Publishers' Picks/ Retailers' Reviews -- October, 2002

Beg The Question

In the '90s, there were two comics series about twentysomething New Yorkers and their relationships: Minimum Wage and Box Office Poison. Both had major characters who were involved in the comic business(which led readers to suspect that both were at least partly autobiographical), and both were about people who struggled with commitment problems in their love lives. BOP was more lighthearted, had a more linear plot and more cartoony characters, and finished its story sooner, while Minimum Wage had little actual plot, but was both deeper and broader, with more detailed art, more actual sex, and a finer eye for the myriad diverse cultural types that make up New York City. Thing was, it was never completed; it just kind of stopped. Now, here's the whole thing in one volume, finally finished, and it's good to get a satisfying resolution to the story. Fans of the original run will want this, since there's more than enough new material to justify the cost, and new readers should get it for Fingerman's quirky-but-clear style, and his careful, faithful reproductions of dialogue, fashion, and the secret yearnings of talented, funny, neurotic singles living in NYC. Grade: A.

Doom Patrol #13

Doom Patrol isn't a book that comes up much in conversation, but here it is entering its second year; it's a survivor, and the Arcudi/Huat team, with its combination of weirdly logical superhero realism, bizarre villains, and humor, has made it unlike any other book out there. This issue is the first of two without Huat, but his replacement, Seth Fisher, is just as interesting, idiosyncratic and slyly funny -- and the plot, which hearkens back to the earliest days of the DP team, manages to combine Silver and Modern-age sensibilities effectively, and should interest both old and new readers. Grade: B.

Killraven

War of the Worlds was one of those '70s series that a lot of current creators grew up with, and look back on fondly; something about the P. Craig Russell art and the lush Don McGregor scripting made it different from anything else on the stands. Most attempts to revive it, unfortunately, have fallen flat -- maybe because they haven't been able to duplicate its inventive, experimental flair, its willingness to expand the boundaries of comics storytelling. This version is a noble try -- Davis' affection for the characters is clear, and the art is more than competent -- but it's too pedestrian, too by-the-numbers in its plotting, to capture the flavor of the original (example: the main group of characters escapes from the Martians, and within minutes just happens to run into the one person who can lead them to what's left of the underground, which just happens to have access to old tapes that can explain how the Martians took over, decades ago -- which, of course, is awfully convenient for filling readers in on the series' backstory. And so on.) Fans of the original series will probably like this, but new readers will find it hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Grade: B-.

Louis: The Clown's Last Words

If Franz Kafka had written Winnie The Pooh, it might have looked something like this: at first it seems like a gentle, whimsical children's story, but there's a suffocating paranoia just under the surface, and elements of totalitarian menace keep peeking their heads around corners and then drawing back (at one point, there's a surreal interrogation scene straight out of The Castle). This is the third installment of this series, and like the first two it's a self-contained story, both charming and disturbing; it's clear why the earlier stories have received a handful of comics award nominations. This book should get few neutral reactions; readers will either take to its offbeat existentialism immediately, or think it's a waste of paper. Grade: B+.