iainpj | Entries tagged with minx

virgin de-and-re-virginized
:: Liquid Comics ::: Liquid Comics has completed the management buyout of Virgin Comics led by the founding management team of Gotham Chopra, Sharad Devarajan and Suresh Seetharaman. Liquid Comics will continue to develop innovative digital, film, animation, and gaming projects for its original character, stories and other properties.

Commenting on the change, Sharad Devarajan said, "Virgin Group has been a fantastic partner with whom to work and together we have established a strong foundation of great character properties and media partnerships.

We remain fully committed to continuing our mission to provide a home for innovative creators and storytellers across the world."

It looks like this means that many, if possibly not most, of Virgin's titles will continue. The front page of the new Liquid Comics site -- which is redirected from virgincomics.com -- contains the first issue of Devi, broken up in a very strange way. The question is, how will Liquid work without Virgin's backing? Who owns the various movie and television coproductions, Liquid or Virgin itself? Will they focus on making good comix instead of focusing so strongly on Hollywood-ready properties? And what's going to happen with the Stan Lee superhero universe that he was going to create for Virgin? Is that still alive? Will they work harder with either the direct market or the book market to get their stuff where people can see it? One of their biggest problems is that they simply got no push at all in the direct market, so a different take on superheroes fell largely on deaf ears. (NB: According to his quarterly Word Balloon interview [FIVE HOURS! FIVE!], apparently Virgin made Marvel's Brian Michael Bendis an offer to work on the Stan Lee project that he was seriously considering. I can't imagine that they can afford to throw mind-numbing amounts of money at him this time around, and in any event, he declined the first time because of all of his other existing work.)

Actually, the real question is: will there be more Devi? I really don't care about the rest of it, I just want her back. (...OK, I care about the rest of it; just not anywhere near as much.)

m. night reconsidering: In other world news, M. Night Shyamalan is considering making Unbreakable 2. Which ... hmm. On the one hand, I kind of think it was the last good movie he made, although it did end on a serious downbeat that limited who would see it. Rightly or wrongly, people generally don't like their superhero movies to end in so dark a manner -- although that said, the end of the original Superman II is awfully bittersweet, and The Dark Knight is only slightly lighter than Unbreakable (although containing more actual corpses). It also had some pacing issues here and there, although I'd say that it's one of the rare movies that doesn't kick you out of the right headspace if you wind up thinking a little about what's going on as it happens. I do think, unless he's going to posit that the main character went into hibernation over the past decade, that Bruce Willis might be a shade long in the tooth to return to the role; that said, given the amount of time that's passed, it would be interesting to see if maybe what happened with the character David Dunn is genetic, and gets passed on down to his son. After all David didn't come into his powers in any major way until he was in his 30s; maybe his son wouldn't come into his until his 20s or some such. And hey! in true supervillain fashion, maybe Samuel L. Jackson's Elijah could escape from prison to plague Dunn from his wheelchair! (And note: if M. Night does decide to make a sequel, Samuel L. is ready to go.)

minx unminxed: According to CBR, DC has pulled the plug on Minx, their imprint aimed primarily at teenaged girls. Some of the remaining titles will still be published, some won't, some won't be published as Minx titles if they're published at all. (I wonder if they'll move them to CMX?) Apparently, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get the titles to the manga shelves in regular bookstores. Not surprising, I suppose; with a recession chopping off people's discretionary spending, and with Borders in acute distress -- and Borders was the single largest sale point for manga in this country -- I can't imagine that anyone would have done well. (That said, while the first wave of titles was good, there seemed to be a real drop-off in quality with the second wave. Mileage varies, of course, but I didn't like the second year titles anywhere near as much as the first, with the exception of New York Four by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly.

What amuses me is that they're possibly considering moving some of the titles to Vertigo, based on the prior success of My Faith in Frankie by Mike Carey. The thing that struck me at the time was that My Faith in Frankie was truly, sincerely, desperately NOT a Vertigo title. It was too light, it was clearly -- except for the ending -- aimed at a younger audience than Vertigo's normal one. Maybe that'll work this time; they certainly won't have problems getting it into regular comics stores, and they've got some inroads into the bookstore markets for the Vertigo and DC labels.

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Burnout (Rebecca Donner/Inaki Miranda; DC/Minx):

Danni and her mother have moved in with her mother's alcoholic and borderline abusive boyfriend after the disappearance of Danni's father -- apparently, he just deserted them. Danni winds up falling in love with Haskell, her sort-of stepbrother, and getting involved in his brand of radical ecological activism. Becoming involved with Haskell means that Danni winds up having to make a lot of tough decisions about her actions and bearing the consequences of them.

Honestly, I think this is the first Minx title where I can say that the issue is that I'm absolutely not the target audience, even though I've liked other Minx books, sometimes quite a lot. Donner's writing isn't at all bad, and Miranda's artwork works well with the story. But it took me three times to get through it, despite its brevity. Part of the issue is that because of the different things she's been going through, and the terribly awkward living situation, Danni's personality comes across as very muted, despite being the first-person narrator. For that matter, for all that he's a radical ecoterrorist of sorts, Haskell comes across as surly and quiet, and not actually there all that much. Danni's mother, aside from making one bad decision after another, is barely there. To be sure, much of this is the result of Hank's verbal and near-physical abuse of Danni's mother and of Haskell; one of the things you learn about being around an abusive person is to be as quiet and withdrawn as possible, because you never know what will set them off. But that means that everyone in the story, aside from Danni's best friend, feels terribly buttoned-down a lot of the time.

