Tag Archives: Clayton Cowles

Nov 18 2015

The Wicked + The Divine 16

wicked and divine 16Today, Spencer and Patrick are discussing The Wicked + The Divine 16, originally released November 11th, 2015.

Spencer: Back in 2012 I was supposed to go to the midnight premiere of The Hunger Games with a group of friends, but I ended up getting tickets to a different theater by accident. Rather than go by myself, I roped a friend who wasn’t a fan of franchise into going with me by playing up the movie’s violence and making it sound like something it wasn’t. He wasn’t happy with the movie, and I knew up front he wouldn’t be, but at the time I didn’t care — I just wanted him to come with me. I couldn’t help but to remember that anecdote while reading The Wicked + The Divine 16; The Morrigan’s inviting Baphomet into the Pantheon is equally selfish, if much more destructive in the long run than my boneheaded move.

(For the record, I did apologize, and he’s made me watch much worse)
Continue reading →

Sep 17 2015

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl 2

phonogram 2Today, Spencer and Shane are discussing Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl 2, originally released September 9th, 2015.

Spencer: Quite a few people who know me in real life think that I’m very quiet and shy. I suppose that’s closer to the truth than I’d like to admit, but the reality is that if you get me talking about the right subject, I’ll never shut up. Sometimes, it actually scares me how I can only seem to relate to people if we can chat about comics or music or pop culture — especially as I grow older and my friends and family turn their attention more and more to falling in love and raising families. I have to wonder if there’s something wrong with me, if my hyper-intense focus on my hobbies makes me a lesser, “two-dimensional” person. The cast of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl seem to be dealing with the same kind of worries in issue 2, even if they’re not quite self-aware enough to articulate them yet. Continue reading →

Aug 18 2015

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl 1

phonogram 1Today, Shane and Spencer are discussing Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl 1, originally released August 12th, 2015.

Shane: It’s entirely possible that I’m among the worst choices to review this comic. I haven’t bought a physical comic in years. That’s not to say that I haven’t purchased comics — after all, we live in a world that has embraced the digital age — but nothing in hard copy, and certainly not by single issue. And yet, on Wednesday I found myself headed to my first comic book shop in years (walking seventy blocks to get there like a madman), all to purchase a single four dollar comic. I bought this comic knowing that I was going to love it, and I’m hardly the only one to show this sort of devotion towards Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl — scores of fans have shown off tattoos, or traveled great distances to cons, or created fanzines, or gone to see Kieron Gillen DJ at a random show due to how well it ties into the Phonogram narrative. It’s not uncommon for media to evoke such passion, of course…but consider, if you will, that prior to this week, Phonogram existed soley as two poorly selling limited series by creators who were, at that time, almost entirely unknown. This wasn’t even the work that built their careers — Gillen and Jamie McKelvie remained struggling artists until their breakout work at Marvel Comics — but it wouldn’t surprise me if this series, more than even Young Avengers and The Wicked + The Divine, will be the comic they’re most linked to in the long run. Continue reading →

Jul 7 2015

The Wicked + The Divine 12

wicked and divine 12Today, Spencer and Patrick are discussing The Wicked + The Divine 12, originally released July 1st, 2015.

Spencer: In superhero comics, readers get used to seeing characters interpreted in myriads of ways. Everyone from Bill Finger to Frank Miller to Jim Lee has had their hands on Batman, and as a result, we’re able to accept Batman’s characterization in almost any incarnation, no matter how drastic the change. That’s great for accessibility, but much worse for consistency, especially when a character gets saddled with a less-than-stellar creative team. Indie books, on the other hand, allow for finite stories told by a single creative team, with some books (such as Saga) even deviating from a monthly release schedule in order to ensure that no fill-in artists will be needed. Throughout its first 11 issues The Wicked + The Divine stuck with a consistent team (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson, and Clayton Cowles), but issue 12 features Kate Brown as the series’ first fill-in artist. This artistic switch-up comes in the aftermath of the series’ most turbulent moment, and it’s the perfect way to illustrate how shaken-up the cast still is after last month’s sudden, tragic turn. Continue reading →

Jul 2 2015

Zero 18

Alternating Currents: Zero 18, Drew and Patrick

Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Zero 18, originally released July 1st, 2015.

Drew: I don’t love fetishizing endings. I resent the idea that the final moments of a work of art are somehow more important than all of the other moments that came before. I do, however, appreciate that it’s not until the end of a work that we can properly understand what it is. It’s not that the last piece of the narrative puzzle is necessarily more important than the rest, it just happens to be the last one added, which makes it the one that completes the image. True to that analogy, most endings are increasingly predictable as they approach — by that late in a narrative, we have a sense of likely conclusions. But then there are those narratives that aren’t so easily tied down. Zero started as a relatively straightforward spy series, but became increasingly postmodern, turning itself into a pointed commentary on the artificial division between “life” and “art.” Even with that trajectory in mind, issue 18 offers a conclusion of such bizarre beauty that nobody could have ever predicted. Continue reading →

Jun 9 2015

Zero 17

zero 17

Today, Patrick and Taylor are discussing Zero 17, originally released June 3rd, 2015.

