Author Archives: Drew

Jun 4 2014

Weekly Round-Up: Comics Released 5/28/14

round upLook, there are a lot of comics out there. Too many. We can never hope to have in-depth conversations about all of them. But, we sure can round up some of the more noteworthy titles we didn’t get around to from the week. Today, Drew discusses Avengers 30, The New 52: Futures End 4, Nightwing 30, and Southern Bastards 2.

slim-banner4Look, we know how you feel. We didn’t believe it either when we were you and we us said what we us are saying right now.

Bill S. Preston, Esquire, Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Drew: Do you ever think about what you would tell your past self if you ever had the opportunity? It seems like a silly question, but it comes up a LOT in fiction, and is never quite satisfactory. There’s almost always some kind of time constraint that keeps anyone from asking the serious questions, meaning that everything ends up being a rushed jumble of cryptic teasers for what’s about to happen. It makes sense — actually having the future version tell the past version everything would either rob the story of any tension, or run the risk of changing the past that we’ve already read. In Avengers 30, Jonathan Hickman knowingly toes the line between too little and too much information, but keeps the focus tight enough on the characters that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Continue reading →

Jun 2 2014

Trees 1

Alternating Currents: Trees 1, Drew and ShelbyToday, Drew and Shelby are discussing Trees 1, originally released May 28th, 2014. Drew: All stories have a narrator. This point was obvious enough to me in high school english classes, as we aimed to parse first person from close third person, or subjective from omniscient, but was utterly lost when I thought about the more visual storytelling of film and comics. Who is the narrator of Casablanca? Of The Godfather? It’s easy enough for us to point to a first person narrator when there’s overbearing voiceover, but whose is the default point of view we take when watching a movie or reading a comic book without that kind of obvious diegetic narration? Some might argue that those narratives present some kind of objective accounting of the events in question, but subjectivity creeps in at every turn, with shot composition, lighting, costuming, pacing, editing, even music cues designed to illicit very specific emotional reactions (often those of the characters on the screen or page). With Trees 1, Warren Ellis and Jason Howard have shined a spotlight on those very details, starting threads that differ not only in their settings and characters, but in the perspective of their narrators, as well. Continue reading →

May 30 2014

Winter Soldier: The Bitter March 4

Alternating Currents: Winter Soldier 4, Taylor and DrewToday, Drew and Taylor are discussing Winter Soldier: The Bitter March 4, originally released May 28th, 2014.

Drew: In a time when serialized storytelling is very much in vogue, it’s easy to forget that some characters are designed for a specific narrative. That is, the situations that they endure during the story so define them that they can’t really exist outside of it. Would we even recognize Hamlet if he wasn’t having an existential crisis? The only way to reuse a character like that is to put them in essentially the same situation again, which obviously yields diminishing returns, and might just undermine the power of the original. Unfortunately, as Winter Soldier: The Bitter March ramps up to its conclusion, it’s clear that Bucky Barnes may only have one important story to tell. Continue reading →

May 29 2014

Batman 31

Alternating Currents: Batman 31, Drew and PatrickToday, Drew and Patrick are discussing Batman 31, originally released May 28th, 2014.

Drew: Between comics, movies, tv shows, video games, radio serials, and children’s imaginations, Batman is arguably the most prolific fictional character in history. With that long, multi-media history comes a secondary history of reinvention. I’ve seen it said that each generation redefines Batman, but in my mind, he’s revamped far more often than once a generation. Each new iteration brings changes, some more superficial than others, but what is it that actually defines Batman? What is his immutable core? The thing that would actually make him a different character if it was absent? With Zero Year, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo have already given lie to what many people would assume were givens — grimness chief amongst them — but issue 31 finds them asserting an essential element I hadn’t expected: masochism. Continue reading →

May 28 2014

Deadpool Annual 2

Alternating Currents: Deadpool Annual 2, Drew and PatrickToday, Drew and Patrick are discussing Deadpool Annual 2, originally released May 21st, 2014

Drew: Humor — and especially jokes — are defined by our expectations. A set-up literally sets up a framework that the punchline carefully subverts. “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” only makes sense if there was ever an expectation that the joke-teller was going to say “banana”. The point is, those expectations are absolutely crucial to the success of a joke, which makes a jokey comic book character like Deadpool a bit of an anomaly. He exists in a world filled with superpowered mutants, aliens, robots, and gods — it’s hard to have a concrete set of expectations when anything is possible, anyway. So, how do you keep Deadpool from disappearing up his own butt? With the Deadpool Annual 2, writer Christopher Hastings chooses to mine the expectations we have for Spider-Man, resulting in a substantive deconstruction of Spidey, but revealing little about Wade himself.

