Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

A mangaka is a comic artist who writes and/or illustrates manga. Demon Slayer’s mangaka goes by the name of Koyoharu Gotouge, which is a pseudonym. His self-portrait or avatar in the comics is an alligator that wears glasses.

I only mention this because Gotouge is both author and artist for Demon Slayer, which I don’t think is the norm. Even though manga is a more conventionalized artistic style than its form of storytelling. You can even buy books on “how to draw manga.” Meaning how to draw comics that look like every other manga comic. Anyway, what led me to bother pointing this out is that my response to this second volume of Demon Slayer has split into a good-bad dichotomy and Gotouge is responsible for both.

I like the story. Toshiro is still a young man on a mission to save his sister Nezuko from her infection with the demon virus. This leads him to fight a series of demons, beginning with the sad, fat demon he was in the middle of fighting in the previous volume, and a trio of demons who have been terrorizing Tokyo. This is all standard stuff, but there are some interesting twists, like the way the trio of demons keep popping in and out of a transdimensional bog. As he slices and dices his way through these bad guys Toshiro finds out the name of the chief demon, the one he has to locate if he wants to save his sister. This is some dude-ish fellow named Muzan Kibutsuji. When Toshiro finds Kibutsuji he’s disguised as a family man with a hip-cat sense of style. He sort of looks like a 1930s American gangster. Toshiro confronts him at one point, but Kibutsuji has a legion of demon obstacles to throw in his way. None of that is going to stop Toshiro’s commitment though. As he bracingly declares at one point: “I’ll follow you to the depths of hell and your neck will feel the edge of my sword!”

This all seemed good, or at least acceptable to me, and I managed (just) to keep up with all the new rules regarding demons and how to fight them that were being tossed out. I only wondered at why Toshiro had to fight the trio of demons with the box he’s using to transport Nezuko still strapped to his back. That was ridiculous.

But then there’s the art. I don’t like the way this comic is drawn. The action has already become repetitive and is confusing to boot. Unless you already know what the Seventh Form Drop Ripple Thrust-Curve is and can see that movement happening. In quite a few places the drawing seemed almost like rough preliminary sketches and I don’t know what Gotouge was doing with the eyes of some of the characters. I don’t think it was just the demons who had bug eyes, and even if it was I thought it looked bad.

Will I read any more of these? At this point I’m not sure. Looking ahead, I know that the series goes on forever. And while I liked the story well enough it’s not a comic I enjoy looking at. So I think I’ll take a bit of a break anyway before I continue.

Graphicalex

Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

/ Alex Good / 27 Comments

Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

I still have the first appearance of Druuna in North America, an issue of Heavy Metal magazine that came out in 1986. More specifically, and regrettably, it’s a copy of that issue as it hit the newsstands in Canada, with several pages removed by state censors. Canada was very tight about sexy stuff back in the day.

Heavy Metal (a magazine that I believe has stopped print publication) had a reputation for publishing adult-themed SF comics, but even so Druuna pushed the boundaries. The brainchild of Italian writer and illustrator Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, Druuna was a raven-haired bombshell pin-up living in a weird post-apocalyptic urban wasteland where people are mutating into tentacle monsters at the hands of a disease called Evil. It’s a dystopian world where everyone, even the mutants, is driven by sexual lust. Which is a fate of affairs that Druuna is both a victim of and that she exploits as she tries to save herself and her lover Shastar (who is now far gone with the disease).

In terms not only of the plot but the world-building the results are hard to keep straight. From Wikipedia: “During the more than thirty years of publication of Druuna’s adventures in Morbus Gravis, the plot has evolved through several stages, differentiated with numerous jumps in the storyline, with some attendant inconsistencies.” That’s putting it mildly. I was never sure what exactly what was going on, and I don’t think Sepieri was either. That said, I always thought there was more to it than just a futuristic setting for a string of hardcore sex scenes, many of which involved threatened or actual rape. There’s a dream (or nightmare) logic to the proceedings, and in the blurring of technology, sex, and body horror I think Serpieri saw a ways into our future. Druuna could be thought of as a virtual reality porn program that has gone viral in the worst way, blurring the line between love, lust, and sex addiction in ways that have come to seem more and more relevant. Druuna is both the ultimate object of sexual desire and someone who is turned on by that objectification, a male fantasy but also a transcendent figure who reigns over her fallen world of mechanical desires.

This is the ‘80s epic of SF T&A, and right from the start, with Druuna lolling in bed for three pages like a post-apocalyptic odalisque, you know where you are in terms of genre if not in the cosmos or space-time continuum. And forty years later it still works. It’s a comic that’s stuck with me, like being haunted by a sexy ghost. And I’m not going to complain about that.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Web Weaver

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

My response to The Web Weaver followed a bell curve. I started off not liking it much. It was wordy, and not in a lively or inventive way. I guess you could say it was written more “in the style” of Conan Doyle than in a modern voice, but the fact is Doyle was in a number of stylistic respects a surprisingly modern writer, and rarely dull. Sam Siciliano seems to be channeling more the spirit of a nineteenth-century potboiler. In any event, the result is that this is a 400-page pastiche and going that long is definitely not the Doyle style. Though it is typical of Siciliano’s Holmes novels.

