Graphic Novel Determination: Pretty Deadly Volumes I (2014) and II (2016)

So, this is a new thing that I'm doing here. Pretty Deadly is a graphic novel series, or a collection of comic books- whatever you feel like calling it. It is a single story over a period of time that was in comic book format at one time, but the way I read it was in the two collections that bound together comics 1-5 and 6-10 respectively. So, I'm considering it a graphic novel and reviewing it as such.

I guess this will be similar to my "Manga Judgment" series, but with "western" comics. I have a few of these graphic novels to explore, but this one will be the first I touch upon.

Pretty Deadly is by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios, and it is apparently the third comic that they have collaborated on together. This is a good thing. They work well together matching the story and visuals to bring together a very elegant Neil Gaiman-esque story together. While I do have some complaints about certain story paths, the comics themselves are incredible to behold. I bought the first volume based off of a random recommendation of the story and art. And it took me a while to actually read it after I had bought it.

But when I did read it I was enthralled. When the second volume became available more recently, I bought it as soon as it was out. The series had drawn me in completely, and I was powerless to resist. The art and the characters remain the strong points of the comic, but the overarching ideas are quite something as well.

The basic premise is that Death (or some personification of Death) wants a little girl dead and gone for unknown reasons. The little girl's protector, an old man blinded by a terrible injury, tries to get her to realize her full potential. He does this while they are both being pursued by some pretty rough-and-tumble Wild West bounty hunter things sent by Death himself. And that's only the premise of the first few issues!

The comics themselves blend together The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, American Gods, and an artistic and surreal horror story about a child chosen for great and terrible things. I guess not everybody will find the first volume horrific. The pursuit has its moments of terror, but, for me, most of the real horror came from the second volume, which takes place during World War I and deals with some personification of War.

I'm not going to get into the story in a heavy way. I think the art and the writing speak better for themselves than I will. And spoiling the story seems like it would be in bad taste considering the fact that the comic is not extremely widely known. To put it mildly, it is very similar to American Gods, as I mentioned before, except make those gods more personifications of certain attributes associated with humanity, and you kind of have the basic premise. Now, set it in the old American West, and you essentially have it.

While I'm not going to go into the plot, I am going to go into some of my criticisms of the series as it stands after the first two volumes. I will state my recommendation for the series right now before I go into it though. The art and style, story and writing, and characters and dialogue are all good enough to try this one out if you want a new graphic novel to read. But, my recommendation comes with a single caveat: read the comic in a vacuum. Don't try to find more about the way it is classified, or what people try to describe it as. Those are my biggest annoyances about the comic, and they literally have nothing to do with what is in the comic proper. So, stop reading here if you've never read the comic and/or don't want more ranting than you should ever read. Because I have a lot to rant about, and almost none of it actually has to do with the comic as it is written.

Anyway: criticisms.

First is that the art and lack of dialogue or narration at times can make the story very hard to follow. It has a confusing and flowing nature to it that makes it sometimes very hard to figure out what is actually going on, especially in the second volume's fight scenes. I have to imagine this is what is meant to be conveyed, but I think it is a misstep. The story is already dealing with personifications as often as it deals with real people. Why be even more confusing to the readers when they're already having to focus on a lofty story? Why obscure details in the art?

It is a minor gripe for me at best, but some people will be really turned off by the focus of ART and STYLE over being able to tell what is going on in certain panels.

Secondly, the story of Volume I itself is a bit of a slow burn with good reason. It takes its time to build up its characters, plot, and setting. Everything flows very nicely over the course of the early parts of the comic. And then- and this is where my problem starts- the story climaxes suddenly and brutally, with very little lead-up, set-up, or difficulty for the main characters to overcome. They are thrown into the climactic battle with barely having a first battle to their names. The story effectively ends there in a way that takes one aback. It's not badly done, per se, but it is really quite jarring.

I guess my problem with all of that is that the pacing, which I feel is very consistent and slow (again, for good reason) over the first part of Volume I, races at a break-neck speed to finish the story off. The consistency of pace kind of goes out the window, and this is probably my biggest complaint about the first volume.

