tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88826105177650022472024-03-18T10:49:34.779-05:00Warren Peace Sings the BluesAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.comBlogger1284125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-35624816424268120522018-10-23T21:54:00.000-05:002018-10-23T21:54:03.201-05:00My Sister, the Serial Killer: Is this more or less troubling than My Mother the Car?<i><b>My Sister, the Serial Killer</b></i><br />
By Oyinkan Braithwaite<br />
<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/588860/my-sister-the-serial-killer-by-oyinkan-braithwaite/9780385544238/">Published by Doubleday</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCfuqgJmTJpk_c3wrJJ5sc5GYv1etqmNnIHhmtBhKuIpiAqGFbtl_r9hflHFABYaG2ee_Gopg3I2iLpVCbfEn8e1MSowMdWFfa1jwEAAC58T24-K6lmfoereOlYJLjZiMi7np0trRUF5Ok/s1600/mysister.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCfuqgJmTJpk_c3wrJJ5sc5GYv1etqmNnIHhmtBhKuIpiAqGFbtl_r9hflHFABYaG2ee_Gopg3I2iLpVCbfEn8e1MSowMdWFfa1jwEAAC58T24-K6lmfoereOlYJLjZiMi7np0trRUF5Ok/s320/mysister.jpg" width="199" /></a><br />
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I remember reading an essay by Kurt Vonnegut in which he offered a piece of advice to aspiring writers: start a story as late in the action as possible. That's a strategy that Oyinkan Braithwaite follows in this, her debut novel, which begins with the eponymous murderer informing the book's narrator that she has killed her third victim. It's a great way to hook the reader, since when the title gives away what's going on, there's no need to explain a detailed origin story. Instead, we not only jump right into the action, but do so following a main character who goes about the morbid business of disposing of a body with resignation and frustration.<br />
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This approach also makes sense for the purposes of the book, which is less a tale of trying to cover up crimes (although that does factor into the plot quite a bit) than a character piece, with Korede, our narrator, struggling to balance a multitude of forces pulling her in opposing directions. She's the responsible one of the family, working as a nurse at a hospital in a hospital in Lagos, Nigeria, while her sister Ayoola seems flighty, irresponsible, and, of course, prone to killing her boyfriends without showing much in the way of remorse. But things get even worse for Korede when her work and home lives collide after Ayoola shows up at the hospital and begins flirting with Tade, the handsome doctor that Korede has been pining for.<br />
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So, there's something of a thriller element here, with Korede trying to make sure her sister isn't caught, but also desperately attempting to keep Tade from being Ayoola's next victim. But there's a lot more going on here under the surface. As the book goes on, we see that Korede and Ayoola are still living in the shadow of their late father, and the more we learn about him, the more we see that they are recovering from some serious emotional trauma, not just from him, but from a society that systematically allows men to mistreat women.<br />
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While Korede and Ayoola have different ways of dealing with this trauma, they are both attempting to reckon with the way the world treats women. While Korede takes a more traditional approach, she doesn't get much satisfaction from it; working as a nurse doesn't seem to be the balance that it should be against the grim nature of her home life, since she spends most of her time dealing with administrative hassles rather than actually helping people, and she doesn't get much recognition for her efforts. So who's to say that Ayoola's me-first approach to life is any worse? While her claims that she killed her victims (a series of boyfriends) in self-defense don't seem very plausible, they were likely to do some sort of physical or emotional violence to her at some point, so she just beat them to the punch. It's a horrifying, sociopathic way to live one's life, but given the statistics about the harm that men do to women, as well as her own experiences, she might be the most prudent character in the book.<br />
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This dark philosophy is pretty universal; the dynamics between men and women play out in similar fashion all over the world. However, what makes the book especially interesting is the specificity of its setting. For a reader like me who knows very little about Nigeria, there's plenty of nice detail here, from the words people use and the meals they eat to cultural customs they follow and the concerns of their lives, such as the frustration of dealing with local government. It's not the stereotypical depiction of Africa, and even though it's a slim volume, it really places the reader into a different world, one that feels lived-in and vibrant.<br />
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This is a pretty excellent read, a fascinating character study that keeps its plot steadily moving forward while doling out bits of backstory at just the right pace and giving the reader plenty to think about. I'm definitely glad I got the opportunity to read it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-51771729038578950642018-05-19T18:20:00.001-05:002018-05-19T18:20:53.032-05:00Bad Man: We're not talking about Shaft<i><b>Bad Man</b></i><br />
By Dathan Auerbach<br />
<a href="https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/557959/bad-man#9780385542920">Published by Blumhouse Books</a><br />
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<span id="goog_1478886262"></span><span id="goog_1478886263"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrubdN8c3rzwVqm4qz4Lsi2Ko_YYxfsf83mFzG_hR20eJnYlNsZfjtKjW1RCQkP3hA0w3sRoHEWnsdkpWhKLQxYv_GLwdi2uHGJ6UkyRLPEoHqnhH3PfMgOrfVRWvo1_cZ5QbBUJQi2q0t/s1600/bad+man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="714" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrubdN8c3rzwVqm4qz4Lsi2Ko_YYxfsf83mFzG_hR20eJnYlNsZfjtKjW1RCQkP3hA0w3sRoHEWnsdkpWhKLQxYv_GLwdi2uHGJ6UkyRLPEoHqnhH3PfMgOrfVRWvo1_cZ5QbBUJQi2q0t/s320/bad+man.jpg" width="211" /></a><br />
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I don't read a lot of horror fiction, but I do occasionally check out the "creepypasta" stories that people publish online, some of which are very effective with the scares. So I was glad to get the chance to read this upcoming horror novel by an author who gained his fame through the online horror story <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Penpal-Dathan-Auerbach-ebook/dp/B008WVVKCQ">Penpal</a></i>.<br />
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However, I ended up being not especially satisfied with the actual book (I didn't like <i>Penpal </i>very much either, for that matter). Perhaps it's just my own tastes, but I felt like this one took much too long to get to where it was going, focusing more on the main character's turbulent emotions than on any spookiness that was going on around him.<br />
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The problem might be my own expectations; I thought this might be something of a supernatural story, but it turns out to be fairly grounded, although I wouldn't exactly call it realistic. The plot involves a young man named Ben whose three-year-old brother disappeared without a trace while the two of them were at a neighborhood grocery store. In the five years since the incident, he has been wracked with guilt and searched everywhere in town to find his brother, to no avail. After he graduates from high school, he looks for work to help his family make ends meet, but the only place in his small town that is hiring is the store where his brother disappeared.<br />
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So, he ends up working the night shift, and some strange stuff seems to be going on around the store, although less than one would expect in a book that's supposed to be scary. Instead, the focus is mostly on Ben's emotional state, including his continuing guilt, anger, and desperation, as well as his inability to trust anyone else. He's a complicated character, and not especially likable, prone to lashing out at people who care about him, obsessing about whether others are lying to him, and suspecting that nearly everyone around him is either involved in his brother's disappearance or just doesn't care enough to help find him.<br />
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I think that's the real focus of the book, and rather than going for scares, the kind of horror the author seems to be attempting is placing the reader in an unpleasant headspace. I wouldn't exactly call Ben an unreliable narrator, but you do get the idea that his internal sense of himself is different from what others see. He seems to think he's on a heroic crusade to find his lost brother, while he's actually causing a lot of pain to those around him and generally making things worse. And that makes what ultimately happens to him kind of fitting, if still pretty disturbing.<br />
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All in all, it's an interesting book that's fairly effective in placing the reader someplace they don't really want to be. It does take a long time for things to happen, but maybe that's by design too; Ben has been waiting for answers for five years, and he's stuck eking out a grim existence, with little hope for the future. Things are already sad enough at the start, and they just get worse, no matter how hard the characters try to make things better. In that way, it's kind of a fitting book for modern times. That doesn't make it especially satisfying or enjoyable to read though.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-69501817833030204302018-05-05T15:42:00.000-05:002018-05-05T15:42:23.758-05:00JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The series gets...less bizarre?This blog isn't dead if I publish one or two blogs a year, right?<br />
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<b><i>JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 3: Stardust Crusaders</i>, Volumes 1-6</b><br />
By Hirohiko Araki<br />
<a href="https://www.viz.com/read/manga/jojos-bizarre-adventure-part-3-stardust-crusaders-volume-1/product/5016" target="_blank">Published by Viz Media</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiygsSotd1pWOdbeyTroCOmFB14zMGZRdPIiqfZcOlwTxl88I8SmJqXZOWBcthSu0zjU32fOaAvomtHcGjPKaPTnle5RizifDm2e-2qorZJsUnpfITYrs2zVA1U4x2R8bVp6ar5WvZ0RVYn/s1600/1421590654.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="320" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiygsSotd1pWOdbeyTroCOmFB14zMGZRdPIiqfZcOlwTxl88I8SmJqXZOWBcthSu0zjU32fOaAvomtHcGjPKaPTnle5RizifDm2e-2qorZJsUnpfITYrs2zVA1U4x2R8bVp6ar5WvZ0RVYn/s320/1421590654.jpg" width="222" /></a><br />
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If the first two parts of <i>JoJo's Bizarre Adventure</i> were ludicrously over the top examples of shonen fighting manga, this third volume seems to be the point at which creator Hirohiko Araki toned things down a bit and settled into a long-running quest storyline. They're still pretty weird, with lots of striking gore, strange fashions, and nonsensical superpowers, but not quite at the level of what he had exhibited previously. Maybe setting the story in the present day somehow made things more restrictive, as if there needed to be at least some semblance to reality?<br />
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Whatever the case, there's still plenty of crazy stuff here. This volume introduces us to a new series protagonist, who is Japanese this time around. He's the grandson of Part 2's Joseph Joestar, but his name, Jotaro Kujo, can still be shortened to JoJo, and he's something of a tough guy high school student. However, we get introduced to him when his mother sends for her father, Joseph, who is looking pretty spry and muscular for a guy in his sixties. She reports that Jotaro has been arrested and refuses to leave jail, and when she and Joseph visit him, he claims that he's being haunted by an evil spirit, whose powers get demonstrated in pretty awesome fashion:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn43SMlyXGHqgE19mrRsfJACzQhNvGL3kJGvAvvalo77V85iGqk1-HYXzqVV_W9I0ZwPxLOz6QnUG9Qoq1DAIOrteftbdy_MuFQyM5KVeKqd_dhe1p6XtNRYP3WeGMjqXUdPRIkGPxZmxS/s1600/image0011-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1043" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn43SMlyXGHqgE19mrRsfJACzQhNvGL3kJGvAvvalo77V85iGqk1-HYXzqVV_W9I0ZwPxLOz6QnUG9Qoq1DAIOrteftbdy_MuFQyM5KVeKqd_dhe1p6XtNRYP3WeGMjqXUdPRIkGPxZmxS/s400/image0011-1.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQcF2BeW_hviubryaaURbo7u2rUvrrODRsgBGpO7rx4CHg3doquk2jE_jXondyRfS-f7RMwg8DWlu53HDBvBzoU-ctmOqnoeVbjUXT_fgfV_4Ht8cb1sicQzJdtQvTiOvfzmWgRtwzkrUi/s1600/image0011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="898" data-original-width="1062" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQcF2BeW_hviubryaaURbo7u2rUvrrODRsgBGpO7rx4CHg3doquk2jE_jXondyRfS-f7RMwg8DWlu53HDBvBzoU-ctmOqnoeVbjUXT_fgfV_4Ht8cb1sicQzJdtQvTiOvfzmWgRtwzkrUi/s320/image0011.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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This is kind of a clever way of introducing the series' latest twist on crazy superpowers. You see, certain people have such powerful life energy that it creates an apparition expressing their inner nature or something. Since these spirit figures stand next to them, they are known as "stands," which I suspect is a case of a Japanese creator using an English word that sounded cool to them but comes off as awkward in translation.<br />
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Anyway, only stand users can see each other's stands, and both Jotaro and Joseph have had their stands recently awakened due to the reappearance of an old enemy: Dio! That's right, the villain from <a href="https://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2015/08/jojos-bizarre-adventure-it-certainly.html">part 1</a> has been awakened after somebody found his body on the bottom of the ocean, and what's worse is, his head (which, you may remember, was all that was left of him after a series of epic battles) is wearing the body of Jonathan, Joseph's grandfather!<br />
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So, Joseph and Jotaro set out to go confront Dio, who is currently in Egypt. They are accompanied by a stand-using pal of Joseph's named Mohammed Avdol, who I think is supposed to be African, although I don't know what's going on with his weird hairstyle (which seems to consist of two-inch dreadlocks and a rat-tail) and what are either facial tattoos or some sort of scarring, as well as what looks like a very heavy earring necklace:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic9mvuOeUjnzY_SAEbAhyphenhyphenci2tHndU32xY1xe6ESaf-Yodhm0rjE8q5PztDPPUGoTRmqOUaYEhbeIle18TKrKXmbglkWymRCSQx0B2jqFk8pLngpAXL5gckSpYkyNANUD35Uk1Pg-QfJ7Qx/s1600/image0000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="796" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic9mvuOeUjnzY_SAEbAhyphenhyphenci2tHndU32xY1xe6ESaf-Yodhm0rjE8q5PztDPPUGoTRmqOUaYEhbeIle18TKrKXmbglkWymRCSQx0B2jqFk8pLngpAXL5gckSpYkyNANUD35Uk1Pg-QfJ7Qx/s320/image0000.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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They quickly pick up a few allies as well. First up is another Japanese teenager named Noriaki Kikyoin, who attacks Jotaro at school in a creepy fashion by using his stand like a puppeteer to take over the body of the sexy school nurse and make her do some nasty stuff to some other juvenile delinquents:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisqEPYpS3xG5JYfrmu7-bwZR4xTEXV154yR-AWv0RRgPKa_0xQy0yMdTbs37431yZjtT7Do6EP5H8RQK6HL4j719c-XplDWF1kSB0cq-rZKR735o4W-ZrB8llrmt4TtavJo67Vei3dQMxL/s1600/image0009-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1028" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisqEPYpS3xG5JYfrmu7-bwZR4xTEXV154yR-AWv0RRgPKa_0xQy0yMdTbs37431yZjtT7Do6EP5H8RQK6HL4j719c-XplDWF1kSB0cq-rZKR735o4W-ZrB8llrmt4TtavJo67Vei3dQMxL/s400/image0009-1.jpg" width="256" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-vhqXHEgQFNfSd4VdMsHOU_sL6I1NwDjjompOooc5YJw4tGh6WOA2L7fWUy-0zkzT6uon5qdAZJk6I52rQFt4ksP0OVPN4yRvegnkfPIj02kOgewChU3MgA8JizOZudaTv9ba_Jb4uAnC/s1600/image0009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1033" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-vhqXHEgQFNfSd4VdMsHOU_sL6I1NwDjjompOooc5YJw4tGh6WOA2L7fWUy-0zkzT6uon5qdAZJk6I52rQFt4ksP0OVPN4yRvegnkfPIj02kOgewChU3MgA8JizOZudaTv9ba_Jb4uAnC/s400/image0009.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ZA53uWAs0yZG0eSpV3uW8pEIcBhvItd2cZKnphi_ICvL1CFPetqD6zmbciy-wjJvt1j2_D78TxqaWbRMbJ6HwFXPRrZ-sBMFItACyC1AdSn_eSHL-zRQbi_ftUKTP3EUQm48pGyPM7_i/s1600/image0010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1092" data-original-width="1040" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ZA53uWAs0yZG0eSpV3uW8pEIcBhvItd2cZKnphi_ICvL1CFPetqD6zmbciy-wjJvt1j2_D78TxqaWbRMbJ6HwFXPRrZ-sBMFItACyC1AdSn_eSHL-zRQbi_ftUKTP3EUQm48pGyPM7_i/s320/image0010.jpg" width="304" /></a><br />
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However, when Jojo defeats him by having his stand punch him a lot, he drags him back to Joseph and Avdol and learns that he was being controlled by a "flesh bud" inserted into his brain by Dio:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIClSadZExwINcxkw67B-7zVrN3-VUngfYadaqZ9WbRaRD1LOnJCpPD9z8qVX_zcKJzKuGuJH_iYGJ2vFAdM1tePVM5INsXqH3J0vYvJFA1C8XRCKUh0KwJaF4KPnMWSwjh3sZUjnANpHU/s1600/image0008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1048" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIClSadZExwINcxkw67B-7zVrN3-VUngfYadaqZ9WbRaRD1LOnJCpPD9z8qVX_zcKJzKuGuJH_iYGJ2vFAdM1tePVM5INsXqH3J0vYvJFA1C8XRCKUh0KwJaF4KPnMWSwjh3sZUjnANpHU/s400/image0008.jpg" width="261" /></a><br />
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Gross! But after Jotaro removes the flesh bud via awesomeness, Kikyoin is eager to join the gang on their quest. However, they quickly learn that their journey to Egypt won't be so easy when another bad guy attacks their plane and causes them to crash. In order to avoid endangering innocent bystanders in future attacks (and to provide a reason for a road-trip narrative), they decide to take a more roundabout route, traveling by sea and land throughout southern Asia. They do manage to fill out their ranks a bit more after encountering a Frenchman named Jean Pierre Polnareff in Hong Kong. As with Kikyoin, he attacks them because he's being controlled by Dio, but his sense of honor fights through his evil programming as he accepts a noble death by fire at the hands of Avdol's flame-controlling stand, which makes them decide to spare his life and let him join the team.<br />
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So, it's a long, eventful journey that's full of geographical and cultural details that may or may not be based on actual research; there are lots of wacky culture-shock misunderstandings while the gang is traveling through India, and plenty of other nonsense, like this strange aside involving some ascetics sighted by the side of the road:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcnfXUQamIIUlg2jgm97P2Ew61oTRPoXHtG5RY8ufE8fKUuyG-BYByHXCSH5Of9dUe20hhyphenhyphenaxuKHQaAtSoa-DF-EEcYKlMTZ9Ba7IQpVVVvEKI-6iTFlm7COH1XP9isxYpr9ExpRt9P9wW/s1600/image0002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1035" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcnfXUQamIIUlg2jgm97P2Ew61oTRPoXHtG5RY8ufE8fKUuyG-BYByHXCSH5Of9dUe20hhyphenhyphenaxuKHQaAtSoa-DF-EEcYKlMTZ9Ba7IQpVVVvEKI-6iTFlm7COH1XP9isxYpr9ExpRt9P9wW/s400/image0002.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
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That might just be Araki inserting some of his general oddball sensibility into the story, which he does take the opportunity to do whenever he gets the chance, although if anything, he seems to have toned things down a bit. This turns out to be a fairly conventional shonen narrative involving a group of awesomely-powered pals (some of whom started out as bad guys) traveling together and occasionally fighting evil on their way to confront the ultimate villain. The sheer level of anything-can-happen strangeness is not as prevalent here as it was in previous volumes, with villains mostly being defeated after being overpowered (Jotaro's main attack seems to be a flurry of punches) or occasionally outsmarted through teamwork. It's kind of disappointing; there's not much of the one-upmanship that I enjoyed so much in previous parts, with combatants countering their opponents moves through secret techniques only to fall prey to counter-counter moves, which are countered themselves in increasingly awesome and unlikely ways.<br />
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But maybe that sort of storytelling isn't sustainable; if every encounter is more awesome than the last, you eventually reach a point in which you can't get any more awesome (although I could think of a few rebuttals to that idea, such as the <i>Dragon Ball</i> manga or the anime <i>Gurren Lagann</i>). For a longer-running series, shorter encounters with secondary bad guys makes for an easier hook, and maybe Araki can pull out all the stops when the gang finally gets to Dio himself. And who knows, after that the sky's the limit.<br />
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But for what actually does occur here, there's plenty of strangeness, imagination, and lots of the series' trademark gore. Also, Araki has given himself an interesting foundation to build the series on by basing everyone's stand on cards from the Tarot deck. They start out by pairing cards with a color; Avdol's stand is named Magician's Red, Joseph's is Hermit Purple, Kikyoin's is Hierophant Green, Jonathan's is Star Platinum, and so on. Later, Araki drops the colors and just names stands after the cards, so they encounter Emperor, Hanged Man, The Lovers, Justice, The High Priestess, etc. It sort of makes sense, at least early on, with Avdol, a fortune teller, remarking on what the different cards represent and how the stand users' powers fit that theme. But eventually it just seems to be an idea generation machine, with the names of cards giving Araki an excuse to draw whatever seems to fit the theme. And eventually, Araki runs out of Tarot cards, so when the gang gets to Egypt, they start encountering stands based on the Egyptian pantheon of gods (some lip service to consistency is paid when a character claims that Egypt is the origin of the Tarot, which is a notion that seems suspect).<br />
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And there are certainly some crazy/cool ideas here, as well as quite a few that don't make a whole lot of sense, but you just kind of have to accept them. Joseph's stand takes the form of thorny vines that come out of his hands, but he mostly uses them to interface with electronic or photographic equipment for remote viewing purposes (including karate chopping and smashing a Polaroid camera in order to generate a picture of Dio). Polnareff's Silver Chariot stand is an armor-wearing swordsman that moves so fast that Avdol's stand's flame powers are useless against him because "My stand can freely slice apart flames and separate them...creating gaps between pockets of air, guiding the fire." Uh...sure, that makes sense, I suppose.<br />
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And those are just the main characters. The villains consist of a motley assortment of freaks and weirdos, mostly recognizable by their grotesque appearances. There's a serial killer whose stand attacks people through reflections, a sadomasochistic creep whose stand seems to be inspired by the killer doll from the movie <i>Trilogy of Terror</i>, a womanizing cowboy with a gun stand that fires ghost bullets, a gross old lady who turns people into zombies/puppets after punching holes through their bodies, a guy who shrinks his stand down to microscopic size to attack people from inside their brains, and a baby stand user who attacks people through their dreams. And those are the fairly normal ones!<br />
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There are also quite a few instances when Araki sets up rules, only to break them as soon as possible. Characters state early on that only stand users can see each other's stands, but at one point, the gang gets shipwrecked and lost at sea, and they, the crew of their boat, and a girl who decided to tag along as a sometime-sidekick end up on what appears to be a drifting, deserted ship. But wouldn't you know it, the whole ship is a stand! The stand user, by the way, turns out to be an ape that does not appear to be based on anything actually found in the animal kingdom:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDaooWlU4y1MCPe6RVo0Om2FPFro4ew1TxUrHV7kvr71uzbYe2oQdgI9-N-gD8uVNPCjj5n5blzt8gMpfzhszmzHWZ3ucWaK15B7HK74KXIQwj3Fjig-EP4lTsQh0lE2g0-e8zDArYJ37y/s1600/image0006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="754" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDaooWlU4y1MCPe6RVo0Om2FPFro4ew1TxUrHV7kvr71uzbYe2oQdgI9-N-gD8uVNPCjj5n5blzt8gMpfzhszmzHWZ3ucWaK15B7HK74KXIQwj3Fjig-EP4lTsQh0lE2g0-e8zDArYJ37y/s320/image0006.jpg" width="305" /></a><br />
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This phenomenon of "normal people" being able to see and interact with stands happens more than once, and it usually gets hand-waved away. There's another guy whose stand is an amorphous, shape-shifting blob which he uses to disguise himself as other people, and apparently his stand is able to take physical form because that was what the plot called for. Later, the crew fights against a stand that takes the form of a sword that possesses anyone who unsheathes it, which kind of upends the whole basis of the series' mythology. Ah well, you can't really take points off a series like this for being unrealistic.<br />
<br />
One thing I did sort of take points off for, though, is Araki not coming up with as many crazy poses, strange anatomical irregularities, or weird costume choices. There are certainly some regrettable hairstyles, like Polnareff's super-high flattop/mullet combo (Araki sometimes gives him a hairline that makes it look like his head is cylindrical):<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyzNE0r4SbOJCazlAOz-Le_mtFn2buk6czCM4vn2sQWPm1qV6IbrAG7ZmM0M1DEfzOG3pkMxk78EwdJuxRWi5cQt_idZUuNig93euOFhu1GMdNr8yTHMPqofa_6dhrRPvgmqnnsyBeJpoU/s1600/image0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="728" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyzNE0r4SbOJCazlAOz-Le_mtFn2buk6czCM4vn2sQWPm1qV6IbrAG7ZmM0M1DEfzOG3pkMxk78EwdJuxRWi5cQt_idZUuNig93euOFhu1GMdNr8yTHMPqofa_6dhrRPvgmqnnsyBeJpoU/s320/image0001.jpg" width="218" /></a><br />
