What Are You Reading?

[Dr. Insomniac]

I read that Batman Damned comic that everybody keeps talking about because of Bruce's penis. Other than that, there's nothing really going on because Azzarello and Batman are never a good match (those extra scenes in The Killing Joke movie he wrote can attest to that). I am wondering why it's part of that new Black Label thing instead of Vertigo. I thought along with being DC's creator-owned imprint, Vertigo doubled as their brand for adult DC stories like Hellblazer and Sandman. John Constantine even shows up in the comic to add to that Vertigo feel, so it's bewildering.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I just finished Straczynski's run on Thor, and I absolutely loved it. I'd almost put it on par with Simonson's run, but unfortunately he didn't get the chance to finish it since apparently Marvel wanted him to prematurely rap-up the Loki and Dr. Doom story-line in order to tie into their next big event, Siege (I'm starting to see a pattern here). That said, I'm not sure why they handed the last three issues of this arc off to another writer instead of Straczynski just finishing what he started, even if having to rush it a bit. All the same, I'll still read Latverian Prometheus to see how this story-line ends, and I'll also read Siege since it's free to read for Comixology Unlimited members. After that I'll probably take a short break from Thor before reading Thor: God of Thunder, which I also hear a lot of good things about. I know that Fraction had a run in-between that, but from what I hear it's pretty forgettable stuff and mediocre at best, and not really essential for getting into Aaron's run with the character.

[Dr. Insomniac]

There's also a Loki comic in-between that series of Thor runs, Journey Into Mystery. Tom Hiddleston gave his seal of approval to it.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I always love it when comic book movie actors get really into their characters. You can tell that people like Tom Hiddleston and Chris Evans (among various others) actually do really give a shit about their characters and how they are portrayed on the screen (in Evans's case, as I hear it, he pushed for a darker tone for the second Captain America movie before they even brought the Russo Brothers on-board).

That Loki run sounds like a lot of fun. Like a lot of other things, though, I've just added it onto my Comixology wish list for now since I have way too much in my backlog to get around to it anytime soon. I work through that list when I start to finish off a number of other series, though, so I'll probably manage to start reading it within the next few months.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I read through that Dark Night comic Paul Dini wrote, where he talks about that time he was mugged and almost killed and it messed with his psyche for a while. The comic plays it up a little by having his conscience symbolized by various BTAS characters, with them guiding his love life and his work ethic. Dini has a moment where he almost becomes Batman mentally. He also talks about this unmade BTAS/Sandman crossover episode where Batman would have met Dream (who Dini suggested would have been played by John Hurt) and Death, but his producers turned it down for being too metafictional.

[Foggle]

I love that comic, some of his best work imo.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Alright, so I've literally searched for weeks to see if I could get a hard copy of Starman Omnibus Vol. 3 for anything under $100, but it's apparently rare enough for that to flat-out not be possible. Some sites advertise it as being cheaper but when you click on the link it says it's out of stock and then shows where you can buy it used for a ridiculous $200+, so I pretty much gave up on trying to read it that way. As it stands now, I can get most of the individual issues that make up that volume digitally on Comixology. However I'm not sure if The Shade #1-4 which are also part of that collection are the same ones that are in the 12-issue miniseries by James Robinson (as there are no other issues of The Shade in any other part of the collection), or if it's part of some original mini-series that he did in conjunction with the run of Starman, which seems more likely since the publication date of his mini-series seems to be from well after his Starman run was over.

If anyone knows anything about that, please let me know. I'm kind of a completionist when it comes to these things, and in general I kind of consider it criminal for a series this good to be so hard to collect.

As soon as I get my next paycheck, I'm going ahead and buying the hard copies of the rest of the omnibi volumes before those get ridiculously expensive as well.

[Markness]

I've read the three volumes of Made in Abyss that Seven Seas has published so far and I am looking forward to getting the fourth one later this month. This series has some heavily divided opinions from what I've seen on some forums and YouTube videos but I personally enjoy it. It has an interesting setting and the characters are well crafted. Nanachi making Reg put her friend out of her misery is also one of the most emotionally powerful moments I've ever read in a manga.

I had some credit with one of the comic book stores I frequent and got $20 off the X-Men The Hunt for Professor X TPB. I've wanted to get it for so long but I had to read some other X-Men comics first. I've also been reading the respective Volumes 3 of both Fantastic Four and Avengers as well as late 90's DC like JLA and JSA.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

What I learned from reading Starman today: Crimes and Misdemeanors is Batman's favorite Woody Allen movie.

