My Favorite Things

Skip-Beat! v1-6

Story and art by Yoshiki Nakamura
Translated by Tomo Kimura
Lettering and retouch by Sabrina Heep

On the first Tuesday of the month, I dutifully make the journey to my local Borders to pick up the new manga volumes. But the title I always look forward to isn't some obscure release from Fanfare or Vertical. It isn't the latest volume of Naruto or Bleach, or even Nana or Yotsuba&! No, the comic I'm always looking forward to is Yoshiki Nakamura's Skip-Beat!.

Skip-Beat! is the story of Kyoko Mogami, who's a decidedly strange firl. She's dropped out of senior high school, doesn't have any friends or family, and is holding down two full-time menial jobs just to make ends meet. But Kyoko's living a dream - she's sharing an apartment with her childhood crush Sho Fuwa, who also happens to be a famous rock star. She's perfectly happy to sacrifice her own dreams for Sho, because she knows that in the long run her love will be repaid a thousandfold.

Except, as far as Sho's concerned, she's just his housekeeper. And Kyoko happens to overhear him telling this to his real girlfriend. Needless to say, she doesn't take it well.

Actually, that would be a serious understatement.

Skip-Beat! v 1, p. 51-2 (not facing pages in original)

This scene sets the tone for the rest of Skip-Beat! You've got high drama and low comedy, realistic emotional reactions welded on to bizarre hijinx right of Looney Tunes. It's an oddly appealing combination, one that lets Nishimura put her characters through the wringer without letting things get too depressing.

(Also, I love how the panel borders almost - but not quite - line up between pages. That's a great way to help establish continuity across a page flip. I'll have to remember that technique...)

Getting dumped by Sho is a transformative experience for Kyoko. The sweet, innocent girl who first came to Tokyo is transformed into a bitter, vicious schemer with revenge on her mind. Kyoko decides that the best way to have her revenge is to become an even bigger celebrity than Sho. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any special talents other than "gritty determination" and her recent experience has left her missing the one thing a celebrity needs - the ability to love and be loved. But something about her caches the eye of president of the LME talent agency, and she finds herself drafted into the agency's "Love Me" section, where emotional cripples are rehabilitated into successful celebrities.

By doing menial work.

In a hot pink jumpsuit.

Did I mention that Kyoko is the first actual person to join the "Love Me" section, and that everyone else thinks it's a crazy idea? Or is that just understood from the above description?

Skip-Beat! v6, p. 123

One of the things that's appealing about Skip-Beat! is the reversal of cliché Lucky shojo heroines get to dance with the man of their dreams while wearing glamorous haute couture. Kyoko, on the other hand, gets to chisel dirty chewing gum off the floor while wearing a hideous work uniform. Most shojo heroines are two-dimensional nice girls. Kyoko's so bitter that her favorite word is fugutaiten - the feeling of hating someone so much you want them to die.

It's also refreshing to see a character driven by negative emotions as well as positive ones. Her goals are not constructive - she's less focused on improving herself and more on dominate and destroying her enemies (she eventually has more than one). In spite of all her talk about being bitter and cynical, though, Kyoko isn't all that bad. Deep in her heart, she's just a normal girl who longs for simple things that she's been denied for years - friends, family, and love. Maybe life has kicked her around to the point where she no longer remembers how to enjoy these things, but as she works for the Love Me section these feeling start to come back. One of the joys of the series is watching her move past her bitterness and become a better person.

Nakamura's character design for Kyoko manages to encapsulate her dichotomies perfectly - she's cute without being cutesy, tough but vulnerable, wild and unpredictable but very conventional at the same time. The short unkempt haircut, the wide (but not huge) eyes, even her tremulous chin and the upturned collar of her uniform all help create an image of someone trying to project an image that's directly opposite to their being.

Skip-Beat! v3, p. 19

The open-ended nature of the Love Me section's business lets Nakamura thrust Kyoko into any number of strange situations. She gets locked in an "acting battle" with a young starlet with a bad attitude, helps the LME president's granddaughter reconcile with her estranged father, makes a new friend out of an actively hostile enemy, and has to babysit an actor who can't be bothered to take care of himself. She even gets a few breaks in showbiz - appearing as a regular on a variety show (albeit in a chicken suit) and winning a role in a soda commercial via an open audition. And shadowing her through all this is the mysterious Ren Tsuruga, the veteran actor who's been mysteriously cruel to her since the moment they first met...

