Scud #20

Thursday, 16 April 1998

Nope, nothing to say about tax day. I mailed mine in last week.

Not much came out yesterday that I collect. Last week's haul was pretty good, but I haven't gotten around to writing about it. In particular, I want to spend some time on why I was so disappointed by Lea Hernandez's Cathedral Child, and I've been putting it off. But on to this week's comics:

The Dreaming #25

This issue presented a stand-alone story, "My Year as a Man," in which Abel reads up on one of the earlier ravens. (That makes perfect sense if you're a reader of The Dreaming and/or Sandman, and would take much too long to explain if you aren't.) The artist, Chris Weston, does a pretty good job. He's got a detailed, realistic rendering style, a good eye for composing a panel (even if his page layouts weren't especially inspired), and makes the fantastic creatures of mythology look real. He does draw Abel as looking a bit more frightening and less harmless than most of the artists have, but that may be intentional.

The story, written by Peter Hogan, was lackluster. I might have liked it better if I had known more about Greek history, literature, and mythology. I suspect it was written mostly to tie together a few old legends, which is a perfectly appropriate subject for The Dreaming, but I thought that it just didn't hang together very well as a story. At one point Hogan gets his protagonist into a hopeless jam, and just has another character come along and get him out of it, deus ex machina.

Scud #20

This issue is a must-read for all fans of the surreal disposable assassin. A major chunk of backstory is exposited, explaining why the world of Scud is the way it is. Some of it had been hinted at a few issues earlier, with a reference to the Rapture, and another piece of the puzzle was given out in the Drywall: Unzipped one-shot.

There's also a back-up strip in this issue, "Black Octopus: Sexy Genius." This wasn't quite as creative as the main strip is, and seemed to be largely an excuse for titilation. On the other hand, there may be more to it, but I shouldn't talk about it above the spoiler warning.

Penny Century #2

More strips about Penny, Maggie, Hopey, Izzy, Ray, Negra, and the rest of the crew from the fertile brain and facile pen of Jaime Hernandez. What could be bad?

I stopped buying Love and Rockets a few years ago, having gotten tired of it, but these strips remind me of why I bought it in the first place. Jaime's art and dialog are, as always, perfect and apparently effortless. I want to spend the rest of the day just looking through my old Love and Rockets collections, but I've got to wash the dishes and make dinner.

Spoilers for Scud #20
That means stop reading here if you haven't read/seen it yet.

I thought that Samantha Gritt, the young woman behind the Black Octopus mask, looked a lot like Sussudio, Scud's girlfriend, who apparently dies at the end of the main story in this issue. She also shares that character's taste for sex with robots. (Samantha also seems to like sex with women; I don't recall Sussudio having any tendencies along those lines. See what I meant about titilation?) I don't know if the resemblence is intentional on Rob Schrab's part, but if it is, it might mean that Sussudio isn't unrecoverably dead. Actually, considering that this issue's story involves Scud fighting a bunch of angels who've tied up God and taken over Heaven, I'd say that she's almost certainly not unrecoverably dead.