Vikings are the new cheese
Sep. 6th, 2007 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkBig comics Thursday, as well as Buffy 8.6 I picked up another two parts of Brian Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man.
Y’s a lot of fun, not as philosophical/political as the “all the men die” SF stories I remember from the seventies, it’s no Whileaway or Consider Her Ways. One simple reason for this lies in the premise, the action is set in the immediate aftermath of all the men but one dying overnight so it’s more of a mystery about how that happened a ‘whatdunit’ than a speculation about how an all female society would organise itself. Mostly though it’s about the characters thrown together by their apocalyptic circumstances, their histories and their interactions provide just as many interlocking twists and mysteries as the plot. It’s very like Heroes in terms of what keeps you reading/watching none of the characters are drawn very deeply but they all hit various buttons and the plot is just absurd enough to be unpredictable but not so much so as to be ridiculous at least as long as nobody mentions genetics. Actually I found myself liking Mohinder this week (episode 7). I just wish they’d have him speak Urdu (or Punjabi or whichever language would be appropriate -Tamil?) and subtitle it like they do Hiro and Ando because half of what Hiro says is just as stilted anything as Mohinder gets given but it matters far less in text.
No future for you: Part I
The constant pop culture references in Y are beginning to grate a little but anything with a Pistols quote for a title still provokes unconditional love. The art for Faith is subtly grittier than that for the other characters, they look (except for Giles) quite smooth-faced in comparison. Faith has shadows all around her not just under her eyes and takes on almost vampire-like features in one panel when she’s attacking Giles with a not-a-salad-fork. She still has the Snow White colouring to give the image of her under attack by a tribe of vampire toddlers a deliciously twisted-Disney feel but I think my favourite panel is the one of her coming back to her apartment after the slay.
Interestingly Vaughan also has a psychotic Englishwoman as a major villain in The Last Man, it could be a thing. Lady Genevieve Savidge is so far better drawn than written, she has the priveleged posture of a public schoolgirl but speaks like no aristo on earth unless it were one of the party-goers young William encountered in Fool for Love. So she may not be realistic but at least she’s canonical. The Giles/Faith interactions are wonderful and being now exposed to Vaughan’s twistiness I think it’s significant that Giles never does get as far as telling Faith why he chose her for this mission. Twist-wise I also suspect that Buffy’s “The Queen is dead” dream, which looks like foreshadowing for a showdown between her and Faith, may have more to do with the Twilight’s plans for Lady Genevieve. Also the Doctor walking the streets of London for the win.
Y’s a lot of fun, not as philosophical/political as the “all the men die” SF stories I remember from the seventies, it’s no Whileaway or Consider Her Ways. One simple reason for this lies in the premise, the action is set in the immediate aftermath of all the men but one dying overnight so it’s more of a mystery about how that happened a ‘whatdunit’ than a speculation about how an all female society would organise itself. Mostly though it’s about the characters thrown together by their apocalyptic circumstances, their histories and their interactions provide just as many interlocking twists and mysteries as the plot. It’s very like Heroes in terms of what keeps you reading/watching none of the characters are drawn very deeply but they all hit various buttons and the plot is just absurd enough to be unpredictable but not so much so as to be ridiculous at least as long as nobody mentions genetics. Actually I found myself liking Mohinder this week (episode 7). I just wish they’d have him speak Urdu (or Punjabi or whichever language would be appropriate -Tamil?) and subtitle it like they do Hiro and Ando because half of what Hiro says is just as stilted anything as Mohinder gets given but it matters far less in text.
No future for you: Part I
The constant pop culture references in Y are beginning to grate a little but anything with a Pistols quote for a title still provokes unconditional love. The art for Faith is subtly grittier than that for the other characters, they look (except for Giles) quite smooth-faced in comparison. Faith has shadows all around her not just under her eyes and takes on almost vampire-like features in one panel when she’s attacking Giles with a not-a-salad-fork. She still has the Snow White colouring to give the image of her under attack by a tribe of vampire toddlers a deliciously twisted-Disney feel but I think my favourite panel is the one of her coming back to her apartment after the slay.
Interestingly Vaughan also has a psychotic Englishwoman as a major villain in The Last Man, it could be a thing. Lady Genevieve Savidge is so far better drawn than written, she has the priveleged posture of a public schoolgirl but speaks like no aristo on earth unless it were one of the party-goers young William encountered in Fool for Love. So she may not be realistic but at least she’s canonical. The Giles/Faith interactions are wonderful and being now exposed to Vaughan’s twistiness I think it’s significant that Giles never does get as far as telling Faith why he chose her for this mission. Twist-wise I also suspect that Buffy’s “The Queen is dead” dream, which looks like foreshadowing for a showdown between her and Faith, may have more to do with the Twilight’s plans for Lady Genevieve. Also the Doctor walking the streets of London for the win.