One of the other appeals of Skip-Beat! is the way it's relentlessly cartoony in an old-school way. For all the serious drama that might be going on, you never know when Kyoko might desire something so much that a "hand came out of her throat"...

Skip-Beat! v1, p. 14

...or find herself plunged into the "depths of despair" (complete with marine life)...

Skip-Beat! v1, p. 14

...or even "spring into action" with gigantic, elastic arms.

Skip-Beat! v4, p. 67

A character who's "surrounded by a dark aura" will be emanating an inky black cloud that's totally visible to other characters. When something "hits someone like a ton of bricks" they'll find themselves driven into the ground by a giant cement block. There's also Kyoko's "grudges" (seen in the first image at the top of this entry), who are always flying around providing her advice. They've also got the abilities sense "evil emanations", to hold people down or assault them from a distance.

They're also a great example of something that comics can do seamlessly. To use a dated reference, they're like Ally McBeal's flights of fancy, except seamlessly integrated into the narrative in a way that only comics can do. And really, that's why I look forward to Skip-Beat! every other month - to see what sort of wacky visual metaphor Nakamura will come up with for the current situation.

Skip-Beat! v1, p. 82

Special thanks to Shaenon Garrity's "Overlooked Manga Festival", which introduced me to Skip-Beat! oh so many months ago.

Tags: manga, my favorite things, Skip-Beat!

Asrial vs. Cheetah #1-2 (1996)

Deep in the Amazon jungle, an ancient hyperspace rescue beacon is activated. Alas, this model of beacon has been discontinued because of its unfortunate tendency to attract monsters from hyperspace, and so the Salusians dispatch Princess Asrial to deactivate it. When Asrial tracks down the beacon, she discovers a centuries-old Salusian named Konam - and Cheetah, who's there looking for the Fountain of Youth. The two of them fight, but it's not long before the true villains arrive on the scene - the Dynasty, a family of alien invaders who plan on using the Fountain to restore their fading powers!

This story is important for three reasons...

1. It introduces the Dynasty, who will be Gold Digger's main villains for the next year or so. At the moment, they're just some generic, millennia-old aliens who think that they're the rightful rulers of the universe. Later... well, later they'll still be pretty much the same but they'll get some characterization.
2. It reinforces that Gold Digger and Ninja High School really do take place in the same universe. Ironically, this would be largely retconned by end of the next crossover....
3. It provides a chance for Fred Perry to draw furries with large bazongas beating the crap out of each other. And also getting groped by a 900-year-old pervert.

Honestly, it's just a big stupid fight scene, an issue of Marvel Team-Up done with Antarctic Press characters. And honestly, it's sort of unsatisfying, because there's no satisfactory resolution to any of the plot threads. There's no significance to the discovery of the Fountain of Youth. Konam is never heard of again. And most tellingly, the Dynasty isn't defeated - they use the Fountain to gas up and then scram, depriving the heroes of a decisive victory.

I don't have anything to say about the art that you haven't heard before, except to note that this issue hails from a period where Brenner Printing seemed unable to print anything properly (there are screening artifacts everywhere, even on the linework). So here's some cheesecake instead.

Asrial vs. Cheetah #2, p. 4

Print Run: 6000

As usual, a bump on the print run, to accommodate both the Gold Digger and NHS fans who will be purchasing the series. Interestingly, it's the same-sized print run they used for the last miniseries, which might suggest that the Gold Digger audience is leveling off at this point, or that the audience for the core books just hasn't been translating into spin-off sales.

Tags: Gold Digger, Ninja High School

Carnegie International 2008-9

Kandors

I finally managed to get down to Oakland to see the Carnegie International today. It's good stuff, I'm still composing my thoughts about it and will probably have more of them later.

