What I Bought 5/8/2019 - Part 1

The books I ordered from last month showed up yesterday. I had the day off today - let's hear it for state holidays - and while running other errands grabbed almost every book I wanted from the first two weeks of this month. Oddly, the only one I couldn't find was the third issue of Domino: Hotshots. Strange.

There was one series that I managed to get the first two issues of between all this, so let's start with it.

Bronze Age Boogie #1 and 2, by Stuart Moore and Tyrone Finch (writers), Alberto Ponticelli and Mauricet (artists), Giulia Brusco and Lee Loughridge (colorists), Rob Steen (letterer) - Somehow I feel you're going to need a better approach than stabbing to deal with Martian war machines.

There are two different primary stories in these issues. Finch, Mauricet, and Loughridge are working on one about a bear that gets sent into space in an imaginary rocket, and gains super-intelligence from cosmic rays. But the U.S. military guy keeps treating him like he's just a dumb test animal, which frustrates "Elvis", considering that he's designed an all new spacecraft. It seems like some country music singer would be more appropriate to use as inspiration for a bear's name, but oh well.

The concept feels like something out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon - super-smart astronaut bear frustrates uptight military guy - but it's played with the bear as the guy in the disaster movie who seems the catastrophe coming, but gets ignored by the higher-ups. Mauricet's art and Loughridge's colors help with this, because it gives a style which is cartoonish enough that a talking bear in a USAF tank top doesn't look out of place, but not so exaggerated that it can work for the more menacing aspects.

I didn't know this back-up story was even going to be in this comic, but I'm enjoying it more than I would have expected if you'd just described the outline of it to me.

The main story is the Moore/Ponticelli/Brusco one, where Martians are somehow attacking Earth simultaneously in 1975 B.C. and 1975 A.D. Brita is a barbarian princess who has a friend who is a talking chimp timelost from the 1970s (A.D.), and she somehow gets transported to that time, where she teams up with Lynda Darrk and Jackson Li (checking the "Blaxploitation heroine" and "martial arts guy" boxes). There's also some sort of time travel group run by a chimp lady in a wheelchair, but they haven't actually done anything useful so far.

This one is not clicking with me as well as I would like. Probably should not surprise me - none of the genres it's using are ones I'm a huge fan of - but I don't think that's the problem. The first issue spent almost all of its time on Brita, her world, her life, the fact she was having visions of a mysterious woman. That worked pretty well for me once I understood why a barbarian girl was using phrases like "Zoinks!", and "Don't squeeze the Charmin."

The second issue feels like it goes too fast. We're barely introduced to Lynda Darrk and see her and Brita begin to interact, before they've crashed into Jackson Li's home and then we're introduced to them. And then it's on to trying to confront the Martian leader. I'd just like a little more time for each thing to get to have an impact before we move on to the next thing. I know that's a tricky act to balance, and it's going to vary between readers, but that's the best I can figure for why the second issue didn't land as well as the first.

Ponticelli's characters are mostly your typical muscly barbarian types in the distant past, and then everyone in the '70s is more wiry, lean muscle, if that. It also feels like he simplified his style a bit between the first and second issues, or went lighter on the extra lines. Even Brita looks younger and less intense in the second issue than the first. Not sure why that would be, she didn't fall into a vat of moisturizer when she was somehow brought to the future by a miniature disco ball. I like the design for the Martians' war machines. Reminds me a bit of the things that would prowl around in the real world in The Matrix, with all the tentacles and mechanical eyes.

There's also one or two text stories sprinkled in each issue. One about some bizarre collection of animals that keep getting Animal Control called on them, another about how to fight writer's block through such tactics as drugs and plagiarism. They're kind of funny. It may just be that this stuff is too before my time for me to get it, exactly.

So at this point, I don't know whether I'll get issue 3. Probably, not like the list of stuff I'm buying is overflowing, but it may just come down to whether I find it or not.