Savage Symposium: FEAR ITSELF & FLASHPOINT (Part 1 of 3)

12 comments

Posted by: Abhay Khosla on June 20, 2011

Categories: Symposiums

As part of the 10th anniversary of The Savage Critics on the internet, and in conjunction with the 4-part discussion of Chester Brown’s PAYING FOR IT, a more mainstream-oriented “round-table” discussion of Marvel Comics’s multi-title crossover headline series FEAR ITSELF and DC Comics’s multi-title crossover headline series FLASHPOINT was conducted between April 11, 2011 and June 19, 2011, covering slightly less than the first halves of both series. As each issue of FEAR ITSELF #’s 1-3 & FLASHPOINT #’s 1-2 was released, a single question was posed.

David Loses His Shit on Justice League: Cry For Justice #7

3 comments

Posted by: David Uzumeri on March 3, 2010

Categories: Reviews

[This is a reconstructed post from Google Cache; originally posted by David!] “Cry for Justice is a singular work,” said James Robinson in the backup prose section of the sixth issue. I can only hope this will forever be the case. This series has been getting negative reviews from the beginning, for a bunch of reasons – stiff art, stiff dialogue, a somewhat cliched premise – all of which made for a fairly silly comic that could be accurately titled Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen’s Act Like Jack Bauer Day. Still, it was buoyed by Robinson’s enthusiasm for its self-aware campiness, and while it wasn’t anything I’d call high art it was at least entertaining. And then, the conclusion came…  Read More…

An Open Letter to DC Comics: Creators Matter

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on January 10, 2010

Categories: Retailing/Industry

Okay, this is going to be fairly short and a bit soapboxy and business-related. I know this is usually Brian’s wheelhouse, but I’m just so annoyed that this keeps happening. I find that most weekends, scanned covers (with trade dress) of the upcoming week’s books show up on eBay. I was flipping through them this week, and saw that YET AGAIN DC completely changed the creative team from soup to nuts on a comic without making even a token effort to inform the audience. I don’t know if retailers were informed, since the DC Direct Channel mailer never seems to show up online anymore, but a Google search shows nothing and DC’s website still has the old creative team (Fabian…  Read More…

David’s 2009: This Has Nothing To Do With The Zeitgeist

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on January 4, 2010

Categories: Reviews

This current trending topic, about how 2009 was a lame year for comics (especially superhero/mainstream/adventure comics), just doesn’t resonate with me at all. I enjoyed a huge amount of comics this year, many of which were from creators I really didn’t expect to become such an ardent fan of, and while most of my non-superheroes comic reading was either manga or stuff released previous to 2009, it all still coalesced into a year of reading really fantastic comics. First off, Achewood reached a relative high again this year, with the Williams-Sonoma/Return of Cartilage Head mega-arc just exploding with avant-garde symbolism and hilarious vagina jokes. Onstad’s work continues to single-handedly justify the existence of the Internet, so while it’s admittedly an…  Read More…

A Review of Batwoman in Detective Comics Focusing Mostly on the Writing

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on October 28, 2009

Categories: Reviews

A while ago, my boy Pedro at Funnybook Babylon talked about how sometimes bad art can obscure a less-than-wonderful script, since bad art is easier to bitch about and more easily apparent. I’m here to talk about the inverse, especially as it relates to Greg Rucka’s inadvertent (I’m pretty sure he originally thought this was going to be a solo miniseries or ongoing) return to Detective Comics. Because, let’s be fair: everyone’s talking about how gorgeous and brilliant and formally inventive J.H. Williams III is, but I just haven’t seen people talk about the story all that much. I reread “Elegy” before reading Detective Comics #858 this week, and the entire story works incredibly well as a continuous whole, with…  Read More…

The Brave and the Bold #28: Welcome to Where Your Soul Dies

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on October 26, 2009

Categories: Reviews

I read a lot of comics. As a general rule, I at least keep up with most of the Big Two shared-universe titles, and I’m not utterly averse to J. Michael Straczynski as a writer. The first half of his Amazing Spider-Man run, Supreme Power, Thor – he’s written comics I enjoyed thoroughly and am glad I paid money for. He also wrote this. I’m used to, and have a certain respect for, well-intentioned, interesting or ambitious failures. It’s why I’m still spending money for Dark Wolverine, after all. To really earn my ire, a comic has to be completely fucked up not just in the execution, but all the way back to the project’s creative germ. This is one…  Read More…