Anway, the exhibiton has a pleasant surprise for comic book fans - a room filled with replicas of the bottle city of Kandor by artist Mike Kelley. Here's a video of an earlier installation that features some of the same pieces on display at the Carnegie:

From the catalog:

Kandors (2007) is the artist's most polished and fantastical realization of these ideas. Stemming from Kelley's observation of a persistent lack of continuity in the depiction of Kandor in Superman comics, this installation reenvisions that fictive capital city through miniaturized Atlantis-like cityscapes. Covered by glass domes, these sculptural landscapes are bathed in the glow of luminescent lights and connected to other minimalist-inspired objects and arhitectural elements via respiratory tubing. Each of ten assemblages corresponds to a slightly ominous, tornado-like video projection on the wall. Sound (synthesized ambient and new-age music composed by the artist as well as "emotive" sounds), light, and motion envelop viewers of this spectacle. Here Kelley narrates a surrealistic topography through an all-encompassing sensory experience, suggesting through his numerous imaginative reinterpretations of a single motif the infinite variations of personal history. In this way, he is faithful to both the virtues and the shortcomings of memory.

The Kandors on display have an immediate sensuous and tactile appeal, regardless of their position re: memory, and are among the most memorable works on display.

Also, one of the collage/paintings by artist Mark Bradford seems to feature a few pages from an issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths (or some other comic where you'd find Dr. Light II and Nightwing on the same page - I'm not a DC geek so I couldn't tell you).

Tags: Carnegie International, DC, fine art, Pittsburgh

Blue Beetle #26

Escrito por Jai Nitz
Ilustrado por Mike Norton y Trevor Scott
Rotulo por Rob Leigh
Coloro por Guy Major

One of the benchmarks for good cartooning is that it can tell a story without words. One of the hallmarks of the hallmarks of superhero comics is that they're essentially visual gibberish that can't be understood without words. So I was sort of curious to see how DC would handle Blue Beetle #26, an issue where 85% of the dialogue is in Spanish. Would it be a tour-de-force of cartooning that anyone could follow, or a mess of pin-ups and glamor shots that no one could follow?

Neither, as it turns out.

Now, Blue Beetle #26 has a very simple plot, and one that's pretty clearly communicated by the art. Jamie takes his girlfriend to a family reunion, spends some time talking to his mother and grandmother, flies off to go fight the Parasite, and beats him by hulking out somehow. All very straightforward. But the art is still a failure, unable to communicate overall context and tone to non-Spanish speakers. For discussion purposes, here's an early page where Jaime talks to two of his cousins:

Blue Beetle #26, p. 5

Now ask yourself, what's going on here? Obviously, we've got four people talking to each other, but what are they talking about? More importantly, how are they talking to each other? Is Jamie happy to see them, just being polite, or even condescending to them? Are his cousins angry, sad, jealous? If this were a Mexican film, I'd be able to pick up those emotional undercurrents from body language, line readings, even the mise en scene.

Now, I don't expect to the art to communicate everything - there are some concepts which are just too complex to be expressed exclusively in visual terms. For instance, let's say Jamie was being insulted by his cousins. I might never know whether they insulted his hair or his girlfriend or his political beliefs. But I should at least be able to tell that he was insulted.

In corporate comics, providing these cues is the responsibility of the artist, but it's a responsibility that's been abandoned because corporate comics are being created and developed by people who have little knowledge or respect for the craft of storytelling. Here, the fact that the an unfamiliar language merely exposes these structural weaknesses in the art.

To be fair to Mike Norton, he actually manages to put together a fight scene that has a nice ebb and flow to it. But the real highlight of this issue is Jamie's interaction with his girlfriend and his family, and his inability to inject life into these scenes dooms them from the start.

Tags: DC

Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975

at the National Portrait Gallery through May 26

The Smithsonian American Art Museum at the National Portrait Gallery is currently hosting a major exhibition of color field painting. It's a good exhibition, well worth your time, but I find myself more interested in how it's been presented curatorially.

Most exhibits of this nature tend to lead visitors by the nose via audio tours or extensive on-site documentation. "Color as Field" goes in the opposite direction - the works are presented as-is, with little in the way of contextual information. On one hand, I like this approach - it lets the work speak for itself and allows the viewer to develop his own critical faculties. But it's a strange approach to take for this exhibition. The general public is notoriously ambivalent towards abstraction, and especially this sort of minimalist, post-painterly abstraction. A few gallery cards and a more rigorous timeline might have helped win over some of the patrons I saw listlessly wandering from piece to piece.

