Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! (5.18.2016) – The Comic Store Is A Consensual Hallucination
Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! A couple of weeks ago, one of OL’s longest supporters on Facebook was like, dudes, where the shit is the weekly comic book column. Turns out it’s a great question, Sarah!
I didn’t think it had been that long since we had one.
It had been a year.
I didn’t think it had been that long since I had been writing it, personally.
It had been four years.
My departure, not surprisingly, is connected to the time of my life when I finished graduate school, got engaged, bought a house, got a dog, and started working fifty+ hours a week.
That’s the truth, man. That’s the goddamn truth, man.
So, a longtime OL supporter demanded an answer to a good question. A valid question. Where the shit has the weekly comic book column gone?
The easy answer is that the previous writer Johnny Hotsauce! wrote a way better column than me, got understandably burnt out, and I never tagged back in. It coincided with a time where, as mentioned above, comic books sort of slid to the back of my rot-synapse’d psyche, being supplanted by grading papers and trying to figure out how to pay for a wedding DJ or a winter electric bill.
Now it’s been a year since the column existed in any state, and four years since I personally vomited up installments in a caffeine-haze, awash in piles of scholarly articles I didn’t want to read.
But here we are!
Rise, comic book column, rise!
Apparently I like lyrical prosody over cheap dick jokes these days, but I can try! I liked Deadpool for Christ’s Sake, clearly I still want to talk about my balls, like the good old days. Lord knows, they seem to announce themselves with a cheddar-funk these days. Lord knows, they still seem to get twisted in my tapered jeans that I insist on wearing, despite my pizza-inflated body.
Rise, comic book column, rise!
For those of you reading this, ingesting this self-absorbed bloviating, I promise. It won’t happen again. Not until I take another four years off. At which point I’ll be coming to you from inside my OculusBody. Dictating the column to the audio-visual experience processor in my VirtuaHome. After my wife kicks me out. After my body kicks me out. After the GreatTrumpening of 2022. Not until then.
Rise, comic book column, rise!
There’s, uh. Just one problem with this comic books column lifting itself up out of the muck of my neglect, apathy, and fear at having lost my voice in prose. I haven’t fucking read a comic book since February. I haven’t fucking committed myself in mind, body, and wallet to the comic book game for, like, a year?
Thereabouts.
So essentially, what we have here, at least for the moment, folks, comma, comma, until I get myself on my feet, comma, comic book-wise, comma, is a man writing a comic book column full of recommendations, where he himself needs recommendations.
And an editor.
But you gotta pick and choose.
And to pierce linear time-space to find a Realm where Pizza has Zero Calories and the Pepsi Max flows like water.
But you gotta pick and choose.
Five-hundred and twenty-nine words in, and I haven’t said a goddamn thing. I guess it is like the good old days.
Jokes!
Ha!
Jokes!
Ha!
So here’s the deal. I’m just going to go ahead and write this comic book column this week. I’m going to recommend some shit that catches my eye. Let me be clear: this was never about me recommending the “best” titles dropping, just the ones that interested me. Let me be clear: this column has always functioned best as an avuncular sharing of pull-lists.
(Predicated on anyone actually reading this, which is doubtful, but hey, what can you do.)
There’s a litany of titles I know I want to read but I’m just behind on. Apparently I chose the week where literally none of them are dropping. Fuck me, right? Fuck me with a hot glue gun. Enough, Ian! Enough. Just give your suggestions. Then beg for people in the comments section to provide their own, for the week.
Rise, comic book column, rise!
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Civil War II #0 (Marvel)
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis Art: Olivier Coipel Cover: Olivier Coipel
I suppose if I’m getting back into the fucking rigamarole of comic book stands diving, I might as well check out my fanboy favorite publisher’s Summer Event. Truth be told! I’m on my third Pepsi Max. Truth also be told! I have no idea what the fuck Marvel’s second Civil War (perhaps a prescient prelude to the upcoming Collapse of It All) is going to be about. Superheroes punching superheroic jaws in an effort to synergize (and fail, I reckon) with the company’s current box office smash. Outside of that? No clue. But it’s Olivier Coipel. That’s dope. Got Captain Marvel on the cover. That’s dope. Got Brian Michael Bendis. Dope enough? Dope enough!
—-
Lazarus Collection Vol. 2, Hardcover (Image)
Writer: Greg Rucka Art: Michael Lark
Oh shit! A comic book title dropping this week that I recognize! A comic book title dropping this week that I’ve read, enjoyed, attempted to catch-up on (but the comic shop didn’t have any back issues), and genuinely anticipate. Not many people I talk to, on the Electronic Web, really seem to get down with Lazarus. Or at least they don’t sport any sort of zealous love for the title. I get it — sort of. It’s never really transcendent. But, it’s consistently solid. A great, intricate plot by Rucka. Full of the old ultra-violence, corporate critiques, and prescient but not really that far off commentary on hacking the human body. All of the sort of material that wanks off CommunistCaff is complimented nicely by Lark’s art.
It won’t change your life, but what does? Great Amateur Porn users on Tumblr? True. Great Deals on Pepsi Products for your Commute? True. Lazarus? Nah. But it’s fun all the same.
—-
Superman: American Alien #7 (DC)
Writer: Max Landis Art: Jock Cover: Ryan Sook
Pretty torn up about American Alien, dude. Pretty upset about American Alien, yo. You see, apparently it’s great. You see, it’s also written by Max Landis. He of the consistently awful comments on Twitter. He of the occasionally insightful and (I hate to admit it) enjoyable YouTube videos. He of the self-satisfied half-baked pop culture critiques, bad hair cuts, and beneficent of the genetic lottery.
What to do? What to do! It’s easy for me, actually. I haven’t read the first six issues! I wish I did, but I haven’t. So I’m just going to pass on this seventh issue, and pretend to wrangle with my own sense of not wanting to support a douche with my money. Pretend, because I ain’t ever bailing on a potentially awesome installment of artistic endeavor just because of the creator. So long as that creator’s crime is being a blowhard, and nothing more.
We’ll meet again, Landis, when your shit comes to trade paperback.
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Archangel #1 (IDW)
Writer: William Gibson Art: Butch Guice Cover: Tula Lotay
Billy fucking Gibson. Butch fucking Guice. Tula fucking Lotay. And did I mention Billy fucking Gibson? The author is one of my favorite writers, assassinating the fog surrounding the Future with nothing but a typewriter back in the day. Took his mind-ocular-portention to pseudo-modern day times with his Bigend Trilogy in the Aughts. Now he’s turning his focus to comic books, with Archangel. The premise sounds right around peak Gibson, taking place in a story where:
U.S. political leaders of 2016 abandon the radioactive planet they’ve destroyed and harness the power of humanity’s last hope: The Splitter, a colossal machine designed to manufacture a bright new reality for them to infiltrate and corrupt.
I mean. Fuck.
I mean. Come on.
What a Reality we ourselves live in, where Warren Ellis crosses over into prose, and William Gibson crosses over into comic books.
It ain’t going to stop us from the Great Trumpian Culling, or Climate Change, or an Asteroid, or an EMP, or whatever is going to smoke us. But dope authors doing dope things is enough to get me not to dwell on all the Upcoming Events.
Right? Right. Right!
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So that’s it for me. We’re back. I’m back. I hope you’re back. What are you reading this week? What are you reading in general? Let’s get the pistons pumping again, the engines churning, the uh, something something figurative language I’ve been writing this for two hours now, something something.
I missed you.