(From The Boys #59, October 2011.)
Showing posts with label The Boys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Boys. Show all posts
Thursday, October 06, 2011
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).
<-------------------------------->
"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).
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
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!
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).
<-------------------------------->
"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).
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
"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.
<-------------------------------->
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!Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Dissector #181.
DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)
[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]
"Why must M'sieu Charcuter consistently deny mon plan jetpack magnifique?" Frenchie, The Boys #47.
On time! On time! Here is the column for books released on the week of 10/06. Last week's DT! was cracked, after much deliberation, by Commander JohnnyDoe, who gets a badge. The guy tells Rogue he'll use gravity to kill her, augmenting the mass of her heart. But gravity doesn't increase your mass, it increases your weight, which is a product of your mass times gravity. Science fail!
The Dissector's Picks Of The Week are as follow: Best Book Of The Week was Superman: The Last Family of Krypton #3, last issue of the mini. Good resolution to a fun book. Worst Book Of The Week was Greek Street #16... subpar finish to what was, a readable book before.
The Rundown: Freedom Fighters V2 ("is" instead of "are"), JSA All-Stars (Power Girl is called Kara Zor-El instead of Zor-L), Spider-Man: Back in Quack (accented letters, and Bev's eyes change color between pages), Stargate: Daniel Jackson (Vala's hair has red highlights when the character has jet black hair), Taskmaster V2 (a story in Mexico... full of crappy Spanish and smaller accented letters), Ultimate Thor (accented letters), Uncanny X-Force ("devloped", smaller "ñ"), Unknown Soldier V4 (wrong German sentence), Young Allies (inconsistent credit lettering, Firestar's eyes are blue, then green).
<-------------------------------->
"GO WEST!"
TITLE: Doom Patrol V5 (DC).
ISSUE: 15.
CULPRIT: Keith Giffen (writer) and/or Matthew Clark (penciller).
DISSECTION: David, one of the members of my faithful Honorary Dissector Scout Corps, noticed this one. Niles Caulder, with stolen Kryptonian powers, is said to be flying West from Manhattan, possibly towards Bialya, yet the monitor displays an arrow that points East from New York. Geography fail!
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Also, Rita Farr's eyes are colored incorrectly as usual... oh, and David gets a badge and makes Lieutenant! He also reported the JSA All-Stars dissection; which Matt Sturges himself admitted to on his Twitter.
<-------------------------------->
"CUATRO FANTASTICOS."
TITLE: Fantastic Four In... Ataque Del M.O.D.O.K.! (Marvel).
ISSUE: One-shot.
CULPRIT: Tom Beland (writer).
DISSECTION: Dissect me this one:
DISSECT-O-METER: 9 Bazzars. There are surprisingly very few Spanish language writing mistakes (just two)... but FORTY-THREE smaller accented letters or Ñs. FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!! In one issue, Dave Lanphear just jumped well ahead of his fellow letterers in dissections count...
<-------------------------------->
"THE MAIN ELF."
TITLE: R.E.B.E.L.S. (DC).
ISSUE: 21.
CULPRIT: Claude St. Aubin (penciller).
DISSECTION: No, Lobo doesn't have pointed ears.
DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"THE GRAY HOOD."
TITLE: Red Hood: The Lost Days (DC).
ISSUE: 05 of 06.
CULPRIT: Brian Reber (colorist).
DISSECTION: Jason Todd is trying to find a girl in a car that's, unwittingly, carrying a bomb. Over the phone, he asks her what kind of car she's in, and she says the car is red. But the colorist made the car gray or black...
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"ABIN SUR: LAST OF THE UNGARANS."
TITLE: Superman: The Last Family Of Krypton (DC).
ISSUE: 03 of 03.
CULPRIT: Renato Arlem (penciller).
DISSECTION: What's up with elven ears this week? Abin Sur gets them, when Ungarans do not have any visible feature that differentiates them from humans except their red skin (well, and males might be all bald, but I'm not sure about that).
DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars. Lobo might have hair covering his ears, but Abin is a red cueball!
<-------------------------------->
A whopping eighty-two dissections this week, thanks to Dave Lanphear and his forty-three ones; with an average of 6.8 Bazzars; slightly higher than the usual, but still within normal limits. Cover Of The Week is this fun piece by Skottie Young:
I think Skottie's better suited to humorous stuff like this. First Moment Of The Week comes from R.E.B.E.L.S.:
A high intellect makes you a great spin doctor... Next, a good rousing speech from the most unlikely source:
Hercules! Herc 2.0, now with more godhead punch! And last, a romantic moment:
So that's why he chose a pornstar name! That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...
THE DISSECTOR!
DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)
[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]
"Why must M'sieu Charcuter consistently deny mon plan jetpack magnifique?" Frenchie, The Boys #47.
On time! On time! Here is the column for books released on the week of 10/06. Last week's DT! was cracked, after much deliberation, by Commander JohnnyDoe, who gets a badge. The guy tells Rogue he'll use gravity to kill her, augmenting the mass of her heart. But gravity doesn't increase your mass, it increases your weight, which is a product of your mass times gravity. Science fail!
The Dissector's Picks Of The Week are as follow: Best Book Of The Week was Superman: The Last Family of Krypton #3, last issue of the mini. Good resolution to a fun book. Worst Book Of The Week was Greek Street #16... subpar finish to what was, a readable book before.
The Rundown: Freedom Fighters V2 ("is" instead of "are"), JSA All-Stars (Power Girl is called Kara Zor-El instead of Zor-L), Spider-Man: Back in Quack (accented letters, and Bev's eyes change color between pages), Stargate: Daniel Jackson (Vala's hair has red highlights when the character has jet black hair), Taskmaster V2 (a story in Mexico... full of crappy Spanish and smaller accented letters), Ultimate Thor (accented letters), Uncanny X-Force ("devloped", smaller "ñ"), Unknown Soldier V4 (wrong German sentence), Young Allies (inconsistent credit lettering, Firestar's eyes are blue, then green).