Fortunately, there's plenty of sensuous work on hand by Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Gene Davis to win over even the most hardened heart. Hell, the exhibition is worth seeing just for the Morris works alone.

The American Federation of Arts has conducted a series of interviews with Larry Poons to help promote the exhibition. They make for some great viewing.

Photographs after the cut...

Tags: cheap irony, fine art, photography, Washington, DC

Turn Back the Clock

I went down to DC this weekend to visit my brother and to catch a game at shiny new Nationals Park. The theme for the day was a "Salute to the Negro Leagues" and so each time was wearing the colors of its local Negro League franchise instead of its regular uniforms. Pittsburgh was dressed as the Homestead Grays, and Washington was dressed as... the Homestead Grays. (There was a period where the Grays split their home games between Pittsburgh and DC.)

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
HOMESTEAD GRAYS	0	1	0	1	3	0	1	2	0	8	14	2
HOMESTEAD GRAYS	2	3	0	0	0	4	0	0	X	9	14	1

• I really like that the Nationals haven't sold the naming rights to their stadium. Nationals Park isn't the most original name, but it's succinct and rolls off the tongue a lot better than, say, "Citizens Bank Park."
• The stadium itself is lovely. Now if only they could do something about the ticket prices... (Hey, I'm from Pittsburgh, we're spoiled in that regard.)
• I was half-hoping that there'd be a diehard French Canadian fan in the front row bitterly yelling "Allez les Expos!" every time there was a rally. No dice.
• But there was a guy in front of us wearing a Kevin Young shirt, and it looked like it was in great condition, to boot. Wonder what was up with that?
• It was a bit disappointing to see Maholm get rocked so early, especially given his last performance. Then again, at times it looked like he was being backed up by the Keystone Kops on the field so it's not entirely his fault.
• They had some Negro Leaguers signing autographs during the game, including Mamie "Peanut" Johnson - a woman who used to pitch for the Indianapolis Clowns in the waning days of the Negro Leagues. Yay gender equality.
• During the Presidents Race, T.R. stopped at a street vendor's cart and was abnormally late getting on to the field. When he finally did show up, he was chasing the Pittsburgh Pierogis with a spork. Funny.

Photographs after the cut...

Tags: baseball, photography, Washington, DC

Before and After

Hellsing v1 & v8

I was at Borders the other day, and since they didn't have any of the new titles I was looking for, I decided to pick up the first volume of Kohta Hirano's Hellsing instead. Plot-wise, it was more or less what I expected - vampires hunting people, vampires hunting vampires, vampires fighting evil Catholics. But what caught my eye was the art.

Hellsing v1, p. 104-5

If you only had this volume to go on, you'd have to say that Hirano isn't a very good artist. A character's clothing and appearance might change wildly from panel to panel. Proportions are wrong - characters will have impossibly long arms, Modiglianiesqe necks, 48 teeth. Poses are tortured, with hands and fingers bending at unnatural angles. There's a tendency to use lots of fiddly non-descriptive details in place of clear drawing. The composition and storytelling are mediocre at best.

And yet, there's still something strangely compelling about it. A misproportioned, misplaced eye leaps out at you - but it can also make a picture creepy and chilling. The tortured poses may be overdone, but they're also extremely dynamic and energetic. The fiddly details may be unnecessary, but they also create an uneasy energy that permeates each page.

Truth be told, it reminded me of early Rob Liefeld, and I mean that as a compliment. He's quite clearly on to something that captivates your imagination, but he hasn't got all the pieces in place yet. At this point in his career, Hirano has an equal chance of developing into a compelling artist or degenerating into a fannish pile of bad habits.

So I went back to the bookstore to pick up a copy of the latest volume, just to see how his style had changed in the intervening years. As volume 8 starts, London has apparently be turned into a battleground between Protestant vampires, Catholic crusaders, and Nazi werewolves. It's mostly gibberish, and almost impossible to follow. But how about the art?

Hellsing v8, p. 162-3

Well, after seven years, Hirano hasn't developed into a "compelling artist" - but neither has he degenerated into a "fannish pile of bad habits." If anything, he's moved sideways.

In some ways, he's improved. His character designs are largely consistent. His characters actually seem to exist in three-dimensional environments. The tortured poses have been replaced with more realistic foreshortening. The random line weights of the earlier volumes have been replaced with a more expressionistic inking style that helps lend the drawings weight and solidity.

