Stuff We Like This Week: May 1 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: May 1 Edition

May 01

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Sarah: I’m a big superdork fan of The Rack, Kevin Church and Benjamin Birdie‘s excellently rendered “comic strip about a comic shop.” I love stories that spotlight microcosms of geekiana, and The Rack does that so perfectly, I sometimes wonder if they’ve been eavesdropping on people I know (probably, they have — they’re sneaky like that). But that’s the intellectual reason for my enjoyment of the strip. The hearts ‘n’ guts reason has always been Lydia Park. Lydia, Yavin IV’s Assistant Manager, is one of those characters that is instantly recognizable as someone you know in real life, but isn’t usually seen that much in mainstream entertainment — crabby, bespectacled Asian chick, likes beer and comics, unfailingly acerbic. I am pleased to have many Lydias in my life and have even been told that I’m a bit of a Lydia myself (best compliment ever). So I was a little worried — okay, actually I was on pins and fucking needles — when she up and quit her job at Yavin IV. Whatwhywhat? Also, what?! (Also, Lydia’s face in that strip I just linked kills me dead.) Well, duh, those wily bastards — and equally wily Max Riffner — have a plan. And it looks like this. And I can’t wait. Highlight of my week, thank you very much.

Matt: Dittos on the Rack/Lydia love, but what kinda knocked my ass over this week is G.I. Joe: Resolute, the animated direct-to-web-and-let’s-hope-DVD film written by comics scribe Warren Ellis. Being a drooling Ellis fanman, I programmed my DVR to tape the full broadcast airing from Adult Swim, and have been watching it in chunks every night. It’s pretty much what everyone else has been saying it is–this totally strange but totally AWESOME PG-13 take on the classic Joe cartoon in which everything stops being silly and Moscow gets vaporized in the first ten minutes. It’s not like one of those revamps where they feel like they have to make it seem all “grown-up,” forcing boobies and blood down Sweet Lady Nostalgia’s dainty throat; this could literally pass for an episode of the cartoon, were it not for the death and extreme mayhem. It buys into even the most insane aspects of the old Joe mythos with such straight-faced lunatic glee that it’s impossible not to get dragged along for the ride. I am loving it and wondering what it will take to get Hasbro, Mattel, et al. to release all their weird old toy cartoons to writers like Ellis for this kind of treatment–I want Garth Ennis’ Thundercats, Brian Azzarello’s C.O.P.S., and YES, Alan Moore’s Go-Bots.

Jeff: Vikings.  I’ve been all about Vikings this week, reading the last five or six issues of Brian Wood’s Northlanders that had piled up in the to-be-read pile in one sitting, re-reading Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein’s Viking #1 (which if you haven’t bought that yet, you basically should drop everything and do so right now).  The combination of rage and enlightened self-interest, even when it isn’t romanticized to death (and it isn’t in either of the comics I’m name-checking above), has an appealing simplicity to it.  And seriously, have you seen Nic Klein’s art on Viking?  Because it is beautiful and intense and emotive and awesome.  And vikings completely got shafted on Deadliest Warrior – screw you, samurai.