Stuff We Like This Week: July 10 Edition
Jul 10In 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)
Stuff We Like This Week?
Jul 02In an effort to combat our occasional positivity, this week, we’re giving you a break from our regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday (but this one), SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the previous seven days.
I’ve gotta level with you, it’s tough coming up with something to not hate every week. Especially this week, with Matt gallivanting around the country like Gruenwald’s Captain America (without the bitchin’ color-changing Chevy van), Sarah and I swamped with work, and Chris perfecting his Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man cosplay outfit. So, give us a week to recharge our love batteries, and we’ll be back with glowing praise in 8 days’ time. Til then, enjoy the fireworks, watch a movie, play some video games and read some comics.
And if you still need something to get you in a good mood, I offer this:
Under The Radar: Sentinels
Jun 30Sentinels is better than it has any right to be.
The indie superhero book got a good deal of buzz from Newsarama, CBR and Ain’t It Cool around the time its second volume – “Masks” – was released, but I never got around to tracking the book down, and then it vanished under the radar again by the time I remembered. I found the entire series of OGNs at Wizard World Philly and have spent the past two weeks digging into it. I finished it up last night.
If you like the Chris Claremont run on Uncanny X-Men, you’re probably going to dig Sentinels. It delivers a page-turning combination of angst, romance, aliens, demons, government conspiracy, daddy issues, Bronze Age-style ass-kicking, frequent costume changes and a long form plot that spans three generations of heroes and manages to pay off satisfyingly, something that few Big Two titles can accomplish these days. Things happen in Sentinels – death, resurrection, betrayal, sex, sacrifice, et cetera.
The most entertaining part of Bernatovich’s magnum opus, though, was watching the evolution of the creators in elapsed time. Much like J.K. Rowling, Bernatovich and Vecchio’s early work is still entertaining and engaging, but becomes much more polished and craft-aware from volume to volume, especially Vecchio’s pencils, which gain added depth over time without sacrificing his Marvel-meets-manga style.
Like I intimated above, Sentinels is very easy to recommend to 80s X-fans, and to superhero fans in general.  The book may be a harder sell for Golden Age/DC die-hards, however. It’s the most competent and interesting superhero project I’ve read from a nonmajor publisher since Rising Stars.
Under The Radar: The Mighty
Jun 29Ever since the Buggles first performed “Video Killed the Radio Star” on a fledgling MTV, we’ve been hearing about the short attention spans of the “MTV Generation” and all those who’ve come after. You see it in movies, TV shows, news outlets, probably even in some churches; it’s the constant drive to compress everything, to shorten stories and ideas and information into the tiniest consumable bits imaginable. Because we who grew up with Music Television cannot possibly hold still long enough for anything to develop, to expand, to simmer.
The Mighty is a recently-launched ongoing series from DC Comics. It’s up to issue 5 now, and every month when the solicits come out, I hold my breath because I keep waiting for it to be canceled. It doesn’t have a great shot in this marketplace, mostly because it doesn’t feature stories that are unavoidably woven into the gigantic beautiful mess that is mainstream superhero universe continuity.
What also makes me nervous, and what makes The Mighty a great superhero comic, is that this isn’t a story being jammed into easily consumable bits for us vidiots raised by the television. It’s a story being told well, and being told slowly and carefully. It develops, it expands, it simmers.
Stuff We Like This Week: June 26 Edition
Jun 26In 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.