Continue reading →

May 27 2014

Saga 19

Alternating Currents: Saga 19, Drew and SuzanneToday, Drew and Suzanne are discussing Saga 19, originally released May 21st, 2014.

Drew: I’ve expressed this before, but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with parenting stories — not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because I’m necessarily lacking the parenting experience to be able to appreciate them fully. With each issue of Saga, Brian K. Vaughan has put those concerns out of my head — I’m not the last man alive, either, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying his Y: The Last Man — but with issue 19, he takes that relatability a step further. Indeed, he so intimately catalogues the reshuffling of priorities of early parenthood that — in at least some small way — I fell like I actually understand what it might mean to be a parent.

Continue reading →

May 23 2014

Chat Cave: Amazing Spider-Man 2

Editor’s Note: Sorry this is coming out so late, gang!

Following only five years after the conclusion of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, the first Amazing Spider-Man struggled to justify its own existence. Amazing Spider-Man 2 suffers from a different proximity effect garnering early comparisons to the similarly overstuffed and tonally inconsistent Spider-Man 3. Are those comparisons fair? You can bet we have thoughts on that. Welcome to the Chat Cave.
Continue reading →

May 21 2014

Weekly Round-Up: Comics Released 5/14/14

round upLook, there are a lot of comics out there. Too many. We can never hope to have in-depth conversations about all of them. But, we sure can round up some of the more noteworthy titles we didn’t get around to from the week. Today, Drew and Patrick discuss The New 52: Futures End 2, Avengers 29, and All-New X-Men 27.

slim-banner4Drew: With DC doubling- (even tripling-) down on weekly series, a lot of ink has been spilled on the benefits of a weekly format. While I certainly think the opportunity to sell four times as many comics is part of the equation, I’m more interested in the narrative benefits. Do you choose a monthly format to allow for more propulsive cliffhangers? To facilitate more nuanced decompression? To broaden the scope of the series? The New 52: Futures End favored this latter option right off the bat (much to the detriment of issues 0-1), but issue 2 begins to make good on that promise in earnest, placing its characters in the context of a larger superhero universe.

Continue reading →

May 20 2014

Secret Avengers 3

Alternating Currents: Secret Avengers 3, Drew and ShelbyToday, Drew and Shelby are discussing Secret Avengers 3, originally released May 14th, 2014. 

Drew: There was a point in my life, from my late teens through my early twenties, where I firmly ascribed to the notion that making an impression, good or bad, was better than going unnoticed. It made me a very outgoing person, but it also made me pretty obnoxious. I may have gotten a bit more cynical over the years (I’ve definitely gotten quieter), but I’m now fairly certain that outgoing and obnoxiousness may be more than just directly correlated; frankly, I think they’re the same trait. “Outgoing” is the term we use when we find that kind of extroverted behavior charming, but it doesn’t take much to see those same behaviors as utterly grating. It forces us to walk a tricky line — we don’t want to be faceless cookie-cutter bores, but we also don’t want to be so fixated on the beat of our own drums that we turn people off (at least, not everyone).

Art walks a similar line, struggling to distinguish itself from the pack without alienating its audience. All art exists on a continuum of underdone to overdone but the vanguard has always been on that overdone edge, as artists push the envelope of taste ever further from the known. I don’t want to suggest that Secret Avengers 3 is quite on the bleeding edge of comic book trends, but it certainly toes the line of obnoxiousness. I know that sounds like a harsh criticism, but I really don’t mean that in a bad way. I may not mean it in a good way, either, but it’s certainly not all bad.

Continue reading →

May 19 2014

Captain Marvel 3

captain marvel 3Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Captain Marvel 3, originally released May 14th, 2014.

Yes, but what does it mean?

Traditional

Drew: We tend to talk a lot about the meaning of a given comic around here, but we’re rarely explicit in what we think “meaning” means. Or, more specifically, whose meaning we think we’re describing. Many folks are interested in authorial intent — who, after all would be better to speak to the meaning of a work of art than its creator? — but I’m personally more interested in the idea that meaning is created by the audience upon consuming a work of art. There may be objective truths about an art, but there are only subjective reactions. Of course, that doesn’t make me immune to the allure of monolithic readings of certain artworks — Virginia Woolf’s work is somehow inherently feminist, or Ernest Hemmingway’s work is somehow inherently macho. We like these readings both because they’re logical (they certainly reflect the character of the author), but more importantly, because they yield meaningful insights. But what about readings that buck those stereotypes? What about interpretations that strain against those meta-narrative to reveal something more meaningful? I suppose notions of “more meaningful” illustrate my point about subjectivity, but I firmly believe that Captain Marvel 3 gains a great deal by being very unlike what we’ve come to expect of this series.

Continue reading →