In other ways, though, he's degenerated. The storytelling is still impossible to follow. Characters may be solid, but they also seem stiff and less dynamic. Proportions are still off in noticeable ways. Fiddly litle details abound, and they still don't add anything to the overall drawings.

More than anything else, volume 8 of Hellsing reminds me of medieval German woodcuts - obviously done with great technical skill and lavished with great detail, but stiff and unconvincing nonetheless.

Sadly, the way Hirano develops between these volumes doesn't interest me as a fellow artist. I'd much rather deal with the loose, haphazard potentialities of the first volume than the stiff realities of the final volume.

On the subject of translation...

The translated Hellsing has some of the most obvious cultural mistakes I've ever seen in a manga, including...

"The Protestant Church." You will encounter this phrase over and over and over again through Hellsing. And yet, no one ever refers to themselves in real life as a Protestant - they're Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and so on. Clearly, Hirano has done enough homework to know that England is not a Catholic country - but not enough to know that "Protestant" is a category and not an actual religion.

"Sir" Integra Hellsing. Of course, a female peer would be "Dame" Integra Hellsing.

The most awful Scottish accent you'll ever see. Seriously, it makes Chris Claremont's worst attempts at dialect read like the Queen's English. Half the time I just try to guess what Father Anderson's said from the way the other characters respond to it.

Now, it wouldn't be too difficult to go through the script and replace "Protestant" with "Anglican", replace "Sir" with "Dame", and tone down the accent, but this raises the question - is it more important to be a literal translation of the original work, or to capture its spirit? Personally, I'm a big fan of cleaning up the rough edges, especially when they don't affect the plot all that much. But a case could be made for both, and I'm kind of curious as to where you would draw the line.

Tags: manga

If they don't win, it's the same...

I'll be backfilling my Annihilation entries over the next day or two, but until then...

Friday, April 25th

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES	2	0	2	2	0	0	0	0	0	6	10	0
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	0	0	0	3	2	0	0	0	0	5	8	0

Saturday, April 26th

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES	5	1	0	0	0	2	0	0	0	8	9	1
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	0	0	2	0	0	0	1	1	0	4	8	3

Sunday, April 27th

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	2	0
PITTSBURGH PIRATES	1	0	0	1	2	1	0	0	X	5	12	0

Man, let me tell you, Paul Maholm throwing a two-hit complete game really helped take the sting out of seeing Matt Morris put on one of the worst pitching performances I've ever seen in the majors. Having Nate McClouth bang two homers right over my head helped too.

• When announcing the Phillies' line-up they used the theme music from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (They usually use the "Imperial March" from Star Wars).
• There were an awful lot of Philadelphia fans at the stadium all weekend - maybe a quarter to a third of the fans in the stands were cheering for the Phillies. Strangely, they were all well-behaved, which seems odd for Phillies fans.
• I hate to say it, but every now and then it really looks like Jason Bay is dogging it in left field. I don't necessarily think he needs to be sliding and diving at every ball but it wouldn't hurt for him to show a little more hustle than he usually does.
• Riding the T after the Friday game was nuts. The Pirates and Pens game let out not too long after each other, and then you had additional traffic from people who'd been hanging around after the Gallery Crawl and the other performances going on in the Cultural District. Game was over at 10:00, and I didn't get home until almost midnight.
• The Pirates have great video packages and scoreboard entertainment. And yet, sometimes I find myself wondering how many minor league scouts they could hire if they cut out all that crap.
• So Taguchi has an enormous face. Really. It takes up way too much of his head.
• Got my first sunburn of the year on Sunday. Usually I get that during the home opener but it just hasn't been bright enough until today.

Photographs after the cut...

Tags: baseball, photography, Pittsburgh

Annihilation: Conquest

Wraith #1-4

Written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach
Illustrated by Kyle Hotz
Colored by Gina Going
Lettered by Cory Petit
Cover art by Clint Langley

On the edge of Kree space an entire Phalanx armada is defeated by a single man with no name. This mysterious stranger is possessed by the Exolon, alien parasites that feed on his soul and grant him strange powers that the techno-organic alients just can't cope with. Will the Phalanx be destroyed by this unholy wraith, or will his secrets be discovered their newest servant - Ronan the Accuser?