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Or the wad of hair that seems to be hanging off the front or side of Kikyoin's head:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD4FP1_-zl3VY_UIbZusc2fkAV6vFns3L07XZrn6z4AakzPAriGKSohNfAfBogdM4tkL6Si7UfNsRFpAjV6a_MzXwJW82zAIho80f7hPEk_cDLP415xxV4e3uVdSxfeJhKR3n55L4nA31j/s1600/image0005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="424" data-original-width="523" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD4FP1_-zl3VY_UIbZusc2fkAV6vFns3L07XZrn6z4AakzPAriGKSohNfAfBogdM4tkL6Si7UfNsRFpAjV6a_MzXwJW82zAIho80f7hPEk_cDLP415xxV4e3uVdSxfeJhKR3n55L4nA31j/s320/image0005.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
And I'm not sure what is going on with Jotaro's hat, which seems to either have his hair sticking up through the top or only covers the front of his head:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD54TU4FUMilppHgTB21LgMlWkL9suqhLBHx1bC0vWGQtcwm0pZKBR0dhmYgGYC5UejwbDImpyiycrWo7ORLS2gftt6Cq4bUt0BkTZYw8L-SLfFX5SUy8B6ZWW2vgPqS7lbiitEZiabg3A/s1600/image0007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="565" data-original-width="365" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD54TU4FUMilppHgTB21LgMlWkL9suqhLBHx1bC0vWGQtcwm0pZKBR0dhmYgGYC5UejwbDImpyiycrWo7ORLS2gftt6Cq4bUt0BkTZYw8L-SLfFX5SUy8B6ZWW2vgPqS7lbiitEZiabg3A/s320/image0007.jpg" width="206" /></a><br />
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But other than that, people seem almost normal, with few expressionistic fashion flourishes (Polnareff's weird tube-top/one-shoulder tanktop is particularly goofy), and aside from an occasional bit of anatomical oddness, action poses that are fairly standard. Instead, Araki seems to be saving up his excessiveness for the ever-present gore. Blood flows in this series like few others, and villains are usually dispatched in incredibly nasty fashion. People's heads explode, limbs are severed, guys are stabbed full of holes or cut in half, and all manner of nastiness occurs. In one especially brutal moment, even a dog gets killed in gory fashion:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgArBlc8zme76oIzMIvjjdnMModoDGVEosRuyF8gUkKjx7D83ia8Ay4JmrTg01t9ayngpzNlKeH2rCLCHiiWIrRYBFkCmLu4NVXR6iRAWvJwtXhdGCo41PdK0Y3k_MwjX8hC-fwAC2CUE-s/s1600/image0000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="837" data-original-width="635" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgArBlc8zme76oIzMIvjjdnMModoDGVEosRuyF8gUkKjx7D83ia8Ay4JmrTg01t9ayngpzNlKeH2rCLCHiiWIrRYBFkCmLu4NVXR6iRAWvJwtXhdGCo41PdK0Y3k_MwjX8hC-fwAC2CUE-s/s320/image0000.jpg" width="242" /></a><br />
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It's pretty horrific stuff, but it's certainly memorable. It also serves to make the good guys willingness to straight up murder their enemies somewhat more palatable, since the bad guys are likely to viciously dismember anyone and everyone they encounter. This usually makes their comeuppance pretty satisfying, whether they're getting stabbed to death by Polnareff:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjxGZociA1QEyBFFG7Y_1FeotZJAAdfyWYcdqNEC76d5i0VVdf1IrH_PurhDal8hnHOq15dkM0a1vr6N3zCbjVjuDM2oh5PUnFLNVTuyYW8fPHNLW9bj-Y96B6i6ukAelpmnYeo5VlNpCW/s1600/image0003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="738" data-original-width="1600" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjxGZociA1QEyBFFG7Y_1FeotZJAAdfyWYcdqNEC76d5i0VVdf1IrH_PurhDal8hnHOq15dkM0a1vr6N3zCbjVjuDM2oh5PUnFLNVTuyYW8fPHNLW9bj-Y96B6i6ukAelpmnYeo5VlNpCW/s400/image0003.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Or pummeled by Jotaro:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicWcTIJ-z8wJy5E1jl_HpYvwkQc-nTiM-_Ry1ho6J7onAXoMYOusC8ftaysoClZ0TVAeMDR_gUPqqv87XOnB1Ow1RZjz87ZihonHHtkLQocF5052yKH6Vt6Pg0Wr6giuNrXzHw0P3dXeEU/s1600/image0004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1353" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicWcTIJ-z8wJy5E1jl_HpYvwkQc-nTiM-_Ry1ho6J7onAXoMYOusC8ftaysoClZ0TVAeMDR_gUPqqv87XOnB1Ow1RZjz87ZihonHHtkLQocF5052yKH6Vt6Pg0Wr6giuNrXzHw0P3dXeEU/s320/image0004.jpg" width="270" /></a><br />
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So, overall, this is still a pretty enjoyable series, even if it has lost some of the batshit craziness of earlier volumes. I'm definitely curious to see what other types of superpowers and gore that Araki can come up with, and who knows, maybe he'll pull out some sort of insane battle that tops everything he's done so far. Here's hoping for as much nonsense and, yes, bizarreness as possible.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-6302848133058263332017-07-25T20:40:00.000-05:002017-07-25T20:40:34.266-05:00Paterson: The power of a blank notebook<b><i>Paterson</i></b><br />
Directed by Jim Jarmusch<br />
2016<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKa25LxTinVqP19z8iSgFcZu99ZCejIpqCsStHkf9I7atBgQ4OgQRJJyIHFl3cNo-uQ-jCAi4pjgMxLuLIpMZIZY2V3e4PaH5iFDsSLNNK-QM7BzM0IZNs4FQA7EXqfZQQu-9pXToQGp8/s1600/Paterson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="746" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBKa25LxTinVqP19z8iSgFcZu99ZCejIpqCsStHkf9I7atBgQ4OgQRJJyIHFl3cNo-uQ-jCAi4pjgMxLuLIpMZIZY2V3e4PaH5iFDsSLNNK-QM7BzM0IZNs4FQA7EXqfZQQu-9pXToQGp8/s320/Paterson.jpg" width="214" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you’re looking for a filmmaker who can accentuate the poetic nature of everyday life, you could definitely do worse than Jim Jarmusch. That’s kind of what his whole career is all about, even when he’s making movies about modern-day samurai or guys escaping from jail. This one is one of his more down-to-earth ventures though, following a regular guy with artistic aspirations through a week of his life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s a pretty low-event movie, one that seems to take place mostly in its main character’s head, and even its most dramatic moment featuring a struggle that’s almost entirely internal. And who better to play a guy of few (verbal) words but one that has a lot going on under the surface than Adam Driver, that most inscrutable (in a good way) of young actors. He plays the eponymous bus driver, who shares a name with his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, and while he seems to just quietly go about his work and observe what is happening around him, we see him regularly write poetry in a notebook that he always carries with him, and we hear him read these poems in voiceover, often delivering them in a somewhat halting manner, as if he is still composing them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that’s about all there is to the movie. Paterson continues throughout his daily routine, working on his poetry and trying to take inspiration from his hero William Carlos Williams and his surroundings, although he seems to be struggling a bit. And that’s where the slow-moving, internal nature of the movie becomes fascinating. It seems that everyone around Paterson has some sort of artistic pursuit of their own, from his wife and her multiple creative outlets (including fashion, interior design, baking, and music), to a young girl he meets who is also a poet, to the bartender at his evening haunt, whose pursuit of his love of chess may end up causing him some trouble, to a cameo by Method Man as a rapper working on his verses while waiting for his clothes at the laundromat. Many of them also seem focused on fame, with the bartender highlighting famous Paterson natives on the wall behind the bar and his wife dreaming of becoming a country music star. And most of all, the spectre of Williams, who is certainly Paterson’s most famous son in Paterson-the-man’s eyes, stands out as the person whose example he’ll never live up to.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But is that really the point? While Paterson’s wife pushes him to share his poetry with the world rather than hiding it in his “secret notebook,” isn’t art truly about expressing yourself creatively, no matter who is watching? Or is Paterson’s intensely internal nature keeping him from sharing his poetry with anyone else, and he needs a push to get him to acknowledge to the world that he’s more than just a bus driver? Whatever the case, he definitely becomes forced to face himself and do something, and that’s where the movie attains a kind of sublime power, a call to action to not let your artistic gifts lie fallow.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m especially fascinated by the film’s repeated use of twin imagery. Paterson encounters several sets of twins throughout his week, as well as other instances of doubling (two bus riders having a conversation in which they each relate an experience in which a pretty woman flirted with them, but nothing came of it; a pair of old ladies sporting similar attire and hairstyles; the bus dispatcher complaining about his personal troubles on multiple days, and so on). At first, this seems like a cryptic detail that highlights the poetry that Paterson sees in the world around him, but then it takes on relevance in relation to his wife’s urges to photocopy his poetry notebook. But after thinking about it, I feel like it’s the world telling Paterson that he is more than one thing; he contains multitudes. He can be a bus driver, and a loving husband, and a friendly guy at the local bar, and also a poet. It’s an empowering realization, and one that we can all take to heart.</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-51839892621916720212017-02-22T17:41:00.000-06:002017-02-22T17:41:53.871-06:00Jerusalem: When can I make a pilgrimage to this new holy land?<i><b>Jerusalem</b></i><br />
By Alan Moore<br />
<a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-1-63149-134-4/" target="_blank">Published by W.W. Norton</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0t2RcEGPx3yn_Y9g_ynR7RU_lgxf2XV2ieakCHKPYgFhmlHVHRVYykTp6ogsDHF7E6ASJb9pe_o4CZJA2so6Fa_Zx3uy9ofBC2svr9l4eHd2d1pTZUN_falVW2MkfXXsrwLKbda4odc2A/s1600/jerusalem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0t2RcEGPx3yn_Y9g_ynR7RU_lgxf2XV2ieakCHKPYgFhmlHVHRVYykTp6ogsDHF7E6ASJb9pe_o4CZJA2so6Fa_Zx3uy9ofBC2svr9l4eHd2d1pTZUN_falVW2MkfXXsrwLKbda4odc2A/s320/jerusalem.jpg" width="210" /></a><br />
<br />
Alan Moore is a weird dude, but he's been writing compelling, fascinating stuff for decades now. Most of his body of work has been comics, but his first novel (or was it a collection of interlinked short stories?), <i>Voice of the Fire</i>, was pretty successful, so he apparently decided to go for broke and pour as many ideas as possible into his next work, and <i>Jerusalem</i> is the result, a 1,200-page doorstop of a book that is in turns mindbending, frustrating, and exciting in its sprawl of concepts and styles.<br />
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Like <i>Voice of the Fire</i> before it, <i>Jerusalem</i> centers on Moore's hometown of Northampton, England (specifically the working-class neighborhood known as The Boroughs), which he posits as centrally important in the history of Britain, a wellspring for much of Western culture, but a neglected and downtrodden place that is constantly being shat upon and systematically destroyed, possibly leading to the eventual downfall of civilization.<br />
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That's a pretty big idea to take in, but it's only one of the crazy concepts that Moore explicates here. While the story jumps around in time, with segments ranging from over 1,000 years ago all the way to the end of the universe (and also beyond time itself into higher dimensions), the story centers around a family native to the area, the Vernalls, and their fitful awakening to the role they play in the relationship between "our world" and the higher realms of the afterlife and the ghosts and spirits that inhabit it. It's an interesting multi-generational story, with everything leading to a climax of a sort, although now that I've finished, I'm still pondering exactly what to make of it all.<br />
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The journey from the beginning of the book to the end is definitely worth taking though. It starts with a prologue about Alma and Michael Warren, a brother and sister who grew up in the Boroughs in the 1950s and 60s. The defining incident around which much of the book is built has to do with a day in 1959 in which Michael, at three years old, choked on a cough drop and spent nearly ten minutes in which he was basically dead before being miraculously revived, with no memory of what happened during that time. But nearly 50 years later, in 2006, he has an accident and the memory of those 10 minutes comes flooding back, and it's so crazy that he thinks he might be going insane. He tells the story to his sister, who grew up to be a somewhat famous artist, and she decides to create an exhibition of works about his experiences, one that she says will make everything right that has gone wrong in their dying neighborhood.<br />
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But, having defined these two events that are of fundamental import to the story (Michael's near-death experience and Alma's exhibition), Moore proceeds to make us wait before he gets to them. Jerusalem is divided into three "books", and the first one skips around all over the place, focusing mostly (but definitely not exclusively) on members of Alma and Michael's family from earlier generations and their propensity for what seems like madness but turns out to be a knowledge of higher dimensions. This exhibits itself in different ways and to different effects, but it probably comes across most strikingly in a chapter told from the viewpoint of their great-grandfather Snowy Vernall, whose fourth-dimensional experience of his life means that he knows everything that will happen beforehand and simply follows predefined steps with his every action. Fascinatingly, Moore turns this into a beautiful examination of how this type of life would be experienced, describing how he still feels all of his emotions and lives every moment, even though he knows what's coming, and it ends up being a beautiful look at human life as lived without the illusion of free will.<br />
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There's plenty of other excellent drama and ideas in this first third of the book, with the perspective shifting in every chapter and jumping around in time to follow not only other members of the Vernall/Warren clan, but other characters as well, including a modern-day Boroughs prostitute, a former slave who emigrated from the United States, a medieval monk who hauled a stone cross from Jerusalem to mark Northampton as the center of England, and a ghost who roams the Boroughs living a strange sort of purgatorial existence.<br />
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That last one is one of the more interesting chapters, since it offers a hint at the weird cosmology that Moore has devised here, in which the departed can roam their former haunts and tunnel backward and forward in time, gaining sustenance from a sort of extradimensional fungus that looks like a bunch of conjoined fairies (you can see a depiction of these "Puck's Hats" right next to the title on the book's cover art, which was drawn by Moore). And when Moore finally comes back around to what happened during young Michael's near-death experience, you understand that he has been laying the groundwork for Book Two, which functions as an extended trip through the afterlife, a higher dimension known as Mansoul.<br />
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Book Two functions as one of the travelogues that Moore is famous for (think of William Gull's tour of London in <i>From Hell</i>, or, perhaps more analogous to this book, Promethea's journey through the Immateria), with Michael taking a premature trip through the afterlife, which sort of sits "above" our world and functions as a place where the dead can congregate, interact with angelic "Builders", and journey to any moment in history to witness what took place. This leads to plenty of adventures, many of which occur after Michael joins up with a group of apparent children (we learn that the dead tend to take the form at which they were happiest during their life) called the Dead Dead Gang, and they take him exploring through various moments in history, interesting areas of Mansoul, and sights that he needs to see to be able to later relate them to Alma so she can turn them into her art exhibition.<br />
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This second third of the book is probably where it works best, since it functions as a rollicking adventure through time and space, shifting perspectives each chapter so that we not only experience Mansoul through Michael's eyes, but also check in with each member of the Dead Dead Gang and learn about their lives and what led them to take part in these momentous events. There's an exciting scene in which they watch a fight between two Builders who come to blows over Michael's fate, an encounter with a demon whose nefarious schemes may or may not all be part of the grand plan, moments of profound sadness and joy, and a grand finale that's a fitting send-off to the kid before he rejoins his natural lifespan.<br />
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Following that tour de force exploration of the workings of the crazy afterlife that Moore has come up with, the last third of the book can't help but feel somewhat less satisfying, with much of it seeming like it's killing time before we can finally get to Alma's big exhibition and the culmination of all the book's plots. But there are still some fascinating ideas and continuing exploration of this world, including a trip to the end of the universe, a look at the world's monetary system (another thing that Moore claims has its origins in Northampton), and the payoff to some plots that had been simmering throughout the entire story.<br />
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Book Three also gives Moore a chance to experiment and push the limits of his format, sometimes in ways that test readers' patience. This is especially true in a chapter about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_Joyce" target="_blank">James Joyce's daughter Lucia</a>, who spent several decades in a Northampton mental hospital. Moore writes the chapter in what seems to be a pastiche of Joyce's style (I haven't actually read any Joyce, so I can't say how effective of an imitation it is), and it's a chore to get through. Everything is written phonetically and with lots of misspellings, rearranged words, and malapropisms, and reading it kind of drove me crazy, since it required constant decoding to determine what it was saying. I did get the hang of it after a while, but I was certainly glad when it was over, even though the content of the chapter lurking under the stylistic presentation was really interesting, with Lucia's fractured mental state allowing her to traverse multiple time periods and interact with lots of fantastical people and creatures.<br />
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Moore also throws in a few other semi-experimental bits, including a chapter that's presented as a sort of stage play (with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett" target="_blank">Samuel Beckett</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket" target="_blank">Thomas Becket</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bunyan" target="_blank">John Bunyan</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare" target="_blank">John Clare</a> as characters), another that takes a stream-of-consciousness journey through one peripheral character's evening, and a third that takes the form of a poem (with an ABCCBA rhyme scheme that seems to reflect the book's structure itself). It's all rather playful, and by the time the book is over, it makes for a kaleidoscopic range of stories and ideas.<br />
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I'm still processing what exactly Moore is trying to say with all of this, but one thing I'm thinking is that Alma Warren is sort of a stand in for Moore himself (her name even sort of functions as a verbal anagram of Alan Moore), and this book is his version of her art exhibition, with the purpose of capturing the history and character of his beloved hometown and preserving its importance even as it (and, by extension, the rest of the world) decays into ruin.<br />
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But the book is really about so much more than just the importance of Northampton. It's full of fascinating ideas, and its extreme length lets Moore take side trips into whatever seems interesting, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell" target="_blank">Oliver Cromwell's</a> psychological makeup; the struggle to come to terms with the fact that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Newton" target="_blank">John Newton</a>, writer of the song <i>Amazing Grace</i>, was also a slave trader; and even a look at cartoonist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden_Whitney" target="_blank">Ogden Whitney</a> and his creation <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbie_Popnecker" target="_blank">Herbie Popnecker</a>. The book contains multitudes, and I'm sure it's full of additional secrets and symbols that I didn't catch. It's a pretty incredible experience, one that's like nothing else I've read, even among Moore's extensive, challenging body of work. It definitely requires an investment in time and mental energy, but it's totally worth it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-40283871471640793392017-01-15T22:52:00.001-06:002017-01-15T22:52:55.622-06:00I Watch TV Too: I need more timeI got behind on <i>Timeless</i>, but I'm all caught up before new episodes start again, so here's a quick review dump:<br />
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<i><b>Timeless</b></i><br />
Season 1, Episode 8-10: "Space Race," "Last Ride of Bonnie & Clyde," and "The Capture of Benedict Arnold"<br />
NBC, 2016<br />
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Welp, <i>Timeless</i> is still rolling along, and I'm still enjoying it. Of the three episodes that closed out 2016, we've got one that's an "adventure of the week," one that's sort of a character piece, and one that furthers the show's overarching plot in kind of interesting ways.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiuUMw_RA95YbSbi7AYwkaD7lYloTRH9utzJp8xSs5sZucp0M70dIkSzXjoPpij1Za-lLYD6cOYwUjZ09g7q-guG_Nl5pAGhzYqlqPMFgDdVkFrAM32FpZ3TZJY6HOPQUsgqEjIZeiq5tT/s1600/timeless+space+race.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiuUMw_RA95YbSbi7AYwkaD7lYloTRH9utzJp8xSs5sZucp0M70dIkSzXjoPpij1Za-lLYD6cOYwUjZ09g7q-guG_Nl5pAGhzYqlqPMFgDdVkFrAM32FpZ3TZJY6HOPQUsgqEjIZeiq5tT/s320/timeless+space+race.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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First up is "Space Race," in which the team heads back to 1969 to save the moon landing, which bad guy Garcia Flynn and his kidnapee/accomplice, the lead time machine scientist played by Matt Frewer (who I hope gets to travel to the 80s at some point and note his similarity to Max Headroom) have decided to sabotage for some reason. It gives our heroes their usual chance to geek out over being witness to a famous historical moment, and it also leads to some pretty amusing technobabble in which Rufus has to figure out how to fix a virus that Frewer infected NASA's computers with (he supposedly used a DDoS attack, which doesn't make any sense). Interestingly, he does so by recruiting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson" target="_blank">Katherine Johnson</a>, the real-life woman who was an unsung hero of the space program due to her race (she's played by Taraji P. Henson in the recent movie <i>Hidden Figures</i>). I do like that this show manages to work in historical figures like this and point out bits of less-remembered history.<br />
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As amusing as all of this is, with jokes about how the giant computers running the space program can hold 10 whole megabytes of data, it definitely strains credulity, with mission control spending most of the episode sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin sit there on the moon waiting for the guys on the ground to fix the computers. The episode also suffers from its other plot, in which it turns out that the NASA stuff is mostly misdirection so Flynn can go meet his mother and try to change his family's history for the better. I think the show is trying to humanize him, making him into a conflicted villain who does evil for what he thinks is the greater good, but it ends up being kind of a muddle, with the audience not sure who to root for or how much they should care. Oh well, it's off to the Depression for the next episode!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibX7XGWLPy3SiTH9iX5rfIFVJOSAad6cBhTfMAS_bjJVq7uxCz0Q9gLz-4qvQd8Xgw5KnWr23ftAmBvnxpWC1ciu5YAZFoghy-Pz-KgeQcCv6aGT6ilaHaohV740GAPbofYPgQvsnLWkMk/s1600/Timeless-6x09-5-e1480907529579.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibX7XGWLPy3SiTH9iX5rfIFVJOSAad6cBhTfMAS_bjJVq7uxCz0Q9gLz-4qvQd8Xgw5KnWr23ftAmBvnxpWC1ciu5YAZFoghy-Pz-KgeQcCv6aGT6ilaHaohV740GAPbofYPgQvsnLWkMk/s320/Timeless-6x09-5-e1480907529579.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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You can guess the setting of this episode from its title, "The Last Ride of Bonnie and Clyde." Unfortunately, it's not especially interesting, maybe because the actors playing the eponymous bank robbers are no Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Our heroes head into the past to meet up with them when they find out that Flynn is after a key that Bonnie wears around her neck, which he has helpfully labeled as the "Rittenhouse Key" in some documents that the government recovered, so everyone knows it's important to the series' conspiracy plot.<br />
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Aside from a shootout that happens when Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank that Lucy and Wyatt have wandered into, the episode kind of drags, spending a lot of time with the characters hanging out with the historical figures and quizzing them about where they got the key (turns out Clyde stole it from Henry Ford and gave it to Bonnie in lieu of a wedding ring, since she was already married to someone else). I think we're supposed to wonder if Lucy and Wyatt are also forming a budding romance and maybe see some inspiration in these historical examples, but they don't have much in the way of chemistry, so I hope not.<br />
