Random Thoughts

I’ve been reading comics! Here’s some stuff I’ve read over the past couple weeks.

DC’s reprint push has made me buy a bunch of these huge books, reprinting things from throughout their history. I’m not sure why, really. Marketing works? Or something?

This is drawn by Gil Kane, which is probably why I got this one. I haven’t read any of these stories before…

… and reading this book, I understand why: They’re pretty bad. They’re just One Zany Thing After Another, and while that can work if the things are inspired, they’re really not here.

I lasted about 120 pages before I gave up and read one of the final stories to see if they improved…

… and they did not.

Except look at that horny grin he has. Yes, indeed, that’s a self portrait by Gil Kane, right?

I have read The Scorpions of the Desert before…

… but not in French and not in colour. It’s a very nice colouring job, I think.

This isn’t Hugo Pratt’s best work (I think it was perhaps the last thing he did before he started Corto Maltese?), but it’s pretty good.

This on the other hand… I don’t know who Sterne is, and I’ve never heard of this thing. “Katana’s Lair” or something.

But look at this art style — it’s like he has a fear of drawing facial features. I kinda love it? On the cover it looks like an exercise in how far you can go in abstracting the not-quite-ligne-claire style.

And the inside pages are indeed very stylish.

Adler’s style is a real storytelling problem, though — the two first panels above depict Our Hero and The Horrible Villain… or is it the other way around? Who can tell?

The story isn’t very impressive, either.

During Corona I got the brilliant idea to take up a subscription to the Swedish version of Agent-X9, which is a long-running thing in Scandinavia. It’s 100 pages of reprints of old US/British newspaper strips, basically, and it’s been running monthly since the 70s. That’s a lot of pages.

So I thought it would be fun to have something like that arrive randomly in the mail, and I could read a few pages before getting to bed or something.

Smash cut to now, where half my bedside cabinet is jam packed with unread issues. I’ve let the subscription lapse now, but I though I should start reading these things now, right?

These days, every single issue features one Modesty Blaise sequence, which takes up (usually) about half the issue. Back in the olden days, they switched it up, but not any more, because her stories are the best, really, and if there’s not a Modesty Blaise story in an issue, then they don’t sell.

But I hear you all reaching for your mechanical calculators out there… If this magazine has been running for nigh on five decades, and there’s twelve of them per year, that’s 600 issues. And you’ve already checked Wikipedia, and yes, there are only 95 Modesty Blaise serials. So how is that possible?

Well, they’ve started over again at least three times.

Yes, they’re re-selling the same Modesty Blaise stories to probably much the same audience. So it’s a kind of double nostalgia thing or something?

The other half of the issues are reprints of, how shall we say, “lesser” serials, and they don’t re-reprint the other more famous series as much (Rip Kirby, Agent Corrigan, etc), so they’re really scraping the barrel here.

An innovation that I don’t know when they started is adding translation of French action/adventure comics. And that works kinda fine? They couldn’t do this in the olden days, because printing in colour for this price point would just be cost prohibitive, but it works surprisingly well. They aren’t using newsprint exactly, but a quite matte, thin paper that has no bleed through. The paper stock is perfect, really. Things like the Green Lantern book would have been much more pleasant to read printed on this kind of stock: Less reflection, so you don’t have to angle the pages away from the light, and softer, floppier pages that lie open easier.

I assumed that Marc Sobel was going to do a expose on Bill Marks since it’s subtitled “How The Hernandez Brothers Saved Mr. X”…

… but nope. This pamphlet just regurgitates known sources. I don’t think there’s anything new? But then again, I may be biased.

I guess this is meant to be used in a college course about comics or something? And for that, it’s a good introduction to an interesting bit of comics publishing history.

But disappointing of you expect something new.

There are apparently several of these free magazines in France?

Their purpose is, of course, to drive sales, so they have capsule reviews of a bunch of comics.

So bookshops probably plonk these into the shopping bags of customers? I’m not quite sure how I ended up with them… I just found them in a stack of French comics recently.

And speaking of French (well, Belgian) comics, I got more issues of Spirou.

They’re kinda variable — a bit hit or miss. When there aren’t any compelling serials running, it’s a bit of a slog.

Well, not a slog exactly, but there’s several of these one-page things (as seen on the right above) that are eerily similar in form: We get four four panel strips, and the jokes are just really, really weak. Especially Léon & Lena is just so pointless — the entire thing is that these two siblings are psychopaths, and … hilariousness doesn’t ensue. I think there’s five of these? That have eeeevil children as protagonists. It’s a trend, I guess?

