The good, the bad, and the worst

A few reviews...'cause it's been a while...

Next in the run of Teen Titans was Titans East, the tale of Deathstroke's Titans killers.

The setup is that Deathstroke - a quality villian who's been terrorizing and trying to kill the Titans since back in Judas Contract. He's, at this point, become the Titans' arch enemy - their Joker, their Lex Luthor, their...um...Wonder Woman's Circe, I guess. This volume certainly isn't on par with Judas in terms of rocking the Titans' foundations, but it's a fun read as each Titan gets taken down one member at a time and eventually have to come together and fight back - a pretty standard Titans story but one done pretty well here.

We get an explanation of why Batgirl has seemingly gone off the rails - a bit too easily explained and undone for my tastes. We get Titans dealing with aspects of the past - Superboy's death foremost among them. We get some decent fight scenes.

Good read.

Two things did bother me about the art, however. One, I'm used to Deathstroke's mask being a solid thing, leaving the face totally expressionless - like this - but throughout this volume, his mask is a flexible thing that clings to him and allows his facial expressions to come through.

Two, Raven and Batgirl are hard to tell apart without the red ruby in Raven's forehead. They're both drawn in ickily skin-tight black leather with identical hair lengths and surprisingly similar facial features.

---

The Titans good read is contrasted ever so easily with Diana Prince: Wonder Woman which may just be the worst graphic novel that I've ever read.

We open with a very much old-school Wonder Woman, big doe eyes, crushing hard on Steve Trevor all girly girly with her head on his shoulder one panel and knocking bullets with her bracelets in the next. By the end of the first issue, however, Steve's in jail - supposedly because of WW's dual life as WW and Diana Prince. So in the next issue, WW gives up all of her powers and loses her connections to Paradise Island - wiping out nearly every essential aspect of the character in about a page and a half - and turning her into a very clear Emma Peel knockoff complete with faux mod language, a new hairdo, and an Eastern, martial arts guru known a bit too spot-on as I Ching. And then, by the end of this volume, the writers try to turn WW back to her history by making her have to go back to the instantly and inscrutably available-again Paradise Island to save momma from some Ares gobbeldy gook.

Had any of this been done with an entirely new character, hoping to hope on the mod/Avengers bandwagon, the comic might have been merely thrown into the dustbin of hundreds of such comic series that have gone with the whims of society. Instead, these stories were told with one of the alleged icons of comicdom, the greatest female hero that the four color panel pages have ever seen. Instead of treating that character's history with any respect or even knowledge, this volume simply throws off every story told before as though they were nothing more than first drafts by some third-rate seventh-grade writer...and replaces them with dreck equally as embarassing.

• The artwork is poor.
• The storylines are poor.
• The fight scenes are lame.
• The logic used is internally inconcistent.
• The changes are half-baked and only half committed to (as Diana falls in love with some new, hip guy - Reginald Hyde-Whyte, seriously? - in about three panels, leaving her no more independent than she'd been before the rewrite.)

This volume is worth picking up only if you run out of toilet paper or think you're a little too smart and want to make yourself dumber.

---

I'm about three quarters of the way through Black Dossier, the third volume in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and I'm not sure just yet what to think. The initial volume of the League was fantastic, and the second volume every bit as impressive.

What Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill seem to be attempting to do is to gather together a number of disparate ideas about the league - various adventures that the League could have gone on in different eras - and to put them out there without quite fleshing any of them out into entire series as the previous volumes had. These tales - told in numerous different styles throughout this book - are collected in the book-within-a-book Black Dossier that contains the bulk of this volume and that serves - within the tale - as a McGuffin to get the framing device moving.

To some extent, this book feels very much like Moore trying on a dozen different styles - including, oddly, different types of paper, even - and providing admittedly interesting and well-written individual adventures that never quite come together into a unified tale. Each of the pieces is fascinating - well, maybe other than the Beatnik-styled story that I'll admit I just couldn't get through - in and of themselves, but the pieces just never coalesce into anything more.

The entire volume is every bit as dense and referential as anything that has come before, but the different between the greatness of the first two volumes and the goodness of this one is that lack of cohesion.

That being said, this is well worth reading. And rereading a few times - because of the aforementioned denseness.

---

A few years ago I reviewed In the Name of Gog - the second of the Superman-Gog trades (following Wrath of Gog and came away thinking rather poorly of the collection, it having the feel of being a major, big event but turned out to not have any repurcussions - sort of like the mess that the Ruin arc turned out to be.

On rereading each of the Superman-Gog trades, I was surprised at how much - agreeing with Collected Editions - more moving I found the trades to be. In all honesty, the reviews on Collected Editions - of the first volume, as well - are spot on. There are a issues with the trades - the Lois-Lana bit is a mess, the Creeper storyline never develops, there are too many villians and heroes on hand in the first, the Preus storyline also dies on the vine, even the rehabilitation of Doomsday fails for me - but the trades end up working for me in the long run.

---

And now, for the pick of the week...



It was about five months ago now that I first heard a bit of Vampire Weekend on NPR, and I immediately threw their eponymous debut album onto my reserve list at the library. The fact that it took until this week for the album to make its way to me, however, speaks to the popularity of their first album.

And the wait was totally worth it.

From the first strains to the last, the album as a great shot of Afro-raggae-pop love. The references are amazingly literate - not surprising once I found out they met at Columbia - referencing Cape Cod, the Khyber Pass, Louis Vuitton, and the music is disasterously catchy.

This is easily the best new album I've heard this year, and I'm thinking it's going to stay in heavy rotation for me for a fair while.

Check it if you haven't already.


SeeqPod - Playable Search