Free Comic Book Day – Not My Finest Moment.

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Wolverina

Once again, I found myself venturing out of my comfortable suburb (living a 15-minute walk to your work is amazing) into the crowded urban wilderness also known as the CBD of my actually quite low-density city. This was for the sake of both Free Comic Book Day, and WASO doing a Star Wars & Beyond concert to celebrate John Williams’ birthday. I didn’t post earlier because I had such a sucky day. In fact, I am still incredibly cranky about the time I had nearly two weeks later.

Unlike last year (when I could have sworn FCBD in Australia was on a Sunday) the weather was fucking awful – rainy and incredibly humid in the way that clogs up air conditioners. So the first comic store we went into, we had to walk out again after two minutes. I couldn’t handle the heat and stuffiness from the place being so packed. It seemed like a fun atmosphere however, lots of people were dressed up and I’m told I had many ladies admiring my Nightwing shirt (though my friends may have just been winding me up).

The next store was a more general geek store, with a huge trade selection. It was a lot less crowded and stuffy (but still the busiest I have ever seen it) so we browsed. I convinced my friend to buy Gates of Gotham because it is fucking fantastic, but also because she is from France and it has the Nightrunner mini in the back. Yes, this is me being an excellent and considerate friend. I picked up for myself the last two volumes of the Red Robin trades.

I am going to pause for a minute and rant about the other thing that made me cranky about FCBD. Namely the Red Robin trades I bought, The Hit List and Seven Days of Death. Now, I know this is old news. I don’t care, I only just got around to finding this out for myself.

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Rating the DCnU

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Wolverina

I’ve finally finished reading most of the new DC titles that I was interested in. I could wank on and on about my opinions, but honestly, you’ll hear most of it anyway if you listen to the podcast, and the internet is already full of opinions. Instead, I’m just going to rate them in order from most enjoyable to least. I’ve added some detail with the following key:

* – I’ll keep reading or buy the GN when it comes out (as I remain annoyed by buying singles).
B – Boring and pointless
S – Slow start but has potential
C – Confusing
GA – Great art
WTFFUCKEDUPSHIT – Insanely terrible content that editorial people should be shot over allowing into such a high profile event without realising how bad it makes comics look as a medium and genre

Most at the top:

Diana managing to land herself on top of the shitheap otherwise known as DCnU

*Wonder Woman – GA
*Batman
Justice League Dark
*Batgirl
Demon Knights
*Nightwing – S, GA
Fury of Firestorm – C, S
Batwoman – C, GA
Birds of Prey – C, S
Superboy – S
Supergirl – S
*Teen Titans – C
Static Shock – S
Stormwatch – C
Deathstroke – S
Green Lantern New Guardians – B, C
Mr Terrific – C, B
Swamp Thing – C, B
Superman – B
Justice League – B
Suicide Squad – B, WTFFUCKEDUPSHIT
Catwoman – WTFFUCKEDUPSHIT
Voodoo – WTFFUCKEDUPSHIT
Red Hood and The Outlaws – WTFFUCKEDUPSHIT

It’s funny, titles mostly wound up at the bottom of this list for being either horribly offensive or just really boring. It’s also quite difficult to rate these things. I mean, there’s plenty of average but decent-enough books that are pretty meh, but how do you rate that against a book that seems incredibly uneven, with terrible plots next to some cute lines or character interactions? Also, introductions that are also entertaining stories on their own are hard to do well when you basically already know everything about the character. Most of the characters haven’t really changed that much outside of the WTF group.

I’ll probably keep reading Teen Titans, less because it seemed that good: Kid Flash looks awful, though Cassie is at least being given more personality than the girl who crushes on Superboy. I can’t stop laughing at Tim’s swan wings. Seriously? Aside from that, while I can appreciate great artwork on a book, I’m a character-and-plot kind of person, so while terrible art might put me off a book, great art won’t necessarily sell it to me, unless it’s doing something unusual in the comics medium.

It’s pretty awesome seeing Wonder Woman at the top of this list. It’s amazing to see that DC has got at least one thing right, and put her where she belongs. Shame she doesn’t have a lot to compete with.

First Podcast: With Red Robin and Secret Six

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Wolverina

My partner and I have created a podcast.

We’re still waiting on iTunes moderator approval before it’ll appear in iTunes, but as you all can’t wait, the mp3 file is here. We’re aiming to get these out about once a fortnight, depending on my partner’s university schedule (be warned, we’re both English majors).

It is the first attempt at podcasting by both myself and my partner, so be warned there are a couple of errors* and we’re both still getting into the habit of how to talk about comics with a microphone in front of us.

Aside from discussing recent geek news and what we’ve been reading in our spare time, we reviewed two graphic novels, Christopher Yost’s Red Robin – The Grail and Gail Simone’s Secret Six – Unhinged.

In any case, let us know what you think! We’d love some feedback to know how to improve this.

*The most obvious of these is that we only got the podcast online after PSN has come back up, and in the podcast we spend a good few moments on the podcast bitching about how it is still down. 😛