Favorites: All-Star Superman

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on March 11, 2010

Categories: Reviews

All-Star Superman Vols. 1 & 2 Grant Morrison, writer Frank Quitely, artist DC, 2008-2010, believe it or not 160 pages each $12.99 each The cheeky thing to say about the brand-new out-of-continuity world Grant Morrison constructed to house his idea of the ideal Superman story is that it’s very much like the DC Universe we already know, but without backgrounds. Like John Cassaday, another all-time great superhero artist currently working, Frank Quitely isn’t one for filling in what’s going on behind the action. One wonders what he’d do with a manga-style studio set-up, with a team of young, hungry Glaswegians diligently constructing a photo-ref Metropolis for his brawny, beady-eyed men and leggy, lippy women to inhabit. But, y’know, whatever. So…  Read More…

Favorites: Blankets, plus a Tori Amos video

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on March 2, 2010

Categories: Uncategorized

[This is a reconstructed post from Google Cache; originally posted by Sean!] Greetings, fans of savagery! Been a long time since I posted here, and I’m barely doing so now, even. I just wanted to direct your attention to an interview I did with Tom Spurgeon as part of The Comics Reporter’s holiday interview series on the Books of the ’00s. Mine was about Craig Thompson’s Blankets, a book I’d eventually have gotten around to writing about for my Favorites series here at SC. So if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in, check it out. On a semi-related note, here’s Tori Amos performing her song “Bells for Her” in 1994 — it’s both my favorite Tori Amos song…  Read More…

Favorites: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on October 28, 2009

Categories: Reviews

Years ago I came across an eye-opening quote from Jaron Lanier in the liner notes of the reissued Gary Numan album The Pleasure Principle. Google reveals that it was pulled from this Wired essay. Here’s what it said: “Style used to be, in part, a record of the technological limitations of the media of each period. The sound of The Beatles was the sound of what you could do if you pushed a ’60s-era recording studio absolutely as far as it could go. Artists long for limitations; excessive freedom casts us into a vacuum. We are vulnerable to becoming jittery and aimless, like children with nothing to do. That is why narrow simulations of ‘vintage’ music synthesizers are hotter right…  Read More…

The funniest comic I’ve ever read: Boy’s Club #3

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on September 30, 2009

Categories: Reviews

Boy’s Club #3 Matt Furie, writer/artist Buenaventura Press, 2009 40 pages $4.95 Buy it from Buenaventura Press It might seem premature to cover a comic I read for the first time a little over a week ago in my “Favorites” series. It might be premature—if that comic weren’t Boy’s Club #3. Find out why I’m breakin’ all the rules after the jump. Two Fridays ago some friends and I gathered ’round the flatscreen for a drunken, junk-food-laden, back-to-back marathon viewing of Crank 2: High Voltage, RoboCop, and Road House. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately we’re not as young and irresponsible as we once were, so fully half the group punched out after the first (AMAZING, SEE IT RIGHT…  Read More…

Favorites: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on April 27, 2009

Categories: Reviews

The Diary of a Teenage Girl Phoebe Gloeckner, writer/artist Frog, Ltd., 2002 312 pages $22.95 Heartbreak and rage: that’s what I feel when I read this book. It’s the story of one Minnie Goetze, a 15-year-old girl growing up in ’70s San Francisco, doing so in large part by having sex with her alcoholic mother’s adult boyfriend and, as time goes by, through various other increasingly drug-fueled sexual encounters. There are a couple of noteworthy tricks to the book, and I talk about them after the jump… There are a couple of tricks to The Diary of a Teenage Girl. The first is that “Minnie Goetze” is Phoebe Gloeckner. Gloeckner doesn’t so much deny that the book is autobiographical as…  Read More…

Favorites: The Last Lonely Saturday

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on March 16, 2009

Categories: Reviews

The Last Lonely Saturday Jordan Crane, writer/artist Red Ink, 2000 Currently available from Fantagraphics 80 pages, softcover or hardcover $8 I find it both impossible and undesirable to separate The Last Lonely Saturday from the pivotal role it played in my life as a comics reader, and thus in my life in general. During the year 2001 I took a job as an editor at the A&F Quarterly, Abercrombie & Fitch’s big giant magazine/catalog/softcore porn hybrid publication. My boss there, Savas Abadsidis, was and is a big fanboy, and a chance encounter with a Wizard magazine on his desk, which contained an article teasing an upcoming revamp of the X-Men by Grant Morrison (whom I remembered favorably from my days…  Read More…

Best of the 00s/Favorites: Black Hole – A Discussion

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on March 8, 2009

Categories: Reviews

Dick Hyacinth here. In case you’ve forgotten, Sean and I both reviewed Black Hole for our first posts here at the Savage Critics (Sean’s post, my post). It seemed kind of silly to have two reviews of a four year old (or twelve year old, depending on how you look at it) comic on the site without something or another to tie to the two together. So over the course of a week of emailing, Sean and I discussed Black Hole and each other’s reviews. We examine gender, genre, eroticism, the horrors of adolescence, and a host of other issues after the break. DICK: One thing I didn’t really get to talk a lot about in my review was the…  Read More…

Favorites: Watchmen

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on March 1, 2009

Categories: Reviews

This past summer, with Watchmen movie hype already in full swing, I reread the book for the first time in a while and posted a review on my blog. Now that I’ve got a “Favorites” review series going here, and with the movie almost upon us, I figured it’s a good time to share the results with Savage Critic(s) Nation after the jump. Hope nobody minds a re-run… Watchmen Alan Moore, writer Dave Gibbons, artist DC Comics, 1987 416 pages $19.99 Like half the nerds in America, I recently re-read this graphic novel, inspired to do so by the trailer for Zack Snyder’s upcoming movie adaptation. I feel much older than I did when I first read the book during…  Read More…

Favorites: Black Hole

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Posted by: Sean T. Collins on February 23, 2009

Categories: Reviews

Hi folks! I’ve decided I’ll use my slot as a Savage Critic to talk about my favorite comics of all time. I’m kicking things off with Charles Burns’s Black Hole–which, coincidentally, Dick Hyacinth had also chosen to use as the inaugural book for his series on the best comics of the decade. So Dick and I will be tag-teaming on this one: I’m going first, then he’ll post his thoughts without reading mine, then we’ll check out what the other guy has to say and post responses. Should be a pip. Meanwhile, I’ve also dug a review of the book I wrote for the geek-culture iteration of Giant magazine out of the archives and posted it on my blog–check it…  Read More…