Author Archives: vommarlowe

Now With Free Checking: X-Men Legacy

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X-Men Legacy issue 226
Carey, Weaver, Tadeo, Reber

You know those people who read just the words in comics and kind of ignore the art? Yeah, I’m the opposite. I like the pretty pictures and often ignore the words.

So I’d been wanting to read some American comics and I circled my options at the Borders. I wanted superheroes (including female superheroes), some action, not too much gore and no zombies. This episode looked promising: Rogue on the cover, decent art, explosions in the background. Neat!

I picked it up and read it over coffee at the Squid Cafe, and I was….disappointed. First of all, this sucker cost me four bucks. It’s full of ads for cheesecake statues and Spiderman toothbrush holders. There’s a large excerpt in the back for some other comic. All of which is fine, except–there’s only twenty two pages of comic. For four dollars! That’s seventeen cents per page.

Well, it seemed a bit steep to me, considering I can get nearly two hundred pages of manga for 8.95 (or 5.37 if I have my Borders coupon).

Regardless, I persevered and read the art. The story isn’t that complicated. There’s this sort of riot on Castro Street (no, I don’t know why it’s there–go with it), and Rogue and company are trying to stop it from being bad.

Some of the art is really fun. Check out this page below. The colors shift from earthy and dark to this sexy, girly pink. The woman’s pose is tough, hot, and feminine. Those earrings! That attitude! I wanted to know more about her right away.

Unfortunately, most of the pages are just not this good. And she’s not in the rest of this issue.

So we switch to another scene, where Rogue is supposed to battle the big female baddie. This should be a fun scene–the big payoff for the issue. Rogue gets to strut her stuff, the baddie gets to be tough, and….

It’s weird, is what. I wanted to mail the artists a copy of a simple anatomy book. Take a look at this page:

In the top right panel, the torsion is just wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Yes, she’s moving through her body, but the arms and body don’t add up properly. Then there’s the competing speed lines in the next section. Speedlines go one direction from the punch–Rogue is thrown. And then we have speedlines from the opposite direction with a couple of sexy boots stepping into them like they’re supposed to indicate a slipstream. What?

The leg in the second to the bottom was it for me. The force lines go up (near the foot), the baddie is kicking up, not out. But Rogue is moving to the right. What?

Wrong. All wrong.

So they battle, Rogue gets in some hits, baddie gets in some hits, Rogue goes crashing through a window and then we get this:

Keeping it classy, I see. Thanks Marvel. Cause showing a woman’s bra when she’s been in a fight and lost is what cheesecake is all about! Frankly, I took one look at this and thought about mailing Rogue a nice brochure for Enell.

So at this point I’m kind of two minds: the Rogue bits were meh, but the Lady in Pink is hawt. The colors are gorgeous, but the drawing is irritating. (Also, whoever does the inks for the eyebrows keeps leaving out a chunk of Rogue’s left eyebrow. Weird.)

Then we come to this, the US Bank portion of the issue. We’re tooling along, having a massive street showdown with lots of yummy explosions and baddie fights on Castro street and we come to this page:

At first, I thought Well, the artist traced some photo of Castro and just included a building logo in the prime center top position for verisimilitude. And then, when the logo appears right next to the baddie’s head, I thought Huh, that’s odd. And then we get to the next page.

And my eyes rolled forever.

I slapped the poor issue shut and ordered myself a consolatory cappuccino. Fortunately, I wandered into a local small comic shop and they hooked me up with a much more promising title. Batwoman! Lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night. Sounds good to me.

Lions and tigers and bears oh my: Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews

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I’ve been a on YA s/f reading kick for a while now. Most of the books I “read” are audiobooks that I listen to while commuting or filing at work, because I have little spare time. One of my recent favorites was the Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Reese Brennan. I follow her LJ and she wrote a great essay about women in fiction during which she recommended Ilona Andrews’ Magic Bites series.

I picked it up at Borders yesterday (yay coupons!) and gnawed my way through it over lunch breaks. It’s pretty good, and I’m curious to see where the author takes it.

The basic summary is boring: Kate, intrepid heroine, is a magic mercenary in Atlanta, where magic returns in waves from time to time. She’s investigating the death of her guardian, Greg, who died while working for an Order of protective knights. There are two main camps of potential baddies: wereanimals (the Pack) and vampires (actually run by necromancers).

Kate is tough, cold, and friendless, unless you count weapons as friends. She wisecracks and is stubborn, wears her hair in a braid, and acts a lot like early Anita Blake, right down to an uncomfortable dinner date at a fancy restaurant. She keeps a big sword on her back, camouflaged by her braid, and she Fights Crime.

This all seems very stock, but it has a certain charm. For one thing, it’s got a very Russian feel to it. (The main author is Russian; English is her second language, and she writes with her husband.) By which I mean, tons of the old parts of Atlanta are destroyed and they’re going to stay destroyed. It’s a fatalism that I find kind of refreshing. The descriptions of people and actions and places are detailed and rather fast paced. In some ways, it reminds me of a short story, where ideas are paramount. There are many ideas in this book–complex buildings, social structures among monsters, weapons, rituals, powers, types of humans, and they’re tossed in practically every other paragraph. It’s a short book, but very dense. This feels very Russian to me, although others might characterize it as something else.

There are many male characters in the book, and very few female ones (except as victims). There’s some fighting over who gets to date Kate, which I found tiresome. However, the essay I mentioned above indicated that part of the purpose of the series is to overturn the Anita Blake-style tough chick surrounded only by guys trope, so I’m curious to see what happens in future books. As per usual for me, the so-called “pack” dynamics drove me nuts (note to authors: alphas do not always insist on eating first; and when they do, it’s often so they can regurgitate to feed their young. Puppies generally eat first. But whatever.)

One other issue I had may be a personal quirk, because I’ve come across this in other books. You’re in the middle of a tough case; “no one” will believe that things aren’t finished; you’re certain that the killer is out there and may be after you. What do you do? Go to bed and sleep soundly. Baffling. Maybe I’m a workaholic, but I’d be calling around, following up leads, or at least having nightmares. Perhaps librarianship has a stricter work ethic than mercenary detectives.