Review: Frieren Vol 11-14

 Going into Frieren Vol 11 I finally got to the point where Macht is killed and the heroes are victorious over a "midas touch" demon as well as Solitar. We then go into an extended time travel sequence where Frieren swaps places with herself from prior to the series beginning (i.e., during the quest to destroy the Demon King), and gets to use her knowledge from the future to help her previous party overcome immediate challenges while they help her return to the future.

I thought this was a great sequence, and well setup to see both how much and how little Frieren herself has changed over time.

Unfortunately, the series came to a hiatus after Vol 14, while ending in a particularly bad place with the shadow assassins plotline coming together. The problem with Japanese Manga is that they're high on filler (lots of pages where nothing essentially happens) and so by the time you get substantial events you're 14 volumes into a series that wasn't finished. The characters also have a tendency to pontificate about their secret techniques while fighting, which is pretty unrealistic but I guess with manga there's no other way to get to know the characters' innermost thoughts!

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 6-10

 I kept checking out Frieren - Beyond Journey's End from the library, even though the books are quite slow moving, and sometimes the writer seems to have written himself into a corner. Getting to the end of the "Class 1 Mage" saga, the author seemed to change his mind on having a Battle Royale type reality show face-off and had each candidate interviewed by the master wizardess (who's an elf who knows Frieren). The decisions seem purely arbitrary, but at least it gets the story moving.

We get a continuation of the journey across the continent, with a bunch of side quests, but the story becomes more interesting as we see Frieren in action against demons, and an explanation that demons are completely a different type of sentient being with no emotions but seemingly evolved to prey on humans. That's interesting, but no explanation on the origins is forthcoming. As always, humans get the short end of the stick --- they don't live long enough, and all the non-humans are immortal. Makes you wonder how humans came to dominate the world, since according to the explication in the books, living longer accumulates magical energy (mana).

Finally, we get a long story arc about a demon that turns things into gold via a midas touch like spell. By the end of the 10th volume things still aren't resolved. We reach a climax where things have gone maximally bad for the heroes when the volume ends, keeping you wanting to reach for the next book.

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 1-5

 Frieren - Beyond Journey's End had a premise that I found intriguing, so I checked out 5 digital volumes from the library onto my Kindle Scribe.

The graphic novel volume starts with the end of a big adventure = the Elf mage Frieren and her fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. They are hailed as heroes, and part ways. Frieren, being an Elf, does not age or die, but her companions are two humans and a dwarf, so she attends her funeral.

The cleric in the party tricks her into adopting his mentee as her apprentice, and she embarks on a new adventure. The story starts slow, and you get the impression the Freren seems to be an unmotivated (by human standards) sort of person. Since she lives forever, she can effectively take her time and tarry at places for years at a time in no hurry.

As the backstory emerges, however, you start to see that she's no ordinary mage, for instance, suppressing her mana aura deliberately so that she appears weaker than she is. You discover that she was the apprentice of a legendary mage.

Like all Japanese graphic novels, a lot of the story is told in pictures instead of words or dialogue, so pages can fly by without a single word. I assume that the story was serialized in one of those weekly compendium magazines, so there's no hurry on the storyline. The story arc about demonic magic took more than a volume to cover. The story arc about getting a mage certification took more than a volume and still isn't done when I put down volume 5.

The characters are slow to evolve, so you have to give the series time to read (hence at least 5 volumes before I tried writing a review). It's a good enough read that I will keep checking out more volumes from the library as they become available.

Review: Lone Wolf and Cub: The Gateless Barrier

 The Gateless Barrier is book two in the Lone Wolf and Cub series. This volume is just as violent and bloody as the previous book, and the adventures the father and son go through make it quite clear that the protagonist is not a hero. Each story can be independently read like the old style TV episodes, so there's no character development.

In one episode, Ogami Itto is asked to kill a Buddhist priest. He tries to do so and discovers that he can't, yet the priest gives him hints that he first has to understand Buddha nature in order to kill him. The guy actually goes and meditates in the mountains for days in order to understand Buddha nature and successfully assassinates the priest. There's of course a bunch of things wrong with this, especially since Buddhist teachings prohibit killing (many Buddhists are vegetarians). In any case, these stories demonstrate something of Itto's character, but ultimately the effects of all that killing never seems to affect him. In another story, he abandons his son in a cave after an avalanche has buried the entrance in favor of his mission, saying that if fate wills his son will live and he will come back to rescue Daigoro.

