Batman: Contagion

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Batman: Contagion (DC, 1996).



There might be two ways to look at this book, but the question of why in the world I own it should probably be raised. When I lived in Athens in the late 1990s, I would occasionally visit the J&J Flea Market a little north of town. There, one vendor had a very impressive room full of very inexpensive comics. Most of them were three-for-a-dollar and probably worth even less, but he also had several boxes of more entertaining 1970s books - Superman Family, Metal Men and the like - for not more than two bucks each. Occasionally, a trade paperback or graphic novel would slip in for the same very low price, and I would usually snap it up, thinking $1 a quite fair price to sample a very long story from comics with which I was unfamiliar.

I also suffered from that foolish malady common to collectors where I wished to have shelves full of books. The quality could come later; first, I wanted the shelves to look impressive and full. This sometimes meant that I would spend an occasional dollar or two on books that I normally would not, just to swell the shelves. You know the greatest thing about swearing off the bloat of my material world a year and a bit ago? I'm no longer tempted by dumb things like that.

At any rate, I suspected that I wouldn't enjoy the book, and I was proved right. I disliked it from the start, as the designer evidently chose to blow his budget on a long lunch. The very first page of the book is the first page of story, and it opens very abruptly, without any kind of scene-setting or even credits. Parsing out who wrote and drew what, and where this material originally appeared, is like a jigsaw puzzle. On the inside back cover(!), there's a list of comics where these chapters were originally serialized. I count twelve, but there are thrteen chapters inside. The twelfth episode is labeled "part ten." The original covers of these twelve comics are reproduced at the size of postage stamps. Alan Grant is credited as one of the five writers on the inside front cover, but because some of the interior credits are edited out, I'm unable to tell what pages he actually scripted.

In other words, this is yet another slapped-together, thought-free, half-assed cash-in to rip off as many Batman readers as can be suckered in by it. Having said that, it is certainly possible that the $19.99 edition presently in print might have addressed some of this volume's deficiency. That is, after all, a price 50% greater than the $12.95 that DC originally charged for this book. We know that DC is capable of so much better - see their astounding series of Starman Omnibus volumes - and so it's just pathetic seeing how they can just crap out books with the barest minimum of work and get away with it.

But really, all the tinkering in the world couldn't turn these comics into anything readable. DC, like its principal rival, often creates "crossover" stories which wind their way through several loosely-related titles over the course of a couple of months. Indeed, "Contagion" was a management-decreed storyline, mostly (apparently) written by Chuck Dixon, and given to the comics' regular creative teams to tell. For my readers unfamiliar with this practice, it would mean that on one week, you could read part one of the story in Batman # 529, and parts two and three the following week in Catwoman # 31 and in Azrael # 15, and so on. There is, bluntly, no way in the universe that this could ever result in a satisfying read for anybody. It never has worked, and it never will. The closest that it has ever come was in a Grant Morrison-led crossover called One Million, and that worked because DC suspended its normal operations for a single month and let the story, as directed by Morrison, take over its entire line through individually-labeled and designed titles, and even that epic was fraught with pointless, unnecessary moments and melodramas that fell on their faces.

Well, maybe it worked somewhere else. Sometime soon, I'll try looking at a similar Superman crossover event from the period and see how well it reads.

This time out, the five writers attempt to tell a story where a lethal, no-known-cure plague called The Clench is brought to Gotham City and many of the city's wealthiest are trapped with it in a luxury high-rise. They send word to the city's underworld that they will pay five million for a cure, leading Robin, Catwoman and a bounty hunter in a race to find one of the only known survivors of the disease. Meanwhile, Batman, Huntress and Nightwing try to keep order in the city after the Clench escapes into the population, and the untrustworthy Poison Ivy, who is immune to all diseases, is recruited to help.

