Longbox Thoughts Returns! Dickson Tackles BPRD, Infinite Vacation, and Wolverine!
So DC is setting their standard price point at $2.99. They’re celebrating this by reducing their covers to the main characters and the logo representing the comic book. Thanks, DC. I love knowing that paying less means less stuff. I guess it does make sense. I don’t know. I saw all of those white covers and thought I’d gone snow blind.
You know me – I hate everything.
It was a light week for comics – well, for me anyway. I don’t really purchase Marvel or DC books on the whole. I was briefly reading Batman and Robin, drawn in by the awesome Quitely covers, but that quickly went nowhere. Though I am liking this new Robin. He’s a little prick.
This week I picked up only two books. BOTH WINNERS! See? I like stuff.
B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Gods (Dark Horse; $3.50)
Of course, anything with “Mignola” on the cover is in my hand automatically. So, it’s no surprise that my first purchase was “B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Gods” (Dark Horse; $3.50). I am excited to see how the apocalypse will unfold. Cities have already been destroyed, a monster breathes people into smaller monsters and Ben Daimyo came back in the first part of this story. Now, we have a rag-tag band of miscreant teens headed up by a psychic hipster chick hopping trains, getting into fights and talking. A lot. The last page has Abe Sapien with a gun! AWESOME!
I still can’t get used to Guy Davis’ art. I mean, we are so spoiled by Duncan Fegredo’s work over in Hellboy that the art in B.P.R.D. looks overall like scribbles and weird faces in comparison. I don’t know.
I’m probably just a cretin. The story by Mike and John Arcudi is still unfolding, but previous B.P.R.D. storylines have been nothing short of epic. Overused word? Yes but sometimes it just fits. Your stupid Yogi Bear hat isn’t “epic”, hipster. End-of-the-world monsters are. Check.
Mate.
Infinite Vacation (Image; $3.50)
The other book I bought this week is, excuse me, F N WEIRD. Dog. It’s called “Infinite Vacation (Image; $3.50)” and it goes a little something like this: Mark lives many lives, all at once, all the time.
When something doesn’t seem to be going his way, he hops on his smartphone and buys another reality, based on lives and experiences from other Marks in infinite realities. He sometimes travels to these other realities to stay for a while with other Marks. He stays with a Mark who decided to open a surf shop in Fiji. He has another Mark for a therapist. Stuff like that.
Then, trouble comes in two forms. He learns through the infinite reality social network that Fiji Mark has been killed. Even though he explains to himself in therapy that Marks die all the time, he gets freaked because the deaths seem to be occurring inordinately amongst the Marks he has gotten to know. Compounding his frustration is his chance meeting and subsequent attraction to a “dead-ender”.
Dead-enders don’t believe in altering your fate with infinite vacations. They just let life go the way it’s planned. I’m suspecting this girl is going to factor into his conflict, one way or the other.
So there you go. I don’t know what the hell is going on in this book.
I summarized because I don’t know what to say. Is this book too smart for me? It could be, but I think I like it. The art by Christian Ward is suitably trippy and there’s a sequence of panels done “Tom Goes to The Mayor” style with actual photographic images supplying the illustration for an explanation of the infinite vacation. The story bends me mind around like a merry-go-round on a record player, so thanks to Nick Spencer for taking the necessary creative enhancements to be able to come up with this.
Wolverine: The Best There Is (Marvel)
Ah… OK! You got it. Got what you say? A little hate, that’s what.
This week, the hate comes down on “Wolverine: The Best There Is”. What the hell, guys. Marvel. Come on. Hey. Come on. What? Guys. Come on.
OK, the book is gory. Way to slap it to the Mouse House.
In the first issue, we do get to see Wolverine try to shed the shame Bryan Singer and his merry men laid on him in the movies and chop some fools. Blood flows and ####’s are in abundance (that means a swear word). However, the first issue was mostly about Logan’s hair styling skills. My roommate summarizes her hatred for this book by telling people, “at one point, someone calls him ‘Mr. Wolverine’ and he says ‘Mr. Wolverine was my father! HAW’”, where “haw” is what is written there. That pretty much sums up the atrocious writing in this book.
The second issue, I admit, had me laughing out loud (LOL’ing) as Wolverine chopped a guys arms and legs off and the gore gets ramped up to 11. I don’t have a problem with the art or even with the gore. I mean, sure, it’s not for kids, I get that, but the writing and situations are like fan fiction come to life. Marvel is paying people to make this book? Really? REALLY? Give me some of that money and I’ll come up with something far, far stupider in half the time. It’s like they couldn’t afford to get Joss, so they got someone who wants to be Joss to badly imitate him. Dreck! I DECLARE DRECK!
That’s it for now. If you think I’m full of ####, then tell me so. Is there something I should be reading? I’ll check it out. Want to talk about what you had for breakfast? Hit me up.
