Author Archives: Drew

Apr 3 2014

Detective Comics 30

Alternating Currents, Detective Comics 30, Drew and ScottToday, Drew and Scott are discussing Detective Comics 30, originally released April 2nd, 2014.

Welcome to Gotham City. It has the potential to be great…for the both of us. It’s a new start.

Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato

Drew: Two figures arrive in the big city for the first time. It’s the start of many a classic story of city life — including this issue — but it also accurately describes Manapul and Buccellato’s “move” to Gotham. After a stellar run on The Flash (ha), Manapul and Buccellato have brought their signature meta-commentary to DC’s namesake, opening with the quote above. The line is not necessarily spoken — it could plausibly be said by Elena or Annie Aguila (the two figures we see arriving in Gotham), but is rather explicitly not represented as dialogue, or even internal monologue — there’s no speech balloon, no voiceover box, not even a quotation mark, suggesting that this really is the creators speaking directly to the audience. It’s a bold move, but exactly the kind that gives me confidence that this does indeed have the potential to be great.

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Apr 2 2014

Deadpool 26

Alternating Currents: Deadpool 26, Drew and Shelby

Today, Drew and Shelby are discussing Deadpool 26, originally released March 26th, 2014

Drew: Third-person omniscient perspective is perhaps the most common in all of storytelling, but it’s also the weirdest. That kind of birds-eye-view of a situation we’re otherwise not involved in is utterly unnatural, yet we almost never question it when we read it. Who is it that’s telling us this story? Why are they telling it? Sometimes these questions are addressed in-narrative, but more often than not, we’re meant to accept that our narrator is not a character at all, but some mysterious force that reveals this story to us just for the sake of it. This can get even more complicated in visual media, like comics and film, where the visual narrator can exist independent of the voiceover narration. Deadpool 26 takes gleeful advantage of that complexity, creating a comic that very explicitly feels like a comic, effectively challenging all of our notions as to what exactly that means.

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Mar 27 2014

The Flash 29

Alternating Currents: Flash 29, Drew and ScottToday, Drew and Scott are discussing The Flash 29, originally released March 26th, 2014.

Drew: I have a friend who used to love Law and Order — er, he liked it as much as a person can really like an episodic primetime drama — the point is, he was happy to tune in every week to see how the team handles the new case. That is, until his son pointed out to him how formulaic the show really is — right down to when in the episode they’ll nab the wrong suspect, find that key clue, or offer a plea bargain. It ruined the show for him — knowing what would happen next robbed every development of any drama, so he just stopped watching it. In some way, we all have this same experience with storytelling in general: the more stories we consume, and the more familiar with common formulas we become, the better we are at predicting what happens next. We recognize foreshadowing, we notice if we’re being intentionally misled — we just become harder to fool. Many of us are willing to put that aside to suspend our disbelief that maybe the hero won’t make it out this time, or maybe the lead couple won’t end up together, after all, but sometimes a writer still wants to surprise us. This often requires going into DEEP left field, which can make the resulting developments feel arbitrary, or even nonsensical. Unfortunately, those are the kinds of final act reveals we get in Flash 29.

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Mar 26 2014

Weekly Round-Up: Comics Released 3/19/14

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, Patrick, and Spencer discuss Batwoman 29, Batman and Aquaman 29, Thunderbolts 23, Avengers World 4, New Avengers 15, Nova 15, Uncanny X-Men 19, Wolverine and the X-Men 2, Superior Spider-Man Annual 2, Superior Foes of Spider-Man 10, Harley Quinn 4, Unwritten Apocalypse 3, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Utrom Empire 3.

slim-banner4Drew: I’ve never seen a writing credit on it, but I’ve always been a big fan of this quasi-famous example script from UPenn’s linguistics department. I know I’ve seen the joke used elsewhere, but there’s something so simple and satisfying about seeing a story where the feeling is expressed at the expense of any other meaning. Or, perhaps I should say: it’s funny because it defies all of our expectations of stories. Unfortunately, Batwoman 29 illustrates exactly why that kind of steamrolling of details doesn’t work in practice.

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Mar 21 2014

American Vampire: Second Cycle 1

Alternating Currents: American Vampire 1, Drew and PatrickToday, Drew and Patrick are discussing American Vampire: Second Cycle 1, originally released March 19th, 2014.

The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt, look at it: it’s too high! It’s in no-man’s-land.

Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld

Drew: I spend a lot of time (maybe too much) thinking about form in narratives. Why do plot points happen when they do? How are they foreshadowed? How are they recalled? For all of my time and energy spent focused on these questions, however, I don’t have a lot of answers — theories for sure, but no solid explanations. Like, why arch forms are so pleasing to us. The return is an important part of the Heroes’ journey, but I’ve always been more satisfied with the more character-based return, like the Seinfeld quote above. It appears both in the series’ pilot and finale, and while the characters have entered a very different status quo by the series’ end, there’s something incredibly pleasing about the same turn of phrase returning verbatim. I’d like to suggest that it’s because it reinforces some fundamental truth about the characters — such that the very final scene of the very final episode is just as good of an introduction to the characters as the very first scene of the very first episode. That kind of consistency is incredibly difficult in any serialized medium, where the characters may need to settle in a bit before truly becoming themselves (and may change a great deal over the course of the narrative), but writer Scott Snyder manages a similarly impressive reintroduction here at the midpoint of American Vampire. Continue reading →