Pace is also my biggest complaint about Volume II, but my complaint is literally the exact opposite for the second volume. I feel that the climax is long, drawn out, and confusing, while the set-up is very fast and brutal with very little characterization of the characters that headline Volume II. It very much expects the background from Volume I to transition into Volume II, but it doesn't, in my opinion, and the pacing is a bit of a mess because of it.

Pace in stories, is incredibly important to me. And I kind definitely understand somebody being turned off of the comic because of it. That being stated, I think the story is told well enough to be able to overcome these flaws, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about them.

The rest of my complaints are not really about the comic itself, but rather about what I've heard about the comic. Some of the words that I've heard thrown around about Pretty Deadly don't seem to actually fit what I've read or seen within it. I don't know who said these things about the comic, if it were the publishers who were trying to fit it into a genre, the authors who were trying to sell the comic to a certain demographic, or people who were reading something in the comic that I just didn't. I have no idea. But in reading these descriptions of the comic, I expected some things that were simply never realized. This is both good and bad. It's good because I read a story that I simply was not expecting, and I liked it a great deal better than what I was expecting. It's bad because somebody is not explaining the comic correctly, and I can see that really hurting the audience.

So, the first thing that I've seen and heard about the comic is that it is very heavily feminist in nature. Now, a feminist comic is absolutely fine. I have no problem with that (case in point another comic I'll be reviewing later this month that is 100% a feminist comic). I simply do not see this comic as one that is "feminist" intrinsically. I guess the male-to-female character ratio is roughly equal, but is that all it takes to have the comic be feminist in nature? Because that's all there is from where I stand. Nothing else about the comic implies a heavy sway into feminism. While, yes, some of the main cast are definitely women in some way or another, some of the main cast are definitely male.

I have to assume the "feminist" nature of the comic has to do with the creators being feminists themselves. Or maybe that the comic is written and illustrated by women? I don't see either of those really being a reason as to why the comic is feminist in nature though. As read, if I had no foreknowledge of the creators (and I really don't beyond vague Wikipedia entries and my own personal knowledge that Kelly Sue DeConnick is also a creator of Bitch Planet, which I would consider feminist in nature) I would have never read it as a feminist comic. It would have simply been a comic with both men and women in it.

I know I'm getting into semantics here, and I tend to in these cases, but I don't understand how it can be classified in this way as it is presented. I think it is misrepresenting itself ultimately. And that actually does the story disservice. I went into the story expecting a feminist comic. I came out of it feeling baffled as to why it wasn't that at all. And maybe the vague equality in the comic is the point, but why call it feminist when it seems to have no hard line in the sand about the nature of itself in that regard? It's like saying a movie that has half of its cast female is feminist simply because of the tautology that half of its cast is female. That doesn't define that movie as feminist in nature. It defines it as having half of its cast as female.

Anyway, coming off the rant of the year there-

The next thing that I don't understand about this comic's classification is that I had thought that the genre of the comic was "superhero" in nature. That's what I had been told by a few different sources. And it is completely and utterly untrue. While the comic is difficult to classify in genre, "superhero" is probably the classification I would least like to give it. It has no superheroes in it. None.

I mean, I guess if you consider American Gods a superhero story, you could also call this one the same. But nobody that I know of has ever considered American Gods a superhero story, and for the same reason this comic is certainly not a superhero story (as it stands now). Maybe it being a superhero comic lets it sell more copies? I have no idea. My opinion is that calling itself simply a story of superheroes is lessening the impact of the story and characters upon the world. They are forces of nature, personifications of human nature- not Iron Man, not Captain America, and certainly not Batman. The story is much more nuanced than a superhero story, and anybody who thinks that it is that, is oversimplifying and dumbing down a very complex story.

Okay, last thought and then this long rant that is going on forever will be over. This one will have me talking about one of the characters in a slight way. Everywhere I see the main character of this series being Ginny, the daughter of Death and a mortal. While Ginny has a great character design, I could not consider her the main character of the story as it stands now.

The cast of the story is an ensemble one. While some characters are certainly more of a side variety, there are possibly five or six that could be considered main characters at any given time. And not a single one of them overtakes the story in a way that would make me consider them the lead over all of the others.

