COOL SHIT 5-26-11

STRANGE ADVENTURES #1: I’m not going to say a lot about this anthology because I’m actually going to review it next week for the Napalm Assault. However, there was one story in here I felt I couldn’t review from an objective viewpoint. “All the Pretty Ponies” written by Lauren Beukes and illustrated by Inaki Miranda treads over the same territory as a story I wrote a while ago called “Slummin’ It” (which was published in the first issue of TABARD INN). In my story, rich assholes liked to experience life through the eyes of the homeless. If they pay enough money, they can feel what it’s like to get killed. Well, in this story, Beukes expresses the same idea. A group of the rich and beautiful gather together so they can plug their consciousness into a couple of poverty-stricken people. They call it “going slumming,” and when a rich bitch plugs into a kidnapped pregnant woman, she feels cravings and excitedly hopes it’s meth. There is a twist, however, that separates it from my story, in which SPOILER ALERT it is showed that the government keeps a bunch of poor people hooked up to dream machines, in which they imagine that they’re rich and beautiful people. So who is plugging into whom? An answer, by the way, that we never get. END OF SPOILERS. I’m not saying that Beukes ripped me off. My story is based on an old idea (with my own twist, of course). But I thought it would be dishonest of me to review it based on the closeness, so I thought I’d bring it up here. Buy this book, by the way.

CROSSED 3D: Holy shit, William Christensen finally delivered on this book. Granted, he swore it’d be out by April, but what the hell? Better late than never. I have mixed feelings about this book. There are a lot of parallels between CROSSED and zombie books, and it’s totally justified. However, there have been a lot of army versus zombie stuff lately, and this is one of those stories. A group of soldiers go on a rescue mission to Manhattan to bring a doctor back to the people who need her, and shit happens. A lot of shit happens. But nothing very remarkable. There is one very interesting thing that happens, though: a character who accidentally reveals himself to be a racist eventually turns into one of the Crossed, and what is the first thing he does? Starts relentlessly calling out racial epithets. This implies that the Crossed do whatever was in their minds when they were human beings. Which is a frightening thought, when you give it some consideration. Ennis and Lapham are essentially saying that these horrible and vile things are inside all of us, and the only thing that keeps us in check is conscience. The last thing I want to talk about is the 3D effects. A lot of it gets lost because the details are too small for 3D to effectively display, and because a lot of the speech balloons are small, it’s hard to read. It also doesn’t help that whenever the Crossed speak, their words appear in red . . . which doesn’t show up very well in a 3D book. There’s no need for this gimmickry. This book would have been good without it. Still, when it gets the effects right, they’re pretty cool. Some of the bigger panels reveal this very nicely, especially if something huge is going on in the background. It’s good stuff. Not great, but definitely worth the nine bucks it costs. And the 3D glasses are pretty cool; if you wear them, the design makes you look like one of the Crossed.