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Anyway, aside from an interesting scene between Rufus, Flynn (who is posing as a bounty hunter chasing the Barrow Gang), and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Hamer" target="_blank">Frank Hamer</a>, the Texas Ranger who led the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde, there's not a whole lot of interest here. Flynn ends up getting the key he was looking for, and the episode ends with him using it to open a steampunk mechanism in some old-timey clock and retrieve a mysterious scroll, which we're supposed to find exciting, if the dramatic music is any indication. What does the scroll contain? Find out next episode:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIDMRXAoWFRLmBgkA7rCnjlGN9EgW1edkbsKCMbwhuGoE4HxnDAD2JxOD1BQdR6aBznJQkLxwjTCbW56qT72TDDUCDuryUyEwe7G39DfhRDZOgKiP6v43GZyP5YksbpXGj8i4YadDoYGhd/s1600/110_timeless_photo08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIDMRXAoWFRLmBgkA7rCnjlGN9EgW1edkbsKCMbwhuGoE4HxnDAD2JxOD1BQdR6aBznJQkLxwjTCbW56qT72TDDUCDuryUyEwe7G39DfhRDZOgKiP6v43GZyP5YksbpXGj8i4YadDoYGhd/s320/110_timeless_photo08.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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"The Capture of Benedict Arnold" functions as a Fall finale for this season, and it's back to exciting territory for the series as the cast faces their own "would you kill baby Hitler?" dilemma. This time, the gang heads back to find out what Flynn wants with, yes, Benedict Arnold; turns out he's a founding member of the evil Rittenhouse conspiracy, which is what that mysterious scroll told Flynn. We learn his plan when the team runs into George Washington and he introduces them to a familiar spy from the Culper Ring (a reference that I knew, having read <i>Y: The Last Man</i>) and asks them all to go on a mission to kill the traitor who recently defected to the British.<br />
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So that's their first big decision: should they trust Flynn and work with him to try to destroy Rittenhouse at its inception? Flynn tries to get them to agree by showing them that Rittenhouse is behind every travesty in American history (Lucy cites the Trail of Tears and the Waco Massacre), which is enough evidence for them to agree, I guess. When they do catch up with Benedict Arnold, the plot thickens even further when he reveals that Rittenhouse is just one man at this point in history, so if they can kill him, maybe they'll change history for the better?<br />
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This is all pretty dubious stuff, and it's the kind of thing that annoys me about not just this type of science fiction, but conspiracy stories in general. Trying to pass of centuries of horrible acts that real people carried out as a sinister plot by some evil overlords cheapens the real human cost that everyone should reckon with. Plus, it's less dramatically interesting, in my opinion. The banality of evil, the fact the real, regular people are capable of the horrors that we've witnessed throughout history is much more interesting than the idea that there is a cabal of moustache-twirling bad guys pulling everyone's strings.<br />
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But that's what you get in shows like this, so at least they make it fun by having the evil progenitor of the show's conspiracy be played by Armin Shimerman (Quark from <i>Star Trek: Deep Space Nine</i>). He almost immediately sees through our band of misfits' assassination plot and captures them, smirking the whole time at his superiority over them. The good guys still win, of course, but mostly out of luck and dramatic necessity, and they end up killing not only Rittenhouse, but Benedict Arnold, and the British General Cornwallis, and who knows what changes that will have on history.<br />
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But Rittenhouse's young son gets away, providing the big dramatic climax of the episode, since Flynn wants to kill him, but Lucy won't allow it, even though we got a scene in which the kid told them all about how his dad thinks that the powerful people are destined to rule over the peasants, preferably from the shadows while mollifying them with the appearance of democracy. The kid is definitely shaping up to be an evil mastermind, but now that his dad is dead, maybe he'll change? That's the argument anyway, which plays out to tiresome extent in the episode's climax, even though it seems obvious that even though the show regularly changes history, it won't actually sign off on child murder. And sure enough, the kid gets away, which enrages Flynn enough to kidnap Lucy and take her with him in his time machine, leaving us on a cliffhanger until next time.<br />
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So sure, the show is still fun, although I'm finding the conspiracy plot to be increasingly tiresome, for reasons stated above. Of the three leads, Rufus is the only one who seems to have much personality; Lucy and Wyatt are bland and boring, no matter how many times they reiterate what they're fighting for (for the former, it's to try to fix things to bring back her sister, who was accidentally erased from history; for the latter, it's to maybe try to do likewise with his wife, who died in a car accident that might have been masterminded by Rittenhouse for some reason).<br />
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Interestingly, one of the series' minor players, the Homeland Security lady who sends the team on their missions, gets one of the more affecting scenes of the entire series in this episode when she has Lucy over for dinner to meet her family, confides in her that she's horrified at the possibility that they might change history in a way that makes her wife and kids disappear without her even knowing that they existed, and asks her to carry a thumb drive full of photos and videos of them with her on her missions in case that ever happens. It's a kind of goofy idea, but it fits into what the show has been doing, and actress Sakina Jaffrey totally kills the scene, demonstrating that with a decent performance, real emotion can be wrung out of these situations.<br />
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If the show has to shoot for emotion and drama in future episodes, it would be great if it's more like this than the overwrought angst the series' leads usually engage in, but I'm not especially hopeful. Instead, I'll just be glad whenever we get to see some fun time travel shenanigans, meet historical figures both well-known and less so, and recreate various settings on whatever backlot the show shoots on. That will probably be enough for me to keep watching.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-21038609906128217022016-12-27T18:28:00.002-06:002016-12-27T18:28:31.416-06:00One Punch Man: When you start out big, where do you go next?<b><i>One Punch Man</i>, Volume 5-6</b><br />
Story by One<br />
Art by Yusuke Marata<br />
<a href="https://www.viz.com/read/manga/one-punch-man-vol-5/11195" target="_blank">Published by Viz Media</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPCNbWqLkvKmwriTvt9o2jVK3uurqYBcd5h4AhooWyEFCYwopZPWpKTWXjCYiiZ675v3Xvm-a6WXbpcOucX3e-RFja2kcniAheMZW0vhWBXzlgggiCHb0ZPIfEqPomD2JsdSGL5WyY2hO1/s1600/81S8hEPwtaL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPCNbWqLkvKmwriTvt9o2jVK3uurqYBcd5h4AhooWyEFCYwopZPWpKTWXjCYiiZ675v3Xvm-a6WXbpcOucX3e-RFja2kcniAheMZW0vhWBXzlgggiCHb0ZPIfEqPomD2JsdSGL5WyY2hO1/s320/81S8hEPwtaL.jpg" width="213" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvXIoESDsCJ_p9CuzwV2lPn_uDGpgX8ImhyphenhyphenZo9zJGl_cMAXOYpRFZuhoLuGID6My5iYHlyp308cnJqqDayKrMPR9u_P6MEEnR-JzE4EG2huRSaC97otJXyAAGYauRq7fjd4rFxr15hzGKl/s1600/4426947-06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvXIoESDsCJ_p9CuzwV2lPn_uDGpgX8ImhyphenhyphenZo9zJGl_cMAXOYpRFZuhoLuGID6My5iYHlyp308cnJqqDayKrMPR9u_P6MEEnR-JzE4EG2huRSaC97otJXyAAGYauRq7fjd4rFxr15hzGKl/s320/4426947-06.jpg" width="213" /></a><br />
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One thing I enjoy about shonen manga is its sense of growing scale. Stories often start out following one character or group as they seek to become the best fighter/ninja/pirate/whatever in the world, and they slowly get better and better as the series progresses, gathering allies and gaining strength until they're ready for a massive final confrontation with the forces of evil. It's a great formula, one that makes following a lengthy narrative over the course of multiple volumes really satisfying.<br />
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But as with any formula, it can be fun to subvert it and play against expectations. That's what this manga does, with its main character starting off the series as the strongest there is at what he does and then subverting tropes as he easily defeats any threats that he faces. The creators get a lot of mileage out of the comedy that comes from a guy who is kind of a schlub being super-awesome, with his struggle being to find a worthy opponent, or just to get through his normal life when he's too good at what he does.<br />
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The fact that this is a superhero comic also gives the creators a chance to put their own spin on that genre. And they certainly do so, making this a very manga take on capes-and-tights, with characters competing to attain certain rankings in a superhero system that's strictly controlled by an organizing body. There's also an emphasis on master/student relationships, although the central one, between main character Saitama and his cyborg disciple Genos, regularly gets upended, as the student is the competent one, only following his teacher in an attempt to discover how he reached his off-the-charts strength levels.<br />
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So really, this manga is all about comedy, as well as plenty of shonen manga style awesomeness. Saitama is an impossibly strong superhero, able to defeat any enemy in a single punch, but how he got these powers is a mystery (he claims it came from working out so hard that all his hair fell out, he lost all feeling, and he gained incredible strength, but when he describes his workout regimen, it's not exactly back-breaking).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8G3Y52BfY9ou5TdQ3zUUHUJ3EnkEgQrjOqeRdIXwOPGrp4D80uETH0j31i6G-qa6ZSbAXdALqWb-EhcIE8G2ILezo01c8qu6COtVoJCiK20dao79t1Ks5C3TJPWsY_Dpedio7YMOt-RR5/s1600/One-Punch-Man-Workout-712x1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8G3Y52BfY9ou5TdQ3zUUHUJ3EnkEgQrjOqeRdIXwOPGrp4D80uETH0j31i6G-qa6ZSbAXdALqWb-EhcIE8G2ILezo01c8qu6COtVoJCiK20dao79t1Ks5C3TJPWsY_Dpedio7YMOt-RR5/s400/One-Punch-Man-Workout-712x1024.jpg" width="277" /></a><br />
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The first few volumes of the series saw Saitama wondering why he was having trouble achieving recognition as a hero, until he realized that he hadn't joined the Hero Association. Once he did that, he then struggled to be able to officially defeat bad guys, and since he was ranked so low, people thought that he had somehow cheated and couldn't possibly be so strong. And lots of other stuff, like rivalries with other heroes, got in the way of his progress. But maybe things are finally starting to look up for him as new threats that require his awesome strength arise.<br />
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As volume 5 starts, several other heroes (including an offensively-stereotyped gay-panic-themed weirdo named Puri-Puri Prisoner) are facing a monster named Deep Sea King who has invaded land and begun killing everyone he sees. It takes Saitama most of the volume to even show up for the fight, giving everyone else the chance to defend innocent bystanders and make courageous stands against impossible odds. We get plenty of dynamic spreads in which punches explode off the page:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzDSs0WzqnST4HyQhDnHGOXAyYMr_Ac1AwD8cxZoKhPvDikflM2-WninlMso8ecIO0jPiVXPZIxXeNMg_8PwYCN6h0VZ8_51fdXmGgjve-DVZ02kryzmnHYHFyNMBdt983hb8fsYbCd3hf/s1600/one+punch+man+v5+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzDSs0WzqnST4HyQhDnHGOXAyYMr_Ac1AwD8cxZoKhPvDikflM2-WninlMso8ecIO0jPiVXPZIxXeNMg_8PwYCN6h0VZ8_51fdXmGgjve-DVZ02kryzmnHYHFyNMBdt983hb8fsYbCd3hf/s400/one+punch+man+v5+1.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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But when Saitama finally gets there, he ends things pretty quickly, as always. But perhaps this is the moment when the creators decided that that joke can only go so far, so they spend the next volume or so building up an impossibly large threat to the planet in order to give Saitama an opponent who can survive a fight scene longer than a page or two. As seems to be standard for the series by now, it takes an entire volume of build to get to the confrontation (with lots of page time devoted to other heroes fighting over-powered bad guys in awesome manner), so we'll have to wait until volume 7 to see how it finally plays out, but given the series' track record with comic timing, I bet it will be pretty enjoyable.<br />
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So, this is a fun manga, full of dynamic action with stakes that are ridiculously high (entire cities are regularly laid to waste during the battles that take place), but an emphasis on comedy that keeps things light and silly while still taking plenty of time for general shonen awesomeness. One area of particular interest (to me, at least) is the way that Saitama himself is depicted. Artist Yusuke Murata uses a <a href="http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2010/10/visual-aliens-part-i-draft/" target="_blank">visual alien</a> style when drawing him most of the time; where everything else is hyper-detailed and full of speed lines, Saitama himself is usually drawn with simple lines and minimal detail. It's another weird bit of comedy for the series, emphasizing that the main character is something of a blank slate, and someone who doesn't really fit in with what's going on around him.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-JGnPN5p2R23275Zi8WD54O0UktNuyjC63LAR4wUr1Sdovn-j-ypD33jj6i2YYd6z-x-eE2TgMcctcVupnzo6xhX8_oX8uWf70ELATCtdLBQrgzpMmCLo_lbNLmCd489RqDuifC3_HMak/s1600/a49.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-JGnPN5p2R23275Zi8WD54O0UktNuyjC63LAR4wUr1Sdovn-j-ypD33jj6i2YYd6z-x-eE2TgMcctcVupnzo6xhX8_oX8uWf70ELATCtdLBQrgzpMmCLo_lbNLmCd489RqDuifC3_HMak/s400/a49.jpg" width="277" /></a><br />
The series makes for a really enjoyable read, albeit one that goes by quickly, since so many pages consist of characters attacking each other in explosive bursts of power, but I'm happy to spend that time having fun and being entertained by whatever nonsense the creators come up with next. I don't know how long they can sustain things, but I'm definitely planning to see them try.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-48117402901706471652016-11-23T21:27:00.000-06:002016-11-23T21:27:29.825-06:00I Watch TV Too: Out of time<i><b>Timeless</b></i><br />
Season 1, Episode 7: "Stranded"<br />
NBC, 2016<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCBdiTWp6E70Vh3-6pm-tOjJPNj_ScwZtQDsm3yIo7bBwC-LgzuKojrQkEq4YeijUCsY7cBnOtJuECSO5zinMfmsZCzZt0Ry_qkhZpM9Tsq5gTqQdfTZFYjJpJzomqLQe3R4aAmpRgon8e/s1600/rufus-1-615x410.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCBdiTWp6E70Vh3-6pm-tOjJPNj_ScwZtQDsm3yIo7bBwC-LgzuKojrQkEq4YeijUCsY7cBnOtJuECSO5zinMfmsZCzZt0Ry_qkhZpM9Tsq5gTqQdfTZFYjJpJzomqLQe3R4aAmpRgon8e/s320/rufus-1-615x410.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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As I've stated, I enjoy this show, but it's not exactly <i>good</i>. That is, it's fun when it gets into rollicking time-travel adventures, but it's at its weakest when focusing on interpersonal drama between its characters. But while this episode does feature some of the latter, it balances it out with a decent amount of the former, enough so that I'll call it a win.<br />
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I suppose some focus on the characters was necessary after the big revelations in the previous episode, which set the main trio of the show at odds with each other as they all found reasons to be distrustful of one another. So, this episode sticks them in multiple situations in which they have to figure out how to work out their differences, which is fine, but neither the writing nor the acting is strong enough to justify the time spent. This means that we have to suffer through some interminable conversations about how they have to learn to work together and all that jazz.<br />
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But luckily, the rest of the episode has some fun stuff. The team pursues their nemesis, Flynn, to Pennsylvania in 1754, thinking he's going to try to change the outcome of the French and Indian War or something. But it turns out he has something more dastardly in mind: sabotage of their time machine in hopes of causing them to get stuck in the past with no way to get home. Oh no!<br />
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Luckily, our heroes are resourceful, so they come up with a ridiculous plan to sneak into a French fort and steal some supplies so Rufus, the team nerd, can cobble together a capacitor and get the ship working well enough to jump back to the present. This is pretty ridiculous (not that I've looked into the science or anything, but replacing circuitry with some bottles and flattened tin seems suspect), but it's one of those things that sciencey guys can do on shows like this, so we'll go with it.<br />
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And they also end up having a series of adventures on the way to their destination, including being captured by both French troops and Native Americans, with the latter providing one of the more dramatically ridiculous moments of the episode when Rufus somehow convinces them that he's not a slave and he'll put his life on the line to free his friends. This scene also gives us the requisite brush with history, as Lucy gets excited to meet their chieftess, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonhelema" target="_blank">Nonhelema</a> (who has a surprisingly good grasp of modern English slang), but doesn't get the chance to explain who she is. Maybe they just didn't have time for the exposition, but it was kind of nice to have a character acknowledge that this is somebody notable without giving us a synopsis of their term paper about them.<br />
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And along with the historical shenanigans, there's also some drama in the present as the team of time-travelers try to send a message to the future through a time capsule, which gives Gia, the mousy (in Hollywood terms) technician who Rufus has a crush on, the chance to angst about her relationship with Rufus and eventually use their shared history of incredibly obvious sci-fi fandom references to interpret the message he left that will help them get back to the future. It's an example of a bit of writing that doesn't make sense (why would he leave such a cryptic message?), but as a way to develop character relationships, it works much better than the dramatic scenes between the three leads.<br />
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So, sure, the show is still fun. It's got time travel adventure, action, technobabble, and lots of ridiculousness (my favorite thing this episode was when our heroes were trying to hide from French soldiers and they just kind of wandered around in the forest without checking to see if they could be spotted). I'm still on board, although this focus on interpersonal drama might wear me down at some point. But as long as there's stuff like people dressed up in tri-corner hats and breeches and guys using blacksmith equipment to fix a time machine, I expect I'll be enjoying what they've got to offer.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-66301198526771136752016-11-21T21:03:00.001-06:002016-11-21T21:03:37.882-06:00The Black Dahlia: She's not ready for her close-up<i><b>A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: Black Dahlia</b></i><br />
By Rick Geary<br />
<a href="http://www.nbmpub.com/mystery/index.html" target="_blank">Published by NBM</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoTjSqucM2KtRut5mGouCM_VMmbMg3OEmeS44uR7xgyFAj-DYqlKVXzj8JDASsftPxuXzIhOkvACYRs0Va-3l8I5whtxXStONYtM_RS5KkCJroID2oFr71pW441wX9F2DR6ematylF7PVW/s1600/blackdahlia_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoTjSqucM2KtRut5mGouCM_VMmbMg3OEmeS44uR7xgyFAj-DYqlKVXzj8JDASsftPxuXzIhOkvACYRs0Va-3l8I5whtxXStONYtM_RS5KkCJroID2oFr71pW441wX9F2DR6ematylF7PVW/s320/blackdahlia_cover.jpg" width="231" /></a><br />
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True crime seems like a genre that would be perfectly suited to comics, but there don't seem to be too many examples of it, at least not in the English-language comics scene. But maybe that's because Rick Geary has got the market cornered, first with his "Treasury of Victorian Murder" series and now with his ongoing "Treasury of XXth Century Murder" books. Between the two series, that's more than 15 books of impeccably-presented tales of people meeting their gruesome ends, and it covers some of the most famous cases of the past couple centuries, giving readers pretty much all the information they need to know about these examples of human nastiness.<br />
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Actually, that might be selling Geary short. His books aren't just basic recitations of facts with competent illustrations; they're detailed examinations of events that cover as much as possible in around 80 pages, examine the relevant personnel, and place these events within the proper perspective, filling in whatever details about the time and setting are needed to understand what captured the public attention and continues to make them intriguing. While some salacious details are provided, Geary makes implication go a long way, keeping most of the gory imagery off the page but still providing a sense of realism. I love the way he gives things a sense of the mundane, making the players seem like everyday people who got caught up in something larger than they ever expected.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlYasOxXY3pYYrbOtvJO6yBtQF6Fz3JMVIetAW2jhZN34oKXlxnDrWQUQbOQiSqVIxZMQj1xNL3wR6FZG2vAos1D0OcxD2QusxZK2t5R6eK2TO1aSi3etIVsHtBx6iX8-iyTKwor9fw78v/s1600/black+dahlia+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="353" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlYasOxXY3pYYrbOtvJO6yBtQF6Fz3JMVIetAW2jhZN34oKXlxnDrWQUQbOQiSqVIxZMQj1xNL3wR6FZG2vAos1D0OcxD2QusxZK2t5R6eK2TO1aSi3etIVsHtBx6iX8-iyTKwor9fw78v/s400/black+dahlia+3.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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This particular case gives him plenty to work with, featuring a young woman's mutilated body found in a vacant lot outside of Los Angeles in January of 1947. Some investigation reveals that her name was Elizabeth Short, but while dozens of men were questioned, the killer was never found, and the horrific nature of the murder (she was beaten and had her face sliced open, and the body was cut in half) almost defies comprehension. Geary brings up several possible explanations, including that she might have had mob connections or that there may have been a serial killer who preyed on several women in the area throughout the 1940s, but none of it is satisfying, which is the nature of many of these true crime tales, and a probable element of why they continue to be so compelling.<br />
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But Geary does give as complete a picture as possible, delving into Short's troubled history as a would-be model and actress who bounced between her hometown in Massachusetts, Miami, Chicago, and southern California, developing relationships with a string of men but never able to find the right guy to settle down with and eventually getting involved with some unsavory characters in LA's underworld. Geary makes her into a sad character, someone who is never able to realize her dreams, but she still feels painfully human, undeserving of her awful fate.<br />
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And as usual, Geary brings it all to life with fascinating detail. He has a knack for giving people a homely look, the kid of person you would expect to encounter on the street, but they're all individual, unique people, everyday Joes and Janes lost in the sea of humanity, only standing out due to their proximity to events that we're still trying to reckon with.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX18Sbez-sN4JTyB2Z_u8asahipb_Lys6ohgDYAAosEjaPsF1dVO3yBqXArS3MkaTzkInTJrVzgLYe0mE2ZbpnAW6DGSH8Qm28aTeQ_n-lxmoGSqAg-JDxZieMhk6Gm7kZsPT_R2r4LARc/s1600/black+dahlia+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX18Sbez-sN4JTyB2Z_u8asahipb_Lys6ohgDYAAosEjaPsF1dVO3yBqXArS3MkaTzkInTJrVzgLYe0mE2ZbpnAW6DGSH8Qm28aTeQ_n-lxmoGSqAg-JDxZieMhk6Gm7kZsPT_R2r4LARc/s400/black+dahlia+2.jpg" width="376" /></a><br />
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And he also does his usual great job of filling in the settings, which here consist mostly of the palm-tree-lined streets of Los Angeles, but also include a variety of hotels and nightclubs. I like the way he gives many of these places an art deco feel, evoking the era without being too obvious about it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIeMG1kHMJE7k0FpmR4Tf5VpGUVbqfOqkvW_lqfYAyfxLqyW9hV0kG8EcIJD3JR8-amOPuBEznTR-kwFWfN0YX4JQdhjff1P8h8XqtA1kCHNTMozH_flqKFExvd1IvwTU8jp3RZ2XwBC95/s1600/black+dahlia+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIeMG1kHMJE7k0FpmR4Tf5VpGUVbqfOqkvW_lqfYAyfxLqyW9hV0kG8EcIJD3JR8-amOPuBEznTR-kwFWfN0YX4JQdhjff1P8h8XqtA1kCHNTMozH_flqKFExvd1IvwTU8jp3RZ2XwBC95/s400/black+dahlia+1.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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So, all in all, it's what you would expect from someone who has gotten to be a real pro at this sort of thing. I don't know if I feel especially enlightened by what I've learned, but that's to be expected. Cases like this are famous due to their incomprehensibility, but they're still intriguing because they involved real people, and Geary is able to capture both the realism and the mystery, tying it all up in one succinct package. If you're looking to immerse yourself in some of the uglier moments of recent human history, you're not likely to find a better guide. Just don't expect to gain much understanding of humanity along the way.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-50976010783726326142016-11-15T22:41:00.002-06:002016-11-15T22:41:52.637-06:00I Watch TV Too: I want MORE of Timeless (I suppose)It's been several years since I wrote about a TV show on an ongoing basis, so here's the first installment of what will hopefully be a recurring feature in which I discuss at least one show that I watch:<br />
