SF/F Commentary

Now that I have this magic tablet thing, I’ve been able to take advantage of all the lovely stuff floating around on ComiXology (a comic store/reading app).  And since I’m now a comic book nut, I figure it’s fair to toss some more reviews at you all. The first of my ComiXology reviews is for Action Lab’s preview collection, featuring excerpts from PrinceLess (Whitley, Goodwin, and Kim), Double Jumpers (Dwonch and Blankenship), Jack Hammer (Barrows and Ionic), Jetta:  Tales of Toshigawa (Wade, Wade, and Williams), Fracture (Gabborin, Cicconi, and Dwonch), Space-Time Condominium (Dwonch), Glob World (Freeman, Strutz, and Garcia), Monsters Are Just Like Us (Super Ugly), Exo-1 and the Rocksolid Steelbots (Pryor, Besenyodi, and Logan), Back in the Day (Dwonch and Logan), and Snowed In (Lundeen).  I won’t talk about all of these in much detail for obvious reasons (so many excerpts!).  Generally, I was unimpressed by the lot.  The best of these eleven comics barely rates as “something you’d use as filler.”  Some of them are awful precisely because they play into stereotypes best served “dead.”  Basically, even though I had no expectations when I went in, I came out extremely disappointed. Here’s the breakdown: PrinceLess (2/5) The basic premise for this comic seems to be this:  princess is trapped in tower; male suitors come to “rescue her”; princess insults them and uses the abuse (and a dragon) to send them on their way.  The idea is cute enough.  I like the reversal of the princess-in-the-tower trope, especially when that reversal comes with a large side of feminist anger.  However, I also find it difficult to enjoy what is clearly a patriarchal universe (something readily apparent in one of the full issues), especially when we’re supposed to accept verbal abuse as a legitimate attack on those structures, despite the fact that the “Princess” never leaves the tower in this particular excerpt.  It just didn’t work for me. Double Jumpers (0/5) Sexism and gaming culture. Why do they so often go hand in hand? Why can’t we have respectful portrayals of women and female bodies in the game world? Such are the fundamental problems with David Dwonch and Bill Blankenship’s Double Jumpers. The excerpt opens in a bar — if you’re expecting one of those “an accountant, a black guy, and a sexy redheaded intern walk into a bar” jokes, then you’ll thankfully find yourself disappointed here, though the setup seems to have been deliberate.  From there, everything goes downhill.  Well, actually, it was already at the bottom of the hill when it started; in the first few panels, one of the main characters does the following:  1) complains about someone else’s girlfriend; 2) proclaims that she is a bitch, but that he’d still “hit that” (direct quote); and 3) essentially hints that the redheaded intern’s value is derived from her ability to bring him beer.  Oh, and it doesn’t get better from there.  Shortly after, the same character acts as the butt of one of the oldest gaming jokes since the invention of female gaming characters:  guy wants to play big burly man warrior, but gets stuck playing the sexy warrior chick in skimpy clothes (boob grabbing and complaining ensues). What might have been a humorous, positive portrayal of women within gaming culture turned out to be a long sea of jokes I remember as “funny” in the 90s (that’s the beginning of my involvement, so I cannot speak for gamers who were active in the 70s or 80s). That’s honestly what this comic feels like: a throwback to 12-year-old me, dripping with assumptions about who plays video games, what female bodies mean in this culture, and so on and so forth. In the end, the decent artwork and the fun concept (geeks playing MMORPGs via VR) couldn’t save the terrible characterization and the out-of-date jokes. I’d pass on this one if I were you. Jack Hammer (2/5) Private detective?  Check.  World with some kind of super power?  Check.  Murder?  Check.  That’s basically what you’ve got in Jack Hammer.  Of all the comics in this lot, this is probably the only one I found semi-interesting, though that quickly fell apart when the perspective shifted to the people who committed the crime, and then once again to some sort of past event.  None of this is properly explained, so the excerpt reads like a bunch of semi-random pages from different issues.  In the end, I was more confused than interested. Jetta:  Tales of Toshigawa (2/5) There’s something about two warrior women fighting for reasons that aren’t altogether clear, and in the midst of that battle, the protagonist talks ad naseum about how she feels about fighting this individual.  Why?  I don’t really know.  There’s an obvious history here; the character suggests as much.  But without a full understanding of that context, it’s impossible to really understand what is going on, except that two women are fighting with swords.  Additionally, the characters frequently utter some variation of the word “unga,” which looks as ridiculous as it sounds.  I have no idea what that sound is supposed to represent, as I’ve never heard a human being make that sound in any other context than “I’m being silly.”  But these characters are kicking and trying to stab one another.  Unga?  No idea. Fracture (2/5) A young man with a blown knee suddenly shifts his mind into that of a local super villain.  Hi-jinks ensue.  If one were to restructure this comic to avoid the absurd “jump” from one body to the next, I suspect there would be a lot of potential in the whole idea.  But the excerpt feels like two indirectly-related chunks shoved together.  There is no sense of character development.  Instead, we’re supposed to care about someone we don’t know.  On top of that, I didn’t much care for the artwork, in part because the character drawings and settings looked too two dimensional — I’m probably spoiled, though. It’s sad, really.  I kind of liked this one at first. Space-Time Condominium (1/5) One very long poop joke.  You’ve heard this