Wraith is a bit of a mixed bag. I like the character - essentially a sci-fi version of "The Man With No Name" with some neat slithery visuals - but revealing most of his origins and resolving all of his long-term goals in his first appearance sort of ruins his uniqueness and long-term viability. The story is also a bit rushed, with plot points rushed out, characters not given sufficient space to develop, and expository speeches taking the place of well-timed reveals.

It's not a good sign that major continuity problems start to pop up in the first miniseries. Assimilation by the Phalanx is presented as a process that takes days, if not weeks or months and can be shut off by the destruction of an outside entity, when in the prologue (and previous Technarchy appearances) it's a near-instantaneous infection that can be transmitted by touch and can only be thrown off from within. Hala appears to be the only world that's been direclty conquered by the Phalanx, when the prologue makes their influence clearly felt across the entire Kree galaxy. Large swaths of the population appear to be uninfected, though the prologue also clearly showed huge masses of infected Kree. The Supreme Intelligence, killed off at the end of Annihilation, is brought back to life just so he could be killed again.

Plus, there are some weird mystic things going on here that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Sure, Marvel's cosmic characters have always had a bit of a mystic side to them, but Wraith features creatures that feast on souls, vllains who try to conquer the universe from the "psychic plane" and a hero who absorbs the "Kree godhead" into himself. It feels less like science fiction and more like Warhammer 40K.

On the plus side, I like the concept of "selection," where the Phalanx allow assimilated creatures a degree of autonomy that increases their effectiveness as tools. It allows the villains to have a degree of individuality that the Technarchy really haven't had in previous appearances. It's half collaboration and half enslavement, which raises the question of where the Select's true loyalties lie. It also raises some additional questions about why the Phalanx are acting differently than usual...

And I really like the work Kyle Hotz is doing here. He's able to make Exolon and the Phalanx seem genuinely alien and unsettling. Plus, he's got a weird sort of Jack Davis thing going on which I enjoy. Plus, he's an effective storyteller.

Annihilation: Conquest - Wraith #1, p. 19

This is a simple but effective way to make a talking heads sequence more interesting. Typically, when drawing a face, it's best to leave more space in front of the eyes than behind them. It prevents things from feeling claustrophobic or alienating. Hotz does the opposite here, to good effect as the odd compositions help drive home the mutual suspicion between Wraith and Ra-Venn.

While I'm at it, here's an annoying technique I've seen in a lot of Marvel comics lately...

Annihilation: Conquest - Wraith #3, p. 8

A scene like this cries out for a sound effect, but there isn't really any way to slap a normal sound effect over top of the picture witout obliterating the original art, so they use the outline sound effect. You get your sound effect, and you can still see the art through it. Problem solved, right? Except the sound effect is barely readable. And those extra lines run counter to the shapes and thrust of the original image, which totally torpedoes the image comprhenension.

Now, this isn't a terrible technique - it actually works for simpler panels where a solid sound effect would still obscure important parts of the image. But the letterers have a bad habit of slapping it on top of complicated images like this one. Of course, if the original art left room for sound effects, the letters wouldn't have to resort to tricks like this...

Tags: Annihilation: Conquest, Marvel

Annihilation: Conquest

Prologue

Written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Illustrated by Mike Perkins
Colored by Guru EFX
Lettered by Cory Petit
Cover art by Aleksi Briclot

The original Annihilation was one of the few enjoyable comics that Marvel has released in the last few years. It was off the editorial radar and featured characters the licensing department honestly didn't care about - which gave the creators free reign to screw around with the status quo in a way that even Marvel's golden boys can't. The results were genuinely interesting, a little bit exhilarating, and blissfully liberated from the continuity quagmire of Marvel's Earth-bound heroes. And it sold pretty well, too, so now we have a sequel. Of course this time, editorial and licensing are paying attention, so the creators weren't going to have the same sort of free reign they had before, but if the new series is half as good as the original it'd still be worth checking out.

So is Annihilation: Conquest any good? Let's find out.

