Category Contributors

Oct 24 2012

Blue Beetle 13

Today, Patrick and Drew are discussing Blue Beetle 13, originally released October 17th, 2012.

Patrick: Did you guys see Million Dollar Baby? I’m going to spoil it right here, so fair warning. The first two-thirds of the movie is a rousing sports movie: Hilary Swank plays  a lady-boxer and Clint Eastwood plays her curmudgeonly coach/manager. During one of the big bouts, Hilary Swank falls and breaks her neck. She breaks her neck. The final 45 minutes of the movie become a morality play exploring Clint Eastwood’s decision to take his paralyzed pupil off life-support. The plot, the tone, the pacing — it all turns on a dime. Suddenly you’re watching a different movie with the same characters. I hated this shift, partially because I felt the message of the later third was heavy-handed, but mostly because I liked the boxing movie. Million Dollar Baby lured me into its world with something I found genuinely attractive and then took it away from me. Blue Beetle, why you gotta Million Dollar Baby me?

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Oct 24 2012

Catwoman 13

Today, Shelby and Drew are discussing Catwoman 13 originally released October 17th, 2012. This issue is part of the Death of the Family crossover event. Click here for complete DotF coverage.

Shelby: Last week, we talked about the overuse of darker tropes as a means to make a story excessively dark and gritty in our Chat Cave discussion of Sword of Sorcery 0. The particular example we were discussing was an attempted rape scene which many viewed as a way to make the comic edgier and sell more copies. Drew made the point that the same argument can be made of any emotion; character’s emotions and their reactions to the emotions of those around them help propel the story forward, and they can easily be twisted to sell comics first, and develop plot second. The same can be said of madness. It can be used to effectively display a character’s unraveling, or it can be included in a story merely to push the envelope and be unique. The big problem with madness is it is, by nature, very confusing. So, when we’ve got a story that pushes madness to the extreme with very little reason behind it, we’ve got a disorienting mess on our hands.
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Oct 23 2012

Wonder Woman 13

Alternating Currents: Wonder Woman 13, Taylor and Scott

Today, Taylor and Scott are discussing Wonder Woman 13, originally released October 17th, 2012.

Taylor: Continuity is a something I appreciate. I enjoy waking up in the morning having a fairly good sense of who I am, where I am, what I’ve been doing and what I need to do during the coming day. I also appreciate continuity in its more mundane and nuanced forms; I appreciate the fact that I can expect my coffee to taste a certain way and even that I can expect the people I know to behave and think in a similar to fashion to that of the day before. Most days I can appreciate the regularity of the subway that takes me to work every morning, but as happens every so often (or more often than not lately), that continuity and expectation of service is broken. Whether it’s an equipment malfunction, signal failures, or a sick passenger, the Red Line of the CTA has a knack for failing to deliver on its promised, regular service that drives me to absolute madness. Maybe I appreciate regularity more than the normal person, but I think most people can appreciate a certain amount of continuity in their life, whether it’s in their daily commute or their comic books. Wonder Woman is a title that garners a fair amount of its strength from consistency, which by no means is a bad thing.

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Oct 23 2012

Green Lantern: New Guardians 13

Today, Patrick and Mikyzptlk are discussing the Green Lantern: New Guardians 13, originally released October 17th, 2012. This issue is part of the Rise of the Third Army crossover event. Click here for complete Third Army coverage. Patrick: You ever stop to think about how weird the emotional spectrum is? The green power of Will is easy enough to understand, and furthermore, easy enough to understand as a tool used by a superhero. The implication is that all a Green Lantern really needs to do is try hard enough and he’ll be successful. “Will” is abstract, emotionally. But the other pillars of the emotional spectrum are more literal – you’ve got to be scary to make Yellow work for you; you’ve got to genuinely believe that everything will get better to make Blue work for you; and you’ve got to be pissed off to harness the Red. The funny thing about emotions though: you don’t just turn them on and turn them off. Kyle Rayner may have the ability to tap into all the colors of the rainbow, but at what cost?

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Oct 23 2012

Red Hood and the Outlaws 13

Alternating Currents: Red Hood 13, Drew and ShelbyToday, Drew and Shelby are discussing Red Hood and the Outlaws 13, originally released October 17th, 2012.