<-------------------------------->
"GO WEST!"
TITLE: Doom Patrol V5 (DC).
ISSUE: 15.
CULPRIT: Keith Giffen (writer) and/or Matthew Clark (penciller).
DISSECTION: David, one of the members of my faithful Honorary Dissector Scout Corps, noticed this one. Niles Caulder, with stolen Kryptonian powers, is said to be flying West from Manhattan, possibly towards Bialya, yet the monitor displays an arrow that points East from New York. Geography fail!
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Also, Rita Farr's eyes are colored incorrectly as usual... oh, and David gets a badge and makes Lieutenant! He also reported the JSA All-Stars dissection; which Matt Sturges himself admitted to on his Twitter.
<-------------------------------->
"CUATRO FANTASTICOS."
TITLE: Fantastic Four In... Ataque Del M.O.D.O.K.! (Marvel).
ISSUE: One-shot.
CULPRIT: Tom Beland (writer).
DISSECTION: Dissect me this one:
DISSECT-O-METER: 9 Bazzars. There are surprisingly very few Spanish language writing mistakes (just two)... but FORTY-THREE smaller accented letters or Ñs. FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!! In one issue, Dave Lanphear just jumped well ahead of his fellow letterers in dissections count...
<-------------------------------->
"THE MAIN ELF."
TITLE: R.E.B.E.L.S. (DC).
ISSUE: 21.
CULPRIT: Claude St. Aubin (penciller).
DISSECTION: No, Lobo doesn't have pointed ears.
DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"THE GRAY HOOD."
TITLE: Red Hood: The Lost Days (DC).
ISSUE: 05 of 06.
CULPRIT: Brian Reber (colorist).
DISSECTION: Jason Todd is trying to find a girl in a car that's, unwittingly, carrying a bomb. Over the phone, he asks her what kind of car she's in, and she says the car is red. But the colorist made the car gray or black...
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"ABIN SUR: LAST OF THE UNGARANS."
TITLE: Superman: The Last Family Of Krypton (DC).
ISSUE: 03 of 03.
CULPRIT: Renato Arlem (penciller).
DISSECTION: What's up with elven ears this week? Abin Sur gets them, when Ungarans do not have any visible feature that differentiates them from humans except their red skin (well, and males might be all bald, but I'm not sure about that).
DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars. Lobo might have hair covering his ears, but Abin is a red cueball!
<-------------------------------->
A whopping eighty-two dissections this week, thanks to Dave Lanphear and his forty-three ones; with an average of 6.8 Bazzars; slightly higher than the usual, but still within normal limits. Cover Of The Week is this fun piece by Skottie Young:
I think Skottie's better suited to humorous stuff like this. First Moment Of The Week comes from R.E.B.E.L.S.:
A high intellect makes you a great spin doctor... Next, a good rousing speech from the most unlikely source:
Hercules! Herc 2.0, now with more godhead punch! And last, a romantic moment:
So that's why he chose a pornstar name! That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...
THE DISSECTOR!
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
The Dissector #175.
DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)
[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]
08/04 "Whoa, wait a minute. This is Khund porn? Shouldn't there be some, you know, sex...?" Captain Comet, R.E.B.E.L.S. #19.
08/11 "YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SCREAM AS LOUD ASS YA WANT WHILE I KICK YOUR ASS!" Guy Gardner, Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #1.
08/18 "(Luke Cage) somehow managed to look manly in yellow silk, which just might be his greatest super-power." Iron Fist, Shadowland: Power Man #1.
08/25 "Delphyne, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!" Amadeus Cho, Heroic Age: Prince Of Power #4.
Late? You say I'm late? Well, yes, a tad late, I suppose. But here's the column for THE ENTIRE MONTH OF AUGUST!!!!! You might have guessed that from the quotes, and let's go quickly through the Dissector's Picks Of Each Week:
Week Of 08/04: Best Book Of The Week was R.E.B.E.L.S. #20; good use of Brainiac characters, plus Claude St. Aubin's art is pretty neat. Worst Book Of The Week was Batman Confidential #47, Kevin VanHook's Batman-battles-the-supernatural-yet-doesn't-believe-in-it stories are horrible.
Week Of 08/11: Best Book Of The Week was Tom Strong & The Robots Of Doom #3, just pulpy goodness. Worst Book Of The Week was Superman #702. JMS's "Superman Walks Among Regular Folk" has been done before... and it's boring.
Week Of 08/18: Best Book Of The Week was Darkwing Duck #3, just like the TV show, month after month. Worst Book Of The Week was Uncanny X-Men #527... the story is passable, but Whilce Portacio and Leonard Kirk make Emma Frost seem like a crack whore, and Colossus like a mentally deficient jock. The art is just hideous, I tell you.
Week Of 08/25: Best Book Of The Week was Heroic Age: Prince Of Power, good mixing of regular superhero adventure with godstuff, and humor on top of it. Worst Book Of The Week was Teen Titans #86. Felicia Henderson's writing is bad, and while the art by José Luís is not as awful as previous issues, it still doesn't make up for the plot.
Oh, no one got the DT! last week, it was the fact that the Kents look like they're 40 at most. The Rundown is ginormous, so you can find it here.
<-------------------------------->
"RING OF ILLUSIONS."
TITLE: Adventure Comics V1 (DC).
ISSUE: 517.
CULPRIT: Kevin Sharpe (penciller).
DISSECTION: Roy alerted me to this one... the flight belts the Legionnaires wear (before their rings) appear and disappear... then Cosmic Boy has a Legion ring, which he wasn't wearing before.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Badge for Roy. So that's a double dissection there, and then in the backup, Atom just takes Calculator to Oracle's base, right in front of Babs; plus in the DC Nation column, Eddie Berganza refers to "the Green Lanterns" as "las Linterna Verde". First, it's "los", if you're talking about the people, the corps members, and not the objects. Second, it's "Linternas Verdes", because it's plural.
<-------------------------------->
"SILENCE OF THE LAMB."
TITLE: Avengers Academy (Marvel).