Definitely a man with dedication to his mission!

Review: American Vampire Vol 1

 Boen's been on a Stephen King kick of late, reading various Stephen King novels like Christine, I saw that American Vampire Vol 1 was available as a Prime free loan, so I checked it out and read it. The narrative is split into two timestreams: one (written by Scott Snyder) set in the 1920s in Hollywood, as two young actresses who're hoping to make it big get dragged into a party for the Hollywood Big Wigs in hopes of landing a great role. Rather than going Harvey Weinstein on them, the big wig instead sucks their blood (hey, it's a vampire book, what did you expect).

The second timestream is set in the time of the Wild West. This narrative was written by Stephen King, and it's obvious that he's new to comic book writing. There's way too much dialog, and not enough time spent making you care about the characters.

The art is good, but the vampire schtick is kinda worn out. It's nothing that you haven't seen in Blade, for instance. I was hoping for more originality. I guess the vampire trope is so worn out that even Stephen King can't come up with a good new story, and is stuck retelling old stories.

Re-read: Lone Wolf and Cub - The Assassin's Road

 I remember reading and enjoying a few issues of Lone Wolf and Cub as a teenager, so I checked out the first volume, The Assassin's Road from Hoopla. A lot of the art and for instance, the stand-off sword-fight scenes look very familiar, because games like Ghost of Tsushima have adopted the art and the tropes and made them look great.

What I was unprepared for was a reminder that the Japanese do not hide behind a rating system for their comics. There's rape, seduction, lots of blood and gore (in black and white) and obviously, there's the incongruity of a Samurai assassin taking on murderous bounty jobs with a 5-year old in tow.

The whole volume (in which the origin story only appears right at the end of the volume) is full of situations where Itto Ogami (the titular Lone Wolf) through craft, guile, and just sheer amazing swordsmanship, dispatches his targets and then walks off into the sunset, baby cart in tow. There are lots of action lines, and the dynamism of the art leaves no question that this is an action comic.

It's enjoyable in small doses. I think I'll space out my reading of the series.

Review: Batman by Grant Morrison

 Grant Morrison won Eisner Awards, so I had high expectations of his Batman book. I came away quite disappointed --- clearly, I've aged out of the audience for this. The first thing is that the collection is badly organized, so you're getting fragments of the story out of order or with connecting stories taken out. That made it quite challenging to stay engaged and interested throughout the reading.

The second issue is that you've got someone introduced as Bruce Wayne's son. By the middle of the book you realize there's no way Bruce Wayne is a secret identity --- everyone seems to know that he's Batman! At no point do we ever get the feeling that Batman is competent. He seems to be bewildered, reacting to events rather than anticipating them.

Then there's the mystical stuff involving Ra's al Ghul and his daughter, and that storyline was never very attractive to me. I checked this book out of the library and am glad I didn't pay money for this.

Review: Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex

 Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex was on sale for $2, so I picked up the kindle copy. In case you haven't kept up with any of the Ghost in the Shell movies, the world is a cyberpunk universe in which major Motoko Kusanagi runs a top-shelf police/commando unit that deals with criminals, terrorists, and political operators in world where human brains can be moved into cyborg bodies and brain swapping is something that's feasible.

This particular story isn't written/drawn by the original creator of the universe, but in some ways that's a good thing --- there aren't any assumptions that you know what the conventions of the cyberpunk genre is, and so concepts are introduced in such a way that a reader is not lost. The characters are a bit wooden, and the art occasionally hard to follow.

The mystery in this episode is easy to follow, and most important for someone like me, fair. You're given all the clues in the story (along with the world-building needed to make use of the clues), and when the reveal happens you're not left feeling like the writer cheated you by pulling out some previously unknown facts.

The action in the story is just OK. I suspect that at the time the comic was written it probably would have been perceived as much more innovative than it is today, but obviously the bar for special effects has been raised quite a bit.

