So many comics, so little time.

As Courtney mentioned last week, we haven't quit reading comics (you'd have to pry them from my cold dead  hands!) but between getting sick with the flu for a week, writing our theses, and starting a new full-time job, we have very little free time to update this blog.  We're not about to give up blogging, but you can expect our posts to be more infrequent until things quiet down.

I've also been cutting a lot of the fat from my pull list, as DC continues to bore me with what I've felt are a lot of really mediocre comic books.  Clearly there is a lot of restructuring going on  there, what with people being let go and then rehired, and then books being announced only to be cancelled before they are published. Something is clearly rotten in the state of Denmark, but in my opinion you could tell that from the low quality titles they've been publishing for the last few months. Once the Rotworld  story arc ends in Animal Man and Swamp Thing, I'll be dropping both of those titles, I doubt Dial H has much of a future, considering how quickly DC is cancelling low-selling titles these days.  If I'm really honest, the only book I'm really enjoying from DC right now is Wonder Woman.

Marvel Now, on the other hand, has been a huge surprise. There are a lot of comics I'd like to read but won't for budgetary reasons, but a lot of titles I've taken a chance on (FF, Avengers Arena, Deadpool, All New X-Men) have been routinely entertaining.  All New X-Men is my most-anticipated book every month, which is something I never thought I'd say.

My enthusiasm for Valiant comics has been cooling off over the past few months. X-O Manowar and Bloodshot just were not meeting my expectations, and neither has Shadowman, so I've dropped each of them from my pull list.  Harbinger has been getting better with every issue, and from a story perspective, is one of the best mainstream comics being published today. My only issue with Harbinger is the art often looks rushed and inconsistent. Warren Simons, get a regular artist on this book now! Archer and Armstrong was the title I was looking forward to the least when it was first announced, but it's actually a lot of fun, and is maybe the most consistently good book Valiant is putting out each month.

Last year everyone was raging about  Image Comics and creator-owned books, and while I am all for more independent creators, not many of the books Image is publishing these days appeal to me. Of course I'm still reading Saga, Prophet, and The Manhattan Projects, but beyond that? I would love to read more Image Comics, but honestly, they're just not publishing a lot of books that appeal to me lately.

So what am I most enthusiastic about lately? Well, that would be my growing stack of hardcovers and trade paperbacks.  I went a little overboard during the holiday season, and now have a ton of books that I still have to read. I rediscovered my love for Alejandro Jodorowsky's comics last year when a friend of mine gave me a copy of Screaming Planet as a Secret Santa gift, not knowing that years ago I was completely gaga for all the Humanoids stuff back when they still had a distribution deal with DC. Now, Humanoids Inc. has retrieved all the publishing rights to their stuff, and have been re-releasing their comics in ultra-rare, premium oversized hardcovers.  Just in the past month alone I've purchased The Incal, Before the Incal, Megalex, The Technopriests: Supreme Collection, The Metabarons: Ulimate Collection, and The Metabarons: Supreme Collection, all in their hardcover glory.  Of those, I've only had time to re-read The Metabarons, and about half of The Technopriests.

I could go on and on forever about the greatness of Jodorowsky and his sci-fi epics, but needless to say, if you've never read The Metabarons or any of the comics I've just mentioned, go buy them before their disappear again. It could be years before they become available again in English, and they are some of the greatest sci-fi epics ever written in the medium.

As if all that wasn't enough, I've started going back to the Judge Dredd Complete Case Files that I bought last summer, and have been rediscovering my love of Dredd. I think I went about reading those graphic novels the wrong way last summer. As much as I appreciate having been able to read some of Dredd's earliest adventures in The Complete Case Files Vol. 1, I would really recommend that new readers not start with that first volume, but instead, start with one of the mega-arcs like The Cursed Earth, The Day the Law Died, The Apocalypse War, or Judge Death.  Speaking of Dredd, lately I've been discovering a lot of the 2000AD stuff that, being a Canadian, I've never really had the opportunity to read. In particular, I've really been enjoying what I've read of Pat Mills' work on ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the ABC Warriors stuff is very hard to find, and very expensive.

