Category Drew Baumgartner

Drew Baumgartner, Co-Editor-In-Chief
drew@retcon-punch.com

Location: Milwaukee

History With Comics: Drew grew up with Superman pajamas. His best days were when he never had to change out of them. He fell in love with Batman the Animated Series when he was 5. He had never read a comic in his life, but started reading Batman trades when he was in high school. He continued to pick up trades and one-offs throughout the 00’s, but never got into the monthly swing. After almost a decade of being an outsider looking in, Drew seized upon DC’s relaunch to start picking up monthlies.

Mar 25 2014

Animal Man 29

animal man 29Today, Scott and Drew are discussing Animal Man 29, originally released March 19th, 2014. 

 And the best part of all was that one day… when they were all real old and had lived happily for a long, long time, they would die, too…

Maxine Baker

Scott: This statement, made by a four year old finally processing the meaning of her brother’s death, underlines the tragic nature of the final issue of Jeff Lemire’s Animal Man. It’s both the realization her father, Buddy Baker, needed her to make, and the promise he knows he can’t keep. Not every family gets to live happily ever after, especially not when the patriarch has as many responsibilities as Animal Man. This issue shows Buddy doing whatever he can to make sure everyone around him gets the happiest ending possible, even if it’s not the fairly tale ending they desire. In the face of uncertainty, maybe that’s the best you can do.

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Mar 24 2014

Sex Criminals 5

sex criminals 5Today, Shelby and Drew are discussing Sex Criminals 5, originally released March 19th, 2014.

Shelby: The honeymoon’s over. The cat’s out of the bag. Issue 4 of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals sees a confrontation between the sex police as well as uncomfortable secrets revealed between our favorite comic book couple. The issue opens with a charming limerick summary, so I thought it would be appropriate to open our discussion in the same fashion. Ahem:

There once was a blogger called Bee
Who loved the criminals sexy
The dirty stuff was the best
But as to the rest
It was actually pretty touching (heh) to see

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Mar 24 2014

The Illegitimates 4

illegitimates 4Today, Greg and Drew are discussing The Illegitimates 4, originally released March 19th, 2014.

Greg: There’s a level of poker-faced sincerity in The Illegitimates that is, at the very least, somewhat admirable. At times the issue reminded me of VHS box art to 1980s action movies, the “blue skies” of USA shows like Burn Notice, and a sense of hazy nostalgia that I’ve played this video game before but couldn’t tell you the name of it. I offer muted applause to the issue for offering unironically these kinds of low-stakes, predictable pleasures gleaned from these cultural experiences, yet can’t help but notice it neither commits hard enough nor subverts strongly enough to make any lasting impact. 

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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 20 2014

Winter Soldier: The Bitter March 2

winter soldier 2Today, Patrick and Drew are discussing Winter Soldier: The Bitter March 2, originally released March 19th, 2014.

Patrick: Enigmatic super-soldier spies are tough to characterize. How can you reveal someone’s true nature when they’ve been trained to be a tool of their government, forsaking all personal interests? Rick Remender’s new Winter Soldier mini-series attempts to paint a picture of a man by presenting his surroundings in as much detail as possible. Even when we get a flashback to Bucky’s more formative years, it’s his mentor’s perspective we see stated directly, and not Bucky’s. It’s addition by subtraction, and the sum is a tantalizing character sketch, made all the more compelling by a faithfully realized period thriller.

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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 18 2014

Fantastic Four 2

fantastic four 2Today, Patrick and Drew are discussing Fantastic Four 2, originally released March 12th, 2014.

Patrick: I don’t like the way James Robinson writes dialogue. Don’t like it. He invents unnecessarily awkward contractions; his characters use cliché superhero rhetoric; there are frequent problems with subject-verb agreement; and he’ll mix up countable and uncountable objects (using words like “fewer” and “less” incorrectly). I can accept some of these “mistakes” as affectations of Robinson’s characters: lord knows Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm aren’t going to edit the words that come out of their mouths. But dialogue is like 5% of a comic, right? As long as the art and incident are compelling, a few glaringly stupid sentences shouldn’t bother me, right? RIGHT!? Continue reading →

Mar 17 2014

East of West 10

east of west 10

Today, Taylor and Drew are discussing East of West 10, originally released March 12th, 2014.

Taylor: Anyone who’s been reading the news lately has been spoiled by a surprising amount of entertaining stories. The mystery of the vanished Malaysian airliner has captivated the world since each day new and more confounding information is released about its fateful voyage. Then there’s the ongoing political crisis in Crimea. Vladimir Putin’s bizarre quest to take back a former Russian province has set the Western world afire. With stories such as these making the news one would wonder why we need to read fiction since the real world seems capable of delivering enough entertainment on its own. As if in answer to this question, East of West 10 tells us why fiction and comics are important. This issue seems to hold a mirror up to the world and the reflection, while twisted, is all too recognizable as belonging to nothing but humanity.

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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 →