…doesn’t much care for your tone, mister.
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Friday Night Fights: Yeah You Know Me!
Tonight, Friday Night Fights returns with an all-new theme, and this time, it’s been declared that brevity is the soul of a beatdown! That’s why this time, it all comes down to One Panel of Pain!
So let me ask.. you down with O.P.P?
For more of Jim Rugg’s totally awesome Street Angel, pick up the trade
The Week In Ink: February 18, 2009
Believe it or not, there are times when I’d like to just skip all the formalities and get straight to the reviews…
…but business comes before pleasure!
Yes, the grand Capcom tradition of having the most ridiculous hair this side of Final Fantasy lives on in both comic and video game
Here’s what I got this week…
…and in a moment, what I thought about them. But first, I’d just like to say that this is honestly one of the best weeks for new comics we’ve had in a while. There’s great stuff from guys like Paul Tobin, Jeff Parker and Phil Hester, Matt Fraction is in the middle of one of the most fun X-Men stories we’ve had in a long time, and even GI Joe Origins is Larry Hama at his fun, just-kooky-enough best. There’s even a couple of milestones for me personally, as the last issue of Birds of Prey ends its 108-month streak as the comic I’ve been reading the longest without stopping, and the arrival of Teenagers from the Future
But really, there’s only one comic that’s really important this time around.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch #100: It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in the world of comic books, but truly, this is the end of an era.
Specifically, it’s the end of writer/artist Tania Del Rio’s tenure on the book, which redefined Sabrina not only in terms of its manga-influenced art, but in the fact that it abandoned the traditional gag strip format in favor of a more cohesive adventure story, which is something the folks over at Archie comics have very rarely attempted. They’ve been dabbling in it more recently with the “new look” story arcs, but while I have sincere doubts that they would’ve even gone that far without Del Rio’s success, they’re really just putting a fresh coat of paint on the same old stories.
With Sabrina, however, it was different. There are people who felt like the manga-style art (not to mention the similarly shojo-meets-Harry Potter direction of the stories themselves) was something of a slap in the face to Sabrina creator Dan DeCarlo–and it wouldn’t be the first one–but in reality, Del Rio was exactly what the book needed to avoid the stagnation that permeates the rest of the line.
Sabrina’s always been one of the more marketable corners of the Archie universe, and it’s worth noting that after the popular success and eventual decline of the live-action show starring Melissa Joan Hart, it was retooled again as a Saturday morning cartoon, with the current series launched as a tie-in that featured what are without a doubt some of the worst comics Archie has ever published. Seriously, they’re still running those things in Betty & Veronica Digest, and even by the formulaic standards of the rest of the line, they are darn near unreadable. Just think of the regular Archie comics, and then imagine what would happen if they tried to dumb them down even more.
The series was eventually reverted to the more traditional version of Sabrina–you know, the one where she’s actually a teenage witch–but the very nature of Archie comics limited what could be done with the character. After all, a teenage witch is a great gimmick, but even Jughead’s Time Police had a little forward momentum to allow things to play out, and by sticking to the time-capsule storytelling, interest was bound to fade. Thus, Tania Del Rio was brought in to capitalize on the growing success of manga among young readers by completely revamping the title, and while Archie missed the boat in typical fashion by only ever collecting one volume
Really: Del Rio’s run on Sabrina lasted an incredible forty-two issues. In today’s market of twelve-issue written-for-the-trade runs, that’s almost unheard of, but to give you some historical context, it’s only three issues less than Walt Simonson on Thor
And she defined the character just as much. In her 42 issues, Sabrina not only juggled her dual lives and her romances with classic love interest Harvey and new, blue-haired Shinji, but also–and again, I am serious–joined a secret underground organization designed to overthrow the government of the magical realm. That’s right: Sabrina was an anarchist in a witchity secessionist militia, and that was before the unforgettable Duality Wands arc where she was briefly turned evil and started wiping people’s memories. Seriously, it was like Identity Crisis, only written by someone with talent.
And all of it has led up to this issue, the thundering climax of the story where the Four Blades unite with Queen Seles to stop Vosblanc from destroying the Mana Tree, and really, it’s got all the action you’d expect. Spells, explosions, Sabrina turning into a tiger and riding a flying carpet, hell, somebody dies in this story, and I’m pretty sure nobody’s gotten killed in an Archie Comic in like thirty years! It is nuts.
But it’s also pretty exciting, and it’s the kind of well-done climax that you can tell was neatly planned and years in the making. And while it does get a little maudlin at the end, well, it’s a shojo-style Sabrina the Teenage Witch; I think a little melodrama is to be expected. Either way, it’s a fitting end for Del Rio’s run, with a payoff that actually lives up to the stakes it raised along the way.
As for the future, well, the next arc on Sabrina is going to be a four-part story about Salem from not only before he was a cat–as Del Rio did a few months back in a story that proved to be the lynchpin of the whole Four Blades saga–but even before he was an evil wizard bent on world domination, which doesn’t really excite me, although there are lizardmen and swords involved, so who knows? And as for Del Rio herself, she’s apparently working on a new Katy Keene story, but for my money, I’d love to see her do an ongoing, movie-style Josie and the Pussycats. She did a few JATP backups in Archie & Friends a while back, and while I’m not sure how they went over with the fans, I think taking the characters as established rock stars and throwing them into adventures (in Persia, or maybe France) would be right up her alley.
Well, that or my long-awaited Crisis In Riverdale, but I’m still waiting to hear back on that one.
And that’s the week. As always, feel free to add to the discussion in the comments section below, but please: Sabrina-related questions only.
