Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The Problem is I'm Not Reading Enough Random, Weird, Old Comics Lately

I want to write something tonight. I have the time, the energy, and the inclination. But not the subject. I thought I might talk about Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey's just-completed run on Moon Knight, which was awesome, but it's been getting so much praise in so many other places I don't want to just add to the roar. Except to say that the whole thing was like some suave, dashing exchange student, showing up suddenly with his cool look and weird word choices, then making a graceful exit well before the sheen had worn off. I'm excited for Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood to take over that book, almost entirely because of Smallwood. It feels like a perfect character for his style, and hopefully Wood will be cool enough to let the art be the title's main draw, like it was when Ellis and Shalvey were running things.
     I also considered doing a whole post on how FBP #13 was kind of a disappointing ending to the "Wish You Were Here" story arc. The whole plot revolved around main characters Adam and Rosa being placed into a semi-fake reality, created and powered and controlled by their minds, so that the whole world was built to satisfy their wishes. Adam got to play out his action hero fantasy, and Rosa got to figure out a way back to the dimension she's from originally. There was a lot of time spent in this alternate reality, like half of the five-issue arc or more, and all along I kept wondering how much of what happened there was going to matter. There were suggestions that some or all of it might come true in the "real" world, but also that maybe none of it would, which made it difficult to know how invested to be. A character was brutally killed, Adam had a new romance blossomed and get spoiled by betrayal, Rosa opened a stable passageway from one universe to another—how much of this was going to stick?
     Turns out, the answer is, "Some." The dead character didn't die, so that's two emotional experiences I was robbed of as a reader: 1. when she died I didn't fully feel it because I was skeptical about the permanence of her demise, and 2. when it was revealed she didn't really die, I felt none of the relief, even as Adam was feeling it, because I'd never been all that worried. The ruined romance didn't happen, but the woman Adam fell for is an actual person, so I guess that's something. Not sure what it means yet, but it's bound to have further significance as the series continues. As for Rosa's portal home...that seems like the most real thing, a theory she already had and just needed to test in the proper environment in order to prove it. Time will tell. What I'm saying is the conclusion was too have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too for me to enjoy. They got to have a bunch of crazy shit go down in the safe little playground of Adam and Rosa's fake world, then undo it all, making much of the content of "Wish You Were Here" feel purposeless. Maybe its purpose is yet to be revealed, but it sure would've been nice if the end of the arc felt like it even attempted to make the rest of the arc feel important.
     That's about all I have to say about FBP #13, and I probably stretched it out with too many specifics as it is. So no full post out of that tonight, either. And nothing else I've read in the past couple weeks even comes to mind as a hypothetically viable topic. I mean...any comic, any panel could potentially be studied and analyzed and dissected for thousands upon thousands of words, but nothing has sparked in me the itch to blather on about it recently. I'm pretty sure [insert title of post here]. I follow all my weekly, ongoing new series, and I read stuff from 1987 for the CSBG column every couple weeks, but I haven't taken the time to dig into any of the assorted back issues and random crap I've picked up over the years. Nor have I done any back-issue diving at any of my local comicbook shops of late to add to the aforementioned collection of crap. I've been subsisting on a diet of only fresh new comics, and they're just not getting my motor running.
     I suppose the best thing for everyone, then, would be if I wrapped this self-indulgent exercise up right now and maybe cracked open one of those random, weird, old tales instead.

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