ISSUE: 03.
CULPRIT: Mike McKone (penciller).
DISSECTION: If Crossbones is supposed to be wearing a muzzle so he can't use his teeth as projectile weapons... why does the thing have enough space for him to actually do that?
DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars. There's also inconsistent lettering in the credits, and Norman Osborn's eyes are colored incorrectly.
<-------------------------------->
"VE DAY!"
TITLE: DC Universe Legacies (DC).
ISSUE: 04.
CULPRIT: Len Wein (writer).
DISSECTION: Lots of time period inconsistencies, but apart from those, they refer to a shot fired the same day as Germany surrendered in WWII as "the last shot of the war"... yet Japan surrendered quite later.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"BAAAA!"
TITLE: The Dissector (Studio Robota).
ISSUE: 174.
CULPRIT: MaGnUs (writer).
DISSECTION: Donald313 noticed that last column said "Jim Baleen" instead of "Balent". I corrected it on the column, but I still admit to it. You get trigger happy with the spell checker sometimes.
DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars, and a badge for Donald. Three more and you reach Commander.
<-------------------------------->
"MACHIAVELLIAN DRACULA!"
TITLE: Ides Of Blood (DC/Wildstorm).
ISSUE: 01 of 06.
CULPRIT: Stuart C. Paul (writer).
DISSECTION: While my fellow Uruguayan Christian Duce provides great vampire/roman mood art; writer Stuart C. Paul script throws me out of the story. I understand the need to use linguistic anachronisms in period stories; to better get your point across and connect with the reader. But when the anachronisms in your dialogues go beyond the linguistic and cross into historic things... a story in ancient Rome, with Julius Caesar around, cannot have the word "Machiavellian" or refer to vampires as "dracul"; not several centuries before the birth (let alone work) of the person who inspires the first term, and (even if it's closer) the rise of the order that the second term refers to.
DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars. Yes, they're figure of speech, but you have to be careful.
<-------------------------------->
"UNITED KRAUT NATIONS."
TITLE: Iron Man Legacy (Marvel).
ISSUE: 05.
CULPRIT: Fred Van Lente (writer).
DISSECTION: This is a good book, Wino Tony Adventures (as Van Lente jokingly refers to it). It's had few errors so far, and in this issue, it was a little slip up. Or a few, but still. Apart from accented letters being smaller than they should, right before Dr. Doom addresses the UN's General Assembly, a translator is translating a speech into German... yet the official languages of the UN, and by extension (if I'm not mistaken, and I did my research), the languages into which things are translated, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. There is also a small
German language mistake, using the German word for "chair" (the piece of furniture) for "chair" as in the chair of a meeting; when there's a specific word for that in German, "Vorsitzender". I snicker when Spanish translation of US stuff think "foreman" is the last name of the head juror in a trial and dub him "Señor Foreman".
<-------------------------------->
"UNBORN DOOM."
TITLE: Iron Man Legacy (Marvel).
ISSUE: 05.
CULPRIT: Fred Van Lente (writer).
DISSECTION: Dr. Doom says he communicates with the UN through a "sonogram". Uhm... I'm pretty sure that should be a "hologram".
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"ALL-STAR DISSECTION."
TITLE: JSA All-Stars (DC).
ISSUE: 09.
CULPRIT: Freddie Williams II (artist).
DISSECTION: Come on, this one is easy.
DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"CRYSTAL METHOD."
TITLE: Justice League Of America V2 (DC) / Justice Society Of America V3 (DC).
ISSUE: Various.
CULPRIT: Various.
DISSECTION: David noticed that Mikaal Tomas, the Starman currently in JLA (and in JSA because of the crossover going on right now) used to have a roundish yellow crystal embedded in his chest, but now for some reason it's being drawn sometimes as a giant green rhomboid jewel, and sometimes it's that shape, but yellow. Badge for David, two more and you make Lieutenant!
DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars... I'll give four to JLA, and three to JSA; I have no energy to go back and identify authors.
<-------------------------------->
"CRAPOSYNTHESIS."
TITLE: TITLE: Justice League Of America V2 (DC).
ISSUE: 48.
CULPRIT: James Robinson (writer).
DISSECTION: Kryptonians process sunlight, but they don't do "photosynthesis", the use of that term, particularly by a scientist like Mr. Terrific is moronic. Photosynthesis is literally s a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Dick Grayson's bat emblems are wrong, too.
<-------------------------------->
"WHAT'S IN THE BOX?"
TITLE: Namor: The First Mutant (Marvel).
ISSUE: 01.
CULPRIT: Stuart Moore (writer).
DISSECTION: Now, if this magical chest thingy can only be opened by a ruler of Atlantis... how the fuck did the vampires put Dracula's head inside of it?
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. There are other writing languages, specifically the fact that Namor "blesses" fallen Atlantean warriors in Latin... Latin? Oh, and he doesn't believe in vampires... what? And art wise, Namor's eyes are colored incorrectly, and Atlanteans do not have fins in their calves (much less spiked ones), those are DC Atlanteans... I'm willing to cut Ariel Olivetti some slack, since you could argue these are from a subspecies, or those fins are part of their pants (since they're all wearing pants... and no shirts, except the female...).
<-------------------------------->
"FUCKING MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?"
TITLE: New Mutants Forever (Marvel).
ISSUE: 01 of 05.
CULPRIT: Chris Claremont (writer).
DISSECTION: Now, this is as lazy as Green Lantern energy deficits; but older. Magneto has control over magnetism, right? And he's been shown to move or immobilize people by the iron in their blood, right? Among other things, He's lifted submarines, starships, planes, and asteroids, right? Yet he's vexed by a bunch of mercs in non-metallic armor? Even if their armor somehow blocks him from moving the bodies inside, he can impale them with pieces of metal from furniture, the building, etc... reminds me of a cartoon episode where he was attacked and captured by ceramic Sentinels... in the middle of a harbor full of fifty foot yachts...
