Jeffrey Bracey

Manga Review: Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru 1

STORY From the creator of Naruto comes a new series and this time its about

Review: Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor #7

STORY

As a long time Dr Who fan I was very eager to read my first ever Dr Who comic. I know that Dr Who has been had runs in comics for many decades but I just never saw any growing up and of course with the tv shows they werenâ€™t as much of a priority to me. But now we live in an age where many properties are licensed by comic companies and its easy to find pretty much all of your genre favorites in floppy format. My enthusiastic expectation however, was dulled by boring story and uninspired artwork.

Im a big fan of giving new readers the needed info to jump into a comic whether by way of some sort of introductory paragraph or within the context of the story being told. In this series we get said paragraph plus a nice little bio on each of the min cast and even the Dr’s vehicle the TARDIS. From there the story ambles along with the Dr and friends pursuing yet another alien threat through time and space and not a whole lot else happens really. The comic is trying very hard to be an episode of Dr Who but things that work in a tv show sometimes do not translate well into a comic. The Dr is often a source of a great deal of expositional information in the series but those info dumps are easy to swallow because of the charismatic actors chosen to play the Dr over the years. In a comic book format there is a need for things to happen to maintain the energy and excitement that a tv show can achieve with camerawork, performance and lighting. Without these things in play the script just becomes a lot of talking heads on mostly static panels. It takes a really gifted author to pull this sort of thing off in comics and unfortunately Houser doen’t have the sort of chops that writers like say Neil Gaimen bring to the table. I just couldn’t make myself care about what was going on as I read this book.

Even worse the story was completely predictable. It really reads like an episode of the show that I’ve already seen but executed less well. The Dr’s dialogue is quirkily superior as she goes about explaining events or deceiving former allies but it doesn’t express the charm of the character while doing so. It just felt like a pale imitation of the punchy speeches the Dr is known for. Every beat of the plot is foreseeable and even when the Dr gets a little preachy trying to protect a species feeding on humans by saying they are carnivores it falls flat. The Dr and crew justify this be commenting out how they’ve each had meat for lunch without acknowledging the fact that they aren’t eating sapient beings or why these aliens can simply feed on common animals. The story logic just fails utterly.

ART

The art is flat, boring and even lazy. Characters are often drawn with expressions like they just caught wiff of a dirty diaper and consistency is random. I spotted several times where the artist reuses the same drawing with either slight or no modifications to save some time on the book. Don’t ask me why though because there are no real backgrounds to speak of. Particularly in the outdoor scenes where looks like everything was done with a stock pack of woodland Photoshop brushes. There is no depth in the entire comic. The colors are murky and most of the characters are so stiff that I can only think that the artist is working from photos.

LETTERING

Why are there three letters on this book? Yeah it’s dialogue heavy but not beyond the scope of a single letterer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Forget this book and go watch the tv show or dig up some of the older Marvel Dr Who comics. 1 out of 5!

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

REVIEW: DOCTOR WHO: THE THIRTENTH DOCTOR 7
Writer:Â Jody Houser
Art:Â Roberta Ingranata
Colors:Â Enrica Eren Angiolini
Color Assistant:Â Vivian Spinelli
Lettering: Richard Starkings, Sarah Jacobs, John Roshell

Review: The Green Lantern #7

By Jeffrey Bracey 6 years ago

STORY

In a series that has been full of cosmic opera of a Jim Starlin sort punctuated by whimsical weirdness comes the most Grant Morrisoneque story yet with issue seven: Emerald Sands. Hal Jordan’s latest adventure plays out as a bizarre fairytale wrapped in an enigma if this issue is your starting point. Fortunately by the end all is revealed bit by bit as you go along building towards the conclusion. It’s a surreally clever bit of storytelling to go from a bit of space cop, superhero adventure one issue and into a fantasyland with parallels to the Wizard of Oz. Morrison deftly shifts gears in a turn of tale telling in a move worthy of Alan Moore he goes way off the path thoroughly beaten by usual comic book convention to engage Hal in a unexpectedly quixotic quest.

Morrison weaves a dreamlike tale reflective of the situation that our hero finds himself in to great effect building upon past continuity but bringing something startlingly new to the table, an idea and scenario that to my knowledge had not been explored in such a way before. This particular story is quite trippy in an Alice In Wonderland sort of way and purposely so given the setting of a subconscious reality. I really don’t want to say to much about the plot as that would spoil the experience for anyone who hasn’t read this issue but this is one of the strangest and most interesting adventures our Lantern has gone on in my memory of the character and better still it lays the foundation of a myriad of future stories to be built upon to add to the mythology of not just Hal Jordan but to the Green Lantern corps and even the Guardians themselves. It will be fascinating to see where this idea might go in the future whether in Morrison’s own hands or some other author in down emerald brick road.

ART

Liam Sharp must be exhausted, having to do triple duty this issue providing pencils, inks and now colors. Yes colors as well! This task is made slightly easier and yet more difficult by the same degrees as the overwhelming palette of this book has to be rendered in shades of green and complementing cool colors. This could have easily gone horribly wrong and would have left the reader with a comic full of muddled, muddy and murky art but Sharp (who I’ve never seen color a comic before) does an admirable job of keeping characters and background elements distinguishable while using a limited color scheme.

This is also accomplished by the artist keeping the backgrounds either simple or creating images and characters that cannot be misconstrued for one another. His rendering of the surreal world and denizens that Hal encounters reminds me of the bizarre originality of Steve Dikto‘s run on Dr Strange’s journey’s into astral dimensions and is equally weird but very uniquely Sharp’s own.

This inks do come across as a bit rushed to me but given herculean workload he took on this month I think that can be easily forgiven.

FINAL THOUGHTS

A rather bizarre jaunt out of the normal territory of a Green Lantern book and into something more akin to the works of Terry Gilliam but still I found myself well entertained by both this comic and the prospect of what might come of it later. 5 out of 5!

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

(W) Grant Morrison (A) Liam Sharp (CA) Emanuela Lupacchino