Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Filler

Yes, Steve, yesterday WAS a long time ago. This from the man who left Velma Dinkley in her (almost) altogether for a whole month...

I do have a few more-up-to-date entries coming up, and two or three of them are even comic-book-related. I'm currently in love with the Fables series of trade paperbacks by Bill Willingham et al. (okay, so that's not terribly up-to-date, but bear with me); Steve loaned me a weird little semi-manga called Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, which I liked very much; and I just read the most godawful comic I've seen in years and want to warn you away from it.

My mini-review of The Five Fists of Science is: "Fun basic concept, damaged by mediocre writing and utterly destroyed by some of the poorest-quality sequential art I've seen since my days as the Marvel submissions editor."

Given that my job then was to review unsolicited artwork, mostly from kids, and send nice form letters to 99% of the applicants, that's not saying much. Or maybe it's saying a lot.

Most of the names at the top of the Image comics masthead on this book are people whose work I liked and/or respected back in the day when I read a lot more comics. I have no idea how much Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders must have bribed them to publish TFFoS. Maybe they're family. Or perhaps Family.

Can't resist one little item that should go in my proper review instead of this filler blog entry:

The "heroic" fight scene on pages four, five, six, and seven took me and J about 5 minutes to piece together, since the artwork was so muddy we couldn't tell what the hell was going on. Once we did work it out, we wished we hadn't bothered. My favorite part was when the one-armed guy manages to remove his prosthetic arm from within the mutton-sleeved blouse he was wearing and bludgeon a pistol-carrying thug with it before the guy was able to run away or shoot. And the thug had a head start. That's one FAST one-armed guy. Richard Kimble wouldn't stand a chance.

I do hope Fraction and Sanders are nice guys who move past this little debacle and end up doing interesting work. Interesting in the enjoyable sense, that is, not interesting like this project. But no matter how great they may be personally, I don't have much to say about their book that isn't criticism. Sorry, guys.

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UPDATE:
Okay, still don't like TFFoS, but I'm a dork to write that Matt Fraction should "end up doing interesting work" when I loved Last Of The Independents. So maybe I'd have liked this one as well, if it had a good artist and a bit of editing. But it didn't and I don't.

 

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