Tag Archives: Ales Kot

Oct 30 2018

Futility in Days of Hate 9

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

“All we do is sit in rooms and wait.”

Arvid, Days of Hate 9

The scariest thing about the rise of fascism in the United States is the immeasurable apathy it has been met with. While people on the left have donated and volunteered and campaigned and protested, there’s nothing that won’t send us back to our couches like a little tongue-clucking about civility. We still expect the old tools work, but leverage and hypocrisy and blackmail only work if your opponent lets it work. In Days of Hate 9, writer Ales Kōt and artist Danijel Žeželj show the futility of protest, blackmail, and scheming against the unstoppable juggernaut of cruelty that is Agent Freeman. Continue reading →

Aug 27 2018

The Ruin of Structure of Days of Hate 7

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

The very first image in Days of Hate 7 is New York City at at night from a distance with the text “Seven Weeks Later.” While the apocalypse-in-motion setting for this series will sometimes lean in to ruined urban landscapes–and there is plenty of that later in the issue–for the this introductory moment, the city skyline seems relatively intact. This skyline is the exception; the sterling faux-beacon for civilization in a world where all other structures, be they physical, societal, social or psychological, have collapsed. Continue reading →

Jul 26 2018

Parallels, Dramatic Irony, and Time in The New World 1

by Drew Baumgartner

New World 1

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

My wife is itinerantly averse to spoilers, to the point that she refuses to watch trailers for movies. It’s an attitude I can sympathize with (many trailers seem more like hyper-condensed edits of the entire film than teasers), but can’t fully understand — how could she possibly know if a movie appeals to her if she doesn’t know anything about it? To me, some foreknowledge of the genre and basic premise of a narrative is essential to my interest in it. Of course, in serialized media — especially ones with particularly high-concept premises — the first chapter might just cover the “basic premise,” effectively spoiling its own plot. But the thing I’ve always resented about “spoiler” talk is the way it privileges plotting (and especially surprise twists in plotting) over every other narrative element. There are real, unique pleasures to be mined from having more perspective than the characters within the narrative, and a well-told story will use those tools as effectively as any narrative twist. Aleš Kot and Tradd Moore demonstrate the value of those tools on both the micro and macro level in The New World 1. Continue reading →

Jun 27 2018

James Bond The Body 6: Discussion

by Drew Baumgartner & Mark Mitchell

James Bond The Body 6

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

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You are driving a bus with 12 passengers on it. At the first stop, half of the passengers get off and nine more get on. At the second stop, a third of the passengers get off and two more get on. At the third stop, one quarter of the passengers get off and seven more get on. What color are the bus driver’s eyes?

Traditional

Drew: Misdirection is a simple consequence of our limited attention. We can only focus on so many details at once, so if we’re misled about which of those details are important, we can easily miss what’s actually important. This old brain teaser illustrates the point perfectly, introducing the fact that we are driving the bus as an inconsequential detail before distracting us with a bunch of numerical information that seems like it is probably the point of the puzzle. Only, the solution to the puzzle requires that we divided our focus in the opposite way, remembering the one detail that seemed irrelevant to what we assumed was a math problem. James Bond: The Body 6 does something similar, laying out a detailed explanation of the case Bond spent the previous five issues skirting the edges of while the actual action plays out in the background. It’s a clever trick, disguising action as exposition, allowing Aleš Kot and Luca Casalanguida to play out their final reveal and villain showdown simultaneously, skipping the falling action right to the moment Bond can reflect on his role in everything. Continue reading →

Jun 26 2018

The Poetry of Days of Hate 6

by Drew Baumgartner

Days of Hate 6

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

en·jamb·ment
/inˈjambmənt, enˈjam(b)mənt/
noun

  1. (in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

Comics has its share of unique jargon, but much of the vocabulary we use when analyzing it is borrowed. More often than not, we’re borrowing language from the world of film and photography, where we might understand issues of the relative location and sizes of images within the panel as matters of placing a camera in a physical space. We’ll also draw parallels to prose, as the language — and especially narrative modes — of comics can often resemble that of a novel. But prose isn’t the only literary media, and while it’s lamentably rare, comics can draw from the world of poetry, as well. Aleš Kot and Danijel Žeželj’s Days of Hate has always lent itself to elegant turns of phrase, but canny use of the decidedly poetic device of enjambment turns issue 6 into a goddamn love poem. Continue reading →

May 30 2018

“Why?” in Days of Hate 5

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Why am I watching this scene?

