It's another day here in New York. Today on the site, Irene Velentzas reviews Jeff Lemire's Roughneck.
The story begins effortlessly with the simplicity of Lemire’s inside cover page, a single image that adeptly introduces the remainder of the text. With such images Lemire demonstrates his candid ability to say so much with so little. A sparse tree, off-centred, standing in a bank of snow, alone in the dead of winter. The tree is naked and vulnerable, it stands prey to and yet against the elements, it reveals no answers. How big is it? A towering tree, a young sapling? It’s impossible to know. It is simultaneously natural and unnatural in its composition. It conveys, ever before the first question of the text “That him?”, the inscrutability, the barrenness, the isolation of Derek Ouellette. Asking the reader to come along on a journey through Pimitamon’s barren landscape and Derek’s mind to find beauty in the wild and stubborn nature at the heart of this man and the environment that shapes him.
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Jonathan Chandler has a fine online comic over here.
The Baffler looks at Iron First and finds some pathways to a larger and sadder thing. Think pieces like this don't interest me that much, but this one's alright. The Marvel diversity story (summary here) is likewise not that interesting in the sense that expecting entities with a history of questionable racial/sexual/economic politics to act in some way progressive is like hoping Fox News will do the same. It's just not built that way. I would like for that not to be the case, because kids love superheroes and there should be more diversity there. But until the current craven white guys are not in power there, it's gonna be a slog, and I suggest reading something else entirely. I'm actually a little surprised that Disney wants to endure so much bad PR again and again. At some point they'll look at the tiny blip on their balance sheet and think, "gee, we should step into the 21st century". But that's a long shot.
