Jason Shiga’s artwork is as precisely functional as a mathematical proof: it communicates what’s happening in his comics clearly, it’s funny, and that’s about all that can be said for it. But he’s an excellent, very funny, enormously original, and wildly peculiar cartoonist–American comics’ equivalent of bands like the Raincoats and …
emanata
Emanata: Batman & Robin Pour Down Like Silver
There’s a touch of silver in the solicitations for the next few months’ superhero comics–a hint that both DC and Marvel are trying to recapture the tone of the so-called Silver Age, the era from the late ’50s to the early ’70s when both franchises laid the groundwork for what they’ve been doing ever since. Nobody’s let anything …
Emanata: Hi, Kids. Do You Like Violence?
Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s miniseries Kick-Ass is, as the cover of the collected edition that came out this week indicates, “now a major motion picture”–or will be when the movie opens in April. Like Millar’s earlier Wanted, the comic book is written like an action movie, right down to the Bondian smart-ass wisecracks its …
Emanata: DMZ Brings the War Back Home
Imagine for a moment that the U.S. was involved in an endless, morally dubious war that had hammered away at a major city. Imagine that that city was perpetually trying to rebuild itself even as internal violence and insurgencies ripped at its seams, and as a private security contractor employed by the American government largely did as …
Just One More Issue, Please!
The Question #37 came out this week–the first issue of that series to be published in twenty years. It’s the last of the one-off revivals DC’s been publishing over the past month as tie-ins with their Blackest Night event. This one, though, is special: it actually is effectively a new issue of the odd, intense little series whose …