Review: Supergirl - Woman of Tomorrow

 No, I still haven't seen the new Superman movie yet (I'll wait to see it in streaming video), but I read enough James Gunn interviews that when he mentioned that he fast-tracked Supergirl because it had a great script based on Woman of Tomorrow, I checked it out of the library despite my not liking Tom King's work in previous comics.

I still don't like Tom King's work. To be fair, when writing about any of the Super-characters, it's a difficult job since they have so many powers and are rarely in any real danger, even ignoring the meta-narrative that a comic book series can never kill off its title character. What I don't like about his work is that he doesn't have a good understanding of visual story-telling, so his writing has a lot of excessive verbiage even when the illustrations could do a far better job of telling the story than his mediocre writing.

In this particular story, King decides to use the device of having a non-super character narrate the story. The narrator has a particularly verbose style (though I suspect it's because King doesn't have the discipline to write a tight story), and Supergirl somehow takes a liking to her and takes her on several adventures. She does get put in real danger and the setup is stupid (Supergirl visits a planet under a red sun for her birthday so she can feel vulnerable). There are a few interesting situations (a green sun that makes Supergirl vulnerable, kryptonite weapons, etc), and we get to see Krypto and Super-horse (!!).

The device doesn't quite work, and while we get a glimpse of how super Supergirl is, I suspect the movie based on this story will have to be highly modified for it to be anything resembling a "terrific" script. This will be one of those few stories where the movie has got to be better than the book because the book is so bad!

Review: Spent by Alison Bechdel

 Alison Bechdel is famous for her rule about how to evaluate women characters in movies. I didn't have first hand experience of her work, so I picked up Spent from the library. It turns out that this book is part of a series, and you really have a hard time reading it without  having read the other books in the series. You can pick it up from context, but with such a large cast of characters I found it really hard to care about most of them. Actually, I found it impossible to care about any of them.

First of all, the book is sort of an autobiography --- the main character is Alison Bechdel, a successful cartoonist whose books got turned into a TV show. She has to struggle with her trump supporting sister who in reaction is writing a book of her own, her partner who's a goat farmer of sorts, and various characters that move in and out of her house.

The book depicts left wing liberal angst to an extreme. I find it hard to believe people actually talk or behave like this in real life (and I consider myself extremely left wing, or at least, anti-right wing). Do people really conflate Marxism with polyamory and all sorts of other things? Is this meant to be funny? If it is, I'm afraid the humor is entirely lost on me. Similarly, there's a lot of angst about money (despite having a lot of success), but given what the characters spend money on it's hard to reconcile that with the plotlines.

The art is OK. Nothing special. The worst thing about the hardback is that it's hard to keep it open to read! The kindle version is probably the one to get just to avoid that problem, but I was too cheap to buy the book and just read it from the library. Good thing I did. I'd be unhappy if I spent any of my hard earned money on a book with effectively no plot and no interesting characters.

Review: Batman/Catwoman

 Batman/Catwoman was on sale at a reasonable price, and I bought it hoping that it would be a great graphic novel. (Tom King's gotten many accolades for his handling of Batman)

The story flips between multiple timestreams. You have a future timestream when Batman/Bruce Wayne is dead, and his daughter Helena is Batwoman. You never really see Batwoman catching criminals or fighting criminals. She obviously has a beef with her mother, Selina Kyle, and spends a lot of time fighting with her.

Then there's the timeline of the past, when Catwoman/Selina has met Batman/Bruce Wayne, but they're not married yet. We get to see multiple pursuits, some sex, and a wedding ceremony, and even a bit about Helena's upbringing. Yet there's something missing --- we never see why Selina holds out on the Joker. We never even see what her motivation is for helping the Joker.

Finally, we get to see Selina's origins. Again, there's a shallowness there. We never see why she becomes a burglar. And given that she's actually good at her job, we don't see why she's still a burglar after all these years. Even more important, there's a central event in the story (one where Robin chases her down for) and we never get to see it. It's forever alluded to, never revealed, and never shown.

I'm glad I paid very little for this book. It's a lot of teasing, not a lot of showing.

