Stuff We Like This Week: September 18 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: September 18 Edition

Sep 18

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.

Matt: To get in the mood for my Big Upcoming Shockingly Surprising Engagement at the brand-spankin’-new Trouble With Comics, I’ve been reading some Batman comics. I think my favorite of the batch is probably “Close Before Striking,” a three-parter from Batman 588-590, featuring a typically jagged and thrilling art job from Scott McDaniel. It’s about Batman’s crook alter ego, Matches Malone, and it’s a tight little mystery; even if I didn’t buy into the psychological twists and turns in Batman’s brain, it was easy enough to go with the flow and follow the story happily to its conclusion. There are vast pleasures to be found in a simple Batman story, well told.

Jeff: I love “Our Worlds At War.”  It is basically everything I could want out of a line-wide DC crossover.  High stakes, sweeping melodrama, big action.  My favorite parts have to be the Young Justice issues and the JSA special (which is one of my favorite single issue comics ever and is basically an All-Star Squadron comic ), but I found the entire thing very entertaining when I was 21, and I think it still holds up.  I mean, you’ve got Lex Luthor stepping up as the president and playing a big role in the hero community’s response to Imperiex.  I liked President Lex.  He was a megalomaniacal douchebag, yeah, but he was the President of the United States — you’re supposed to be a megalomaniacal douchebag.  Especially early on, he was written as a decent President, which was a great source of dramatic tension.  Of course, Jeph Loeb undid all of that.

Chris: A few years back, Dark Horse released a selection of small hardcovers that contained a half dozen or so short stories – illustrated mostly – on a single theme; witches, the undead, ghosts, etc. I bought them all and they were all great, but for me, the highlight, were the Beasts of Burden stories, written by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson. I didn’t know of Jill before hand, but being a longtime Dorkin fan, I was already sold, but Thompson’s art is just fantastic. The story ideas were pretty simple – a group of neighbourhood dogs encounter something supernatural, the first being a spirit dog that needed their help to pass over. How fantastic is that for kicking off a series? And it only got better – witches familiars (a cat, of course) and one of the dogs has apparently been infected by a werewolf! All of this sets the stage for Beasts of Burden #1 – yes, the serials got themselves a series. Nothing has changed – Dorkin is still writing, Thompson is still doing the art, and the first issue picks up where the last installment in the Dark Book series left off. It’s everything for everyone – it’s a creepy tale, it’s funny pets, it’s dramatic, it’s funny, and it’s no-holds-barred. The animals are not immune to harm – these encounters with the doggie and kitteh unknown are serious.

I’m so looking forward to this series I can’t even tell you – in fact, I think it needs more than the series. I think it needs an RPG. I want to play as a dog shaman! NOW!