Path: ...!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!feeds.news.ox.ac.uk!news.ox.ac.uk!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!news.eyrie.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: dvandom@eyrie.org (Dave Van Domelen) Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc Subject: Dave's Comics and Manga Capsules for August 2024 Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:46:07 -0000 (UTC) Organization: Coherent Comics UnInc Message-ID: Injection-Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:46:07 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: hope.eyrie.org; logging-data="8532"; mail-complaints-to="news@eyrie.org" X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010) Originator: dvandom@eyrie.org (Dave Van Domelen) Bytes: 31653 Lines: 472 Dave's Comicbook Capsules Et Cetera Generally Monthly Picks and Pans of Comics and Related Media Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups. Recommendation does not factor in price. Not all books will have arrived in your area this month. An archive can be found on my homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants My mortgage will be paid off before I post the next column. Items of Note (strongly recommended or otherwise worthy): Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 5 In this installment: Harley Quinn Season 3, Spy x Family vol 12, The Great Cleric vol 10, Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 5, Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 3, Delicious in Dungeon vol 8-10, Batman: Wayne Family Adventures vol 5, Godzilla: Monster Island Summer Camp, The Eternals by Jack Kirby: the Complete Collection, The Dusk, Lackadaisy vol 1-2, Fantastic Four #22, Vengeance of the Moon Knight #6-7 (of 8), Venomverse Reborn #2, My Adventures With Superman #2 (of 6), Gatchaman #1, Gatchaman Ken: Deathmatch, Gatchaman: Galactor #1 (of 4), Vampirella #670. "Other Media" Capsules: Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e. comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this section when I have any to mention. They may not be as timely as comic reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two (or ten) to get around to. Harley Quinn Season 3: DC/Max - Finally got around to this. I almost didn't watch it all, it started off pretty weak, with the cliche "happy couple from the end of last season has to fight and maybe break up" plot arc, plus some of the caricatures of the Bat-fam were a bit wearing. However, it did come together pretty well on the back half, and I particularly liked the Joker-focused episode that picked up his S2 "wife and kids" thing and kept doing "plausible but not quite expected" stuff with it. Ultimately, this season was overtly a parody but did come through with a lot of heart despite seeming to wallow in bathos and irony. It took years as a murderous henchwoman for Harley to become the therapist she'd never managed to be honestly prior to meeting the Joker. Recommended. Lots of swearing and blood, but nudity is censored. Price varies by format and store, also available on streaming if you're willing to get HBOMax. Digital Content: Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column. Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for reading online or for download, usually for pay. I will also occasionally include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze sometimes. Nothing this month. Manga Collections: With manga collections coming to dominate my reading habits, I decided to formally split them off from Trades (informally they'd already been split for a while). Spy x Family vol 12: Viz - I've probably said it before, but it bears repeating: the Anya-focused stories, especially Anya around just other kids, bug the crap out of me. And that's something of a compliment, because I think that the telepathic kid is one of the most realistic characters in the whole story...it just makes it clear to me that I really should not raise children. I'm fine around kids when they're someone else's responsibility, but sooner or later they will act like Anya does here, and...ugh. Okay, they probably wouldn't plot world domination, but no guarantees. Fortunately, Anya is a fairly minor presence in this volume, it just feels like she's all up in it. In fact, the first story is about Twilight's supervisor, the elegant lady on the cover of this volume...who is a total slob at home. She gets a dog so that she can meet Twilight at the dog park for an info drop, and I get the impression that this is gonna be a Cat + Gamer situation going forwards in terms of impacting her life in weird ways. The next big chunk of story involves Yor getting the mistaken impression that having TOO happy a home life is suspicious, so she keeps trying to manufacture drama with Loid so she can be Normal. Very sitcom, but with the very real possibility of death or serious injury, especially when Yuri mistakes his for actual problems in the relationship. (No normal person would take away that message, but this is Yuri Briar.) But the sitcom gets put on hold when an emergency spy thing comes up for both Loid and Yuri...and Loid's somewhat yandere coworker who still thinks she can get a Happily Ever After with him. Yeah, this is gonna be a royal mess, isn't it? Recommended. $11.99/ $15.99Cn/#8.99UK Rated Older Teen (a lot of violence and a little innuendo). The Great Cleric vol 10: Kodansha - The establishment of the new Healers' Guild hall continues, including some rather overpowered dwarven magic in the process. While the overall theme of "treating people decently can get a surprising amount of loyalty from them" continues, Luciel gets multiple warnings that he may be going too far in that direction, both in terms of putting himself in too much risk and losing his ability to project authority as he's seen as too soft. Despite having been in his thirties before getting Isekai'ed, Luciel is really starting to feel that he's young again, since the growing up he did the first time was suited for a completely