Review: Justice (DC Graphic Novel)

 DC put a bunch of graphic novels on sale, and I noted that I'd never read Justice before, and the artist was Alex Ross, which made it a buy for me.

The opening of the novel is fantastic. The villains of the world got together and announced that while the superheroes have focused on fighting super-villains and preserving status quo, they'd never done anything to improve things that matter to ordinary people, like cure diseases or build housing for the homeless. And they proceed to do that, creating a miracle cure and offering the poorest the opportunity to move into newly built cities.

Of course, this being a graphic novel, the superheroes soon discover that it's a scam (how could it be otherwise?). The plot is convoluted, and we get a few interesting fights (far fewer than you would expect), but in the end our heroes prevail and we discover who the master villain is, as the various super-villains in the DC universe could never expect to cooperate with each other.

Unfortunately, the novel never grants our heroes the epiphany that they could make the world a much better place than just by preserving the status quo. In fact, at the end of the story we return to status quo, which makes it quite unsatisfying.

Re-read: Kingdom Come

 Kingdom Come is Alex Ross's beautifully painted story set in the future of the DC Universe that's non-canon. In this world, public opinion turned against the superhumans, forcing Superman to retreat to his farm and Batman's secret identity to be exposed.

Years later, we see that the effect of that superhuman ban is that the non-law-abiding superhumans have effectively created havok. Wonder Woman persuades Superman to come out of retirement, and he embarks on a war to bring those unruly humans back into prison.

Things go wrong, of course, as Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne team up to keep Superman from becoming a dictator for the world. Of course, things don't go as they might seem, and we get a big fight in the end. We get apocalyptic visions, and of course the supernatural parts of the DC universe (Specter and Deadman) come into play.

You cannot beat Alex Ross's art. It is fantastic and a feast for the eyes. The plot is so-so, but as a result of the story not being canon, it gets to play games with the ending that you wouldn't expect. If only Wonder Woman could talk Alan Moore into coming out of retirement to work in comics again. Then we'd get great stories along with great art. But as a book, this one was decent fun. I even liked the ending.

Re-read: V for Vendetta

 In the wake of the murder of Brian Thompson by a vigilante I had to re-read V for Vendetta, Alan Moore's treatise on totalitarianism and a vigilante who takes it upon himself to burn it all down. The art by David Lloyd is one of the best things about the book, tying in with Moore's plot (which is a little clumsy) and sensibilities beautifully.

Set in an England which is the sole survivor of a nuclear war, the story's main point of view character is Evey, who in desperation tries to commit a crime to survive but unfortunately is the victim of a police setup. She is rescued by the eponymous character V, and then we see that V has been systematically killing various people in power in government.

The backstory is revealed in drips and drabs and depicts the concentration camps that hear of. Presciently, Moore has the concentration camp victims not be of people of one race, but of the deviants in society, the gays, lesbians as well as people of color. V is himself a lone escapee from that camp and goes on to terrorize the people who ran that camp.

The writing is dense --- this was Alan Moore early in his career, not having learned to use pictures to tell stories as much as text. The dialogue, while characteristic of Alan Moore's later work in places, is at times still clumsy and does more "tell" than "show." But it's astonishing how predictive Alan Moore's work has been, and it's well worth revisiting this graphic novel in these troubled times.

Review: Flashpoint

 I came across Flashpoint after I fished Three Jokers and checked it out despite my misgivings about Three Jokers. To my surprise this is a really good story, and formed the basis for The Flash movie. It's quite a bit better than that movie.

The premise is that Barry Allen wakes up in a world that he doesn't recognize. His mom is not dead, but Wonder Woman and Aquaman are in a fight with each other that's caused all of Europe to. be drowned. Superman is MIA, and the only recognizable superhero is Batman. And... he doesn't have superspeed.

I won't spoil the story for you, but rest assured that there are plenty of surprises even if you've already seen the movie. There are no points in the plot that makes you feel like it's unfair. There's a bunch of other crossover stories which I'm not sure I'll bother tracking down, but apparently this was the launch of the "New 52" which I heard is an absolute failure.

