Here we go again with Snyder and these 3 issue series. I’ve been burned before: ‘We Have Demons’ and ‘Night of the Ghoul’; those were both major oy’s to the veys. This one, per usual Double S, intrigues me. Apparently this has already been released digitally on Comixology so I assume it did well enough to warrant printing it? Uggh, I loathe that whole marketing premise: Release it digitally, see how it does and if if sells then print it for the world. Everything is hedging your bets these days isn’t it? God forbid you just say, hey I like your idea, write the shit out of it and let’s put it out to the world. No Risk=No Glory. I feel like Image is aligned with that thinking, for the most part. As has been lamented before in this blogamajigeroo, the whole 4, 5, 6 issues dropping at a time before there is an evaluation to come up with more is really bringing me down along with a lot of other comic geeks I know. They justify it by saying they’re story arcs where more than half the time they’re just a continuation of what the hell was going on in the first place; in other words…a series. I can’t say why this is the norm now but it sucks balls.
Does anybody actually read digital comics? I suppose many do. I mean, can you even consider that a comic at that point, it’s more like webpages with art on them. I would dry heave if I had to open up an app on a tablet and then swipe left on my digital comic; what a dehumanizing concept. It’s like dating apps for comic books. It feels like you’re reading a comic book but you’re not actually reading one just like it feels like you’re viably communicating with a prospective smooch prospect but you’re not. You’re looking at the ingredients of a comic but not actually ingesting one. You don’t go to a restaurant and tell the kitchen to bring you the ingredients to your meal do you?
I also can’t understand why digital comics cost the same as regular comics. Clearly that’s a misstep by the industry. Either make digital 4 bux and real tree juice comics all 6 or 7 bux or make the comics 4 bux and the digital 2 bux. Pricing all formats at the same price point makes zero sense and undermines the idea that it costs more to print, ship and deal with LCS human beings. I get that the argument for digital anything is convenience and that it saves space. Having traversed the entire rainbow path of having nothing but physical products to having everything be digital to 2023 I can say that actually feeling and touching something is way more of a fulfilling experience than just having it exist on a rectangular device somewhere.
Remember that moment in the ‘Steve Jobs’ movie where Michael Fassbender as Jobs is on the roof of a building at the end of the movie talking with his daughter? She’s upset or something or is about to walk away and he says “I can put 1000 songs in your pocket”. Clearly this was a reference to having the iPod in development which would turn the world of content upside down. If I was his daughter I would have rushed at him, pounced on his chest and with my fingers clenching down on his throat I’d growl ‘Nothing will replace Vinyl you degenerate NerdFuck!’.
Dave Chapelle tells a story where he was in a bar or something with Steve Jobs and Jobs was bragging about how he had the first iPhone in his pocket. Chapelle says he should have taken it from him and thrown it into the ocean and thereby would have saved all of us. Look, in no way am I luddite but digital convenience will, at least for me, never replace tangible objects that enrich our experience. You can’t bag and board a digital comic. I mean, you can snag the file and drag it to your bag and board gif but there’s something about bagging and boarding a comic you loved and putting it away for posterity’s sake that can’t be replaced. I do realize that since rents now average 3K a month here in La La Land that you need to be making six figures in order to afford a big enough place for your comic book collection; so there’s that.
Okay okay, ‘Clear’. Well, I’m clear that ‘Clear’ is the best thing Snyder has written since Wytches and his majestic New 52 Batman Run. Praise Jesus, Allah, Buddha and Prince we finally have a winner! Took ya long enough Double S. This is Sci-Fi Noir at its best. This is the Sci-Fi book I’ve been waiting for. A real Superstar Writer’s take on the whole Augmented Reality phenomenon. Snyder nails it on the head with this whole ‘Veils’ filtered reality concept wrapped around a hard boiled murder mystery. Couple that with Francis Manapul’s flawless art that captures this futuristic world to a tee and I’m all in. So this was just sitting on a digital cloud for months until it made it into the physical world? Ridiculous! This should have been front and center in my LCS like it was an overhyped Marvisney Multidimensional Multitrashbinfodder Crossover Event.
Man, there’s nothing better than seeing a battered and bruised dude with a hard lined jaw walking into his office with the blinds barely cracked open to find a smoky hot babe in a pencil thin dress bursting out of her top wanting to talk to him about her case. I’d like that. Maybe the Marvisney people can send me a babe from their marketing division to come here dressed like Mary Jane Parker to talk about their case and why I’ve been ripping them apart for the past 6 months.
Minor little gripes:
1. It takes place in San Francisco 2052. That’s thirty years in the future which means that’s thirty years of deranged psychopathic homeless people pooping all over the city. By then there’d have to be poop neighborhoods and poop castles. There’d probably also be a Poop Skateboard Park where skateboarders drop into poop half pipes, poop ledges and poop rails. This would’ve added another layer of realism, maybe our protagonist hunts down the murderer at a poop dock, that would be cool.
2. The pretext for the war that brought the US to its knees is pure caca legacy media lamestream news nonsense. So Snyder says that China took over Taiwan, then Russia invaded Poland like they’re Nazi Germany then North Korea invaded South Korea. China’s invasion of Taiwan would not cause us to do ske-wat because they own half of our land and we buy all of our cheap junk that lines every Target and Walmart from them. Enough with us fighting China, ain’t gonna happen. Plus, Russia would never invade Poland nor would The Jong Un invade South Korea. Some dipshit’s been watching too much Wolf and Anderson and needs to stop believing the tripe that gets reported on NPR and Apple News.
3. Snyder then says that our military initiative was turned back by China because they programmed all of our missiles to turn around on us and blow up our shit. C’mon Snyder. This ain’t War Games and Matthew Broderick isn’t sitting in the Pentagon, come up with something a little more believable or just skip the whole geo political military stuff altogether.
Other than that, this was a super fun issue to read through and it was jam packed from front to back with pages of Manapul artistic goodness with zero ads; a serious clear bang for my buckaroo. Obviously given Snyder’s history on these three issue drops the second issue go could south and implode faster than a six pack of Bud Light at Kid Rock’s ranch but with this fantastic premise I think Snyder would be hard pressed to mess this one up. If you read this on Comixology only, I feel bad for you. It’s like you enjoyed this on a web cam. I got the real thing baby. Nothing like turning the page of an actual page. It’s called a Comic Book not a Comic Swipe.
Rating: 9.1
Verdict: Pull and Turn
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