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars. Lots of more errors: eye colors, saying Nova Roma is in the Andes, an accented letter, "Valkyror" instead of "Valkyrior", being surprised that people with paramilitary gear open fire without mercy, being surprised at the new costumes Ilyana conjures, yet they were wearing them in a picture they were looking at minutes earlier, and saying David Haller is Moira's son... Nine errors in the first issue only? Good start (but it was a good read, though), Chris.
<-------------------------------->
"THOSE PESKY MEMBERS OF OUR OWN FEDERATION!"
TITLE: Star Trek: Burden Of Knowledge (IDW)
ISSUE: 03 of 04.
CULPRIT: Scott & David Tipton (writers).
DISSECTION: Andorian technicians perform an overhaul on the Enterprise's computer systems, something mandated by Starfleet, done at a UFP starbase. While overhauling the computer systems, the Andorians sabotage them to have a bias about Tellarites. When this is discovered and reverted, McCoy complains that the Andorians "are scott free".
What? The Andorians are part of the United Federation Of Planets, and not "their allies", like Bones say. Yes, this is the TOS era, and it was common to have an all-Vulcan starship in Starfleet (like the USS Intrepid, a curious name for a Vulcan ship), or all-Andorian space stations... but it's not like they're anonymous Andorians that just happened to offer you a computer overhaul in the middle of space, and you accepted because it was cheap and you had a coupon!
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"OHNOES! THERE'S NO PLACE TO LAND OUR SUPERTECHNOLOGICAL ALIEN-ENHANCED VTOL AIRCRAFT!"
TITLE: Wolverine: Weapon X (Marvel).
ISSUE: 16.
CULPRIT: Jason Aaron (writer).
DISSECTION: I just picked up the most recent issue because I knew it was a Nightcrawler tribute; and Kurt's one of my favorite X-Men. I liked the story; I really dug what Jason Aaron, the writer, was getting at... however, wasn't there another way to force Logan to make an effort to deliver the piano? Did you need to say there was no airstrip on which to land a Blackbird? X-Men aircraft have been consistently shown as having VTOL capabilities, and they can also hover; being enhanced by Sh'iar technology, and the work of people like Forge.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars. Also, Angel's eyes are curiously blank, and Wolverine's eyes are colored brown.
<-------------------------------->
146=6.4
Even with a hundred and forty six dissections, the average was... well, average, at 6.4 Bazzars. Sorry this column is not as good as usual; not only I've done it in a hurry, but it's also been fragmented and my attention has been crap because on Sunday my cat was killed by the neighbors' dog, and I'm still depressed... But anyhoo, here are the Covers Of Each Week; for the week of 08/04, it's again Darwyn's Cook cover for The Murder Of King Tut:
Next, for the week of 08/11, a nice looking piece from Sky Doll: Lacrima Christy Collection #1, by the book's creators Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa:
Nothing striking, but the best of that week. From 08/18, the last issue of the regular Star Wars: Legacy series, by co-creator Jan Duursema, and Sean Cooke:
Yes, not one of the best covers ever either, but it's a nice bookend for this series. Good thing there'll be at least one miniseries continuing the story, as I'm more interested in going forward with the story of the Star Wars universe than with exploring its past (unless it's Rebellion or New Republic eras). Last, from 08/25, another nice painting by Whilce Portacio for X-Men Legacy:
I wish he could do this kind of stuff inside the book... Now, Moments Of The Week... first, from 08/04, Lobo flaunts his bling:
Scary... Next, the villain in Metaba... err, S.H.I.E.L.D.?
Why, of course, Isaac Newton! I was hoping it'd be Edison... Now, from the interest "Last Family Of Krypton" mini, Lex being Lex:
Bastard. And from that same book, this is how Kryptonians do make-up sex:
Now, from 08/11, Bart gives the best possible eulogy for Comic Book Guy:
Good one. Next, Tony Stark, fashion disaster:
MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! And now, why shapeshifters are evil:
MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! MY SOUL!!! MY SOUL!!! Next, Blade, as played by the Wayans Brothers:
It still made me laugh. From 08/18, things are tough in the sidekick/pilot market, in this economy:
That brought a big smile to my face. Next, the foreshadowing started in Ex Machina #1 was indeed about something gloom:
Gaaaah!!! Over in the UK, Hughie disappoints me:
Stella? A Belgian beer? Yes, it's pretty common over there, but still... Next up, legacy heroes have to be true to their legacy:
Power Man? Check. Cheesy? Check. Speaking of Legacy, my favorite character from Star Wars: Legacy, Antares Draco, goes down in a blaze of glory:
Just as a note, he's not a red-skinned-black-inked Sith; that's just a disguise, this is his usual look, and he actually went down fighting his former master (now a Sith), but this was the cooler moment to show. Next, Spider-Man, nerdgasming:
Like a true schoolgirl of nerdiness. To finish this week, you know who you should not mess with?
That's John Walker, aka the U.S.Agent, now warden of The Raft. You know what happens if you mess with him?
This. Even missing an arm and a leg, he's got superpowers and combat training, you idjits. Now two moments from 08/25, first up, Kirby flashback!
Courtesy of Butch Guice. And last, Amadeus Cho ascends to godhood:
Not quite as I expected he'd look... That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...
THE DISSECTOR!
DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)
[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]
08/04 "Whoa, wait a minute. This is Khund porn? Shouldn't there be some, you know, sex...?" Captain Comet, R.E.B.E.L.S. #19.
08/11 "YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SCREAM AS LOUD ASS YA WANT WHILE I KICK YOUR ASS!" Guy Gardner, Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #1.
08/18 "(Luke Cage) somehow managed to look manly in yellow silk, which just might be his greatest super-power." Iron Fist, Shadowland: Power Man #1.
08/25 "Delphyne, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!" Amadeus Cho, Heroic Age: Prince Of Power #4.
