The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1858: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic #4, February 2013

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

Not going to lie, I had goosebumps at the end of this issue. The climax of this four-issue story manages to capture the magic of the television show in a palpable way. Though the previous four issues have been mostly humour, wrapped around the occasional action sequence, in the background there have been the main tenets of the series popping up, lessons of love or friendship or caring. But during the final battle with Queen Chrysalis, these tenets crystalize into Twilight's support from her friends, which translates directly into magical power.

At one point, Twilight, imbued with magical energies, says "We fight because we know about things worth fighting for! Love! Friendship! We have things that you can't hope to have!" For me, this is the main thrust of the series. The world right now is in a very difficult place, and you can see that it is dividing people into two groups. You have the ones who hoard supplies, or raise prices on essential items. These are the Queen Chrysalis people, the ones who will never know (well, hopefully one day they will) that there are greater, better things to fight for than possessions and wealth. The other group are the people who are trying to mitigate the spread of the disease, despite personal difficulty, and who are willing to help when the situation warrants it. Hopefully, when (if?) the worst of it passes us by, those will be the people who rise to the top and help us forge a new way forward.

Though, sadly, I won't be holding my breath for that to happen.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1857: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic #3, January 2013

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

Just a short one today. I'm tired and the isolation is getting to me. Perhaps the best joke in the series so far is just how tired of the Cutie Mark Crusaders Queen Chrysalis is getting. One almost imagines that if the ponies had just waited for a little bit longer, the changeling queen would have sent the talkative tweens back to Ponyville just to get a bit of peace and quiet. Has anyone ever told a story where the kidnappers return their hostage due to extreme annoyance?

They probably would just kill them, I guess. Which would make this comic much, much darker were it to happen.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1856: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic #2, December 2012

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

I think that for me, like most who grew up in the 1980s, the revival and incredible popularity of My Little Pony was a surprise. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that said revival was an incredible wellspring of creativity and positivity that resonated with so many people, and not just in the demographic the show was ostensibly aimed toward. I count myself amongst those drawn in by these multi-coloured equines. One of the things that I most appreciate about the series, televisual or comic, is their focus on making the stories inclusive for all audience members. The pre-pubescent girls to whom the series is marketed likely have no idea who David Bowie is, or who Doctor Who is, yet the show and the comic are rife with references to them, and to numerous other pop culture moments and giants. Later issues of the series take their story titles (and premise-ish) from Fringe, which I think is one of the great television shows of all time.

I remember taking my child to see Monsters, Inc. when they were very young, and I was thoroughly impressed with the attention paid to entertaining the parents who inevitably were stuck in the theatre with all of these little children. This is obviously an economic move, in that if a parent knows they're likely to be entertained by a childrens' cartoon, they're more likely to take those children to see one at a movie theatre. But I think it also shows some respect toward those parents who utilize their disposable income to support an industry that had basically ignored them up to that point. And if post-secondary teaching has taught me anything, it's that children's media can be every bit as complex as any other media if the people producing it are thoughtful, and are invested in their work.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1855: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic #1, November 2012

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

I've always been a Fluttershy kind of guy. Something about her quiet and cheerful demeanor that masks a fierce rage beneath, often provoked by threats to ones friends and family, reminds me of someone.

It's my wife, BTW.

How's everyone doing with the isolation? I'm surprised, actually, at how hard I'm finding it. On the other hand, my job involved walking around all day and talking to people. This is a bit of a shift. Thank goodness for my incessant hoarding throughout my life that has prepared me with more stuff to do than I can possibly get done in one pandemic. At least I'll be ready for the next one.

Too soon?

Today's comic is a wonderful adaptation of a wonderful cartoon. Though I've not watched the entire series, the first couple of seasons were entertaining and moving, and both preached and practiced an ethos of friendship. The comic follows suit, and makes wonderful use of the medium of comics to expand our view into Ponyville and its environs.

Am I tempted to keep reading this series? Yes. Yes I am.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1824: Star Trek Year Four #3, September 2007

I will post a picture here when I've got my electronics all figured out - can't make them talk to each other for some reason.

https://www.comics.org/issue/381201/

I really enjoyed this comic, and I think I'm definitely going to have to track down the other three issues of the series. Today's comic gave us a great science fiction story, one where we think one thing is happening, but it's actually something entirely other. As I mentioned when I read the first issue, the format of the comic allows for the Enterprise to really encounter strange new life forms, not just the humans with funny foreheads that tend to dominate in the television series. The viral lifeform encountered by the crew in this story is an excellent idea, and the symbiotic relationship that they have with the crew of the Enterprise, even though the crew don't realize it at the time, is an interesting way of exploring the universe. While perhaps not a completely new idea, the execution of it was great.