Drew: I hate recommending art. From movies to books to music, I think there’s something really presumptuous about the statement “you’d like this.” Moreover, I hate what recommending that art says about me, especially if the person I recommended it to didn’t like the art in question. This may all stem from a particularly traumatic recommending experience where, while staying overnight at my cousins, I insisted that we all watch the TGIF programming bloc — a mainstay of my Friday nights at home. For whatever reason, this particular Friday aligned with all four shows delivering episodes uncharacteristically romantic in nature. I’m sure it was as tame as a kitten fight, but it struck my young mind as profoundly inappropriate — at least in part because I was acutely aware that my aunt had already banned The Simpsons in her household, which seemed unfathomable to me. As if to intentionally make me feel more devious in my tastes, at the conclusion of the night, she remarked, “well, that’s really not the kind of thing we like to watch around here.” The absurdity of being made to feel TGIF was inappropriate aside, I still get incredibly nervous when someone consumes art on my recommendation. That feeling is only exacerbated in cases of serialized narratives, where the sampled episode/issue may not be indicative of what you actually like about it. That’s more or less the feeling I have introducing Shelby to Red Hood and the Outlaws with issue 13. Continue reading →

Oct 22 2012

Birds of Prey 13

Today, Shelby and Patrick are discussing Birds of Prey 13, originally released October 17th, 2012.

Shelby: A common trope for team titles is the “member with a problem.” You’ve got one member of the team with some sort of personal issue which spills into their superhero-ing. The team wants to help, the individual says they can do it alone and end up in trouble, the team saves the day. It’s tired, but it works; as a plot device, it injects character moments into the story while bringing the team closer together and providing a quest for us to read. Birds of Prey 13 delivers perfectly on this trope, so why do I feel like I’m missing something?

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Oct 22 2012

Before Watchmen – Minutemen 4

Alternating Currents: Minutemen 4, Drew and Michael B4WToday, Drew and Michael are discussing Minutemen 4, originally released October 17th, 2012. Minutemen is part of DC’s Before Watchmen prequel series. Click here for complete Before Watchmen coverage (including release dates).

Drew: Is it fair to assume we’re all nerds here? Do you remember that feeling when C-3PO first shows up in Phantom Menace? That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realized this prequel was going to cash in on every moment of cheap recognition it possibly could? Not only did I not care where C-3PO came from, the explanation shown in Menace doesn’t make any fucking sense. The negative response to 3PO’s inclusion probably curbed Lucas’ origin obsession a bit, but he still managed to cram in Luke and Leia’s birth AND the building of the first Death Star, turning the whole prequel trilogy into a sad game of “spot the thing you used to love.” As the world’s most ubiquitous prequel, those movies effectively set my expectations for what a prequel should be, which may explain why I was so resistant to the notion of Before Watchmen in the first place; I was terrified of the prospect of stories focusing on petty details like where Ozymandias got the idea for his TV wall, or spending four issues explaining where that one headshot in Dan Dreiberg’s apartment came from. We’ve certainly gotten some of that, but titles like Comedian and Silk Spectre have turned those expectations on their heads by largely avoiding any such references. With Minutemen, Darwyn Cooke has embraced the third option — addressing the known history head-on with such deftness to make it seem inevitable.

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Oct 19 2012

Batwoman 13

Today, Patrick and Jack are discussing Batwoman 13, originally released October 17th 2012.

Patrick: One summer time during college, I was looking for a job and I stopped by the mall in Appleton, Wisconsin. There was a sign at the info desk in the food court that said “Help Wanted” and then listed all the stores that were hiring. I didn’t know why, but I was really uncomfortable asking for this information – to the point where I almost wasn’t going to do it. But then I swallowed hard and just to myself “okay, I’ll just be funny.” Humor is the one tool I have at my disposal that I can use to address any situation I get myself into. God help me if I ever find myself pitted against the spawn of Chaos – I’d be fucked. Batwoman’s tools, on the other hand, we can have some confidence in those.

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Oct 19 2012

Nightwing 13

Today, Scott and Shelby are discussing Nightwing 13, originally released October 17th 2012.

Scott: The other night I just could not get to sleep. I was lying awake restlessly, my mind racing through any number of thoughts until the desire to know what year a certain Guided By Voices album came out was nagging at me so much that I convinced myself to open my computer and look it up. 40 minutes later I found myself on John Woo’s Wikipedia page and decided it was time to call it a night once and for all. Dick Grayson is having one of those restless nights, but instead of GBV’s chronology, what’s nagging at him is Gotham’s lack of gang activity — the city is too quiet for him to sleep easy. The sequence of events that follows is something like a night spent with Google and Wikipedia: a bunch of tangentially related bits and pieces — some very intriguing, others merely dead ends — that by the end has you wondering what you’ve really learned.

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Oct 18 2012

Sword of Sorcery 1

Today, Shelby and Taylor are discussing Sword of Sorcery 1, originally released October 17th, 2012.

Shelby: It seems a common element of fantasy is the quest for power. You’ve got multiple countries, or cities, or houses, or whatever, all scrambling for as much power as they can get. In Dune, the power comes from control of the geriatric spice melange. In Game of Thrones, the power is in owning land and controlling trade. Amethyst seems a little different: the power is in your blood, is literally passed from generation to generation. This isn’t a power that can be bartered for, or distributed through a treaty; there appears to be one way to obtain more power in Gemworld, and it is a bloody one.

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