Tag Archives: Brian K. Vaughan

End of another year

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Well it is the end of another year and I haven’t managed to spend any time maintaining this blog. So, in what is rapidly becoming an annual tradition, I am posting an image from Goodreads of all the comic books that I have read this year.

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Highlights this year were The Walking Dead, The Unwritten, Batgirl Year One and Saga.

I have been reading the first two volumes of Saga over the last few days and will continue till I have finished the currently available issues (24). This book is really good and if you are a fan of Y: The Last Man then you should also love this book from BKV. A highlight of this year will be the publication of the last issue of BKV’s self published comic The Private Eye so that I can finally read the story in one go.

Until the next time – whenever it might be – have a great 2015 if you can.

The Private Eye #1 (2013)

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“Look, once upon a time people stored all their deepest, darkest secrets in something called ‘The Cloud’, remember? Well one day the cloud burst.”

This is a new venture from Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin that is creator owned and only available online at a price that you choose. Vaughan is a writer known for series such as Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina and current hit series Saga. Martin is a Spanish artist who has worked with Vaughan before on Doctor Strange: The Oath and Gotham City Secret Files.

The story is set in a future where people guard every aspect of their private life including their true face from each other. In this society, the Paparazzi are private investigators who are hired to find out the personal details on subjects and the Press seem to act as the regulating force attempting to apprehend these illegal investigators.

The story has an intriguing premise in the current climate of the increasing blurring of private and public personas via social media and cloud services. The first issue, of a projected 10 issue series, rattles along and grips nicely. The art by Martin is very nice and the crowd scenes, with everyone in disguises of one kind or another, remind me of Geof Darrow.

I liked the comic very much and I hope that the creators get enough support for them to finish off the story. It will be interesting to see if this sort of venture can stand up against commercial enterprises such as Comixology Submit. The first issue is available now from the Panel Syndicate web site.

Wolverine: Logan (2009)

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Quote:
That broad of yours. She … she once told me you were the only man on this island with … with an ounce of mercy. Whatever happened to that guy?

 

This book collects issues 1-3 of Wolverine: Logan by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Eduardo Risso. I know Vaughan primarily from his excellent work on Y: The Last Man and I have also read a couple of volumes of Ex Machina. Risso is rapidly becoming one of my favourite artists for work on 100 Bullets, Vampire Boy and currently Spaceman.

Wolverine journeys to Japan with his memories newly restored to him. While there he has to confront the ghosts of his past from 1945 as well those that linger in the present. In the 1945 story line, Logan wakes up in a cell with an American named Warren in a Japanese PoW camp. Together they escape but soon part ways over a disagreement over whether or not to kill a civilian woman they come across. Warren returns to kill Logan and the woman and is found to have similar abilities to Logan in that he seemingly cannot be killed. But before Logan can exact vengeance for the death of his lover, the Americans arrive to bomb the nearby city.

This is a great book but with one slight qualm. I am a bit uneasy that the background of this book is the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. While there is nothing particularly distasteful in the story it only seems to added to, firstly, show that Wolverine can survive a nuclear explosion and, secondly, to create a powered opponent for him to smack down in the present at the end of the book. It is this second aspect that is particularly shabby to me as the character, Warren, while not portrayed in the best light in the 1945 sequence is just as much a product of his circumstances and nature as Wolverine himself. Maybe if they had more space to examine Warren and Logan as two sides of the same coin then maybe I would have had accepted it more.

Risso’s art is great again. The book contains some unused pages in black and white that are even better. He is an artist whose style is well suited to balck and white only – you can see (and buy) most of the pages from this book in black and white on his web site – including some that don’t seem to be in the collected volume. Having said that some of the coloured pages are superb – especially in the third chapter. Well worth the admission price.