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| Saturday, April 21, 2007 02:37 PM |
| Book Trader Books |
 by Fëanor |
Here's a group of books I picked up recently at the cool used book store The Book Trader, near 2nd and Market in Philly, when I was wandering around looking for something to do between film festival movies.
Batman: Scar of the Bat - This short graphic novel attracted my attention because I recognized the author (Max Allan Collins again), and because the concept was great: Batman during Prohibition (he's actually shown in an overcoat blasting away with a gat on the cover). Yep, it's one of DC's Elseworld books, where they get to explore various interesting "What if?" scenarios. This time, it's "What if Batman had fought Al Capone during the '20s alongside Elliott Ness and his Untouchables?" Clearly Max Allan Collins is obsessed with writing historical fiction set during this period. Anyway, the story is mainly pretty standard cop and gangster stuff, based on real events and real characters, but with the Batman inserted into the story as a mysterious rogue enforcer on the side of the cops. The art is also pretty standard stuff; not mind-blowing, but perfectly serviceable. Collins attacks the material with what I'm starting to feel like is his usual lack of flare, taking a really interesting concept and sucking almost all the life out of it. It doesn't help that I'm not a big fan of the oddly misplaced pun that's at the center of the piece: Batman fights the mobsters with a baseball bat, and is thus literally a bat man.
I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh on Collins. This book isn't really bad, it's just not really as interesting as it could be, and it's very wordy and everything is over-explained. I don't hate Max Allan Collins, and I probably won't deliberately avoid his work in the future, but I'm also definitely not going to deliberately seek it out.
Punisher: No Escape - I'm not terribly familiar with the Punisher, but I'm fascinated by the character, and this looked like an interesting book with some interesting cameos from other Marvel characters, so I picked it up. It turns out to be a story about mob guys getting bumped off by their boss, which would normally be A-okay with the Punisher, except that the innocent families of the mob guys are also getting killed, and the Punisher doesn't approve of that kind of thing. So he begins an investigation into who's ultimately behind all the killings. The mob chief doesn't like him nosing around, and hires another superhero to kill him: Paladin. (Unfortunately, I know even less about Paladin than I do about the Punisher so this didn't mean much to me.) Also getting involved in the whole conflict is a sort of second-rate Captain America who calls himself US Agent, and who works for a rather shadowy government agency called the Commission for Superhuman Affairs. This was one of the more interesting parts of the story, as it's suggested that the Commission may really be under the control of the mob, and that they had sort of brainwashed US Agent into doing what they want. By the end of the story, US Agent looks like he's ready to walk out on them. Unfortunately, there isn't much else all that interesting going on in the book; the art is dull, and the dialogue and narration rather melodramatic and clumsy. Still, it's okay for what it is, and helped me kill some time, for which I'm grateful.
Death Dealer - When I realized that this book (from a rather questionable-sounding publisher called Verotik) was written by Glen Danzig, with art, characters, and story inspired by the work of famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta, I just couldn't resist; I had to buy it. And it delivers pretty much the experience you might expect from this kind of collaboration: lots of gory fantasy-themed violence, with magic helmets and axes and ogres and trolls and nude cat-women and demons and horses. Also, lots of exclamation points. It's pretty fantastic, really. It reads - especially at the end - like an introduction to a series, but it doesn't look like said series was ever created. Interestingly enough, however, a completely different comic book mini-series based on the character of the Death Dealer (but not written by Glen Danzig, alas) has apparently just been started by Image Comics. I just might have to track that down... |
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