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Thursday, October 07, 2010 ( 10/07/2010 07:35:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: One of my favorite Oasis songs: # | Wednesday, October 06, 2010 ( 10/06/2010 07:21:00 AM ) Bill S.  “IN THE END HE BELIEVED THAT HE HIMSELF WAS A DAEMON.” When it comes to hard boiled heroes facing off against demonic adversaries, Radical Comics has clearly staked out their own parcel of the shadowy turf. Recently received two review comics from the company, Driver for the Dead #2 and the premiere ish of Ryder on the Storm, and, aside from the fact that both titles seem to mimic each other (kudos to Ryder for its play on the Doors, however), the two three-issue mini-series also star lone wolf heroes pitted against murderous supernatural nemeses.In the second issue of Jeff (Snakes on a Plane) Heffernan and Leonardo Manco’s Driver hearseman Alabaster Graves continues the task of transporting the body of a dead witch doctor and his hot sceptic daughter across the swampy southland, pursued along the way by a necromancer who keeps stealing body parts from fortune tellers, collaterally slaughtering their unfortunate customers on the side. The results are bracingly grisly, if a bit repetitive -- by the time the third party of hapless Southerners shows up for a reading, we know they’re doomed -- but it decidedly establishes what a mean s.o.b. the villainous magicman Fallow is. And Graves remains an expressive enough protagonist to make us want to see the showdown in issue #3. In comparison, the tarnished knight hero of David (FVZA) Hine and Wayne Nichols’ Ryder on the Storm (no first name: “I don’t like it,” he succinctly explains to his femme fatale-y client) plays things a trace closer to the chest. A p.i. working in an alt-universe 21st century cityscape out of a 30’s sci-fi pulp, Ryder gets hired by a Russian chanteuse named Katrina to look into the seeming suicide of a playboy who’s dispatched himself with a power drill. His investigation takes him to the Lust Garden, a decadent private sex club devoted to bloody sado-masochistic shows, and attracts the attention of the city’s wealthiest family -- who would appear to be other than human. It’s all connected to daemons plotting to regain control of the human race, of course. How could it not be? Hine and Nichols treat this dime novel fare with an occasional visual nod to material as diverse as the Green Hornet and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. If the characters come across more constricted than the wounded leads in Driver, some of this can be attributed to artist Nichols’ treatment of his people, who look more wooden in their close-ups. Still, with this kind of hardnose genre work, flat affect is often part of the package, the better to contrast against the visual horrors we’re gonna be shown. In this last, the first issue of Ryder delivers, most effectively in the unnerving club scenes and a sequence where a character gets his hand lopped. “There’s something uniquely disconcerting about seeing a piece of your body lying on the other side of the room,” we’re told -- a classic piece of hardboiled understatement if ever I read one. (First published in Blogcritics.) Labels: fifteen-minute comic # |Sunday, October 03, 2010 ( 10/03/2010 08:45:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Here's another pic of our house guest Bailey Cat, as taken by my feline fancying wife Becky:  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Saturday, October 02, 2010 ( 10/02/2010 04:28:00 PM ) Bill S.  “THE WORLD’S TIME IS SKEWED.” A real fantasy smorgasbord, Natsumi Itsuki’s shojo manga Demon Sacred (Tokyopop) opens on a page-turningly unsettling note. A honeymooning couple, Rena and Ryota Ichijima, go to Finland, birthplace of a deceased music idol beloved by the bride. There to witness the aurora borealis, they’re instead treated to a more fantastic sight: a herd of unicorns galloping toward them. Hubby Ryota and the rest of the tourists suddenly vanish when they get too close to the mythical creatures, leaving nothing but their empty clothes behind. The only one to survive is Rena, whose contact with one of the unicorns “chains” and transforms it into the spitting image of her late musical hero.Cut to fourteen years later, and we’re in Japan with Rena’s twin daughters, who are being raised by an earnest young research scientist named Shinobu. “I’m the only family they have,” Shinobu explains since their mother has apparently since passed on and dad, you know, suddenly disappeared the night of the aurora. The father-to-be was one of the first victims of Return Syndrome, a “localized reversal of the space-time continuum” that causes most of its sufferers to rapidly age backwards and blink out of existence. Twin Rina is experiencing an ultra-rare version of the syndrome, aging backwards but doing so more slowly. Though the same age as her 14-year-old sister Mona, she has the body of a nine-year-old. The world-wide plague of Return Syndrome is linked to the unexplained appearance of all manner of legendary creatures, called “demons” by a religio oriented media. When the unicorn/demon named Mika (after the late Finnish idol he resembles) shows up, he tells Shinobu and the girls that the key to saving Rena is for Mona to call forth an even higher-level demon, which she can do since she carries her mother’s ability to be in close contact with these creatures and develop a kind of master-and-pet relationship with one.  