Comments | about_faces: Happy 2/22!

about_faces

Happy 2/22!

Feb 22, 2019 22:12

Hellooooooo, everyone! I am (temporarily) back! Anyone else still out there in LJ-land? I’m going to assume no one is and just post this for my own sake, as I’ve missed having the spoons to keep up this blog like I used’ta could ( Read more... )

christopher priest, scott snyder, tom king

Comments 26

It's Back! nakadai30 February 23 2019, 03:47:56 UTC

Hooray! Great to see new content on here. I'd love to see your thoughts on the Long Halloween when you have the time.
God help us, the animated version will be atrocious, with the dull new anime-esque look they are using now, it won't even have Tim Sales memorable style going for it.

RE: It's Back! about_faces February 23 2019, 04:16:15 UTC

That’s what really galls me! You just know they’re not going to embrace the Sale style and try to create an incredible visual feast. They’ll just do like they always do with their adaptations and go with a slightly varied version of their same, stiff, bland, drab designs!

Like, can you imagine what the “Gotham By Gaslight” movie would have looked like if they had truly embraced the Mignola style the way the animators did for the sadly-unproduced “Amazing Screw-On Head” animated show?

Re: It's Back! nakadai30 February 23 2019, 04:46:28 UTC

Wow, I'd never seen that pilot. I can't imagine why a series wasn't picked up. Too expensive or too niche to produce at the time ( ... )

RE: Re: It's Back! vadvaro7 March 11 2019, 14:21:14 UTC

Aside from burning 200 victims in a nightclub (Hef was correct in his analysis that really is hard to come back from, I’m not sure even the Joker had unleashed that muc destruction in Gotham) Crime and Punishment is a great depiction of Harvey, probably higher on this list than Eye of the Beholder ( his willingness to trip up evidence before the scarring never sat well with me...the break was always about a man who did everything and was handed a terrible fate...the inability to reconcile any sense of justice therefore everything must be chance...notions that The Dark Knight movie ...and even heaven help me Batman Forever actually commented on)

Thread 5

(uh, that was weird) tungstencompton February 23 2019, 05:00:05 UTC

I guess I have my account back? In case the spam filter hit my other comment too hard, here we go:

=

IT LIVES! :D

Hi from Tumblr and back from ye olde days of s_d. Good to know you're back.

From what I can gather Arkham Knight was a mess, but I've been waiting to hear your thoughts on its Two-Face mainly because he seems to have been so marginal that nobody was really talking about him. Good to know there's something in there which is actually worth it.

As regards The Long Halloween, I'm somewhat sympathetic to it but yeah, it suffers a great deal of breadth without depth, but at least it does explore Harvey's frustrations leading up to the acid attack causing it all to fall apart and here he has some redeeming traits unlike, say, Dark Victory, where he's just a humourless, sneering villain (although that one page of him pistol-whipping the Joker in revenge for his home invasion was pretty cathartic) and for all of its faults still does give us pretty decent Year One continuation imagery and probably my favourite purple Catwoman ( ... )

Re: (uh, that was weird) about_faces February 23 2019, 17:19:19 UTC

Wow, that dissection of TLH is fantastic and it considers angles that never even occurred to me! Pretty much the only possibility it didn’t consider was Wizard Magazie’s #2 theory, which was that the killer was the unnamed wife of Richard Daniel, the banker killed by Johnny Viti in the first issue. I still like that idea. They didn’t even consider Gilda, by the way.

As for the old round-robin idea, I don’t know. A lot of the folks who agreed to do it have either dropped off the face of the earth or I’ve bevome estranged from them. But maybe I should consider it anyway, so I can devote my time primarily to Harvey and Gilda and let everyone else handle the rest.

Arkham Knight is a frustrating case. It’s worth playing for many reasons, but the story alternates between good and so bad it insults your intelligence. And for those of us who are less comfortable with driving games, all the contrived situations that the game forces you into using the Batmobile in mandatory missions is really fucking annoying.

tungstencompton February 24 2019, 02:05:28 UTC

I'm now just imagining Carmine and Alberto alone in the Roman's penthouse right after the Richard Daniel murder, with Carmine thinking out loud that a hit performed by a family member is as much a necessity as it is a liability, and that things would be just so much simpler if problems were taken care of by a complete outsider, leading to the gears turning in Alberto's head being practically audible...

