Stuff We Like This Week: July 10 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: July 10 Edition

Jul 10

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

(image kindly borrowed from Matthew Brady)

Matt: I’ve never really gotten into manga, for no particular reason — I’ve tried once or twice, and it didn’t really grab me, but I knew in the back of my head it was probably just a matter of finding the RIGHT manga to hook me, and then taking tentative steps into this giant world of new stories.

When Jeff Lester and David Brothers met me for dinner in San Francisco last week, Jeff surprised me on our way out of Comix Experience (truly, the greatest comic book store on the planet, no joke) with a gift — a copy of Drifting Classroom, Volume 2. I was a little skeptical, since I usually hate jumping into a series mid-story, but hey, it was a gift, and I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. Or Jeff, for that matter. Though he seems to have lovely teeth.

Drifting Classroom is…well, it’s kinda awesome, I think. I say that realizing just how late I am to that particular party, or the whole manga party in general, but it’s new to me, and it’s pretty freaky shit. It’s about this grammar school that somehow disappears, although it’s not totally clear in volume 2 exactly where or when it’s gone; at this point, it’s just a school with a bunch of kids and teachers in it disconnected from the rest of the world.

Everyone goes batshit crazy. There’s a cafeteria worker who starts slashing throats and beating kids to get their food; he starts in the freaking FIRST GRADE CLASSES. He eventually gets shot in the head by a fifth grader. The principal goes psycho and starts garroting his fellow teachers. Kids have to rely on the old dramatic trope of slapping each other when they get hysterical — it may be overdone for adults, but seeing kids do it to each other is pretty intense.

It’s weird, slightly manic, pretty bloody, and damned fun. More, please.

Jeff: My favorite things this week are probably the new Stellastarr* album, Civilized (which has a different sound from their earlier work, with the vocals being a bit less David Byrne-inspired, but is on par with Harmonies For The Haunted in terms of quality), and Wednesday Comics#1.

Yes, Wednesday Comics is somewhat uneven in terms of content, but that’s got to take a back seat to the awe/joy you feel when you interact with the physical artifact, and that’s a very important part of the comics-reading hobby. Even seeing the thing as Bob Wayne unfolded it and showed it off a few weeks ago in Philly got me going a little bit. I got two copies — one for me to keep, and one to pass around or leave at the office, where I know a few coworkers who are passively into comics and who love when I bring books in for them to read.

Sarah: I own all of Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise in a haphazard mish-mash of trades and single issues and the occasional puzzling duplicate of a single issue. When Moore launched his new series, Echo, I made a pact with myself to pick a format and stick to it. And because I tend to enjoy reading stuff in trade anyway these days, collected editions it was.

And then, well, you know. Echo is so damn good, you guys. And its sheer goodness is making me have a little problem with sticking to this pact.

The story is sort of tough to boil down into a pithy little sentence, but basically: photographer Julie Martin gets caught in the midst of a mysterious explosion, and, as a result, finds herself with a weird silver metal breast plate coating, er, thing that she can’t seem to remove. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are interested in this thing. I don’t want to give away any more than that.

The storytelling here is gripping and tightly-controlled, but allows plenty of room for Moore’s trademark exploration of messy human emotions. And his beautiful black and white pencils continue to be some of the most simply breathtaking in the biz — no one maps precise facial expressions the way this man does.

I just purchased and devoured the second trade. And GODDAMMIT, it ends on this note that is making me want to run out immediately and buy the next single issue. I’m sitting on my hands to keep myself from doing it. Seriously. That’s what I’m doing right now. I mean, when I’m finished typing this.

Chris: While there’s a lot that’s come to light this week – like the trailer for the Evangelion re-tooling or District 9, two thing caught my eye and made me thankful for the good things to come.

The first is the video for Daybreakers – I was kind of hoping Ethan Hawke would wander back into Gattaca territory and now he has, with a movie about a world that traded their humanity for vampiric immortaility. And then the blood starts to run out. The concept alone was enough for me, but the future-vampire society style was a bonus, and the use of Placebo’s cover of Kate Bush sealed the deal.

The second thing that caught my eye was this trailer for a new Mechwarrior game. The last mechwarrior game was a bit too shot-at-dot-in-distance, and this one might suffer the same fate, but certainly the console horsepower has doubled, and this trailer gives me hope.