I enjoyed the book, despite having been away from cyberpunk for a while. It's enjoyable and easy to follow.

Review: Arrowsmith

 After admiring Carlos Pacheco's work on Superman, I decided to look for more of his work, and came across Arrowsmith, which comes in two volumes: So Smart In Their Fine Uniforms, and Behind Enemy Lines. Since Pacheco is now dead and the second book ends in a bit of a cliffhanger, you have to be OK with the story probably never getting finished.

The world is a fantasy version of the state of the planet during World War 1, complete with trolls, dragons, and wizards and magic spells substituting for the technology. In this world, history is quite a bit different (there's an appendix in volume one where a writer friend of Kurt Busiek fills in the background behind the world).

The art is the highlight of both volumes. Pacheco's art is gorgeous, and makes you really believe the world exists. The story is a bit of a cliche --- it's the loss of innocence that happened in World War 1 but transplanted into this fantasy milieu. Sure, maybe that's some plot about the trolls being the bridge to the sunlit lands or to the seelie court, but to be honest Busiek breaks no new ground here in the story. As a vehicle for beautiful art though I cannot fault the setting or the way the story takes you through a mythic version of a Europe that might have been, seen from the point of view of an starry eyed American would-be-hero.

The story is short and obviously unfinished, so we never see how the world of Arrowsmith lives up to its potential. But it was very much worth my time checking it out from the library.

Review: AstroCity Metro Book Vol 6

 I never got around to buying/reading the last few AstroCity collections, and it turned out that they're now all available on Hoopa as part of the Metro Book collections, so I checked out the final volume. The framing story is that of a mysterious blue-skinned character known as the Broken Man. It turns out that he's the last of a series of historical supernatural characters that embody music. This gives Busiek a chance to explore the history of Astro City and its previous incarnations.

Unlike the first few AstroCity volumes, which focus on the mundane characters living in AstroCity, this one is truly focused on the superheroes. What I like about the heroes is that these are all really quirky characters. One is literally the figment of his daughter's imagination (unfortunately, I got exposed to the same idea in Kurt Busiek's Creature of the Night). Another is an amulet that confers the power of a bonded animal with the human it's attuned to. This one was fun, because the amulet got bonded with a Corgi puppy. The result was hilarious (imagine a superhero being told how adorable and cute he is after saving the day).

One great mundane story was a follow up to a story told in the first volume of Astro City where a man lost his wife as a result of a time changing battle between heroes and a volume, and as a result his wife never existed. In that story, he was given the choice to forget her and absorb himself into his new timeline or to remember both time lines. In this story, we see the followup consequences of that. It was a great story.

I enjoyed the book. It kinda ends tentatively --- we never see what happens to the Broken Man. I get the impression Busiek abandoned Astro City because his other contracts were more lucrative. It's a unique universe, however, so I hope he comes back to it.

Review: Superman - Camelot Falls

 While browsing Hoopla I saw that Busiek wrote another Superman story called Camelot Falls, so I checked it out as well.

The thesis behind Camelot Falls is that human civilizations move in cycles, with a rise and then a fall. The fall can be resisted, and Superman and the Justice League form one of the forces resisting the fall. An ancient Atlantean sorcerer called Arion insists, however, that the longer the fall is put off the worst it will be, and if Superman insists on going on his current path it would result in the extinction of humanity.

Superman, of course, posits that he has free will, and that he cannot simply not help out and feel good about himself (was there any doubt about this?). He has a fight with Arion and defeats him, but the overall arc of the story ends there --- apparently Busiek stopped working on Superman and nobody ever picked up the unfinished grand plot he left behind, leaving the story very unsatisfying.

There are a few interesting pieces of the story, including one where it is revealed that everyone from the United States government and the Justice League has a plan for stopping Superman on the day he goes rogue from mind control, magic, or just decides to turn against humanity. The intention there is to make you feel how alienated Superman can feel.

In this Superman universe, he's married to Lois Lane and they even have a child. Lana Lang is running LexCorp (another weird one). The art is fantastic (especially the interpretations of Lois Lane and Lana Lang), making me sad that Carlos Pacheco died in 2022.

