Comic Covers Sunday: Exotic Romances

Many many thanks to Jim for covering for me this week.  It's been over the top busy and life finally overwhelmed my comic book addictions.  Anyway, to celebrate my whining I decided to look at a series that had some excellent weepy covers.  Today I give you Exotic Romances!  In which no one is exotic and the locations even less so!

Let's start with...

Exotic Romances #22.  Yep, tons of exotic here.  Maybe it's the fact that she appears slightly stalker-ish.  That could be exotic.

Exotic Romances #24. Besides the story about back stabbing sisters (always a top seller!) there is the one about "Too Many Sweethearts."  I gotta admit, I am curious what defines too many sweethearts in 1950's America.

Exotic Romances #27 doesn't have the best cover but it's got the best stories.  With tales like "I waited too late," "Afraid to Marry," and "Did I love him enough?" it would have been hard to resist this issue.

Exotic Romances #28. Based on that look, it really appears that the officer was using the girl to get to the private.  Now that's exotic!

Exotic Romances #31.  As a man, if I am to understand this cover correctly, all women are "husband hunters."  Good to know... but a little late for me.  Another classic tale in this issue, "I was the girl in his past."  What did all the ex's in the world do before Facebook???







That's all folks, now go enjoy your Sunday.

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The Avengers Movie – A Review

I usually try to lower my expectations before a big film I’m eagerly anticipating comes out with the rule being that it can only go up from there.  Well, I couldn’t really do that for the Avengers.  I was buzzing all night thinking about seeing it at 0900 Friday morning.  And I’m happy to say that it was indeed EXCELLENT!  But is it the BEST Marvel film to date?   You know, that’s a really tough question.  I guess I’d say Iron Man, Captain America, and the Avengers are each just about tied for first, because I love them all, but for different reasons.  Thor is respectably in second-place with the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man II both being deeply flawed and essentially unnecessary to the overall saga. 

X-O Manowar #1 – First Impressions

 

Again we are in need of a post and again I have decided to pull something together. I get new comics on Thursday via the mail now since I moved to Florida. While I have a list of what I’m getting it is still fun to open the box. I also find I order number ones a lot since I’m not at the store to pursue stuff before I buy. Since I have cut back on DC and Marvel, it is usually fun getting new #1s from various publishers. I have always had a soft spot for Valiant books as I think under Jim Shooter that company had the potential to be the next Marvel or DC comics. Due to various reasons it did not come to pass. Now we have a new Valiant comics and a new X-O Manowar as their flagship book. Instead of the same static review I decided to experiment by doing a page by page impression of the book as I’m reading it.

The cover – Okay, we can clearly see X-O swinging an energy sword fighting some bad guys that are clearly alien, but it is too dark and I can’t imagine it jumps off the rack.

Inside front cover, WTF is this. A timeline of X-O and we are welcomed to 402 AD. Two much information I just want to read the book, I’ll come back later.

Page 1, four vertical panels. Two soldiers are running in the field away from or towards Romans. Last panel it is not going well.  I know Cary Nord is the pencil artist and Stefano Gaudiano is inker, the art looks solid.

Page 2 and 3 – huge two page splash shows a lot of Romans firing arrows into a group of the barbarians. Oddly we see a word balloon pointing to the two guys who were running to the battle?  Minor point.

Page 4 and 5, two three panel pages showing the Romans kicking the snot out of the barbarians and they are deciding to retreat.

Amazing Mysteries The Bill Everett Archives Volume 1 and the Golden Age

Lee is having a personal crisis, I believe it is called having a job and children, in other words the man is busy, busy, busy. Heck we dragged Thomm’s post ahead a day so it would not be the blank page, because we do not work very far ahead. Anyway Lee was going to just have a gone on vacation or some other type of post, but I decided to see if I could opine about something comics related. I can usually bore any non-comics fan in the span of five minutes talking about comics, so I’m sure there is some subject I can talk about.

The Golden Age of Comics is one. First let’s get this out of the way; the early days of comic books were not the Golden Age of Comics. In my mind the term would denote that something was at its absolute best. No matter how you cut it those early days were about production, going with what ever sold yesterday and seeing what sticks. It was more of an Iron Age of comics or perhaps the Glory Days of comics. The Golden Age of Comics started about 10 or 15 years ago and is still ongoing. You can use the Watchmen as the first days of the dawning of a Golden Age when comic books started to become literate and the writers and artists use to medium to its best effect. Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, Ed Brubaker, Jason Aaron, Eric Powell, Robert Kirkman, Terry Moore, Joe Hill, Jeff Parker, Bill Willingham, Jeff Lemire, Gary Frank, Ivan Reis, Marcos Martin, Gabriel Rodriquez and the list of artists and writers goes on and on and on. Today’s comics, in general, are the best comics have ever been. We are in the Golden Age of comics and the same time the print comic is in its death throes.

