Elsewhere

Yikes, another whole week of nothing new on Comics Matter. How terribly irresponsible of me. Not only have I been slacking off here at my home base, I've had a fairly light week other places as well. Only one new review over at read/RANT on Eternal Warrior #2, plus a fairly lengthy piece about Catalyst Comix for PopMatters. In my defense, my parents were visiting me this weekend, which was a great time but definitely kept me from my comicbook reading and writing. I did talk comics with my dad a great deal, and he brought me a whole box of new stuff to read, so here's hoping I can become hyperproductive here in the second half of the month.

Something I Failed to Mention
Back when I wrote a tiny review of Eternal Warrior #1, one of the things I pointed to as a major turn off for me was main character Gilad killing his dog. I'm an enthusiastic, almost obsessive dog owner myself, and giving the book's protagonist a pet just so he could kill it (in self-defense, yes, but still) seemed like a needlessly nasty thing to do. However, in issue #2, which I wasn't wild about overall as you can read in the review I linked to above, there was at least a tender moment of Gilad burying his pet with great reverence and care. It made me like him more as a character, and it softened the blow of the dog dying in the previous issue. It would have been easy for Greg Pak to ignore the dog now that it's deceased, and narratively it would've made little difference if he'd gone that way, so I appreciated him taking the time to give the poor animal his due. If you're going to have a pet brutally murdered by its owner, then the only decent thing to do is give said owner a chance to say goodbye properly.