The patchwork story, with its artificial cliffhangers, just does not engage in any way. Dixon's installments are the most energetic, and Denny O'Neil's the most somber and humorless. At one point, Robin starts to succumb to the Clench, leaving no doubt as to how quickly this plague will be cured. Unresolved subplots from these books wander through and just confused me. Commissioner Gordon has been outed from his job when the book opens, and his replacement is a dim buffoon. The Clench has evidently been dumped into the population, deliberately, by a gang of Azrael's old enemies. I'm sorry to spoil that, but telling you that the rogues' gallery of an already-forgotten C-list supporting character is behind this allegedly important story might best explain why this book is not recommended at all.

Batman and Son

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Batman and Son (DC, 2009)



Ouch, my achin' eyes, what an ugly book this is! I don't know what on earth is going on with Grant Morrison's career, but it seems that for every page of his comics drawn by a really talented professional, readers have to suffer through four drawn by somebody who's more interested in obscuring Morrison's intent behind horrible storytelling, a total misunderstanding of human anatomy and a latent desire to simply miss the point of what he should be drawing.

Morrison started his run on DC's Batman in 2007 and this is the first of four collected editions of the still-ongoing story. Reports from people who are reading it as it's released suggest that the current episodes - to be reprinted in, I suppose, the fifth and sixth books - have hit that wonderful Morrison payoff where elements from much earlier in the story are shown to be delicately tied together. Nobody in comics does this as well as Morrison. He hides things in plain sight and foreshadows so well and so casually that I'm genuinely curious to see what might be going on, but, honestly, it can probably wait if the artwork is anywhere as awful as this.

The story begins with the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker, being critically wounded by a rogue cop dressed as Batman. After a detour dealing with two old enemies, one of whom knows his secret identity of Bruce Wayne and can attack him in public, Batman begins to discover there's a secret order among these rogue police, using his identity for a purpose to be explored down the line. Along the way, he has to deal with his thirteen year-old son, a murderous brat raised by a gang of international criminals and cultists.

DC's reprint division has done their usual half-baked job on a contemporary property. It's a shame the way that company can make archival reprints shine with usually sensible decisions about what to collect and a strong sense of design; I'll be writing about their recent Creeper collection soon, and that great book proves that somebody in that company has their head firmly in place. But when they reprint modern comics, they just throw a random number of issues between two covers and assemble it with no thought as to how anybody's supposed to follow it or even know that the story continues into subsequent editions. There's literally nothing in here to tell readers that the story of the doppelganger Batmen and the other subplots should find some payoff in the books "The Black Glove" and "Batman RIP." It's a book, idiotically, that assumes anybody who wants to read it has Wikipedia open in another tab.

I confess that certain message boards that I enjoy have roared their disapproval of the artwork in these subsequent books, but honestly I'm having trouble imagining any art worse than that contributed by Andy Kubert in this volume. It's not merely that the characters are drawn to look unpleasantly angular and ugly everywhere, it's that the whole book is rendered in such a stylized way that there's no sense of place or scale anywhere, making sequences incredibly difficult to follow. Early in the book there's a fight in a museum's pop art exhibit, which sees people slugging it out in front of panels reading POW! and WHAM!, surely a sequence that cries out for artwork in the style of sixties artists like Carmine Infantino or Murphy Anderson, and not this sub-Jim Lee material, all pouches and constipation faces. Some years ago, Morrison scripted a one-off comic called Doom Force which specifically parodied this style of artwork and now the art on his mainstream work looks like the parody.

Part of me wants to embrace this book, because there are enough wild Morrison ideas inside it to occasionally overcome the book's major deficiencies. I'm certainly curious where the story will go next, but I've been a fan of the writer since Zenith in 1987 and I've overlooked a lot of terrible artwork in that time. When you spend even a second listing the names of previous Batman artists who could have made these comics shine, I believe that's a large enough suspension of belief violation to curb any interest in these books. Absent the employment of a Jim Aparo clone to redraw a second edition, not at all recommended.

Batman Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Batman Featuring Two-Face and the Riddler (DC, 1995)



Here's an interesting case where not only is the book I've read just all over the map, my thoughts on it are equally scattered. This might just add up to an even more incoherent than usual entry.