(EDIT This means that their very brief conversation at Thanksgiving is in fact Carmine's tacit approval of the killing, because it's not as though they'd succeeded in getting the money in the bank at that point so Carmine's cheeriness is somewhat unwarranted.)

about_faces March 19 2019, 00:10:22 UTC

See, that’s a perfect example of how Alberto being the killer works! Especially after Thanksgiving, when we’re expected to believe that a normal woman (who we have no reason to believe is a master assassin) pulled out her IVs, got clothes, managed to disguise herself as hospital staff, deliver room service, and use a peashooter of a gun to kill five hardened murderers with guns drawn.

Thread 8

ext_5026554 February 25 2019, 23:44:40 UTC

Nice recap!

I really miss the long-form style of the Internet of old. I don't mind new platforms and new ways of doing things getting popular, it's just that I wish the old style of in-depth discussion would not completely disappear, you know?

Gotham Academy looked cute, too bad it got cancelled. I feel with big marketing companies like DC has become, these kinds of quirky titles are where we are most likely to find unique takes on the characters these days.

And I've had some bad experiences with marshlands so all I can think about looking at that last picture is that he must be getting eaten alive by mosquitoes lol. Though in Vietnam that might not be a problem, I don't know.

about_faces March 12 2019, 16:42:33 UTC

Thank you! It was really nice to get back to this format, even as a temporary thing. I really wish there were a good modern outlet for this sort of thing. Preferably one that also paid!

Gotham Academy was very cute, and it’s a shame it didn’t get the audience it deserved, even if it wasn’t for me personally. The art was one of the biggest reasons to recommend it. Kerschel’s work on the Flash segment of Wednesday Comics really was one of the best parts of that anthology.

Ha, you’ve probably right, Harvey and Rose are probably getting eaten alive! Maybe he doused them both in Off and they had gin and tonics between panels.

vadvaro7 March 11 2019, 15:03:33 UTC

Completely agree..Beautiful Ugly and the chapter from the Judas Coin should have been in the 75year celebration 9stunned that Two-Face even warranted a collection). Great to see the Haney era represented in Double Your Money and Die... the great fun Emperor Eagle story was hard bound collected in Legends of the Dark Knight by Jim Aparo vol 2...btw...great to seeHarvey chasing Joker around the boat for the finale...

Perhaps I always root for Harvey because his Justice League guest starring role was in my first batch of comics ever where he did help save the world and was double crossed for it! ( and a reprint of the Harvey Kent trilogy was my second story with him). So I’ve always been empathetic for him ever since...

about_faces March 18 2019, 23:56:22 UTC

Glad you also agree about Beautiful Ugly and Judas Coin! Oh, another one I would rather have seen is O’Neil and Novick’s “Threat of the Two-Headed Coin” instead of seeing the Neal Adams “Half an Evil” yet a-fucking-gain, but that was a fool’s hope. That story is never not going to be included in any Best Of Two-Face collection.

I love that your earliest experience was that JLA story, and it gave you a soft spot for him. If collections like the ARKHAM collection simply had to include stories that were more than one issue, I’d happily have seen that included. That, and the two-part Gilda story by Wolfman and Novick.

vadvaro7 March 11 2019, 15:26:42 UTC

Aside from a pretty great use of and characterization of Harvey, I love how Priest reinforced that Two-Faces was ttained by Deathstroke AND Batman...and used him as a competent lawyer for the other Arkham inmates. Really intelligent depiction of Harvey ( not to mention cool muscle shirt ( ... )

about_faces March 18 2019, 23:53:14 UTC

It’s amazing how Priest shows a rare interest in drawing from past canon, which everyone else would either ignore or retcon. The downside of this is that he explicitly made Talia a rapist, which I think even Morrison walked back on. Knowing that made me even LESS interested to read Priest’s run, but damn if he didn’t win me over in the end. Still, Talia deserves better ( ... )