Friday, November 19, 2010

The Dissector #185.

DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)

[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]

"What do you mean? No more food? No more pigs and cows and other animals and vegetables of a victual nature to finish my repast? (...) How then can I demonstrate my prowess in this challenge you've set, to prove to you how much I can eat for the bounty of fourteen ninety-nine? By my word, Joe of Joe's Diner, I've barely begun to tuck in! (...) Have I failed then? Am I to be ridiculed again among you fine people as a weak slackbelly?" Volstagg The Voluminous, Warriors Three #1.

And I got another column in before the week was over! This one's for 11/03, the first week of November. Jordan cracked the DT! last column; the Wolverine clone's claws are articulated, they have knuckle joints, when they shouldn't. Badge for him. He also noticed something else that I hadn't, see more of that below.

What are The Dissector's Picks Of The Week, you might be asking yourself... well, Best Book Of The Week was Iron Man Legacy #8... it's not extraordinary, but Fred Van Lente month after month shows how you can write between-the-raindrops-of-continuity tales or flashbacks without being cheesy or lame; Steve Kurth's art certainly doesn't hurt, with a healthy mix of retro and modern. Worst Book Of The Week was JSA All-Stars #12... Matthew Sturges' scripts for this book aren't very good; but what makes this book sink are Howard Porter's pencils... everybody has misshapen heads and weird expressions on their faces. The very flat colors by The Hories don't help either...

Now, how about a change in layout? The Cover Of The Week will, from now on, appear in this part of the column. Why? Well, several reasons. First, having a picture in this first part of the column makes it look better. Second, it's more in line with the Dissector Picks than with the Moments Of The Week. And third, Facebook doesn't detect any other images in the blog post after the first one, making the thumbnail for the post on each column usually end up being the DT!, which is not necessarily (that is, never) the most attractive image in the column. So, there... this is an obvious parody cover for The Boys, by Darick Robertson. Not fantastic, but pretty funny.

The Rundown: Avengers Academy (inconsistent lettering in the credits page, bullshit theories about mass conservation in Reptil's powers, accented letter), Batman Confidential (timeline in main story doesn't jive, in the backup story Martian Manhunter comments about having problems with the English language... when he's been speaking English longer than the other characters, particularly Wonder Woman; and Aquaman comments that a mere big lab is larger than the Mariana Trench... Silver Age style doesn't have to mean ridiculous), Doom Patrol V5 (Rita's eyes colored wrong), I Am An Avenger (Jarvis's eyes should be blue), JSA All-Stars (Cyclone's eyes should be green, but start out blue, then change to green in the same page, later they're blue again, and then green once more), Namor: The First Mutant (Namor's ankle wings on the cover are too large, inside his eyes are colored incorrectly, and while the Atlantean logomancer might be half-human, I doubt it, so he should be blue), Secret Six V3 (the word "undetectable" is between quotation marks, but one quotation mark ended up on the next line), Strange Tales II (the Watcher first calls the fake Watcher guy Philip, and then Tony; Toro shouldn't be blonde, and he certainly shouldn't be called "Maestro" by Iron Man), Young Allies (inconsistent credit lettering).
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"THE FUTURE IS STRANGE."

TITLE: Adventure Comics V1 (DC).

ISSUE: 520.

CULPRIT: Paul Levitz (writer).

DISSECTION: Saturn Girl refers to Naltor as "that strange planet where people can predict the future". That's just dumb... what about that strange moon where people are telepaths, that strange planet where people control magnetism, that strange planet where people eat anything, that strange planet where... That's, uhm... called the Legion Of Super-Heroes' setting!

DISSECT-O-METER: 4 Bazzars. Star Boy's hair is colored incorrectly, Ultra Boy, Superman, and Supergirl's powers are incomplete (and even Superman and Supergirl are not said to have the same powers).
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"HÉRR."

TITLE: The Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel).

ISSUE: 647.

CULPRIT: Joe Caramagna (letterer).

DISSECTION: Joe's one of my favorite letterers, and that makes this dissection worse... he letter's what's supposed to be the word "Señor" as "Senõr". Not only that, he makes the "o" smaller because of the tilde. *sigh*

DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzar's for fucking up the word, 7 for the smaller letter. Then there's eye coloring mistake galore, baby goblin's ears are wrong in one story, and Vin Gonzales gets called "Gonzalez". Twice. Also, the story "You Again?" is missing the question mark in the credits page.
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"DISSECTION OUT OF TIME."

TITLE: Captain America: Man Out Of Time (Marvel).

ISSUE: 01.

CULPRIT: Jorge Molina (penciller).

