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Post by wickedmountain on Dec 15, 2021 0:38:23 GMT -5
Titans United #4 ( 2021 )
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Post by commond on Dec 16, 2021 9:23:17 GMT -5
I finished the 40th volume of Yasuhisa Hara's Kingdom, which marks the halfway point in the series. It was easily the most impressive volume of the manga for me personally. I ran through a gamut of emotions, almost cried, gave the book a clap of applause, was taken aback by the depth of the storytelling, and was overwhelmed that Hara had stayed so committed to the manga for ten years. What I thought was a good manga has now been elevated to the next level.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Dec 18, 2021 6:19:42 GMT -5
Casual Fling (AWA, 2021)  Jennifer Ryan has an apparently perfect life: she's a promising young attorney working for a high-power NY corporate law firm, and also married with a handsome husband, an IT specialist and consultant, and two beautiful children (who are mainly cared for by her husband, who's more or less a stay-at-home dad). But then things go upside-down when she makes a poor choice and has a steamy one-night stand in a hotel room with a potential client (who's kind of kinky - he likes to wear a mask during sex). Not long afterward, she starts getting messages from a blocked number, telling her to pay enormous sums in Bitcoin or video evidence of her little fling will be sent to the senior partners in her firm and to her husband. This is a pretty solid noirish tale, although it starts off a lot better than it ends - basically the conclusion seems a bit hastily put together, and it's all a little too pat. Personally, I think this should have had at least one, but probably two more issues to let the story breath - and I think there should have been more serious consequences for Jennifer (hope that's not too much of a spoiler). The art, though, is really, really nice. Talajić can do superheroes, supernatural horror, SF or noir/crime without missing a beat - I'd like to see him do more stuff like this.
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Post by wickedmountain on Dec 28, 2021 0:08:00 GMT -5
A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance # 3 ( 2021 )
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Post by wickedmountain on Dec 28, 2021 0:24:06 GMT -5
Out #3 ( 2021 )
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Post by EdoBosnar on Dec 28, 2021 4:53:04 GMT -5
Eden (Aftershock, 2021)  A very beautifully rendered one-shot by Cullen Bunn (writer) and Dalibor Talajić (artist; I should also give a shout-out to the coloring by another -to me - local talent, Valentina Briški). The story revolves around tattoo-artist Niles, whose his wife and young son were killed in a car-wreck in the not-too-recent past. He still hasn't recovered from this, and all of his colleagues in the tattoo shop want him to move on. Then one day an alluring woman who just calls herself Eden comes into the shop and wants Niles to do a butterfly tattoo on her stomach freestyle. She comes back a few weeks later and wants him to do another, even though the first one he did is now gone, with not even a sign of laser removal. That's as far as I'll go in summarizing this, because I'd give too much away otherwise. Like I said, this is a beautifully done story, but also deeply sad and also disturbing (an adjective I can apply to pretty much everything I've read by Bunn). However, it's well worth reading. Highly recommended.  (A sample of the interior art from the back cover)
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Post by wickedmountain on Dec 29, 2021 1:05:02 GMT -5
Aquaman : The Becoming Issues #2, #3, #4 ( 2021 )
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Post by Trevor on Jan 4, 2022 6:29:43 GMT -5
I can see this gimmick bothering me in time, but for at least one issue, I had a ton of fun with this book written in iambic pentameter, No Holds Bard #1. Shakespeare and his page have secret superhero identities and must rescue the Queen. Behemoth has been mostly a miss as a publisher for me, but I enjoyed this one and will check out at least one more issue.
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Post by wickedmountain on Jan 5, 2022 15:34:20 GMT -5
Elvira meets Vincent Price #4 ( 2022 )
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 5, 2022 15:46:26 GMT -5
Sapiens, the graphic novel version of Yuval Harari's book on human society's evolution.
It's very well-made, but I disagree so deeply with some of Harari's core ideas that it's hard for me to enjoy the book as much as it deserves considering the effort put into it. (It was a Christmas gift from my wife. She didn't know what I thought of the original book in the first place. Fake Enthusiasm Power... Activate!).
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Post by berkley on Jan 6, 2022 0:11:46 GMT -5
Sapiens, the graphic novel version of Yuval Harari's book on human society's evolution. It's very well-made, but I disagree so deeply with some of Harari's core ideas that it's hard for me to enjoy the book as much as it deserves considering the effort put into it. (It was a Christmas gift from my wife. She didn't know what I thought of the original book in the first place. Fake Enthusiasm Power... Activate!).
