Still a tad under the weather.
For those of you keeping up with STERLNG HEALTHWATCH 2007, I’m feeling marginally better at the moment…at least now I’m able to sit upright, and I no longer have a blinding headache, so I think I’m through the worst of it.
Close personal friend Kevin Church has also been sick, and it looks like he did the same thing Wednesday night that I did…inflicted the Spawn movie on himself, as it was airing on some basic cable channel or another. Boy, that’s not a very good movie. I wonder if Martin Sheen thought “What did I get myself into?” after seeing John Leguizamo in the Clown makeup for the first time.
Anyway, a couple notes about the new comics from this week:
Nexus Archives Vol. 5 – I already have all the Nexii, so I only poked through this new book out of curiosity about its reproduction value…and, as it turned out, though most of the book presents the material very clearly and cleanly, there’s one story (a Clonezone backup) which looks like it was shot from the original comic’s printed pages. It’s very blurry and washed out to the point of distraction, which is too bad. Some other pages appear to be shot from printed comics as well, but they’re not nearly as bad as that Clonezone story. But still, this is fun stuff, though I wish these reprints could be made available for a little less than 50 bucks a volume (which may not be economically feasible, I realize).
Batman #663 – Ah, the “illustrated prose” issue, which I’m imagining is probably being ravaged by fans online because it’s “not comics” (which I haven’t checked on, since I’ve been sick an’ all). I can see why they went with the text-heavy telling of this story…the explicit detailing of the Joker’s self-reinvention comes across as a lot more sick and creepy in prose. There’s a lot of internal stuff going on in this story, so even had this been told in the traditional comic format, we would have ended up with a lot more captions and it probably wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. Normally, I’m not a big fan of the “who got the prose in my funnybooks” storytelling technique either, but when it’s done well, like in this comic, it’s hard to complain. And for those of you keeping track: references to The Killing Joke abound in this issue.
Nextwave #12 – To talk about why I loved this issue so much would give away the surprise, so just trust me on this: it’s great. And, of course, it’s cancelled. Bastards.
Little Lulu #14 – I can’t believe we’re up to 14 volumes of this already. This volume includes the story “Red Faces,” where the punchline of the story is completely lost in black and white (and why it was printed in the Little Lulu color volume a few months back). However, Little Lulu remains one of the peaks of the comics form, and the occasional storytelling glitch caused by its b&w reproduction is easily forgiven in the face of getting these stories back out into circulation.
Right on, Tubby.