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<i><b>Timeless</b></i><br />
Season 1, Episode 6: "The Watergate Tape"<br />
NBC, 2016<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCdtt9NgYqkrAqXhRAkoBwwq-XMCHCxar6b7IjXVDPN-MTVCydBNuJ7dhXl2dSdB0wHJrmtS1ZHhtQbYiUXaKG3KrCgYwZUL6W0z0Gydluvh-UQQfaLgSRLCFGJwPrPBx6oDy6F31Q5Qm3/s1600/p12900266_b_v8_ab.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCdtt9NgYqkrAqXhRAkoBwwq-XMCHCxar6b7IjXVDPN-MTVCydBNuJ7dhXl2dSdB0wHJrmtS1ZHhtQbYiUXaKG3KrCgYwZUL6W0z0Gydluvh-UQQfaLgSRLCFGJwPrPBx6oDy6F31Q5Qm3/s320/p12900266_b_v8_ab.jpg" width="213" /></a><br />
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It's been a while since I've had a show that I enjoyed as something fun and kind of silly, without much in the way of importance on any real artistic level. Luckily, I'm kind of a sucker for time travel stories, and this show, which began airing on NBC this fall, pushes all the right buttons for that genre: recreations of the past that mostly focus on recognizable signifiers, people gawking at famous historical figures, characters recalling important details that help them in their adventures to the past, lots of hand-wringing about maintaining the sanctity of history, that sort of thing. And it's all wrapped up in a goofy ongoing plot about some sort of Illuminati-based conspiracy too!<br />
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So, the story goes as follows: some corporation invented time travel and immediately had their time machine stolen by some sort of evil mastermind who is out to destroy the United States by wrecking important historical moments. Luckily, they have a backup time machine on hand, so they recruit a young lady who is an expert in American history and a rakishly handsome special forces soldier, and along with one of the scientists who acts as their pilot, they get sent back to the past to foil the evil plots. That's your basic structure for every episode: the scientists track the bad guy's time machine, figure out what event they're going to screw with, and send our heroes to stop them. Rinse, repeat, enjoy.<br />
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And it has been pretty enjoyable, with the characters getting involved in events like the crash of the Hindenburg, Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and the Alamo, and interestingly, they've often ended up changing history, resulting in significant alterations when they return to the present. There's plenty of angst about whether or not they should try to change the past, but much of this is just a dramatic hook to hang the next action sequence on. They do at least try to make it compelling; the episode about Lincoln had some real emotional moments built around whether to let a great man die just because it's supposed to happen, along with a nice look at the plight of black soldiers who fought in the Civil War. It's all generally fun times, but the show does seem to want to struggle a bit with its themes, and maybe with American history as well (there's a nice moment in the pilot episode when Rufus, the time machine's pilot, says that as a black man, pretty much any moment in the past would be a bad one for him to visit).<br />
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But, since this is a TV show in the 2010s, there has to be an ongoing plot and some sort of shadowy conspiracy pulling the strings, and many of the early episodes have seen some menacing stuff going on around the fringes. The pilot, Rufus, had been tasked with providing intelligence on his fellow time travelers by secretly recording them and providing said recordings to his boss (British actor Paterson Joseph, who retains the aura of creepiness that he brought to his role as a cult leader on <i>The Leftovers</i>), and he's only doing so because some organization called Rittenhouse is threatening his family. In the first episode, Lucy, the historian, ran into the bad guy, Flynn (played by <i>ER</i>'s Goran Visnjic), and he claimed that he's actually carrying out a campaign to bring down these same Rittenhouse people, and he's helped in his task by a journal that he received from Lucy's future self. So many secrets; when will our heroes ever find out about them?<br />
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Well, this week's episode answered that, as most everything was brought to light. During a trip to 1972 to recover the missing 18 minutes of Nixon's recordings (it turns out he's also afraid of Rittenhouse), all three main characters have their secrets revealed to each other, and now they're all rather mistrustful. But they also discover more about the Rittenhouse conspiracy, which seems to involve some sort of secret society that is so intertwined with American history that it's basically inextricable from the United States itself. Which may provide some interesting plots going forward; should they continue trying to stop Flynn each time he tries to ruin history, or should they team up with him? How can they use their exploits in the past to give them more power in the present? Will they ever stop whining about how they can't trust each other? We'll have to see, I guess.<br />
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But in the meantime, I'm sure there will be many more time travel adventures to go on. This episode had some enjoyable moments, like Lucy and Rufus getting in touch with Deep Throat (since we actually know who he was now) to try to extract some information about the Watergate burglary, or Rufus happening to know all about the relationships between the leaders of the Black Liberation Army so that he can convince them he's a member in order to recover something they were hiding from the Nixon administration (it turns out to be a person who knows a bunch of secrets about Rittenhouse, but for some reason nobody asks her to share any of that information with them, even though it would probably help them fight this evil conspiracy).<br />
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This show isn't exactly high art, but it's a pretty good time, with lots of action and at least some attempts to pay attention to historical details, even if those often take the form of interesting factoids that somebody can note on their current trip to the past. It's fast moving and goofy enough that you can usually just roll with it, even when some things don't make sense (where did Flynn get his army of thugs who are all too willing to accompany him to the past and get killed in the many shootouts that he has with the heroes?). Because why worry about the boring stuff when you can go on an adventure where you get to shoot a bunch of Nazis? That's what I'll be tuning in for each week; more of that sort of thing, please.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-17654874947741991242016-11-06T14:01:00.003-06:002016-11-06T14:01:56.235-06:00Kung-Fu Klassix: Return to the 36th Chamber<i><b>Return to the 36th Chamber</b></i><br />
Directed by Lau Kar-Leung<br />
China, 1980<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXJtZF5UK6QFbi0oeZO-t4x8LNKUlS2dMuSwU5ggRzZxSyt2eUD-cWoBi4Ae8UbzpTE4oZcmNQiQ3fLkudVKz7DB4MgA9fnor_p7lGXuriTEXOCr5X-rDM4CHdkDVJGqF70jiilfqpGoOF/s1600/Return_36th_Chamber_movie_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXJtZF5UK6QFbi0oeZO-t4x8LNKUlS2dMuSwU5ggRzZxSyt2eUD-cWoBi4Ae8UbzpTE4oZcmNQiQ3fLkudVKz7DB4MgA9fnor_p7lGXuriTEXOCr5X-rDM4CHdkDVJGqF70jiilfqpGoOF/s1600/Return_36th_Chamber_movie_poster.jpg" /></a><br />
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<i>The 36th Chamber of Shaolin</i> is one of the all-time great martial arts movies, cementing Gordon Liu into the ranks of the best kung fu stars and establishing a lot of the standard tropes about training sequences and Shaolin monks. This sequel-in-name-only is an odd way to follow up on that greatness, taking a much more comedic approach and only vaguely paying lip service to the original. But it's still pretty fun, even if it doesn't rise to the level of its predecessor.<br />
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This time around, Gordon Liu plays a goofball who poses as a monk to beg for money from people on the street. His brother, who works in a dye factory, starts having trouble with the management, who bring in outside workers and start docking everyone's pay, then threaten violence on anyone who tries to quit. The poor working stiffs (one of whom include a guy with some ridiculous-looking buck teeth) come up with a plan to have Liu pose as a Shaolin monk and confront the boss to tell him to treat his workers fairly. This leads to some goofy bits in which they help him pretend to use his awesome kung fu powers by throwing themselves around after he waves his arms at them:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjioQIXy0rNWagAkFE6hYiw-XM65XZYxfiYR2Y5PdUrDeb-fJR8ZuAdeS-e-fEwWejfUELWV2UvSSUU3-k85Vf2Az25j0TdHxIrETs4wWCXSFU9X0j074x87ujnBisQ4R0nPB5BQu6RtKSN/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+1.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjioQIXy0rNWagAkFE6hYiw-XM65XZYxfiYR2Y5PdUrDeb-fJR8ZuAdeS-e-fEwWejfUELWV2UvSSUU3-k85Vf2Az25j0TdHxIrETs4wWCXSFU9X0j074x87ujnBisQ4R0nPB5BQu6RtKSN/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+1.gif" /></a><br />
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This all backfires as expected when the boss, a guy with some actual martial arts skills, challenges him to a fight, and the resulting beatdown that everyone is given puts them in a worse place than ever. So, in despair, Liu decides to go to the actual Shaolin temple and get some real kung fu training so he can avenge his pals.<br />
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But, since this is a comedy version of the kung fu movie, he can't get officially admitted as a monk, so he has to try to sneak in to the temple, leading to lots of shenanigans as he pretends to be a monk, tries and fails to participate in the training, and gets repeatedly humiliated. But the wise abbot uses some lateral thinking and tasks him with building some scaffolding around the entire temple, with the ostensible goal of fixing the roof. This gives him the chance to not only build his physical skills, but also to watch as the monks train and come up with his own makeshift version of their techniques:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEei9xifZr0mtIviiO9F4ih9hP_3GV_gnZcc1P5V5XKPOUTx9oIy3AMTYR5DiDmt4xLiDYeEjaIAZP54NZx2EMoVm7CAddmQyUUaW92T4_nH72VZi5nbMtQ37_e_TZnpFSwUE10MCCG8vN/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEei9xifZr0mtIviiO9F4ih9hP_3GV_gnZcc1P5V5XKPOUTx9oIy3AMTYR5DiDmt4xLiDYeEjaIAZP54NZx2EMoVm7CAddmQyUUaW92T4_nH72VZi5nbMtQ37_e_TZnpFSwUE10MCCG8vN/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+2.gif" /></a><br />
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After spending something like a year working on this, he finally completes the scaffolding, so the abbot kicks him out, having seen that he has unwittingly learned everything he needs to know. He returns despondently to his hometown, feeling like a failure. Everyone is excited to see him, and they're sure he's going to use his new kung fu skills to avenge them, but sadly informs them that he didn't learn anything. But then he discovers his amazing reflexes, and realizes that he did learn kung fu after all, so he goes to confront the bosses at the dye factory.<br />
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And all this build-up leads to a pretty great series of fights, as he not only uses the standard punches and kicks to beat up the bad guys, but he also utilizes his scaffolding skills to tie guys up with strips of bamboo in mid-fight:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsB7ve6h7BvbHBGzcWR0mmAhDd2K52AAfGSjgZJnIYk0xclPLP19bJPZ-1RWfGjoYuSfKM_yUYBXHA7NxltRLBwqNLwPPNJTxy28xaSqu-Cm7QVlGI0Usuwlq8C7ho9H-VxR_8LPuRBh3E/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+3.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsB7ve6h7BvbHBGzcWR0mmAhDd2K52AAfGSjgZJnIYk0xclPLP19bJPZ-1RWfGjoYuSfKM_yUYBXHA7NxltRLBwqNLwPPNJTxy28xaSqu-Cm7QVlGI0Usuwlq8C7ho9H-VxR_8LPuRBh3E/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+3.gif" /></a><br />
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And then there's a final battle that takes place in a construction site, meaning that Liu has plenty of scaffolding and bamboo to use, giving him the chance to do stuff like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnhCFprCht45RtWHGdv-2PA2b6H8jP41tsIY-7DAgC8Y0stDhaR2haC1beT5dBh4P0ThLRoFB4BohLUi1rVVYUitLRqbsK6JnyqqjezsR5zEOcA8Vk4Zs5RDOERIBDz8vMB2uE6Uq62j_i/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+4.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnhCFprCht45RtWHGdv-2PA2b6H8jP41tsIY-7DAgC8Y0stDhaR2haC1beT5dBh4P0ThLRoFB4BohLUi1rVVYUitLRqbsK6JnyqqjezsR5zEOcA8Vk4Zs5RDOERIBDz8vMB2uE6Uq62j_i/s1600/Return+36th+Chamber+4.gif" /></a><br />
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So, overall, this one is pretty fun, if not one of the all time greats. It's definitely on the goofier end of the spectrum, with lots and lots of humor that's hit or miss, and it takes quite a while to get to the good stuff, but the final series of fights is enjoyable enough that the wait is definitely worth it, especially when you've got a charismatic performer like Liu to watch throughout. And it's got some unique ideas; I love the way some of these older films would come up with techniques and fighting styles that fit the story and characters while still feeling dynamic and exciting. And there's also plenty of the old standby stuff, like the way the bad guys' weapon of choice in the final battle is those stools that people were always using to fight with in old-school kung fu movies.<br />
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I'm always up for a classic Gordon Liu movie, and this one was definitely worth checking out. I wouldn't recommend it for first-timers, but if you're looking for a fun bit of Shaw Brothers chop socky, you could definitely do worse.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-35524298690830359942016-11-02T12:51:00.001-05:002016-11-02T12:53:03.515-05:00Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Barreling bizarrely toward the present<b><i>Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency</i>, Volume 4</b><br />
By Hirohiko Araki<br />
<a href="http://www.viz.com/read/manga/jojos-bizarre-adventure-part-2-battle-tendency-vol-4/11609" target="_blank">Published by Viz Media</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMSY7R1IEQDX_XfeYlVas1g3EjjWLrZiwdmnR0wvJ_fRgSocXgpaZPPPO85GsypOqqKrUuZbV8vS8QcryH6F0OEwrwDOJXDFNFP0gYvEJ57Aq0DzRAVeFk1hnI2Uke7zG4HGM4dHPMgV0w/s1600/1421578859.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMSY7R1IEQDX_XfeYlVas1g3EjjWLrZiwdmnR0wvJ_fRgSocXgpaZPPPO85GsypOqqKrUuZbV8vS8QcryH6F0OEwrwDOJXDFNFP0gYvEJ57Aq0DzRAVeFk1hnI2Uke7zG4HGM4dHPMgV0w/s320/1421578859.jpg" width="218" /></a><br />
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So here's another volume of classic manga craziness, so, <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2016/08/jojos-bizarre-adventure-is-it-getting.html">since this series has defeated my abilities to offer much in the way of cogent analysis</a>, get ready for another recap of the madness contained within. Let's get started!<br />
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The previous volume ended with Jojo and his mentor Lisa Lisa about to confront the evil Wamuu and Kars following the heroic death of their ally Caesar. But they soon discover that the bad guys have created an army of vampires, including this guy:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7b22qpExXF9RGRl3emDQ6tK8OrqcjA9OfHF5s-Ei9pSYXx5IbwMOdy5HLRj_MRiIhDcTKRcipT7t8TX0KbuMoVRUQtg45CdYDQQOwj3xE-aGrgZg4WHCW6ieWLKKokvS5bx1ACpEuQfMU/s1600/jojo15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="391" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7b22qpExXF9RGRl3emDQ6tK8OrqcjA9OfHF5s-Ei9pSYXx5IbwMOdy5HLRj_MRiIhDcTKRcipT7t8TX0KbuMoVRUQtg45CdYDQQOwj3xE-aGrgZg4WHCW6ieWLKKokvS5bx1ACpEuQfMU/s400/jojo15.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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But even though our heroes are outnumbered, they manage to bluff their way into a pair of one-on-one duels, since they still have the magical gem in their possession that will grant their foes untold power. They agree to meet at a nearby location called Skeleton's Heel, which is a Stonehenge-style stone circle (in Switzerland, because this series' grasp of history and geography is rather tenuous) that also doubled as a chariot-racing arena in Roman times.<br />
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In case you're wondering if that means what you think it means, here's what appears as soon as Jojo shows up for his scheduled fight:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEZVhuo3SkiVw9d4NraPfc63ziezmF5f2JurNMewMePCQGAVU42nJkOjonB1dh1Xf9kUIQOud28wIUCBjujjExm7_h3EGNmHuHbz8RfD4Gv9DrXTNFaE6bbA-9tsTvcCht1dZ8hsSufG2f/s1600/jojo14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEZVhuo3SkiVw9d4NraPfc63ziezmF5f2JurNMewMePCQGAVU42nJkOjonB1dh1Xf9kUIQOud28wIUCBjujjExm7_h3EGNmHuHbz8RfD4Gv9DrXTNFaE6bbA-9tsTvcCht1dZ8hsSufG2f/s400/jojo14.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Yep, that's right: it's time for a chariot race with vampire horses! That sounds pretty awesome, and it quickly turns into a classic shonen manga battle, with rules about weapons being deployed by being hung on pillars throughout the track. Jojo manages to get an early lead due to some trickery, but the early advantage he gains by obtaining a giant sledgehammer is quickly undone when Wamuu does this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxiKoctSAWeOQXVPMjRH-wNRMzFNJiLnZHd7h-p0u5kpAI_TUWfOttZ_DvrOvipWGEUM4x1CGSgz1LeDlIc9ZTZ6sdjTg8tbWRhW32EgzY9JsN2UmXd8WlxaLaQ6q0o1BISRdCNwE06iN-/s1600/jojo12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxiKoctSAWeOQXVPMjRH-wNRMzFNJiLnZHd7h-p0u5kpAI_TUWfOttZ_DvrOvipWGEUM4x1CGSgz1LeDlIc9ZTZ6sdjTg8tbWRhW32EgzY9JsN2UmXd8WlxaLaQ6q0o1BISRdCNwE06iN-/s1600/jojo12.jpg" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwMpGYnydremKmexNOZxA6WGzB7aFtPOStvCvgmFf8PSuMkLkkg74m5nqzacmmyNAMSat5pv1MgSpANOpJRmpshouy9nH6nhlT-_IbzmDR7PVWXRggqhZJR67Fa0TDndMBaCzFz_6OAc5w/s1600/jojo11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwMpGYnydremKmexNOZxA6WGzB7aFtPOStvCvgmFf8PSuMkLkkg74m5nqzacmmyNAMSat5pv1MgSpANOpJRmpshouy9nH6nhlT-_IbzmDR7PVWXRggqhZJR67Fa0TDndMBaCzFz_6OAc5w/s400/jojo11.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl-5ayosJGYAQucvyxea1_oVQzV2etrkBTS4HbDRbDwwEmF5mj3USs-Lel_ys1ujKiYuhMD25quU2TDpWwWpArGBVQm-bur4hcs5jLRdh9Xmam6sMcCLJ9cR_L-7QmLKZGF239d3ZJlx8p/s1600/jojo10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl-5ayosJGYAQucvyxea1_oVQzV2etrkBTS4HbDRbDwwEmF5mj3USs-Lel_ys1ujKiYuhMD25quU2TDpWwWpArGBVQm-bur4hcs5jLRdh9Xmam6sMcCLJ9cR_L-7QmLKZGF239d3ZJlx8p/s400/jojo10.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
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The fight soon turns into one of those affairs where each guy uses some awesome move against the other, only to find that his opponent has foreseen it and come up with a counterattack, but then the original guy has a counter-counterattack ready, and so on. We seem to reach a turning point when Jojo uses his Hamon super-breathing powers to basically rip Wamuu's arms off:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS05G7VnGX4fOisB2TmCL3BNdbtHSvEA406jvKLd0Yz2ui7mxJMa8iBHukvaGwLVy7nOyW6M0aRoCMbrQfJYX9qKs2BTzMKGWFBwWXR_d4fI5PrgbysTW9hhw5qiRkFr7ryh0zvVH2bjcx/s1600/jojo9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS05G7VnGX4fOisB2TmCL3BNdbtHSvEA406jvKLd0Yz2ui7mxJMa8iBHukvaGwLVy7nOyW6M0aRoCMbrQfJYX9qKs2BTzMKGWFBwWXR_d4fI5PrgbysTW9hhw5qiRkFr7ryh0zvVH2bjcx/s400/jojo9.jpg" width="336" /></a><br />
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But Wamuu uses an awesomely dramatic technique to power through the pain:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgllNH3fGD181QykbFH9tDswgJA0jKBn7G9wIQEpWdoYsWwHI4rla7MxWbBQz-CiwcCSbmbApvJTr5z87SVQ4asW6m-nVaTODWAZfv44XM1m5oIxTIMw-YdD30wYW8us_57o3bL7t5hIjcP/s1600/jojo8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgllNH3fGD181QykbFH9tDswgJA0jKBn7G9wIQEpWdoYsWwHI4rla7MxWbBQz-CiwcCSbmbApvJTr5z87SVQ4asW6m-nVaTODWAZfv44XM1m5oIxTIMw-YdD30wYW8us_57o3bL7t5hIjcP/s400/jojo8.jpg" width="235" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAA5BIX4XZ8KZO-2_cIU7YHsnFX1tGhHRz0JsX9a-u3HbLe9b_IKGb85xe0b42ta58m0BkOP99_DsPKoqxnufRSlQICSzfHPGJN5SiifNJEXD3gaeD97OXv_exFAQ7gQtv4Ev9lERfB-BX/s1600/jojo7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAA5BIX4XZ8KZO-2_cIU7YHsnFX1tGhHRz0JsX9a-u3HbLe9b_IKGb85xe0b42ta58m0BkOP99_DsPKoqxnufRSlQICSzfHPGJN5SiifNJEXD3gaeD97OXv_exFAQ7gQtv4Ev9lERfB-BX/s400/jojo7.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj54Djn_X18J1gCuuneKCDX6PuwcYse1CHktsdDsMYwFZWuYCwYkVEvYwnCnMVu9FST7im8EQF3pFemw1LtK-C92kMr7W1L8Kjgo0X_lVF4sd6EORjpP0gok54gFxf-ccAVhhzBACWZmxNy/s1600/jojo6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj54Djn_X18J1gCuuneKCDX6PuwcYse1CHktsdDsMYwFZWuYCwYkVEvYwnCnMVu9FST7im8EQF3pFemw1LtK-C92kMr7W1L8Kjgo0X_lVF4sd6EORjpP0gok54gFxf-ccAVhhzBACWZmxNy/s400/jojo6.jpg" width="272" /></a><br />
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Sure, why not? Blinding himself apparently also heal's Wamuu's wounds, and he extends a unicorn horn that he can use to sense vibrations, Daredevil style, and keep going. After more fighting involving super-powerful crossbows and meticulous ricochet skills, Jojo seems to have delivered a killing blow, but Wamuu doesn't go down easily:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHphzrngf3ghIR6q4Ea1GWLzM7CU5kETkMhVonjvX9pE-mKD3Y5Fjo1QgVTTyaa6p-vvGZ5ClAtCduIZY6BMLkJVyIZtzKM3R2mOvMXmnuVNqHYQ_eEgdF7-tO_FR-88WsQ62u0IB0MQBD/s1600/jojo4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHphzrngf3ghIR6q4Ea1GWLzM7CU5kETkMhVonjvX9pE-mKD3Y5Fjo1QgVTTyaa6p-vvGZ5ClAtCduIZY6BMLkJVyIZtzKM3R2mOvMXmnuVNqHYQ_eEgdF7-tO_FR-88WsQ62u0IB0MQBD/s400/jojo4.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
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Yep, even with his body disintegrating, he keeps attacking using awesomely weird moves, including a suicide maneuver in which he sucks large volumes of air into his lungs and shoots it out with a laser focus, threatening to decapitate Jojo. But Jojo manages to come up with a counter that basically explodes Wamuu's body, leaving only his head to finish off. Which Jojo does, in a surprisingly merciful fashion:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1m-v-qHU-BTFnKznUAvU9XvkWK7X2jD3XwJzi1ANyqUKrkBiHZn7aAhgxXE487iT3H2ffCP5NH2TI6r9e-T0MtwWTpzxDwsVE0qyPEb7vNvUvDnu3ToIWYIjJXNOsFSVWaT05mRBiJnar/s1600/jojo16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1m-v-qHU-BTFnKznUAvU9XvkWK7X2jD3XwJzi1ANyqUKrkBiHZn7aAhgxXE487iT3H2ffCP5NH2TI6r9e-T0MtwWTpzxDwsVE0qyPEb7vNvUvDnu3ToIWYIjJXNOsFSVWaT05mRBiJnar/s400/jojo16.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqeTR90iEIZB4LyN4Hd1XThLhA0RtQtiyKDYFDCN3wsXZJd8kqemZ56HiJM5czrIUx3YKHbabn4Delj9cFvejmttNZUP-MYgeqnwME7No0ep7yFs0sPT3TpzTzMx-Y02PEAQDRToyDLY9j/s1600/jojo17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqeTR90iEIZB4LyN4Hd1XThLhA0RtQtiyKDYFDCN3wsXZJd8kqemZ56HiJM5czrIUx3YKHbabn4Delj9cFvejmttNZUP-MYgeqnwME7No0ep7yFs0sPT3TpzTzMx-Y02PEAQDRToyDLY9j/s400/jojo17.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfEtrULtrnnsug_kxUGT7jk-cd9W6HzDi67g5d_l2wLTsxDII9zoa4jL-n_nw7QA37OMJAD2zaTJ60dzdr1i3U8XhmuFgO23-Zp_BqDelyg1SOepYfVy86RfB0yx5NbGkhWDYuhjG2uewL/s1600/jojo18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfEtrULtrnnsug_kxUGT7jk-cd9W6HzDi67g5d_l2wLTsxDII9zoa4jL-n_nw7QA37OMJAD2zaTJ60dzdr1i3U8XhmuFgO23-Zp_BqDelyg1SOepYfVy86RfB0yx5NbGkhWDYuhjG2uewL/s320/jojo18.jpg" width="248" /></a><br />
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Yes, it's all about respect between warriors, that most classic of shonen manga tropes. The other vampires don't see it that way though, and they try to attack, giving Wamuu the chance to make one last awesome attack:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD1Bupib6j5NCu2cA2q60c82_UqXskeuSLmgbVsGWUkI0w4pj7InVpKOlUp-OkEshvAc7vRtb2CeCB3Ne0Pv8GY2cqCCujcOIoRevENCxFNr4RVGjHn7qRAKHpijhKwDWR04SVJIKLu0K1/s1600/jojo2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD1Bupib6j5NCu2cA2q60c82_UqXskeuSLmgbVsGWUkI0w4pj7InVpKOlUp-OkEshvAc7vRtb2CeCB3Ne0Pv8GY2cqCCujcOIoRevENCxFNr4RVGjHn7qRAKHpijhKwDWR04SVJIKLu0K1/s400/jojo2.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmTHql-Or8ESiAhjRyJb1Qsk4c0RnLDPOanckiyGfG8535uc-4ReNjjIf6Oxj-epGkKQX2ajdCaTKvKPaFcYjtGCOw-SYgkqCoIA6w8y9u51IBzjMYukkrOtFZS6N3-BSPTmKv8LmmLKM4/s1600/jojo3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmTHql-Or8ESiAhjRyJb1Qsk4c0RnLDPOanckiyGfG8535uc-4ReNjjIf6Oxj-epGkKQX2ajdCaTKvKPaFcYjtGCOw-SYgkqCoIA6w8y9u51IBzjMYukkrOtFZS6N3-BSPTmKv8LmmLKM4/s400/jojo3.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
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After all this nuttiness, it seems like there's almost no way for the big climactic battle with Kars, the leader of the Pillar Men, to top it, but it ends up being epicly dramatic, involving the revelation of the secret connection between Jojo and Lisa Lisa (spoiler: she's his long-lost mother), the last minute arrival of Nazi cyborg Stroheim to lend some help, Kars becoming the "ultimate being" and gaining the power of all life on earth, and one last final plan by Jojo that involves flying a plane into a volcano. It's pretty amazing stuff.<br />
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However, I've shared enough images, so more of my breathless "and then this happens" descriptions can only dull the brain-melting effects of experiencing this manga. Just know that it's crazy and awesome and full of so many bizarre things piling on top of each other that the only possible response is to just hang on for the ride.<br />
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Of Hirohiko Araki's various artistic tics, I was disappointed that there weren't very many chances for crazy outfits in this volume, although I did like Wamuu's battle garb, which consists of a bulging, jeweled loincloth, some sort of bicep guards, and a vest pinned to his chest with knives:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDMp6kTq-C0rX8o6FUgvLNr53ve8mtytyodv692D0DMwogA9NDwa-W6_ZxhiZ23lU2PfuQDc8aE8zBjOsa4fqRmm4A1RTKIja851c-SvC36RiryBrL_ztlOM4RQEkrU_4K-4GRFsZEwmic/s1600/jojo13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDMp6kTq-C0rX8o6FUgvLNr53ve8mtytyodv692D0DMwogA9NDwa-W6_ZxhiZ23lU2PfuQDc8aE8zBjOsa4fqRmm4A1RTKIja851c-SvC36RiryBrL_ztlOM4RQEkrU_4K-4GRFsZEwmic/s400/jojo13.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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There's also this goofy chapter-opening illustration of Jojo wearing what appears to be four hats that have been loosely stitched together:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5sk60L36iimm2Bp-XStUGkTBkMaIj6UT_UB05OVJvqcIjpaZwhV-r8GoKXB-67UE3DOZYIBYLsM3DtR5j1fCB0H6Zm-U1E6mwWyeUevGdKpnIjBE7oRDy856dQpXTEPXrYr8qMIH4xFom/s1600/jojo1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5sk60L36iimm2Bp-XStUGkTBkMaIj6UT_UB05OVJvqcIjpaZwhV-r8GoKXB-67UE3DOZYIBYLsM3DtR5j1fCB0H6Zm-U1E6mwWyeUevGdKpnIjBE7oRDy856dQpXTEPXrYr8qMIH4xFom/s400/jojo1.jpg" width="272" /></a><br />