This issue was very much on the nose for 2025, hein?

At least somebody’s crushing the Nazis, even if it’s in 1943.

OK, I finished Descender earlier tonight, and if you’re a fan and don’t want to listen to me moan and bitch about it, close this browser tab now. OK?

Because I hated it. Everything about it, except the artwork, is offensively clichéd.

Like… they have to go find this boy robot, so the Mightiest Army In The Galaxy sends out… yes, you already guessed it… a small ship with a crew of three people, and one of the people are (yes, you guessed it) the daughter of the Boss Of The Entire Army Of The Mightiest Army In The Galaxy.

Because that’s what a Boss Of The Entire Army Of The Mightiest Army In The Galaxy does.

It’s also just so optimised for the TV adaptation. The cute kid there? Yes, that’s the robot, but he looks totally unrobotic for 90% of the time, presumably so that the CGI costs wouldn’t be too high.

So to save the universe, they assemble a Scooby Gang consisting of The Feisty Daughter Of The etc, a Mad Scientist, The Boy Robot, A Big Robot With A Catchphrase (“I’m Driller, A Real Killer”) That He Says All The Time (to be played by The Rock), a Yappy Dog Robot (That Says Arf Arf All The Time But His Friends Understand The Meaning), and of course The Hairy Strong Guy Why Looks Vaguely Lionish (To Be Killed Off For Stakes).

All that sounds like we’re going to go for a rollicking knowing kick-ass adventure a la Guardians of the Galaxy (which, coincidentally enough, was released the year before this debuted), but we’re not, because it’s mostly humourless, and most everything is played straight. Which makes all these cliches so annoying.

And of course, the Most Evil Guy is this fat, ugly guy, because all heroes are pretty and all the evil people are fat and ugly.

Which makes it so risible that Lemire tried to palm off this fat and ugly guy as The Anti-Hero’s Sidekick, because you only have to look at him for a microsecond and go “yeah, he’s gonna betray everybody”.

And speaking of The Anti-Hero… yes, of course, the moment he was introduced I went “that’s the robot boy hero’s adoptive brother, right?”

You’re not gonna believe what the revelation is gonna be!

And that’s basically the plot all the way through — all the major players are going to turn out to be connected to everybody else, so only seven people in the universe are going to end up mattering. It’s such a picayune vision, but of course, it makes the TV adaptation much easier to handle.

I could go on and on, because Descender is just that annoying. I haven’t even mentioned that the Driller Killer Robot lands on a Planet Of Magic where he encounters a Wizard and almost falls into The Quicksands, because, yes, you can’t have a book like this without quicksand.

I haven’t even mentioned how repetetive it sometimes gets, because it’s apparently structured based on how it was originally collected, in six books. So one chapter here ends, and then the next (apparently at random) give us a recap of what’s gone before, and you feel like you’re having a stroke. “Didn’t he just say that literally seven pages ago? DID I IMAGINE IT?!”

It also feels strangely rushed for a six hundred page (I think) book, because large parts of it consists of flashback to the Before Times so that the characters can achieve Character Development. Some of these aren’t too bad, but in other cases it takes us away from the storyline for so long that you almost forget what was happening when you’re finally returned to it. And some of these flashbacks are from the same scenes (but from different viewpoints — but not in a Rashomon way; just literally from different angles).

And it doesn’t even have an ending. Since so room is taken up by flashbacks, we gallop to the final page, and then find “To Be Continued In The Next Series, Ascender”. And I’d rather watch another Trump speech than subject me to such a horrifying thing.

The artwork’s nice, though. It’s depressing to think how much time somebody so talented spend drawing this offensively badly written piece of shit.

But perhaps somebody will give him a payday:

In January 2015, it was announced that Sony Pictures had acquired the film rights to the series with the intention of creating a feature film adaptation. In June, 2020, Canada’s Lark Productions, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, announced that they had acquired the exclusive television rights to the series.

Or perhaps both Sony and NBC decided that it was too generic to even bother with proceeding with an adaptation. You could have any hack script writer in Hollywood cobble together something better in half a week, and then you’d save the outlay.

To sum up: I kinda didn’t like it? It has a 4.36 rating on goodreads:

Amazing! So a beautiful piece of science fiction. On the surface, this is a book about man vs machine, but its also about family, loss, expectations, and so much more. There is so much heart and soul in this.