Naturally, DC Comics would like to cash in on the film versions of their comic books, and so when Batman Forever was released in 1995, somebody compiled this incredibly slapdash 192-page book which collects some of the many stories that featured the film's two bad guys. Each villain gets the spotlight in three tales, and they share space with the Penguin in an interesting additional story called "Original Sins."

"Original Sins" is by far the most interesting thing in the book. It was initially published in the 1989 Secret Origins special edition and was co-written by Neil Gaiman, Alan Grant and Mark Verheiden. Gaiman contributed the frame story about a documentary film crew coming to Gotham to investigate the city's problem with oddball criminals, and the middle story, in which the Riddler explains his life of crime to them. Magically, Gaiman chose to include the Riddler of the 1960s TV series, rather than the comics, and presents a sad, aging man who misses his old colleagues like King Tut and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, and laments the modern version of the Joker, who goes around killing people these days. This story, and Grant's clever look at the Penguin, are easily the best things in the collection, although the two Riddler episodes from his 1960s heyday are each amusing in their audacious, impossible way.

Was Two-Face always such a boring villain that no writer wanted to bother with him unless they were recounting his origin for the umpteenth time? This book includes his two-part first appearance from 1941 and an extra-long tale from 1990, each of which tells his origin. So does Verheiden's segment from "Original Sins." I suppose there is some mild archaeological curiosity in comparing the way that Bill Finger and Bob Kane told the story in '41 and the ways that Verheiden and Andrew Helfer did it more recently, but crowded into this slim volume, it's too repetitive, and makes Two-Face feel One-Note.

The 1960s Riddler episodes are available in the second and third volumes of DC's Showcase Presents line of Batman reprints, where they make a little more sense placed in the high-concept, bizarrely-told pop art world of that time. The Secret Origins Special should be available from many back issue dealers, although demand from Neil Gaiman's fans might make it a little pricy. As for this book itself, I found it at a publishers' overstock clearout store about a year after its release, and felt good paying just two bucks for it. I'd recommend it if you could find it for less than what dealers charge for the Secret Origins Special, but no more.

Showcase Presents: The Brave & The Bold - Batman Team-Ups Volume One

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Showcase Presents: The Brave & The Bold - Batman Team-Ups Volume One (DC, 2007)



Well, this was a trial. DC has released three collections of the old team-up series The Brave & the Bold in their Showcase Presents format and I've read the first. This was a book that I enjoyed picking up from time to time throughout my youth, but the mid-to-late sixties material in this volume has dated terribly and was a slog to get through, despite some extremely good art which is worth a look.

The Brave & the Bold started life in the 1950s as an anthology book with various adventure stories, occasionally including superhero stories as those became more popular. Within a decade, it would usually feature a team-up between one of DC's popular marquee characters and one of their lesser-known properties. Batman was a frequent visitor to the book, and after the character's TV series became a hit on ABC, the comic was given over to him entirely, to con kids watching Adam West that they needed to read this as well.

The book was written by Bob Haney without any regard to continuity, common sense, logic or anything you might hope to hold a story together. Many of the stories are agreeably weird and wild, but some are just plain dopey from the outset. One baffling example from 1967 shows Bruce Wayne teaming up with Sgt. Rock in wartorn France and meeting again in "the present," neither having visibly aged a day. Another teams the hero with the wacky Metamorpho to fight the popular TV villains Joker, Riddler and Penguin, and also deal with a strange chemical that turns the Dark Knight Detective into a giggling, bloated "Bat-Hulk." I don't think Haney watched that TV series very much. And then there's the story pictured on the cover, where Batgirl and Wonder Woman pretend to fall in love with Batman in an extremely convoluted scheme to convince the evil Copperhead that the hero's off his game, only it starts to backfire when the ladies really do fall for him. That one's worth reading just to experience the feeling of your eyebrows raising past your hairline.