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And I also caught several appearances of one of Araki's weirder anatomical impossibilities that he keeps returning to (I mentioned it all the way back in <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2015/08/jojos-bizarre-adventure-it-certainly.html">part 1, volume 1 of the series</a>) in which a character gets hit so hard his legs seem to get shortened:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdv6zDxFpsDHYu3UiLppIYK37WOyyj6Kbh3tpl944mTlP-67EtDHg0PYkTE9Bl7Zg2di3IcZ-KE-QW608cu0m0TYfUY6K4Hqn0XSJNDhx2sIhxt4KzGS8dX8TtpRs7qq_NPeLl2wEwXMo7/s1600/jojo5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdv6zDxFpsDHYu3UiLppIYK37WOyyj6Kbh3tpl944mTlP-67EtDHg0PYkTE9Bl7Zg2di3IcZ-KE-QW608cu0m0TYfUY6K4Hqn0XSJNDhx2sIhxt4KzGS8dX8TtpRs7qq_NPeLl2wEwXMo7/s400/jojo5.jpg" width="256" /></a><br />
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Note that that page also includes Araki's weird sense of scale, in which it's hard to tell how big characters are actually meant to be. Is Wamuu really supposed to be three times as tall as Jojo? Maybe it's just exaggeration, but it works to make the series feel strange and unearthly, the kind of story where literally anything can happen (and often does).<br />
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So, as of the end of this volume, the series seems to finally make its way to the present (that is, the late 80s), and part 3, <i><a href="http://www.viz.com/read/manga/jojos-bizarre-adventure-part-3-stardust-crusaders-vol-1/12512" target="_blank">Stardust Crusaders</a></i>, kicks off with what is sure to be more awesomely nonsensical fighting. I can't wait to read it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-39356144360894150282016-09-20T22:12:00.000-05:002016-09-20T22:12:18.314-05:00Fight Club 2: I am Jack's pointless sequel<i><b>Fight Club 2</b></i><br />
Written by Chuck Palahniuk<br />
Art by Cameron Stewart<br />
<a href="http://www.darkhorse.com/Books/27-009/Fight-Club-2-HC" target="_blank">Published by Dark Horse Comics</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheu7xpIRX9EdoRrkN0ZyEKNAGrk328rvj17_1bW7RUMcZmp8Hqfv3HiO_PJxiSQI05aLRc3r6iYJ0_0ItcVvbKkTTC1b-6c2sKfPYogEpNQMvSu2PDnZ410y0cD53S5KKjZ13ctMggX3RL/s1600/Fight+Club+2+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheu7xpIRX9EdoRrkN0ZyEKNAGrk328rvj17_1bW7RUMcZmp8Hqfv3HiO_PJxiSQI05aLRc3r6iYJ0_0ItcVvbKkTTC1b-6c2sKfPYogEpNQMvSu2PDnZ410y0cD53S5KKjZ13ctMggX3RL/s320/Fight+Club+2+cover.jpg" width="211" /></a><br />
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I used to be a huge fan of <i>Fight Club</i>; for a while, I said it was my favorite movie (I still think it's one of the few cases where the movie is better than the book). However, as the years wore on and the passions of youth faded, I realized that it hit me at the perfect time in my life, right when I was in that "idealistic young man" phase and thought that the insights it offered about men being feminized, relegated to meaningless jobs, and pacified with mindless consumerism were profound. I do still think there's some bite to the story, and the movie is so stylishly presented that it makes for a hell of a thrill ride, enough so that it's not just easy to miss the story's secondary moral about the dangers of giving yourself over to a charismatic demagogue, it almost makes the fascism that rises out of this demagoguery seem attractive.<br />
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Interestingly, that arguably makes <i>Fight Club </i>as relevant as ever, even though it's very much of its time, reeking of 90s slackerism and pre-9/11 ennui. But while a case could be made for <i>Fight Club </i>as an examination of exactly the sort of white man's fear of irrelevance that has led to the rise of Donald Trump, the comics-format sequel has nothing in the way of relevance to modern times. It's a strange attempt to recapture the magic of the original, but it never offers a reason to revisit these characters, a desire to look at how society has changed in the 20 years since the book's release, or anything more than some noncommittal gestures at new and interesting ideas.<br />
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Frankly, I'm kind of baffled as to why this even exists. I'm sure Chuck Palahniuk doesn't need the money, but if he did, he could surely have made more of it by writing a true sequel novel and selling the screenplay rights. Maybe he was so bereft of ideas that no book editor would accept them, so he went with the comics industry, which will instantly bow down before any hint of wider celebrity that deigns to approach its ranks.<br />
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So, the story that Palahniuk has apparently been waiting 20 years to spring on us is that <i>Fight Club</i>'s narrator, here called Sebastian for some reason, but also sometimes referred to as Running Wolf, has basically gone back to his boring life as a corporate drone, now medicated to keep his alternate personality in check and trapped in a loveless marriage with Marla (they also have a kid who seems to be exhibiting strange tendencies involving an obsession with explosives). But! Marla is bored, so she has been swapping out his pills with a placebo in hopes of reawakening Tyler Durden and finding some passion in her life. Except we also find out that Sebastian's psychiatrist has been regularly hypnotizing him in order to bring Tyler out and let him secretly work on taking over the world.<br />
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Based on this opening, maybe Palahniuk had something in mind about the idealism of youth quickly succumbing to the easy complacency of family life. Or, when he reveals that Tyler has been operating a corporation that provides paid military contractors to countries around the world (which is apparently the only societal concern that Palahniuk has picked up on since 1999), one wonders if he's trying to comment on the way American society is happy to spread death and destruction as long as it's happening on the other side of the world. Both of those ideas are a stretch though, and Palahniuk doesn't do anything with either of them. Instead, he sets up a plot involving the kidnapping of Sebastian and Marla's son, Sebastian trying to infiltrate the ranks of Tyler's army (which still operates out of the crappy house they lived in together), and Tyler apparently planning to destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust. There's also a nonsensical subplot about Marla organizing an army of her own through a support group of kids with progeria who get a stand-in for the Make-a-Wish Foundation to parachute them into war zones for some reason, and Robert Paulson (the man with the bitch tits) seems to have also risen from the dead as some sort of zombie minion, I think?.<br />
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To tell the truth, I don't really know what was going on, and I found it hard to care. Palahniuk's main objectives here seem to be to wander through a vague plot without much in the way of forward momentum, make a few jokes that fall far short of the thrilling transgressiveness of his early work, and compliment himself on the way <i>Fight Club </i>has become a cultural touchstone. He even has himself show up in the story to advise the characters on what to do when the plot seems to have stalled, but the joke doesn't really work, since there doesn't seem to be any drive to the story either before or after that point.<br />
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The whole thing ends up being a mess, one that has nothing of interest to say and no real reason to say it. The one slightly clever idea that Palahniuk comes up with is that Tyler Durden is a self-propagating meme that has existed for thousands of years, but his choice of comics as a medium (and Cameron Stewart as an artist) sort of shoots him in the foot in that respect, since that's the sort of idea that comics writers like Grant Morrison have been tossing off in their sleep for years. Palahniuk seems to recognize his desperation, since he spends the entire final chapter of the story having the characters berate him for coming up with a dumb ending. If only they had let him know about the beginning and the middle as well, not to mention the very conception of this comic, which fails on pretty much every level to justify its existence.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-42666205106777781412016-08-29T17:35:00.001-05:002016-08-29T17:35:21.415-05:00One Piece: A storyline finally ends, in predictably awesome fashion<b><i>One Piece</i>, Volume 79</b><br />
By Eiichiro Oda<br />
<a href="https://www.viz.com/read/manga/one-piece-vol-79/12390" target="_blank">Published by Viz Media</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Tu4wxcmssutn6h0-UMyJNBKQTnscRMeULa3-T1poCVnaKbS-Ye45mE38q7z_cqwtVx74sWqdrKEYY1GjRC7D_roOKLxekz5pFpNLErEkRREwt8mKCcSdzaHsRVJPBqNsBq059LJuzBMW/s1600/onepiece79cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-Tu4wxcmssutn6h0-UMyJNBKQTnscRMeULa3-T1poCVnaKbS-Ye45mE38q7z_cqwtVx74sWqdrKEYY1GjRC7D_roOKLxekz5pFpNLErEkRREwt8mKCcSdzaHsRVJPBqNsBq059LJuzBMW/s320/onepiece79cover.jpg" width="213" /></a><br />
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This is it; after around 12 volumes, Eiichiro Oda finally hits the big finale of the current <i>One Piece</i> storyline, which has seen the Straw Hat pirates fight in increasingly high stakes battles to liberate the nation of Dressrosa from the tyrannical rule of Don Quixote Doflamingo. In <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2016/06/one-piece-aargh-why-do-i-have-to-wait.html">the previous volume</a>, the various battles between characters reached their conclusions, leaving only the big showdown between Luffy and Doflamingo, and it seemed like it was almost over. However, Oda manages to drag it out for a few more chapters, ratcheting up the drama and turning it into an expectedly epic final confrontation that allows the entire nation to contribute to the victory.<br />
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That's a great example of how well Oda paces the series; even though this battle has lasted multiple volumes and hundreds of pages, it doesn't feel like it's padded. The stakes build and build, with the fates of thousands of people in the balance, and while the good guys are sure to prevail, they end up doing so not just through determination, but by rallying an entire kingdom.<br />
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So how does Oda take a fight that seemed to be drawing to a close at the end of the last volume and drag it out for several more chapters without making it seem tiresome? He has Doflamingo briefly knock Luffy out, meaning that our hero needs about 10 minutes to recover his strength for a final attack. But during that time, the "birdcage" that Doflamingo has placed around the kingdom is contracting, and it's likely to cut everyone to ribbons before that 10 minutes is up. So that gives everyone, from the Straw Hats' remaining allies, to the surviving gladiators and pirates, to the members of the Navy, a chance to struggle as hard as they possibly can to buy Luffy enough time to get back on his feet:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjWCE5zrsi1piju-PKktUMlthce47MgBkiRgItBaTmAINz2U8dBbFRJ4k_wVrOP9hVbCYcgvy8dBLQ74RjNe0VXBCP94A-WS1_yWlfwPMvgFDiwWjIED5dUIJKZPpeqT5DHjb7-wMuGeSz/s1600/onepiece79-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjWCE5zrsi1piju-PKktUMlthce47MgBkiRgItBaTmAINz2U8dBbFRJ4k_wVrOP9hVbCYcgvy8dBLQ74RjNe0VXBCP94A-WS1_yWlfwPMvgFDiwWjIED5dUIJKZPpeqT5DHjb7-wMuGeSz/s400/onepiece79-2.jpg" width="253" /></a><br />
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And then, when Luffy is just about ready, the coliseum announcer from <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2014/09/one-piece-is-still-awesome-as-of.html">the gladiator battles earlier in this storyline</a> makes sure everyone in the kingdom knows exactly what is going on and who the man fighting to take down the tyrant is:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY0TSP0Tp4MoyDOKbUe9Nic9QKLbIaRF-cY5KETroBnAQalkk1TPC6rp8UbbExRxCPTx1226xn-FZkV0wX_9fz92ddesK5crezLG1fyW_QpF4rZrTL4bBla43-zQZlNZbKagm51yQNGVRR/s1600/onepiece79-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY0TSP0Tp4MoyDOKbUe9Nic9QKLbIaRF-cY5KETroBnAQalkk1TPC6rp8UbbExRxCPTx1226xn-FZkV0wX_9fz92ddesK5crezLG1fyW_QpF4rZrTL4bBla43-zQZlNZbKagm51yQNGVRR/s400/onepiece79-3.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju9dUytH67zW7y5gRvFKnjVNR2dOYnKurtEhSl__CEgppPL5KN0R5Hiyv-LIqzBr6SL-wcQdlBhGB6jOnZRxIn3h1nd49uji5ec3KhspQvmOYv8ul_0q5HUyzSB_ouNu7OUh_nHLtwIHmq/s1600/onepiece79-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="377" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju9dUytH67zW7y5gRvFKnjVNR2dOYnKurtEhSl__CEgppPL5KN0R5Hiyv-LIqzBr6SL-wcQdlBhGB6jOnZRxIn3h1nd49uji5ec3KhspQvmOYv8ul_0q5HUyzSB_ouNu7OUh_nHLtwIHmq/s400/onepiece79-4.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOCZBYUO79qbKp8o4PTB8K_8QrNytHxdjOj9PR87etbJOMqn2wDZjTycogseBIDmZTudjGEatRghAkP_Z45E1K3SJpBfbNj1I6VwYjI7WlX_i6JQ0pv7p-dD4xWlA1Tiw4jNn6bQqsPYWL/s1600/onepiece79-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOCZBYUO79qbKp8o4PTB8K_8QrNytHxdjOj9PR87etbJOMqn2wDZjTycogseBIDmZTudjGEatRghAkP_Z45E1K3SJpBfbNj1I6VwYjI7WlX_i6JQ0pv7p-dD4xWlA1Tiw4jNn6bQqsPYWL/s400/onepiece79-5.jpg" width="390" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgohx27QXY7OUrdC6mLW0zqIAlRZxCsEeji_T_sXocmF8owRiX6hxnYwDnsJ8bjPGTwrcZl6i681unixcu7vRZhCNJXO_plT4GtEt_rLhJKlFitOqhDzy_aeB7MmJ_WracZiCNYOAeSJR5c/s1600/onepiece79-6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgohx27QXY7OUrdC6mLW0zqIAlRZxCsEeji_T_sXocmF8owRiX6hxnYwDnsJ8bjPGTwrcZl6i681unixcu7vRZhCNJXO_plT4GtEt_rLhJKlFitOqhDzy_aeB7MmJ_WracZiCNYOAeSJR5c/s400/onepiece79-6.jpg" width="253" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2cparmgy-ZKFg5WtHQQFQw3qvRZAVYJq9ODJ8lf6iuGW5Ql3DBn37q5DexrE-n4eZVdqrhMcVBofRjWfMnkFcpAtqY0FIgc6PSav6znVKGp5_0G_mldpXu2x7pyBnRK2pT7ZdMd_1iy2d/s1600/onepiece79-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2cparmgy-ZKFg5WtHQQFQw3qvRZAVYJq9ODJ8lf6iuGW5Ql3DBn37q5DexrE-n4eZVdqrhMcVBofRjWfMnkFcpAtqY0FIgc6PSav6znVKGp5_0G_mldpXu2x7pyBnRK2pT7ZdMd_1iy2d/s400/onepiece79-7.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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This makes for an incredibly rousing moment, with the entire kingdom cheering for Luffy and lending him their emotional strength. And sure enough, the final confrontation is awesome and epic, about as satisfying a finish to one of these lengthy storylines as the series has ever done. Oda is a master at building emotional stakes and then paying them off in spectacular fashion, and this is just the latest example.<br />
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So what's next? With the battle wrapped up, the rest of the volume provides some nice closure, including a look at how <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2013/05/one-piece-is-awesome-example-51.html">Luffy's childhood pal Sabo</a> survived his apparent death and eventually made it back into his life, and it starts setting up what's to come by introducing a new antagonist, a guy so tough that he survives a suicide attempt in which he jumps from a city in the clouds:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuGHA7Z_NZNg-Lg8sycoUmskNCxuy7H3DDT95Jy3H2D3BYSbIrtZobvdl8fjHOhKv28u5RsqN4OMiYavozIUu-2mqOxraFMfz5IkUjBMrn6HkD0uPjfmSbc9Dbb39oZInc_IhjpyjohiH0/s1600/onepiece79-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuGHA7Z_NZNg-Lg8sycoUmskNCxuy7H3DDT95Jy3H2D3BYSbIrtZobvdl8fjHOhKv28u5RsqN4OMiYavozIUu-2mqOxraFMfz5IkUjBMrn6HkD0uPjfmSbc9Dbb39oZInc_IhjpyjohiH0/s400/onepiece79-8.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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That's funny stuff, a great way to show us that this guy is going to be a major threat. I'm sure it will be another dozen volumes or so before Luffy gets around to fighting him, but I'm happy to wait that long, because it's sure to be awesome.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-70998115875691548462016-08-15T19:42:00.000-05:002016-08-15T19:42:48.311-05:00Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Is it getting more bizarre? Maybe!<b><i>Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency</i>, Volumes 2-3</b><br />
By Hirohiko Araki<br />
<a href="http://www.viz.com/read/manga/jojos-bizarre-adventure-part-2-battle-tendency-vol-2/11611" target="_blank">Published by Viz Media</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidY8gokN4DhfHqh8ykiGG2JuM0wfZLS2cgNLq11kXngaX1KRdDV_dZlolNjBRE7y7DgJK8T5GvNsWSDaUj5nAvLiwpcNZ289ajwikzpqFOGK2teCsTm7hn3qx2jNHFJciMO01a1Uhf4Xhl/s1600/jojo+v2-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidY8gokN4DhfHqh8ykiGG2JuM0wfZLS2cgNLq11kXngaX1KRdDV_dZlolNjBRE7y7DgJK8T5GvNsWSDaUj5nAvLiwpcNZ289ajwikzpqFOGK2teCsTm7hn3qx2jNHFJciMO01a1Uhf4Xhl/s320/jojo+v2-2.jpg" width="219" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAJrr0PYfY3lA_NMROBHXrk_ADE523QyhaxVgR7USPQ6Q-jH-v7NA1WYxaE5Qs9pybNeyXP9JzAgbIWNmEsbg2zq4y92uRTZeXf0i98oyqmJwvUSSHEYbmvP7H4B6DFIOakqV8yut4yunS/s1600/jojo+v2-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAJrr0PYfY3lA_NMROBHXrk_ADE523QyhaxVgR7USPQ6Q-jH-v7NA1WYxaE5Qs9pybNeyXP9JzAgbIWNmEsbg2zq4y92uRTZeXf0i98oyqmJwvUSSHEYbmvP7H4B6DFIOakqV8yut4yunS/s320/jojo+v2-3.jpg" width="219" /></a><br />
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At some point, if you're writing about a long-running shonen manga series, you reach a state in which you just scan pages and say, "Check out this crazy/awesome thing!" With <i>Jojo's Bizarre Adventure</i>, I think I might have reached that point after only six volumes. I mean, just look at the impossible anatomy in this splash page:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHCoOsjnRikepRFiGYnBb7og1Zjl45tpwJMV66o7eHUdI3z_tJrLhVZoYV-g_4v83vYI-FhsALPZwhxqu1VC4L2crgkDgAGRlzfN6buspowRVLL8-2uokhoEPlMtG7BOsSWrsMo_VHujEe/s1600/jojo4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHCoOsjnRikepRFiGYnBb7og1Zjl45tpwJMV66o7eHUdI3z_tJrLhVZoYV-g_4v83vYI-FhsALPZwhxqu1VC4L2crgkDgAGRlzfN6buspowRVLL8-2uokhoEPlMtG7BOsSWrsMo_VHujEe/s400/jojo4.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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That's a depiction of our hero, Joeseph Joestar, and his rival/ally, Ceasar Anthonio Zeppeli, about to fight each other on the streets of Rome. I love how Caesar (the guy on the right) has upper arms that appear to be about four feet long, and how Joseph's neck seems to be sprouting out of his pectoral muscles (he's also pulling a total brokeback pose, making it look like his upper body has been severed, rotated 90 degrees, and then reattached).<br />
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This sort of thing is par for the course for Hirohiko Araki, who commits these crimes of anatomy on nearly every page of his comics, but that's part of his charm; you never know what sort of weirdness is going to come up next, with strange poses and anatomical impossibilities only being one part of the goofy whole. He also gives his characters strange, nonsensical methods of fighting, such as Caesar's soap bubble attacks:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhny8986ar_K3dBNenSr7D4s3-azEob6xDQ790sOnBNAyyDkxxd-lWzTZcNu0uoP7qgBhyphenhyphenrPflSTC8FWbSx9NkiaMfx5uQbDd0T960Ww97YxYeyN63L-kIeMGrgYFyFNeHMA3kt2ZVrvjoS/s1600/jojo1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhny8986ar_K3dBNenSr7D4s3-azEob6xDQ790sOnBNAyyDkxxd-lWzTZcNu0uoP7qgBhyphenhyphenrPflSTC8FWbSx9NkiaMfx5uQbDd0T960Ww97YxYeyN63L-kIeMGrgYFyFNeHMA3kt2ZVrvjoS/s400/jojo1.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ3baityh4oTPnmc5jk0CZYgVr26Wz3bYDZqSy9NwcfKSvZbWA_iAxxhjvetRzLKEULTWqHZlXLGVDvsduKzrvCB72HmQ_tGNy_xNe7k58FEHLZCwb0T8na6LjIMUGJIrMsFLmv-f8g4Rd/s1600/jojo2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ3baityh4oTPnmc5jk0CZYgVr26Wz3bYDZqSy9NwcfKSvZbWA_iAxxhjvetRzLKEULTWqHZlXLGVDvsduKzrvCB72HmQ_tGNy_xNe7k58FEHLZCwb0T8na6LjIMUGJIrMsFLmv-f8g4Rd/s400/jojo2.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUhnQJDdl1FJ6s2GIO_GQ5TsC09kysUkYgir_AVReoBK0hlBy9cIheFGyLl3I5GtciEKKQPaN5cEbJMn3RzJMsTmcGRzJd2hR0Ixtsxcc4W-6s4ac5KI67E1PM9RfEkBk2TWYirgV1T2fH/s1600/jojo3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUhnQJDdl1FJ6s2GIO_GQ5TsC09kysUkYgir_AVReoBK0hlBy9cIheFGyLl3I5GtciEKKQPaN5cEbJMn3RzJMsTmcGRzJd2hR0Ixtsxcc4W-6s4ac5KI67E1PM9RfEkBk2TWYirgV1T2fH/s400/jojo3.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<br />
And there's the prevalent gore, which we'll get to soon. The plot for these volumes sees Jojo and his pals searching for more of the evil "pillar men" like the guy he defeated in <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2016/04/jojos-bizarre-adventure-things-get-more.html">the previous volume</a>. He and Caesar (who is the grandson of Baron Zeppeli, the teacher who trained Joseph's grandfather Jonathan back in <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2015/08/jojos-bizarre-adventure-it-certainly.html">the first part of the series</a>), follow a lead from some Nazi friends of theirs (this part of the story takes place in 1938, and since they're in Italy, why not hang out with Nazis?) and check out some tunnels under the Colosseum, where they find that three weird dudes have just woken up and are preparing to take over the world or something, and they need to find some mysterious gem in order to do so. And if you thought the anatomy was strange before, just look at these guys, who seem to be about fifteen feet tall, with their legs taking up 70% of that height:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbMaihG927dzIhxQsijx-623uHhPXV05eSJuOzR_Ziy1QNEMMpIKUtRtTTcCP4KVK5bg4G9O7W5y2FhBnAgK820sKwrUSuOAeD7b2Ci6QgSndg3gUfwc2ZRU-NtXRlnJOn_Cp7UaIBbgap/s1600/jojo5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="395" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbMaihG927dzIhxQsijx-623uHhPXV05eSJuOzR_Ziy1QNEMMpIKUtRtTTcCP4KVK5bg4G9O7W5y2FhBnAgK820sKwrUSuOAeD7b2Ci6QgSndg3gUfwc2ZRU-NtXRlnJOn_Cp7UaIBbgap/s400/jojo5.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Santviento, the pillar man that Joseph previously defeated, was apparently at a lower power level than these guys (who are named Wamuu, Esidisi, and Kars), because one of them takes out Joseph and Caesar pretty easily, despite Joseph's ridiculous new special attack:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_ZTkHdgGiQ1GqUOxHU7juy8bKtG3dQRoP8vZ68f0fEi3K2vwp2HAlpS9f2UaQ0ysiSLwmiKDb0l7KNgY8mQXzuS6QZKX-BYhJuXXcI1rPvJQej_iNu1eMcYou640mrA7g8t9JEQEZAwgf/s1600/jojo6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_ZTkHdgGiQ1GqUOxHU7juy8bKtG3dQRoP8vZ68f0fEi3K2vwp2HAlpS9f2UaQ0ysiSLwmiKDb0l7KNgY8mQXzuS6QZKX-BYhJuXXcI1rPvJQej_iNu1eMcYou640mrA7g8t9JEQEZAwgf/s400/jojo6.jpg" width="321" /></a><br />
<br />
I love the display of power that Araki depicts here, with Wamuu nearly obliterating Joseph with some sort of wind attack:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZduK8l1XMfRC8LpEzAUki25sknwcXngq-TsnNdFwTLqvzv2ajQIUudPu_EihiIihOL8s5GX-j3fPKZMRNRPmUpwC-aXZeeQHCcAHOMo8thY6Qrdxh0GZVs7MYBRtXpKLT78i_ZwxPYqQ/s1600/jojo7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZduK8l1XMfRC8LpEzAUki25sknwcXngq-TsnNdFwTLqvzv2ajQIUudPu_EihiIihOL8s5GX-j3fPKZMRNRPmUpwC-aXZeeQHCcAHOMo8thY6Qrdxh0GZVs7MYBRtXpKLT78i_ZwxPYqQ/s400/jojo7.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTTZiiCuigyKSVEtajx87xMePW8Uh-n3Ft_2lHzC2SO_ZoTQ_d4EBqO3CFJmDfOCAl8nwX73mCVf7gUow2kRXCQzgLPq5F-440TK3blJihJC4DPktH5konFq9jIS1P1qY01PuCpJq3B8y/s1600/jojo8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTTZiiCuigyKSVEtajx87xMePW8Uh-n3Ft_2lHzC2SO_ZoTQ_d4EBqO3CFJmDfOCAl8nwX73mCVf7gUow2kRXCQzgLPq5F-440TK3blJihJC4DPktH5konFq9jIS1P1qY01PuCpJq3B8y/s400/jojo8.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQGjCmxb5012VOCgF-Ba_XbtNs-Kc5NgvjVAMa2X6HJ-K_c-l_KM8deXLsQai2qT9iwMSJnrD_WCvrPbpBHutj7ivsKDrCRHJhD4EExdT7klBNrZr2wemb0il2B6yONHRqVpYGfLLeWm_V/s1600/jojo9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQGjCmxb5012VOCgF-Ba_XbtNs-Kc5NgvjVAMa2X6HJ-K_c-l_KM8deXLsQai2qT9iwMSJnrD_WCvrPbpBHutj7ivsKDrCRHJhD4EExdT7klBNrZr2wemb0il2B6yONHRqVpYGfLLeWm_V/s400/jojo9.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPhBbZcIFsITi_N0JEHGfPE9E_v1uaxn_PQ030kGekIvN4XLRvaaubhKigABfK2SPzF_8Al-3Wn87tyicRVdwRdFwKpoavvEOIZ4D1uSOpqOvJY8pHJXpojD2Nidou3tjQLJctHpAEcJq2/s1600/jojo10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPhBbZcIFsITi_N0JEHGfPE9E_v1uaxn_PQ030kGekIvN4XLRvaaubhKigABfK2SPzF_8Al-3Wn87tyicRVdwRdFwKpoavvEOIZ4D1uSOpqOvJY8pHJXpojD2Nidou3tjQLJctHpAEcJq2/s400/jojo10.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
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It seems that these guys have been menacing humanity for thousands of years, and they've previously killed many other members of the "Hamon tribe," the people who use the breathing techniques that give Jojo and his pals the psychic powers to pull off awesome attacks. But through his arrogance, Joseph manages to impress them, and convinces them to give him a month to train and grow more powerful so that he can be a better match for them the next time they fight. And this being a battle manga, the all-powerful, evil bad guys say "Sure, why not?" and plan to meet them for another round in 33 days. They do, however, come up with a clever way to ensure that he won't run away:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK8TKVMGphsQ5fCE1BLjBHV_q_A0HQg0jORssvlFX4s0MHq_Mf6L8dHi7-6qySC3gq3GbPLUwo47QjFyti1ILPr7hVk7_ii2a1cW9aBwNSC1BP5BX5-xrBL_cw7bTOctqhGYYnDC1y5Ips/s1600/jojo11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK8TKVMGphsQ5fCE1BLjBHV_q_A0HQg0jORssvlFX4s0MHq_Mf6L8dHi7-6qySC3gq3GbPLUwo47QjFyti1ILPr7hVk7_ii2a1cW9aBwNSC1BP5BX5-xrBL_cw7bTOctqhGYYnDC1y5Ips/s400/jojo11.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