Screenwriter Advice, Traditional

While the “who,” “what,” and “where” of a scene is crucial to the audience’s understanding of what they’re experiencing in the moment, it’s the “why” of a scene that ends up being the most meaningful. If there’s no reason for the scene, then it doesn’t belong in the piece. This is one of those pieces of writerly advice that’s actually kind of intuitive, and readers and audiences feel it without having to be told. If we start reading about a man climbing a tree, then we assume something happens to him in that tree. Writer Aleš Kot and artist Danijel Žeželj take the conflict inherent the mere existence of a scene — three scenes, actually — to tease out a slowly burning tension-inferno in Days of Hate 5. Continue reading →

May 17 2018

James Bond: The Body 5 Discussion

by Michael DeLaney and Drew Baumgartner 

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

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Michael: “Realism” can be a dirty word in the realm of comic books and its movie franchise offspring. Making comic book superheroes “more realistic” often makes them lose their larger-than-life qualities. James Bond, on the other hand, is a character who could probably use a little more realism. The Daniel Craig series of James Bond films have been hailed as “more realistic” than their predecessors, but he’s still an uncrackable murder machine. The beauty of James Bond: The Body 5 is that Aleš Kot provides us with a rare opportunity: to get inside Bond’s head. Continue reading →

Apr 24 2018

The Illusion of Control in James Bond: The Body 4

By Spencer Irwin

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

We all know what happens when James Bond meets a beautiful woman. It’s one of the most (in?)famous aspects of the franchise, and it’s an assumption creators Ales Kot and Eoin Marron clearly lean into when their injured Bond runs into a woman named Moira early in James Bond: The Body 4. Even Bond himself, if only momentarily, thinks he knows exactly how things are going to play out.

It never happens. Moira isn’t a conquest; she’s a complicated woman with her own desires and internal life that Bond can barely begin to fathom. That’s really the idea behind this entire issue: James Bond is a professional who thinks he understands how the world works, but control is far more elusive than he ever truly realized. Continue reading →

Apr 3 2018

A Glass Half-Full of Pessimism in Days of Hate 3

by Drew Baumgartner

Days of Hate 3

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Drew: The heuristic we use for optimism and pessimism — whether a glass is seen as half full or half empty — focuses on the language we use to frame a description. But that’s not necessarily the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. If we could construct some kind of neutral description of an amount of water in a glass, you could still have disagreement about whether that is good or bad, whether it will improve or get worse, and what exactly caused this state in the first place. Moreover, in this day and age, you might have people disagreeing about the facts of how much water is in the glass at all. These are the distinctions Aleš Kot and Danijel Žeželj make between Amanda and Xing’s accounts of their relationship in Days of Hate 3. Continue reading →

Mar 28 2018

Racism, Homophobia and Hypocrisy in James Bond: The Body 3

By Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

James Bond is an agent of the state. His actions seldom need to be motivated beyond “for Queen and Country.” We can infer some other values that the character holds from his choice of career. For example: he believes that violence can (and should) be used to bring about justice. He’s pro sex, but possibly in a way that devalues his relationships with his sexual partners. Issue three of James Bond: The Bond reveals another of Bond’s values — he hates white supremacy.

Or… is that it? The thing that seems to really get Bond going is the hypocrisy inherent in white supremacy. His appetite for sweet, violent, humiliating revenge seems to be fueled less by his desire to stamp out intolerance and more to do with people and organizations neither understanding nor practicing what they preach. Continue reading →