Sorry for the recent silence. Still adjusting to the extra hours I’ve been getting at work recently. Here’s what I’ve been reading lately:
Omega the Unknown: This was on of those titles that looked great when it first came out, but I decided to wait on the collected edition before I read it. Its a great read; a fun, quirky, superhero story unlike anything Marvel publishes today. Farel Dalrymple’s art really stood out to me as well, not just because it doesn’t look like anything else the big two release, but because it is so dynamic that it puts some of those other “top artists” to shame. Some artists have taken to the somewhat lazy technique of repeating panels during “talking heads sequences,” making the pacing slow. Dalrymple, on the other hand, changes angles with each panel, making each scene feel dynamic, even if there is no real action. I also love the technique he using of laying out a page so that the larger events going on frame the smaller ones. For example, when James and the Mink are talking at the baseball game, their conversation takes up the middle third of the page, divided into three smaller panels. This is framed by a full third shot of the crowd above and a full third shot of the action on the field below, perfectly creating a feeling fo the more important conversation being a small thing amidst bigger, less important happenings. Its great work.
Saga of the Swamp Thing Deluxe Hardcover 1: Alan Moore, John Totlebon, and Stephen Bissette’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing helped herald the coming of the modern age of comic books. Totlebon and Bissette’s art creates a perfectly claustrophobic horror feel while Moore redefines how comics, and particularly dialog, are supposed to be written. Its also interesting to see hints of what would later become Promethea, Watchmen, and The Killing Joke all present in even his earliest American work.
Crisis on Infinite Earths: I’m actually rereading this one because, after reading Saga of the Swamp Thing, I felt the urge to work myself through the comic book canon of the modern age (at least as its described by Timothy Callahan in an excellent blog post on the subject), rereading some books I haven’t looked at in a while and finally getting some others that I should have read a long while ago. Skipping over Maus, which I read not that long ago, I moved onto the original Crisis. Reading this after reading Moore’s Swamp Thing really shows off how far ahead of its time Moore’s dialog was, but Perez’s art is still impressive. I love the landscape layouts he uses in several issues, having the reader read multiple paths of story or dialog from left to right over two pages before moving downwards creates a very “widescreen” feel to certain scenes. It works better in some places than others, but one thing that can’t be denied is that Perez is an absolute machine. So many characters on so many pages, this is still his trademark today as he’s often brought in the do similar stories where others falter, such as his fill-in work for Ifinite Crisis and his current work on Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds.
What’s everyone else reading?