Gordon Purcell's art is very good as well, quite different from what I remember from Gammarauders. And not that I want to come down on him again, but I think that the more animated style of art from Steve Conley over the last couple of issues suited the series more so than Purcell's. The series starts out in the aesthetic vein of the animated series, which did for a while continue the 5-year mission, so to have the art jump from the cartoonish to a slightly more realistic depiction throws things off, for me at least. Which I think is almost the same critique I had for his work on Gammarauders. What I really have to do is see if I can find a comic that starts out with Mr. Purcell - then I won't have anything to compare it to and can appreciate it on its own merits.

Well, as much as we can do that with anything, if Derrida is to be believed.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1823: Star Trek Year Four #2, August 2007

Damn, but this is a good series. At first I wasn't on board with the art, but parsing it in terms of the animated series, it's fantastic.

But, oh shit, Kirk is a goddamn sexist bastard. The first page has him referring to one of the female servants on a particular planet as part of the planet's "natural resources." I'm hoping that this is a conscious decision on the part of the writer, David Tischman, demonstrating an understanding of Kirk's character in the original series. I'm hoping it's not, from a 2007 comic, a declaration of sexism on a level that we really ought to have moved past. Again, call me an optimist (those who know me laugh now), but I'm hoping this is narrative sophistication rather than social crudeness on display.

I've got one more issue of this series, and it only ran 6 issues, but I really think I may have to track it down. Perhaps it's the length of time since I've actually seen/read Star Trek, but this comic, and, based on yesterday, this series, really are excellent. Tischman and Conley have managed a really good adaptation of a particular era of the series, one that doesn't simply attempt to be an episode of the television series, but that instead transfers the atmosphere and narrative-style of the series to the two-dimensional medium of comics.

Was supposed to get back to Hard Time tomorrow, but we'll see about maybe reading the next issue of this series. Gordon Purcell is the artist, and the last time I saw him on something, it was Gammarauders, and I wasn't a fan of his style on that series. Interestingly, he's coming in in the next issue to replace an artist whose style is much more stylized that Purcell's, much like he did with Martin King in Gammarauders, so we'll see if that shift affects my enjoyment of the series. I'm so fickle :D.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1822: Star Trek Year Four #1, July 2007

In order that I don't fall into my usual trap of getting jaded and annoyed by a longer run of comics, I'm breaking up Hard Time with some other stuff I stumbled upon as I was revamping my filing system last week. When my brother was downsizing and moving, he bequeathed to me all of his I.D.W.-published Star Trek comics, of which I have only read one. So when I flipped past these, I thought that I'd have a look.

This was a pretty good comic, very much in line with the style of storytelling the original series is known for. We even had a redshirt getting left behind and then killed, with Kirk and the crew showing just as little emotion over the fact as they did in their live action incarnations. And speaking of that incarnation, this comic isn't really going for that particular aesthetic of Star Trek. The art style is much more influenced by the cartoon that followed the last of the live action series, a fact I noticed almost right away from the very rigid construction of many of the characters. At first I wasn't sure if this was the fault of a less-talented artist, until I realized that Mr. Conley was actually going for the aesthetic of the cartoon, which is famously a very poorly-animated show. After that, the comic fell into place for me. I'm hoping that the series, such as it is at only six issues, maintains its "one and done" style - I was rather happy to get a complete story this morning that really did feel like it could have been a 30 - 45-minute episode of a television series. It was also lovely to see some of the non-human characters from the animated series being deployed. While I get that there were budgetary restrictions, I've always felt that the lack of non-humans on board the original Enterprise was one of the aspects of the series that kept from really immersing myself in it. A universe filled with only, or mostly, humanoid creatures just seems very boring to me.

A bit more Star Trek tomorrow, and then back to Ethan and his hard time.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1697 - 1701: Catching Up

Y'all, moving takes a lot of time and energy. You'd think I'd know that by this time in my life.