different society. A lot of his markers of maturity come across as naivete or impracticality in a world of magic and monsters. However, it's not yet a matter of "kindness coming back to bite him," just warnings to avoid going too far down that path. Even if he's fated to change the world, he still has to live in it until it changes. Recommended. $12.99/$16.99Cn, rated Older Teen 16+ (more a case of mature topics like slavery than violence or sex stuff) Mr. Villain's Day Off vol 5: Square Enix Manga - Mostly more of the same as in the last few volumes, although a few new characters from the alien invasion force get introduced, and we find that his tail in Job Mode is actually part of a symbiote he wears as a cloak (the claws on his shoulders aren't just aesthetic, they're the cloak's hands). Some more of the oddities of the aliens' plight come out as well, such as siblings who are forced to timeshare a body because one of them is actually in hibernation awaiting the colonization. Yeah, a lot of the alien invaders are monstrous in appearance and personality, but it looks more and more like they just picked their nastiest sorts to handle the nasty business of invasion and displacement of humanity, not that they're any worse than humanity on average. Makes sense, once you've committed to genocide as the only way to save your own people, you don't want to put the plan in the hands of people who will vacillate (although the General is finding he's not quite so dedicated to the plan as he initially thought). Continues to be amusing and mostly light-hearted but sometimes poignant "what people do between the fights in a super sentai setting." Recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn, rated Teen (some violence, implied torture, the whole "genocide humanity" background thing) The Way of the Househusband vol 12: Viz Media/Viz Signature - "We've finally crossed the 100-chapter mark. Time doesn't progress in this manga, whereas in the real world, my Shiba Inu and I are both puzzled by our aging." - Kousuke Oono, back matter of this volume. I'd dispute the idea that time doesn't progress at all, but there's definitely the "comic book time" thing going on here, where no one really ages, even if they do have character development, and characters enter and leave the story. But much like a syndicated cartoon in the 1980s, the only real markers of time are character introductions...once they're in the story, the episodes where they appear can happen in almost any order. These slice of (odd) life stories don't have much continuity beyond that, and some seasonal markers like the Halloween trick or treating in this volume. Does it happen before or after a Christmas story in another volume? Doesn't really matter, so long as it happens after he's already met everyone in the story. There may be some other ordering hints, such as the mob boss lady wearing the "I (heart) CATS" shirt means this happens after the story in which she found she loves cats. All in all, while very little is nailed down to a set of years, as Oono notes, there is still the feeling of the passage of time, of character development. The illusion of change is handled very well. Recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn/ #10.99UK, rated Older Teen (themes of crime, some people being scary in inappropriate situations) Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. vol 3:Viz Media/Viz Signature - There's been hints the last two volumes about the Deep Reason Shigemoto founded the company, that it's not just to try out new stuff in a nimble startup company...there's a motive for NEEDING to try things that the big magical girl companies won't. And while that doesn't quite get spelled out (pun not intended, ow) this volume, a strong case could be made for at least one theory based on what we see in the third main story of the volume. (The first finishes off the fashionista magical girl story, the second is the origin story of how the codemonkey joined Magilumiere, the third is a big trade show where a dog and pony show goes awry.) There's also a strong case made for three major schools of thought in magical girl work: just get the job done efficiently, make sure everyone sees you smile and takes heart while you do the job, and Magilumiere's "aesthetic" which is more about considering the whole situation and the needs of the client beyond just "get rid of the kaii monsters." It does also seem like the beginnings of ensh...er, "platform decay" may be setting in among the leaders of the field, or even a cavalier disregard for the possibility that they're just masking symptoms while making things even worse in the long run. Still very much a "rookie professional trying to find her place in a competitive field" story, but it does seem to be slowly gearing up for the kind of apocalypse found in many mahou shoujo stories. Like, what if the season finale of Ally McBeal involved the possible destruction of the world by demons? But that's a problem for future volumes, there's only the hints of foreshadowing right now. The main threat at the moment is "can passion for one's work survive, or must it be crushed in the name of doing the job well?" Recommended. $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK, rated Teen. Delicious in Dungeon vol 8-10: Yen Press - Whoo. The Secrets of Dungeons are revealed, as well as the reason by Dark Magic is so forbidden. In fact, there's two layers of revelation, and I got the strong feeling that even the deeper secrets were still not quite true. In the spirit of revelation, the rest of the gang gets their motivations laid out by the end of vol 10, mostly pretty noble but likely to pave the road to apocalypse. As one does. Some of the recipes are a little goofy this time, with the writer playing around with the idea a bit...perhaps this is also meant to mirror how the dungeon itself is starting to change and get more dangerous and less sensible. Recommended. $15.00/$19.50Cn each, rated Teen plus Language and ========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========