Late? You say I'm late? Well, yes, a tad late, I suppose. But here's the column for THE ENTIRE MONTH OF AUGUST!!!!! You might have guessed that from the quotes, and let's go quickly through the Dissector's Picks Of Each Week:
Week Of 08/04: Best Book Of The Week was R.E.B.E.L.S. #20; good use of Brainiac characters, plus Claude St. Aubin's art is pretty neat. Worst Book Of The Week was Batman Confidential #47, Kevin VanHook's Batman-battles-the-supernatural-yet-doesn't-believe-in-it stories are horrible.
Week Of 08/11: Best Book Of The Week was Tom Strong & The Robots Of Doom #3, just pulpy goodness. Worst Book Of The Week was Superman #702. JMS's "Superman Walks Among Regular Folk" has been done before... and it's boring.
Week Of 08/18: Best Book Of The Week was Darkwing Duck #3, just like the TV show, month after month. Worst Book Of The Week was Uncanny X-Men #527... the story is passable, but Whilce Portacio and Leonard Kirk make Emma Frost seem like a crack whore, and Colossus like a mentally deficient jock. The art is just hideous, I tell you.
Week Of 08/25: Best Book Of The Week was Heroic Age: Prince Of Power, good mixing of regular superhero adventure with godstuff, and humor on top of it. Worst Book Of The Week was Teen Titans #86. Felicia Henderson's writing is bad, and while the art by José Luís is not as awful as previous issues, it still doesn't make up for the plot.
Oh, no one got the DT! last week, it was the fact that the Kents look like they're 40 at most. The Rundown is ginormous, so you can find it here.
<-------------------------------->
"RING OF ILLUSIONS."
TITLE: Adventure Comics V1 (DC).
ISSUE: 517.
CULPRIT: Kevin Sharpe (penciller).
DISSECTION: Roy alerted me to this one... the flight belts the Legionnaires wear (before their rings) appear and disappear... then Cosmic Boy has a Legion ring, which he wasn't wearing before.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Badge for Roy. So that's a double dissection there, and then in the backup, Atom just takes Calculator to Oracle's base, right in front of Babs; plus in the DC Nation column, Eddie Berganza refers to "the Green Lanterns" as "las Linterna Verde". First, it's "los", if you're talking about the people, the corps members, and not the objects. Second, it's "Linternas Verdes", because it's plural.
<-------------------------------->
"SILENCE OF THE LAMB."
TITLE: Avengers Academy (Marvel).
ISSUE: 03.
CULPRIT: Mike McKone (penciller).
DISSECTION: If Crossbones is supposed to be wearing a muzzle so he can't use his teeth as projectile weapons... why does the thing have enough space for him to actually do that?
DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars. There's also inconsistent lettering in the credits, and Norman Osborn's eyes are colored incorrectly.
<-------------------------------->
"VE DAY!"
TITLE: DC Universe Legacies (DC).
ISSUE: 04.
CULPRIT: Len Wein (writer).
DISSECTION: Lots of time period inconsistencies, but apart from those, they refer to a shot fired the same day as Germany surrendered in WWII as "the last shot of the war"... yet Japan surrendered quite later.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"BAAAA!"
TITLE: The Dissector (Studio Robota).
ISSUE: 174.
CULPRIT: MaGnUs (writer).
DISSECTION: Donald313 noticed that last column said "Jim Baleen" instead of "Balent". I corrected it on the column, but I still admit to it. You get trigger happy with the spell checker sometimes.
DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars, and a badge for Donald. Three more and you reach Commander.
<-------------------------------->
"MACHIAVELLIAN DRACULA!"
TITLE: Ides Of Blood (DC/Wildstorm).
ISSUE: 01 of 06.
CULPRIT: Stuart C. Paul (writer).
DISSECTION: While my fellow Uruguayan Christian Duce provides great vampire/roman mood art; writer Stuart C. Paul script throws me out of the story. I understand the need to use linguistic anachronisms in period stories; to better get your point across and connect with the reader. But when the anachronisms in your dialogues go beyond the linguistic and cross into historic things... a story in ancient Rome, with Julius Caesar around, cannot have the word "Machiavellian" or refer to vampires as "dracul"; not several centuries before the birth (let alone work) of the person who inspires the first term, and (even if it's closer) the rise of the order that the second term refers to.
DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars. Yes, they're figure of speech, but you have to be careful.
<-------------------------------->
"UNITED KRAUT NATIONS."
TITLE: Iron Man Legacy (Marvel).
ISSUE: 05.
CULPRIT: Fred Van Lente (writer).
DISSECTION: This is a good book, Wino Tony Adventures (as Van Lente jokingly refers to it). It's had few errors so far, and in this issue, it was a little slip up. Or a few, but still. Apart from accented letters being smaller than they should, right before Dr. Doom addresses the UN's General Assembly, a translator is translating a speech into German... yet the official languages of the UN, and by extension (if I'm not mistaken, and I did my research), the languages into which things are translated, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. There is also a small
German language mistake, using the German word for "chair" (the piece of furniture) for "chair" as in the chair of a meeting; when there's a specific word for that in German, "Vorsitzender". I snicker when Spanish translation of US stuff think "foreman" is the last name of the head juror in a trial and dub him "Señor Foreman".
<-------------------------------->
"UNBORN DOOM."
TITLE: Iron Man Legacy (Marvel).
ISSUE: 05.
CULPRIT: Fred Van Lente (writer).
DISSECTION: Dr. Doom says he communicates with the UN through a "sonogram". Uhm... I'm pretty sure that should be a "hologram".
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"ALL-STAR DISSECTION."
TITLE: JSA All-Stars (DC).
ISSUE: 09.
CULPRIT: Freddie Williams II (artist).
DISSECTION: Come on, this one is easy.
DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"CRYSTAL METHOD."
TITLE: Justice League Of America V2 (DC) / Justice Society Of America V3 (DC).
ISSUE: Various.
CULPRIT: Various.
DISSECTION: David noticed that Mikaal Tomas, the Starman currently in JLA (and in JSA because of the crossover going on right now) used to have a roundish yellow crystal embedded in his chest, but now for some reason it's being drawn sometimes as a giant green rhomboid jewel, and sometimes it's that shape, but yellow. Badge for David, two more and you make Lieutenant!