The DC Comics Presents here will show up twice. It has a free preview of Atari Force, which I read in conjunction with all of my video game-based comics the last week or so.

And Tom Scioli's work is just fucking nuts. Read it.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1689: H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror, October 2011

I'm back, I'm back.

We're buying a house. Did you know that takes of lot of time and work? Me neither.

Though now I do.

I finished off the first volume of Squirrel Girl, and, needless to say, just fucking read it.

Back to Lovecraft/Cthulhu now.

I have a thought. Is the secret of a good Lovecraftian story that there is an undertone of racism in it? Is that the horror that we're reacting to, on some instinctual level? Writers always seem to go back to New England, the earliest of colonial settlements, and to the horrors of the woods around them, as did the forebears of Lovecraft and his ilk. Is there something horrific there about the entrenched, decrepit whiteness of so many of Lovecraft's protagonists. Very likely he was trying to show us the dangers of miscegenation, but perhaps instead, through both his life and work, he was showing us the grim, unspeakable ending that virulent whiteness leads to.

Maybe.

I liked both of the adaptations in here. The title story is more a sequel, I think, or a reimagining, than it is a faithful adaptation, but the second story, "The Hound," uses Lovecraft's words to illustrate some creepy atmosphere pieces by menton3. I unfortunately do not have any more of this series, but I assume it all turns out terribly for the main characters. Not really a Cthulhian story if they get through okay.

"It's loose."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1654: Haunted Love #3, April 2016

Not quite the same as the old Charlton title, this series, edited by the talented Craig Yoe, collects some very strange and gruesome love stories from the pre-Code days. It's interesting to contrast these stories with some of the later horror stuff - I've been reading, though not blogging, some of the old Marvel reprints from the 70s, Creatures on the Loose and Vault of Evil and such. There's just something a little more neutered about those later stories. So much happens off-panel, or almost happens but then doesn't, whereas the old stories just go all out. While the sexual politics of virtually every story are pretty shady, the art and the willingness to take the stories to extremes is really lovely.

Well, not lovely. Gross, really. But that's what we come to these old comics for.

"I'm glad you value it, my dear husband. Then, perhaps, you won't mind when it cracks your skull wide open! I can wait no longer for you to die!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1491: The Zaucer of Zilk #2, November 2012

Seriously. Look at that cover. That's got to be one of the best comics covers I've ever seen. And I want a pair of "fancy pants."

The Zaucer travels "behind the scenes" in his pants, exposing himself to ravenous consumers of content who float on clouds. I'm not sure there's a lot of social commentary in the story, but this part definitely is. The Zaucer must escape these creatures, who transform into a giant mouth, before they devour him.

And then he enters Dankendreer, Errol Raine's domain, and the McCarthy colours disappear. Pages and panels are streaked across with rain, bleeding from the panel borders right across our field of view. It's a lovely touch, to give us the impression that literally everything in this dimension is sodden and miserable. Such wonderful contrast to the psychedelic swirliness (that's the technical term) of the rest of the comic.

A nice thing that we see, and I like to these days call it The Squirrel (or Zquirrel?) Girl Effect, is that the Zaucer attempts to help the bad guy (who isn't who you might think), rather than simply defeating them. So much violence is born of fear and feeling powerless - if we can help people to not feel that way, we reduce the amount of violence in the world. I'm not trained in these sorts of things, but that seems pretty straightforward to me. Help people, don't hurt them = better world.

If only that were a majority sentiment.

"A thousand billion aeons of time burst from Charognae's every cell, to seep into the infinite mansion of Darkendreer --"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1490: The Zaucer of Zilk #1, October 2012

I don't know how it is for other comics fans, but I have a hard time walking past a Brendan McCarthy comic without at the very least having a flip through. He is, bar none, the most colourful and psychedelic artist working in mainstream comics, and everything he does looks amazing.

Today's comic could really be set in Pepperland (from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine). Both the tone of the series and the look of the series hearken back to that crazed wonderland. The Zaucer's realm is populated by bizarre and colourful characters, as you can see from the cover, and their adventures are, for the most part, exercises in randomness and chaos. At least, that's what it looks like to us. The Zaucer's realm is a very different place from ours, and all that randomness actually seems to work for the characters in the story, almost as if, from their perspective, it's not random at all.