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So, we're off for a classic bit of shonen manga training, as Joseph and Caesar seek the master that trained Caesar in the way of Hamon. This brings them to Venice, where they encounter said master, who confronts them in an amusing manner and reveals a surprising identity:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho_UGD3ozwP2w0M0ltLIAmXjztOcxbC62ziTO9xRNaiXlwDixbGGemRxKZBJWFX4D8eaxrQt_2LZDIEl_lzr5YLjI8amE58qZy6nn1FcCg2mc0XaM2ptXxSth_-WuXN4bdgpBoFsNoPo-x/s1600/jojo12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho_UGD3ozwP2w0M0ltLIAmXjztOcxbC62ziTO9xRNaiXlwDixbGGemRxKZBJWFX4D8eaxrQt_2LZDIEl_lzr5YLjI8amE58qZy6nn1FcCg2mc0XaM2ptXxSth_-WuXN4bdgpBoFsNoPo-x/s400/jojo12.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ_wUh7t39VhaHXv8GuRtho7cM-eo8Up5Arp4kAJ7GgKmeCkho-28cTQztG80s99778o_6fkyrF2yJ355rhSqev6RfX1uB_DGPwKMBYi0KZ6HQJn7_9Uft75_tGcuP75UwwKUlMAoiR72L/s1600/jojo13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ_wUh7t39VhaHXv8GuRtho7cM-eo8Up5Arp4kAJ7GgKmeCkho-28cTQztG80s99778o_6fkyrF2yJ355rhSqev6RfX1uB_DGPwKMBYi0KZ6HQJn7_9Uft75_tGcuP75UwwKUlMAoiR72L/s400/jojo13.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxAc61QVzUNkcxxOWdww8tOW9QzlbRiu8m-o7KRgmzCIJ756EUnyTfzSDb_IsCxa2aBcXpRSlXmc60aGugcH7lm9wFBt5WClLoXniCWgBM8KjYtVLSpJ0Te-TYdxbKhg0m4sTt707KyF8j/s1600/jojo14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxAc61QVzUNkcxxOWdww8tOW9QzlbRiu8m-o7KRgmzCIJ756EUnyTfzSDb_IsCxa2aBcXpRSlXmc60aGugcH7lm9wFBt5WClLoXniCWgBM8KjYtVLSpJ0Te-TYdxbKhg0m4sTt707KyF8j/s400/jojo14.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPhujRUgpvEoMTDBGJ7jnaFT9wwYdcuuaKBbejkajB8u3kCfxux5YXPybSd_ECqCN1i-CEjSAqsi-2Nz6aQxDqfb7ALG3ji9yjIUcNS6TUPabocAjBhIlqljOSjh15jE05t4-EUpdcAt8v/s1600/jojo15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPhujRUgpvEoMTDBGJ7jnaFT9wwYdcuuaKBbejkajB8u3kCfxux5YXPybSd_ECqCN1i-CEjSAqsi-2Nz6aQxDqfb7ALG3ji9yjIUcNS6TUPabocAjBhIlqljOSjh15jE05t4-EUpdcAt8v/s400/jojo15.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjczsN_wH8sbmameZFN1Hthxw261-zdBtMS-2_17wAmV-Y6mgRRIXQqY1yrQwh9l1cZhOE-XYmNDMifPxF3x39CHo70ekpdu4Zz8ajpbzTVY4Bk2rIcb5lGc2UeJRZqDvaqY3ZfeZJ2HRfC/s1600/jojo16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjczsN_wH8sbmameZFN1Hthxw261-zdBtMS-2_17wAmV-Y6mgRRIXQqY1yrQwh9l1cZhOE-XYmNDMifPxF3x39CHo70ekpdu4Zz8ajpbzTVY4Bk2rIcb5lGc2UeJRZqDvaqY3ZfeZJ2HRfC/s400/jojo16.jpg" width="280" /></a><br />
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Yep, that would be Lisa Lisa, who Araki notes in the volume's backmatter was kind of groundbreaking at the time (1986) as a female character who was strong both physically and in terms of personality. In reality, I don't know if she's really all that strong of a character; she mostly falls into the role of the mean trainer who forces her trainees to accomplish the impossible, but she's not a stereotypical giggling schoolgirl, so perhaps that's a positive change from the norm for female characters in manga at the time.<br />
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Anyway, they all proceed to Lisa Lisa's secret island training facility, where they have to face lots of impossible trials that demonstrate the awesome potential of their powers. After almost a month of training, they've definitely leveled up their powers, which is a good thing, since when Joseph goes to face his final test, who should he find waiting for him but Esidisi, who now appears to be wearing a costume that is stitched into his skin and includes cords wrapped around pegs that have been driven into his abs:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzdth2o85bpAv8-kTQ2NHrLeOxYKMxJTegxt2tCX0w7IHauHl7IJhGvMpkVIV4L3o5UoWvwzvNzztbnQ4q49ZQ0kXKE81gxCvYFeWuiFgV3q8-3a5lVRLclLonA83RZr53nMAh1QHzdlPa/s1600/jojo17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzdth2o85bpAv8-kTQ2NHrLeOxYKMxJTegxt2tCX0w7IHauHl7IJhGvMpkVIV4L3o5UoWvwzvNzztbnQ4q49ZQ0kXKE81gxCvYFeWuiFgV3q8-3a5lVRLclLonA83RZr53nMAh1QHzdlPa/s400/jojo17.jpg" width="357" /></a><br />
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The two of them battle each other while standing on top of spikes, and there's plenty of weird and goofy stuff, like a bit in which Esidisi has a crying fit after Joseph cuts off his arm:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuKUGNGBA7FPeWydbODJELEqcoZxsd9AzUoPLZ2_Uv8sY7At1dFm9VOtWgi3e1vSVIFeV_TKA7Zqwxqna8peuwz8mE8NjU0IhTkB9mqmZFaDjQsNGRn3h3ai1gPA_oPbrLTecwUz7gfvLL/s1600/jojo18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuKUGNGBA7FPeWydbODJELEqcoZxsd9AzUoPLZ2_Uv8sY7At1dFm9VOtWgi3e1vSVIFeV_TKA7Zqwxqna8peuwz8mE8NjU0IhTkB9mqmZFaDjQsNGRn3h3ai1gPA_oPbrLTecwUz7gfvLL/s400/jojo18.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Bhl7NCSz-McnVvYp5EZB7eIOBIObCstI7PF0J4PcjznvC95ryTs166TgBmvsFlKN95d1N3Q3RYOKZdJ5MZBFjGz1HmLniSPb8Prj0kSutyqgc0yqHlV62ZxEBIxJOFPdRTTUs9vaXCBv/s1600/jojo19.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Bhl7NCSz-McnVvYp5EZB7eIOBIObCstI7PF0J4PcjznvC95ryTs166TgBmvsFlKN95d1N3Q3RYOKZdJ5MZBFjGz1HmLniSPb8Prj0kSutyqgc0yqHlV62ZxEBIxJOFPdRTTUs9vaXCBv/s400/jojo19.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
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He also reveals that his secret power is heating up his blood and injecting it into people's bodies, boiling them from the inside out, which he demonstrates on the corpse of Joseph's ally in an effective example of the series' memorable gore:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqt2FPKcJcF1YKSM1ODDRtQn84xqNsCR80GtzURG-GmwKvWA9mUyO_t5HcbrZplIF3e0EQd5g9mS6zV8RIyAZbfo1Xf5B-D9uyLcz-eraG7WCKseSF9pmgikGED8WE4aD5K5ZsOqEfTcsP/s1600/jojo20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqt2FPKcJcF1YKSM1ODDRtQn84xqNsCR80GtzURG-GmwKvWA9mUyO_t5HcbrZplIF3e0EQd5g9mS6zV8RIyAZbfo1Xf5B-D9uyLcz-eraG7WCKseSF9pmgikGED8WE4aD5K5ZsOqEfTcsP/s400/jojo20.jpg" width="256" /></a><br />
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That's the moment of the prevalent nastiness that Araki brings to this series. There's also this gross attack, in which Esidisi shoots his veins out of his fingernails:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTwucd2s4EQBG6iBcnOe4av0IeOjb-2qCIdjXCvESWxVbMzUl7Ki5U3vJQyVGVeY1KbxGZqRlwIxUYy2hihdqWDrjR5RAvEM8XFlz5vZB37V1yhlS05I0KtYj6z6pSsXIhSM5CkrYzG2a/s1600/jojo21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTwucd2s4EQBG6iBcnOe4av0IeOjb-2qCIdjXCvESWxVbMzUl7Ki5U3vJQyVGVeY1KbxGZqRlwIxUYy2hihdqWDrjR5RAvEM8XFlz5vZB37V1yhlS05I0KtYj6z6pSsXIhSM5CkrYzG2a/s400/jojo21.jpg" width="392" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi80U2SRW2RD86YsIKm-3PysvW0nwZPf87lrK38OSz9UsKVe5JF8XDDH_SZjYM_Whyphenhyphenz-tAb7OSB5FvL7cDZchLTH0Afpjx-BFd2aXsvXOSTzqPgEfMjnHFD57dlYtXYpdCCUVNjtP_JmpNm/s1600/jojo22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi80U2SRW2RD86YsIKm-3PysvW0nwZPf87lrK38OSz9UsKVe5JF8XDDH_SZjYM_Whyphenhyphenz-tAb7OSB5FvL7cDZchLTH0Afpjx-BFd2aXsvXOSTzqPgEfMjnHFD57dlYtXYpdCCUVNjtP_JmpNm/s400/jojo22.jpg" width="258" /></a><br />
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Jojo eventually manages to defeat Esidisi in a spectacularly gory fashion, but it turns out that he had stolen the red gem that he and his pals were looking for, which in a lucky coincidence, Lisa Lisa had in her possession the whole time. So the gang heads off to intercept the gem, which they learned had been sent to a town in Switzerland, and when they get there, they face off against Kars, who we learn has the ability to extrude blades from his limbs in a fashion that puts Wolverine to shame:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg55l4qlN8IEf9nsOWxw1BzzbawJSfq4ARyWwBRIPq1lRp7-OTeFXID2pm98Cd4ElCTN4bTvwdyWXQhQxmMjQB6GFVyFR_IQeUagqNd8J9A2kmwIl02C2HjffbR2jVai5a8oWE8wIF7Cctn/s1600/jojo23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg55l4qlN8IEf9nsOWxw1BzzbawJSfq4ARyWwBRIPq1lRp7-OTeFXID2pm98Cd4ElCTN4bTvwdyWXQhQxmMjQB6GFVyFR_IQeUagqNd8J9A2kmwIl02C2HjffbR2jVai5a8oWE8wIF7Cctn/s400/jojo23.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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However, he meets his match when he runs into the Nazi officer Stroheim, who seemed to have been dismembered and killed during Jojo's fight with Santviento in Mexico. But he's back, and he's been turned into a cyborg through superior Nazi technology!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibWXBeWSRDMyTQpZsAVsQATOZSjpYES96ki2pD-x3V2VMEdgKdgyoK3UBCW5gxTo81tKdGVz1rcPti7Y8Z-mbHPHrpGR8iVtazZlA7hJLflE7FWfGeVKenP-K1QCmtTHoh0R39DprqSfUX/s1600/jojo24.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibWXBeWSRDMyTQpZsAVsQATOZSjpYES96ki2pD-x3V2VMEdgKdgyoK3UBCW5gxTo81tKdGVz1rcPti7Y8Z-mbHPHrpGR8iVtazZlA7hJLflE7FWfGeVKenP-K1QCmtTHoh0R39DprqSfUX/s400/jojo24.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDRVKF4tjotWqr7PAWJp0kaYtnomMSFW88lGzY6WTJDTgRzEGFDvMWUjGBeLgA5Z4dGkTSY81GaApK5pxSPuqcGpt_zxyOZ5QuXWv9dSZ4wJ-UCIXEwQ0sv2PSvB0agdBOPx7YszNVyxe-/s1600/jojo25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDRVKF4tjotWqr7PAWJp0kaYtnomMSFW88lGzY6WTJDTgRzEGFDvMWUjGBeLgA5Z4dGkTSY81GaApK5pxSPuqcGpt_zxyOZ5QuXWv9dSZ4wJ-UCIXEwQ0sv2PSvB0agdBOPx7YszNVyxe-/s400/jojo25.jpg" width="257" /></a><br />
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After they recover the gem and fight off Kars, who escapes to menace them another day, Jojo and company decide to go after the bad guys, who appear to be hiding in an abandoned castle. We learn a bit about Caesar's tragic backstory, and then he has an epic battle with Wamuu, in which he demonstrates a new technique in which he turns his soap bubbles into deadly blades:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJO6qiQU7w4G3iSktkz3TlNIgUDAJlH8qrhb8DUyQewa4ZkFQRLW3KITxRAaYG8lsHGTUL5FMQmIpNBfzvNiS7IuRMuwGQQHHAJa5Vnw4sFXpmIw2OdV5R29j1fsVmaw8Yd_rm8YRw5NYF/s1600/jojo27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJO6qiQU7w4G3iSktkz3TlNIgUDAJlH8qrhb8DUyQewa4ZkFQRLW3KITxRAaYG8lsHGTUL5FMQmIpNBfzvNiS7IuRMuwGQQHHAJa5Vnw4sFXpmIw2OdV5R29j1fsVmaw8Yd_rm8YRw5NYF/s400/jojo27.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1NR0OP-keUYfucBLjcy4g1kOoJX9B2UV9wXyGA2PK8YgXhZR6LWKcmsC9VGQdVtbCoJNSjyeg3FowlbRpr7V69NkBI036eKNypTQt_eIIMZfl6DUGNI0Nd5AdMIHORiLiqpjXOC1e20sp/s1600/jojo28.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1NR0OP-keUYfucBLjcy4g1kOoJX9B2UV9wXyGA2PK8YgXhZR6LWKcmsC9VGQdVtbCoJNSjyeg3FowlbRpr7V69NkBI036eKNypTQt_eIIMZfl6DUGNI0Nd5AdMIHORiLiqpjXOC1e20sp/s400/jojo28.jpg" width="261" /></a><br />
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And then he dies heroically, while managing to recover the antidote to the poison that Jojo has been infected with, and Jojo and Lisa Lisa mourn for their fallen ally in a typically over the top manner:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdu0YrOikES_21PTDTgiUBgP5GHow6aVvkJc3QndEwsMzX3zkgHiAU319eeX7WmJwBA75CN3kHHewaYFcAL9fm6GYUMTUkfr1cM4HyTRTCh9UIbet42VjQrASfTFOeF9ihMinS1qzCwV-T/s1600/jojo26.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdu0YrOikES_21PTDTgiUBgP5GHow6aVvkJc3QndEwsMzX3zkgHiAU319eeX7WmJwBA75CN3kHHewaYFcAL9fm6GYUMTUkfr1cM4HyTRTCh9UIbet42VjQrASfTFOeF9ihMinS1qzCwV-T/s400/jojo26.jpg" width="268" /></a><br />
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And that's pretty much it for these two volumes. I believe the next installment will be the final volume in part 2 of the series, so we should get some especially epic battles to finish things off, hopefully leading to anticipation of more craziness to come in part 3 of the series.<br />
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So, what have we learned after all of this? This certainly isn't great literature, and it often comes off as incompetent and haphazard, but there's a definite charm to it. Shonen manga like this that involve drawn-out battles follow a very particular formula, with characters constantly coming up with new, crazy techniques and innovative uses of their powers, often delivering long monologues about what they and their opponents are doing in the split seconds that take place while punches are being thrown, leading to lengthy battles and attacks that take multiple pages to play out. There's an emphasis on strategy, with characters regularly revealing that they have anticipated the other's attack and preemptively countered it, only to have their own strategy undone by the other guy's anticipation of their anticipation. It's crazy and complicated, and Araki is great at coming up with surprising ways to have his heroes prevail against what seem like impossible odds.<br />
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So yes, the series delivers the pleasures that so many shonen manga provide, but I can't emphasize enough how utterly weird Araki's sensibilities are. Whether he's clothing his characters in strange fashions, contorting them into bizarre poses, or destroying their bodies in ever more grotesque displays of viscera, you never know what you're going to see upon the next page turn. I'm fascinated by this series, and I can't get enough of its strangeness. I can't wait to read more, and I hope to be surprised, grossed out, and amused for many volumes to come.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-30408365746339253792016-08-11T20:56:00.002-05:002016-08-11T20:56:45.245-05:00Slices of CAKE: Kid stuff, but not really<i><b>Night Air</b></i><br />
By Ben Sears<br />
<a href="http://koyamapress.com/projects/night-air/" target="_blank">Published by Koyama Press</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaHb-ylQ2HCOr-pzQXoiaESWFiiDTwzs0VUniqjBCXXvI3IBY0g5z0SLBy7AZcyETvdBs31RL3YDBcDuP1IfAIPisYoZx1KJdU4MEZdMAMq3OFVHnTZ_iYrvnKVr3FhY4G9v0epey_VB-c/s1600/night+air+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaHb-ylQ2HCOr-pzQXoiaESWFiiDTwzs0VUniqjBCXXvI3IBY0g5z0SLBy7AZcyETvdBs31RL3YDBcDuP1IfAIPisYoZx1KJdU4MEZdMAMq3OFVHnTZ_iYrvnKVr3FhY4G9v0epey_VB-c/s320/night+air+cover.jpg" width="230" /></a><br />
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Perhaps I don't pay as close attention to the comics scene as I used to, or maybe the world of comics has grown large enough that it's impossible to do so, but this is a case where I discovered an artist whose work is right up my alley, but who I didn't know about before I met him at CAKE. I love his art style, which seems equally influenced by European comics like <i>Tintin</i>, the animated films of Studio Ghibli, and role playing video games like the <i>Zelda </i>series, but he brings all this together to craft his own world, which features a rich, fascinating mix of boy adventurers, blocky robots, menacing monsters, and haunted castles.<br />
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The story here involves a boy who seems to be just traveling around the retro-futuristic fantasy land and having adventures with his robot pal, and they end up checking out a castle in hopes of finding treasure, only to get trapped within its walls by a malevolent ghost-entrepreneur. I love the way Sears has his heroes just go along with the strange stuff they find, coming up with a plan to defeat the bad guys using the power of friendship. He gives things just enough menace that there seems to be real danger, while still letting his characters use their wits and resources to prevail.<br />
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Sears' art is just lovely, using a thin line and plenty of rich colors to fill the pages with detail, and he includes enough background information to make the world seem like a living, breathing place, full of exciting and fantastical happenings, which we're only just getting to experience one small corner of. I loved this book, and I'm really excited to read as many more of Sears' comics as I can.<br />
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<i><b>Lou</b></i><br />
By Melissa Mendes<br />
<a href="http://indyworld.com/imprints/alternative-comics/melissa-mendes/lou/" target="_blank">Published by Alternative Comics</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja70Recg29rzyccNFPSqrFJ60xHXgdTsbfrcst8nTUwFsahQ0DmSHIeKoO0o9O_DGCoG5Goy5tzJYRTssxY9ec2YChNKK0xP5I7fSmis1gqEALFFQI4Q92RXP9JmpN_csGxx-Wy94jiq86/s1600/Lou-MelissaMendes-225x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja70Recg29rzyccNFPSqrFJ60xHXgdTsbfrcst8nTUwFsahQ0DmSHIeKoO0o9O_DGCoG5Goy5tzJYRTssxY9ec2YChNKK0xP5I7fSmis1gqEALFFQI4Q92RXP9JmpN_csGxx-Wy94jiq86/s1600/Lou-MelissaMendes-225x300.jpg" /></a><br />
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With this graphic novel, which was originally published as a series of minicomics by <a href="http://www.oilycomics.com/" target="_blank">Oily Comics</a>, Melissa Mendes tells a pretty fascinating story about a group of kids (the title character, a girl who is about 10 years old, and her two brothers, with the younger one being around six and the older one a teenager, as well as a couple of her friends) trying to understand the events going on around them. But before diving into any dramatic happenings, she just lets us spends time with these characters, giving them realistic relationships with each other and their parents, showing them bickering with each other or begging their parents to get a dog, and letting us see glimpses of their parents as they struggle to make ends meet and keep up a good relationship with their children.<br />
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But while these scenes of daily life are going on, we get hints of more adult concerns that are going on around them, especially in the teenage brother's job at a pizza place, where his boss seems to be going through a crisis of some sort. There's also an odd plot about the younger kids discovering a secret hideout in an abandoned building, and these two plots converge in what turns out to be a harrowing adventure that occurs when the kids' parents finally get a chance to go out and have some adult time (which, as a parent, might have been the most agonizing part of the book for me).<br />
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This isn't any sort of grand artistic statement or a book that reveals untold depths when examining the lives of children, but it's a good story told well, and one that manages to capture some real truths about how kids see the world, and due to that, it ends up being quite good. I'm glad I got a chance to read it, and I'll be sure to look for some of Mendes' other comics in the future.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-63274329385490275892016-07-19T21:10:00.001-05:002016-07-19T21:10:55.355-05:00Slices of CAKE: Cathy G. Johnson brings the talent<i><b>Gorgeous</b></i><br />
By Cathy G. Johnson<br />
<a href="http://koyamapress.com/projects/gorgeous/" target="_blank">Published by Koyama Press</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7nXKJNKKZn1KBeR1uf1ow7sw1_sLS3Ch6wxmzotnLqX7CmtYrLcwd8zrK56EYbNTHzd8S8c-rp56BWuUoG2y60yQwGRo0bk4_WX-Enj4W0LDZVFaLYTggwP8rb8IBuDITa1bLjrnkZPTs/s1600/Gorgeous+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7nXKJNKKZn1KBeR1uf1ow7sw1_sLS3Ch6wxmzotnLqX7CmtYrLcwd8zrK56EYbNTHzd8S8c-rp56BWuUoG2y60yQwGRo0bk4_WX-Enj4W0LDZVFaLYTggwP8rb8IBuDITa1bLjrnkZPTs/s320/Gorgeous+cover.jpg" width="230" /></a><br />
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<i><b>Jeremiah</b></i><br />
By Cathy G. Johnson<br />
<a href="http://onepercentpress.bigcartel.com/product/cathy-g-johnson-jeremiah" target="_blank">Published by One Percent Press</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGfpV4I2vk_rnh09XWVdrH8y9dy6KCycDRGNCg3pthiaMTE6q4iBa5QGOZYRhNYvqlJrP9oQtwvVyksB6T_BT9cx3gfdCUGQPH2BRIF5zmZYE-XsoGO73wCvS7MWm22_mvOM3RqDdOaVUf/s1600/Jeremiah+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGfpV4I2vk_rnh09XWVdrH8y9dy6KCycDRGNCg3pthiaMTE6q4iBa5QGOZYRhNYvqlJrP9oQtwvVyksB6T_BT9cx3gfdCUGQPH2BRIF5zmZYE-XsoGO73wCvS7MWm22_mvOM3RqDdOaVUf/s320/Jeremiah+cover.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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Cathy G. Johnson was a special guest at CAKE this year, and while I had looked at their art in previous years and thought it was really nice looking, now that I've actually read some of their comics, I can see why my fellow organizers wanted to highlight their work. Johnson has some great cartooning skill, utilizing simple lines for character art and delineating faces with dot eyes and triangle noses, but also filling panels with gorgeously moody shadows and evocative watercolors. Johnson's art and storytelling leave a lot unsaid, forcing readers to puzzle out what characters might be feeling, but making them compelling enough that we want to do so.<br />
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<i>Gorgeous</i> is an interesting character piece following a couple of rebellious young punks who get chased out of a house party, get into a car accident due to their stupidity, and end up hanging out with the girl who they crashed into as she waits for a mechanic shop to open in the morning so she can get her car fixed. It's an interesting portrait of disaffected, carefree youth, one in which these characters hint that maybe there's something going on under the surface, but then reverse themselves suddenly and turn out to be worse than we expected. And fascinatingly, Johnson chooses to leave them there and follow the other character instead, providing a glimpse of things from the other side of the equation and an understanding of how people's actions affect others, both positively and negatively.<br />
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<i>Jeremiah </i>is another somewhat minimalist graphic novel, following the title character as he lives and works on his father's farm, has a strange, at least somewhat sexual relationship with a younger girl that seems like she might be related to him, and becomes enamored with the stranger that his father hires to help out. It's an odd story, one that gets odder as it progresses and things start happening that don't really make sense, but the way that Johnson details Jeremiah's confusion, uncertainty, and inner struggles makes him compelling, and when he finally takes an action to pursue his desires instead of letting others rule him, it's thrilling. I'm still not sure what the symbolism of everything means (maybe something about the oppression of small-town life or a religious upbringing?), but it's a fascinating work to consider, and it's full of absolutely beautiful watercolors that capture the alternating bright beauty and oppressive shadows of Jeremiah's life.<br />
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It's obvious from reading these two books that Johnson is a young talent to be reckoned with, and they have cartooning skill to spare. I'm always amazed when an artist can do so much with what seems like so little, and Johnson is a perfect exemplar of finding just the right line and tone to evoke emotion or draw the reader in and make them examine their characters. I'm excited to see someone like this continue to develop and mature as an artist, and I can't wait to see what they do next.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-55570803840682633712016-07-04T13:16:00.001-05:002016-07-04T13:16:32.637-05:00Slices of CAKE: Moving, Silly, and Cute<i><b>Sit and Think About What You've Done</b></i><br />
By M.R. Trower<br />
<a href="http://mrtrower.bigcartel.com/product/sit-and-think-about-what-you-ve-done" target="_blank">Self-published</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrxMHmEE_pg9AeZKBOY2cTAd7l5WMHmIKbWrE9fYOcJB96KEG9n14KCuewDpOA_0YODLNz0c5VVdnryYluRkVh2Dx0jMbGAH6SIY5_XnToIK3nUHMNJQjb68UQsYGfNZ2FprcdRYA5Pdwe/s1600/sit+and+think+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrxMHmEE_pg9AeZKBOY2cTAd7l5WMHmIKbWrE9fYOcJB96KEG9n14KCuewDpOA_0YODLNz0c5VVdnryYluRkVh2Dx0jMbGAH6SIY5_XnToIK3nUHMNJQjb68UQsYGfNZ2FprcdRYA5Pdwe/s320/sit+and+think+cover.jpg" width="207" /></a><br />
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Transgender people seem to be in the spotlight in the United States at the moment, but as with any minority, it can be hard to understand them when you're coming at the subject from a position like mine; that is from the perspective of a white male heterosexual whose experience is deemed the "default" and who doesn't have to question how they fit in to society. That's why I find stories in which members of minority groups describe their experience so valuable; they provide me with understanding that I wouldn't have otherwise.<br />
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Of course, that perspective makes these stories all about me, which is the opposite of their usual intent. I don't need my sensibilities catered to; I have pretty much the entirety of western literature available for that. But I still get a lot out of this type of story, and I'm glad that people are willing to share them with me.<br />
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That's what M.R. Trower does with this minicomic; it's a sort of diary of their experience following their top surgery, a detailed look at the physical toll the surgery took on their body, the swirl of emotions that they felt, the support received from friends, and the fact this is just one step along the way in their life. It's moving stuff, full of raw emotion that doesn't pull any punches, a nearly direct pouring of feeling from Trower's head onto the paper, and it's a beautiful document of humanity, a glimpse into another person's experience that's immersive and heartfelt. I applaud Trower for their courage in sharing this story, and even though I don't think it's purpose is to educate people about the lives and travails of trans people, I found it immensely rewarding to get to share a bit of a life that's so foreign from my own.<br />
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<i><b>Papa Time</b></i><br />
By Max Weiss<br />
<a href="http://waxmice.storenvy.com/products/16468371-papa-time" target="_blank">Self-published</a> (although I got it from <a href="http://onepercentpress.bigcartel.com/" target="_blank">One Percent Press</a>)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOC9CQ7JShznHKlV08RoL4ynznEr9AbxT3zCLzbEysfETrJL0IE9oFWEOM3RoN0PAaV5Ga7fu5jgL4Y16Elc9Ddui3EKPIslGDMOZX0buIlk_nVV5SkiotfEN0Y_6ggummR-l6jP-GrhDU/s1600/papa+time+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOC9CQ7JShznHKlV08RoL4ynznEr9AbxT3zCLzbEysfETrJL0IE9oFWEOM3RoN0PAaV5Ga7fu5jgL4Y16Elc9Ddui3EKPIslGDMOZX0buIlk_nVV5SkiotfEN0Y_6ggummR-l6jP-GrhDU/s320/papa+time+cover.jpg" width="250" /></a><br />
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And now for something completely different. This one is just silly, a stream-of-consciousness story (literally; Max Weiss notes on the inside from cover that he scripted it in this manner, then later adapted it to comics form using techniques learned in <a href="http://franksantoro.tumblr.com/course" target="_blank">Frank Santoro's correspondence course</a>), about a young woman who meets a friend in a diner and tells her about a guy she just met and fell in love with. He's a nondescript, balding, middle-aged fellow, but she is now in love with him, and the reasons for that, as well as the rivalries she soon finds for his affections, all sort of make sense, at least from a comedy perspective. It's goofy, funny stuff, and Weiss's fairly simple art makes it all work by highlighting the characters' expressions in a humorous manner and mixing simple character art with fairly dense shading and texture in the backgrounds. There's really not much to this thing, but what's there is pretty enjoyable in its strangeness. I liked it well enough.<br />