The quality of the artwork varies greatly throughout. Most of the book's second half is drawn by Neal Adams, and it's just terrific. Adams was starting about a decade of exciting, dramatic work with wild panel layouts and a really unique presentation when he got this gig, and it's certainly worth looking at his early material. Unfortunately, the book's first half is nowhere near as visually engaging. Some of it is pretty good; I always like looking at Ross Andru, especially inked by Mike Esposito, and Carmine Infantino was always reliable in the sixties, but much of it is drawn by the likes of George Papp, Mike Sekowsky and Jack Abel, and is uniformly dreary and unimaginative, grounded in the corporation's stodgy 1950s house presentation.

The thing is, Bob Haney's highwire, high-concept scripts really demand an artist who will throw caution to the wind and come up with something completely unique. The Neal Adams material works to an interesting degree; the rest of the book looks like the reason people started the cry of "Make Mine Marvel!" Not without its charms, but not really recommended either.

Batman and Bad Company

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Showcase Presents Batman volume three (DC, 2008) and Bad Company: Kano (Rebellion, 2007).



More of the same. Depending on your opinion of mid-to-late 1960s Batman, agonizingly more of the same. The book features several television-friendly villains, even ones they never used in the 60s TV series such as the Cluemaster and the Getaway Genius, but sometimes in grandiose schemes that could never have been realized on that show's budget. It features the old-styled, retarded Catwoman who was obsessed with stealing anything with "cat" in the name, be it catamarans or catawba grapes. There's some nice artwork from the likes of Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane, but you'll probably like this book a lot more if you're one of us who love the show.



Oh, I wish I could recommend this a little more strongly. The first series of Bad Company, back in 1986-87, was really amazing. Peter Milligan's been a really uneven writer, ranging from utterly compelling (as seen in that first series and, say, Enigma), and then there's well, the last two years of Shade the Changing Man and most of this. The book reprints two storylines. The first, in which the battle-scarred Kano attempts to retire to a farming community beset by ghosts and by creatures in the forest, has elements of genius, but it's completely undermined by Brett Ewins' artwork, which is even more stiff than usual and colored in that garish watercolor he seemed to be using throughout the early 1990s. The second features far better, more vibrant black and white work that recalls the earlier adventures, but the story is Milligan on autopilot. There's very little here which will convince new readers just how amazing that first series was.

(Originally posted September 02, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

1940s Batman and 1990s Takahashi

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Batman: The Dailies 1943-1946 (Sterling, 2007) and Rumic Theatre (Viz, 1996).



Boy, a little of this goes a long way. In the early 1990s, the now-defunct publisher Kitchen Sink teamed up with DC to reprint the entirety of the wartime Batman newspaper strip. The three books, poorly designed to my eye, with only two strips per page, sold badly and more than fifteen years later, Sterling cobbled up the innards, not even modifying the page numbers, and put them all in one mammoth, heavy hardback that'd bludgeon a runaway hoodlum, apparently with an eye on the remainders table at larger chain bookstores. If you can stand the discomfort of reading the 600-page thing, there's some good stuff. Batman in the 1940s had a lot more in common with Dick Tracy than the modern super-ninja, and our hero routinely comes out on the wrong side of a fistfight with thugs. He gets knocked cold by a thrown can of tomatoes at one point! Only one of these sixteen serials features a name supervillain - the Joker - the rest are pretty colorless villains with pretty colorful criminal schemes. The strips are supplanted with an amazingly exhaustive series of essays and interviews, meticulously researched and not a little dry, but more like the sort of supplements I'd prefer to see more publishers attempt. I reviewed Sterling's companion volume of Sunday strips in the spring (See here.) and can't help but feel that's the better volume, but I'm perhaps biased against this awkward, heavy book which, redesigned to display three or four strips a page would have been a lot thinner and manageable. Recommended with reservations; look for low-cost options first.



Now Rumiko Takahashi is of course well known for her long-running serial stories, but it looks like every few months she creates a one-off thirty-odd page story which appears in one of those weekly Japanese anthologies in addition to, or in lieu of, an episode of Ranma ½ or InuYasha. These are typically light romances, occasionally with some supernatural or magical element. I'm not certain how these were originally compiled in Japan, but this is a mid-90s Viz effort which packages six of these stories in that awful old neither-fish-nor-fowl $16 format that Viz used to use before giving in and going with low-priced digests like they do today. It's long out of print, but you shouldn't have much trouble tracking down a copy - Amazon has links to sellers letting it go quite cheap - and you certainly should, because each of these are charming and clever and, if we're honest, a whole lot better than InuYasha.

