Tag: Image Comics
Wie goed in de Halloweensfeer wil komen moet zeker Nocturnals van Dan Brereton (1965) lezen. Een van de personages heet zelfs Halloween Girl! Nocturnals ademt de Halloweensfeer bij uitstek.
Na VEDA en Comic Con Amsterdam moet ik even bijkomen, dus ben ik op de bank gaan zitten met enkele comics uit mijn WEESHUIS VOOR STRIPS & COMICS, waaronder GEN 13.
Een comicreeks uit de jaren negentig die dat tijdperk mooi reflecteert in de tekenstijl die toen werd gebruikt. Sexy dames in strakke, kostuums die vooral veel huid laten zien. Gen 13 werd gecreerd door Jim Lee en Brandon Choi. Met tekeningen van J. Scott Campbell en Adam Hughes.
The Walking Dead is sinds 2003 een zeer succesvolle stripserie van schrijver Robert Kirkman en het is natuurlijk ook een bekende tv-serie.
In deze vlog laat ik je de strips van Kirkman, Tony Moore en Charlie Adlard zien én praat ik over het nieuwe geeky YouTube-programma Next Level Heroes van Bas van Teylingen en Bardo Ellens waarin ik te gast was. We hebben het hierin namelijk over The Walking Dead.
En dit is de eerste aflevering van Next Level Heroes:
Neil Gaiman schreef een verhaal over Angela, een schaars geklede hemelse krijgster die jaagt op Hellspawns.
Ik vond deze Image comic uit de vervlogen jaren negentig in mijn weeshuis van strips en heb me er goed mee vermaakt. Gaiman houdt het actievolle verhaal luchtig door gevatte humor, de tekeningen van Greg Capullo spatten van het papier. En er zit een draak in, dus dat smaakt naar meer. Ben daarom meteen in de stapel Spawn-comics gedoken.
Gaiman introduceerde Angela in Spawn #9, maar deze vlog gaat over een miniserie van drie delen die Angela heet en die door Juniorpress werd uitgegeven in 1997.
Check ook deze video over Image en Spawn gemaakt door Kaptain Kristian.
Even een korte uitleg over de strip Witchblade.
Iemand wees me erop dat ik in vorige vlogs wel vertelde dat ik deze strip aan het lezen ben, maar eigenlijk weinig prijsgaf waar deze Image comic nu eigenlijk over gaat. Dat zet ik bij deze even recht.
Tekenaar Michael Turner (1971-2008), een van de bedenkers van Witchblade, is helaas al vroeg overleden aan botkanker. In deze vlog kun je wat van zijn mooie tekenwerk zien. Kende jij de strip ‘Witchblade’ al? Wat vind jij ervan? Toevallig had vertaalheld Olav Beemer het in een recente vlog ook over Image bij Juniorpress.
Het is zomer mensen, en ik smelt langzaam weg. Daarom een vlog over mijn geeky plannen voor de zomervakantie. En wat spook jij op dat vlak uit de komende tijd?
Ook neem ik enkele leuke reacties door die ik op recente vlogs kreeg. Bedankt voor jullie reacties!
Dit is de video van de vader die zijn zoon voor het eerst Batman laat zien.
Om een zekere Arnold te citeren: I’ll be back!
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Daily Bugle: Liefeld vs McFarlane
Aan de krantenkop te zien is het een stuk over economie, of over toenemende politieke spanningen tussen landen, maar wie de tekst goed leest, leest dit:
‘Rob Liefeld said today […] that Todd McFarlane can’t stand a chance. He said “I can draw bigger eyes on ol’ Spidey any day of the week.” Todd fumed. “That young upstart, just who does he think he is […]’
Nu heeft Rob Liefeld gelukkig weinig Spider-Man-comics getekend, maar McFarlane gelukkig wel. Zoals je wellicht weet waren Liefeld en McFarlane twee van de tekenaars die Image Comics startten in de jaren negentig.
Het is dus toch een artikel over Spider-Man. Soort van.
Amazing Spider-Man #324.
Tekening: Erik Larsen, tekst: David Michelinie.
If we can believe Rick Remender’s and Greg Tocchini’s Low, vol. 1: The Delirium of Hope, the future of mankind seems bleak. The sun’s premature expansion has irradiated Earth, and humanity has fled to the lowest depths of the seas, hiding within radiation-shielded cities.
For millennia mankind has been hiding in the cities with no hope of finding a new planet to inhabit. People have given up hope that one of the probes in outer space will ever find another place to stay. Except for Stel Caine, who believes there is a life-supporting planet out there. Stel never gives up hope.