Regardless of the end result, this particular story was excellent and worth my time.

Review: Three Jokers

 For various reasons, we activated a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I was browsing and saw Three Jokers and checked it out for grins. This is a direct sequel to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, in which Jason Todd (Robin) got killed and Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) became paralyzed from the waist down and becomes Oracle.

Somehow in this novel, Jason Todd comes back from the grave, and Barbara Gordon went through rehab and became fully functional. I'm not sure whether this is canon in the current universe or whether it's part of an alternate universe story.

Jason Todd becomes the Red Hood and runs around angry and unhappy about him being buried alive, and at one point murders one of the jokers. Of course, given the high lethality of the Joker as a criminal he would have gotten the death penalty ages ago.

There's no big mystery in this story, no displays of intelligence between the major characters, just a lot of anger and angst and much action. It adds nothing to Alan Moore's story and I'm going to do my best to forget that this sequel exists.

Review: Clover Collector's Edition

 I saw Clover's Collector's Edition at the library and the cover said it was a most daring science-fiction work. The art seemed nice so I checked it out.

It's not science fiction. It's fantasy dystopia --- and a not very good one. For instance, the main character's supposed to be a four-leaf clover, the most power kind of sorcerer there is, uncontrollable and therefore forced to be alone. This makes no sense, because anyone that powerful can do whatever she wants, so why would she submit to forced isolation. We never see much demonstration of her powers.

There's a sort of romantic relationship, and references to the past, but we never see resolution of the major event, the death of Kazuhiko's lover/partner. I only found out later through a web-search that the series is indeed incomplete.

The narration revolves around a song with elusively written and vague lyrics. That's OK, but the same song is repeated in bits and pieces throughout the book as well as reproduced frequently in full length. Again, this works in movies or TV but not in comics.

About the best thing about this book is that it's short and therefore I didn't waste much time reading it.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Four

 The Walking Dead Compendium Four is the last volume in the series. In this volume, the story has Rick Grimes' collection of 4 communities link up with a much larger one called The Commonwealth. The contrast between a class-based hierarchy and the much more egalitarian society that Grimes had established also parallels the much wealthier and larger commonwealth.

This contrast doesn't make a lot of sense. For instance, the commonwealth is depicted as having body armor, and specialists (including having lawyers as professions that they're in dire need of), but yet seems lacking in innovation, as Eugene, one of Rick's friends from way back in volume one is able to make locomotives work with relative ease.

In addition, we never get much of a backstory of the Commonwealth's formation and rise, which again makes zero sense --- so a couple of high class aristocrats take control once they get involved and everybody else goes along?

OK, so the story behind the series never made much sense anyway. But the action and characters? They're mostly good. We get a colorful loner who somehow managed to survive on her own and yet happily encounters Rick Grimes' group to meet the commonwealth. And for whatever reason the much larger Commonwealth never has had to deal with a huge herd before? The setup felt fake and quite rushed.

Nevertheless, Kirkman redeems himself by giving Rick Grimes a fitting sendoff and a beautiful epilogue that's got surprises, interesting twists (though again, not very believable --- it's hard to imagine a single generation being able to restore safety to the point where few people have seen a Zombie, especially since early on in the series Kirkman makes a point out of noting that even dying of natural causes would turn you into a zombie, and in any reasonably sized city at least one person would die every day), and fine resolutions for many of the characters we've gotten to know.

In any case it was compelling reading and made me put other books on whole while I zipped through it. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Three

 The Walking Dead Compendium Three continues Rick Gimes' story of post apocalyptic survival.  This volume features a conflict with a "protection racket" governance regime along with the "whisperer" gang. The former forces Rick to build an alliance to overthrow the tyrant Negan, but at the last minute he uncharacteristically lets Negan lives. What I can say is that some of the characters do grow and develop and we see constant action as well as the humans starting to learn how to cope with the zombies in an intelligent way (though again, I'm just surprised that nobody learns how to drive a tank or even mount automatic weapons on SUVs or jeeps).

