Tag Archives: John Freeman

Jul 25 2018

What Parents Want in East of West 38

by Taylor Anderson

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

It’s generally assumed that parents always have the best interest of their children at heart. However, as is often the case in our world there is a difference between what is assumed and what is reality. In my job as a teacher it’s sometimes my sad duty to witness parents putting their own interests before their kid’s. Such was the case of one student who was forced by his mother to be in student council when he had no interest in it whatsoever. He hated all the meetings and eventually started to skip them which led to him breaking down in tears in front of me when his mom wanted to call a meeting about the ordeal. No one was happy then and I am reminded of this when I read East of West 37, where parents put their needs and wants before the kid’s resulting in sorrow for all.

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May 31 2016

Weekly Round-Up: Comics Released 5/25/16

roundup12

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 Aloha, Hawaiian Dick 2, East of West 26 and Tokyo Ghost 7. Continue reading →

Feb 9 2015

East of West 17

east of west 17

Today, Drew and Taylor are discussing East of West 17, originally released February 4th, 2015.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Star Wars

Drew: Myths are almost all told from a third person omniscient perspective in the past tense; not only do we get a glimpse into the separate actions of both the Tortoise and the Hare, we understand that this race already happened. That second part is natural to storytelling in general — everything from personal anecdotes to the high-flyingest science fiction is told as if the events already happened. Curiously, both tense and narrative mode tend to disappear when working in a visual medium — the illusion that these actions are actually playing out in front of us is strong enough to override any confusion about who is telling this story, and when. To give visual storytelling a mythic quality requires making the past tense nature and omniscient narrator explicit, perhaps with a framing device a la The Princess Bride, or perhaps just with that innocuous introduction I included above. East of West 17 finds writer Jonathan Hickman slipping his narrator in, lending the proceedings the mythic qualities they rightly deserve. Continue reading →

Apr 14 2014

East of West 11

Alternating Currents: East of West 11, Drew and TaylorToday, Drew and Taylor are discussing East of West 11, originally released April 9th, 2014.

That’s when the attack comes — not from the front, no, from the side, from the other two raptors you didn’t even know were there.

– Alan Grant, Jurassic Park

Clever girl…

– Robert Muldoon, Jurassic Park

Drew: I’m not sure I can explain why, but some of my favorite movies feature surprises that are actually spoiled within the movie itself. Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy perfected this idea, basically using it to structure each film, but my all-time favorite example has to be the raptor attack from Jurassic Park. The attack doesn’t come until towards the end of the movie, but is actually explained, virtually point-for-point, by Grant within the first ten minutes. In the excitement of the scene, we forget what Grant said about raptor attacks, and can only piece it together after it happens — after we realize that we already knew what would happen. While Jonathan Hickman doesn’t hide anything quite as shocking as a surprise velociraptor in East of West 11, he does blindside us with an element that has been hidden in plain sight since the beginning: the Endless Nation.

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Feb 3 2014

East of West 9

Today, Taylor and Drew are discussing East of West 9, originally released January 29th, 2013.

Taylor: When successfully writing a story about a fictional world, there is one thing the author must do if they want their work to be believable. It’s not necessarily high-flown concepts or a strong thesis, though those certainly help. Instead, it’s important for the author to create a world that follows its own rules and mythologies. The author must not break away from these or else the world he or she so deliberately built will come crashing down. In the land of comics where fantasy worlds become reality on a regular basis, Jonathan Hickman has established himself as a skilled observer of this rule with such titles as The Manhattan Project and of course East of West. In the latter, Hickman has created a bleak landscape where death roams the world, both literally and figuratively. The world Death inhabits, along with its inhabitants, is fascinating and dark, and learning more about it is part of the joy of reading East of West. Issue 9, like issue 8 before it, indulges the reader with world building which is both a delight and a little frustrating at the same time. Continue reading →