Revival #1 (July 2012) © Image Comics.
Aw yeah! Kate Sherrod has started a new comics blog, Comics Time Sonnets, at which she posts a new sonnet review of a comic book every day. How does this girl do it? Elizabeth Barrett Browning meets rhymer demon Etrigan (only in Hell do you have to start speaking in poetry when you get promoted).
Given the way some publishers are behaving, I'm not entirely sure they deserve Sherrod's love letters to pulp culture. But then again, to her credit, she has not reviewed the usual suspects - so far.
Here is Kate's poetic review of the unsettling new Image zombie series, the rural noir, Revival. The premise of the book is that dead people in a small town have come back to life; yet they are more or less as they were when they were alive - talking, memories intact, still recognizable - but what with being undead and all, they are not quite right:
Farm noir, they say? So what's that even mean?
I'll tell you what. It's creepy on a scale
Both intimate and cosmic. There's a scene
Wherein a zombie grandma turns to flail
And kills with just a scythe sweep, doesn't care
Because her teeth keep growing back and she
Must yank them out, because she cannot bear
To be without her dentures. Which means we
Have not seen zombie horror quite like this.
The undead all remember, can still speak
And feel unholy. Meanwhile their small town
Is quarantined (but gorgeous!). Where it's weak
Is exposition dialogue. I frown
On this unsubtlety in what should be
The greatest zombie comic we may see.
Posts
Ha! Fear not, fair friend - the Big 2 publishers get none of my love except when something truly exceptional sneaks out from their houses. For instance, China Mieville wrote a comic. Yeah, I'll be looking at THAT. But new 52 and whatever the hell Marvel's version of that is? NO.
ReplyDeleteDial H - yeah - I hear you, but I kinda got lost at Boy Chimney. I realize that people see it as brilliant. The only series that really struck me as exceptional in the 52 are written by writers who ignore current tastes/editorial edicts and go right back to old school: Lemire's Animal Man reads like early 90s Vertigo. That said, it works but is derivative. Before Watchmen: Minutemen and Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre also are derivative but are excellent because Darwyn Cooke really understands what he is doing. The rest of the Big 2 - dead end street of rehashed ideas, mass deaths, and gutted values. Onward to the indies.
ReplyDelete