-----<br />
<br />
<i><b>Come Back Soon</b></i><br />
By <a href="http://www.rachelbard.com/" target="_blank">Rachel Bard</a><br />
Self-published<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5Hv5K-cmmnPtQhHOdOGwqyQ9nJEr8NI6PNZW053C5Mpn5FDJE2Ims7lcD48rkQem64o8yTg_Vplb1vhdjqyAUCoBin49Q1kCMCPsRMUWRM3OqVB6U2Z_zWS54iB_Q_NdEsPtFvPfYKqg-/s1600/come+back+soon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5Hv5K-cmmnPtQhHOdOGwqyQ9nJEr8NI6PNZW053C5Mpn5FDJE2Ims7lcD48rkQem64o8yTg_Vplb1vhdjqyAUCoBin49Q1kCMCPsRMUWRM3OqVB6U2Z_zWS54iB_Q_NdEsPtFvPfYKqg-/s320/come+back+soon.jpg" width="233" /></a><br />
<br />
If I was going to give out an award for the cutest comic I got at CAKE 2016, this would win hands down. It's tiny, measuring about 1 inch by 2 inches, and it's one of those little minicomics that's formed by folding a single piece of paper into a short comic that's only a few pages long. What makes this one special though is that Rachel Bard manages to use this limited space to tell a cute story about a lizard going on a trip to an island, checking out all the animals he saw there, and drawing pictures of them. Then, he makes a little comic of his own called "New Animals that I Found", and Bard includes it as an even tinier minicomic tucked into the last page of the comic! It's a beautiful little piece of art that tells a simple story, and an ingenious use of a comic within a comic to demonstrate both Bard's creativity and that of her character. I loved it, and I love that this is the kind of amazing work I can find at CAKE each year.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-42310756130187322852016-06-27T12:30:00.000-05:002016-06-27T12:30:28.271-05:00Slices of CAKE: Jon Drawdoer does some cool drawings<b><i>Mindfulness Comics</i> #2</b><br />
<i><b>Hello</b></i><br />
By Jon Drawdoer<br />
<a href="http://drawdoer.bigcartel.com/#_=_" target="_blank">Self-published</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnnOaePPQJTLmHlkgu7kuboygwdTuyWyUFlOu8RL9o-qZ5J9K-VrN4ac_-FNOWcmdv-iwLlSfukU1DpGDqjtY1yADW2yzjjAhyphenhyphenOOj7GatA8X6cFsGEmQUHRE9H6LeTrNYJuNhOh_FqWkph/s1600/Mindfulness+Comics+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnnOaePPQJTLmHlkgu7kuboygwdTuyWyUFlOu8RL9o-qZ5J9K-VrN4ac_-FNOWcmdv-iwLlSfukU1DpGDqjtY1yADW2yzjjAhyphenhyphenOOj7GatA8X6cFsGEmQUHRE9H6LeTrNYJuNhOh_FqWkph/s320/Mindfulness+Comics+2.png" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7xlJcjhec03Sr3Btq2TaeMzhoZscySRdpclik2ZnWccbChsCCjnIky1D1PwgQB3E-CrL5xif3m0NqjEpWzx1LrSMNFfv_nlg96nRfGjM7tfGy3WFh0LBt1GvCu15lA_BJNZMNcxEDvQwA/s1600/hello.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7xlJcjhec03Sr3Btq2TaeMzhoZscySRdpclik2ZnWccbChsCCjnIky1D1PwgQB3E-CrL5xif3m0NqjEpWzx1LrSMNFfv_nlg96nRfGjM7tfGy3WFh0LBt1GvCu15lA_BJNZMNcxEDvQwA/s320/hello.png" width="320" /></a><br />
<br />
Jon Drawdoer is a fellow CAKE helper-outer and all around nice guy, and he's gifted me with several of the comics that he's made over the past few years, so it's about time I got around to writing about them. Jon is an interesting fellow, and I'm loving the way he is using the comics format to explore some of his inner thoughts in <i>Mindfulness Comics</i>. In this issue, he ruminates on his "second adolescence and interpersonal communication, but the bulk of the issue is taken up with a sort of visual essay about how he tries to consider the way his mind works as a function of his body's physical processes, and how looking at things this way is kind of liberating, since it allows him to refrain from getting too upset if his emotions get out of control or he becomes too self-critical. Since these are functions of his body's chemicals (or as he puts it, drugs going through tubes), taking their actions personally would be like getting angry over a sneeze.<br />
<br />
As someone who has had my own struggles with depression and controlling my emotions, I find this to be fascinating, and the way Jon looks at things is definitely worthy of consideration. He details his own process of meditation, demonstrating the value of taking the time to understand why he feels the way he feels and thinks the way he thinks.<br />
<br />
And since this is a comic, the visuals play as much of a part as the words here. Jon fills pages with intricate, near-abstract swirls of imagery that play off what he is saying beautifully, illustrating the snarl of the mind's inner workings and the attempts to begin to understand it, if not actually control it. It makes for a lovely, near-breathtaking illustration of a concept that's hard to wrap your head around. I'm really glad I read it, and it will continue to give me plenty to think about.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0khbHa-QUujugSeOtnlJiMuKsRy3zQUUY9AA9ErUwFwL7ps11KnVXOrtRp633_eFUm8fOYXH5OxX4UzR76TkeWTCQOTkMSLA5StfmbO7PWjc0jtxmgmZ8-F1sqH-lC8SNrHSan_brPPVC/s1600/mindfulness+comics+p12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0khbHa-QUujugSeOtnlJiMuKsRy3zQUUY9AA9ErUwFwL7ps11KnVXOrtRp633_eFUm8fOYXH5OxX4UzR76TkeWTCQOTkMSLA5StfmbO7PWjc0jtxmgmZ8-F1sqH-lC8SNrHSan_brPPVC/s400/mindfulness+comics+p12.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
With Jon's newest comic, <i>Hello</i>, he seems to go in a more stream-of-consciousness direction, using mostly wordless imagery to depict all sorts of odd transformations and scene changes. It would probably make a cool animated short, with one odd tableau leading to another and lots of clever shifts between styles. It's in bright, striking color, and it appears to have been created digitally, making use of computer-created art alongside hand-drawn imagery (and maybe even some photo manipulation) to come together into a strange, fascinating whole. I dig it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_6uhOTt65cLG1JWEYQI0KIgyaCeTbTYejgAvfAwglZaL2izvvdRtu4AXoPWFC1cfg9J2MKeq9CI-7gWh5ir2sv9owcdlhaQRWCjebNun47pLwHUgSIRL7ZQfFsYq3OWe_fpzifdWQb0IC/s1600/hello+p12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_6uhOTt65cLG1JWEYQI0KIgyaCeTbTYejgAvfAwglZaL2izvvdRtu4AXoPWFC1cfg9J2MKeq9CI-7gWh5ir2sv9owcdlhaQRWCjebNun47pLwHUgSIRL7ZQfFsYq3OWe_fpzifdWQb0IC/s320/hello+p12.png" width="318" /></a></div>
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<br />
With these two releases, I feel like Jon has really come into his own as an artist to watch, and I'm excited to read more of his work.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-32241228729087819022016-06-26T09:58:00.002-05:002016-06-26T09:58:42.104-05:00Slices of CAKE: Ben Passmore is smart, yet playful<i><b>Your Black Friend</b></i><br />
<i><b>Dead, Dead, Dead</b></i><br />
By Ben Passmore<br />
<a href="https://www.patreon.com/daygloayhole?ty=h" target="_blank">Self-published</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8hk07ewbjWs5Abo-3FDO1tP0J1n2fEsJvuFBg9Ki9cGhBh29LFQaQ7iJ3f3pRea6YYIQeVxDXRiAMNFfv2Y0tJMto3zStO9kdK_uVzTUnjqMmSe-2n0zsde2rmXVTQ3ClePCdj781f9QH/s1600/Your+Black+Friend+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8hk07ewbjWs5Abo-3FDO1tP0J1n2fEsJvuFBg9Ki9cGhBh29LFQaQ7iJ3f3pRea6YYIQeVxDXRiAMNFfv2Y0tJMto3zStO9kdK_uVzTUnjqMmSe-2n0zsde2rmXVTQ3ClePCdj781f9QH/s320/Your+Black+Friend+cover.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigRe_8eYIRvT8A07Gw8V4vvTP9Qrxy8B_JXBBwL4XkPwGTtBu98BoPXGkyFtQMAevKkX91zoDiMKJAlWROD_d-eFb-99-Wdtub0k9rSpiPbbDZsUeQrGZ8IgagNVTKoPuC4It5CVm0yORm/s1600/Dead+Dead+Dead+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigRe_8eYIRvT8A07Gw8V4vvTP9Qrxy8B_JXBBwL4XkPwGTtBu98BoPXGkyFtQMAevKkX91zoDiMKJAlWROD_d-eFb-99-Wdtub0k9rSpiPbbDZsUeQrGZ8IgagNVTKoPuC4It5CVm0yORm/s320/Dead+Dead+Dead+cover.jpg" width="201" /></a><br />
<br />
I discovered Ben Passmore a couple years ago at CAKE, and I've been excited to pick up some new comics from him each new year. He's got a great style that's full of expressive cartooning and dynamic action, and his writing is a mix of philosophy, goofy jokes, highly particular pop culture references, and cynicism about the world (there's a definite reason why so many of his comics take place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland) leavened with poking fun at himself.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, his new minicomic <i><a href="https://t.co/JqkN7BxRAE" target="_blank">Your Black Friend</a></i> strays away from that template. It's more of a treatise on race in our society, and its incredibly instructive and insightful, taking the point of view of a black person who has friends who are white and liberal, yet still do plenty of clueless things that drive him crazy. I've seen plenty of essays about this subject over the past several years, and as a white person who tries (and probably regularly fails) to be aware of how easy my life is in comparison to those of other races, I'm glad to have regular reminders of the fine line that many African Americans have to walk in our society and the stupid attitudes that I need to adjust.<br />
<br />
Passmore's version of this type of essay is a good one, looking at the subject from several angles, with his main character demonstrating anger over the casual racism that he sees every day, expressing frustration over how his friends act enlightened but still view him as a sort of exotic accessory and co-opt his identity without thinking, and even feeling somewhat distanced from other black people due to the way he acts and dresses. That's what really makes this work, I think: Passmore doesn't try to sell this as an example of the universal black experience; he looks at one person's experience and notes the difficulties that he faces every day, both from others and himself. And he does it in a manner that conveys anger, sadness, uncertainty, and even humor, offering some great insights for the reader. I think it's really something special.<br />
<br />
With <i>Dead, Dead, Dead</i>, Passmore is back in his comfort zone, presenting a series of somewhat goofy stories in his usual post-apocalyptic hellscape and touching on religion, art, consumerism, and violence in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner. Most of the story follows his "Nolimitz" character, a drifter who keeps running into people who want to kill him, at which point he ends up beating them to death in action scenes that rival most any superhero smackdown.<br />
<br />
There's plenty of symbolism/commentary going on here, with my favorite bit being a corporate executive offering food to the character, but having his goons literally take an arm and a leg first, then giving him a peg leg, saying that the company values their customers' sense of well being. It's a ghastly look at how the rich treat the poor, and the comeuppance the bad guys receive is enjoyably therapeutic.<br />
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I also liked a bit in which we come across Jesus hanging on the cross, arguing with God (who appears as a giant disembodied hand) about how antiquated and ridiculous the Christian religion is, before Nolimitz shows up and beats them both up. It's pretty funny, and I love the way Passmore depicts the action, with his character making crazy jumps and cutting people in half with his machete. This whole minicomic is full of that sort of thing, and it's a delight. I don't always fully understand what Passmore is saying, but I love his passion and how he seems to be having so much fun creating mayhem and destroying the various philosophical ideas he evokes. I'm always up for more of this sort of thing, so here's hoping he'll have more to offer at next year's CAKE.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-27333914695636085902016-06-17T12:38:00.001-05:002016-06-17T12:38:41.122-05:00CAKE 2016: What a haul!The fifth annual Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) took place last weekend, and it was a blast. I've gotten more and more involved in helping out with the festival over the past few years, and this year, once again, I handled the official CAKE social media accounts, so if you're interested in what I saw during the fest, I recommend heading over to the <a href="https://twitter.com/CAKEchicago" target="_blank">@CAKEChicago account on Twitter</a>.<br />
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As for what I ended up bringing home, here's what ended up being a pretty massive pile of comics:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLGZk86LwRWGfsa4RAGPXhKQC22xzHNZzdK_FL8i3dIIraE0OkBS6fxQx9Ofv-ZWzZ4bu1Uk2nEeWGezWY-dy5kEtVrc-VtwgDIQQM4x2BwRYPWb70SAaApOTBpsZoCLRkc86Zl86hpHM_/s1600/CAKE+2016+haul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLGZk86LwRWGfsa4RAGPXhKQC22xzHNZzdK_FL8i3dIIraE0OkBS6fxQx9Ofv-ZWzZ4bu1Uk2nEeWGezWY-dy5kEtVrc-VtwgDIQQM4x2BwRYPWb70SAaApOTBpsZoCLRkc86Zl86hpHM_/s400/CAKE+2016+haul.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Let's see if I can detail all of this comics goodness:<br />
<br />
Along the top row:<br />
<ul>
<li>A tote bag promoting the Charles Schulz Library and a "Toonie" t-shirt, both from the <a href="http://www.cartoonstudies.org/" target="_blank">Center for Cartoon Studies</a>.</li>
<li>A print from the "CAKE Not Dead" comics reading that took place on Saturday night, featuring art by <a href="http://benjaminmarcusi.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Ben Marcus</a>.</li>
<li>CAKE's minicomics incentive giveaway print for this year, featuring art by <a href="http://www.ezracdaniels.com/" target="_blank">Ezra Claytan Daniels</a>.</li>
<li><i>The Great Green House and Other Stories</i>, by <a href="http://primeslime.com/" target="_blank">Henry Guerra</a>.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Next row:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><i><a href="http://www.conundrumpress.com/new-titles/20x20-twenty-years-of-conundrum-press/" target="_blank">20x20: 20 Years of Conundrum Press</a></i>.</li>
<li>Two issues of a newsprint comic called <i>Emergence</i>, published by <a href="http://neoglyphicmedia.com/" target="_blank">Neoglyphic Media</a>.</li>
<li>Three installments of <i>Thursday Night Comics</i> and <i>a. afarensis</i>, by <a href="http://johnvestevich.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">John Vestevich</a>.</li>
<li>"An Excerpt from <i>Bottled</i>," by <a href="http://chrisgooch.com.au/" target="_blank">Chris Gooch</a>.</li>
<li><i>Kutikuti Feminist Issue</i>, by <a href="http://feministinensarjakuva.sarjakuvablogit.com/" target="_blank">Femicomix Finland</a>.</li>
<li><i>Godhead</i> #1, by <a href="http://talkweirdpress.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Caitlin Skaalrud</a>.</li>
<li><i>Ppppmm Hhssss #1</i>, by <a href="http://atpratt.net/" target="_blank">A.T. Pratt</a>.</li>
<li><i>Papa Time</i>, by <a href="http://waxmice.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Max Weiss</a>.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Next row:</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><i>Shadow Hills</i> #1-4, by <a href="http://www.onlyskincomics.com/" target="_blank">Sean Ford</a>.</li>
<li><i>The Electric Cruise </i>and <i>Misfits and Strays</i>, by <a href="http://limbusland.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Andy Glass</a>.</li>
<li><i>G Hhrt Xipj</i>, by <a href="http://variety-pak.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Walker Tate</a>.</li>
<li><i>Nori and the Bats in the House</i>, by <a href="http://www.rumihara.com/" target="_blank">Rumi Hara</a>.</li>
<li><i>Sit and Think About What You've Done</i>, by <a href="http://mrtrower.com/" target="_blank">M.R. Trower</a>.</li>
<li>An untitled snake minicomic by <a href="http://krystaldifronzo.com/" target="_blank">Krystal DiFronzo</a> (who also did this year's CAKE poster art!).</li>
<li><i>Gorgeous</i> and <i>Jeremiah</i>, by <a href="http://www.cathyboy.com/" target="_blank">Cathy G. Johnson</a>.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Next row (if it can be called that; this "row" sort of ends in the middle of the pile, just to the left of <i>Nori and the Bats in the House</i>):</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>The Winter 2016 edition of <i><a href="http://www.fineprintpaper.com/" target="_blank">Fine Print</a></i>, a newsprint comic collection/zine.</li>
<li><i>Lou</i>, by <a href="http://www.mmmendes.com/" target="_blank">Melissa Mendes</a>.</li>
<li><i>Fortune</i>, by <a href="http://jasonwwalz.com/" target="_blank">Jason Walz</a>.</li>
<li><i>Someone Please Have Sex With Me</i>, by <a href="http://www.ginawynbrandt.com/" target="_blank">Gina Wynbrandt</a>.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Next row (what the hell, we'll just call this the last row): </div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Viewotron #2, by <a href="http://sambsharpe.com/" target="_blank">Sam Sharpe</a>.</li>
<li>Two Shots, <i>Lucky Shot </i>and <i>Little Dudes</i>, by <a href="http://abgcomics.com/" target="_blank">Andrew George</a>.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://www.kilgorebooks.com/shop/gc4bxcx112n686k7xjaprwikacvfvx" target="_blank">Paid For It</a></i>, by "Chesty Matt" (a.k.a. Joe Matt).</li>
<li><i>A Brief History of Slinkys</i>, an excerpt from the forthcoming book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Brief-Histories-Everyday-Objects-Warner/dp/1250078652?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0" target="_blank">Brief Histories of Everyday Objects</a></i>, by <a href="http://andywarnercomics.com/" target="_blank">Andy Warner</a>.</li>
<li>Night Air, by <a href="http://freebensears.com/" target="_blank">Ben Sears</a>.</li>
<li><i>Bad Dog!!/Good Kitty!</i>, by <a href="http://www.isabellarotman.com/" target="_blank">Isabella Rotman</a> and <a href="http://www.mikefreiheit.com/" target="_blank">Mike Freiheit</a>.</li>
<li><i>Dead Dead Dead</i>, <i>Your Black Friend</i>, and <i>Daygloayhole: A Neverending Story</i>, by <a href="http://daygloayhole.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Ben Passmore</a>.</li>
<li><i>Dancing With Jack Ketch</i>, by <a href="http://www.joshshalek.com/" target="_blank">Josh Shalek</a>.</li>
<li>Folrath #1, a zine by <a href="http://lamano21.com/" target="_blank">Zak Sally</a>.</li>
<li><i>Honey</i>, by <a href="http://corinnehalbert.com/home.html" target="_blank">Corinne Halbert</a>.</li>
<li>And finally, a tiny minicomic (with another even tinier minicomic tucked inside!) called <i>Come Back Soon</i>, by <a href="http://www.rachelbard.com/" target="_blank">Rachel Bard</a>.</li>
</ul>
<div>
And that appears to be everything. Whew! I'll be trying to get some more blogs about some of these cool comics up over the next few weeks, so stay tuned. And now we can start planning for CAKE 2017!</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-82996537304318693512016-06-07T12:58:00.001-05:002016-06-07T12:58:46.146-05:00One Piece: Aargh, why do I have to wait for the NEXT volume for the awesomeness?<b><i>One Piece</i>, Volume 78</b><br />
By Eiichiro Oda<br />
<a href="http://www.viz.com/read/manga/one-piece-vol-78/12254" target="_blank">Published by Viz Media</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1fchluXWX2ObNFjpaxE9S9YR5Fyy1oTDQ3PCPbdz7sfTacx2aOa1rOjF3yN7RX4Yslplao9xXXM7zXoiiHylaruaJ-4oPDR_15XPnle-lbowKOQiWqZrtXWF_JP9Bc2KM_aya9CAmmnUI/s1600/One+Piece+78.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1fchluXWX2ObNFjpaxE9S9YR5Fyy1oTDQ3PCPbdz7sfTacx2aOa1rOjF3yN7RX4Yslplao9xXXM7zXoiiHylaruaJ-4oPDR_15XPnle-lbowKOQiWqZrtXWF_JP9Bc2KM_aya9CAmmnUI/s320/One+Piece+78.jpg" width="213" /></a><br />
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Writing about each new volume of One Piece is kind of difficult, since it's tough to do it in a way that's not just "And then this cool thing happens! And check out this other bit of awesomeness!" The series has gone on for so long that it can be hard to come up with other things to say. Not that it's not still great; every new volume is tons of fun, full of crazy action, funny jokes, and emotional character moments, and this one is no exception.<br />
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So: how about a summary? This is what seems to be the penultimate volume in the current storyline, in which the Straw Hat Pirates are fighting the evil Don Quixote Doflamingo, who has been tyrannically ruling the kingdom of Dressrosa for ten years. The battle has raged throughout the last several volumes, but Luffy and his allies (who have grown in number here to include not just the Straw Hats, but the kingdom's former royal family and a bunch of other gladiators and pirates) have defeated most of the bad guys, with only a few of them remaining.<br />
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As usually happens in this point of these stories, various one-on-one matchups occur, and the ones we get here are pretty great. We get to see the gladiator Kyros (who spent the last ten years and most of the last several volumes in the form of a toy soldier, but has now been restored to his full, if one-legged, form as a total badass) face off against a guy named Diamante, who murdered Kyros' wife. Diamante has a weird power where he can turn things into paper (or some two-dimensional form) and back again, and he uses an attack where he shoots a bunch of confetti up into the air then turns it into a weapon:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj81qm51HwJkgX6M8BGimaz6jlPccDZavA8wtBFbHNQQ6pmI_PyvxlEOFjUIMa0477MnxMSmewNj-W_ISp293J4c-_JMPt-dBNfCo6NjRYIJJ8XQOkBgGNET_x4p1w0NWAAbrmBYoT7b0xl/s1600/One+Piece+78-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj81qm51HwJkgX6M8BGimaz6jlPccDZavA8wtBFbHNQQ6pmI_PyvxlEOFjUIMa0477MnxMSmewNj-W_ISp293J4c-_JMPt-dBNfCo6NjRYIJJ8XQOkBgGNET_x4p1w0NWAAbrmBYoT7b0xl/s400/One+Piece+78-1.jpg" width="255" /></a><br />
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But that's no real obstacle to Kyros, who refuses to be harmed by such cowardly tricks:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6CLzA0E6LErtl5qUqyXlThhbXdb2f2qvV0tLXRJrgR_A8xI8yMvW9te1RefaYYBsdPt89iAnm1bEqzVpllc7_tta3TiYfodmMeS-s42I6JUsUSWubTgDn3Bu5Ycl91TxJHtzUAE2ax6Lm/s1600/One+Piece+78-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6CLzA0E6LErtl5qUqyXlThhbXdb2f2qvV0tLXRJrgR_A8xI8yMvW9te1RefaYYBsdPt89iAnm1bEqzVpllc7_tta3TiYfodmMeS-s42I6JUsUSWubTgDn3Bu5Ycl91TxJHtzUAE2ax6Lm/s400/One+Piece+78-2.jpg" width="357" /></a><br />
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Diamante shoots Kyros in the leg, leaving him open to damage, but he won't stop coming, demonstrating some intensely righteous badassery:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRBgY-LFEXSMhO0OpAuphNXuGI9p3Iix_imN18BY-Dg6ApoY2GUucdCB8ALI6zEyxVro-RfIGvlFJFeb0-u0qG_1Esi46g_H87vgC7zS11hFdN2YMDM2YnoiOHVUcZ-FbrFtoTmR3NRQzL/s1600/One+Piece+78-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRBgY-LFEXSMhO0OpAuphNXuGI9p3Iix_imN18BY-Dg6ApoY2GUucdCB8ALI6zEyxVro-RfIGvlFJFeb0-u0qG_1Esi46g_H87vgC7zS11hFdN2YMDM2YnoiOHVUcZ-FbrFtoTmR3NRQzL/s400/One+Piece+78-3.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEish5S_tLvB-Og3MmA-cvPalcEYWVOV1dPFQOJMUXIOGe5yqOaC7g0C0B7cwkeWUysDUSroAIXzd4h1lHUoa0hP9hMNRip2l7ToBzb6agRkPjFMc6LSbNo4niq9vnDtilIjiGfrz37tfV91/s1600/One+Piece+78-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="395" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEish5S_tLvB-Og3MmA-cvPalcEYWVOV1dPFQOJMUXIOGe5yqOaC7g0C0B7cwkeWUysDUSroAIXzd4h1lHUoa0hP9hMNRip2l7ToBzb6agRkPjFMc6LSbNo4niq9vnDtilIjiGfrz37tfV91/s400/One+Piece+78-4.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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I love that sort of stuff. Also good is Zolo's fight against a guy named Pica, who has taken the form of a giant stone version of himself and is about to attack the former King Riku and stop any opposition to Doflamingo's rule. But by the time Zolo realizes what's going on, Pica is halfway across the town, so his only way to stop him is by getting one of his gladiator allies to throw him the entire distance:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTnN8UgQiejSBwy6SUJ95_4aeS03YDNuFyG1cAt_A6L2Ll_tKTqONWyi3lwPg0Xse86AnvJaQqZba1FPQYe-mo89lL8bgpuq1Ouc8cfAre_Cx9dRS5BhW6AAqNCYfcx3NosVnenZnBmYh9/s1600/One+Piece+78-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTnN8UgQiejSBwy6SUJ95_4aeS03YDNuFyG1cAt_A6L2Ll_tKTqONWyi3lwPg0Xse86AnvJaQqZba1FPQYe-mo89lL8bgpuq1Ouc8cfAre_Cx9dRS5BhW6AAqNCYfcx3NosVnenZnBmYh9/s400/One+Piece+78-5.jpg" width="255" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCPpy_31EbsSMiUbF6Zt9ULWHd-eZ9EzVCg4Hec9qHqtLiYK6W31TGlSvawRafG0-n4HuAWiL_0X7XUvii1FAonmnsmKSm9Rw_DsSrhEj41i9TgxvauXpkcUoSbv_QvfDrnzV4ywcLL1xP/s1600/One+Piece+78-6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCPpy_31EbsSMiUbF6Zt9ULWHd-eZ9EzVCg4Hec9qHqtLiYK6W31TGlSvawRafG0-n4HuAWiL_0X7XUvii1FAonmnsmKSm9Rw_DsSrhEj41i9TgxvauXpkcUoSbv_QvfDrnzV4ywcLL1xP/s400/One+Piece+78-6.jpg" width="252" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS5ALzfa2SOuh_UvRiynq-gOprb7QVY3DrtgifxytXH0-lxzDDrpLxgAxo_cDexEMmi6NTbCAmOqyPPS6dWhlOu16HAa7x06Xqbzn9p5X4diDAuuxiGCxkvDtJrsUgiR9FXjDcPHhe7kRM/s1600/One+Piece+78-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS5ALzfa2SOuh_UvRiynq-gOprb7QVY3DrtgifxytXH0-lxzDDrpLxgAxo_cDexEMmi6NTbCAmOqyPPS6dWhlOu16HAa7x06Xqbzn9p5X4diDAuuxiGCxkvDtJrsUgiR9FXjDcPHhe7kRM/s400/One+Piece+78-7.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkEByYNAOWVa-I7uhCYP93-kIqi1FhKrBkXr97TsevrfoaDhkhl54JAvhFuQtC4yNOZ9fSUbuYXysclpRUAxwCSDUKrlH4dWVru8yQre0aQ0ueGnpiZcJ_FfFEYw-WfAI5cfGOEf73hoZF/s1600/One+Piece+78-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkEByYNAOWVa-I7uhCYP93-kIqi1FhKrBkXr97TsevrfoaDhkhl54JAvhFuQtC4yNOZ9fSUbuYXysclpRUAxwCSDUKrlH4dWVru8yQre0aQ0ueGnpiZcJ_FfFEYw-WfAI5cfGOEf73hoZF/s400/One+Piece+78-8.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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That's actually not the end of the fight; it goes on for several more pages as Zolo continues to fight Pica's stone form in mid-air, and it's awesome.<br />
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And then there's the big final battle between Luffy and Doflamingo, which seems to come to a climax here but looks like it's going to stretch into at least the first few chapters of the next volume. It's one of those high-energy fights that Eiichiro Oda does so well, somehow managing to keep raising the stakes further than they already are throughout, with Doflamingo beginning to make the "birdcage" surrounding the kingdom contract, which will eventually end up killing everyone inside, and the seemingly-defeated Trafalgar Law managing to strike more blows against Doflamingo at the last moment. But Doflamingo is cunning and resilient, and he manages to survive even though Luffy keeps doing awesome stuff like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD3SnJNt_jZozbBLTq5UYCvFzqaIRIBHcEwM32cYHCPXBJ6kNPjT-vwqWpKzHYOONrxdfZG69gVtSpiu8UA3AQaNIe1tnjmjee31-E4RtziaTm7j6G3Ubv7SSGO1XjZvb2QFqGNCFVqiUO/s1600/One+Piece+78-9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD3SnJNt_jZozbBLTq5UYCvFzqaIRIBHcEwM32cYHCPXBJ6kNPjT-vwqWpKzHYOONrxdfZG69gVtSpiu8UA3AQaNIe1tnjmjee31-E4RtziaTm7j6G3Ubv7SSGO1XjZvb2QFqGNCFVqiUO/s400/One+Piece+78-9.jpg" width="253" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsO0BXdSSQ_Uii-qjQvv-UTo1Vt8QxknZtszKBWBb_2FiRCZtURCZH_0SLsjDMV_GTteAkyjOr69ymcPN0tD_2Qq7GgN-gFYY1NxDYrlK3eHG4DbgRBsWpd7RjWFFQhR_j_ft67jntGYGO/s1600/One+Piece+78-10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsO0BXdSSQ_Uii-qjQvv-UTo1Vt8QxknZtszKBWBb_2FiRCZtURCZH_0SLsjDMV_GTteAkyjOr69ymcPN0tD_2Qq7GgN-gFYY1NxDYrlK3eHG4DbgRBsWpd7RjWFFQhR_j_ft67jntGYGO/s400/One+Piece+78-10.jpg" width="252" /></a><br />
