A lot of stuff to catch up on. So just the quick hits:
§ John Jakala looks at manga that don’t hold up over multiple volumes:
Death Note – Man, I loved the early volumes of this series, with the mental mind games between the main characters. They were pure crack in comic book form. And unlike many others, I didn’t mind it when certain changes happened about midway through. But even I grew weary of the Endless! Exposition! in the last few books. It’s like they decided just to cut and paste writer Tsugumi Ohba’s overly wordy script directly atop Takeshi Obata’s artwork. (To his credit, Obata did manage to make the talky scenes as dynamic as humanly possible, with lots of dramatic angles and lighting.)
Made it to: All the way to the bitter end, volume 12.
§ Marc-Oliver Frisch has a new blog
§ Whitney Reynolds makes many friends with a list of overrated webcomics.
While I’m making people mad, I’ll just go ahead and get it over with. Ahem. User Friendly has, despite publishing for over ten years, failed to ever improve its art or create a joke that might be funny to someone who doesn’t know intimate details about Linus Torvalds. MegaTokyo is what happens when a pathetic American anime fanboy wants to live out his fantasies of having a bunch of identically-drawn manga females fawn over him, and without even managing to stick to a regular update schedule. And Sluggy Freelance was better in the 90’s, when you didn’t have to slog through ten years of continuity and alternate universe and rabbits to figure out what the heck is going on.
§ Jim Hill looks at what he perceives as pre-spin for lowered box office returns for RATATOUILLE. Frankly we wouldn’t be surprised.
§ San Diego has put up its Independent film festival schedule.
Eh, every year we get the “This is the Pixar movie that will crash and burn!” predictions and they’ve always been wrong.
Funny thing regarding MegaTokyo. I was just writing about how I wasn’t overly impressed with it’s first few volumes but that Fred Gallagher’s rate of improvement is both visible and laudable and that I found Volume 5 to be pretty darned awesome. I love what he’s done with the place! And really, the complaint that all the female characters look alike is pretty unfounded – at least so far as the six or seven primaries go.
Wow. Jump to the John Solomon criticism. Even with his warnings, I am tempted to look at some of those sites.
I guess i’m a Kritikfreude junkie. Give me a good, almost joyful, criticism of something so bad, it should be preserved in a jar of formaldehyde so thatit can be studied, and I’m happy.
which reminds me, I gotta find a copy of Vampirella/Witchblade…
Thanks for the plug!
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