DISSECT-O-METER: 7 Bazzars... I'll give four to JLA, and three to JSA; I have no energy to go back and identify authors.
<-------------------------------->
"CRAPOSYNTHESIS."
TITLE: TITLE: Justice League Of America V2 (DC).
ISSUE: 48.
CULPRIT: James Robinson (writer).
DISSECTION: Kryptonians process sunlight, but they don't do "photosynthesis", the use of that term, particularly by a scientist like Mr. Terrific is moronic. Photosynthesis is literally s a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Dick Grayson's bat emblems are wrong, too.
<-------------------------------->
"WHAT'S IN THE BOX?"
TITLE: Namor: The First Mutant (Marvel).
ISSUE: 01.
CULPRIT: Stuart Moore (writer).
DISSECTION: Now, if this magical chest thingy can only be opened by a ruler of Atlantis... how the fuck did the vampires put Dracula's head inside of it?
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. There are other writing languages, specifically the fact that Namor "blesses" fallen Atlantean warriors in Latin... Latin? Oh, and he doesn't believe in vampires... what? And art wise, Namor's eyes are colored incorrectly, and Atlanteans do not have fins in their calves (much less spiked ones), those are DC Atlanteans... I'm willing to cut Ariel Olivetti some slack, since you could argue these are from a subspecies, or those fins are part of their pants (since they're all wearing pants... and no shirts, except the female...).
<-------------------------------->
"FUCKING MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?"
TITLE: New Mutants Forever (Marvel).
ISSUE: 01 of 05.
CULPRIT: Chris Claremont (writer).
DISSECTION: Now, this is as lazy as Green Lantern energy deficits; but older. Magneto has control over magnetism, right? And he's been shown to move or immobilize people by the iron in their blood, right? Among other things, He's lifted submarines, starships, planes, and asteroids, right? Yet he's vexed by a bunch of mercs in non-metallic armor? Even if their armor somehow blocks him from moving the bodies inside, he can impale them with pieces of metal from furniture, the building, etc... reminds me of a cartoon episode where he was attacked and captured by ceramic Sentinels... in the middle of a harbor full of fifty foot yachts...
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars. Lots of more errors: eye colors, saying Nova Roma is in the Andes, an accented letter, "Valkyror" instead of "Valkyrior", being surprised that people with paramilitary gear open fire without mercy, being surprised at the new costumes Ilyana conjures, yet they were wearing them in a picture they were looking at minutes earlier, and saying David Haller is Moira's son... Nine errors in the first issue only? Good start (but it was a good read, though), Chris.
<-------------------------------->
"THOSE PESKY MEMBERS OF OUR OWN FEDERATION!"
TITLE: Star Trek: Burden Of Knowledge (IDW)
ISSUE: 03 of 04.
CULPRIT: Scott & David Tipton (writers).
DISSECTION: Andorian technicians perform an overhaul on the Enterprise's computer systems, something mandated by Starfleet, done at a UFP starbase. While overhauling the computer systems, the Andorians sabotage them to have a bias about Tellarites. When this is discovered and reverted, McCoy complains that the Andorians "are scott free".
What? The Andorians are part of the United Federation Of Planets, and not "their allies", like Bones say. Yes, this is the TOS era, and it was common to have an all-Vulcan starship in Starfleet (like the USS Intrepid, a curious name for a Vulcan ship), or all-Andorian space stations... but it's not like they're anonymous Andorians that just happened to offer you a computer overhaul in the middle of space, and you accepted because it was cheap and you had a coupon!
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
<-------------------------------->
"OHNOES! THERE'S NO PLACE TO LAND OUR SUPERTECHNOLOGICAL ALIEN-ENHANCED VTOL AIRCRAFT!"
TITLE: Wolverine: Weapon X (Marvel).
ISSUE: 16.
CULPRIT: Jason Aaron (writer).
DISSECTION: I just picked up the most recent issue because I knew it was a Nightcrawler tribute; and Kurt's one of my favorite X-Men. I liked the story; I really dug what Jason Aaron, the writer, was getting at... however, wasn't there another way to force Logan to make an effort to deliver the piano? Did you need to say there was no airstrip on which to land a Blackbird? X-Men aircraft have been consistently shown as having VTOL capabilities, and they can also hover; being enhanced by Sh'iar technology, and the work of people like Forge.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars. Also, Angel's eyes are curiously blank, and Wolverine's eyes are colored brown.
<-------------------------------->
146=6.4
Even with a hundred and forty six dissections, the average was... well, average, at 6.4 Bazzars. Sorry this column is not as good as usual; not only I've done it in a hurry, but it's also been fragmented and my attention has been crap because on Sunday my cat was killed by the neighbors' dog, and I'm still depressed... But anyhoo, here are the Covers Of Each Week; for the week of 08/04, it's again Darwyn's Cook cover for The Murder Of King Tut:
Next, for the week of 08/11, a nice looking piece from Sky Doll: Lacrima Christy Collection #1, by the book's creators Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa:
Nothing striking, but the best of that week. From 08/18, the last issue of the regular Star Wars: Legacy series, by co-creator Jan Duursema, and Sean Cooke:
Yes, not one of the best covers ever either, but it's a nice bookend for this series. Good thing there'll be at least one miniseries continuing the story, as I'm more interested in going forward with the story of the Star Wars universe than with exploring its past (unless it's Rebellion or New Republic eras). Last, from 08/25, another nice painting by Whilce Portacio for X-Men Legacy:
I wish he could do this kind of stuff inside the book... Now, Moments Of The Week... first, from 08/04, Lobo flaunts his bling:
Scary... Next, the villain in Metaba... err, S.H.I.E.L.D.?