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So that means Luffy has to shift his powers into "Gear Four". We had previously seen him use additional "gears" when he came up with new levels of his abilities, but this one is especially weird and goofy. It involves him pumping his body up into a form that resembles a muscular balloon and then using his psychic "Haki" powers to armor himself up and resist any damage. This allows him to basically fly and keep attacking, but he can also sort of telescope his arms to deal incredibly powerful blows:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD2_c22BjSbJaVDOJiYNoeRsiA0H0mk1BBRe9xOqHS1jNkme_jCiO9bqG9kbNj7RHRS_uLzXwC9_i0k1zSARZoazFeq2cRAebp8ZYwCH6PUfF-44Yf3QyChFP_S435Q0LlvfB0tMLLEgSa/s1600/One+Piece+78-11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD2_c22BjSbJaVDOJiYNoeRsiA0H0mk1BBRe9xOqHS1jNkme_jCiO9bqG9kbNj7RHRS_uLzXwC9_i0k1zSARZoazFeq2cRAebp8ZYwCH6PUfF-44Yf3QyChFP_S435Q0LlvfB0tMLLEgSa/s400/One+Piece+78-11.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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It's one of those signature <i>One Piece</i> moments that's silly but effective, and Oda sells it by demonstrating Luffy's anger and determination. He also throws in some extra drama by having King Riku exhort his citizens to not give up, even though their situation seems hopeless:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXxkh6yNuXJSm2GG4tRTefprSIaFmZfuGjQco5qrbXeyALd65FyIGPGqfJC9_wC4vHo9WOZtmYxpcBUQICh4X22A6uP2AcSjLEAu9TUbGi5iVbBVWicxOCo15QV_xTOA2v_uRjK5MJKGu0/s1600/One+Piece+78-12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXxkh6yNuXJSm2GG4tRTefprSIaFmZfuGjQco5qrbXeyALd65FyIGPGqfJC9_wC4vHo9WOZtmYxpcBUQICh4X22A6uP2AcSjLEAu9TUbGi5iVbBVWicxOCo15QV_xTOA2v_uRjK5MJKGu0/s400/One+Piece+78-12.jpg" width="251" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1DWAjVgX_HatxjX7tcWBb2gbNnTuv8L_uY8LJX-Y73nZIQ91FJ5st2BxOVJRuHmHXKGV7tfDpObsLqWBOTlUV_YYayBgTBHnTAKMD-ca9ySeV_N-1TkW9N82vKT8QoPxqBCI2xXVLDyj/s1600/One+Piece+78-13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq1DWAjVgX_HatxjX7tcWBb2gbNnTuv8L_uY8LJX-Y73nZIQ91FJ5st2BxOVJRuHmHXKGV7tfDpObsLqWBOTlUV_YYayBgTBHnTAKMD-ca9ySeV_N-1TkW9N82vKT8QoPxqBCI2xXVLDyj/s400/One+Piece+78-13.jpg" width="256" /></a><br />
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Those are the sorts of moments that I love in this manga; scenes that are awe-inspiring in their awesomeness and plain in their emotions, while still retaining a sense of fun and adventure even in the midst of high-stakes battles. This series continues to be pretty great, and I can't wait to cheer at what I expect to be the resolution to this long storyline in the next volume. And then it'll be back to waiting for a few more years for the next big moment like this, but based on past experience, it will all be worth it.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-53172207980778511702016-06-04T15:13:00.000-05:002016-06-04T15:13:24.122-05:00Something New: It's good for when you're feeling Something Blue<i><b>Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride</b></i><br />
By Lucy Knisley<br />
<a href="http://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626722491" target="_blank">Published by First Second</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5yBXrvzjPHqZ2scDDy9NHjrm_HIr_wtQU5_zxJzAJkLZO8kmyuAhmde67m4pEcIZorcT7ckAwYA2ceuzbwB1ElZzSWYrVr2D8cH2gpzAbdMeZ5v3BnkWeFMG3t76MUHZGZ4FIKsnmJ0_G/s1600/Something+New.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5yBXrvzjPHqZ2scDDy9NHjrm_HIr_wtQU5_zxJzAJkLZO8kmyuAhmde67m4pEcIZorcT7ckAwYA2ceuzbwB1ElZzSWYrVr2D8cH2gpzAbdMeZ5v3BnkWeFMG3t76MUHZGZ4FIKsnmJ0_G/s320/Something+New.jpg" width="225" /></a><br />
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I love Lucy Knisley's comics. I've been following her work for years (I first mentioned her on this blog <a href="http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2008/11/ex-machina-god-is-dead-or-maybe-hes.html">way back in 2008</a>), and it's been wonderful to see her continued success as she has published multiple books. Since she uses her comics to tell autobiographical stories that offer a lot of insights into who she is, I feel like I've gotten to know her as a sort of friend, and with books like this (and her <a href="http://muthamagazine.com/2016/05/kid-gloves-comics-by-lucy-knisley/" target="_blank">next book</a>, which will be about her experience with pregnancy), which cover major life experiences, I feel like I get to celebrate them along with her.<br />
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As the title indicates, this particular book is all about Knisley's wedding, and she covers the experience in her usual fashion, not just detailing the event itself, but also examining her feelings about marriage and weddings, looking at things from the perspective of a modern-day feminist and trying to find a way to satisfy her own wants and needs alongside those of her family and friends. She's as insightful as ever, examining her reservations about weddings by looking at the sometimes-unsettling history of marriage where brides were treated as property and the ongoing struggles of certain marginalized groups who didn't always have the freedom she does to marry the person she loves, as well as all the weird baggage that societal expectations and the wedding industry bring to the affair. She also delves into her own feelings about subjects as varied as shopping for a wedding dress, clashing with her mother about plans for the ceremony and reception, and, of course, the food that will be served, using her lovely illustrations to ensure that it's never boring.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIHVk88NSdKLUKiOS_wC6xMVTpHVDHk-etk2L2Vv3OaDZaS-96ty2G8bWBGiKRb6X3620TY90cVQorWgzy3hUP8r0mDUzmHbeECfjkSIbiSUuQcw_rph9OkBg6S3eeIv5sYqnHY8AJjby/s1600/somethingnew-100-19.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIHVk88NSdKLUKiOS_wC6xMVTpHVDHk-etk2L2Vv3OaDZaS-96ty2G8bWBGiKRb6X3620TY90cVQorWgzy3hUP8r0mDUzmHbeECfjkSIbiSUuQcw_rph9OkBg6S3eeIv5sYqnHY8AJjby/s400/somethingnew-100-19.jpg" width="288" /></a><br />
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And this doesn't all happen in a vacuum, either. Rather than just jumping in to the story as planning for the wedding is beginning, Knisley takes the time to detail the history of her relationship with her husband and how, even after ending their long-term relationship because they felt the disagreed about what they wanted for their lives, they ended up engaged and planning a life together. It's a touching story, and one that pulls the reader in and gets them invested in the event itself, providing understanding of why it's so important to everyone involved.<br />
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Knisley also finds plenty of humor in everything, whether she's pointing out her own bridal foibles that come from the stress of wanting everything to be perfect or throwing in amusing collections of wedding-related products (custom-engraved bullets!), explanations of various traditions, or wedding themes that she considered (The X-Files!). As emotional as all of this can get, she keeps the tone light, and as the book gets closer to the big day, I was cheering her on as she solved problems, put her crafting skills to work to create decorations and handmade gifts, and gathered her friends and family together in celebration.<br />
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And here's where I'm going to do something I don't do too often here and discuss my personal life. Right now, after a 14-year marriage and three children, my wife and I are in the midst of a divorce, which makes my choice to read and review this book at this time somewhat perverse. Divorce is difficult at the best of times, and while I don't feel the need to go into details about mine, I'll just say that this is not the best of times. With all the hurt and betrayal that I'm feeling right now, just thinking about weddings and marriage brings up all sorts of emotions, with many of them being pretty negative. But Knisley is so good at what she does that this book overcomes all of that baggage and makes me feel like celebrating love again. I'm glad I get to experience the beauty and joy of two people who want to celebrate their life together, and that's a real gift.<br />
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I'm regularly amazed at the openness and honesty that Knisley displays in her comics and how much she is willing to reveal about herself. She obviously puts a lot of thought into every comic she makes, and it really shows; she's not only entertaining and funny, but she creates beautiful images that utilize the comics format wonderfully to tell stories that examine both her internal and external life. I'm happy that I get to follow her as she shares her journey through life, and I'm always looking forward to the insights that she brings to each stop along the way.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-21986394600942772592016-05-21T12:57:00.000-05:002016-05-21T12:57:47.409-05:00I Hate Fairyland: For pretty good reasons<i><b>I Hate Fairyland, Volume 1: Madly Ever After</b></i><br />
By Skottie Young<br />
<a href="https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/i-hate-fairyland-vol.-1-madly-ever-after-tp" target="_blank">Published by Image Comics</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU14v96Etb9tZHOp1gSUL_XU1SIZ85npGMuYq5VeOQ2hN9aFc2VMd1zBTAV2k6a32NqOZga9-wCverlXLPCIjGNoZjhrl9HYZ4QVsS0QmEd4cvgms2goDHbC5yrHPZ-c-xcpazOWy3pVF1/s1600/ihatefairyland_vol1-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU14v96Etb9tZHOp1gSUL_XU1SIZ85npGMuYq5VeOQ2hN9aFc2VMd1zBTAV2k6a32NqOZga9-wCverlXLPCIjGNoZjhrl9HYZ4QVsS0QmEd4cvgms2goDHbC5yrHPZ-c-xcpazOWy3pVF1/s320/ihatefairyland_vol1-1.png" width="208" /></a><br />
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Skottie Young is one hell of a talented cartoonist, able to bring a liveliness to his characters and settings that make his images really enjoyable to look at. While he usually works in a cute, expressive style that's fun and kid-friendly (as evidenced by <a href="https://vertigology.net/2015/04/14/complete-list-of-skottie-young-baby-variant-covers-from-marvel-photos-of-each/" target="_blank">his regular "baby variant" covers for Marvel</a> or his work <a href="http://marvel.com/comics/collection/47824/oz_hardcover" target="_blank">adapting the Oz books</a>), it seems like he might have gotten tired of the kiddie stuff and wanted to unleash his id, and <i>I Hate Fairyland</i> is the result.<br />
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With this creator-owned series, Young still works in a cutesy style, but he twists it into an exuberant nastiness, telling the story of Gertrude, a little girl who gets transported to a magical kingdom and sent on a journey to retrieve a key that will allow her to go home, but instead of a quick, exciting adventure, her quest drags on for 27 years. When we join her after all this time, she's a jaded, profane, hard-edged force of nature, rampaging through this magical world in her ever-futile search for her magical MacGuffin, but still stuck in the body of a six year old.<br />
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That setup gives Young a chance to just go nuts with violence and come up with all sorts of crazy variations on this type of portal fantasy story, filling the world with weird creatures and landscapes, and then having Gertrude destroy them in ever more inspired ways. His cartoony expressiveness goes so over the top that it becomes grotesque, and each new issue of the series gives him a chance to see how far he can go. If Gertrude faces some sort of barbarian character, it's not enough to give him one or two giant battle-axes; he needs 10 huge weapons strapped to his back. If Gertrude gets maimed in a fight, she doesn't just have a black eye, she looks like she's been run over by a steamroller (luckily, by Fairyland rules, she's able to shrug off most any bodily harm). It's pretty hilarious to see what sort of craziness Young will come up with next, and since he's obviously having so much fun, the reader can't help but go along for the ride.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2apvt-yATlJQcuhMBl3Braa2Stjupli2Felu8PI-6t08g7L6cHlY3ctZf_oTWyZKVHN1BImps084Tph_WYgXljBogjKnE4vwgV3ZfpJMxR6z6ydpWTLWMr8y7HOuztCFRttJgnm8pDXle/s1600/Bruud_the_Brutal_I_Hate_Fairyland_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2apvt-yATlJQcuhMBl3Braa2Stjupli2Felu8PI-6t08g7L6cHlY3ctZf_oTWyZKVHN1BImps084Tph_WYgXljBogjKnE4vwgV3ZfpJMxR6z6ydpWTLWMr8y7HOuztCFRttJgnm8pDXle/s400/Bruud_the_Brutal_I_Hate_Fairyland_001.jpg" width="256" /></a><br />
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Young also works in plenty of good running gags, like the way Gertrude manages to kill a succession of cute narrator characters, or how her constant swearing is replaced by terms like "muffin fluffer" or "what the spell". And the driving plot of the book works well too; rather than just being a violent rampage through a magical world, he gives Gertrude obstacles to overcome and enemies to face, all leading up to a climactic conflict that's pretty satisfying while also setting up an interesting direction for future volumes.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhknAT_ipzJL46r9WZdEqkuCvXpxqPSfVFKPIhmuQbe6pPz8W3Jpmlz0UDk5g7exaPb5XKKJI2RMqMHvF179MvxLHT5v4gYNFicPBRhaD8-Mg_e_r5fXWKtmWm9nijwhc6YPNvCq7ZD69o/s1600/IHateFairyland03_Preview_Page_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhknAT_ipzJL46r9WZdEqkuCvXpxqPSfVFKPIhmuQbe6pPz8W3Jpmlz0UDk5g7exaPb5XKKJI2RMqMHvF179MvxLHT5v4gYNFicPBRhaD8-Mg_e_r5fXWKtmWm9nijwhc6YPNvCq7ZD69o/s400/IHateFairyland03_Preview_Page_01.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
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Overall, this comic ends up being highly enjoyable, if only because Young's exuberance is highly contagious. His funny, mean-spirited take on these familiar tropes is tons of fun, and it's a great way to exorcise demons and push back against the cutesiness of these types of stories. I'm excited to see where he goes next, and with the imagination that's on display here, I expect it will be great fun to accompany him on his continuing journey.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882610517765002247.post-82469560565667880602016-05-12T20:24:00.000-05:002016-05-12T20:24:33.556-05:00The Kitchen: Another nail in the Vertigo coffin<i><b>The Kitchen</b></i><br />
Written by Ollie Masters<br />
Art by Ming Doyle<br />
<a href="http://www.vertigocomics.com/graphic-novels/the-kitchen" target="_blank">Published by DC Comics/Vertigo</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGoCalhxIp31BJX4ebKF1bSZHpKU_9ec6dMzuATxtSP8u00TMf7amfM2SR8YDAJJ5Blo8QsDKOBziixiuGCrfZCCOY56U_reA1nm8xStFkQ0lv3V2dz51t9xSfWZ3hlWXRAt0wVVW3q_3G/s1600/kitchen+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGoCalhxIp31BJX4ebKF1bSZHpKU_9ec6dMzuATxtSP8u00TMf7amfM2SR8YDAJJ5Blo8QsDKOBziixiuGCrfZCCOY56U_reA1nm8xStFkQ0lv3V2dz51t9xSfWZ3hlWXRAt0wVVW3q_3G/s320/kitchen+cover.jpg" width="208" /></a><br />
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Remember when the Vertigo label on a comic book used to mean something? It's not that every comic released by DC's mature readers imprint was great, but there was a certain level of quality to be expected. And there were many pretty great comics, from the early days of <i>Sandman</i>, <i>Swamp Thing</i>, <i>Hellblazer</i>, and <i>Shade the Changing Man</i>, through to <i>100 Bullets</i>, <i>Transmetropolitan</i>, <i>Y: The Last Man</i>, and <i>Fables</i>. But these days, the imprint seems to be a victim of the continuing terrible management decisions made by DC (including <a href="http://www.theouthousers.com/index.php/news/135141-dc-restructures-vertigo-fires-shelly-bond-provokes-naming-of-open-secret-sexual-harasser-in-upper-management.html" target="_blank">the recent kerfuffle surrounding the firing of longtime Vertigo editor Shelly Bond</a>), and if you want an example of how far Vertigo has fallen, <i>The Kitchen</i> is a perfect example.<br />
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The premise behind this series seems solid: in New York in the 1970s, three members of the Irish mob get sent to jail, and their wives end up taking over their business dealings, which leads to lots of power struggles and violence. It would probably make for a decent movie (although more of a middling crime drama than a prestige picture), but in this form, the story just kind of sits there on the page, without being very engaging or making the characters and their motivations compelling.<br />
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So: there's Kath, who starts out as the ringleader that convinces the other two women to take up their husbands' business while they're indisposed, mostly as a way to make ends meet for their families (although I think Kath is the only one with children, and they remain pretty much unseen until they play into a climactic moment between her and her husband, so there's not really anything in the way of stakes to get the reader on board for why they need to do this). Raven, Kath's sister, is initially hesitant, but somewhere down the line she turns ruthless and violent, a character arc that happens without much in the way of motivation. As the third member of the crew, Angie starts out kind of scared, but she quickly becomes enamored with the lifestyle and seems to revel in the violence.<br />
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As the plot proceeds, it takes all the turns you would expect: meetings with more established mafia figures, deals struck in order to solidify power, assassinations of rival gang members, and so on. When the husbands are unexpectedly released from prison (for no real reason other than dramatic purposes), this kicks off a war as the wives fight to keep their hard-gotten gains from being taken away from them. This is supposed to be the moment of actualization, in which they are faced with the choice of going back to their old lives as housewives or continuing down the path that they have forged as independent women (while the book is set in the 70s, the era of Women's Lib, there's little acknowledgement of the politics of the era; the time period is really just an excuse for costuming choices). Instead, it seems like they're going through the motions; there has to be a big enemy to face in order to have a dramatic climax, and while the series does throw in some late flashbacks in an attempt to flesh out the women's relationships with their husbands, it's too little, too late in the way of character development.<br />
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So there's little to speak of in the way of plot or character, but gangster stories are all about style, so if the execution is good, sometimes shakiness in other areas can be forgiven. However, as much as I think Ming Doyle is a pretty good artist, either this type of story is not her forte, or she was too rushed to turn in work that added much to the series. While much of the art is fine, with fairly realistic body language and facial expressions, there are many bits of awkwardness that draw attention away from the impact of the story and leave the reader with the feeling of watching mannequins trying to mimic human actions and failing. This includes characters that don't seem to be able to drink from glasses correctly:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDO0F2-DHis-6Vyam4VnPnr2M7JwaBOMKuMHbQ8R4hZOV0O-AVYHGJ3b_lq3FetIiNU7o3a0xy4mF721XFfa7hk765fhqnXgC7etXiUIpQHZbxP5JGV2_dG1UIpm_XluE8p6RNlb5DrwrE/s1600/kitchen2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDO0F2-DHis-6Vyam4VnPnr2M7JwaBOMKuMHbQ8R4hZOV0O-AVYHGJ3b_lq3FetIiNU7o3a0xy4mF721XFfa7hk765fhqnXgC7etXiUIpQHZbxP5JGV2_dG1UIpm_XluE8p6RNlb5DrwrE/s1600/kitchen2.jpg" /></a><br />
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Doors being kicked in with oddly stiff legs:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvpj8XxN8w6UDz4ro4h6esMPmrU07y1gsc0tiBKDTAQXQ1xzkL-EDMKyiczNm1MpsOvRzr7Qkq81NJoZwoBzU8wUgUi-TKFyTckPiX5e6W4-rz2HUXXJJWA86FYEA2dDvPUFk1Nb_X2pCw/s1600/kitchen3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvpj8XxN8w6UDz4ro4h6esMPmrU07y1gsc0tiBKDTAQXQ1xzkL-EDMKyiczNm1MpsOvRzr7Qkq81NJoZwoBzU8wUgUi-TKFyTckPiX5e6W4-rz2HUXXJJWA86FYEA2dDvPUFk1Nb_X2pCw/s400/kitchen3.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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Punches that look like hands being awkwardly thrust into people's faces:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR2lw6vRokGrJRodRBawf-4lvhcd6FfxeELmreoPjJyMFTMX6p8EVnzlp3uYgHm43QAfYMjWEzKDiyJUSIKVgFSm9ngmFyZ4qZxKV6D9UW3PL995DsPVY5a48FemmKdBz-7kXZ_ivXQgrR/s1600/kitchen4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR2lw6vRokGrJRodRBawf-4lvhcd6FfxeELmreoPjJyMFTMX6p8EVnzlp3uYgHm43QAfYMjWEzKDiyJUSIKVgFSm9ngmFyZ4qZxKV6D9UW3PL995DsPVY5a48FemmKdBz-7kXZ_ivXQgrR/s400/kitchen4.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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A sex scene in which the characters' legs don't seem to follow any recognizable human anatomy:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgll3SSxXH1-wNFq-43RjP_gM1K4rZoilJ7Qz4XfeOM2JavQkgkETjVd_crHuANR-Wz853MnC9f52p0MsU2gDgSR-7Nu0inlJIvT5Rekh44xErdsZAet6z3O1vJb7MmhB0XytEDllTkDECs/s1600/kitchen5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgll3SSxXH1-wNFq-43RjP_gM1K4rZoilJ7Qz4XfeOM2JavQkgkETjVd_crHuANR-Wz853MnC9f52p0MsU2gDgSR-7Nu0inlJIvT5Rekh44xErdsZAet6z3O1vJb7MmhB0XytEDllTkDECs/s400/kitchen5.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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And all manner of choreography that doen't make sense, like this bit in which a guy is apparently backhanding Kath with his left hand while somehow bruising her right eye:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrw-mGN-wggs1RFl7-xrdXu1xEk9kprwHhKO7qit85W83-bMsHwqobfkOhMJqL5bKJ8GmSEeN_U46JfW5l5Qcio1bvCevot-cgClKqTRpxAE_SY3jLcxolhcEdlwXAum1jKet75_EeKmFH/s1600/kitchen6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrw-mGN-wggs1RFl7-xrdXu1xEk9kprwHhKO7qit85W83-bMsHwqobfkOhMJqL5bKJ8GmSEeN_U46JfW5l5Qcio1bvCevot-cgClKqTRpxAE_SY3jLcxolhcEdlwXAum1jKet75_EeKmFH/s400/kitchen6.jpg" width="332" /></a><br />
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Doyle also seems to struggle with guns, which often don't seem to fit into characters' hands very well. Here's a bit in which a character shoots her lover, and she apparently manages to hook her hand through her purse's handle, pull out the gun, shoot it, and then remove her finger from the trigger between panels:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi57xDMmiDyyIOzEiOBhNQprfcJMSZKQ_80zMdJgQuooj-vUbMjkprHPaxtPIAK7f1S4k5QXY5slXNc_M7klPUAkxG18V3mnmwp7czsAQNIZoY67BT1TRRWLsPDh6x6m7WRU0WWEGTEL7wl/s1600/kitchen8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi57xDMmiDyyIOzEiOBhNQprfcJMSZKQ_80zMdJgQuooj-vUbMjkprHPaxtPIAK7f1S4k5QXY5slXNc_M7klPUAkxG18V3mnmwp7czsAQNIZoY67BT1TRRWLsPDh6x6m7WRU0WWEGTEL7wl/s400/kitchen8.jpg" width="255" /></a><br />
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And here's another odd moment, in which I think what's supposed to be happening is that the man is being hesitant about shooting the woman, so she takes the gun away from him, but it comes off more like the gun just jumps from one person to another between panels:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie6kRC8KyRUCZPkoOM4LlQrrlOfGMjHcFhmvIvZvj4vdFzh5pQ6x5fZpMgHpvuETprmEjCUReA5zGgFviDYEO0wU_I57rMpasfLyon-vp_odj7amEG4rX2AzQlctq4lqU6D21gBHsMpnjk/s1600/kitchen7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie6kRC8KyRUCZPkoOM4LlQrrlOfGMjHcFhmvIvZvj4vdFzh5pQ6x5fZpMgHpvuETprmEjCUReA5zGgFviDYEO0wU_I57rMpasfLyon-vp_odj7amEG4rX2AzQlctq4lqU6D21gBHsMpnjk/s400/kitchen7.jpg" width="252" /></a><br />
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If the man is supposed to be hesitant, his forceful manner in the second panel seems to go against that idea, leaving any hesitation to be (poorly) demonstrated by the depiction of his hands in the third panel. Or maybe he was surprised when the phone started ringing, giving her the chance to grab the gun? If that's the case, the blase sound effects don't help; they don't seem like a jarring, distracting interruption. Instead of a loud "BRRRRIIINNGGG!" it's almost like someone is standing off-panel and saying the words "ring ring".<br />
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The book is full of strange moments like this, little continuity errors like a guy who in one panel has a gag over his mouth but doesn't in the next, or characters that are much too easy to confuse with each other (in one bit involving a truck heist, I was sure that a character that was hiding in the truck was the mob boss that had hired the women, but that apparently wasn't the case). The dialogue is often poorly edited too, full of phrases come off as stilted rather than realistic like "Stay the fuck out've this, lady!" (why make "out've" a contraction, since the character is saying "out of" rather than "out have"? Wouldn't "outta" sound better?). And while I'm nitpicking, why is the image on the book's cover made to appear as if it has been creased? Is it supposed to be a magazine pinup that the characters posed for that somebody tore out and folded up to keep in their wallet?<br />
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It's this kind of poor quality control that seems indicative of a huge drop in Vertigo's fortunes. I can't believe somebody in the editing department looked at this book and said, "Yes, this is exactly what we want to publish." I don't think this was ever going to be a great series, but its failures on nearly every level, from plot, to characterization, to art, to basic copy editing, are kind of astounding when coming from an imprint that used to be synonymous with a certain level of quality. With this pointless dreck, I think I can officially say that those days are over.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13867868039166531163noreply@blogger.com0