The List - April 2012

Ok, here I go trying to figure out how to do this with the new Blogger.  Hopefully it won't look like a totally disjointed mess.

1. Spaceman 6 - I love this book.  I really hope it goes into a larger story at some point in the future.  Not necessarily an ongoing series but just more story arcs.  Azzarello and Risso have one of the best works I've seen in a long time, and that's saying something, because unlike Jim, I like almost all of what I'm reading in comics.  "When the thievers thieve you...this where you buy it back."  A throw away line but encapsulating so much of what's going on in the world they've created for Orson, Tara and the band of kids helping to keep Tara alive.  Reality TV, extremes of wealth an poverty, celebrity obsession, slang that's removed from standard English but easily translatable.  It's our world in extremis.  Beautifully ugly.

2. Fables 116 - A long time love, this book.  No easy infatuation with the new.  Willingham, Buckingham, and Leialoha have been working this wonderful series of stories, intertwined throughout, for almost a decade now.  Hard to believe, but it makes the fact that Snow and Bigby's cubs are around 10 fit right in, too.  Not long ago I thought the story of one of the cubs becomine the new North Wind was going to be occupying our attention for quite some time, but this arc with Therese becoming the queen of the island of discarded toys is a nice look at another of the cubs.  I'm hoping Willingham and crew have a lot more stories of each cub lined up.

Mega Library IV

A shorter sampling of what the Baltimore Co Public Library, Reisterstown Branch, has to offer this time. I liked the last posting's method of the oreder being the order I read them, so I'll stick with that.

First off is Blacksad from Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido. It's another funny animal book, and one that Lee and I had mentioned in one of our Previews postings. Dark Horse put together this English translation. Somewhat amuing that it needs translation, being set in the US, but the writer's not a native English speaker. Guess that'll keep the Know Nothings from reading. Well, the fact that they're Know Nothings keeps them from reading as a general rule. Anyway, this is some great hardboiled noir. Lots of the little guy detective, Blacksad, trying to figure out cases without the powers that be coming down too hard on him. The first story, Somewhere Within the Shadows, was the best of the three stories in this collection. It's a more or less traditional noir with its urban setting and connected suspects. Think The Big Sleep, only making sense. Arctic Nation was the weakest. It's an allegory about race relations. Sort of. It wants to be an allegory by using animals in place of humans, but it's straight up black versus white, as the Arctic, white furred animals run a small, broken down company town. There's a lot of incestuous relations and beating deaths going on. Somehow the whole thing rings false. Maybe it's because the allegory is too one dimensional.

Next up is Noche Roja by Simon Olilver and Jason Latour. An imprint of the Vertigo Crime subdivision, it's another noir tale. I was on a bit of a noir trend this go round. No funny animals here. Black and white humans. Well, the characters are shades of grey. This story is mostly set just over the Mexican border from the US, though there's some action in the US. The protagonist is searching for the killer of a series of poor girls who work as virtual slaves doing whatever piecemeal work is being done at the factory. Some are just sexually molested by the factory boss, a slight improvement over the ones who are being killed by someone. The ghetto where the workers subsist is cowed by the factory operators, and the police are in the pockets of the same owners, so nothing is being done about the girls' deaths. Our hero has a history in the area, having investigated the local boss when he was a cop, until a friend and source was killed. No happy endings to this story. Brutal all around, really. Very much a product of its genre, it has a bit of the conspiratorial with a US Senator that's kind of easy to see coming, but it's enjoyable story.

Finally, there's Trickster: Native American Tales, compiled by Matt Dembicki. There are different writers and artists for each of the 21 stories in the book. It's a nice, think composition with stories from different tribes and regions that all share the common element of a trickster character. Sometimes the trickster comes out on top. Sometimes not. I enjoy culturally specific stories like these. They provide insights into cultures, and in the case of these stories, are well told. Most of the writers are Native Americans from the tribe whose story is being told. Some were told and recorded a long time ago with only the art being new for this book. After the previous two noir books, it was a very nice change of pace. Probably my favorite of these three selections.