#comics review
You know it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these. I could make excuses, but they’re the all same ones you and all your friends are making about not getting shit done, and they’re all true!
So, gather ‘round ye mongrels of media as we attempt to satisfy our primal urge to consume!
TV
Wandavision - So much good stuff! I don’t need to talk much about it because everyone else is doing it for me. Just watch it and then talk about it with all your friends.
30 Coins - This Spanish horror series started out great and stayed great…until the last episode. I still recommend watching it because it veers from camp to monster gore to pure horror fun and back again. The characters are well written and some “heroes” end up playing against expectations while others are just what they seem. It’s a good watch just reset some expectations for that last episode.
The Head - A group of scientists and support crew hunker down in a remote arctic research station and before you know it strange things are afoot! The communications have been destroyed, people are dying and no one knows whodunnit! This is that fun genre of movies where a group of people are completely isolated and it constantly has you asking, “whose the bad one?”. Good stuff.
MOVIES
Sound of Metal - Can a movie about a metal band be introspective and even meditative? Watch and find out. Riz Ahmed paints an enthralling portrait of loss, stubbornness and what comes after. Props to the deft sound design of this movie.
Palm Springs - If you’re like anyone else in the world right now you probably need a pick me up. Watch this This time loop, comedy, love story if you want to laugh and smile. If you’ve got someone to share it with all the better. I would love to see this movie again at a drive in with someone special.
His House - This haunted house horror movie about two Sudanese refugees hits on several levels and bursts at the seems with tension. I quickly recognized Wunmii Mosaku from Lovecraft Country, but this is the first time I’d seen Sope Dirisu. Both put on great performances that pull at the heart in both fear and sadness. Great overwhelming dread throughout!
MUSIC
Operators - Some friends recommended this other other band from Wolf Parade frontman Daniel Boeckner. It’s full of 90’s synth nostalgia references while pushing their sound into something modern and intriguing. A good listen on a road trip with your 90’s high school friends or to bop along to while housecleaning.
Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin’s Hanukkah Sessions - Note: I was supposed to write this in December so this is a bit outdated, but this is still a fun thing to listen to so shut up and listen). These fun covers dropping daily throughout the 8 days of Hanukkah stretch from The Beastie Boys to Drake to Peaches to Mountain’s Mississippi Queen and more. Just good grungy fun, my favorite of the bunch is Elastica’s Connected.
Y La Bamba - Entre Los Dos (Between the Two) - I stumbled across this band on Spotify through their track Ojos Del Sol. Their sound immediately grabbed me in a warm caress and lovingly held me as ones cultural mother might hold a long lost child. This is folk music, Mexican music and in some way spiritual music. It will firmly be part of the soundtrack to the journey of me discovering more about my culture and my own self.
COMICS/BOOKS
The Glass Hotel - I finished Emily St. John’s most recent book far too quick. A plot device that finds characters orbiting around a key event only to come crashing into each other is her signature move at this point. And while things are slightly different this time around, it’s all told with such mesmerizing prose that I can’t help but long for her next book. The characters are at once real and fantastical, they’re not quite someone you know, but are more of a friend of a friend. Complicated and simple and sad and selfish and hard to figure out, in other words, like actual people.
Miles Morales Spider-Man- Book 3 - More good stuff writer Saladin Ahmed and a bevy of top notch artists, including Javier Garron, Ze Carlos and Belén Ortega. This story moves at a breezy clip and Ahmed excels at building relationships between characters, but the action seems to move along too quickly. There’s no highs and lows in the fights scenes, an enemy shows up, a few punches are thrown, Miles quickly gets the best of the enemy. I just want to see a bit more tension in some of these scenes. Otherwise this is a fun read that add some nice bits to the Miles Morales character.
GAMES
Hades - This is a fantastic Metroidvania style game that instantly had me staying up way past my bedtime. While some may not like the repetitive gameplay I wasn’t bothered by it. I was also completely hooked by the storyline and the great dialogue. Also, the art and music is top notch!
RANDOM NOTES
I’m going to try and get one of this out every month. Wish me luck.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Mitsumi’s got a plan. High school. College. Post-graduate academia. Proficient work in governmental affairs. Active retirement as an influential civic leader. Mitsumi’s got a plan.
Now, if only Mitsumi didn’t get lost on her first day of high school.
Such are the inevitabilities when a raucously overconfident but eternally kind teenager faces off against the largest challenge of her young adult life. Mitsumi is a kid from the sticks attending a school located in the world’s largest metropolitan area. Tokyo’s a bright, big, busy, noisy place; it’s a daunting springboard. As for Mitsumi? She’s got a plan.
SKIP AND LOAFER is a wonderfully fulfilling manga. The humor is warm-hearted and the characters are all purposefully but flexibly crafted. It’s a coming-of-age manga whose guiding principle is that awkwardness and uncertainty are the mandatory guardrails of maturity. Everyone thinks they’ve got a handle on things until they don’t.
Mitsumi is late for her first day of school but she’s incredibly book smart, and it’s impossible for her peers to get a read on her because she’s constantly resetting everyone’s expectations of what they are going to get from a dreamer like her.
Yuzuki is tall and standoffish, but the girl’s stoic and cynical nature instantly crumbles when Mitsumi belts out the anthem of a children’s TV show during karaoke. The bespectacled Makoto slouches, mumbles to herself, and hates being alone, but when she realizes the clumsy yet ebullient Mitsumi is just as content to stumble through life as to glide (even if she’s stumbling under the impression she’s gliding), the dour glasses-girl realizes it’s okay to stretch and enjoy life’s oddities.