I did start getting into it though, and through the middle sections I can say I was enjoying it. Watson is missing and narrative duties are split between another medical pair: Holmes’s cousin Dr. Henry Vernier and Henry’s wife Michelle, who is also a doctor. Together they are presented as an ideal couple, to the point (or past it) where you grow tired of how they keep going on about how much they love each other. They’re too good to be true.

Since he’s not around to defend himself, Watson is dismissed as a fantasist whose tales of Holmes are mostly made up. It seems real detective work is dull, routine stuff, and Holmes is bored by it. He wants a challenge and wishes he had a Moriarty (one of Watson’s fictional inventions) for him to match wits with.

Holmes is also miffed that Watson presents him as a cold-hearted automaton where he is really a passionate man of feeling. Perhaps to prove him wrong, our hero falls in love with Violet Wheelwright, a married woman threatened by a gypsy curse. Violet is stuck in a loveless marriage to a brute who is deathly afraid of spiders. Nevertheless, she is good-looking and even plays the violin and chess as well as Holmes. Though with regard to the latter accomplishment I had to wonder how well that was. In one game with Holmes she surprises him with a checkmate, which is something that doesn’t happen to good chess players, who always see the game several moves ahead (or in depth). They (good chess players) usually know well in advance when a position is lost.

Then my enjoyment faded at the end. The thing is, I was pretty sure I knew who was behind everything with over 100 pages left to go, and their motive turned out to be even worse than I thought. The hero/villain is a social justice warrior, fighting the Victorian class system as well as the patriarchy. And this view is endorsed by Michelle, who is sympathetic with such a “view of life” and a crusade against “the self-importance and self-righteousness of Victorian England.” (Did people living even in late Victorian England think of themselves as living in “Victorian England”? I’m not sure.) Michelle even offers an exoneration to the web weaver: “Your goal was a worth one, although you took . . . the wrong path.” And: “Your decency is what drove you to your crimes. What more is decency than the desire for justice and the hatred of injustice? Your acts came more from an excess of decency rather than a lack of virtue.”

This sounds awful, like Prince Andrew saying his hanging around with Jeffrey Epstein was “colored by my tendency to be too honorable.” Talking in this manner goes back at least as far as Warren Hastings being astonished at his own moderation in not enriching himself more with Indian loot. It’s rarely convincing, and it isn’t here. And yet it seems a position Siciliano wants us to sympathize with. I felt uncomfortable about that.

It’s a book that Siciliano put a lot into. I think too much. Some of it was interesting, especially in the middle stretches where I was still wondering what was going on, but it didn’t come together very well. The subplot about the bogus oil company is a good example. It was interesting and led to some pithy observations (“All in all, the higher classes of society are more gullible than the lower ones”) and made interesting connections to our own time, but it felt like the web weaver was probably biting off more than they could chew. Then I didn’t like the ending, and the romance between Sherlock and Violet didn’t feel right at all. A lot of the Further Adventures err on the side of being too light and whimsical, but I wanted more of that here. This is altogether too heavy a case.

Holmes index

Old Man Logan 3: The Last Ronin

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Old Man Logan 3: The Last Ronin

Ronin because we’re in Japan. Why? Because Logan/Wolverine is hunting down Lady Deathstrike, who he tore apart at the end of the previous volume, Bordertown. This is apparently “to settle the score for what she and the Reavers did in Killhorn Falls.” So why didn’t he kill her at the end of that book? I can’t say.

The story felt to me like it was falling apart. The first book set up the idea of a Logan from the future coming back to prevent the supervillain uprising, but then that idea was sort of shot down because how can you prevent anything in the multiverse, where all things are not only always possible but ever-occurring? So then Logan went north to a Canadian mining town and fought Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers. And this book kicks off with him having tracked Lady Deathstrike to Japan, in order to finish her off. I didn’t feel like there was any through narrative here but just Logan going from place to place and fighting different bad guys.

Well, as things turn out Lady D. was just being used as bait to lure Logan into a trap set by the Silent Order and their superpowered mutant level boss the Silent Monk (who is actually quite loquacious). They have a big fight and . . . Logan is on the road again. But perhaps all roads lead back to home.

You’ll be able to tell from this quick synopsis that I’m not a big fan of Jeff Lemire’s work on the story here. I think there is a larger narrative, but it’s hard to keep in focus and in the meantime these side alleys aren’t very interesting and just feel like they’re not going anywhere. On the plus side, however, Andrea Sorrentino’s art really does a bang-up job of carrying the load. I love the way he builds pages and images around text and sound effects that become important design elements, like the wallpaper of BRAT-AT-AT-AT machine-gun fire, the explosive THOOOM!s, the SNIKTs of Logan’s claws extending, and the FWIP labels that come with individual arrows sticking into him. Our hero really takes a shit-kicking in these comics, and you don’t just see it, you hear it. Which, in turn, helps you feel it, in a good way. One complaint I’d register though is Sorrentino’s bizarre way of rendering a muscular mid-section. Both Logan and Sohei have six-packs that go up almost to their necks, and their abs look like giant tumors. He does all his shirtless male heroes like this, and it looks sick.