My favourite scene in this issue is when the Zaucer has to get himself some "fancy pants" in order to walk between dimensions. He had to actually trap these free-roaming pants himself, jumping into them both legs at once, after luring a pair with a tasty piece of pocket lint.

And that right there tells you everything you need to know about the story. Its silly and weird and beautiful, and very much work a read.

"Merely a facilitator for those cosmic intelligences who've paid to watch your intrepid struggles."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1191: Star Trek Alien Spotlight: The Gorn, September 2007

Today is my Mum's birthday, so I thought I'd do a bit of a tribute. Back when I was much younger, my Mum and Dad used to drag us from flea market to flea market as my Mum tracked down every Star Trek paperback novel that had been published up to that point. This was all the old ones, like Spock Must Die and the adaptations of the TV and cartoon series. While I may not have appreciated it at the time, I think much of my collecting practice these days comes directly from those trips. I've learned that in the dusty corners of these kinds of markets, the most wonderful treasures can be found.
And more, I remember back in 1987 when The Next Generation started airing, and we would gather on a Saturday afternoon (I think) and watch Picard and crew have amazing adventures. Basically, my Mum was the template of my geekiness. She even loves, to this day, to regale me with stories of having sat and read old Superman comics at the shop around the corner from her, back in the dawn of the Silver Age. Basically, I come by how I am quite honestly. One day I'll tell you about my Dad's proclivity for organizing the data he collects, and I'll come completely into focus.

So Happy Birthday, Mum!

But as for the comic...it was amazing. Totally not what I was expecting, though I'm not actually sure what I was expecting. First and foremost, this was a great example of not judging books by covers, or comics in this case. The Gorn prove themselves a very interesting species, a reptilian version of the Klingons, perhaps. It was delightful to see a comic in which the first reaction of an ostensibly alien species to a human incursion is to render aid, rather than to attack. I'm sure there's been quite a bit written about them, but I kind of prefer getting bits and pieces, like this comic or the episode it carries on from, and having the race be more mystery than interlocutor.

There's also a really tragic aspect to the comic, in that the Federation crew that we see are actually the doomed crew of the Reliant, the ship that Khan commandeers in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Though it's nice to see Captain Terrell demonstrating exactly why he's in charge of a ship, the knowledge of his fate ads a bittersweet melody to this tale. As usual, what I'm curious about is the reaction to this comic of people who don't know Terrell's fate. It would be a very different reading experience. I guess that's kind of what Stanley Fish's reader response theory gets at.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Pride month, so I'll be doing some special things to celebrate, not least of which will be a comic that somehow intersects with queerness, either explicitly or implicitly, each day of the month.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 18 - Weekly World News, July 2010

You'll evince no surprise, I'm sure, when I tell you that I used to buy The Weekly World News newspaper. The hilarious cover images, the smack you in the face satire, and, just a bit, the acknowledgment that if we lived in the world that the WWN reported, life would be a bit more strange and wonderful. So, obviously, when I found out that there had been a comic series based on it, I was very excited.

(Side note, this graphic novel has me wondering if I should be setting aside the individual issues that I also have as GNs, and either get rid of them or count them as already read. Then again, 30 years from now, I might just enjoy reading the second issue of this series.)

This comic takes up the farcical seriousness of the original newspaper and uses it as the backdrop to tell a story about acceptance of difference, to comment on the politico-social divide that becomes more and more apparent in the U.S. as time goes on, and to offer further proof that Batboy really is the hero we need. Ryall and Robinson manage to deploy not only the content and characters, but also the context of the original paper, straying into the bizarre, weird, and outrageous, but never forgetting that, as with all good satire, there is a political element that must be given just as serious a consideration as all of the narrative aspects.

Ed Anger is the epitomy of a Trump supporter. It's both beautiful and scary. We read this character, his bigotry and stupidity, and think that he's a caricature, that no one could possibly actually be that way, and then some dumbass makes the "news" (in quotation marks here because I'm not entirely how sure I am that I can call the trending topics on my Facebook feed "news"), and makes Ed Anger look quite moderate. And, in all truth, he is. He manages to see past physical difference, and realizes that those who may look different still share some of his beliefs. Bigotry and close-mindedness are not the strict purview of the White, Male American.