The whisperer gang seems much less plausible to me. Living amongst the zombies by wearing their skins on your face seems like a recipe for getting all sorts of skin infection and/or other diseases (dead human bodies are toxic/poisonous to living humans, which is one reason we bury our dead or burn them), so it seems unlikely that any group adopting that survival tactic would survive long enough to pose a threat to the living.

The art is good, and the action never stops. It's quite clear that the series is turning into an exploration of various crisis governance regimes, and Kirkman is always happy to put all his characters into the wringer. I can see why the TV show based on the book would be incredibly popular. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 2

 The Walking Dead Compendium Two continues with the story from the first book. The post apocalyptic story as always is pretty unrealistic. For instance, the group encounters a different community that then attacks them. That community has a freaking tank. One tank basically can make short work of any number of zombies just by running over them. You don't even have to fire your guns (though I will note that most tanks also have machine guns in addition to the main cannon). But what do these humans do? Instead of using the tank as a lawn mower to take out all the zombies, they use them to attack other humans? And since the US military has lots of tanks how did the zombies take over in the first place? None of that is explained, because it can't be.

OK. Let's take the story for what it is, which is a tale of survival. What will humans do to  ensure their survival? And after they've compromised themselves ethically, is what's left still human? One of my friends told me that after time as a refugee and watching what people have had to do to survive, they have a hard time readjusting to normal society. I can believe that's true. But on the other hand, when the nature of the threat is so obvious (we're not talking about invisible microbes here), I'm not sure that humans (especially in the small groups depicted in the comic book series --- none of the groups depicted go above Dunbar's number) wouldn't naturally form alliances for protection rather than try to fight each other instead over the scraps. After all, if 90% of the population has turned into zombies, what's left is enough to feed the remaining population for at least 10 years (and probably more given that the average lifespan took a dramatic drop!)

But instead what we get is hostility between human tribes over and over again, even in the face of an immediate zombie threat. And when the protagonist (Rick Grimes) finally decides that humanity can do a lot better if large groups of people cooperate and work together it's treated as an unbelievable epiphany. Of course, all through the pandemic I was convinced that this sort of cooperation is precisely what American society isn't capable of doing, which was why the USA was uniquely hard hit by COVID-19.

But when I think about it, even that's an aberration --- American society did cooperate in the 1940s to defeat its opponents. It could very well be that the current situation is what happens leading up to a crisis. Regardless, the book is still compelling reading because Kirkman is good at stacking one crisis on top of another and moving events along. That ability makes the book never boring, and characters change in permanent ways. Heck of a lot better than many prose novel series I've seen in recent years. Recommended.

Re-read: The Walking Dead - Compendium 1

 Last year was a year when Boen loved zombies. I enjoyed The Last of Us TV show, though the video game is still too hard for him. Similarly, he tried to watch the first episode of The Walking Dead TV show, but that wasn't compelling enough for him to keep watching. But he loved the comic book. I'd bought it ages ago back when the Google Play Store was trying to actually become a viable for buying books and had DRM free comics for sale. (Nowadays it's too expensive) I picked it up to read.

The premise of the series is kinda hooky. A zombie apocalypse has always seemed to me to be improbable because any pandemic that a small group of poorly-outfitted people can survive would be easily survivable by an organized government (though probably not a very democratic one). The swiftness into which civilization falls apart also doesn't make sense --- even warlords in places like Somalia rarely commit the kind of depravities regularly seen in this book.

Finally, the characters are flawed, regularly making poor decisions (even the lead protagonist in the series who starts off demonstrating how competent he is) that have disastrous consequences.

Set against that is that this is a series where there's non-stop action. Events happen that shake up the status quo almost every chapter, and it's a far call from series like Game of Thrones where entire novels go by where nothing happens. I can see why it turned into a hit TV show with lots of fans (even some Asian parents watched it!). Each chapter leaves you hanging and keeps you wanting to find out what happens next. But of course 10 years later I'd forgotten it all and the events still happen and are shocking.

The black and white art is crisp, clear, and easy to follow and probably not for people who don't have a strong stomach (I can't imagine any of this being done on TV). Hey, anything that can hold my kid's attention through two fat thousand page volume books (he abandoned the series halfway through the 3rd book) has to be recommended.

