Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Alex Hoffman on Burrow.

* not comics: between basketball and the Iron Fist TV show, I had background noise and break-watching for an entire weekend of work. Iron Fist is a weird show. I thought Marvel passed on a huge opportunity to include gigantic swathes of fans more firmly in its orbit when they declined to cast some of their recent leads across racial lines. I get veering away from this strategy for Doctor Strange because Benedict Cumberbatch exists, but it's harder to justify doing that for the young man playing Danny Rand in the latest Netflix series. It wasn't nearly as horrible as promised. I was more entertained than I was watching the second half of Daredevil 2, some of the later episodes of Jessica Jones that felt like filler, and the bulk of Luke Cage. The scripts meandered, there were a lot of shifting alliances that felt poorly earned, and the fights were only intermittently impressive. There's a scene where the Danny Rand guy uses nunchucks less effectively than my shirtless 1980s college drug pusher Fat Pete, but I liked the compound fight, the drunken master battle and a short fight with a fat thug. They did a reasonably good job of giving a story logic to the various fight outcomes. I liked the lean agency they gave the Davos character, a sharp contrast with the constantly shifting goals of the protagonist. You can be conflicted and have a narrative through-line. The big message of "Distrust All Families" was kind of interesting, too. But mostly the sins were the sins of the other Marvel shows about 20 percent louder, including a New York that feels like 300 people live there and writing that just seems two to four solid passes from matching the producers' ambition for the material. Why not a first scene of Danny Rand giving his shoes away?

* finally, I didn't know that Paul Karasik's story from We Told You So: Comics As Art was on-line at his own space. This was mentioned to me as a favorite by a lot of Karasik's fellow artists. I, of course, love all the comics in there equally.
 
posted 5:05 pm PST | Permalink
 

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