Felipe Smith

Lacks the charm of the first series
8:43 am 1 December 2016
Ghost Rider (2016-) #1 - Felipe Smith, Danilo Beyruth, Tradd Moore, Marco Checchetto
Maybe because there's less of a focus on Gabe and Robbie? When he's hanging out with and taking care of his brother, I find Robbie the most endearing. The resignation with Eli doesn't help and the fact that he's got two guest stars - one who shows up on later on - adds to this sense of disconnect.

It's a pretty scattered story, but for all that, I enjoyed seeing Robbie Reyes as the Ghost Rider more than I realized I would. I missed him more than I thought I would.

I wish it had focused on Robbie himself. He was all about taking care of his neighborhood, and that was nice, too. He is Latino and his neighborhood is poor and mostly ethnic from what I can tell - and it meant that the little guys that most people forgot got some decent protection.

Instead, this looks like a more epic tale taking him further and further away from his roots. I enjoyed this, a great deal, but have many, many concerns. I could have done without the backstory with a villain that outraces the Hell Charger, but it was cuter, felt more in line with Robbie's origins, and it helped soothe some of those concerns.

Definitely giving this a good shot, but if I find this doesn't do it for me, I will drop this series.
Marvel Graphic Novel read in 2016… (more)

MBQ contains short episodes in the lives of a handful of acquaintances in LA. Workers at various menial jobs, cops, a drug dealer, a struggling comic artist. I was interested in trying it, as while it doesn't sound horribly like the kind of thing I'm interested in, it's gotten a lot of praise and came off to me as one of the perhaps too few OEL out there that aren't afraid of not being Japanese. Being able to read the manga style we like but still able to read about our own/other cultures besides Japan's is one of the greatest reasons for OEL to exist (besides my #1 reason of 'because there's no reason it shouldn't') to me, so it always makes me happy to see something like this.

But as I read it I felt I must be missing something. People had called this manga 'gritty,' and it certainly does contain more than it's fair share of violence, rough language, and some sexual content. But when I think gritty I think something like 'harsh realism.' Is that what this is? I feel like people are just impressed with it's 'honesty,' as if this were slice of life. But is one gruesome scene of a man getting his faced kicked in and another of a woman and man getting much too personal in a karaoke room only to have the woman lose her lunch outside 'honesty?' It's unflinching, sure, but I need more than that. And how about a grossly obese woman getting angry about getting the wrong order at the fast food joint? Ok, that's honest, but it's also an overused scene and too overdone and wacky to feel like some nugget of American city life. From what I've seen of the characters' personalities, I am interested in getting to know some of them, but the little snippets of their lives this manga shows me usually feel less like something that will help me get to know them better and more like something that will make me go, 'Wow! How very unflinching of you to show me that! (...Remind me why you did again?)'

This manga is trying extremely hard to be gritty and different. While the goal is quite respectable (even if the self-indulgent rant of the artist that takes up an entire last chapter is quite a turn-off) and I can't really say that it's *not* accomplishing this... What's it accomplishing besides that? The art's not my style, but it's definitely good for what it's doing, and it would probably grow on me a lot more if I liked the story more. But something in the writing isn't working here for me. Showing one extreme scene after another can work for some stories I've seen, but here something's missing. I feel looking at it rather like I feel about the sort of people who try to be this exaggeratedly IN YOUR FACE. It might be impressive and swaying at first, but if you step back and look past the attitude, the things they're saying have no real substance or meaning. It might not even be that they're stupid. But somewhere along the way they learned or internalized accidentally that the show was more important, or at least got more response, than anything else.

Or maybe I'm just crazy? How can a whole internet of reviewers and fans be that wrong?… (more)