Oh yeah, and I've got Matt Wagner's Grendel Omnibus, Volume 2: Devil's Legacy to read as well.

So what am I doing wasting my time writing here, I've got comics to read!

Review: The Complete Case Files of Judge Dredd 01

The Complete Case Files of Judge Dredd 01
Writer: John Wagner
Artists: Brian Bolland, Pat Mills, Mike McMahon, and others
June 15, 2010
Rebellion

I've always wanted to read Judge Dredd, ever since seeing the Stallone film as a kid, but 2000AD comics have been hard to come by here in Canada. With the upcoming release of Dredd 3D, I decided to see if any Judge Dredd trade paperbacks were easy to obtain. To my luck, I learned that 2000AD publisher Rebellion has been releasing The Complete Case Files of Judge Dredd here in North America since 2010.

And so, to countdown the days to the release of Dredd 3D, I decided to read and review the first five volumes of the Complete Case Files of Judge Dredd.

There was only one problem: this first volume is a real drokkin slog.

When read in its historical context, the adventures of Judge Joseph Dredd in Mega City One represent a landmark in British comics. It's impossible to understate the impact that Judge Dredd has had on British Comics, and the development of comics in general. But it's one thing to appreciate what these first Judge Dredd stories are and what they represent for that time in comics history, and it's another to actually enjoy reading them.

In this first volume, Dredd is introduced as a futuristic Dirty Harry, and the stories in general are written mostly as satires of American popular culture or stereotypical crime stories transported into a far-future scenario. These stories read best in short bursts, but after reading a lot of them I started getting a general feeling of boredom and disinterest.

The best stories, the ones that kept me reading through this entire volume, were the stories that really manage to add to the mythos that Wagner and co. were building. Keep in mind, that each Dredd story is roughly six pages long, although sometimes those six pages are committed to a single chapter in an ongoing story arc. It is really impressive then, that a six page story like The Return of Rico, in which Judge Dredd's psychotic, exile brother returns to exact revenge on the man who judged him, can still leave such a strong impression after reading this entire 320 page volume.

My favourite story arc by far was The Robot Wars, in which a robot named Call-Me-Kenneth decides to rebel against his human masters and inspires a violent robot revolution. It's one of the only stories in this first volume that really has a lasting impact on the series, and is referenced occasionally in later stories. But more importantly, The Robot Wars arc is notable because it's so damn insane. A Hitler-loving robot kills thousands of humans, and Dredd and his butler Walter the Wobot have to lead the underground revolution. It's a violent, over-the-top scenario with clear parallels to the history of U.S. slavery and the workers rights protests occurring in England at the time.

Speaking of Walter the Wobot. I'm sure he has his fans among 2000AD and Judge Dredd readers, but I hated this character so much. His gimmick is that he's a neurotic robot manservant that pronounces all his R's as W's, and who is so obsessed with serving Judge Dredd that it borders on pathological. Occasionally, Walter's antics inspire a few laughs, but mostly he's just annoying.

I realize now that I've talked a lot about the mixed quality of the stories in this volume, and the context of the comic itself, but I've barely mentioned the art. Well, there's not really that much to say about it except that it's even more of a mixed bag than the stories themselves. Brian Bolland is one of my favorite artists, and even his earliest work in this volume stands head-and-shoulders above those stories drawn by Mills, McMahon, and others. The art in this volume is very rough, especially when compared the excellent mega-arc that begins at the very start of Volume 2, The Cursed Earth.

The Complete Case Files of Judge Dredd 01 is not a good place to start reading Judge Dredd at all. In fact, I wouldn't recommend it to any except completists. For those of you who want to read some old-school Judge Dredd comics, but don't want to trudge through this rough stuff, I would recommend you skip this volume.