And yet all I ever see is that Ginny is the main character by a landslide. While she is important and pretty well-realized, other characters have a central role as well. Alice, Sissy, Fox, Johnny, Sarah, and even Death are all decent candidates for pieces of an ensemble cast that each have as much characterization and page time as Ginny does. And maybe it's because the creators have a special liking for Ginny, but it doesn't work well here. It's like saying there is a main character is The Lord of the Rings, which is much more an ensemble cast than it will ever be about a single character. This is no Harry Potter where we only ever see one character's perspective for the most part.

Anyway, thus ends my rant. The story is really good. The horror is well done. The characters are well realized. And the art is superb. If you go into reading the comic with literally never seeing anything about it online, you'll never get annoyed at how it classifies itself or how other people(?) classify it. So, I recommend that.

Movie Appraisal: Kaidan (怪談) (2007) and J-Horror Theater Wrap-Up

From the director of Ringu, Hideo Nakata, we have Kaidan, a movie about a curse and a ghost. As the fifth movie in the J-Horror Theater series, I wasn't expecting much. Hell, the fourth and sixth movies were not all that good in my opinion, with the sixth one, Kyofu, being a trainwreck of a movie. Kaidan is a masterpiece. While calling it strictly a horror movie is laughable, it is a great movie to just watch. Hideo Nakata could never make a better movie than this, and yet he would still have made one of the great ghost story movies of all time with this one.

While the story is a tradition Japanese one about a legacy of death, a curse, and love, it is also fantastically put together. A moneylender is killed by a broken Samurai in old Japan. The Samurai dies himself soon after, and their children grow up orphans. The moneylender's daughters grow to be beautiful and powerful in Old Tokyo (Edo), while the Samurai's son is very clearly of a lower status. He falls in love with one of the daughters, but their relationship is cursed, and when he decides to leave her, he is cursed as well.

And that's the basic story. I know it has been told before in movies like The Depths (1957) and others, but this is one of the more recent re-tellings of an old tale with a tragic story. The movie is art in motion throughout, showcasing both acting talent and a story that works incredibly well. It does take on the old idea that the sins of the father are passed down to the child, almost literally in the case of this movie. It shows that fate is fixed and cannot be changed. And a curse, a woman scorned, and ultimately fate... those things cannot be avoided. They will follow one around for the rest of his days.

Maybe it's a little silly, but a movie like this, made so traditionally about such a tradition matter, is exactly what I want to watch. It is one of the only period horror movies that I know about, which makes it very unique and incredibly interesting in its own right. I wasn't expecting what I received, neither the quality nor the absolute passion evident in this film.

Again, this is not strictly a horror film. While it has horror elements to it (mostly in small pieces and mostly at the end of the movie), it is much more of a historical drama of a sort. I would even call it a romance movie at times. While it doesn't always work, it damn well tries very hard to be something special, and I truly appreciate that. It hearkens back constantly to the ancestral sins as well showing that one's own sins can damn one as well. The way Shinkichi (the lead character) treats the women throughout the film can only be described as disheartening. While appearing to be a good man on the surface, he takes advantage of them, leaves them once they cannot give him what he wants, and finds another, prettier face. I know customs were different once upon a time, but I find it kind of sickening how easily he slimes his way through the story. Even then, there was a certain sadness I felt towards him at the end of the movie, before his ultimate fate is decided. It takes a great movie to make me feel something for a character I loathe, and this is certainly a special sort of movie.

Again, there really isn't horror here, so despite the moniker of J-Horror Theater, this is much more of a traditional ghost story, one of the ghost seeking revenge certainly, but one that shows very little in the way of actual scares. I would almost say that this movie is made in a way to be a throwback to early Japanese horror movies of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It has that style and feel to it, although I could be wrong, I suppose.

Anyway, this is a great movie and I recommend it all the way, just don't expect a horror movie, because this isn't really one of them, not in the modern sense of the term anyway.


So, I guess we're done with all six movies of the J-Horror Theater. What six movies they were too! We saw everything in the Japanese Horror repertoire, from Infection with its subtle gore and mindscrew attitudes to Kyofu and its terrible and bizarre story. We saw Premonition and Reincarnation, both with their slow builds and near-perfect stories, both full of so much horror and awe that they'll always remain in my mind as true quality. And then we saw Retribution, a movie that I should have liked, and ended up finding far too dry for my taste. But even that one had a certain something, even if it was simply a single perfect scene. And finally we have Kaidan, a traditional ghost story I won't soon forget. All six movies were something to watch, even if I found two of them less than stellar. All-in-all the J-Horror Theater experiment was a success, really showing the quality that Japanese horror movies can achieve when their best directors take on the task of making amazing movies.

