REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #63 - March 2009 [spoilers]
Saxon Brenton
saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
Thu Apr 30 05:16:00 PDT 2009
[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #63 - March 2009 [spoilers]
Reviewed This Issue:
58.5 #47-48 [LNH]
Thunderclap #13 [Pincity]
Also posted:
Academy of Super-Heroes #98 [ASH]
Very, very late. But that's not important.
What is important is that Suicide Squid - the Ten Tentacled Avenger Of
The Deep - had been feeling rather morose about the change to the climax of
the _Watchmen_ movie. You know, taking out the a giant space octopus.
However, once he realised that there was still a cephalopod link in the
name of the 'Sub-Quantum Unifying Intrinsic Devices' (SQUIDs), he's been
feeling a bit better.
Spoilers below:
====
58.5 #47-48
'The Two-Way Mirror Mountain' and
'You Ain't No Friend Of Mine' (Part 1 of Cannon Fodder Triumphant)
A Legion of Net.Heroes [LNH] series
by Lalo Martins
Hmmm. Something that may or may not be interesting, but is at least
tangentially relevant, was the mistake I made last issue in identifying
Witch Princess as Disdain of the Evilverse's Acla Fright rather than
Whatever on the New Misfits. This is, of course, appalling, since the
stated purpose of the EoMR is to be the prod I use to ensure I read and
comprehend what's happening on RACC in a timely manner rather than being
lazy and procrastinative. Alas, backtracking through the error, it seems
that the second read through, when I was actually writing up the entry for
#46, happened too late at night for comprehension to work properly.
Now, the pertinent point of this is: I should have remembered Whatever.
After all, the discussion between herself and the Leviathan in issue 29,
which summarised the battles between the Legion and their Evilverse counter-
parts (with its many fights, cooking contests, poker games, political debates,
and the intense non-efforts of Procrastination Boy and the Evilverse's Super-
Apathy Lad vying to do nothing whatsoever) is one of my favourite and most
easily recalled scenes from the series so far. However, upon further
reflection I realised that I could not recall much about Whatever beyond
her apprenticing herself to the Leviathan. Clearly, I have not been
'soaking' in this series, in the sense of re-reading it for pleasure in the
way I would for some others. This, methinks, I will correct when I take a
few weeks rec leave in early May and reread the series. At this point I
can't make a determination as to whether I've simply been insufficiently
fanboyish enough in not bothering to remember stuff once I had finished
summarising it, or whether the jumps over issues have harmed the narrative
flow, or whether certain characters get a greater proportion of the
characterisation than others.
Which allows me to segue into the semi-pertinent part of the discussion
(pokes audience with a stick: you haven't died of boredom form my
circumlocuitous blatherings, have you? good, just checking).
Characterisation. Now, it most certainly is not true that the characters
in _58.5_ don't get any characterisation. Pantra, in particular, gets an
number of nice little moments. That said, I will admit that I have always
had a problem differentiating between a stereotype and an archetype. Still,
the aspect of Pantra's personality that is kill-happy strikes me as a
stereotypical cat-girl trait. This can be put to good use for humour
(always a useful narrative tool in an LNH story) as in #47 where in the
wrap-up to a fight she makes the comment that the shapeshifter Jim Green
"tasted like ~^@#@=$". On the other side of the equation there are other
scenes which still play upon her cat-like nature but look at it from a
less obvious point-of-view: for example, in #48 when she waits for Cannon
Fodder's body to regenerate "until there was enough to recover... then,
like any good cat, I dragged it away." Still, one thing I will need to
keep an eye out for is whether there are any dimensions to Pantra beyond
the obvious cat-girl aspects of self-indulgent sex kitten given to
occasional mega violence.
A somewhat different aspect of characterisation can be seen in the
handling of Cannon Fodder. Cannon Fodder is an old LNH character, and
not unsurprisingly has had characterisation that wanders a bit. Of course,
he's a Legion of Net.Heroes character, and in many ways can therefore be
defined more by the shtick of his superpowers and/or the obsession on which
his costumed identity is based. That said, from memory he's usually been
depicted as within a plausible throwing distance of his main concept: the
guy who comes back to life after getting killed. The main differences
have tended to be how angstily or resignedly or blasely he handled being
used as the red shirt. What Lalo has done is effectively taken Cannon
Fodder back to his roots, made him aware of his own secret origin that he
has effectively been oblivious too for the past decade or so, and gotten
him to embrace the violence of his home newsgroup alt.fan.bugtown that
clings to him. I've actually enjoyed most of the scenes where he goes
into his 'Zen destructive' mode, partly because he doesn't come across
as a posturing macho tool, but mostly because he uses his abilities
intelligently. Putting together these two factors means that he comes
across as intriguing because his actions run more-or-less at right angles
to the behaviour of the standard action hero - there are ramifications to
the use of his abilities that require specialised consideration in how
they are applied.