I bought the first prose book a while ago but have put off reading it - more out of a vague feeling of uncertainty rather than anything specific that I remember hearing. What was it disagreed with? And how's the artwork in the GN version?
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 6, 2022 7:09:08 GMT -5
Sapiens, the graphic novel version of Yuval Harari's book on human society's evolution. It's very well-made, but I disagree so deeply with some of Harari's core ideas that it's hard for me to enjoy the book as much as it deserves considering the effort put into it. (It was a Christmas gift from my wife. She didn't know what I thought of the original book in the first place. Fake Enthusiasm Power... Activate!).
I bought the first prose book a while ago but have put off reading it - more out of a vague feeling of uncertainty rather than anything specific that I remember hearing. What was it disagreed with? And how's the artwork in the GN version?
My main gripe with Harari is that he overstates his case that the neolithic revolution and the discovery of agriculture was a catastrophe for mankind. Yes, it was bad for our lower back, yes, it gave rise to the drudgery of daily, hard and repetitive chores (when compared to the freer life of a hunter-gatherer, that is)... but it bloody gave us civilization! Reading Sapiens, and especially the GN, you get the impression that hunter-gatherers lived in a Rousseauesque permanent paradise while farmers live a miserable, disease-riddled and violent nightmare. Harari blames violence, women abuse and greed on the discovery of agriculture, which is obviously nonsense (as demonstrated by the existence of warfare and abduction of females not only in extant hunter-gatherer societies, but also in other primates like chimpanzees). The second thing that annoys me (especially in the GN, again) is how we're told in a moralistic tone that Harari's own views on certain things are virtuous and right and self-evident while ours are probably not. His veganism is a fine philosophical position, but his ascribing human emotion and aspirations to farm animals is a bad case of Bambi syndrome. What's more, I take exception to his description of the life of farm animals -he does not say "some" farm animals- as hell on Earth. My neighbour's free-roaming hens, donkeys and alpacas seem perfectly content; in fact, when a chicken crosses the road (yes, yes, it's like the set up for a joke) it just comes back home after a little while. It's clearly not "longing for its freedom" or anything.
It was also pretty ironic to have a character tell us about the evils of drinking milk (because we enslave innocent animals) as she was served a glass of almond milk... the poster boy for environment-damaging ersatz. (Ersatzes? Seems to me a z should be enough to mark the plural...) It's doubly ironic, in fact, because we are asked that oft-repeated question (which I suppose is meant to be a a-HA! moment) : "what species drinks the milk of another species?" to which we could easily answer "what other species drinks almond milk?" The fact that we are the only species to do something is not in and of itself a sign that we are wrong; we're also the only species to have gone to the moon (apart from our gut bacteria and assorted acarians living on the skin of astronauts, I suppose). The human species is omnivorous; it should come as no surprise that it consumes whatever it can find that can nourish it.
Personally, I think drinking milk (or eating cheese, because I seem to have a harder time with milk as I grow older) is one of the best ideas we ever had. It allows us to strike a very useful partnership with cows, sheep and goats: we protect them from predators and other hardships as best we can, and they turn grass (which we cannot digest efficiently) into something we can consume. It's a perfect case of a win-win scenario.
The art is pretty, in that modern loose and sober style we often see in "slice-of-life" graphic novels, with a pastel palette. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Jan 6, 2022 12:20:32 GMT -5
(...) The second thing that annoys me (especially in the GN, again) is how we're told in a moralistic tone that Harari's own views on certain things are virtuous and right and self-evident while ours are probably not. His veganism is a fine philosophical position, but his ascribing human emotion and aspirations to farm animals is a bad case of Bambi syndrome. What's more, I take exception to his description of the life of farm animals -he does not say "some" farm animals- as hell on Earth. My neighbour's free-roaming hens, donkeys and alpacas seem perfectly content; in fact, when a chicken crosses the road (yes, yes, it's like the set up for a joke) it just comes back home after a little while. It's clearly not "longing for its freedom" or anything.
