The Week In Review
I haven't written much this week. Partly that's due to lethargy on my part (i.e., I just haven't felt like it), and partly it just hasn't been a very exciting week.
I did finally finish all the Prince Valiant collections I've bought recently. There are still about ten left for me to buy, and four of those are out-of-print. Plus there are two more due to be released this year. But I'll buy those at a more leisurely pace; I think I'm a bit worn out by reading so much of it in so short a time.
It is great stuff, though, and doesn't really suffer from reading it all at once rather than one page per week. Foster's art gets more detailed and more realistic as time goes on, and never stops progressing. The earliest stuff seems to owe much to the Alex Raymond/Flash Gordon style of comic art (indeed, it closely resembles the earliest Flash strips in layout and style), but I'd say Foster is by far the superior artist. Raymond always had a superlative feel for anatomy and figure, but Foster's skill at layout, detail, and backgrounds is beyond anything I recall Raymond accomplishing.
By the late 40s Foster's skill had reached epic proportions, and some of the backdrops - particularly during the sequence in which Val and Aleta travel to North America - are breathtaking. By the late 1950s he started working with a rougher ink line, which gave his art an edgier feel, but he never abandoned his trademark eye for detail. (The later strips actually reproduce better in Fantagraphics' reprint books; the coloring is often rather iffy, and the later art style just seems to work better with the separations.)
I've heard some people say the storylines border on the lame or tedious. Not all of them are winners, and his handling of the characters is cliche at times. But overall it's an exciting strip with a lot of marvelous scenery and adventures. Many of the adventures rely on Val using his wits to overcome a far superior force (often on his own!), and in that respect it resembles some of Joe Straczynski's scripts for Babylon 5 (the first season of which tended to rely heavily on the "what clever trick will Sinclair pull to get out of this one?" schtick). But there are genuinely memorable moments, many of them involving Val's son Arn in his earliest adventures.
It's been a lot of fun reading these. I guess Fantagraphics plans to reprint all of Foster's episodes, which stretches through around 1970, and they're undecided whether they'll continue with John Cullen Murphy's strips (which in the current newspapers involve the fall of Camelot, and my friend Tracy speculates that he's planning to wrap up the series soon!).
Brewers pitcher Jeff Juden fell completely apart in the fourth inning, and gave up four runs, the eventual final score being 5-1. Juden sounds like a total headcase; apparently he has arguments with teammates about the heavy metal music he plays in the clubhouse. Rumor has it that he'd going to Anaheim soon; it wouldn't surprise me if the Brewers just put him on waivers to cut him, frankly. He has a huge amount of talent, but seems to lack the focus to apply it properly.
it was an okay game, punctuated by occasional drizzle - and a full-blown rainstorm on the drive home - but wasn't a standout. None of the games I've been to this year have been.
The temperature has been very reasonable - in the 70s - but the humidity has been just terrible. Last night I finally broke down and closed up my apartment and turned on the air conditioning. It seemed silly to do so with the temperature below 80, but it was really unbearable. Yuck!
The most fun book was Squadron Supreme: New World Order from Marvel. The Squadron Supreme was originally created as a direct counterpart of DC's Justice League. Back in the 60s the two companies decided to play a game where counterparts of the JLA appeared in the Avengers (as villains), and vice-versa. The Avengers counterparts are basically forgotten, but the Squadron lived on intermittently, until appearing in a 12-part series in the 1980s where they effectively took over the United States to run it better and more benevolently. The theme of the series was how even these well-meaning heroes couldn't create a "utopia program" that really worked. This new book involves the Squadron's return to their own Earth after being exiled for a time on the Avengers' Earth, and finding that a police state has been erected in their absence. It's a fairly light read, but it's fun for us longtime Squadron fans.
The new issue of Bone takes us back to Princess Thorn and Phoney Bone and a darker twist to the series that suggests that the plot will be substantially advancing soon. I doubt Bone will ever achieve the heights of its first twelve issues (featuring "The Great Cow Race" and some fall-down-funny schticks), but it's still entertaining.
Chronos continues to be a quality series from DC. It's a time travel story, but the time travel elements are primarily used to get our hero(es) into trouble, rather than as a deus ex machina to get them out of trouble, or to contrive one more time paradox. I'm enjoying this series a lot, and it has some fun showing us various times and places in the DC universe that we might otherwise know nothing about.
Fans of the old Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror" might enjoy the 2-part miniseries Gen 13/Monkeyman and O'Brien from Image. Although writer/artist Art Adams draws a lot of cheesecake shots (which is actually somewhat unusual for him; his women tend to be "healthy" but not often scantily-clad), it's also a subtly amusing re-telling of the Trek story.
Finally, John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake kick off their new Martian Manhunter series this week, telling what I presume is all the backstory of J'onn J'onzz's origin that's been built up over the last decade (much of which, I think, was written by J. M. Dematteis, a writer I don't much care for). Ostrander runs very hot-and-cold; I loved his work on GrimJack and Dynamo Joe, but his DC work remains very uneven for me. Part of it is that he and Mandrake are good friends and long-time collaborators, and I am just not a fan of Mandrake's artwork. I find it sketchy, loose, and often hard to follow. He could really benefit from a tight inker like Jerry Ordway. So I've skipped stuff like their Spectre series (I tried the first half-dozen issues, and it wasn't for me). We'll see if I like this one any better.
I finally bought a copy of the 5+6 player expansion for Die Siedler von Catan, so now I can look to sell my US editions of the game.
I also stumbled across the page of a fellow on-line diarist, Andrew Hicks, who, according to Diane Patterson's list of journals at least a year old has the longest-standing active journal out there. However, what really makes his page worthwhile are his extremely witty movie reviews. The Godzilla review, in particular, is not to be missed.
Oh, and the other cool link-du-week: An interesting piece on the Foucault Pendulum, with a brief note on the Umberto Eco book of the same name. Illuminating.
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