Some Indie Shit and Manga David Done Read

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on September 16, 2009

Categories: Reviews

Yeah, so I haven’t written about superhero comics for a while largely because – not to go all David Brothers in this piece – while I’ve been enjoying a lot of stuff coming out, I haven’t been driven to write much about a lot of it. So instead, I’ve been dipping my uncultured, pervert-suit-loving self into the world of INDEPENDENT SMALL PRESS COMICS, not to mention the dangerous and exotic Orient of sequential art they call “man-ga.” Joking aside, here’s some pretty great shit I read recently, and what I thought about it. (Obviously, there is more after the jump.) Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, Pantheon Press Yeah, I’m hardly the first person to come out and say that this…  Read More…

JUSTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE! Capsules for 7/2/2009 (We operate on Canadian time up in here)

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on July 4, 2009

Categories: Reviews

This was certainly a week of high-profile titles, although uncharacteristically dominated by DC in that regard (if not in OVERALL output). DC had two A-list releases this week: the second issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s nearly-universally-praised Batman and Robin, and the first issue of James Robinson and Mauro Cascioli’s seven-issue Justice League: Cry for Justice miniseries, a book DC’s seriously promoting (unquestionably to the detriment of the regular Justice League of America title) as one of their major event books of the year. A review of Cascioli’s art is pretty short: if you’re the kind of person who enjoys the stiff realism of Alex Ross, this is your thing. If the stylish, partially cartoonish fluidity of a Frank…  Read More…

Batman Didn’t Tap: David Reviews Detective #853 and the State of DC Comics

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on April 28, 2009

Categories: Reviews

“Well, it definitely wasn’t going to be called Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? at that point. That was what some people at DC Comics started out calling it, and eventually it stuck, but the title did take me slightly by surprise.” – Neil Gaiman I had some of this review prepared before this little piece of news hit, but first I just want to address the recent Mark Waid interview posted at Ain’t It Cool News, which is pretty much the balls-out closet-opening light-shining festival on the perceived insanity behind DiDio’s DC that I’ve been waiting for, also containing a few incredibly choice (and very humorously put) words for Crossgen’s Mark Alessi and former Marvel head honcho Bill Jemas….  Read More…

Patterns of Patterning: David Takes a Look at Irredeemable #1 (With Capsule Comments on Other Stuff From This Week)

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on April 1, 2009

Categories: Reviews

In Grant Morrison’s afterword to Irredeemable #1, he discusses an email exchange he had with the book’s writer Mark Waid regarding patterning, or the practice of essentially permanently categorizing and cubbyholing a person’s potential and MO. Morrison goes on to relate this to himself being “patterned” as a factory of insane gobbledygook – and while that’s an opinion of him that may be held by many, I’d hardly call it a complete majority, so I was surprised at how defensively that came off – and of Waid being “patterned” as a dude who writes Silver Age throwback stories, which, well, is pretty true. A lot of people don’t remember Empire. And it’s difficult not to compare Irredeemable with its seeming…  Read More…

Hey, Kids! Comics! Reviews for March 25

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on March 25, 2009

Categories: Reviews

Yeah, OK, so I lied to both you and myself about my scheduling. I’ll be better in the future, I promise. I’ll also try to be more… savage… in my criticisms, hopefully regarding some books that aren’t *too* obvious of whipping boys. (What’s the point of making fun of Ultimatum at this point?) So yeah, comics! I read some good comics! And some mediocre comics, and even one utterly, completely, fucking terrible comic, which I will review since there were complaints last time I wasn’t “savage” enough. Let’s see how we roll now, bitches. New Avengers #51 Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayamn! First: Billy Tan really isn’t very good at all, I’m sorry, and he needs to be put on a book more suited…  Read More…

Hello! I’m Here to Talk About the Comics. Those Shitty, Amazing Comics.

no comments yet

Posted by: David Uzumeri on February 15, 2009

Categories: Reviews

I’m David Uzumeri, from Funnybook Babylon, and I’m pretty honored to be invited to this pretty elite crew. I’m probably most famous on InterNET for my work annotating Final Crisis and Batman R.I.P., but what you might not know is that I read comics that aren’t by Grant Morrison! Hell, I read comics that aren’t published by DC – or even by the Big Two! So I’m pretty happy to be here at Savage Critics, and I plan on reviewing my weekly titles (along with other items of interest) fairly regularly. If I seem a bit superhero/genre-centric, that’s not because I’m averse to “indie”/mainstream stuff, but more because I’m still reading classics like Love & Rockets and I doubt I’ll…  Read More…