Make art, not war.

Traditional

Patrick: Perhaps it’s because the above statement is so simple that tracking down a specific origin proves so difficult. A little bit of on-line research will keep pointing back to street artist Shepard Fairey — who did design the now-iconic image that often accompanies the phrase. Even if we assume Fairey’s authority, the artist’s populist message and street-art aesthetic makes it hard to credit him with any particular concept or turn of phrase. “Make art, not war” is also clearly a reference to the anti-Vietnam War slogan “make love, not war,” which itself has an origin that is up for debate. Be it art or be it love, there is a persistent need for something that man can consider the opposite of war, so it’s fitting that these slogans should resist a single point of origin. Like the fungus in Zero, they come from everywhere — in all times and all realities — to mitigate the suffering caused by war. Continue reading →

Jun 8 2015

The Wicked + The Divine 11

Alternating Currents: The Wicked + The Divine 11, Drew and Spencer

Today, Drew and Spencer are discussing The Wicked + The Divine 11, originally released June 3rd, 2015.

Mr. Ross: Firestorm, that’s a hell of a picture. Remember when they had the helicopter land on top of that car —
Frank Costanza: Hey! I haven’t seen it yet!
Mr. Ross: It has nothing to do with the plot!
Frank Costanza: Still, I like to go in fresh!

Seinfeld, “The Rye”

Drew: I wouldn’t say my girlfriend has a lot in common with Frank Costanza, but she also prefers to “go in fresh” to narratives. For her, any information beyond the barest gist of the genre and mood constitutes a spoiler. Of course, I’ve always been on the opposite end of the spoiler spectrum — because I’m most interested in how the story is told, knowing plot points ahead of time can’t “spoil” the experience. Every so often though, I’ll encounter a twist so shocking that I have to admit I’m glad I didn’t know it was coming. Which is to say, when I say that you should only read on if you’ve already read The Wicked + The Divine 11, I really mean it. Seriously: spoilers after the jump. Continue reading →

Jun 3 2015

Material 1

material 1

Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Material 1, originally released May 27th, 2015.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Drew: Like most Americans, I first read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, and like most Americans, that experience utterly ruined the book for me. My 9th grade teacher proudly trotted out all sorts of historical information about the French Revolution, making it all the more difficult to keep in mind that its themes of privilege and oppression are, unfortunately, timeless. Indeed, I’d long seen the famous opening paragraph’s use of past tense as an affirmation of that historical distance, but only because I’d forgotten the less-quotable final clause that reminds us that this is mostly remarkable for being “so far like the present period.” It’s that same “present period” that is reflected in Ales Kot and Will Tempest’s Material 1, which offers a tale of many cities that is just as timeless as Dickens’, but also decidedly more of-the-moment. Continue reading →

May 11 2015

Zero 16

Alternating Currents: Zero 16, Drew and Taylor

Today, Drew and Taylor are discussing Zero 16, originally released May 6th, 2015.

“You” believed this was “your voice” and “you” were a story “you” were telling to a boy who was “your son” but “who” was telling the story of “you” telling the story to “your son?”

Ales Kot, Zero 16

Drew: In our discussion of Zero 14, I noted that, while the framing device of Zero telling his story to the boy about to shoot him gave us a narrator for our story proper, I had to wonder who was “telling” the story of that framing device. Of course, that was just before writer Ales Kot pulled the camera back even further to reveal another framing device in issue 15. That issue explained that the “higher narrator” is actually William S. Burroughs, introduced as a character in the comic, but still left open the question of who was presenting us with that framing device. That kind of nested reality could go on forever, but this issue actually finds Kot doing something much more clever — dissolving the borders between these framing devices. It’s a fascinating trick that brings us closer to the fiction that is Zero…or is it that it brings Zero closer to reality? Continue reading →

May 8 2015

The Wicked + The Divine 10

wicked and divine 10

Today, Patrick and Spencer are discussing The Wicked + The Divine 10, originally released May 6th, 2015.

You know what hope is?
Hope is a bastard.
Hope is a liar, a cheat and a tease.
Hope comes near you?
Kick its backside:
Got no place in times like these.

Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, “Picture Window”

Patrick: The world of The Wicked + The Divine posits that everyone wants something just beyond their reach. Fans just want to connect with the gods, the gods just want to live a little bit longer. Their goals always seem tenable, but for the simple fact that they aren’t. This extends directly to the reader — ten issues in and we should be able to speak more definitively about whether Lucifer killed that judge, but we can’t. This issue explores the gulf created by what the characters want, and only sheepishly celebrates what they have. Continue reading →