Well, hello there!
I’ve not done more than glance at a copy of Previews in years. I don’t need to. The internet gives me all the news I need, and working Saturdays in a comicbook shop gives me more than enough exposure to excitable geekery. But, as sometimes happens, I had little to do and a strange urge to have something to talk to the punters about, so the shop copy got dragged out for a flick-through.
Previews comes in two parts these days; the main, thick-as-a-brick magazine and the smaller, Sunday supplement/TV listings-sized Marvel Previews, which, if you resolutely despise all other comicbook publishers, magazine publishers,book publishers, toy manufacturers, purveyors of apparel and anybody else whose products appear in Previews but who are not Marvel Comics, you may buy separately for a bargain $1.25.
I’m assuming here that MP is put together by taking solicitation bumph from various editorial departments – the X-office, the Spider-Man office, etc – and wrangling it into the one magazine. But, you know what? It’s a product. It carries a price tag, it’s asking its audience to put down good coin for something they could easily source on the net. It should have standards.
That’s why there’s no excuse for nearly all of the Spider-Man solicits in this issue to feature the word ‘guest-staring’.
Unless that’s what happening in the books. Maybe Spidey’s just going to sit there and gaze intently at whoever’s passing through that month.
Ach, who cares. It’s on a par with ‘kidnaping’, a word that used to crop up on covers every couple of issues. We all have blind spots. We’re not all paid to check twice before we pull out, though.
Anyway: here’s something far worse.
It’s very easy to take the piss out of Rob Liefeld, but what else can he expect? He sets himself up for it so often, and so well. Here’s something coming soon from the mind of Rob: a revival of his old Youngblood series. Now, to be fair, Rob’s not being very hands-on with this one. It’s written by someone else, it’s drawn by someone else, but Rob’s provided the cover and his name’s all over the whole thing, much in the way that Tekno Comix used to splash the name of Leonard Nimoy all over something that had been written by an intern during his lunch break. So Rob should take responsibility. He’s a grown man, after all.
And after all, what we’ve seen so far of this new Youngblood – and again, to be fair, I’ve seen only what’s been offered up so far, i.e. a cover image and a few interior pages - pretty much follows the Liefeld template.
Here’s a character, name of Shaft. Maybe he’s a sex machine with all the chicks. I don’t know.
Look! His world has no backgrounds in it. Just a load of speed lines. Maybe he’s six feet off the ground. Maybe he’s just about to smash his chin open. I don’t know. There’s no reference. I do know that he’s got a dislocated spine, and probably both arms are having an in-need-of-counselling relationship with the rest of him, and maybe that’s why he needs such big shoulder pads, otherwise he’d just collapse in a big pile of random limbs like a rag doll that’s been thrown out of a second-story window.
And here’s a page.
It’s not a good page. It looks pretty much like whoever drew it took a lot of reference either from a bunch of magazine photographs or from other comicbooks. The faces on his characters are just that little bit not-cartoony, just that smidgen away from being attempts at photo-realism while, perversely, also being typical comicbook exaggerations.
And golly, those women! Look at the one in red in panel one. She looks both anorexic and annoyed. Luckily, she has no eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul. As she has no eyes, we cannot see into her soul. If we could, we would probably want to look away again, very quickly. Maybe she’s annoyed about her tiny tiny waist and tiny tiny hips, or the short, short skirt she’s wearing. Maybe she’s thinking dark thoughts about the blonde.
What about the blonde? Well, in the first panel we can see that she’s remarkably well-built. And in the third panel we can see that her body is barely wider than her head. Given her breast and head sizes, if we extrapolate from the given information we can work out that she is approximately three feet tall. And as we can see from panel one and panel three that she is roughly the same height as the other characters, then we must conclude that this is a book about very short superheroes. Well done. Midget heroes have been an untold, criminally-ignored area of comics for far too long. Whoever drew this page deserves a pat on the back for bringing Heroes Of Restricted Growth, or HORGs, into the spotlight where they deserve to be.
Mind you, as there are no backgrounds, and as no character is shown to have knees, lower legs, or feet (See! The hand of Liefeld!), there is a strong possibility that this is simply fucking awful drawing.
Would you now read the words on this page, please?
Now, I’m quite willing to give the benefit of the doubt and allow that as this is a preview, there may be a final polish to come on the dialogue.
Christ, I hope so.
Look at the blonde’s dialogue in panel one. Note the dissonant phrase “Words and all”. Now go to panel two where this phrase is repeated, but this time as the phrase it’s supposed to be.
“Warts and all”.
You know, the old Cromwell thing.
I read this page three or four times before I realised what was meant to be said in panel one. First I wondered if it was my fault, if perhaps ‘words and all’ was some neologism that, as a fully paid-up middle-aged git, I’d not yet come across. Then I wondered if the reference in panel two to a team member as ‘one big wart’ was meant to be taken literally. After all, this is comics. The chap with the bow and arrow could conceivably actually be one big wart. It would explain the disconnected arms.
But no. All it comes down to is that somebody was either too stupid or, more likely, too bloody lazy to either type the correct phrase in the first place, or to correct it in the second. Or, and this is scary, they thought ‘words and all’ was the correct phrase to begin with. The idea that somebody with that level of stupidity is allowed to write their own name in crayon on a wall, let alone something for public consumption, is quite simply bloody terrifying.
I’ll err towards lazy editing, though, given that the very next dialogue balloon – attributed to the blonde – contains the words ‘I can’t imaging that’s possible’. Imaging. From the context, the word can only be meant to be ‘imagine’. But it's not. It's 'imaging'.
Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I won’t err towards lazy editing. I won’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt. Instead, given these examples and given the additional clumsy attempt at flirtatiousness in panel three that comes across as just plain flat-out rapey, I’ll point my finger and say this is the laziest excuse for a comicbook I have come across in many a year. It shows contempt for its characters, it shows contempt for the medium and worst of all it shows nothing but unveiled contempt for its readers. Its creators have thrown the least possible effort at the page, secure in the knowledge that several thousand idiots will pay for this lack of effort notwithstanding its sheer, undiluted hackery.
And if you’re one of those thousands, you bloody well deserve it.
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