The Four Color Media Monitor

Yet another mainstream news site, The Hollywood Reporter, found some woke comics to fawn over in their picks for what they claim are the "best" of 2024. For example, here's a GN with a title of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Goes:

Filmmaker and artist Partick Horvath takes a Dexter approach to the styles of Beatrix Potter or Richard Scarry. Samantha Strong is a serial killer living a cozy life in a small town with a very simple rule: don’t kidnap and kill the locals. But when a towns person shows up dead, it doesn’t take long for Samantha to realize that there’s another serial killer in town. Now she has to figure out who it is — and how to stop them before the doggone sheriff catches up to her lifestyle.

Samantha is a bear, and the book is grisly, made all the more icky because talking animals are doing the dirty work. Horvath’s watercolor-like art gives the reader a false sense of a security blanket even as he draws blood.

Wow, a horror thriller with a setup that's like a slap in the face to classic literature. I read both Potter and Scarry's children's books when I was little (the latter's are collectively known by the title Busytown), and anybody who believes it's okay to illustrate grisly fare like this in the style of children's literature is doing little more than signaling dislike for said literature, most likely under the belief it "never went far enough". That's all these new variations on James Tynion's Something's Killing the Children are doing. Another example from the list is the new Ultimate Spider-Man:

While a married (and fat) Peter Parker was cute in the Spider-Verse movies, Hickman takes the concept (minus the fat) and runs with it in a reinvented alternate Marvel Universe that reconfigures relationships. Uncle Ben is not only alive, but best friends with J. Jonah Jameson, who launches an internet news site called The Paper. Plus, Peter Parker and Harry Osborn become crime-fighting teammates.

Forget it, this kind of alternate reality take on classics became lethargic long ago. And of course, even if Mary Jane Watson is married to Peter in this version, that's no substitute for the real 616 universe deal. Perhaps even more telling what's wrong with the mainstream by today's standards, is their citation of Tom King's take on Wonder Woman:

Nine panel grids? Check. Dialogue juxtaposed over separate scenes? Check. When this Wonder Woman debuted in 2023, it was filled with the usual King storytelling tricks, ones that can make his books fly high (The Human Target) or weigh them down (Heroes in Crisis).

The book was quite good out of the gate, but in 2024, it soared to greatness.

King writes the defining Wonder Woman book for modern times, one that doesn’t deconstruct as much as it explores the many aspects of makes the Diana Prince the heroine she is. The overall story involves a villain named the Sovereign manipulating the world against Prince, but the plot is glacial and sometimes besides the point.

One is meant to savor each issue one month at a time, with each edition having a conceit or topic that flows throughout. Wonder Woman No. 8 is one of the best single comics of the year as it basically gives the heroine her Amazing Spider-Man No. 33 equivalent, showing her strength isn’t just physical but mental. Wonder Woman No. 14, titled “What’s the Point of Steve Trevor,” was a profoundly moving look at love and grief and an ironclad statement on Trevor’s importance in Wonder Woman lore. Simply put, this DC’s best monthly book.

If they're trying to make it sound like they were disappointed with Heroes in Crisis, I'm not convinced. That they take such a favorable stand on this version of WW is decidedly telling, and only excuses King for the embarrassingly bad tales he wrote up. 9-grid panels are actually the least of the problems in his writing. It's the contrived applications of traumas and stuff like that which sinks his stories, along with the left-wing political metaphors. It's also telling they see nothing wrong with a series using story titles that only hint the tale will belittle the guy who was originally WW's mortal boyfriend. The trade paper also cited Absolute Batman:

There was cause to be skeptical. Another re-invention of the world’s most popular DC character? Another alternate universe readers had to buy into? But there’s a reason Absolute Batman was the jolt that electrified the company.

Set in an oppressive pocket universe created by the villain Darkseid, the book includes clever new spins on the Batman mythos. Batman father, deceased, was a teacher. His mother, alive, is a social worker, for example. In the wrong hands, these new spins could have come across as hackneyed or mediocre, but in the hands of writer Scott Snyder and artist Nick Dragotta, that first issue is pure rock concert energy.

Considering Snyder boasted the Joker in his earlier Batman stories would be turning to sexual violence, I'm not sure why they believe he's the perfect scribe for even an alternate world version of the Masked Manhunter. Besides, the story appears to be written for the sake of tearing down on the whole idea of Bruce Wayne being a millionaire. In that case, their "review" was predetermined, and one can only wonder what they'd say if a right-wing scribe had written the same script.

Wow, these "best of the year" lists become drearier every year.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, indie publishers, marvel comics, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, Spider-Man, violence, Wonder Woman