Why, of course, Isaac Newton! I was hoping it'd be Edison... Now, from the interest "Last Family Of Krypton" mini, Lex being Lex:
Bastard. And from that same book, this is how Kryptonians do make-up sex:
Now, from 08/11, Bart gives the best possible eulogy for Comic Book Guy:
Good one. Next, Tony Stark, fashion disaster:
MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! And now, why shapeshifters are evil:
MY EYES!!! MY EYES!!! MY SOUL!!! MY SOUL!!! Next, Blade, as played by the Wayans Brothers:
It still made me laugh. From 08/18, things are tough in the sidekick/pilot market, in this economy:
That brought a big smile to my face. Next, the foreshadowing started in Ex Machina #1 was indeed about something gloom:
Gaaaah!!! Over in the UK, Hughie disappoints me:
Stella? A Belgian beer? Yes, it's pretty common over there, but still... Next up, legacy heroes have to be true to their legacy:
Power Man? Check. Cheesy? Check. Speaking of Legacy, my favorite character from Star Wars: Legacy, Antares Draco, goes down in a blaze of glory:
Just as a note, he's not a red-skinned-black-inked Sith; that's just a disguise, this is his usual look, and he actually went down fighting his former master (now a Sith), but this was the cooler moment to show. Next, Spider-Man, nerdgasming:
Like a true schoolgirl of nerdiness. To finish this week, you know who you should not mess with?
That's John Walker, aka the U.S.Agent, now warden of The Raft. You know what happens if you mess with him?
This. Even missing an arm and a leg, he's got superpowers and combat training, you idjits. Now two moments from 08/25, first up, Kirby flashback!
Courtesy of Butch Guice. And last, Amadeus Cho ascends to godhood:
Not quite as I expected he'd look... That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...
THE DISSECTOR!
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Dissector #171.
DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)
[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]
"I'm a sorcerer, motherfuckers! And I hereby declare your consciousness... EXPANDED!" Byzantium Mack, House Of Mystery V2 #27.
I know I'm late, but I've had a lot of work on my desk... the kind of work that actually pays my bills, so... no disrespect to my readers, but I'm sure you'll understand. On top of that, I was sick last week, and it was too cold to be outside my blankets in bed; and I'm not comfortable writing there. You wanna know how sick I was? Well, the first day I stayed at home (Wednesday) I didn't even had enough energy to read comics or listen to my favorite radio show live... that's how awful I felt.
Last column's DT was spotted by JohnnyDoe, the problem was that Iron Man's full name was given as "Anthony Edwards Stark"; it's "Edward". At least he didn't spot the other thing I did with that entry, see more later on. Let's get on with The Dissector's Picks Of The Week, shall we? Best Book Of The Week was Batman And Robin #13... yes, I know I haven't liked much of Morrison's recent output, but this book is the exception, and this particular issue was just... well-rounded. The script, the art... it didn't WOW me, but it did strike me as a very well crafted comic book.
Worst Book Of The Week also goes to Batman, in this case, Batman Refuse, err, Batman Confidential #46. Nothing memorable comes out of this book, and sometimes, it's even home to stuff that shouldn't even see the light of day... or the light of night, in this case. Kevin VanHook returns with a sequel to his Superman/Batman Vs. Vampires & Werewolves mini (or whatever that drivel was called). The art by Tom Mandrake is acceptable, but VanHook's script is lazy, and full of bad choices when it comes to the supernatural, as well as Superman's powers. For example, using sunlight as a weapon on zombies? Yes, they're usually creatures of the night, but they're not vampires. Not only that, but Superman's heat vision, while derived from the sun, is not sunlight... On top of that, even if they're magic creatures, Superman's weakness to magic would not prevent their bodies and clothes from catching fire from a wide-burst visible heat vision attack...
The Rundown: Avengers: The Children's Crusade (the font used for the credits has an "A" with an extra line above it, like an accent but not it... and it's on some "A"s, and not in others... and it's not consistent), Batman And Robin (the Joker likes to leave clues about his crimes, since when? also, both Batman emblems are wrong), Brightest Day (Hawkman's hair is the wrong color), Darkstar & The Winter Guard (English signs in a Russian installation?), Doom Patrol V5 (Rita's eyes are still colored incorrectly), Scarlet (accented letters), Sparta USA (accented letters), Spider-Man/Fantastic Four (Doom's eyes are colored incorrectly), X-Men V3 (Wolverine's eyes are colored incorrectly, plus "women" instead of "woman" in one of the ads), Young Allies (inconsistent lettering, just like in Children's Crusade).
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"ACTION DISSECTION!"
TITLE: Action Comics (DC).
ISSUE: 845.
CULPRIT: Dave Stewart (colorist).
DISSECTION: Just one from the Vault for the Dissect This!, because there was no good one for this week.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars.
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"HOMEBOY."
TITLE: The Boys (Dynamite).
ISSUE: 44.
CULPRIT: Tony Aviña (colorist).
DISSECTION: Sidney noticed that the Homelander's trouser piping disappears between panels. Badge for him, and he makes the rank of Lt. Commander! Congratulations. Mr. Sidney!
DISSECT-O-METER: 4 Bazzars.
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"IT'S EASY LIKE THAT."
TITLE: Fantastic Four V1 (Marvel).
ISSUE: Annual 32.
CULPRIT: Joe Ahearne (writer).
DISSECTION: Are we really supposed to believe that someone can walk up and into Reed Richard's lab, the heart of the Baxter Building, just because they have Johnny Storm's keycard? Really?
DISSECT-O-METER: 9 Bazzars. Also, one dialogue later says "protction" instead of "protection".
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"BULLETPROOF MONK."
TITLE: JSA All-Stars (DC).
ISSUE: 08.
CULPRIT: Matthew Sturges (writer).
DISSECTION: Judomaster and Citizen Steel are sent first into battle because according to Hourman they're "impervious to gunfire". WRONG!!! Citizen Steel is invulnerable, but Judomaster's power (an "aversion field") only works on attacks specifically aimed at her. Bullet hails are not really aimed, not to speak of stray shots.
DISSECT-O-METER: 8 Bazzars. Atom Smasher's eyes and hair continue to be miscolored.
