Comic Quotes Should Be Good

You see the list of blogs on the side of this site? All of them fine blogs where folks talk about comic books. I occasionally feel a bit bad that I do not pimp the blogs on the sidebar enough. So I have to decided to now do a weekly thing where I pick out ten cool quotes from those blogs about current comics during the past week. I cannot promise that my picks will be thorough, or even the best quotes. They are just quotes that made me laugh or smile or say, "Good line." Please note that I love the people who write on this here blog (Comis Should Be Good). I think that they often have many good lines. That is why I asked them to write here, because they are fun for me to read. But it seems a bit too self-serving to quote any of them here, so I will not. But be assured that I think they are all quite good.

Let's begin!

Shawn Hoke, at Size Matters, describing Paulette Poullet's "Life’s a Cakewalk,"

When her bus finally arrives, she gets a good seat isolated from the other riders. Then a talkative guy gets on and sits right next to her annoying her for the rest of the trip. She mistakenly wears a red sweater on Valentine’s Day. She gets attacked by her cat, who is normally eleven pounds of pure fun. She’s annoyed by the people on her television. This is you. This is me. There’s nothing spectacular, but again, this is you. This is me. There’s a lot of us in this diary comic. So you keep reading.

Kevin gives a great summary for NYC Mech Volume One,

I can see why Brian Azzarello's endorsement is so prominently displayed on the back of the new NYC Mech Volume One: Let's Electrify collection, as fans of his own work, along with another Brian (Wood), would find much to appreciate in this pleasingly minimal, well-constructed look at the underbelly of a cybernetic city that never sleeps. Writers Ivan Brandon and Miles Hunter do a admirable job of using New York as a platform to create a new city where androids may walk the street instead of humans, but greed, lust, and jealousy still form every second of this city's life.

Joe Rice, of Listen To Us, We're Right, had this to say (granted, it was not on his actual blog, but whatever) about Fin Fang Four,

Fin Fang Four was fun. Nice, early-Mad-ish art, simple but funny story, some metacommentary ...this didn't really set out to move mountains, but it accomplished what goals it had perfectly. This makes up for last week's laaaaame Where Monsters Dwell. Eric Powell covers should not wrap crap. Fin Fang Four is fun, though.

I just LOVED that Powell line. Sooo true.

The Comics Shrew helps explain why I have been enjoying Anderson Gabrych's Batgirl so much,

Andersen Gabrych, with the same aplomb he took with Tarantula II and, well, most of the other guano, doesn't completely rescue the Daughters of the Demon. But he does rescue the girls from looking like they got picked up in the Supermarket Sweep bonus round that was the gathering of the Secret Society of Supervillains. Nyssa has a plan. And it makes sense. In a perverted, impractical-because-genocide-is-never-the-best-answer kind of way.

Sean Maher has a good take on "Will You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed?"

A lot of the vibe here will strike a chord with readers who are in Happy Relationships, or who enjoy romantic comedies. It's optimistic, it's sweet, it's goddamn gleeful.

So, yeah, if you're alone and bitter, this is either going to piss you off all to hell or leave you a sobbing, Radiohead-listening wreck.

Mark Fossen ALMOST makes Infinite Crisis sound palpatable (almost...hehe...still, he should be commended for that),

It has a grand scope, and Geoff Johns effectively races through the apocalypse. He neatly introduces most of the threads that have been building in the various miniseries, and introduces some new wrinkles. There's definitely some fat that could be trimmed (see Mongul) and some ham-fisted expository dialogue (see the Trinity on the moon). There's also some moments of wonder, where the page opens up and we see the immensity of the situation. I don't know where things are going or what's going to happen, but it feels already like events are afoot that will deliver on the hype. And that's why I'm buying it: the concepts and situations. There's room for a lot of stories in the superhero genre, but one is the Story Of Ideas. It's been said that in true science fiction, it's the idea that's the protagonist, not the character. The same can be said of crossover events, and I don't mind some character missteps or awkward storytelling if the meaty ideas in the center are good.

Jog points out a cool facet of Klarion #4,

And even after hitting the blue rafters, he encounters children who’re sent off to the awful Red Place as soon as they are grown, in something of a twisted mirror image of Klarion’s own home situation. But Morrison understands the implications of such a course of action, and he’s not advocating that we just remain children forever; indeed, Guardian #4 is filled with suggestion as to the inevitability of maturity, but it must be maturity of the right kind. The hero must be an enlightened adult, and this journey to new, superheroic adulthood forms the core of the project’s structural makeup and schema for character development. The eager reader might even want to contrast this developmental set-up to the turgid 'maturity' of the sorts of contemporary superhero books that Morrison is prone to criticizing; these might be grown-up, but not in a pleasing way at all, and now there will be an alternative.

Tom Foss, describing a problem of The Rann/Thanagar War,

"Show, don't tell" is typically the cardinal rule of literature. Unfortunately, there was a lot of telling in Rann-Thanagar, and we sure could have used a scorecard to tell who was where at what time and on what side. I couldn't tell you who the Okaarans were fighting with as opposed to the Durlans, and a dozen other worlds were involved. I really wanted to like this story, but it was a twelve-issue maxiseries, cut up and randomly assembled into a six-issue miniseries.

Tom the Dog has a great message to send to DC,

I've always liked Green Lantern... theoretically; in practice, I've never really been a regular reader, but I like the character well enough when I encounter him in group books, like JLA. So I thought I would try the first issue of Hal Jordan's new series, and the first issue of the Corps series. Mistake, both times. These books -- and to a certain extent, all the big-name DC titles -- are encumbered by an insurmountably arcane history of continuity and such a vast legion of obscure supporting characters that they're completely inscrutable even to someone like me, who's been reading comics pretty much weekly for almost two decades. Throw in the crossover events on top of it all, and almost the entire superhero lineup of DC is nigh unreadable to a less-than-hopelessly devoted fan.

For example, if I wanted to read and properly understand and enjoy the first issue of Infinite Crisis (which I don't), I first would have to be familiar with its preceding mini-series Villains United, Omac Project, Rann/Thanagar War, Day of Vengeance, and even Adam Strange, as well as the one-shot Countdown to Infinite Crisis, plus the regular JLA, Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman comics (at the very least -- possibly also Green Lantern, Flash, JSA, and others), and be more than passingly familiar with Crisis on Infinite Earths, a mega-crossover event from 20 years ago, which tied into the continuity of basically the entire history of DC superhero comics.

Sure, I could do that. Or -- here's a thought -- maybe DC Comics can kiss my ass instead.

Finally, last, but CERTAINLY not least, here is David Welsh, with an interesting take on She-Hulk #1,

As happy as I am to see this title return, I’m a bit worried that writer Dan Slott is suffering from a surplus of conscientiousness. After reintroducing his cast and their workplace (the super-human law division of Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg, & Holliway), Slott then seems headed towards an attempted reconciliation of his She-Hulk (funny, independent, smart) with everyone else’s (a gamma-irradiated plot device who can reliably generate wholesale destruction when things get too talky). I like this book because it’s an oasis from the maudlin doings of the rest of Marvel’s line, and I’m not particularly interested in a dissection of the counterpoint. There are plenty of good bits, like She-Hulk’s don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you encounter with the New Avengers, but all of the tethers to Marvel’s grim plotlines aren’t very encouraging.

That was fun!

A lot of good comic reviews this past week. The only thing left, of course, is for all of you folks to keep it up NEXT week, so I have some more choice quotes to pick!

See you then!

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