Comics I Bought: May 8, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 3 new comics plus a hard cover collection:

American Splendor Vol 2 - 2

Buffy Season Eight - 14

Jack Staff - 16

Iron Man - "Demon in a Bottle" (HC)

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Red Prophet: Tales of Alvin Maker Vol. 2" by Roland Bernard Brown, Rodney Buchemi, and Miguel Montenegro

This book finishes up the story begun in volume one. It's an alternate history/fantasy story adapted from an Orson Scott Card novel. I've never read the novel but it's about American Indians trying to hold onto their land and way of life as American Europeans expand westward. And magic is real so it's not a straight historical fiction tale.

I like this better than the first volume which I was ambivalent about. I enjoy the historical stuff more than the magic mumbo jumbo but I even liked the magic stuff better in this volume. The title character, Alvin Maker, is white kid (ten years old?) who has some magic powers that whites don't usually have. He tries to aid a and Indian warrior, Ta-Kumsaw, who wants to unite all of the tribes to drive the white men back to Europe. It all seems kind of hopeless to both of them and neither really wants war but they see no other option.

White people don't come off too well in this story (except for their military prowess) and I can certainly understand why since a lot of it is told from Ta-Kumsaw's point of view but sometimes it's a little heavy handed.

This book also dealt with a lot more big events, such as the climax, than did the first volume so I found it moved along more quickly and was generally more interesting.

The only real problem I had with this book was the art. The inking to be specific. The credits are unclear as to which artist inked this book or if it was inked at all. In recent years the craft of comic book inking has been on the decline and illustrative coloring has taken over some of it's responsibility for clarity and finish but the inking in this volume is an embarrassment. Some pages and chapters are okay and others look amateurish. This is a hardcover book from Marvel comics and some pages look like they were inked by a kid in high school art class. It takes a lot to ignore that. The art wasn't much better in the first volume and I know this is a licensed book so the profit margin may be smaller but c'mon hire some professionals.

Overall I enjoyed the story but was distracted in places by bad art. That's my final call on this one.