A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

Time Magazine has posted its year-end round-up of the best comics of 2007. I’ve missed quite a few and question the inclusion of others. But then it sometimes boils down to taste.

This year I’ve discovered the Killer - a series about an introspective assassin. It has a great balance of fresh action sequences and a talky, inner-monologuing anti-hero with a unique point-of-view. It’s an ongoing series, which I tend to avoid since I dropped getting my monthly X-Men fix in the 90s.

I did however, picked up the mini-series cross-over of Messiah Complex. It’s about the mutants in the Marvel Universe headed by the X-Men to find a newborn baby mutant. I won’t get into the details prior to the events of this book but it’s nice to see my favorite mutants taking on the initiative rather than waiting for things to happen. Go Slim!

Another exception to my no-monthly-title pick-up is Jack of Fables. It’s a spin-off from the Fables title (another title we collect on trades) and a favorite of the wife. It’s about Jack and his quest to be the “richest, most famous” Fable of all time. Getting his own title enables him to give us a glimpse of the Jack we’ve read and heard about in stories. The art isn’t that great but it’s serviceable. It’s the wit in the stories that pulls this along. The wife and I both adore Babe, Paul Bunyan’s Blue Cow.

Alam Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is supposedly LoEG 2.5: a set-up of a new story of the League in modern times. Black Dossier is supposed to bridge the gap of the time between the League’s last adventure at the turn of the century and the world of the 1960s. Mina Harker and Allan Quartermain are still alive and has gone rogue from the British intelligence. The Black Dossier is different from the two previous outings as it contains more than average fake prose fiction — the contents of the Black Dossier itself. Moore still crackles as he takes a shot at the late 20th Century fiction including Mr. Ian Fleming’s famous creation. The book contains a 3-D glass and that comes into play at the last chapter of the book. Moore creatively immerses the reader into the unique alternate world populated by characters of popular fiction. It’s definitely not one of those comic books that you read in 5 minutes.

The Immortal Iron Fist: The Last Iron Fist Story is the tradepaperback collection of Matt Fraction’s take on the Marvel super kung-fu character. I was never a fan of Iron Fist and Luke Cage when they were together as Heroes for Hire. They were, in my view, B-list characters who pop-up once in awhile to help Daredevil or Spider-Man. This year’s incarnation of Iron Fist puts a different, interesting spin on the character. The art looks great and hopefully the creative team gets more time developing Iron Fist as a character. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for future issues on this one.

American Born Chinese by Gene Yang may have been released 2006 but I have put off reading it much to my regret. American Born Chinese is a very simple story yet elegantly executed by Yang. It’s about, well, an American Born Chinese boy growing up in the US and having to deal with identity, cultural differences and relationships. Its humor prevents it from being too much of a navel-gazing exercises and definitely one of its strengths. The art maybe cartoony but it works in telling this coming-of-age story.