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Dec 13 2016

Motor Crush 1

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Today, Drew and Ryan M. are discussing Motor Crush 1, originally released December 7th, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Drew: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about story structure, and particularly Dan Harmon’s distillation of the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth was designed to be as general as possible, so that it might be applied universally, but Harmon takes it a step further, stripping away specifics like “the belly of the beast” and “death and resurrection” to land on an ordered set of eight words: You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Take, Return, and CHANGE. Harmon explains all of those in greater depth, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’m interested in the first two: you (establishing a protagonist in a zone of comfort) and need (establishing a need for the character that might draw them outside of that zone of comfort). I’m used to that opening quadrant of the “story circle” — the quadrant that ends when the character leaves their zone of comfort — being relatively small, moving on to the meat of the journey quickly. That’s definitely the case with Motor Crush 1, which pushes its protagonist out of her comfort zone so quickly, I’m honestly not sure what “normal” looks like for her. Continue reading →

Dec 6 2016

Saga 40

Today, Ryan and Patrick are discussing Saga 40, originally released November 30th, 2016.

Ryan: When I was a child, my least favorite sentence was “Life’s not fair.” As a hyper-verbal kid who was encouraged to talk out her frustrations, things boiled down to those three words far too often. It got to a point where my mother would only have to intake her breath to start to say it and I would finish the sentence, feeling a sense of injustice that the world cannot be bent to fit the ideals of fairness of my ten-year-old mind. It felt glib then, but I understand a bit more now. Fairness is an ideal and is easy to enforce in a tennis match or on tax forms, but when the stakes become more personal, there is no way to find a quantifiable balance. Saga 40 is made up of scenes of characters behaving unfairly to one another and Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples use thematic elements to hold together an otherwise scattered issue.

Continue reading →

Nov 29 2016

A.D.: After Death Volume 1

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Today, Michael and Spencer are discussing A.D.: After Death Volume 1, originally released November 23rd, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Michael: A frequent criticism of popular fiction is the overemphasis on plot instead of character. There’s a lot of moving pieces involved in “epic storytelling” and oftentimes the emotional resonance of the characters in a story gets left by the wayside in service to the overall concept. Sometimes the fantastical plot of a story so greatly eclipses everything else that the personal relationships of the characters are rendered completely irrelevant and uninteresting. Then there’s A.D.: After Death Volume 1. Continue reading →

Nov 17 2016

Moonshine 2

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Today, Patrick and Drew are discussing Moonshine 2, originally released November 16th, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Patrick: My father grew up in Theresa, Wisconsin. It’s a small, rural town a good 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee. Most of his side of the family is still there, cheering on the Packers and living lives I’m going to charitably call “old fashioned.” My father must have envisioned a better — or at least different — life for himself, and he got out, went to college and become an engineer. He worked in northern Illinois, the greater Chicagoland area, so the physical distance he traversed wasn’t enormous, but the philosophical distance he traveled was. He values education and art and compassion — a departure from what he was raised on. In turn, my siblings and I have all also moved away from our Wisconsin homestead and embraced cultural, societal and philosophical ideas even further from where we were raised. And not even in the same direction — my older sister is in the army, and my little brother is a crusader for homosexual homeless teens in Colorado. And I’m an artsy-fartsy comedian in Los Angeles. We’re allowed this room to grow with relatively little violence or conflict precisely because of the distance we’ve given ourselves from our stomping grounds. Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s Moonshine 2 shows just how traumatic that transition from one generation to the next can be when everyone stays in one place.  Continue reading →

Nov 11 2016

Mayday 1

Alternating Currents: Mayday 1, Drew and Ryan

Today, Drew and Ryan are discussing Mayday 1, originally released November 2nd, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Drew: Logic puzzles often include a clause that all actors within the puzzle are perfectly rational and possess infinite intelligence — a fact that those actors must also understand in order to properly interpret the behavior of other actors within the scenario. Like physics problems that ignore friction, those assumptions lead to simple, elegant answers on the page, but break down completely in the real world. Such is the case with Alex de Campi and Tony Parker’s Mayday, which finds a straightforward Cold War espionage story beautifully complicated by some decidedly non-rational actors. The results spiral out of control in magnificent fashion, carrying this spy thriller in unexpected directions. Continue reading →

