Thursday 14 November 2013

Comics I Read Last Week - Week 9

Welcome to the slightly belated ninth week of Comics I Read Last Week, the imaginatively titled blog feature where I talk about, well, comics I read last week.

Definition of a Dead Body
Jang Young (translated by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada)



Definition of a Dead Body is one of the big digital pile of books I got as part of the last Whole Story bundle. It's strange, sad and sweet and one of those books I finish reading and just really don't know what to take away from it.


The book contains a few different stories which, unsurprisingly, are all about death in one way or another and also love and friendship and it's actually a really confusing book for me to write about.


All the stories in the book are related and connect together in way that might not seem obvious to start with.


The stories vary in style visually, using whatever works best for each situation, so you get pages like the one the image above is from, and yes that one is about a fish, and also pages that look like the one below.


So yeah, it's a weird comic. Good, but weird and I'm really not sure what to make of it. I plan on giving it another read sometime and see what I make of it then.

Plague!: The Musical
Ryan Estrada


The other Whole Story comic I read this week.

Plague!: The Musical is the shortest comic out of this week's lot, running at a tiny six pages. That's 17 panels and a title image. It's less a full musical and more a single song really, but I'll forgive him, because it is a really good little (emphasis on the little).

It's short, but it's good.

Tokyo Mew Mew volume 3
Mia Ikumi, Reiko Yoshida


Last week I talked about volumes one and two of Tokyo Mew Mew, so this week it's volume three. As I said last week, the plot is absurd. Aliens are trying to take over the world by turning animals into monsters and two strange men who own a cafe decided that a great way of combating this would be to zap the animals with the combined DNA of five different endangered species. It didn't really work out though, because an earthquake disrupted their experiment and they accidentally zapped five girls who just happened to be stood near each other somewhere close to the cafe and now they all have superpowers accessed by shouting seemingly random word combinations and transforming costumes and for the most part they do what the two strange men with the cafe tell them because, hey why not?

Oh and they all work at the cafe, even the rich one because, hey why not?

In this one we get to meet some more of the alines trying to conquer the planet, find out what's so special about this little spinning lump of rock and stuff and the Mew Mew's learn that they really shouldn't trust their strange bosses when a day off on a rediculously huge private boat turns out to be a mission in disguise.

Oh yes, and Ichigo turns into a cat.

One of the big problems this title has, the biggest problem in my opinion is that the people over at TokyoPop seem to have no idea what they're doing. Take these two images from the recap at the start of the book for example.


One of these characters is a hyperactive acrobat called Pudding and the other is a famous model. Somehow someone at TokyoPop got a bit confused about which one is which.

And then we have this panel only 18 pages in.


I think someone got a bit confused between what Ichigo there is saying and what's just going through her head. Either that or she's even weirder than she seems.

Anyway, if you can get over the occasional mistakes on the English language team's part and don't mind your comics being more than a bit daft then give it a go.



And that's all for this week. Yes, I promised some Daredevil too, but I've been kind of busy and didn't manage to finish reading it, so...

Come back next week for some Daredevil (finally), X-Files, The Beano, Book 1 of Pita-Ten and something else probably too.

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