Tag Archives: Cornwall

May 30 2018

Aesthetic Takes Center Stage in Curse Words 14

by Patrick Ehlers

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

There’s an intangible quality to most of your favorite art that belongs solely to that work. Maybe it’s a voice, or a take, or a perspective, or a rhythm. It’s that magical X factor that makes you say “that’s a Farside joke” or “that’s a Stevie Wonder horn line.” Curse Words’ DNA is so hard to nail down — a mix of crass irreverence and hopelessness, with a jolly veneer that just barely hides some genuine darkness. Issue 14 drifts away from Wizord and lets this lurching aesthetic take center stage. Continue reading →

Dec 22 2017

Curse Words Holiday Special 1: Discussion

by Patrick Ehlers and Spencer Irwin

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

“No hugging, no learning.”

-Larry David

Patrick: It’s maybe not fair to say that Seinfeld was a show about nothing. The show was about cynicism, it was about flawed people trapped in their familiar patterns, it was about manners and modern etiquette. But it was mostly a vehicle for observational jokes about the weird ways human beings behave. So while there are virtually no sincere lessons learned in the whole series, the show illustrates an awful lot about human nature. The only way it ever drills down into that fundamental human truth is by straying aggressively true to itself — no hugging, no learning. The same is true of Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s Curse Words, which gets to the heart of a nearly impenetrable relationship by being just as gross, just as crazy, and just as heartless as it possibly can be in Curse Words Holiday Special 1. Continue reading →

Mar 22 2017

Injection 11

Alternating Currents: Injection 11, Ryan D. and Drew

Today, Ryan D. and Drew are discussing Injection 11, originally released March 15th, 2017. As always, this article contains SPOILERS.

Ryan D: Returning after the Viv-centric Van Der Zee mystery arc, the inciting incident in Injection 11 — the discovery of a ring of stones in Cornwall featuring a flensed corpse at the center — is one of the seven unusual world events which Viv learned of at the end of issue ten, all of which sport the Injection’s dirty, complicated fingerprints. The last arc culminated with a large, almost full-cast denouement, and writer Warren Ellis focuses the start of this tale with the spotlight on the Irish lass and tech genius Brigid Roth. While I miss the rest of the team already — we’ve only seen Maria Kilbride via video chat and heard passing reference to Cunning Man/Breaker of Britain, Robert Morel — I think that the isolation of this chapter might play as a valuable counterpoint to the last’s ensemble sleuthiness. Continue reading →

Jan 19 2017

(p)review: Curse Words 1 – SPOILERS

curse-words-1-preview-spoilerLast week, we started a conversation about Curse Words 1. The issue hadn’t been released at the time and there’s an awesome twist at the end that we knew we had to discuss somewhere. If you haven’t read the issue yet, maybe check out that spoiler-free discussion, and then come back here for our conversation about That Big Twist. You’ll know it when you see it. Obviously, SPOILERS follow.

Patrick: So, okay, like 95% of this story is pretty well-examined territory in fantasy and science fiction right? An outsider from another world visits our own and falls in love with the places and the people and decides to make a home of Earth. Or protects it or whatever. Where Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s first issue delightfully subverts that narrative by demonstrating that, while New York city has charmed Wizord, it hasn’t exactly made him a better person. For real, spoilers ahead.

Continue reading →

Jan 13 2017

(p)review: Curse Words 1

curse-words-1b

(p)reviews are a bit different from our usual coverage, as they discuss comics that haven’t come out yet. As such, we’ll avoid our usual spoilers — think of it as part preview, part review. Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Curse Words 1, which will be released Wednesday, January 18th, 2017. If you’re looking for a Spoiler-y discussion, click here.

I’m outta balloons. Is a baggie all right?

-Lance, Pulp Fiction

Drew: Rules are fundamental to our understanding of any narrative. For most, the only “rules” we need to understand are those of the world we live in — physics, social norms, human nature — but other narratives take us out of this comfort zone. Pulp Fiction may seem like an odd choice to illustrate this point, but when I first saw the movie in high school, the world of recreational opiates was foreign enough to me that someone had to contextualize the line I included above, which explains why Mia Wallace later confuses heroin for cocaine. That heroin was normally packaged in balloons was an important rule, but not in the moment the concept is introduced — a kind of Chekhov’s baggie of heroin, if you will. As a story featuring magic, Curse Words promises to take us even further from the rules we know, but just like that line from Pulp Fiction, its first issue seems to lay some key groundwork for the rules that will govern the series. Continue reading →