Review: American Born Chinese

 American Born Chinese is a graphic novel depicting the Asian American experience. It intertwines 3 narratives: the story of the monkey king (known to nearly anyone from Asia), the story of Jin Wang, and the story of Danny, whose visiting embarrasing FOB cousin embarrasses him in school. It has been made into a Disney+ TV show, and has won many awards.

I can see why the story got picked up by Disney+ --- it has the fake sort of epiphany common to many Disney stories, which is the realization that you need to be true to yourself. The story is a straightforward narrative and the art is nothing special.

The ending was reasonable, but nothing I would call ground-breaking. 

Review: Heartstoppers Vol 1-4

 Heartstoppers is the story of a gay couple, Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson. Set in high school in England, the story starts with Charlie breaking up with his boyfriend for kissing a girl. Nick then recruits Charlie to play rugby (which is a much more macho sport than football --- no armor!), and in the process of the two becoming best friends Nick discovers his own sexuality.

The characters are great and well-drawn. Maybe it's all kind of odd because all the main characters are either gay or transexual or bisexual. What's interesting to me is that Alice Oseman focuses on everything that happens after the relationship starts --- all the relationships in the book start with no drama, no one is ever rejected. This seems very unrealistic to me, but you have to understand that the author is a young woman who's probably never been rejected before, and at some level the author's focus isn't on the start of a relationship but the maintenance of it.

The depiction of characters are great --- people genuinely care about each other, and the treatment of anorexia is unusual and realistic. The book's main message is that love doesn't cure mental illness --- you have to get help and get the support of everyone around you, teachers, parents, doctors, and yes, your boyfriend. I love how tolerant everyone is in the book as well --- even the homophobes eventually admit to being wrong.

The book is set in England, so there's talk of A levels, but I also love that the school trip is to Paris and they don't need anything more than a bus to go there. The school trips depicted in the book are also way more chill than American school trips, with the kids being given lots more freedom and autonomy to approach a museum the way they want to, rather than being herded like cats. That's par for the course --- by the teenage years, in most countries kids have much more autonomy than in the USA.

With the huge amount of tolerance for non-straight behavior in the book, it's not a surprise that right-wingers have banned Heartstoppers. That should be enough to get you to read the book, but the reason I would want my kids to read the book is because it's full of empathetic characters who care about each other, who learn to deal with each other's problems, and are resilient enough to cope with bullying and other negative events in their lives. And that's good enough reason to read the book.

Review: Attack on Titan Vol 1-8

 With my Kindle Scribe in hand, I checked out all 8 volumes of Attack on Titan that were available on Kindle Unlimited. With the title, I expected a science fiction story about attacking a civilization on Titan, that moon of Jupiter. Instead, it's a fantasy story about a human civilization that lives inside huge walled enclosures. The area outside the enclosure is too dangerous, as they are populated by "Titans", giant humanoid creatures that have only one weak spot and will just regenerate even if their heads are blown off by canons. These Titans like to eat humans.

Manga stories move slowly on a per volume basis --- the medium is serialized weekly, and most of the comic books are devoted to action without words rather than plot exposition, etc. The story revolves around Eren and Misako, both orphans. Misako's parents were killed and Eren helped rescue her, and when the first giant Titans manage to smash one of the protective walls, Eren's mother was crushed under their house while Eren's father has disappeared.

Beyond that, the plot and story starts getting wonky and strange.  If you're willing to accept the fantasy I'm sure it all works, but I got impatient and read the plot summary on wikipedia and decided it was too silly to keep reading.

Review: Logicomix

 I picked up Logicomix from the library at $4 when I saw it in the donation rack. A comic book written by a Berkeley professor about Bertrand Russell's Principia defintely got my attention in a "wait, how the heck did I miss this?" kinda way. The book basically follows the life of Bertrand Russell as well as the history of logic in mathematics. It includes many many illustrious mathematicians, including George Cantor, Gauss, Turing,  Whitehead, Boole, Godel. It does take some artistic license, all acknowledged in the appendix, that Russell could not possibly have met some of them in person.