On that note, I can't help but feel as though Robinson portrayed Batman as a bit too much of an uptight dick in his crossover with Jack Knight and Sentinel. I mean, it makes sense that someone with his personality clashing with Jack's personality would lead to tension between them, but he was kind of a jerk to everyone here, including Sentinel; and even Batman strikes me as someone who is usually at least respectful of veteran heroes. I can't tell if Robinson wrote him this way because he didn't like the character and was sort of satirizing him by making him into an extreme version of himself (which is entirely possible given the tone of Starman on the whole), or if he literally just thought that's the way that Batman should act at the time that he was writing this series.

[Dr. Insomniac]

It's similar to how Geoff Johns writes Batman. It seems to them, he provides an easy bad cop for their main character to call out.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Got to read volume two of Wonder Woman Earth One. It's far from the weirdest reinvention of a character Grant Morrison's done, but still remarkably weird compared to other Wonder Woman books. The Invisible Jet is now a vagina-shaped ship. The Amazonians don't just preach submission as the path to happiness, but outright BDSM. The main villain is a pick-up artist/hostage negotiator who tries to manipulate Wonder Woman sexually. Diana even gets to ride a kangaroo. The story and themes all have a Le Guin quality to it, and does a better job reconstructing Wonder Woman from the ground up than Batman and Superman's Earth One books did. Even if Morrison gets really indulgent here.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

While I'm still not the most experienced with Grant Morrison, my opinions of his work tend to fall into one of two general lines of thought: he's either writing a genius weird story or a pretentious weird story. I really love stuff like Doom Patrol and All-Star Superman because, despite embracing really crazy, out-there concepts, there is a clear straight-forward point to those stories and Morrison doesn't seem to lose site of always keeping the reader engaged. In some of what I consider to be his weaker-stories, such as a good chunk of Morrison's Batman run at least up through RIP (though, to be fair, there are some good bits sprinkled in there), I feel as though he gets too self-indulgent in data-mining lots of older and obscure bits of continuity. Stuff that would alienate most non-hardcore Batman fans, and generally tries too hard to capture that weird nature of his writing that he doesn't even really bother to make his stories and characters interesting enough on their own. Generally I prefer his stories that makes reader want to keep reading from issue-to-issue like you would expect any good story to do. A Serious House on Serious Earth falls somewhere in-between these two categories for me.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, Grant can be crazy. I do like he's styled himself as the antithesis to Alan Moore in writing, creative decisions, relationship with DC, type of magic, how they style their head, and even their own names. Even though I've known it for a while, it's still bizarre that two of the people who have shaped and re-invented mainstream and independent comics for decades are wizards who are exact opposites and despise each others' guts.

And while Morrison can trip over and write garbage like the latter half of New X-Men, I appreciate that he makes his comics weird. For characters as old as Batman and Superman, you need to be weird in order to innovate them. Do the things you couldn't get away with in the movies or the shows. Even his most normal and straightforward comics like JLA have that subversiveness that I believe more comic writers should strive for.

[Foggle]

I absolutely love Grant Morrison for the reasons Marquis listed above. His writing/storytelling can definitely be a little too much at times, and I don't always enjoy his work, but I think he's a genius. He loves and understands superhero comics to an extent that I don't think most people (myself included) ever could, and he just does whatever he wants with that. I wish there were more comic book authors like him out there, though I understand why there aren't.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Well, saying that you like him for how different he is from other comic book writers but then also wishing that there were more comic book writers like him is a bit of a contradictory statement, isn't it?

Like I said, though, I absolutely do love some of his series while others don't work for me as well, but I still need to read a lot more of his stuff. I've been wanting to work my way around to Animal Man and the Invisibles, as it's actually a lot of his earlier DC comics that seem to resonate with me the most.

Also, on a side note, I kind of feel as though I could draw a lot of similarities between Grant Morrison and Chiaki J. Konaka. Granted, the latter wasn't nearly as prolific and flat-out stopped doing anime after the late 2000's, but I feel similarly about both of them as writers, in that they have some pretty insane stuff out there and I have mixed feelings of them on the whole, but they are consistently pretty weird. And just like Morrison has at least a few straightforward hits, Konaka has his fan-beloved season of Digimon which a lot of people (myself included) still love to this day, and he also did that really bizarre second season of The Big O which has actually grown on me personally over time. Anyways, that's just an observation that I made on my part.

Oh, and since I'm currently reading it, James Robinson's Starman run actually hits a lot of the same notes as what I love about Morrison at his best, namely in his Doom Patrol run (which Robinson cited as a direct inspiration for his work on Starman, which is easy to see).