Not that this is necessarily a completely positive outcome. It would be nice to think that we could connect with others outside of shared dislikes/hatreds for other ideas and people. And this is of course where the satiric nature of WWN is most prominent. We get a satisfying conclusion to the narrative, but not necessarily to the commentary. Yes, Ed and Manigator find common ground, but it's a ground that is poison. For the commentary to have the same sort of satisfying conclusion, we'd need to see them move from that poison ground to one more nurturing. As the end of Superman Beyond told us, the struggle is never-ending, even when the story is done.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 285: The Infinite Loop #4, July 2015

Alright, getting back on track. Weekends can be funny things, sometimes, especially around the holiday season.

When I read this issue, I had a similar feeling to reading issue #21 of The Invisibles v.2. Everything in that comic happens out of sequence as a result of the activation of a time machine. In The Infinite Loop, it's not a time machine that's activated, but the time manipulation powers of Teddy (last name unknown). To add to the confusion, she's beset by multiple versions of herself who've just revealed to her that various iterations of her are actually the organization that she's ostensibly been working against all this time. Needless to say, for both Teddy and the reader, things are getting a bit weird.

The similarity to that issue of The Invisibles isn't solely due to the non-linear nature of the story. In that penultimate issue of the second part of Morrison's opus, there's a love story going on too. King Mob is about to say goodbye to Ragged Robin for what he thinks will be the last time, and for a brief moment we're witness to an emotion from KM that we've not yet seen - love. This is not to say that he's not working to stop the Archons out of a large sort of revolutionary love, but this love is a personal, individual one, directed at a girl from the future who has to go home.

I think, were I to level a criticism at The Infinite Loop, it's that it doesn't integrate these two stories quite as nicely as "All Tomorrow's Parties" does. I'm never sure whether the time war or the love story should be the main thrust of the tale, and I get the feeling it's creators are unsure as well. Not that one should stay and one should go, but there ought to be some indication as to which is the primary narrative arc and which the secondary. I know that they're fundamentally intertwined, but the equal privileging they're receiving makes it difficult to completely commit to either story. Again, for both the reader and the writers, I'd think. Hopefully they'll wrap up together nicely, and this criticism will fade away in light of the story's end. But we may have to wait a bit to see. I'm going to try to track down the next two issues soon, but until then I think it'll be random comics for a bit. I'm feeling kind of random right now.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 282: The Infinite Loop #3, June 2015

Interestingly, the scan above does not include the "mature readers" warning that the copy I actually own does. And, given the relatively explicit sex scene that occurs on the second page, the caution label is a fair addition. Up to this point, I feel like this comic has had a hard time trying to figure out who its audience is - initially I would have said teens and young adults, but the inclusion of Teddy and Ano's lovemaking perhaps pushes that range a little higher. Y'know, because we can't have the kids seeing loving sex scenes or anything.

This is the philosophy issue of the series. Much of the time is spent in Teddy's "closet," a small portion of spacetime that she has sealed off from the rest of the universe. Ano spends her time here reading humanist texts, a process that radicalizes her to the point of proposing a revolution, with Teddy at the forefront. Teddy is hesitant, hoping to remain hidden, and, she assumes, happy.

The revelation of the identity of the "forgers," against whom Teddy's agency labours, is good, but not really unexpected. What will prove this comic to be either mediocre or really, truly excellent, will be the subsequent handling of (SPOILER ALERT) multiple iterations of the same character. I've just finished marking some essays from my class, and many of the students chose to write about the problem of nature versus nurture in our texts - the depiction of the Teddys will say much about Colinet and Charretier's thoughts on this dichotomy.

Tomorrow I'll be moving on to the latest issue I have, though there are two more in the series. I've not read issue #4 yet, so it'll be a lovely surprise to see where the story goes. Join me, won't you?

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 281: The Infinite Loop #2, May 2015

The nice thing about this series is it kicks into high gear almost from the very beginning. This issue we're introduced to some unsavory characters that are experts at cleaning up the sort of temporal messes that Teddy has made, though they're not shy about using their cleaning powers on anything deemed aberrant, such as a gender-less David Bowie lookalike who witnessed Teddy's crime. We're also introduced to someone who was in Teddy's situation but ended up neutralizing the puppy-shaped anomaly he found, and who realized that the rules under which they labour are, at times, difficult to enforce.

There's also a fair bit of nudity in this issue, which I was not expecting. Usually such things are signaled by a content warning on the cover, but there's no such beast on the cover of this comic.