Nov 7 2016

The Wicked + The Divine 23

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Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing The Wicked + The Divine 23, originally released November 2nd, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Drew: The epistolary novel — a novel told as a series of documents (letters, newspaper clippings, etc) — presents an intriguing contradiction of allure. The thought of holding “real” evidence of a story brings it closer to us, while their existence distances us from the immediacy of the events they describe. That tradeoff can be mitigated when only a portion of the narrative is epistolary; in presenting both a traditional narrative and physical evidence of that narrative, storytellers can have their cake and eat it too. This is a tactic that is remarkably common in comics, where text and image already freely mix to create illusions of reality in a way that simply isn’t true of prose. Watchmen is obviously the most well-known example of augmenting a traditional comic with epistolary documents, but countless series have employed the technique since. I would argue, however, that none of those examples — including Watchmen — justify the existence of those documents quite as elegantly as The Wicked + The Divine 23. Continue reading →

Nov 2 2016

Descender 16

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Today, Ryan D. and Spencer are discussing Descender 16, originally released October 26th, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Ryan D: Descender 16 drops the reader directly into the past, without even stopping to say hello to the cast from last issue’s focus on Andy and Effie/Queen Between. From the cover and the lovely introductory spread, it is clear right away that it is now Driller’s turn to get the spotlight treatment. As soon as we see the two robots being dropped from orbit into the Dirishu Mining Colony, it became very clear to me where this issue was heading: we met Driller alone on the planet, so something needs to take us from Driller having companionship to its solitary, human-hating life. Though the arc seemed fairly obvious, it was still a treat to see this robot get some well-deserved further characterization, not to mention the big reveal at the end. Continue reading →

Nov 1 2016

Saga 39

Alternating Currents: Saga 39, Drew and Ryan

Today, Drew and Ryan M. are discussing Saga 39, originally released October 26th, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

The best-laid plans of mice and men
Often go awry

Robert Burns, To A Mouse

Drew: If I had to pick an epigraph for our discussions of Saga, this most well-known line from Robert Burns’ most well-known poem would be it (indeed, I also used it to kick off our discussion of issue 16). It’s a sentiment that comes up often enough to have entered the lexicon as a common expression, and could reasonably describe most narratives where the protagonist(s) could be said to have a “plan,” but I’d argue that it is woven into the very fabric of Saga. Nobody, from the highest princes of the robot kingdom to the lowliest mouse medic ever has their plans work out perfectly, leaving them in a constant state of flux. That leaves them all like the mouse Burns’ poem was written for — the one whose home he destroyed while plowing a field. Issue 39 makes that parallel even more explicit, as the home of our leads is threatened by a force apparently unaware of their presence. Continue reading →

Oct 25 2016

Hadrian’s Wall 2

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Today, Spencer and Ryan D. are discussing Hadrian’s Wall 2, originally released October 19th, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

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Spencer: When discussing the first issue of Hadrian’s Wall, we were pleased to report that the series was more about the fallout of Simon and Annabelle’s former relationship than about sci-fi tropes, or even the actual murder mystery. With Simon’s very specific scenario now thoroughly established, though, Kyle Higgins, Alec Siegel, and Rod Reis are free to use issue two to dive more into the mystery, and specifically, into introducing the list of suspects. Even in the middle of all this very necessary groundwork, though, the creative team never loses sight of Simon, his past, or what makes him tick. Continue reading →

Oct 19 2016

Kill Or Be Killed 3

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Today, Drew and Ryan D. are discussing Kill Or Be Killed 3, originally released October 12th, 2016. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Drew: Narrative modes in comics are a particular fascination of mine, as the visual “narrator” isn’t necessarily tied to any of the modes we understand in prose — indeed, while comics may have an explicit narrator in the text, the visual storytelling isn’t necessarily tied to the perspective of that narrator. Film may be a better analogue, because the visual storytelling can similarly be divorced from, say, voiceover narration, but I’d argue that such explicit narration is FAR more common in comics than film. Point is: narrative modes are complicated in comics, yet are rarely remarked upon. Unless, of course, we’re talking about a comic by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, in which case, I struggle to talk about anything but the narration. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why their use of narration draws my attention in this way, but Kill Or Be Killed 3 reveals that the idiosyncrasy may be more with their visual narration than their textual one. Continue reading →