I can't really recommend this story. It's just not that satisfying and an unfinished storyline. Probably the only reason to read it is to look at Pacheco's art.

Review: Batman - Creature of the Night

 After reading Superman - Secret Identity, I discovered that Kurt Busiek wrote the Batman equivalent called Creature of the Night which showed up in 2020. So of course I checked it out of the library via Hoopla and read it.

Just like the other graphic novel, this one is set in a world where DC Comics exist, and everyone knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. In fact, growing up, Bruce Wainwright loved Batman and made sure everyone knew about it, even calling a family friend Alfred.

When Wainwright's parents are killed, he gets distraught and somehow a Batman appears to help him out. Over the rest of the graphic novel, we get exposition about the nature of this Batman (which is nothing like the conventional Batman comics) and then we deal with how the real world differs from the easy answers of the Batman comics.

The story falls strictly into the fantasy category. There is no explanation for the Batman that makes sense (unlike even in the official DC comics), though there's some bizarre explanation in the narrative that's unsatisfying to me. There's no deep exploration of Bruce's psyche, and there's no long journey where Bruce gets any ephiphanies. That makes this book a weaker work than Secret Identity, but it was worth reading for a unique take on Batman.

Review: Superman - Secret Identity

 Somehow I'd missed that Kurt Busiek wrote a Superman story called Secret identity. Well, of course I had to go and check it out from Hoopla. The story is set on Earth Prime (or rather, our Earth, where no superheroes exist). On Earth Prime, DC Comics continue to publish superhero comics, so everyone knows that Clark Kent is Superman. Except, in this universe Clark Kent was just the cruel joke played on him by his parents, who figured why not subject their kids to the worst bullying possible by naming him Clark when they live in Picketsville, Kansas.

Much like the story in Invincible, Clark Kent has a normal childhood and grows up having broken bones just like any other kid. But in high school, his powers manifest one day, and he discovers that he's Superman! Unlike other Superman stories there are no Lex Luthors or other Super-Villains. (There is a Lois, but not Lois Lane) He works as a writer, but not as a reporter for a newspaper. (It's The New Yorker)

The challenges this version of Superman gets are of course, the government trying to capture him and subject him to experiments and so forth. (Why governments are never sensible can probably be a PhD thesis on Earth Prime) Strangely enough, this Superman can get his blood drawn and so on. We see him fall in love, get married, have kids, and even retire.

As Superman stories go, this is a pretty down to earth, easy to read, and short story. We never get to see where his powers come from, or whether he truly was adopted. There are lots of loose ends. But beyond that it's a pretty reasonable story but not quite up to par with Busiek's AstroCity work.

Review: Good Omens Graphic Novel

 I will confess that I've always bounced off Terry Prachett's work. Disc World, you name it, I can't read more than a few pages before I'm tired of it. Good Omens (the novel) was no exception. But a year or so ago Bowen and Boen got into watching the TV show, and I found that I enjoyed it. I guess I liked the plot, it was always Terry Prachett's writing that left me cold.

Colleen Doran announced that she was doing a graphic novel adaptation of Good Omens. It was a kickstarter project, and I backed it before the allegations about Neil Gaiman was announced. In any case, it wouldn't have felt fair to knock Colleen Doran for associating with Gaiman. The graphic novel took a year or so to deliver, and I'd even forgotten about it by the time it showed up in the mail.

It's a testament to how far Gaiman's star has fallen that his name wasn't even on the title page to the book, though it showed up in the interior splash page. The art is great, as you can expect from Doran, but you can tell that the comic was adapted from a (very wordy) novel. There are several places where a traditional comic book author would tell the story in pictures rather than huge blocks of text that were probably lifted from the novel proper.

Where the comic differs from the TV show, it was clear that the show was the one that deviated from the novel. The novel does the usual Gaiman schtick of setting up for a great battle and then having it be defused with an anticlimax (the TV show doesn't shy away from that schtick). The graphic novel adds enough color (literally) and distraction that the Terry Prachett prose didn't bother me at all.

What can I say? A comic book that lets me read a novel that I've bounced off. That makes it recommended.

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.