In short, a visually brilliant and well-designed comic that brings the action but I really didn’t care too much about where the story might be going, despite the time spent trying to build up Logan’s relationship with Maureen and maybe starting a family. I guess I should give points for at least trying to do something in this direction, but given the shattered narrative it just wasn’t working for me. Maybe you have to be more up than I am on all the different timelines. Also there’s no bonus comic included with this volume so that was a bit of a letdown too.

Graphicalex

Titans Vol. 2: Made in Manhattan

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Titans Vol. 2: Made in Manhattan

The Return of Wally West left off with Deathstroke wondering who Wally West was, but we don’t pick up on that here for some reason. There’s just another quick cutaway to Deathstroke spying on the gang’s flashy new headquarters, the Titans Tower, which rises out of the East (or Hudson?) River across from the Manhattan skyline. I don’t know how they got a building permit for that, but surprisingly they do acknowledge that this might have been problematic.

So . . . instead of Deathstroke what we have here is the return of Bumblebee, in a storyline that has an evil company called Meta, run by the Fearsome Five, offering to take superheroes’ powers away (they’re a curse as well as a blessing, you see) and then selling them on the black market. This was five years before Facebook turned into Meta, which for all anyone knows is up to something even worse. I don’t know if there was any connection there.

I wasn’t too happy that the Titans, despite ditching the “Teen” prefix, are in fact still a bunch of undergrads. Titans Tower is just the typical superhero dormitory, with a gym and a cafeteria and individual bedrooms with posters of rock stars on the walls. They spend a lot of time eating pizza and drinking pop. There’s boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense going on with Donna and Roy (Arsenal), and Wally and Linda. They get mad at each other, kiss and make-up, etc. I found this juvenile, but that shouldn’t be surprising. I think they were still going for an adolescent demographic.

It’s a decent comic. There are two storylines. The first is the one where they take on the Fearsome Five. In the second, which was a standalone that ran in Titans Annual #1, the four junior Titans are transported to a very dark site where they meet up with their four seniors. So there’s Wally West Flash and Barry Allen Flash, Nightwing and Batman, Tempest and Aquaman, and Donna Troy and Wonder Woman. It’s unclear who was behind the abduction, but the eight heroes come together and smash their way free of the prison they’re in, which turns out to have been in Alaska.

Both stories end abruptly. The Fearsome Five are sent packing, leaving the Titans to speculate as to who was fronting them. And the ghoulish guy who was running the extraordinary rendition scheme in Alaska disappears through a dimensional doorway, where he meets the sinister force who was pulling his strings. But that’s all we get, as we never see who was behind it all.

And as I say, Deathstroke is still waiting in the wings. I think it’s time for him to start getting more involved.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

I think this is one of the slighter Holmes stories, and it’s one that Doyle himself ranked near “the bottom of the list.” A British aristo, the Lord Robert St. Simon, gets married but his bride pulls a runner as soon as they get home from the wedding. It turns out she was already married back in America to a man she thought was dead, but who had secretly appeared to her at the church. Since she still loved him, she ditched her new husband, who then went to Holmes, asking him to investigate and figure out what the heck just happened.

It’s not much of a challenge for Holmes, and what sticks in the mind is the moral judgment on display. Holmes doesn’t care for St. Simon from the get-go, treating him as a pompous ass in need of being taken down a peg or three. Indeed the intake interview basically just involves Holmes laughing and mocking him repeatedly, though it isn’t clear what’s so foolish about him, aside from his dress, which is only “careful to the verge of foppishness.” And what’s wrong with that?

The dislike clearly goes deeper than what’s registered by Holmes. Doyle seemed to have something in for the dregs of the British aristocracy, and made St. Simon into the standard-bearer for his class, being a poor fellow with a fancy title out to wed an American heiress. Which is true on the face of it, but again St. Simon doesn’t seem like he’s just a mercenary prig. And I’m honestly at a loss to explain the way he’s treated at the end. Does Holmes really think it likely that St Simon will join the newly reunited couple in a celebratory dinner? I don’t think that’s possible, which means the fancy meal was prepared as another form of mockery. But doesn’t St. Simon deserve to feel hard done by? I felt more than a little sympathy for him, as the typical ending of having lovers reunited is achieved very much at his expense and I don’t see where he’s done anything wrong.

The plot is again driven by a backstory set in a wild, foreign land, in this case the American West in the 1880s. And that link to America adds something to Doyle’s critique of England’s ruling class. As Holmes puts it at the end of the story: “It is always a joy to meet an American . . . for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a Minister in fargone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”

A nice thought, foreshadowing the mostly rhetorical “special relationship.” But wouldn’t the marriage of St. Simon to Hatty Doran have better dramatized the consummation devoutly to be wished? And if so, why was Doyle so against it?

Holmes index