From here, Demon Sacred turns into A Girl and Her Demon. Spunky Mona pulls up a dangerous creature, and he turns out to be a doozy: the Beast from Revelation (the monster that John sees rise up from the sea). Once chained, he appears as yet-another dreamy looking pop idol, only this time a living one named Kaito Fujino. This adds a further complication, of course, for while Mika is able to get away with looking like a musician everybody knows has been dead for over fourteen years, “K2” has a living counterpart walking the streets of Tokyo. You know the two are gonna meet, and in volume two of the series, that’s exactly what occurs.Unlike its typical practice of releasing tankōbon one book at a time, Tokyopop scheduled the release of Demon Sacred’s first two budget-priced ($5.99) volumes for the same day. The move makes sense since the events in the second book -- primarily focused on the comically K2 and his dreamy human double -- are obviously meant to further pull in a teen girl readership less interested in dialog about serious subjects like “spirituology,” the history of demons in our human world or the possibly sinister company politics at Shinobu’s research lab. Those of us interested in the broader scope, however, can only hope that the series returns to some of those more lightly touched plot threads in the series’ third volume. Creator Itsuki's art runs the gamut from flowery light (with all the requisite sparkles and floral patterns in the background) to darkly fantastic (check out the sequence where the beastly form of K2 rises from the sea), but the shifts don't feel disjointed. Credit the writer/artist's commitment to her characters. In the midst of all the free-ranging weirdness, Itsuki never loses sight of them or lets her elaborate imagination pound away their individuality. That’s not easy to do in serialized fantasy like this, but Demon Sacred manages it with wit and plenty of flair. A top-flight premiere that deserves to find its audience: hopefully, they’ll be able to look beyond the first volume’s nondescript front cover. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Friday, October 01, 2010 ( 10/01/2010 08:39:00 AM ) Bill S.  “NOT ALL DOGS RETURN AS MEN, THEY SAY, ONLY THOSE WHO ARE READY.” As the companion to an elderly Australian Shepherd mix (Ziggy Stardust) who is at the stage in life when his hind legs regularly give out on him, I had some difficulty getting through the opening chapter of Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper). Narrated by Enzo, an aged mixed breed adopted by a young would-be race car driver named Denny, the book opens on the dog as he goes through his life one more time before leaving it. It is writer Stein’s conceit that Enzo, from his observant nature and time spent with Denny in front of the television, is a remarkably ruminative animal, capable of reflecting on the afterlife (no All Dogs Go to Heaven for this canine, more a steadfast belief in reincarnation) and opining on the greatest race car movies ever made.As he watches Denny go through his life and life crises, Enzo alternates between personal reactions (initial jealousy, for instance, when Denny meets the woman he marries) and the philosophical. The latter is frequently expressed through metaphorical reflections on auto racing as first pontificated to Enzo by Denny -- and also through a memorable chapter where the driver takes the dog for a spin on Thunderhill Raceway Park -- and if a few of these words read more like the author’s than they do the dog’s, I was willing to go along with it. This is one of those books that dog lovers give to other dog lovers to read, and I’ll admit to having been a little wary when one of my co-workers first offered me a copy. That initial chapter, as Enzo describes the pain brought on by a lifetime of the kind of hip problems that frequently plague big dogs, is real and emotional, letting the reader know that the writer isn’t going to back away from the hard parts of his characters’ lives. Throughout the course of the book, Enzo’s family experiences cancer, the devastating death of a loved one, a punishing child custody battle and trumped-up allegations that his owner is a sexual predator. That last almost pushed me out of the book -- a bit too melodramatic to these eyes -- though I was held by our narrator dog’s believable devotion and concern for his man. In the end, though, I found The Art of Racing in the Rain difficult to put down once I got into Enzo’s life story. Most of us who live with animals have moments at our ebb when we look at our pet and know, at the very least, that they can sense we’re feeling down. Stein’s imminently readable novel takes that idea further and argues that our pets know so much more about us -- and still love us anyway. That’s a comforting thought, even if there are some things I’d rather not have Ziggy Stardust know about me. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: animal fare # | |
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