The beginning of the issue is a visualization of Teddy's internal dialogue when she's faced with difficult situations. We meet a variety of versions of the character, and it's a nice way of thinking through the various voices that we all have in our heads. Though, in Teddy's case, none of them are saying nasty things to her. That's not always the case in our day to day lives.

Having said that the comic kicks into high gear immediately, the story itself hasn't really moved much forward by the end of this issue from the place that it begins. Much of the time is spent kicking around what should be done about this human-shaped anomaly (named "Ano," as she doesn't seem to remember her name), and there's a substantial portion of the comic dedicated to the two women lying in bed together. While this might sound boring, or exploitative, it serves a very interesting function. Though ostensibly a comic about a rogue time anomaly agent, it's more properly a comic about dealing with a relationship that was completely unexpected, and takes one by surprise. Our focal character, Teddy, was certainly not expecting to fall for anyone; she outlines the fact that the future society within which she lives has even gone so far as to somehow remove the feeling of love from human interaction. So when we get these quiet moments, we're seeing a stylized representation of the experience of falling, unexpectedly, in love. And, though slow, these moments can be every bit as exciting as the more kinetic action sequences.

We'll follow Teddy and Ano's adventures a bit more tomorrow. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 280: The Infinite Loop #1, April 2015

I can't tell you why I picked up The Infinite Loop earlier this year. It's probably something to do with my love for a good time travel story. It's probably also something to do with Elsa Charretier's pseudo-Bruce Timm style, an aesthetic that I absolutely adore.

I can tell you, however, what kept me coming back: it's a bloody good story. There's time travel, reality paradoxes, zealous agents, endearing rebels, and some big, unabashed queer love. Reality maintenance agent Teddy falls in love with a gorgeous, purple-haired woman who appears as a time paradox, and goes on the run with her love from the agency for which she works.

I don't want to say too much about the story, because I think it's quite a lovely one that you should go and read. The artwork is beautiful, and the characterizations of the people we meet are really nicely fleshed out. I know that Marvel and DC have started to take little tiny strides toward a more representative gender diversity, but it's really nice to see a smaller company like I.D.W. presenting a no holds barred queer love story.

I will say, however, that the one thing that sort of irked me about this comic was, and continues to be, the top of the letter page. The creators of the comic are very interested in this being a place where queer people can come together, can talk about love and their experiences, but something about it seems really forced. I'm probably just being particular about the language used because, well, that's what I do and it's really hard to turn off. I'm not saying it's disingenuous in any way - in fact, I'm sure it's not. It just sounds...awkward. But maybe that's because it's just not something we see very often in comics, or on a letters page in a comic, and that awkwardness is just the birth pang of something important finding its way into the medium.

The series runs 6 issues, and if I can track down the last one some time in the next week or so, I'll give a full rundown of the series. See you tomorrow for issue 2.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 103: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #6, May 1989

Before reading today's comic, I took my son down to our local gaming store (The Sentry Box). While he was flipping through new D&D books, I had a look at the book section of the store. I was surprised to find a volume entitled Classic Dungeons & Dragons, published by I.D.W., that contained the first eight issues of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series. There were three more there collecting the complete series. My problem now is a mathematical one. Is it cheaper to buy the trades or the individual issues? Coupled with this conundrum is whether or not I'll be able to find all of the issues. Ah well. The concerns of the comic collector.

I've not much more to say about this storyline as yet. Both the praise and the problems I've outlined thus far with the series are still present. The Myrrth story is quite amusing, especially the Marty Feldman appearance as the leader of the Ancient and Revered Order of Merrymakers (the Jesters' Guild). A bit more of Vajra's backstory is filled in, by way of the mysterious Connor and his cat-child. One of the slight inconsistencies this time around was Vajra's behaviour while lost beneath the City of the Dead in Waterdeep. She begins to act quite petulantly, which Connor points out, and it's certainly not in keeping with her character as portrayed in the earlier issues. I'm sure this will be dealt with at some point, and the off-putting nature of the scene serves in some ways to add a bit of depth to characters that, as with any adventure-based comic, run the risk of descending into stereotype.

This issue, and the next, do afford me the opportunity to type something that I've never, ever typed before: Giant Undead Skeletal Jester.

That was satisfying. See you tomorrow.