Comics from Uticon 2023
Oct. 12th, 2023 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAs noted, I got a stack of new comics at Uticon. And this doesn’t include the Minecraft graphic novels or stack of Archie digests that ARR pulled.
Bizard: The Bear Wizard - A goofy kids story that I pulled for ARR but read anyway; a wizard loses his wand and it gets stuck on the head of a bear who gains magical wishing powers. The bear mostly wants to do bear things like sleeping and eating, but gets pulled into granting wishes for everybody in the forest. Nothing brilliant, but entertaining in a “sensible chuckle” kind of way.
The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries - As adorable as you might hope; Batman is drawn in the Batman Adventures style but acts much more the Batman: The Brave and the Bold cartoon; which meshes well with a typical goofy, cartoony Scooby-Doo cast. There’s time travel, guest stars, giant robots, self-referential-humor, supervillains, and greedy old real estate developers in rubber masks.
Modern Fantasy – A casually queer mashing-together of D&D fantasy tropes with modern-day workplace/friend-circle drama. 20-something angst populated with office work and monster fights. (The barbarian coworker is the best character.) Cute, amusing, cartoony; ultimately forgettable.
Henchgirl – The trials and tribulations of a lesser supervillian’s minion and her roommates, driven by workplace drama and poor life choices. Sometimes, you can read something and tell if it was written in pieces, or all at one time, or by multiple people. And this you can tell was “pantsed.” It eventually pays off pretty much everything, but it’s also pretty clear that when she wrote issue #1 she hadn’t yet figured out anything that was happening in issue #2.
I Am Stan – A biography of comics legend Stan Lee based mostly on interviews with him. This lacks the “connective tissue” that would actually tell the story of Stan Lee’s life to anyone who didn’t already know 90% of it. Famous comic characters and creators (and less-famous ones) pass through without any explanation of who they are or why they’re important. Scenes from interviews or significant events appear unrelated to what comes immediately before or after, assuming that the reader already knows what’s going on. And Stan himself doesn’t actually come off that well, but the author was unwilling to take any narrative stance on the morality of anyone’s actions, or even try to clarify people’s relationships to one another at the various points.
Dirk Gently’s Big Holistic Graphic Novel – As far as I can tell, this was created independently of the TV series (in 2016) and then repackaged with a tie-in cover. The Dirk in the comics doesn’t look like the actor who plays him in the series at all (and is characterized by a giant pompadour) and his personality is a lot more confident and forceful; and none of the show’s recurring characters appear in either of the two independent stories this volume collects. That said, they’re amusing stories if you like watching Dirk piece together a series of seemingly-completely-unrelated nonsense into one sensible interconnected mystery.
Bizard: The Bear Wizard - A goofy kids story that I pulled for ARR but read anyway; a wizard loses his wand and it gets stuck on the head of a bear who gains magical wishing powers. The bear mostly wants to do bear things like sleeping and eating, but gets pulled into granting wishes for everybody in the forest. Nothing brilliant, but entertaining in a “sensible chuckle” kind of way.
The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries - As adorable as you might hope; Batman is drawn in the Batman Adventures style but acts much more the Batman: The Brave and the Bold cartoon; which meshes well with a typical goofy, cartoony Scooby-Doo cast. There’s time travel, guest stars, giant robots, self-referential-humor, supervillains, and greedy old real estate developers in rubber masks.
Modern Fantasy – A casually queer mashing-together of D&D fantasy tropes with modern-day workplace/friend-circle drama. 20-something angst populated with office work and monster fights. (The barbarian coworker is the best character.) Cute, amusing, cartoony; ultimately forgettable.
Henchgirl – The trials and tribulations of a lesser supervillian’s minion and her roommates, driven by workplace drama and poor life choices. Sometimes, you can read something and tell if it was written in pieces, or all at one time, or by multiple people. And this you can tell was “pantsed.” It eventually pays off pretty much everything, but it’s also pretty clear that when she wrote issue #1 she hadn’t yet figured out anything that was happening in issue #2.
I Am Stan – A biography of comics legend Stan Lee based mostly on interviews with him. This lacks the “connective tissue” that would actually tell the story of Stan Lee’s life to anyone who didn’t already know 90% of it. Famous comic characters and creators (and less-famous ones) pass through without any explanation of who they are or why they’re important. Scenes from interviews or significant events appear unrelated to what comes immediately before or after, assuming that the reader already knows what’s going on. And Stan himself doesn’t actually come off that well, but the author was unwilling to take any narrative stance on the morality of anyone’s actions, or even try to clarify people’s relationships to one another at the various points.
Dirk Gently’s Big Holistic Graphic Novel – As far as I can tell, this was created independently of the TV series (in 2016) and then repackaged with a tie-in cover. The Dirk in the comics doesn’t look like the actor who plays him in the series at all (and is characterized by a giant pompadour) and his personality is a lot more confident and forceful; and none of the show’s recurring characters appear in either of the two independent stories this volume collects. That said, they’re amusing stories if you like watching Dirk piece together a series of seemingly-completely-unrelated nonsense into one sensible interconnected mystery.
