What I Bought 6/12/2021

Well, it's been summer weather here for over a week now and I completely hate it. But what else is new? I knew I was going to hate the heat and humidity once it arrived, and I do. In other news, this month is all over the map on comics. Four I wanted the first week, one last week, nothing this week. Which should mean 7 the last two weeks of the month, hopefully. So here's the one from last week, and one from two weeks ago.

Freak Snow #1, by Kevin Roditeli (writer) and Robin Cannon (writer/artist/letterer) - That definitely looks like someone I want carrying a firearm. Unfrozen Slack-Jawed Yokel.

Set in some iceworld apocalypse, the story focuses on Berny, who has somehow survived, drinks a cocktail of beer and the blood of something called a Smarg, and talks to a beer can and an old cartoon robot toy. He claims he fought three guys, but they were actually women, and one of them was the daughter he thought got eaten by a Smarg 8 years ago, and she shot him, but she's alive, so that's good.

The beer can raises the possibility that Berny's memories of his wife and child's deaths my be inaccurate, and they can't very well have a woman-killer as part of the woman-protecting defense force. He's got to prove he's innocent. The robot's cartoon apparently had an episode with a "hole of truth", and Berny's sure he knows where one of those is, so they go there and he jumps into it.

This wasn't quite what I was expecting. Not in a bad sense, just more focused on the disintegration of a single person than I thought it would be. It might be funny, if Berny wasn't so pathetic, a wild-eyed, wobbly-looking shell of a person. Cannon's art style is very loose, like a much more exaggerated Kyle Baker, maybe. At times, I think he's using continuous contour line drawing, where the person draws without ever lifting the pencil. (I remembered that was a thing, but I had to look the term up). Huge, uneven eyes and skin folds that run into jawlines. It's like a scribble that managed to pull itself into a coherent drawing through gravity. 

It certainly works for making Berny look unhinged, but sometimes I can't entirely tell what's going on. When Cannon whites out an area to show the flight of a bullet, or smoke drifting from a gun. I guess you could argue that Berny's perceptions of things is pretty sketchy, so it should be a mess.

Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon #6, by Larry Hama (writer), David Wachter (artist), Neeraj Menon (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - Ah, I see the Wakandans have perfected their boob armor. State of the art, no doubt.

The heroes' attempt to stop the undead dragon's not going well. Okoye needs a little more power, which means, yep, the baby dragon has to die, too. Then Danny goes ahead and gives her the Iron Fist chi while he's at it. Cripes, he passes that stuff around like it's a common cold. Okoye kills the dragon, but here's the Heirophant, but she kills him as well, after making a comment about how her hubris may kill her. But then she just stabs him with the spear and punches him the chest with the Iron Fist, so I'm not sure what that realization did for her. Get her to wait for him to attack, rather than charge in?

Day is saved, dragon hearts return to their cities, Gork is reborn as an egg. The Brenda lady is left blinded and still swearing vengeance, but Danny won't let her be killed. OK, not sure what Hama's point was using her at all. She didn't really do anything of significance, since Taskmaster could clearly have killed the dragons just as easily. She never got any sort of a showdown with Danny.

Danny tells Okoye she can't give him the Iron Fist back which, bullshit. Danny's taken it back from people in the past, so clearly if he gave it to her, she can give it to him. But, sure fine, whatever. She gives the chi to the egg that'll hatch as Gork one of these days, and Danny's apparently done being Iron Fist now. Right, pull the other one. There's been at least three other mini-series where Danny either loses the Iron Fist, or has lost it, or lost his purpose in the last 20 years. 

 

Man, I was so excited about this mini-series after the first issue, and it let me down so, so badly. I've mentioned multiple times the way there seems to be a lot of pointless running around, but I do not see what Hama's going for at all here. Take the Fist off Danny? I thought Kaare Andrews' Iron Fist series already did that 7 years ago, or at least Pei was the one training to be Iron Fist and Danny was her teacher. That was definitely the impression I got when they showed up in Black Cat, with Pei socking Beetle all over the place and calling Danny "Thunderer".