I don't know ... I think overall, this story just wasn't to my taste, so I can't really rate it.

Gemini 2 of 5 (Faerber/Sommariva/Plascencia; Image): ...Yeah. I'm guessing, given the events that occur in issue 2, that perhaps issue 3 is where they explain the concept, and why anyone would do such a damnfool thing as these people are doing, because at the moment, this makes less than no sense. Why in the name of sanity would you want to run a superhero like a machine, and wipe his memory of his civilian life when he's in costume, and vice versa when he's not? Yes, it would have the benefit of not allowing them to betray any knowledge of each other, but the way this story has been put together, Dan seems not to have chosen to be a superhero. The science nerds who are running the show picked him, so he's putting his life in danger entirely without his knowledge or consent. Moreover, Dan's control circuits were in his contact lenses, without any backup, so when, say, one's head gets blown off, and one's regenerative powers cause it to grow back (...yeah, that's another handwave moment there), and he no longer has contacts, you have to find another way to control him. There's no redundancy in the system that's actually connected to Dan, for some reason. So then you send in another one of your controlled superheroes, whom no other superhero in the city knows, and, well, Very Bad Things happen. And then it turns out that Dan's former control agent, who was fired because she started having issues of various sorts with what they were doing, is out and running around with full knowledge of everything in her head. She wasn't killed, doesn't seem to have been mindwiped, and has the ability to throw a wrench in the works. Seriously, at this point, there is no level on which this series makes sense, which is a pity, becausse it's kind of ... weirdly cool throughout much of it. With the exception of those (many) moments where the concept intrudes forcefully into the storytelling in awkward ways, it's an interesting superhero/mad science story. The fairly stylized artwork is really a perfect match. But the concept, so far, it sucks the bilge water. (I'm guessing that when the concept is explained, when they have to tell the newbie why they're doing what they're doing, it's going to shake out basically as "Because we could." I can't conceive of any sensible reason why even vaguely ethical people would do what they're doing, but I hope Faerber can.)

Pilot Season: Genius (Bernardin/Freeman/Afua Richardson; Top Cow):

Imagine a balkanized and divided Los Angeles, in which the people don't really trust the police, and vice versa. (Or don't; that's pretty much the situation in the city today.) Imagine that gang warfare suddenly seems to be becoming ... oddly organized. Against the police. That's the setup for Genius, from the writers of last year's Monster Attack Network and Highwaymen. Destiny, a young black woman, has organized the gangs in and around her Compton neighborhood into a very good, appallingly strong paramilitary force. Something specific -- we don't quite know what just yet -- happened to make her decide that their neighborhood would be better with them maintaining control than with the apparently corrupt police. So she and her people kill off a few police and send one back to give headquarters the message.

In the meantime, inside HQ, Detective Reginald Grey has been putting together the clues and realizing that there's a "Suspect Zero", someone controlling all the action, someone setting up the LAPD to take a fall. Of course, nobody at HQ quite believes him -- after all, nothing like that's happened before now, so why should they believe that things have changed so drastically? Except then the cop that Destiny didn't kill gets back to HQ and lets them know that, in fact, the map has changed dramatically.

Bernardin and Freeman convey the situation and characers very well in the limited space they've got. Richardson's art at first seemed a bit stylized for the story but ... it really does work. All the characters are easy to distinguish, and it keeps the story from looking quite like the grim trip that it's likely to be. Tonally, the closest things to it I can think of are Walking Dead and Rex; the former because of the way it deals with people driven to doing difficult things that they otherwise would never consider, the latter because of the gritty and dark way it deals with the police and official corruption and people taking the law into their hands after they've been pushed Just That One Step too far.

I really hope this title is one that survives Pilot Season to become a continuing title. I'd really like to see more of this one. The one thing that I think might give it problems in the voting is that it is in no way, shape, or form, a superhero story, and I wonder if maybe that's all that people are expecting from Pilot Season. I hope they're expecting more than just that. Highly Recommended.

Pilot Season: Twilight Guardian (Hickman/Reza; Top Cow): Twilight Guardian, I suspect, is going to have a much tougher time than Genius in the voting. The story follows a young woman who, because of various difficult events in her past that we really only see the edges of, decides to become the superhero the world clearly needs. Only ... she's just a regular person, as far as we can tell. No particular powers or special abilities, just a decided lack of certain aspects of sanity. It's somewhat like Millar's Kick-Ass, only the Guardian herself comes off as somehow more reasonable and sane that Kick-Ass (and considerably less pummeled by the end of the first issue). It's not really that nothing happens in the issue -- although it is more about introducing the character than anything else -- but it's not jam packed and full of action, and I think that might hurt it against titles that are more conventionally busy, like Genius or Lady Pendragon (the other Pilot Season titles published to date this year). Reza's artwork is perfectly serviceable, helping tell the story without drawing attention to itself per se. Recommended.

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So, this week, we look at a couple Minx books, a Hellboy Animated book, and a few other things.

So, let's get going, shall we?

( Let's shall... )

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THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

random weirdness, with occasional comics, dinosaurs and sodomy

comickal: comix business gets weird (EDITED)

comickal: recently read, independent edition

comickal: recently read, short books edition

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