Besides a (very non-technical) tour of logic, sets, and mathematics, it covers Russell's anti-war work, his childhood, and illustrates that many of the mathematicians mentioned effectively went crazy. Fortunately, the book shies away from drawing any unwarranted conclusions since I know many sane mathematicians. The story's covered very nicely and the art serves the story rather than drawing attention to itself.

The book is self-referential, at times dipping into discussions amongst the authors and artists about how to depict a scene, or about the various concepts that Russell was grappling with. I thought this was fun, though sometimes a little on the tangential side.

The back of the book includes a glossary and cast of characters as well as a detailed explanation of some of the mathematical concepts involved. It's quite thorough and enjoyable to read as well.

This was a fun and surprisingly educational comic to read. Highly recommended!

Reread: Fables #1-75

 You can pick up the first major story arc of Fables in two compendiums:

• Fables Compendium One
• Fables Compendium Two

I do not recommend reading past issue #75 of the original series, as I feel that Willingham jumped the shark after he resolved the adversary storyline, though the art by Mark Buckingham continued to improve with age.

My two kids are so different in tastes that it's hard to believe they are brothers. Bowen, for instance, doesn't like reading fiction. But Boen actually enjoys fantasy stories, so once I started reading Fables to him he was hooked. Since Fables is essentially the ultimate fairy tale crossover, by the time we got to the Vorpal sword I was digging up my copy of The Annotated Alice in order to read him the Jabberwocky poem.

I have to admit it, re-reading Fables was really enjoyable. The uncovering of Bigby Wolf's background, the big reveal of Gepetto as the adversary, and the fun use of Cinderella as a superspy was as much fun to re-read as the first time. You don't have to buy the books if you have access to Hoopla through a library, as they're always available as a download.

I stopped reading Fables to Boen at issue #75, and then went on to reading him one Neil Gaiman book after another. Maybe we'll get around to watching the Netflix version of Sandman at some point.

Review: Blue Lock 1-10

 Boen is a huge soccer fanatic, so I tried to find him a comic book that has soccer that he'll like. Blue Lock came up repeatedly as a good comic, so I picked it up for him.  He didn't want to read it though, so I ended up reading it.

The concept is a Hunger Games style selection game, in which a coach hired by the Japanese soccer federation promises to produce a winning striker. The idea is to start with 300 players and through a process of elimination ultimately produce a winner.

There's some social commentary about how the typical Japanese person is too communitarian and not egoistic enough, and the training/selection program is supposed to encourage egoism. The training is not very realistic, as there's nearly no downtime and any athlete training this hard and playing this many games is likely to become injured. But that's par for the course for these types of stories --- realism is not the point.

The story starts out with some very basic selection and setback stories, with each player focusing on his specialty and trying to evolve it against other players. The primary story is about player position and seeing into the future, and the games are rarely a full 11x11 soccer game. Slowly the comic series introduces character interaction and history, to give a bit more flavor rather than just soccer action.

I'm not sure I can consider this series a really good one. But maybe if Boen watches the anime it'll be something he'll enjoy.

Re-read: The Killing Joke

 It's been a long time since I read any new Alan Moore, and I'd almost forgotten that he'd written a few Batman stories, the most canonical of which was The Killing Joke. Brian Bolland's art is distinctive for its clean lines and well-demarked detail, so the grim and gritty look is out of the question. Alan Moore uses this to show off how horrifying The Joker truly is, and how unlikely it is that a truly moral Batman could let him live.

The book's also well known for its depiction of the Joker's origin, which ties nicely into the actual story itself. I didn't like the resolution, but to my mind, there's no resolution I would find satisfying that wouldn't result in the Joker's execution, so maybe that's not surprising.

What's interesting about this Batman story is that the Batman is hardly a character here --- he's depicted as always being one step behind the Joker, and does no detecting whatsoever. He's purely there as a contrast to the Joker, and even then he's redundant compared with Commisioner Gordon.

The Killing Joke doesn't stand up to any of Alan Moore's more independent work. Nevertheless, it's a good story and worth the relatively short read.