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"STOMP!"
TITLE: Thanos Sourcebook (Marvel).
ISSUE: One-shot.
CULPRIT: Mike O'Sullivan (writer).
DISSECTION: Sidney earns another badge by pointing out that Gorgon's profile says that he can "stop his feet" to create seismic shockwave.
DISSECT-O-METER: 4 Bazzars. Also, the Nova Corps article uses the word "centurian" instead of "centurion".
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"JUST SHOOT ME."
TITLE: The Dissector (Studio Robota).
ISSUE: 170.
CULPRIT: MaGnUs (editor).
DISSECTION: I was working on the column, and I noticed I didn't have a DT!, so I went and plucked one out of The Rundown... and left it there too. No one seems to have noticed, though, until Sidney did, some time later. Another badge for him.
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars.
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"WORDS AND PICTURES."
TITLE: Vengeance Of The Moon Knight (Marvel).
ISSUE: 10.
CULPRIT: Juan Jose Ryp (artist).
DISSECTION: Now, if the script has the Moon Knight thinking that you can crack a walnut on Captain America's chin cleft... don't you think you might wanna draw a cleft on Cap's chin? This issue had the cheesiest monologues ever, as well as poses that were even too much for a superhero book. That, and Ryp's art, while detailed, is not yet in sync with the Marvel Universe.
If Ryp wasn't so good, and the issue hadn't been a fun badass superhero romp, this would have been a candidate for Worst Book Of The Week. Oh, and if Batman Confidential had been any good...
DISSECT-O-METER: 4 Bazzars.
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"FASTER! FASTER!"
TITLE: Vengeance Of The Moon Knight (Marvel).
ISSUE: 10.
CULPRIT: Gregg Hurwitz (writer).
DISSECTION: The Glove Of Asteria is a mystical artifact that projects a directed column of air moving at... the speed of light? THE SPEED OF LIGHT?!?!? WHAT THE FUCK, GREGG??!?!!
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars. Also, if Captain Barracuda's pirates on the ship's top deck are fighting the Avengers, and it's all kinds of noisy, why are some of them calmly dining below decks so they can be jumped by Moon Knight.
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"X-WOMEN: EUROSTYLE."
TITLE: X-Women (Marvel).
ISSUE: One-shot.
CULPRIT: Chris Claremont (writer).
DISSECTION: Wow, this was painful to read; Claremont really managed to make me wince several times at how bad the writing was. Only Milo Manara's cheesecake art made it bearable. There are so many errors in this book, that I'll just list them in one entry:
* What the hell is up with Psylocke firing "TK blasts", like they are Havok's blasts, or Bishop's?
* Rogue inherits a villa on the Greek island of Kirinos? From whom? Even if she inherited from Mystique or Destiny, wouldn't the X-Men suspect a trap? Or at least not go on vacation to party?
* Psylocke's eyes are colored incorrectly.
* Rachel Summers and Shadowcat never shared a psychic rapport. That was Dani Moonstar and Rahne Sinclair.
* Kitty Pryde's eyes change from their correct brown to blue, then to brown again, then back to blue once more.
* Even if I can accept that a cargo cult in Madripoor could include Caucasian people, Claremont handles the concept incorrectly. What he shows as a cargo cult is more like a band of pirates or scavengers, and the things he writes regarding cargo cults are utter balderdash.
* The "cargo cult" children that Rogues guards and has known for about a few days are not "her" kids. It doesn't even look like she's speaking figuratively.
* All of a sudden, the cargo cult leader has mutant powers? What?
* "Now the Baroness just has to take psychic control of the target armies, start a few skirmishes... for which she can not only provide arms to India and China... and ultimately sweep in when the dust settles to become the dominant power in the region." Apart from how stupid the plan is, and the fact that India and China probably don't need an unknown party to supply them with arms... isn't that sentence missing a "but" component for the "not only" part?
* If this Baroness can inhibit mutant powers on her person (but not around her, because Psylocke can use her telekinesis very near her)... why the hell doesn't Betsy just use TK to fling something heavy at her, instead of trying to fire a blast directly at her?
* What's with everybody calling Rogue "Anna" all the time? Oh, yes I know that Anna Marie is her name, but no one calls her that on the comics, at least not regularly.
I finish reading it, and Joe Quesada writes in his afterword that I probably want to read it again? Hell no, I wish I hadn't read it at all!!!
DISSECT-O-METER: 10 Bazzars for the ridiculous "villa inheriting" plot starter. Various ratings for the other dissections.
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This week's average was 6.3 Bazzars in forty-three dissections, standard fare, Cover Of The Week was this simple, yet effective piece by Darwyn Cooke for The Murder Of King Tut #1:
Yes, it's simple, but it's very appropriate. The book itself is not bad, either, alternating between chronicling what happened before Tut's birth, his ascension and so forth, and showing Howard Carter's start in Egyptology and his eventual discovery of the famous tomb. Recommended reading if you're into this stuff. Now, Moments Of The Week.... from The Boys:
It's the policy of truth! Then, even in the future, don't mess with Hercules:
Damn... Skipping over to DC, look at this:
It's like a watching a baby saying "da-da" for the first time! Now, back to Marvel, Dr. Doom's hench-scientists know the first rule of technical work:
The Scotty Time Rule!!! Now, you know who's a practical man?
Bane. And tell me, what's a day like this called in Marvel's New York City?
Thursday. The Smurfs return and show us how useful their language is:
You can curse all you want! Next, Anna Mercury:
Oh, no, it's the Black Widow... sorry. From the same book, the Moon Knight shows his combat prowess:
Yeah, well... even action books should have their limits, and I don't think Moon Knight should be so good with a bow and arrow. And now, last, Marvel teases us:
The only good thing about X-Women, and it's just tease. If like me, you've read Milo Manara's classics like Perfume Of The Invisible or Click (and if you don't, and you're 18 or older, do it), you'll know how much we're missing out here. I'd love to see Manara's sketchbook for this issue... That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...
THE DISSECTOR!
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