Stel’s husband Johl Cain is the last helmsman of the city of Salus. When the family goes out in their ship so Johl can train his two daughters to become helmsmen as well, they are raided by a group of pirates. Their leader is the infamous Rolm who has a personal score to settle with the Cains. The pirates leave Johl for dead, steal the helm suit and kidnap the daughters, for only the Cain family’s DNA will activate the helm. Now, ten years later only Stel and her son are left. When a probe returns from space and crashes on Earth’s surface, Stel is convinced it contains information about a inhabitable planet. Determined she sets out to travel to the surface to reclaim the probe, taking her reluctant son with her on what is basically a suicide mission.
In a few months the air in the city will be toxic because of being recycled too many times, and therefore all inhabitants are dead meat anyway, so they haven’t got a lot to lose. At least, that’s what Stel thinks.
Rick Remender, scribe of titles such as Black Science, Deadly Class, Venom and Uncanny X-Force, gives us a bleak picture of humanity. Being on the brink of dying of bad air, the Senate has resorted to a lifestyle full of debauchery and self-indulgency, waiting for the coming end. Meanwhile, in the third underwater city the doomed population is entertained by gladiators fighting in the arena, while being controlled by their dictator Rolm. Even Stel’s son Marik turns out to be a bad seed, he’s a junkie cop that abuses prostitutes. Within all this despair, Stel keeps believing there is a better future and mankind can be saved. This element in the story I particularly liked: a female protagonist that remains positive against all odds.
As Remender explains in his foreword: ‘Now I realize that in fifteen years I’ve never once written an optimistic character. […] A perfect character to examine the notion of that it’s not what happens in life that defines us, but how we choose to deal with it.’ To make this philosophical point concrete, Remender is joined by frequent collaborator Greg Tocchini. Tocchini’s art looks like the figures are put to paper in just a couple of well-placed strokes, giving the work an impressionistic quality and vivacity. The bright, warm colors contrast with the bleak picture of humanity that Tocchini depicts making all the harsh occurrences of this science fiction tale a little bit easier to stomach.
I recommend this comic for anyone who wants to read a science fiction story that is somewhat different, that has captivating twists and turns that keep the reader on his toes, an arresting visual approach, and an interesting female lead character. Low, volume 1: The Delirium of Hope contains the first six episodes and was recently published by Image Comics. The monthly series still continues. The tenth issue is scheduled for a September release.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
Mark Millar is one of my favorite current comic book writers. The Scottish scribe (born 1969) always comes up with promising high concepts that deliver most of the time. Millar is the co-creator behind titles such as Kick-Ass (which I reviewed earlier), Wanted, The Secret Service and Marvel’s Civil War. If some titles sound familiar to you that may be because most of his creator-owned series have been adapted for the silver screen or will be in the near future.
MPH is a five-part limited series recently collected in one trade paperback published by Image Comics under Millar’s own label Millarworld. The science fiction comic revolves around Roscoe, a 19 year-old drugs runner that hopes to get out of the slums of Detroit and build himself a business. During a drug deal Roscoe gets busted and goes to jail. He’s a model prisoner, counting on his good behavior to reduce his sentence. However, when Roscoe discovers he’s been framed, he takes a special drug he has been offered. This special drug, called MPH, gives Roscoe the power to move really fast. While under the influence of the drug, it seems time and everyone else stands still which makes escaping the high guarded prison easy.
Roscoe, together with his best friend, his girlfriend, and her younger brother decide to use the remaining pills to rob as many banks as possible. This isn’t just their ticket out of the slums of Detroit, it is also their way of getting back at the bankers and other bastards that bankrupted the city in the first place: ‘We knew it was wrong but it felt so good to pick the pockets of all of those fat cats that crippled Detroit. The banks that stopped our lines of credit, the crooked politicians that sold us down the river, the car companies that outsourced jobs and left us with nothing but drugs and American Idol. They took us from being an industrial powerhouse to half the city upping and leaving us with over eighty thousand empty buildings. It’s only right we got a little payback for those three generations of corruption and neglect,’ are Roscoe’s thoughts on their actions. And really, who could blame them?
By anchoring MPH in contemporary America, in which a lot of regular folks are crippled financially by the economic crisis, Millar not only tells a relevant story, he also writes characters whose motives are understandable and hard to argue with, especially when the thieves act like modern-day Robin Hoods and start to distribute part of their takings amongst the poor and jobless.
Of course, there’s trouble on the horizon: not only will they run out of pills, the teens will also have to fight Uncle Sam and a mysterious guy who seems to know an awful lot about the drugs and Roscoe and his partners. I don’t want to spoil the story too much, so let’s just say Millar has some nice twists and turns in store before this adventure comes to a well-rounded end.
British artist Duncan Fegredo is MPH‘s co-creator and delivers realistic and vibrant art for the comic. Fegredo really gets across the contrast between the fast-moving thieves and the world around them, which is not an easy feat in a medium consisting of static images.