Mar 19 2014

Weekly Round-Up: Comics Released 3/12/14

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 Batman: Li’l Gotham 12, Batwoman 29, Secret Avengers 1, Green Lantern Corps 29, Manifest Destiny 5, and Daredevil: Road Warrior Infinite Comic 3.

slim-banner4Drew: In the face of increasingly daunting comic canons, I’ve become a pretty big proponent of “fanon” — a personal canon each reader cultivates to suit their own tastes. I hate to suggest that continuity and quality are mutually exclusive, but it’s hard to argue with the allure of Batman: Li’l Gotham, which has found the heart of the Batman universe without sweating the details. Then again, this week’s final collection reveals just how precise those details are. Effectively taking place in what the Timmverse would be if it had been created to reflect the pre-reboot continuity, writers Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen, treat their final installment as a retrospective on a universe that DC isn’t publishing anywhere else, revealing just how much potential it has. Also, every panel is somehow more adorable than the last. It’s more of the same, for sure, but when that same is this charming, I’ll gladly take all I can get (and hope for more down the line). Continue reading →

Mar 18 2014

Captain Marvel 1

captain marvel 1Today, Drew and guest writer Suzanne are discussing Captain Marvel 1, originally released March 12th, 2013.

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

Federico Fellini

Drew: The notion that art reveals something about the artist is a popular one, and I think is at least part of the reason artists are such alluring figures in our society — who wouldn’t want to be closer to the mind that whose autobiography is the sistine chapel or the brandenburg concerti? What a work of art says about its creator is a fascinating line of inquiry, but I’ve personally always been more interested in what a work of art says about its audience. It’s this other autobiography that is often ignored when discussing (and dare I say creating) a work of art, but I personally think it’s much more important its success. Could I relate to this work? Could I empathize with its characters? Could I understand their sorrows and joys? As a woman holding her own in a male-dominated field, it’s easy to see Kelly Sue DeConnick’s autobiography in Captain Marvel 1, but as ever, this series is really about the fans. Continue reading →

Mar 14 2014

All-New X-Men 24

Alternating Currents: All-New X-Men 24, Drew and ShelbyToday,  Drew and Shelby are discussing All-New X-Men 24, originally released March 12th, 2014. This issue is part of the Trial of Jean Grey event.

jean gray divDrew: As much as I can understand the appeal of seeing your favorite superheroes fight, the strained justifications for why they were fighting in the first place always got in the way of it being any fun. Shouldn’t Superman have heard of Batman? Shouldn’t they know they’re on the same side? These problems are exacerbated in cohesive publishing universes where you can confirm that, yeah, every hero should basically have heard of every other hero by now. Brian Michael Bendis discovered a creative end-run around this problem in All-New X-Men — the time-displaced original X-Men ultimately missed a LOT of introductions to Earth’s superheroes — which finds its logical conclusion issue 24 as they face off against the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. I mean, honestly, how would they know they were on the same side? Continue reading →

Mar 12 2014

Green Lantern 29

Alternating Currents: Green Lantern 29, Drew and SpencerToday, Drew and Spencer are discussing Green Lantern 29, originally released March 5th, 2014.

Drew: We often talk about “close readings” in our discussions, but the most rewarding works of art are interesting from far away, too. When zoomed out, you can appreciate the broader form and plotting, while when zoomed in, you can appreciate the moment-to-moment mechanics that make those larger parts work. Indeed, it’s this scalability that allows stories to remain interesting in spite of our familiarity with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth — at some scales, the non-essential details don’t matter at all, but at other scales, they’re the only thing that matters. Any halfway decent discussion of a work of art needs to focus on multiple scales, but certain works of art strongly suggest one scale over the other. More formulaic stories — an episode of Law & Order, for example — tend to offer more rewards for those looking at the details (and certain boredom for anyone looking at form). I’d argue that the controversy of LOST‘s finale stems largely from confusion over the suggested scale — is this a show about a weird island, or about the people who encounter it? — which may have changed from episode to episode. I’d argue that that ever-shifting scale is part of what made that show so great, but there’s no denying that abruptly changing gears can bring discomfort, even if it reaps the kinds of rewards we see in Green Lantern 29. Continue reading →

Mar 11 2014

Veil 1

Alternating Currents: Veil 1, Drew and GregToday, Drew and Greg are discussing Veil 1, originally released March 5th, 2014.

Drew: What is an identity? Is it a name you call yourself? Is it a series of values that dictate your actions? I think we often tend to think of our identity as some kind of immutable part of our being, but I personally believe that it changes with the context. Sometimes we’re outgoing, other times we’re shy. Sometimes we’re funny, other times we’re humorless. I tend to think that context-dependence means that we define ourselves — at least in part — by the way others treat us. I tend to be a pretty mature guy, but as soon as I go home to visit my parents, I’m a little bit seventeen again. I often find myself rising (or falling, as the case may be) to those expectations, but Veil 1 introduces a character who refuses to be defined by the way she’s perceived. Continue reading →