On the surface, a great deal of the protagonist’s exploits are simple and familiar. The manga repeatedly pivots around Mitsumi’s fish-out-of-water scenarios that include karaoke, dressing fashionably, operating a fancy new cellphone, visiting a nifty new café, and joining a school club. None of these endeavors or scenarios are original. However, Mitsumi’s social awkwardness always wins the day.
For example, after stressing about her class intro, the girl accidentally earns the rep of a gangster (Mitsumi: “I deserve a place at the top!”). And when the girl tries tracking down the student council in search of someplace to volunteer, she can’t help but creep up on unsuspecting classmates, glower over their shoulder, and dryly pester them about their ambitions (Mitsumi: “Do you have some time today?”). Everything that should be casual and typical of the first week of high school becomes, in the words of the bookworm Makoto, “bizarre,” and it’s all thanks to Mitsumi.
SKIP AND LOAFER also includes numerous kernels of curiosity, floating just beneath the surface. One of Mitsumi’s classmates is clearly attempting to manipulate the country girl and take advantage of her humility. Elsewhere, the leading male protagonist, described in-text as a “stupid himbo,” apparently shies away from a past he’s not too proud of. And Mitsumi’s aunt, Nao-chan, who helps house the peculiar protagonist, is queer-coded. SKIP AND LOAFER is a genuinely funny and obtuse manga whose imperfect characters are well aware they have plenty of room to grow and plenty of time to do so.
Comics Reviews||ahb writes on Good Reads
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For all of MARVEL’s gargantuan, multi-universe cast of hero and criminal geniuses, the tendency to label this or that character as “underrated” is admittedly frequent and often attributed to the genuinely unremarkable. Indeed, there is a sea of B-level and C-level villainy that constitutes the bulk of the publisher’s history yet sees so few published pages. Many have contested it’s only a matter of assembling the right creative team to bring forgotten criminal talent to life (on this, Brubaker’s comments on Batroc the Leaper are prescient). All of which brings readers to TASKMASTER, an extraordinarily entertaining comic with clear and precise writing and a specific, polished visual aesthetic. Indeed, though relegated to B-level or C-level familiarity, Taskmaster deserves this treatment.
Taskmaster is brilliant, stubborn, and exceedingly content to give in to pragmatism. If he’s trapped in the ventilation system and a hero plans to use his laser eyes to fry him, Taskmaster will scream madly and run like hell. If he gets into a scrum with the general of the Dora Milaje, Taskmaster dutifully acknowledges the woman’s military expertise and takes as much as he gives. He’s not above tactical counter-planning and he’s not above manifesting an escape route on the most common of missions. In short, the guy does his homework. Every time.
Which is probably why he hates Nick Fury for pulling him into a black SUV for the sole purpose of snaring the biometrics of three amazingly well-trained or exceedingly well-guarded individuals. TASKMASTER is a cat-and-mouse comic. The book sends Taskmaster not unironically on a series of very specific tasks (kinesics; that is, to study three high-profile people) just as he flees a death sentence courtesy of the world’s deadliest assassin (who believes Taskmaster guilty of killing Maria Hill). The broader tale of a criminal needing to clear his name from a crime he didn’t commit is neither new nor fascinating. And the same can be said of the criminal-as-hero secondary theme. However, both narrative tapestries are torn asunder when the man of the hour is a psychotic fiend in a skull mask who thinks nothing of revealing a hero’s secret identity or of slicing someone’s throat in the middle of a street in broad daylight.
TASKMASTER is very sharply written. Taskmaster himself is chummy but frank. It’s not that he doesn’t take himself seriously; it’s the opposite; he takes himself too seriously. The result is a clever and purposeful combination of sinister humor and villainous glee. For example, when Taskmaster fights off White Fox, he earns his fair share of scrapes and cuts. But when it’s clear an easy exit isn’t in the cards, he straps in for some real fun (“Okay! We could’ve done it nice… So no we do it nasty.”).
The book’s art relishes the dirty close-ups warranted by the bloody fists of super-powered street fights, the disjointed limbs of a vibranium-infused melee, and the headaches induced by facing off with the famed Black Widow. Taskmaster’s skull mask is cool, but so are the harsh, angular shadows and wayward trickles of blood that make this comic book come alive. Vitti’s art is ideal for this type of comic. There no exaggerated movements. There is no glamorous posing. And every character who brawls legitimately looks the part.
An argument can be made for an anti-climactic ending or a tautological narrative that merely sends the characters back to where they were at the beginning, but TASKMASTER is only four issues long. And what this title accomplishes in only four issues is admirable. The characters are engaging, the art is engaging, and the story reinforces the protagonist at a granular level without going overboard. Reading this collection, one cannot help but agree: Yes, Taskmaster is underrated.
Comics Reviews||ahb writes on Good Reads
The Riddler holds all the cards, but the Secret Six are anything but predictable - it’s time for the truth, by whatever means necessary.
A-Force discover a traitor among them, but there are bigger problems when Doom’s Thors arrive on Arcadia’s shores looking to arrest She-Hulk!
The Parker family stand together for one final battle with Regent, the fate of their world as the prize. Spider-Family, unite!
In a flashback issue, Bruce Wayne tries to solve the murder of a Gotham teen, only to discover that the villain may have terrible repercussions for Jim Gordon in the future.
While the Titans break into a supermax prison to break out a deadly supervillain, Manchester Black and the Elite close in from all sides.
The Flash battles the Folding Man and tries to track down his father, but his real enemy is the boredom that this issue instills.
Emmet O'Cuana and Dr Matt Finch on The Immortal Hulk - full episode here https://deconstructingcomics.com/?p=7826