This prologue starts off by showing us the post-Annihilation state of the galaxy by through the eyes of two protagonists. On one side we have Phyla-Vell, who's helping the Priests of Pama distribute aid to to the downtrodden and needy. Thing is, she's on a backwater world that's not representative of the galaxy at large (and for that matter the temple she's supposed to be rebuilding doesn't seem to be damaged at all). On the other side we've got Star-Lord, who's helping the Kree upgrade their ruined defensive grid. Thing is, he's on Hala, which seems to have been completely untouched by the Annihilation Wave. Effectively, Abnett and Lanning are telling us the galaxy is in ruins rather than showing us. Strangely, their first issue of Nova did a much better job of setting the stage by showing us a harried Nova, hopping from one bombed-out planet to the next, putting out fires as fast as he could in the hopes that they wouldn't spread.

Anyway, back on Hala, Star-Lord has made a deal to update the Kree War-Net with Space Knight technology. Unfortunately, the Galadorians prove to be less than trustworthy, and Sentries start to run amok, destroying ships in orbit and bulding a big tower that somehow manages to seal off all of Kree space from the rest of the universe. One Sentry even makes it to the backwater planet that Phyla is living on and attacks her.¹ As Phyla defeats the Sentry and gets a mystic vision commanding her to seek out "Kree savior," Star-Lord gets pushed off a skyscraper and the true villain stands revealed as the techno-organic Phalanx. Who look a lot different, and yet somehow familiar.

This part of Conquest actually works pretty well. There's some effective confusion as the main characters try to figure out just what's going on. There's a nice bit of misdirection with the Galadorians, and the closing sequence will be genuinely shocking to new readers but containis enough clues to tip off long-time readers. There's a definite direction - Phyla needs to go find the "savior" before the rest of the empire is assimilated. There are even a few mysteries - who's sending these visions to Phyla? Why are the Phalanx deviating from their usual M.O.?³

No, it's not Shakespeare, or even Lost. But it's enjoyable enough for disposable entertainment and intriguing enough to bring you back for more.

As for the art... well, you're going to notice a common thread over the next couple of days, which is that I think the artists are tremendous draftsmen and terrible storytellers.⁴ Here's a good example from the beginning of Prologue.

Annihilation: Conquest - Prologue p. 2

Now, the art team has rendered the holy living heck out of that temple. The perspective is spot on, and the inking and coloring help give the building substantial weight and volume. The coloring is suitably out-of-this world, soft and familiar yet alien, and the added detail doesn't overwhelm the pencils. There are lots of little details and imperfections that help particularize the structure - heck, there are even little snow shovels crammed off into one corner, though you can't see them at this size - and yet there's not so much detail that you're overwhelmed by it. The figures actually feel like they're standing in the space instead of just floating over top of it.

And yet this spectacular drawing is situated in the lower left-hand corner of an awkward two-page spread with no clear focal point. And that's the pattern the book follows - every time Perkins wows me with his drafstmanship he makes some awful storytelling decisions that confuse me. Here's another example from near the end of the book.

Annihilation: Conquest - Prologue p. 39

I get what that bottom tier is trying to do - our camera view remains unchanged as Star Lord plummets out of a window to his doom. But it doesn't read well, for a few reasons. First, The diagonal panels are cut at weird angles that make them seem strange rather than dynamic. The brown gutters don't sufficiently separate the individual panels. The shattered struts complicate things, because they're almost the same color as the gutters and run counter to the diagonal of the panel, which further confuses things. And there are just too many panels - you could probably get the same effect with three panels instead of five.

(Interestingly, that bottom tier works at better at screen resolution than it does at actual size, because there's less room to get lost in the details.)

1. I understand that space opera often depends on unrealistic superluminal communication, but having a Sentry a) instantly show up on a planet that the Kree empire has supposedly abandoned and b) immediately attack the only two named characters on said planet is just lazy writing.²
2. Strangely, though, I don't have a problem with the equally-unrealistic concept of a single spire instantly generating a completely impenetrable force field capable of sealing off a galaxy light-years across, which would require not only superluminal communications but also more power than a single star could possibly generate.
3. The Phalanx's usual M.O.: a) Assimilate everything in sight. b) Build Babel Spire. c) Get eaten.
4. Which is actually pretty close to the Marvel house style these days - beautifully drawn, totally unreadable.

Tags: Annihilation: Conquest, Marvel