Comics Roundup 5/6/2006

Oh yeah, wasn't I going to do a weekly round up of comics acquired? Perhaps so. This week I picked up two things.

Local #5, by Brian Wood & Ryan Kelly, is set in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That's why I bought it, as I have a friend who has moved there. I figured that if it was rubbish I could post it to her and she might get mild amusement out of seeing her town in pictorial form. It turns out that the story is about a disturbed woman who moves to Halifax. She seems to have problems with the truth, and behaves in an increasingly erratic manner in the arthouse cinema in which she works, before skipping the town. The story is quite affecting. Since then, I read a bit more about this Local comic. It seems like the creators have designed it such that each issue tells a self-contained story, even though the issues together form an ongoing narrative. I am sufficiently interested by this title that I will probably go and look for other issues of it, possibly today.

My Inner Bimbo #1 of 5 is by Sam Keith. Keith is a fairly cultish comics figure, despite being the co-creator of the massively popular Sandman book. His cultishness comes from his art style, which does not readily lend itself to depiction of guys in spandex twatting each other (for all that he is currently drawing a Batman title). His preferred subject matter seems a bit extreme too, often being about women in scarily abusive situations. Maybe you have read his Four Women comic, which is both brilliant and unflinching in its narrative exploitation of a WOMEN IN PERIL storyline. Anyway, This title does not seem to be driven by an abused women theme, but its sexual politics are still a bit weird. The main character is this porn-obsessed old guy in the midst of some kind of breakdown. The pornographic images he looks at have started talking to him (and not in a good way), and now his subconscious has produced a fantasy lady for him, and made her (subjectively) real. It's all pretty bizarre and somewhat heavy going, but at this stage of the game I have to say that I like it.

Other comic things - if you have not jumped aboard The Exterminators yet, then you should do so. This is a comic by Simon Oliver and Tony Moore about down at heel pest exterminators in Los Angeles, and gets a lot of its mileage from how horrible roaches are. Amazingly, the title managed to survive the early extermination of the most amusing character, and continues to go from strength to strength.

I'm also interested to hear that DC are talking about doing another series of Seaguy, the comic by Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart that was bought by almost no one but is among the very best things they've ever published. The story thus far ended on such a miserably downbeat note that it would be really nice to see it continued.

One more thing: There was an interesting discussion on I Love Comics about the Women In Refrigerators trope, this being the tendency in comics for Really Bad Things to happen to female characters.