Running off on another track, it's continues to be the case that this
series is clearly written as superhero parody compared to, say, the
_Thunderclap_ series (below). The plot of these two issues is basically
Cannon Fodder and the New Misfits continuing to search for the home
universe of the Xinerama Brothers, first arriving on Earth 308 and
getting into a sequence of fights with local heroes and villains
masquerading as heroes, then either being dispatched to a Xinerama prison
or back to the mainstream Looniverse. However, for fans of the original
Excalibur series the arrival of the group in the Mystic Bandwagon onto
Earth 308 is said to be drawn in art reminiscent of Alan Davis and features
the characters in a mixture of disguises much as occurred in the 'Crosstime
Caper'. By comparison to this long-past fan-favourite, the dystopic state
of Earth 308 is later summarised in terms clearly analogous to recent Event
storylines from the big two superhero comic publishers, most particularly
'Civil War' and 'Dark Reign'. Structurally this works both for pacing
purposes (it helps get past a lot of history that might not need to be
shown; 'might' in this case because the sheer length of the _58.5_ series
is such that it could, theoretically, fit in at least some of the story
where those disguises where needed), as well as for the humour purposes of
parody.
However, there is always the risk that if too much of the plot is
subsumed by parody references that the story as a whole suffers. To date
the overarching structure of _58.5_ has avoided that, simply because the
search for the Xinerama Brothers has matched the search for the Monitors
in _Infinite Crisis_ only loosely, allowing for various activities that
do not map one-to-one with the events of _Infinite Crisis_. Meanwhile the
history of Earth 308 is not the main point of issue 47, but instead is
only the backdrop on which the LNHers are continuing their search. By
comparison, if the main purpose of issue 47 had been about the struggle of
the New New New New New Young Teens against the Thundersquad, then I think
it would have required something more of a twist on the likes of 'Civil
War', 'Dark Reign' etc rather than being a distillation of them.
Thunderclap #12
'Revolution Part I - Spooks'
A Pinnacle City [Pincity] series
by Rick Hindle
And now for something much shorter.
Plotwise the action starts in media res. The Playboy and the Ice Queen
are waiting in Montecavio for the ransom demanded for the safe return of
Suzie to turn up, when they are informed that the American Ranger and co
are in the neighbouring country of Santa Maria, and that Thunderclap is in
captivity. The rest of the story backtracks to detail the arrival of the
heroes and how Thunderclap attempts in infiltrate (without his powers)
Montecavio, until we catch up to the point where the Ice Queen gets to
gloat that she's going to kill the captured hero.
The story opens with the lovely scene of the Playboy being unhappy
with the climate and room service in the place they have been lodged by
their hosts in General Echevarria's regime in Montecavio. The
effectiveness of this evocative touch in bringing the Playboy to life can
be gauged by the fact that I immediately started wondering how the Playboy
handled not just defeats by the heroes (when you just know that he's had
his nice clean clothes scuffed up) but also by how he handled hard work
like setting up criminal capers. Does he grit his teeth when doing the
hard work of preparation? Is he a savant planning genius who can arrange
things with ease? Does he simply pay lieutenants to arrange the details
of the crime for him? The Ice Queen, meanwhile, remains obsessed with
revenge against the type of 'beautiful people' who made her life hard in
high school, which in this case carries forward to include Thunderclap
because of their recent fight in issues 9-10.
Thunderclap, meanwhile, gets to demonstrate either utter bravery and
confidence or utter impulsive foolishness by agreeing to leave his pin -
the source of his powers - behind when he infiltrates Montecavio. Possibly
it's a combination of both, considering he is an adolescent male. In any
case, this sets up the cliff hanger of leading to wonder how the title
character will get out of this one.
----------
Saxon Brenton University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au
The Eyrie Archives of Russ Allbery which collect the online superhero
fiction of the rec.arts.comics.creative newsgroup and its sibling group
Superguy can be found at:
http://archives.eyrie.org/racc/ or
http://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/racc/
http://archives.eyrie.org/superguy/ or
http://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/superguy/
_________________________________________________________________
Need a new place to rent, share or buy? Let ninemsn property search for you.
More information about the racc
mailing list