Saturday, August 14, 2010

A Comics Pioneer and Some Reviews

How did I not know about this amazing woman? I've been catching up on my Newsweeks and found this article about artist Lily Renee Phillips. She's led an incredible life, escaping to London from Nazi Germany when she was 14, then years later, being reunited with her parents, who also managed to get out of Germany, in New York. She worked in the '40s at Fiction House. having answered a newspaper ad for an artist. The examples of her art are wonderful. I'm sure I've seen these and another examples, but never realized a woman had drawn them.


Batgirl 13 had my least favorite cover of the series so far, but the story, featuring Clayface, was fun. I like how Wendy Harris as Proxy is fitting in and I appreciated the reference to Babs being on "Birds-related business." Continuity is a good thing, and so is remembering characters appear in more than one book.

Birds of Prey 4
This sorta concludes the first arc while setting up the next one, which is really a continuation of the first arc. The identity of the White Canary makes sense and fit in nicely, and I like how the story broke into three sections that paralleled each other, matching the danger and tension: Babs with Savant and Creote, Dinah battling White Canary, and Zinda and Helena dealing with the Penguin. The fill-in pages of art made the sections with Babs look just weird (and what's up with those big, pouty lips?). I also appreciated White Canary naming Roy Harper among Dinah's loved ones she planned to kill. But my favorite part: Babs telling Savant (about Creote): "Don't you know anything? He loves you, you idiot. He loves you." Ah, sweet romance. :)

And then I bought and skimmed something I swore I'd have nothing to do with: Titans 26. Roy was in it. Roy Harper, who I decided was dead to me. I had to peek. I haven't been reading this and I skipped all the pages that didn't have Roy in them, so I have no idea what's going on, nor do I care, but the continuation of the tension between Roy and Cheshire was okay, though I did not like the implication that Roy was on drugs, again and still. But he and Cheshire are up to something, so I'm curious. Damn it. And damn me for not being able to look away.

1 comment:

  1. Firefox is getting weird when I try to moderate comments from the email. When I tried to publish this comment from SallyP, it said it was deleted, which made no sense, and it's gone except in the email. So, I'm posting it here and answering.

    SallyP: You're braver than I am, when it comes to peeking inside of the Titans book.

    But Birds of Prey was QUITE nice, although some of the art was a little...wonky, to put it kindly. I did quite enjoy Helena and the Penquin, on the one hand, he was gloating over his brilliance, and then he was gasping at the thought of being betrayed, which is just a littl naive on his part.

    And it's about time that Creote and Savant got together, dammit!

    Me: Yeah, I love Creote and Savant as a couple and hope Gail really develops that.

    As for Titans, I'm not brave. I'm weak, too weak to resist. I tell myself it's an alternate earth. ;)

    ReplyDelete