Karen Ellis
As some of you may have heard, Karen Ellis, creator of the webcomic Planet Karen, has recently lost virtually everything she owns in a fire.
This is, needless to say, a pretty horrible thing to happen to someone, and if you can spare anything at all, I’d encourage you to head over to her site and donate via the button in the sidebar.
The Annotated Anita Blake: The Laughing Corpse #4
As any academic will tell you, gaining an understanding of any great work of literature requires a willingness to sit down and do the research so that you can unlock the subtle, nuanced mysteries that the author has presented. Fortunately, not all works are great–or even “literature,” really–and the bar for understanding is set low enough that even thinly-veiled mockery and outright scorn can pass for concerted study.
That’s where the ISB Research Department comes in.
Yes, it’s that time again, so please, grab your own copy and follow along as we delve into Laurenn J. Framingham’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter: The Laughing Corpse: Book One #4!
0.0: Among other things, this issue’s cover, seen here…
…promises a scene where Anita actually fights the supernatural, but considering that the sum total of “action” in the series thus far has consisted of
1. Anita sitting around at someone’s house refusing to do her job,
2. Anita standing around a crime scene telling detectives things they already knew,
3. Anita standing around Aunt May’s house, and
4. Anita standing around her apartment talking to the love child of Salvador Dali and Rob Liefeld
…I’m not holding out much hope that this will actually be the case.
1.1: And thus, my suspicions are borne out, as Anita starts this issue by charging headlong into the cutthroat world of getting someone to look things up on the Internet for her. Because really, nothing says “action” like microfiche.
1.3: Doing the actual looking up–which I think technically makes him the protagonist of this story–is new character Irving, who is described in a caption like so:
First of all, if Irving doesn’t look like a werewolf, then what exactly does a werewolf look like? I mean, I’m not an expert on the subject like Glenn Danzig or anything, but don’t werewolves just look like regular people up until they start turning into wolves? Isn’t that their entire function? Apparently not.
Second is the interesting fact that “lycanthropy can’t cure baldness,” which would mean that on the night of the full moon, Irving here is apparently cursed to become wolf with a bald spot, which is actually kind of awesome.
It’s unknown whether or not his particular strain of lycanthropy leads him to wear daisy dukes in his hybrid form, or if that’s just some crazy-talk from the last book. All documented. All true.
2.2: What starts here is yet another thrill-a-minute talky sequence with Anita pressing Irving for information on the ersatz Big Lebowski from the first issue, Harold Gaynor. Although honestly, I think it’d be a lot more interesting if they were discussing someone else:
One assumes that they’d be investigating his fraudulent behavior
4.7:
No one calls you that.
6.4: In attempt to reveal what I believe is an atrophied, vestigial personality, Anita attempts to banter with Irving:
Clearly, Anita’s either mistaken or has forgotten about New York City’s own Taimak
8.3: If you’ve ever wondered what your humble annotator looks like when he’s writing these little chats of ours…
…that pretty much covers it.
10.2: Continuing the discussion of Harold Gaynor’s fetishes–which by my count has been going on for over nine thousand hours at this point–Irving introduces us to Wheelchair Wanda:
Really, Anita? Really? The prostitute in the wheelchair is “too weird?” You raise the dead for a living and (allegedly) hunt monsters on the side, and the wheelchair hooker is too far into crazytown for you? REALLY.
Regardless, long-time comics readers will no doubt realize that “Wheelchair Wanda” isn’t a prostitute at all, but rather the Matches Malone-esque identity that Barbara “Oracle” Gordon assumes when she wants to go undercover in the seedy underbelly of Gotham City. Still, though.
12.4: Prepare for trouble…
…and make it double!
Yes, it’s the return of Jean-Claude, the hapless member of Team Rocket that’s always after Anita’s Pikachu. Oh, no, wait, got my notes mixed up, he’s a vampire or something and he gave Anita some super-powers that, judging by the content of the series, give her preturnatural skill at standing around and a superhumanly wooden personality. But surely THIS is the turning point, right? I mean, he’s a vampire master who tried to enslave Anita to his will, and she–according to the cover, at least–is a vampire hunter, so this scene couldn’t possibly turn into seven pages of people standing around telling each other plot points, right?
19.6: Son of a bitch.
20.1: In this scene, Anita teams up with “a pair of exterminators” who are “licensed to carry flamethrowers.” In keeping with the theme of the book, they don’t ever actually do anything–again, despite the fact that they and their equipment are explicitly mentioned in the narration–but man, what the hell kind of exterminator comes equipped with napalm? I’d originally assumed this was a rare mistake, but then remembered that rats in Anita Blake’s St. Louis are six feet tall, wear pants and eat at Denny’s. So yeah. Flamethrowers.
21.3: This scene, wherein Anita flashes back to her origin, is–no joke–my favorite bit of the comic thus far, if only because I can’t read the line “my stepmother, Judith” without hearing it in the voice of the Teen Girl Squad.
22.5: SUDDDENLY… TENTACLES!
Yes, on the last panel, the cover’s promise of action finally pokes its head out, sees its shadow, and then promptly disappears with a complete lack of gunplay, skeleton hands, and looming shades rising from the background. But what’s really worth noting here is the caption, because this is a comic book that not only includes the line “It was a cemetery–there were lots of dead things in it,” but uses it to close out the issue.
And brother, if there’s a better analogy for the entire book, I’d like to hear it.
The 100% Factual Adventures of Abraham Lincoln
In honor of President’s Day, a segment of history that was sadly left out of even the most detailed
Hang on a second, let me double-check here… Herbie? Fighting a bear? With Abraham Lincoln? I think it’s official: Herbie #11
And Now…
The Amazing Spider-Man:
Think About It, Won’t You?