DISSECTION: Yay, another re-telling of Cap's getting frozen and thawed! Yay, it changes stuff unnecessarily! *groan* While he was still in WWII, spot me this one:


DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars.
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"COVER THIS DT!"

TITLE: The Dissector (Studio Robota).

ISSUE: 184.

CULPRIT: MaGnUs (editor).

DISSECTION: Darryn noticed that instead of putting the Cover Of The Week, I repeated the DT! image. Badge for Darryn.

DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"DT! WITHIN A DT!"

TITLE: X-Men Forever 2 (Marvel).

ISSUE: 10.

CULPRIT: Mike Grell (penciller).

DISSECTION: Jordan also noticed that Wolverine's claws come out of his wrist instead of from in between his knuckles.

DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
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"DO YOU SMELL THAT?"

TITLE: X-Men: To Serve And Protect (Marvel).

ISSUE: 01 of 04.

CULPRIT: James Asmus (writer).

DISSECTION: Now, Emma Frost's diamond form has been shown to grant her a nebulous level of immunity to psychic powers... but pheromones are not psychic, so she shouldn't be able to resist Mandrill's powers. Then again, she might not have a sense of smell in her diamond form ,but I doubt it... it still gets a dissection, though with a low rating.

DISSECT-O-METER: 4 Bazzars. Also, an accented letter in the Batroc/Fantomex story is smaller than it should be, but then another one is the right size.
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A lower than usual rating, at 5.8 Bazzars in thirty nine dissections... Now, Moments Of The Week! First, it's bad enough to be a zombie and eat brains, getting memories from the dead...


... it's worse when you eat your mom's brain! The next Moment needs some explanation as to why I found it so funny. Some years ago, my friends and I were playing a roleplaying game where we "reality hopped", and we ended up in a dimension where Mars looked a lot like the John Carter Of Mars setting. My character was a cowboy, a Texan soldier from WWII... who happened to read pulp magazines. What did he do? He stripped down to his underwear, boots, hat, and gunbelt, and that's how he went around the world (only to discover nobody actually dressed like that there, but well...)

Now, I'm reading Secret Six, and the team (or teams) is in Skartaris... and what does Ragdoll do?


Basically the same my character did. It was very nice to see Gail Simone thinking in a similar wavelength as me. Next, there are certain things you don't do in...


Such as fucking with The Wall. And the 90s come back to bite Cable:


But Spidey ends up footing the bill... Now, how would Thor fly if he didn't have his hammer?


Why, of course... The following Moment is not so much something I found cool, funny or shocking, but more something that puzzled me, but that I couldn't actually consider a dissection. Look at this cropping from the Women Of Marvel #1 cover:


The cover has several Marvel women, including the Black Cat (you can see her white hair there) and the Enchantress... and look at that woman in the middle. Now, I know it's Medusa, for several reasons: long hair, hair that's flaring up in odd ways, etc... but do you think you could have tried a bit less to make her look like Mary Jane Watson? There's no reason (except for the fact that she's not in a story inside) why MJ couldn't have been on the same cover as the Black Cat; you gave her a fringe haircut like MJ has used (but Medusa hasn't, at least not famously)... and you give her bracelets that look like web shooters. Not to mention the fact that the Medusa story inside the book is actually a story from her past; when she's a very young teen, and not the sexy seductress that you're showing in fake Moulin Rouge lingerie on the cover of a comic that is supposed to portray your publisher's female characters in a positive, non-sex object way!!!

Of course, the cover for issue #2 will be by Greg "Porntracer" Land. What, Greg doesn't trace porn? That's right, he traces ANYTHING he can find... Next Moment; how did Harry Osborn name his new baby boy?


Stanley! After his real dad, I guess! But don't worry, Norman still has young men to influence... like Vin Gonzales:

THE DISSECTOR!

4 comments:

JohnnyDoe said...

A quick stab at the DT! this time: the story is in the main Marvel Universe (since side-kick Bucky is there) but Cap is drawn as his Ultimate version with no wings on his helmet.

Not to mention that a Tommy Gun doesn't have that ammo-"drum" in that angle compared to the rest of the gun.

MaGnUs said...

You got it bro, it's the Tommy gun ammo drum. Ridiculous angle.

Cap's uniform, well, this is a re-telling, they're changing stuff, and they're getting it more in line with the upcoming movie I guess... it wouldn't be the first time 616 Cap is shown wearing a helmet or some other uniform variation that makes it more military.

It's not Ultimate, though it's similar.

JohnnyDoe said...

Oh, just a little suggestion but could you make it so the images open in a new window/tab instead of the current one when you click on them. It makes it more user-friendly in my opinion but I understand if you don't.

MaGnUs said...

I thought it already did; but that was just in Firefox. It should do the same in Internet Explorer now, I've adjusted the blog template.