MPH reads like a fast-moving and very enjoyable movie, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we can revisit these characters in the cinemas soon.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
Trees, volume 1: In Shadow by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, The Authority) and Jason Howard is something else. Trees is a great science fiction story that presents a new perspective on the theme of alien-invasion. Like all good science fiction, Trees is an exploration of human nature in alienating and trying circumstances.
Ten years ago we discovered there is intelligent life in the universe: large black obelisks came down from the sky and landed on different places on earth. These big shapes wrecked their surroundings wherever they landed, destroying whole city blocks. Humanity panicked, but ‘the trees’ as people call them all but ignored humans all together. They don’t recognize us as intelligent or alive. Basically they just stand there, sometimes dumping toxic waste on their surroundings.
Now, ten years later, people have accepted these ‘trees’ and life goes on as well as possible. Writer Warren Ellis focuses on five locations on earth to show how the presence of the trees has changed our lives and how people adapted to them. In China a young artist arrives in the special cultural zone of a city under a tree and starts a journey of self-discovery. In Italy a young woman under protection of her boyfriend, the leader of a fascist gang that rules the city, meets an older man who will teach her survival skills so she can move up the social ladder. In Svalbard, one of the members of a research team is about to discover that the trees may not be dormant after all. The Somalian president starts placing artillery on the trees to demonstrate his military power, and in New York a Democrat is running for mayor in a city that’s been utterly transformed when the trees landed – Manhattan flooded when the trees landed on the cityscape.
In the first eight comics that are collected in Trees, Volume one: In Shadow, Ellis focuses most on the young artist, the Italian woman and the research team. Rightly so, because these three storylines concentrate on the characters and their development, whereas the other plotlines are more concerned with the politics of a world covered by the trees. At the moment they seem less interesting than the more personal storylines, but my guess is the political issues will be explored in later comic book issues.
I especially liked the story about Tian Chenglei, the young artist who is the new arrival in the city of Shu, a special cultural zone in China. Chenglei tries to find his place within a community of free thinkers, artists, homosexuals and transgenders and starts to explore his own sexuality.
Jason Howard‘s artwork has an energetic feel to it. Howard’s love for cross-hatching gives the art a sketchy kind of look, while at the same time he gives a detailed impression of the scenery. All major locations in the book have their own distinctive look and feel, and these settings really sell the story. For the facial expressions Howard seems to use a sort of short-hand: they sometimes are lacking subtlety.
At first glance the cover of Trees reminded me of the film poster of David Lynch’s Eraserhead with Jack Nance wearing that goofy haircut, but although the trees are weird, Ellis’s story isn’t as strange as any of Lynch’s films. Trees isn’t less fascinating, though.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
Sometimes you just don’t ‘click’ with a story and for me this is the case with Umbral, Book One: Out of the Shadows, a so-called dark fantasy story that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Fendin, a world in which magic and religion are forbidden.
The story is about a young thief named Rascal. During an eclipse she sneaks into the Red Palace and tries to steal a priceless royal gem called the Oculus. She gets help from Arthir, the crown prince. Together they witness the horrific murder of the King and Queen at the hands of the Umbral: nightmarish, Lovecraftian creatures from another dimension. When the creatures kill the young boy as well, Rascal can barely escape the palace alive. With the Oculus in her possession Rascal tries to flee and outrun the Umbral. Interestingly, the Umbral are able to take on the shape of the people they’ve killed, making it hard to figure out whom to trust. On the way, Rascal gets help from a drifter named Dalone, who might be a wizard of sorts.
I’ll admit: I’m not a big fantasy buff, but as a reviewer I’m willing to try and read any comic that I come across. I thought the cover of the comic looked intriguing. Speaking of the interior art by Christopher Mitten, I have mixed feelings. On the positive side, I like the look of the Umbral. With their dark and shadowy form, bright red eyes and large mouth with sharp teeth they indeed seem to be creatures that will devour you in your nightmares. Storytelling-wise, Mitten is all over the place and from a visual standpoint the narrative flow feels a bit disjointed at times. It also doesn’t help that some of the characters look alike a lot and are hard to tell apart. For instance, Dalone and Master Gearge, master of the thieves’ guild, could have been twins. They’re both big-bearded men and father figures to Rascal.
Of course it is nice that the main character is female, and a teenager at that. But Rascal is a young, spunky girl with a potty mouth that frankly isn’t very interesting as a character. Nor are most of the other characters, to be honest. As a whole, Umbral Book One is pretty bland. It seems writer Antony Johnston (The Fuse, Wasteland, Dead Space) put some familiar tropes of the fantasy genre in a blender and this is what he came up with, throwing a bunch of ghost pirates in the mix as well.
Reader be warned: this first volume ends with a annoying ‘to be continued’ sign, so after almost 170 comic pages of chasing, cursing and violence, nothing really gets resolved. To be honest, I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm to pick up the recently-published second installment of the story.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.