Daily Breakdowns 047 - I Have The Neediest Cat In The World

Welcome back. Today I thought I'd write about three books that have nothing to do with each other. First, though, I was thinking. I couldn't wait for 2008 to end. It was a bad, depressing, lonely year. 2007 as well. 2009 has certainly had some low points for me, but something seems a little different, a little better. I know part of it is just that I got involved with TWC and have been writing regularly. I don't know, maybe it's just another escape mechanism and it's not like I feel I'm doing something very important, but it feels pretty good to be doing this.

No credit goes to my cat, though. She's like the worst girlfriend, always flopping down in your path when you're trying to walk, meowing incessantly. And stupid? She can't figure out how the push-in door of the litter box works, so she'll pee on your dirty clothes while you're taking a shower, or take a crap on the bath mat.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Reviewing comics is fun.


Starr The Slayer #1-4
Written by Daniel Way
Art by Richard Corben
Published by Marvel Comics. $3.99 USD ea.

This was a pretty bad miniseries. I don't want to belabor this, because what's another bad miniseries? There are lots of better comics to talk about, and indeed I'm getting pretty backed up already. There are probably fourteen people who care about Starr the Slayer, and I'm not sure half of them would enjoy this. Corben fans probably will, as he gets to draw some odd, alien faces and big breasted women without having to try to tone things down for our reality, or a superhero universe.

Not sure how Way fans will feel, as I don't know much of his work. Here, he takes the original premise--a hack writer comes up with stories of a sword-and-sandal warrior who really exists in another dimension--and uses this mainly in the first issue and then gets away from it for increasingly annoying rhyming narration (think Mark Evanier trying to write Groo while on Vicadin from his stomach-stapling), and a haphazard, let's-beat-him-again-and-again-until-he-fights-back storyline for Starr. Starr is not interesting, nor is his Spartacus-like rebellion, nor is his enemy. After the first issue, I kept buying the rest and only read them after the last came out. If I'd been reading every week, I would have stopped at #2. The miniseries exists only so that a trademark is maintained, in case anyone had ideas of writing their own stories about a blond barbarian named Starr.


Batman: Unseen #1-5
Written by Doug Moench
Art by Kelley Jones
Published by DC Comics. $2.99 USD ea.

Ostensibly a miniseries existing so people who like the Bruce Wayne Batman have something to read until he's inevitably brought back, this is actually a little more narrowly focused towards those who remember the '90s Moench/Jones Batman run (plus a few one-shots/graphic novels) fondly. The majority of those stories took advantage of Jones' gift for grotesque anatomy and high contrast images. There was often a horrible looking character involved, like Black Mask or Dracula, because that's what Jones does best. His normal characters, like Bruce Wayne, are flat and not interesting to look at, but give him a chance to draw Batman's six (eight? twelve? pack framed by a flowing, apparently 30 foot cape, and he's on-point. Moench knows what to give him, and here Jones has the opportunity to draw a deranged scientist in various stages of invisibility--sometimes there's muscles with no skin, sometimes just some organs and eyes, sometimes a skeleton, based on his continued ingestion of a special formula of his devising. As a villain he's not that clever, and his patron Black Mask doesn't get much to do, but Jones' art is always fun to look at, and Moench seems to be having a good time, giving new chapter headings every couple pages like it's an old horror novel. A pretty good time.


Tre Tarino
Art by Ashley Wood
Published by IDW Publishing. $35.00 USD

I've always enjoyed Wood's artwork, and have reviewed a few of these books before. It's not easy to do when you're not an artist. They're interesting books in that they're big and glossy, and yet sort of sloppily put together. That is, they're just a bunch of representative images from the past year or two of Wood's comics output. This time around I see some World War Robot in one section, some of his 48 Nudes in another. Maybe some of it is new to this collection, I dunno. Wood briefly explains at the start that this is a map of where he was and where he's going, and from that point the reader is on his own. From what I can tell, Wood has gotten away from a brief fascination a while ago with depicting female genitalia as mechanical and dangerous. He still has some interest in the contast between the soft, curvy feminine form contrasting with the blunt angles of dull metal robots, but it seems to be cooling a bit based on the selections here. Women are soft and playful and with the body tone of the '70s or '80s rather than the hardbodies of today. Sometimes faces are realistic and sometimes they're cute and cartoony girls atop realistic bodies. Robots still tend to be like darker versions of the ones from Disney's The Black Hole. One example of growth is the murky, oppressive quality he brings to the WWR settings, as well as the horrific quality of their gas masks. Wood's pretty easy to take for granted, as he does a lot of covers and comics art and these art books come about once a year or more, but there's really no one doing anything like him right now.