Feb 9 2016

Spider-Man 1

Alternating Currents: Spider-Man 1, Ryan and Drew

Today, Ryan M. and Drew are discussing Spider-Man 1, originally released February 3rd, 2016.

Ryan: The danger of starting your story with a climactic image and then jumping back in time is that it can displace interest. At best, it builds anticipation. At worst, it feels like a bait and switch. It’s like when a friend starts a story with “Did I ever tell you about the time I made out with a mime in Vegas?” and then proceeds to tell you details about how she booked her hotel room. By getting me too invested in the end of the story, you’ve diminished my interest in the preamble. At that point, I’m just listening for mime specifics that indicate we’re getting to the good stuff. Continue reading →

Feb 8 2016

Marvel Round-Up: Comics Released 2/3/16

marvel roundup17We try to stay up on what’s going on at Marvel, but we can’t always dig deep into every issue. The solution? Our weekly round-up of titles coming out of Marvel Comics. Today, we’re discussing A-Force 2, Amazing Spider-Man 7, Sam Wilson: Captain America 6, Captain Marvel 2, Deadpool: Mercs for Money 1, Howard the Duck 4, and Rocket Raccoon and Groot 2.

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Feb 8 2016

Velvet 13

Alternating Current: Velvet 13, Drew and Ryan

Today, Drew and Ryan D. are discussing Velvet 13, originally released February 3rd, 2016.

Drew: I wince whenever someone asks me if I can play chess. I certainly understand the rules of the game, but I feel like that makes me a chess player in as much as understanding the mechanics of applying paint to canvas makes me a painter. That is, the actual playing of chess lies not in my rudimentary grasp of what moves are allowable, but in the nuance of applying those moves towards a goal. Real chess players have so internalized those rules, they can plan several moves ahead, and the strategy ultimately revolves around forcing their opponent into moves they can anticipate. This is exactly the kind of game Velvet has been playing with ARC-7 for most of this series, and she’s damn good at it. But what if the rules she had internalized weren’t the rules of the game at all? That’s the situation she finds herself in this month, as Damian Lake proves to be even more of a wild card than she ever imagined. Continue reading →

Feb 8 2016

Midnighter 9

midnighter 9

Today, Spencer and Mark are discussing Midnighter 9, originally released February 3rd, 2016.

Spencer: Who is Midnighter? It’s clearly a question writer Steve Orlando wants to keep on his readers’ minds, as most issues of Midnighter feature its titular character explaining his life story to someone (this month, his documentarist Robert). Any conclusions we can draw about who Midnighter really is deep inside from that information, though, are complicated to say the least. Who is Midnighter? He’s a contradiction. Continue reading →

Feb 4 2016

Detective Comics 49

detective comics 49

Today, Michael and Drew are discussing Detective Comics 49, originally released February 3rd, 2016.

Michael: Jim Gordon has been Gotham’s Dark Knight since June and with Bruce descending into the Batcave in the pages of Batman, it seems that Gordon’s rooftop days are nearing their end. That kind of bums me out to be honest. While Snyder’s work on Gordon in Batman has been bombastic fun, I’m not sure that he’s had enough time to engage in the wide array of Batman capers. Enter Pete Tomasi’s three-part story arc: “The Bronze Age.” Continue reading →

Feb 4 2016

The Vision 4

vision 4

Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing The Vision 4, originally released February 3rd, 2016.

Drew: I recently watched a video titled “Why Donald Trump is a Gift to Democracy,” which effectively argues that the correlation between Trump’s disproportionate coverage and high poll numbers reveals the problems in how a profit-driven news media can be hijacked by anyone desperate for attention. I’m not as optimistic as the video seems to be about our collective will to change this phenomenon, but the more I think about it, the more absurd a profit-driven news agency is — if good reporting and the bottom line don’t match up, a publicly traded company really only has a duty to the latter. It’s ultimately not in service of the public it reports to, but the shareholders. This may seem like an odd introduction to a discussion of a comic about a robot-family’s struggles at fitting in in suburbia, but a profit-driven news media is actually the closest thing I can think of to an artificial intelligence that would harm humans in order to sustain itself. Only, you know, I have a lot more sympathy for the family of robots. Continue reading →

Feb 3 2016

Black Magick 4

Alternating Currents: Black Magick 4, Drew and Ryan

Today, Drew and Ryan D. are discussing Black Magick 4, originally released January 27th, 2016.

Drew: I’ve been thinking a lot about genre lately. Specifically, how we might define genre as a concept. I tend to think of genre as a checklist of conventions; guns and horses? That’s a western. Period costumes and overly-earnest impressions? That’s a biopic. But every convention you can think of has numerous exceptions, and writers love deconstructing genres, which means there’s no one trait that would actually be true of an entire genre. Instead, “genre” is more of a cloud of possibilities, and any given story’s placement within that genre is a negotiation of the conventions that fit within that cloud and the subversions of those conventions. Why use those conventions at all? There are a number of reasons, but one of the most practical is that those conventions work as a shorthand — we don’t need the concepts of interrogation rooms or fortresses of solitude explained to us, even though we’ve never experienced them ourselves. This allows writers to skip ahead to the subversions, showing us what’s unique about this particular genre story. We all know what’s unique about Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott’s Black Magick (it’s right there in the name), but issue 4 is the first to hint at just how different that might make this story. Continue reading →

Feb 3 2016

Weekly Round-Up: Comics Released 1/27/16

round up

Look, 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, we discuss Cry Havoc 1, Faith 1, Jem and the Holograms 11, Jupiter’s Circle Volume 2 3, Outcast 15, Ringside 3, and Spire 6.
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Feb 2 2016

Marvel Round-Up: Comics Released 1/27/16

marvel roundup16

We try to stay up on what’s going on at Marvel, (especially when All of these things are New) but we can’t always dig deep into every issue. The solution? Our weekly round-up of titles coming out of Marvel Comics. Today, we’re discussing Daredevil 3, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur 3, Spider-Woman 3, and All-New Inhumans 3.

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Feb 2 2016

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl 4

squirrel girl 4

Today, Spencer and Taylor are discussing The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl 4, originally released January 27th, 2016.

Spencer: What does it mean to be “unbeatable?” When Squirrel Girl was mainly a joke character, it meant that she could take down any opponent in combat, albeit always off-panel. While Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s take on Doreen still has extraordinary physical prowess, her victories under their pens have instead come from a place of compassion, understanding, and compromise; Squirrel Girl’s “unbeatable” because she always finds a way to appeal to and appease the humanity of any opponent she faces. It makes sense, then, that Doctor Doom is the first enemy to truly flummox Doreen. How is she supposed to defeat someone with no humanity to appeal to? Continue reading →