(...) I have thoughts on the other side of this argument, i.e., the oft-held belief or accepted wisdom about how brutal and/or uncultured and/or unsophisticated pre-literate, pre-agricultural societies were, but yeah, I really take exception to the anthropomorphization of animals and the assumption that domesticated animals see their life with humans as akin to being in a maximum security prison. I grew up in a pretty rural area, and my mom always had chickens, ducks and turkeys and we kept them fenced in mainly so they wouldn't a) get into my mom's garden and destroy everything and b) to keep them from getting taken away by foxes, raccoons and stray dogs. For a pretty long time, my dad also had a herd of about 30 sheep (we lived on a 12-acre property) and at several points we also held cows. Needless to say, they were not spending their days trying to break through the fence and escape to freedom. Rather, they liked coming into the barn at night, esp. when it was raining, and munch on hay and grain. In fact, during my senior year of high school, we were down to just six heifers, and a deer from a nearby forest jumped over the fence on our property and started hanging out with them - for months and months.
And yeah, humans aren't 'naturally' (digression: I hate the loaded meanings attached to the word 'natural'; friggin' cancer's natural, too) vegans - an opinion I come across all too often. We're dietary opportunists, like many other primates.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jan 6, 2022 13:05:47 GMT -5
(...) The second thing that annoys me (especially in the GN, again) is how we're told in a moralistic tone that Harari's own views on certain things are virtuous and right and self-evident while ours are probably not. His veganism is a fine philosophical position, but his ascribing human emotion and aspirations to farm animals is a bad case of Bambi syndrome. What's more, I take exception to his description of the life of farm animals -he does not say "some" farm animals- as hell on Earth. My neighbour's free-roaming hens, donkeys and alpacas seem perfectly content; in fact, when a chicken crosses the road (yes, yes, it's like the set up for a joke) it just comes back home after a little while. It's clearly not "longing for its freedom" or anything.
(...) I have thoughts on the other side of this argument, i.e., the oft-held belief or accepted wisdom about how brutal and/or uncultured and/or unsophisticated pre-literate, pre-agricultural societies were, but yeah, I really take exception to the anthropomorphization of animals and the assumption that domesticated animals see their life with humans as akin to being in a maximum security prison. I grew up in a pretty rural area, and my mom always had chickens, ducks and turkeys and we kept them fenced in mainly so they wouldn't a) get into my mom's garden and destroy everything and b) to keep them from getting taken away by foxes, raccoons and stray dogs. For a pretty long time, my dad also had a herd of about 30 sheep (we lived on a 12-acre property) and at several points we also held cows. Needless to say, they were not spending their days trying to break through the fence and escape to freedom. Rather, they liked coming into the barn at night, esp. when it was raining, and munch on hay and grain. In fact, during my senior year of high school, we were down to just six heifers, and a deer from a nearby forest jumped over the fence on our property and started hanging out with them - for months and months.
And yeah, humans aren't 'naturally' (digression: I hate the word loaded meanings attached to the word 'natural'; friggin' cancer's natural, too) vegans - an opinion I come across all too often. We're dietary opportunists, like many other primates.
We probably share the same opinion there; when I look at the paintings left on the walls of the Chauvet or Lascaux caves, I see the work of highly intelligent, skilled and sensitive artists; not that of dumb club-wielding brutes. (Well, they may have carried clubs... but they were very likely not dumb at all!) Plus, things like Göbekli Tepe were built by hunter-gatherers!
That being said, whenever it sprang up, agriculture allowed societies to free a lot of manpower to start building things -eventually getting us to the moon. Agriculture was something of a Faustian bargain (as Harari demonstrates) in that once we taste baked goods (and civilization in general) we don't really want to go back, but I would not agree that we were tricked into a bad bargain. Lower back pain and bad eyes notwithstanding, I don't think it can be argued that mankind isn't better off now than 20,000 years ago.
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Post by Batflunkie on Jan 6, 2022 20:12:01 GMT -5
Rick Remender (2012/#1-#5) and Ta-Nehisi Coates' (2018/#1-#3) respective runs on Captain America
From what I've read of Remeneder's run so far, it's fun (owing a lot to Kirby's 70's run) but it's not without it's serious moments that kind of get overshadowed by a lot of people by how far out and trippy it is coming off of Brubaker's celebrated run.
Coates' run is more politically driven and more in-line with what people want out of a Captain America book I feel, it kind of picks up the pieces from whatever the hell you want to call Spencer's run
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