skip to main |
skip to sidebar
So apparently someone gave Jason Aaron (a writer who has been impressing me greatly recently with his quality, manly, comics) the keys to my comic geek subconcious, because he picked out pretty much my favourite two semi-obscure recent Marvel characters to star in his spuriously titled "Wolverine" one shot. I mean, Wolverine doesn't exactly do a great deal, while the limelight is comprehensively stolen by Fantomex:
...the French (or faux-French), gun-toting, amoral, mutant, super-thief with the external nervous system; and Marvel Boy, the fascistic, half-insect, super soldier from another dimension: 
Both of whom were created by Grant Morrison during his brief tenure at Marvel where he almost turned the X-Men into the powerhouse of ideas and excitement that they should be, before someone screwed something up and he went back to DC. I mean, considering the absolute farce that surrounded the lead-up to Infinite Crisis, DC aren't much better at utilising his talents, but at least they're letting him do exactly what he wants on the books he's writing.
Anyway, Marvel have built massively on the work that he did for them in recent years, but every time they pull out a character like Fantomex or (especially) Marvel Boy, I hold my breath because I really love those characters and while I try not to be unreasonably geeky about these things I don't want to see them fucked up. Jason Aaron fails to fuck the pair up in this comic so spectacularly, that it ends up absolutely amazing.
Seriously, if the world could be twisted to the extend that I could get a Fantomex / Marvel Boy monthly team-up written by Aaron, I would buy the shit out of it.
So good.
So, so good. I've been reading Grant Morrisons work on Batman over the last few years only sporadically, but I'm suddenly possessed with this desire to find and consume all of it all over again.
It's so good.
Hey! Happy 400 posts everyone! Let's look at comics again!
That is a picture of Robin (as in Batman and Robin, yes) getting kicked into a wall by a siamese triplet martial artist. "SMASH". It's from the second issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's new Batman and Robin comic book. You can't buy it in actual, regular, non-niche bookshops at the moment, it's still being published as floppy issues and only two have come out so far, but I'd hazard a guess that once it's collected it'll be one of the finest Batman stories in a heavily oversaturated field.
I don't want to get geeky about this (n.b. this is a lie, I absolutely DO want to get geeky, but my self control is... just astonishing, I'm like fuckin' Ghandi or something) but this is a book in which Batman himself... doesn't actually appear. This is about someone else taking up the Batman name while Robin is the real Batman's psychotic son. And of course, normal service will eventually be resumed, but this book is so good at the moment that I'm not really looking forward to that. Reading this comic for me was sheer comic book joy - no scratch that, sheer joy. Everything is wonderful, the action and the pacing, the toying with the coventions of the medium, the characters and dialogue... Morrison and Quitely are so at the top of their game that they are the game. That barely even makes sense, and it sounds like something Fiddy Cent would come up with, but I don't care. This is amazing.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye, the second chapter of one of the greatest comic books ever, came to a close a couple of weeks ago.
And it was just as good as I'd hoped. One day, we'll see Seaguy Eternal, and the world will be a better place for the completion of a masterpiece.
I am in the process of obtaining certain footage - certain Eurovision footage. This will probably result in a brain melting marathon of both semi's and the grand final, which in turn will lead to a giga-post next week clocking in at somewhere far beyond indulgent.
But some poor sap also mentioned that he wanted me to recommend some single volume graphic novels or comic books here. I do use comic panels to fill space... ahem, as visually arresting blog posts pretty regularly, and I did want to post about this today anyway so here's a good place to start. Seaguy
is so freakin' awesome it hurts my teeth. These panels are from the second issue of the second mini-series, which came out last week:
I'm not sure if I should go over it again, since I'm pretty sure I've written about it quite a few times now. It's a demented, surreal, rapid-fire, super-hero subversion where everyone's a hero, but the heroes are no longer needed as a massive Disney-esque corporation works to opiate the world with pink goo and children's cartoons. It's illustrated in a fabulous, classic style by Cameron Stewart and Grant Morrison's writing is like a stream of awesomeness, straight from the subconcious.
I'm kind of cheating to include it here, since that ol' sap wanted one volume stories and Seaguy is going to be three when it's finished. But only the first volume is out at the moment (possibly out of print, since it came out in 2005) and it's so short and fun in itself, and one of my favourite comics of all time, it seemed like a no brainer.
Also it leads onto another two easy recommendations: We3
and Vimanarama
. Seaguy, WE3 and Vimanarama were all three issue mini-series that were published at the same time as part of a rough "Crack!Comicks" concept by Grant Morrison. They're all amazing and they're all wonderful as short, stand-alone graphic novels. Vimanarama is a cosmic-Bollywood-apocalypse story set in the North of England and WE3 is Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey except with cyborg tank-pets. It's so good that people talk about turning it into a movie every now and then, which... eh, probably means nothing. What does mean something is that Vimanarama is drawn by Phillip Bond and WE3 by Frank Quitely and they might be two of my favourite artists ever too. I love all of those books.
So there you go, recommendations and amazon links and all's well with the world.
I have written many times about Grant Morrison, and how he's my favourite comic book writer, and thus (since comic books are the greatest of all mediums) probably my favourite writer full stop. For a while now he's been labouring on the big names at DC comics: Batman, Superman, and so on - putting aside the smaller, non-company works that are often his best. Thanks to this though, DC have agreed to publish the second part of Seaguy, and believe me, that is worth all the so-so DC corporate stuff in the world.
Seaguy is the best hero-trapped-in-a-brainwashed-world-of-conformism-that's-secretly-run-by-an-evil-company story ever. And there are a lot of them. It's probably also one of the best man vs. "them" stories ever, and it's mostly in the telling. Reading the first issue of this new mini-series was pure, pure joy for me. One day, I pray, there'll be a Seaguy omnibus, just like nine issues in one book. And I'll buy like three copies, and read it every time I fly, and I'll buy a copy for every person I know, and ninety percent of them will think that it's unreadable insanity, and the other ten percent will see it as the song of the human spirit it is. I love it so much.
So much.
Y'know like so many people, I never really liked Superman:
I guess it just takes the right story to show you why he's so awesome. For me that'll be Final Crisis by Grant Morrison.
From Final Crisis #5, the comic which proves for the 27th time why I love Grant Morrison so much. I really could not give a flying crap about the DC comics "universe" or most of the characters therein, but almost every issue of this big blockbuster "Crisis" series has had a moment that has made me physically tingle. And there's so much in there you have to work to keep up with it, and that's just wonderful.
