My comics shop (The Great Escape, Bowling Green, KY- hereafter referred to as TGE) had a big sale all week last week, culminating in a 25% off of everything inside and up to 75% off stuff outside in a sidewalk sale, so I decided to go pick up a couple of things I had been waiting to purchase for a while now.
Now usually I'm not much of a toy buyer. Some of the figures available these days are kinda cool, but I'm barely able to maintain my floppy pamphlet habit let alone pick up every action figure or statue or shot glass or what have you that piques my interest. However, when TGE does their periodical sidewalk sale thingy they usually put out a pretty good lot of toys at 3/4 off, and that's when they get me. For four bucks each, I picked up the recent DC Direct figures of the Planetary cast: Elijah Snow, Jakita Walker and the Drummer. They're pretty nice looking, as these things go...and you gotta admit that there probably won't be too many more of them.
After going inside, I snagged the hardcover edition of The Art of Nick Cardy that they've had on sale for several months now, and I got an additional 25% off of the sale price. Sweet. Anyway, it's a very nicely done career overview slash interview collection, with lots and lots of great Cardy covers and interior art reproduced within, some in color. Cardy, as principal artist on Aquaman, Teen Titans, and most notably (to me, anyway) Bat Lash used his excellent design abilities to create some of the most innovative art to be found in mainstream comics in the Sixties and early Seventies. He also did a lot of illustration work for movie posters and promotional materials, something which I wasn't aware of.
Finally, I picked up the new softcover edition of Human Target: Final Cut by Peter Milligan and Javier Pulido, the events of which have served as a prologue of sorts to the current ongoing series...or maybe it should be said that the current ongoing is a continuation of the TPB. Whatever. Anyway, it's a (for the most part) cleverly written and beautifully illustrated action thriller with Milligan once again furiously working the one handle he has on the Human target character: Chris Chance has imitated others for so long and so well that he has a tendency to lose his own identity in that of those he imitates. Valid and smart, but I'm tellin' ya that this conceit will get real old real fast by issue 10 or 11 of the ongoing. I think, though, that Milligan is a smart enough writer to realize this and will come up with another direction, eventually. I hope. Pulido, perhaps responding to the enlarged format, has beefed up his often minimal style here; there are several scenes and figure drawings that are nicely detailed. And bojemoi, this man can lay out a story. He's quickly becoming a huge favorite of mine. So otherwise, this is a fast-paced kidnapping/action story, like recent films Ransom and Along Came a Spider, except this one's set in Hollywood and features a ton of internal angst by the lead. About the only thing that really bugged me was the out-of-the-blue appearance, at the end, of a character that was only seen once or twice for the first 3/4 of the book- and I'm not sure was ever mentioned by name- who's given a key role. But everything else was very well done so I can overlook it. Human Target: Final Cut is well worth picking up, even if you don't get 25% off.
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