only stories that “count” in comics are the ones that I’ve read), but it’s certainly interesting to see how the Big Two twist themselves up in knots to explain things. Marvel has long touted its continuity as being unbroken (a few retcons notwithstanding), in contrast to DC’s system of periodically “resetting” their universe with a massive crisis, but Secret Wars began with proudly proclaiming the death of the Marvel Universe as we know it. Indeed, this week finds writers not just defending that break, but reveling in it. Continue reading →