Round Two!

OK, I’m back—trying to strike while my own petard is heated, or something along those lines.

After spending last newsletter catching you up and lamenting that I didn’t want to write capsule reviews, lemme go ahead and just do that, in part to catch you up on what I’ve been reading without you having to look through a list and go, “huh, so Jeff never misses an installment of Blue Box. Fascinating.”

Gunsmith Cats Omnibus, Vol. 1: One of the super-nice benefits to complaining about Dark Horse’s digital division a few weeks back, is David Wolkin asked if I’d ever read Gunsmith Cats. I hadn’t, and he pointed out Dark Horse was doing a new omnibus collection a la Gantz.

Based on the title, and the fact it was a holdover from Dark Horse’s early days of manga, I’d just always assumed it was—what?—a manga about cute cats fighting in battleships (kind of like Catshit One, except instead of bunnies it’d be Where’s Michael lookalikes)? Or maybe a Clamp style manga of….whatever it is Clamp did? Like, these were some serious old pre-manga reading biases floating around in my head, and like the chill zen instructor David so often is for me, he had silently and gently drawn my attention to them.

So I picked up the book and it’s just ridiculously enjoyable. It’s about two women running a bounty hunting business in Chicago in the ‘80s—one’s an gun and ammo expert who has her own bespoke gun business shop, and the other is a barely-of-age nymphomaniac who’s a bomb expert. It’s like if Miami Vice was set in Chicago and done in the style of Lupin The Third starring two fanservice pin-up girls.

It’s not just my jam; it’s shockingly my jam, and thanks to Hoopla, I didn’t have to risk any of my hard-earned dollars on Dark Horse’s shoddy digital work and customer service. It’s not like I’m counting the days until vol. 2 comes out but….boy oh boy I’ll be very happy if Hoopla uploads it in mid-July.

Fortune and Glory: The Musical TPB: As long as I was pillaging Dark Horse’s digital stock on Hoopla—and because I was in-between series—I picked up this trade by Brian Bendis and Bill Walko. It’s subtitled “A True Spider-Man Broadway Musical Debacle”, and considering the first volume, Bendis’s look at trying to pitch movies in Hollywood, was really enjoyable, I figured it was worth the gamble of time and eyeball power.

I…think I lost that gamble? It wasn’t like pulling teeth or anything, but Bendis’s connection to Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark is pretty slight—two or three meetings with director Julie Taymor were taken before Bendis decided to bow out / got canned—and then a lot of the rest of the book is Brian Bendis: The Illustrated Resume, with Bendis talking a lot (a lot!) about the characters he’s created, the awards he’s won, the classes he’s taught. It’s a self-effacing take, but it’s either tremendous amounts of padding to fluff out the page count of a slight anecdote his editor really wanted or a gentle attempt to position Bendis as a tremendous talent in the comic field, presented with all the conviction of someone who didn’t feel like drawing himself this time around.

After finishing vol. 2, I sourly grabbed vol. 1, which I hadn’t read in years, figuring I would now see it warts and all for being a similar piece of stealth self-promotion and self-satisfaction. And….nope! Vol. 1 holds up pretty damn well and does exactly what it sets out to do—tell some amusing Hollywood stories that shed light on how movies are made.

And even though Bill Walko is clearly a more accomplished artist than Bendis, Bendis’s work really does have some cartoony chops in the midst of all the xeroxed backgrounds and forgivingly thick line work—his characters can act, and when someone like Marc Andreyko has only a single resigned smirk for an expression you realize in the context of the story that’s Andreyko, not Bendis’s limitations as a cartoonist (or rather, Bendis using his limitations as tool in service of the work–you know, the actual work of being a cartoonist).

So yeah. I don’t think anyone in Fortune and Glory: The Musical and I’m willing to include myself in that appraisal?

Imaizumi Brings All the Gals to His House Vol. 2: Did I talk about vol. 1 of Imaizumi Brings All the Gals to His House? If so, I apologize and I’ll keep this brief because really I’m just dying to talk about the book because of what I think is some bizarre publishing choices (even by manga standard). Imaizumi is a stringy nebbish highschooler who lives in his own apartment and has to deal with three assertive classmate gals who insist on hanging out.

In other words, it sounds like Please Go Home, Miss Aktusu with three hot gals instead of one hot delinquent and I enjoyed Please Go Home enough to give it a shot.

It was pretty underwhelming, the first volume of Imaizumi…, so much so I was kind of wondering why it’d even been translated into English and published. (I didn’t wonder that much, however, since the answer to that question is almost always: because there was an anime adaptation that got attention.)

But thanks to the publisher’s newsletter, I got a clue. In the listing of their new releases, they had a two sentence description for Imaizumi: One guy’s place becomes the go-to for games, gossip, and more—the manga continuation of Imaizumin Brings All the Gyarus to His House!

