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PIPELINE COMMENTARY AND REVIEW #37
15 February 1998
by Augie De Blieck Jr.
http://www.nic.com/~augie/pipeline
UPDATE: I'm back on USENET. Thanks to some brave souls (including Todd,
Kate, Justin, and Craig - thanks, guys!) for pointing me some ways; for
showing me some tricks; for explaining some long-thought-lost knowledge.
In the end, I'm sticking with Forte Free Agent, but have discovered most of
the keyboard shortcuts for it, and can whip through the newsgroups in
decent time. (The time, I'm convinced, will get shorter as I
ignore/killfile more and more. =)
TRANSMETROPOLITAN #8 by Warren Ellis and Darick Roberston contains the best
work of their careers. Don't be stupid; buy this book. I don't have the
room to go into it this week, but it's bloody brilliantly done and should
provide an easy crossover to people who just consider themselves
science-fiction fans, but not necessarily comic fans.
Scott McCloud's long-anticipated THE NEW ADVENTURES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
finally came out this week. It needs consideration on more than one front.
There is the format front, the artistic front, and the story front. First,
it's a graphic novel, with a story 129 pages in length. I think this is
something which should be supported. More and more, I think the answer to
a great many problems in the comic book world lies in graphic novels and
trade paperbacks. It allows creators to tell complete stories all in one
shot. It allows book stores and comic book stores to sell books with
better profit margins. The price point (this one is $20) might be a bit
worrisome, but that just means more products will rely on word of mouth to
survive on their relative merits, instead of insipid loyalty, either to a
creator or to a character. It would probably also mean less would be
published. I doubt you'd get the equivalent of the dozen mutant titles
Marvel puts out now, if things came out less often in thicker formats.
(Although knowing Marvel, they'd miss the point completely and still use
fill-in artists and writers in the middle of a graphic novel.)
Second is the artistic front. McCloud uses computer-generated backgrounds
and lettering and coloring in this book. Sometimes it works, sometimes it
doesn't. I'm taking a Computer Graphics course at school right now and am
a big Babylon 5 fan. So I've seen a lot of computer graphics. While I
haven't studied the subject formally in any artistic vein, I like to think
I know what works. And, not to repeat myself but, some of it does and some
of it doesn't. There are some glorious images in the book, such as the
dinosaurs and the interior of the Capitol Dome. More often than not,
though, the computer really shines when it's doing more coloring and less
modelling. There's a scene in which the protagonist, Johnson, is seen in
his bedroom late at night. The blues used in the two-page sequence are
perfectly done. The texturing is done extremely well. And the following
page with the big screaming close-up on Abe Lincoln is appropriately scary.
But there is still in a great many scenes the dissonance between the
computer generated images with the hand-drawn images of the characters in
the foreground. Even with what I assume is PhotoShop ray-tracing
skillfully making reflections of the characters in all the right spots,
there are times when the two styles collide and just look completely out of
their elements.
Storywise, I'm tempted to sit here in front of you and say how much I just
enjoyed the third issue of UNCLE SAM, but I think I'll stay away from that.
My opinion of the book has wavered back and forth some in the days since I
read it. It may change again before next week. If you stay away from a
couple of the usual cheap shots at Republicans (after all, they are the
party of Lincoln, so they are the ones who suffer the most from the grand
delusions present in the book right, Newt? Sheesh), the book has a real
message behind it. Stop taking the easy way out and ignoring the messages
behind the icons and the speeches and the famous parts of American History.
It isn't black and white. At the risk once more of repeating myself, I'm
an American History minor. I know that. Nixon wasn't the devil and JFK
wasn't the second coming. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was a brilliant
memorial to the fallen soldiers of war, not a line to be memorized and
cheered completely out of context for its fame. So the message is true,
even if some of the ways in which McCloud felt the need to get there were
completely out of whack.
There are some endearing characters, and some moments of great wit and
humor. But, in the end, when I was done reading it, I just put it down and
moved on. It didn't excite me. It didn't move me. It didn't provoke too
many reactions, other than the political leanings described above. I have
no real desire to go back to read it and sing its praises. I don't even
know, given the price tag attached to it, if I could honestly recommend
this book to my friends.
-Augie
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