Catching Up on my Reading

I pretty much stayed home today, doing laundry and house chores. I did a bunch of cleaning, although I have a bunch more to do. Paid some bills, caught up on my taped television, and petted the cats.

I also continued working through the Starcraft scenarios, which are moderately challenging. I've been learning how to mix the Siege Tank advance with managing cloaked Wraiths, Battleships, and the Science Vessel. I could use the last to much fuller advantage, but I'm still working on that. One of the last Terran scenarios defeated me this evening, so I will try again sometime later.

Catching up on my reading tonight mainly entailed getting through a chunk of the comic books I've had lying around, so I'll do my comics roundup here:

• The Authority #4, by Warren Ellis, Brian Hitch, and Paul Neary, Wildstorm, $2.50: The fourth part of this series' first story involving protecting various cities around the world from an organization that sends hundreds of Superman-like beings to destroy them. Strangely, this story is actually the middle of the overall series, not the beginning. Ellis started writing about these characters a few years ago in Stormwatch vol 1, #37, and I guess there were 25 or so issues (vol 1 #37-50, vol 2 #1-11) which led up to the formation of The Authority, an autonomous superhuman police team. So I'm not quite sure where things came from, or where they're going. But these four issues were pretty good, so I'm searching out the earlier ones.

  Ellis also writes Planetary, which as you may know I like a lot.

• Earth X #5, by Jim Krueger, John Paul Leon, Bill Reinhold, and Alex Ross, Marvel, $2.99: This is a grim and ultimately gratuitous series which features the future of the Marvel universe to little good effect. Many things have changed in questionable ways (such as Thor becoming a woman), and, after six issues (including #0), nothing much has happened, and virtually nothing has been explained. It's really kind of pointless.
• Grendel: Black, White and Red, by Matt Wagner and others, 4 issues, Dark Horse: 160 pages of short stories about Wagner's demonic character, this case in its Hunter Rose incarnation. Rose is a 20th century crime lord, a man who wishes to excel at the highest level, and chooses a demonic rather than an angelic route to do so. The art is varied: Sometimes nearly unreadable, other times stunning. It's all in black and white, with grays and reds thrown in, which makes it an interesting curiosity. (Frank Miller has been trying similar tactics - I think to better effect - in his recent Sin City stories.)

  The basic problem with this collection is that the Hunter Rose milieu is just not that interesting, to me anyway. Rose is very much a one-note character, and what depth he and his supporting cast have - mainly involving his adopted daughter Stacy - is more implied than it is shown, so it feels rather ephemeral. The Rose stories usually devolve into Grendel instilling fear in everyone around them and manipulating them through clever but ultimately repetitive means. The Grendel stories from a decade ago, most of which took place in the future, are far more rewarding.

• JSA #1, by James Robinson, David Goyer, Stephen Sadowski and Michael Bair, DC, $2.50: Picking up from the Secret Files and Origins book published last week, this story introduces the characters in the new Justice Society at the funeral of the Sandman. It's a nice-looking book, though Sadowski's renderings are better than his layouts. The story doesn't advance much more than it did in SF+O, though it seems clear that the first story arc will revolve around the next Doctor Fate somehow. The final page features the return of a minor DC character who was himself based on Doctor Fate. Good enough to keep following.

• Prince Valiant vol 36: "The Dead Warrior's Sword", by Hal Foster, Fantagraphics, oversize, $16.95: The latest collection of this comic strip includes 8 months of stories from the late 60s, when Foster's art skills were at their peak. This book also has two very good stories: One story where Val leads a slave revolt in a desert city, and another where his wife, Aleta, must deal with the problems which too much prosperity have delivered on her kingdom. The book ends with the first half of a story involving their son, Arn.

  I love this stuff.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)