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Showing posts with label John Stinsman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Stinsman. Show all posts

Apr 25, 2020

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1886: Scarlet Crush #2, February 1998

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 really hate series that don't ever have a conclusion. It's a sad fact of the way that comics are published that very often (very often) we'll get a few issues of a series, with promises of more to come, and then the comic simply disappears. Such is the case with John Stinsman's Scarlet Crush.

I really quite like this setting and these characters, though, as with many comics from the late 90s, I'm not entirely certain why the main female character has to have a costume that barely covers anything. Indeed, the flight suit that Icaria wears in this issue actually has a zipper that goes at least up to the underboob section of her anatomy, but she chooses instead to leave it open almost to the point of the happy trail. While flying. And fighting. I just don't get it. I mean, I do, because it's a reason to show a woman basically undressed doing cool things. But, and I've said this before, it completely detracts from the story itself. This is a tale of someone trying to rescue her father from a brutal race of aliens. In the first issue, Icaria is in her police outfit, and the story is quite intriguing, as is the setting. But once she quits the force and strips off her uniform, she becomes yet another scantily-clad lady superhero whose anatomy seems to trump any attention given to her personality.

The only time I've ever seen anything like this where the rampant almost nudity didn't detract from the story is the insane, gorgeous, amazing anime Kill La Kill. If you've not seen it, it's perhaps the most kinetic television series I've ever seen, and for a large portion of the series, the main protagonists, male and female, are mostly naked. The thing is, the story is so intriguing, and the ironic perspective on the nudity so much in the fore, that it virtually disappears into the action and narrative. It's hard to explain how it happens, but it does. While watching it, I told my offspring that this had happened (they'd seen it already), and they said it was a common reaction to the series, the loss of viewer focus on the nudity, in response the the absolute awesomeness of the story.

I like to think that, had we had more, Scarlet Crush might have done something similar. But there's really no way to tell.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

A couple of other really questionable looks at the female superhero form from Image comic can be found in my "Horror from the Dollar Bin" posts.

Apr 24, 2020

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1885: Scarlet Crush #1, January 1998

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.
 
 
https://www.comics.org/issue/2098491/ 

And back to the Awesome Universe for a bit, though a slightly different part of it than the superheroic bit we've been looking at lately.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this comic. I don't know John Stinsman's work, and a quick look at the GCD shows that he was involved in both the Avengelyne and Lady Pendragon series that Maximum and Image, respectively, put out. He's also the artist on Chapel, and on the single issue of Avengelyne that Awesome produced, which I'll get around to reading once I'm ready to read Avengelyne's non-continuity Avatar Press adventures. But let's focus on Scarlet Crush, shall we?

I get a heavy Star Wars vibe from this comic, likely because it involves our main character attempting to recruit a mercenary and his large companion for a mission at a seedy bar. Star Wars has reached a level in our culture in which it has become a touchstone, one that many will recognize when it's referenced, even tangentially, like it is today. The four main protagonists prepare to engage in a rescue mission when they are attacked by the evil characters in the series, the Tiamatians. For some etymology, Tiamat is an ancient Babylonian goddess associated with chaos, and is also a 5-headed dragon goddess in Dungeons & Dragons. It's probably even money as to which of these Mr. Stinsman drew inspiration from.

As I say, heavy Star Wars vibe, partially because this series is set in the future. The question I have is is this the future of the Awesome Universe, or is Scarlet Crush meant to take place in its own continuity? The reason I ask this is Prophet. I've waxed lyrical about the effect that Brandon Graham and company's amazing future superhero series has on its predecessors. In a very different way from Supreme, Prophet contextualizes the Extreme/Maximum/Awesome heroes by giving them a future. Though Lt. Icaria (the main character of Scarlet Crush) doesn't show up or get a mention (as far as I remember), her presence in what is ostensibly the future of the Awesome U means that she fits into this timeline somewhere. Given that Prophet takes place in a future so distant it's hard to imagine, the present series, at only 2 issues long, could rest comfortably in a temporal nook or cranny somewhere along the way.

Okay, last thing before this post gets too long: the costume and wings she sports on the cover? They never show in the comic. Icaria wears a police officer's uniform, albeit a mini-skirted one. I'm curious as to where this other costume comes from, when it will make its appearance, and whether it's a commentary on global warming, as it really looks like it might be a bit chilly to wear on Earth.

More to follow.

Apr 13, 2020

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1874: Chapel #1, September 1997

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.

  https://www.comics.org/issue/2098208/ 

How about a comic about one of my least favourite characters in all comics? Chapel is the most one-dimensional character I've ever read, created, as far as I can tell, solely to facilitate Spawn's origin story, and then dragged along because someone thought that a dude with a skull on his face that killed people was an awesome idea.

It's not. It's derivative as fuck, and, as I've said, is barely a character. But because I've decided to read through my Awesome Comics stuff, Chapel must be read.

To be fair, it kind of nicely dovetails with the Fighting American series I've just finished, as it takes place in a much more grim, and much more violent, corner of the Awesome Universe than most of the other stories. I've no doubt that such brutality is implicit in any superhero universe, but I felt that the point of the Awesome U was that it was much more Silver Age, much less prone to violence. And then Liefeld has to bring his early Image sensibility back in and ruin everything. Wait until we get to the sadly aborted Joe Casey Youngblood, in which Liefeld literally kicked the creative team off the book mid-story, produced one extremely mediocre issue afterward, and then the series collapsed. Why does he do this?

One interesting thing about this issue is that it tells the story of Chapel's last mission before being ordered to assassinate Al Simmons. They only ever call him "Al," which is nicely ambiguous given Spawn's ownership by Todd McFarlane, but it does fill in a blank from that character's history. But that's just the problem - this probably should have been a special issue of Spawn, not an attempt to add character to something that is basically a plot device.

Ah well. As I've said before, and will undoubtedly say again, you can't love them all.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts
 
More thoughts, though not that many, on Spawn.