What I Bought 1/3/2018 - Part 2

Alex and I watched a couple of different stand-up specials on Netflix recently, and I never want to see another comedian complaining about how people get too easily offended these days. Not that I expected better from Joe Rogan, but I did think Dave Chappelle wouldn't go that route, especially after he spent all that time on a bit about how good he is at coming up with jokes. Then it shouldn't be that hard to come up with some that don't punch down, should it?

Giant Days #33, by John Allison (writer), Max Sarin (penciler), Liz Fleming (inker), Whitney Cogar (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Hear no Embarrassing Disaster, see no embarrassing disaster, speak no, aw forget it.

With Daisy and Susan moving in with their significant others, with reservations, Esther is scrambling to find new roommates. But hey, there's Ed, also trying to find a place. He recognizes that Extreme Bros would be a terrible experience, but turns down Esther's offer. Then he ends up accepting Dean's offer to live with a bunch of coders who mine cryptocurrency, but not before helping Esther move in as well. And Ed makes sure she gets the nice room, while he takes the glorified closet.

Things are in a death spiral for several characters. Esther is running out of people to rely on, Ed's going to wreck himself hoping for Esther to confess feelings for him rather than just getting it over with and telling her how he feels. Daisy's doing the same thing with Ingrid (see her open admission to Susan they were hiding in her makeshift room, and her uncertain face when she says, 'If you can't beat them, join them!'). Susan seems to be doing the best, as she and McGraw seem to have found a good equilibrium. But she's worried she's committing to being an adult too soon. It doesn't seem as though any of them have figured out balance. What am I saying, of course they haven't. They're college kids. The fuck they know about balance? I'm considerably older than them and I still can't seem to find a good balance between time spent alone and time spent with friends.

Requisite paragraph gushing about the art: Sarin having Esther keep collapsing into the face on the floor position at each setback was pretty good. Daisy got a slight variation of it on the last page as she collapsed on the couch, which seems to indicate a similar level of unhappiness and isolation in the two of them. Also, Sarin draws the backgrounds with the same wobbly lines he draws the frazzled Daisy with. And in the panel where Esther first reaches out to her, the squiggly lines start just on the other side of Daisy, as if we're entering a zone of altered reality caused by her mental state. Actually, that may just be part of someone's coat hanging up in the background, but screw you, I'm saying it's a deliberate move.

And the panel of Ed's nightmare vision of Dean was beautifully colored, the pink glow of the computer monitors, contrasting with the maw of Dean's mouth. Sarin and Fleming even drew in the taste buds on the tongue of the giant, sharp-toothed Dean. It's just a nice, horrifying image.

Anyway, there will undoubtedly be many tears in the near future, though I can't predict at all who they're going to come from.

Copperhead #17, by Jay Faerber (writer), Drew Moss (artist), Ron Riley (colorist), Thomas Mauer (letterer) - Human Resources is going to need to have a talk with Interim Mayor Budroxificus.

Ishmael's attempt to protect Zeke doesn't go well, as he gets beaten to a pulp by Clay. The Sheriff is explaining how she wound up with Zeke and Clay's money, and the sequence of events is not what I expected. Wasn't what her captor expected either, but that lady is dead now, so her expectations don't count for much any longer. Mayor Boo is tracking Mr. Hickory to some clandestine meeting. And by the end, the Sheriff has caught up to Clay, who she probably should have just shot when she had the chance.

Surprising revelation in this issue comes from Interim Sheriff Ford telling a possible informant he can do anything he wants because he is human, white, and a cop. I knew humans in this universe tended to hold themselves at the top, certainly compared to the "arties" or Budroxificus' species. And cops are seemingly all conditioned to believe they can do whatever they please. I'm surprised, though, that being white still matters in this particular fictional universe. I guess crackers didn't see any reason to knock that shit off once they had other sentient species to discriminate against.

There's a few panels in here, when Moss draws people in profile, where his artwork reminds me a bit of Greg Capullo's. In the faces mostly. The panel in the lower left there, for one. He uses a little lighter linework than he normally does, but it might also be Riley's coloring. The skin tones remind me of Capullo's time drawing Batman in the last few years. It doesn't carry over from one panel to another, so it's a brief, abrupt surprise.

The fight between Clay and Ishmael is handled differently from Clara's fight with the assassin in the conclusion of the last arc. A lot fewer speed lines, and Moss doesn't focus on the impacts as much. In that earlier fight, there were a lot of panels of the moment a hit landed. Here, he seems to draw the moment before the hit lands, or simply doesn't show the impact. Because for Clay, Ishmael is ultimately irrelevant. Not because he's an artificial human (or not only that), but because, as Clay describes during the beating, he's naturally tough and mean. He likes hurting people, doesn't really matter who. He killed Missus Sewell without a second thought, simply because she was near his son. It's all in service of his goal, and that's all that matters to him.

Well, I certainly hope Clara choosing not to simply shoot Clay in the back doesn't come back to bite everyone in the butt next issue.