Comic Reviews
Blade of the Immortal 20
Oh, yay, the arc is over. Or possibly the entire series. It wasn’t bad, and I’m quite happy where it is now, so even if there’ll be more volumes, I probably won’t get them.
What drew me to it first was the apparently pencilled rather than inked art in some places, which vanished long ago, and for some reason the mix – some serious themes, some bloody stupid parody of fight-manga tropes (called attacks, whatnot), high violence in a relatively realistic style of art (well, compared to, say, One Piece) – doesn’t work that well for me.
Gargoyles # 7
So, Macbeth asks the Gargoyles to help him keep the Scone of Stone from being stolen. And other stuff, including relationship(drama).
This being the first issue that will be part of the second trade, it seems like it’s a setup for a new part-arc, trying to draw in new readers. Maybe. At least that’d be one possible reason for the jumble of flashbacks, flashforwards, stories being told, in short, panels with timestamps you needed to sort out, which I found confusing.
Mind, I need to re-read the series, after watching the TV series. Having missed some latter part of the second season, I think there’s a lot that’s going over my head in the comics.
One of the flashbacks did tickle my humour damn well – the third one in this post at scans_daily, which CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Other strong points include some very nice art on facial expressions, and the sheer “WTF?! Yay, funny!” of the last pages (which you can see if you follow the link above, at least as of this writing).
Over all, the art was nice. The “photoshopping pencils to look clean” worked way better than last issue, for one thing. The lineart may have even been a bit too light and thus lack variety for my taste, but that did look better than the very thick and blocky and rough in one of the early issues.
Gargoyles: Bad Guys #1
Again with the non-sequential story, as the above, but not that bad.
There’s some really goofy stuff involving a masked villain with a tasmanian tiger theme, and a nearly-as-goofy superhero, namely Dingo assisted by a nanotech AI serving as armour. They are later press-ganged/persuaded into some team (which was first shown, including them, on page 2; time-confusing, I tell you) by a woman calling herself a hunter.
Thankfully, the artist completely gave away one chance to highlight her arse in that fightscene. I guess the fact I noticed this mainly says something about what reading Marvel comics for a year or so did to my brain.
The art is black and white, with digital greytones, and in my opinion could do with a bit more variety in line-weight and a bit less of randomly switching shape of chins, but it does the job just fine. Nice work on some of the backgrounds, too.