The manga continuation? From…what? A videogame? A light novel? Some…earlier manga? I’d seen all of those possibilities, and found it kind of weird they weren’t more specific about what the material had usually been, the way copywriters usually do. So I looked it up on the Internet…and found porn.

Imaizumin Brings All the Gyarus to His House is a sexually explicit manga of at least four installments. (I don’t know if it’s accurate to describe it as doujinshi, which is the term for a self-published comic but it seems like it might be?) Like the manga I’d just read, Imaizumin is a stringy nebbish highschooler with his own apartment and has to deal with three assertive classmate gals…who won’t stop banging his brains out.

It’s basically a free use fantasy but with the added fantasy of “oh my god, this scrawny kid is so good with his dick, I love him so much that I can’t wait to start riding him the second he makes this other woman riding him have an explosive orgasm.”

And for what it is, it’s pretty good? The dialogue between the gals—the best part of vol. 1 and vol. 2—has some zip to it, and each gal has their own personality…and the pacing is interesting, I’m not gonna lie—the manga-ka paces the stories so the sex stuff comes and goes but kind of comes back stronger each time so that by the end it feels legitimately, uh, orgiastic?

It’s kind of weird that some manga editor looked at it and was like, “you know, let’s just do a sequel to it without all the explicit fucking and, you know, make it kind of a heartwarming manga about a high schooler in a quadruple with three tough gals who have dreams and histories and are able to learn love again because of how considerate this nebbish stringbean is.” It’s…kinda like if back in the 70s CBS had decided to turn Deep Throat into a half-hour sitcom? I mean, yeah, you can do that…but, you know, should you?

Admittely, who am I to judge? I bought volume two. (Though really to see if they were going to stick to the “no porn” angle or if it was going to ramp up or something….) But, uh, really weird.

Daredevil #1-96 (and continuing): So after finishing up reading seventy-plus issues each of ROM and Micronauts, I decided to find another Marvel series to chain-read in small doses. And originally that was going to be Spider-Girl but…oof, no, Pat Olliffe’s art was killing me I hated it so much. I mean, he’s probably a sweet guy and he was drawing at a time where the trend for superhero comic art wasn’t really to my taste but…man I made it through eleven issues or so and felt like it’d drained as many years off my lifespan.

So, anyway. Me being the digital hoarder that I am, I’ve got a lot of comics I’ve bought but never read and that includes the first twelve or so volumes of Daredevil Masterworks, and it was always one of those things I’d meant to read so…

Honestly, I’m not sure the first four dozen issues are any better than Spider-Girl but they look so much better. Skipping over the early two or three weirdo issues with Joe Orlando on art (and those issues introduce both The Owl and Killgrave the Purple Man so they’re actually kind of seminal in terms of Daredevil villains despite looking pretty kludgy), you go from Bill Everett to Wally Wood to Gene Colan which is…you know, a pretty good run of artists!

Stan is absolutely terrible, however, as I kind of suspected from the times I’ve read anything that wasn’t propped up by Ditko or Kirby (and even those had their less than stellar moments). Rather than making the case for Stan Lee one way or another here—I’m tempted to both make excuses for him and slander him posthumously—there’s no way you can read Daredevil and not see him as critically distracted at best or apathetic and inattentive at worst.

The “love triangle” between Matt and Karen and Foggy shifts from issue to issue, as do the reasons why Matt won’t confess his love—one issue it’s because Foggy would be broken-hearted; the next it’s because Matt can’t bear being pitied for his blindness; the next it’s because Matt can’t bear the idea of forcing the love of a blind man onto Karen. Both Mike Murdock’s arrival and departure are ludicrous, but they’re painfully arbitrary, and the reasons between any given decision change from issue to issue. It’s almost fun in a “wow, these stink” kind of way…but only almost?

In fact, it was really educational to me to see how much I’m really a kid of Bronze Age Marvel—when Roy Thomas comes on-board as writer is where I actually enjoy the book, and now, deep in the depths of the Gerry Conway run, I’m actually having to pace myself and not tear through three or four issues at a time. Say what you will about the post-Stan Lee writers at Marvel, but most of them—if nothing else—felt an obligation to keep the characterization consistent and the plots coherent.

I’m not sure when I’m gonna jump off—I have the Masterworks right up to Miller’s run, and I’ve got at least the first volume of those issues in another set of trades—but it’s been a weird ride. I’m glad it’s finally one I’m enjoying.

OK, there’s a few more things I could gab about but it’s either gonna be for another post or I have to be ok not letting you know what I think about Delicious in Dungeon. (I absolutely have been loving it, just like everyone else.)

Anyway, thanks for putting up with me—I hope you’re well!

-Jeff