I'm glad I finally reviewed all these movies. They've been on my plate for years and years. I have a few more series and sets of movies like this to review, probably not this year (not at this point anyway), but next year and the years after I'll need more horror movies to review, so why not? I don't think I'll forget these movies, and if this year goes down as my J-Horror Theater October, then so be it. I think I can be proud of these reviews and these movies for the most part. I will admit I really wasn't expecting much out of these last three reviews, especially since two out of my first three reviews of this series were fairly negative. I'm glad that these final three movies picked up the series, making it rise in my opinion, and making all the hours I put into watching and reviewing these movies definitely worth it.

Anyway, until tomorrow night... 

Stuff Analyses: Horror Art and Urban Exploring

This is a picture of a supposedly haunted painting called "The Hands Resist Him". It was painted in 1972 by artist, Bill Stoneham of Oakland, California. I'm not going to go insane and spill out every fact or speculation about this work. If you want that go look the painting up on Wikipedia or something. I'm going to tell you what I think about this work and a few other forms of horror art that I've seen and either enjoy or find absolutely terrifying. I know in a lot of my recent reviews I've spoken of a lot of the horror and enjoyment I get from the genre of horror comes from imagery and the way things look or are described, and that's incredibly true, which is why I find horror art so fascinating and so awesome. I don't have the talent to be an artist and paint awesome stuff, but I will say that I truly wish I could have that talent. So, I'm going to show off some different works from different people and explain what I think. I'll be reviewing, in a word. Oh, here's a closer view of "The Hands Resist Him" just so you can see that this is a fairly creepy painting:
I'm guessing it all looks very creepy. When I first saw this painting I kind of freaked out a little. It reminded me of something viscerally terrifying and I wasn't comfortable with that. I've seen the painting often since that first viewing and it doesn't bother me as much as it used to, but there is still something uncomfortable about... something off or wrong or something. It just feels like it shouldn't exist... or maybe simply that it shouldn't be seen by human eyes.

Now, I'll get to some other things. That is a photograph taken by myself. Anyway, I took this awesome and creepy photograph while my girlfriend and I were urban exploring not very long ago. For those of you who might not know what urban exploring is, it's simply exploring places that are either abandoned or condemned. I'm going to write a disclaimer here and tell all of you not to do it because it could be dangerous or stupid and most of the time it's probably against the law. So, take that as you will. Anyway, urban exploring is fascinating because you get to see what a building looks like once humans aren't in it anymore and nobody is taking care of it. These old buildings are hollowed out husks ripe for animals, zombies, ghosts, and ax-murders... and probably hobos... but yeah... Anyway, while urban exploring my girlfriend and I saw many things, some creepy, some weird, and some just downright scary. That hallway above, although in black and white, was seriously very dark. We never saw or found the end of it. On the opposite side of the room (Picture this in your heads, children.) there was another long, dark hallway as well, which I'll show with my own picture again:
This hallway was incredibly dark, which is kind of hard to see since I was using my flash on my camera, but imagine all of that, but pitch black, then you can start imaging just how terrifying it can be. So, there were two of these hallways with a door in between them. Both were underground and about as dark as anything could be, and I just seriously thought that Pyramid Head was going to run up to me and start hacking at me with his great knife... It was so awesome, I can't even say how awesome it was. Also, I am going to say that my girlfriend is a much better photographer than I am (Mostly I specialize in taking videos. That's what I enjoy.) and she has some fantastic photos from our excursion up online, so I'm going to plug her webpage shamelessly, because she is crazy talented and her stuff really brings out the imagery much better than any of my own photographs ever could, and since this is a critique on art and stuff, I figure that I could say how much I enjoy her art and you could all look at it yourselves and enjoy it too.

There are plenty of other horror artists out there, but I really don't care about most of them... not that they don't do good art, but moreover that it just doesn't appeal to me anywhere near as much. I like art that has a history to it or something behind it (usually psychological and if you want more psychological art go back and look over the Pyramid Head pictures I posted or wait until I review Jacob's Ladder.

Yup.