Comics: Planetary and Others
I’m still waiting for Powers 10 to come out—it may be out, but the local comic store I go to (Comix Experience on Divisadero) hasn’t gotten it in yet. So I got some other things instead.
I picked up number six in the Sin City collection; somehow I didn’t have that already. It’s mainly short vignettes, and while reasonable, doesn’t approach the better (mainly earlier) books in the series.
I also grabbed Jack of Fables: The (Nearly) Great Escape. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s on par with the other Fables collections. Perhaps that’s because Jack was never one of the more interesting characters to me. I’d rather read about Bigby, Snow White, Blue Boy, the Adversary, Cinderella, etc.
I haven’t been much of a Warren Ellis fan in the past, partly because I just don’t like Transmetropolitan much. But he has an excellent reputation, and I decided to try out some more of his work. I bought Planetary and Desolation Jones and was reasonably impressed by both. Planetary has an excellent atmosphere to it, and I will probably end up getting all of them, and possibly getting sucked into Stormwatch and The Authority as well, although I’m resistant at the moment. The idea behind Planetary seems to be that there’s a team of super-powered archeologists operating in the near future and trying to figure out the secret (or true) history of their earth. It feels almost like a cross between Hellboy, Rising Stars, and Top Ten.
Desolation Jones is good too, but I find its core concept—Los Angeles being a prison for ex-intelligence agents—somewhat implausible (yes, somehow more so than super-powered archeologists). It’s quite gritty, and definitely pays homage to Los Angeles noir, but somehow I had this “more of the same” feeling about it, as if Ellis just churns out a lot of stuff like this—even though I don’t read a lot of Ellis and enjoyed this particular collection. Slightly odd, that.
Some good stuff, but they didn’t distract me for too long from wanting to get my hands on the tenth Powers collection.