(Originally posted July 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

The Filth and some old Batman newspaper strips

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I reviewed this three years ago for my old Weekly Comics Hype, but this time around, I was not as engaged by Morrison's weird world than I had been. The narrative is occasionally very frustrating; I got lost wondering where some of the bizarre encounters with the Hand and its agents actually happen, and became aggravated by the multiple layers of the story. On just one level, it's one of Grant Morrison's very best stories, but it's too obscured by too many odd things to really resonate. On the other hand, some of the actual incidents are still pretty damn amazing, including one of the best death scenes ever, when Slade's fight with an assassin results in a neighbor getting... well, I shouldn't say. Chris Weston's art is amazing. Recommended if you like The Prisoner.



Oh, this is fun stuff. Originally published in 1990 by Kitchen Sink, Sterling Books last year reissued this in a low-priced hardback edition. It's the complete four-year run of Sunday Batman and Robin comics from 1943-46, back when the character was a detective adventurer for children, free from angst and the continuity of modern comics. Most of the stories are told over the course of two to eight dense pages, with lots of fun old art, mostly by Jack Burnley. Other contributors include Bill Finger, Dick Sprang and Bob Kane. The stories play like shorter Dick Tracy cases, and Batman's periodically lighthearted encounters with his foes are quite refreshing. They're not all whimsical, however. A great case where a "fortune teller" is murdered on a live radio show, only to curse his four killers with his dying breaths to cruel deaths of their own, is about as good as kids' entertainment can get. On the other hand, the old-fashioned art was an instant turnoff to the Hipster Son, who didn't stick around long enough to see Batman and Catwoman fight on the steps of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park. Seriously! Recommended for nostalgic readers.

(Originally posted April 22, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Saga of the Super-Sons, Showcase Presents Sgt. Rock

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



And then there was the time that Superman and Batman got married in the 1950s and had kids. Clark Jr. and Bruce Jr. grew to be teens in the mid-70s and had to totally deal with their square parents, who were just were not with the scene, man. And because Superman Jr. was only half as powerful as his dad, the old man was always laying down the law and saying he shouldn't get involved with either criminals or chicks. Talk about a generation gap! Didn't these relics understand this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius? Sometimes a cat's just got to do his own thing, you dig?

DC actually published this lunatic stuff for years in the pages of World's Finest Comics. One month, you'd have Superman and Batman in a traditional team-up, and the next month, you'd have their otherwise unmentioned teenage sons riding around the country on motorcycles having bizarre, quasi-socially relevant adventures. The Super-Sons were quietly shelved after Bob Haney moved on to other titles, apart from an odd, unnecessary retcon published a couple of years later. Every Super-Sons appearance is reprinted in this collection. Recommended for nostalgists and completists.



Oh, it's Robert Kanigher again.

This isn't quite as much of a slog as Kanigher's other 1960s titles, but it's still very repetitive and very uninspiring. Actually, the principal draw is Joe Kubert's artwork, but you won't believe the shortcuts he chose to take to get all these pages turned in. There are countless panels with nothing but explosions or helmets flying, or close-ups of rifle barrels.

DC wasn't entirely like this in the 1960s - the TV show era of Batman, for instance, is silly and inventive and fun - but Kanigher's books display an amazing sense of malaise and a lack of imagination. They weren't made to be read one after another, and the total absence of any continuing subplots or storylines mean that you can put this book down at any time, not missing anything. I hoped Rock would have aged better than this, but it didn't. Not recommended.

(Originally posted February 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Golgo 13 vol 10, Houdini: The Handcuff King and Showcase Presents Batgirl

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



"Wasteland" is a nuclear-scare story from the early 80s, which really has not aged as well as the other stories in this series of reprints. On the other hand, the story does a stunning job depicting the absolute desperation of a team of engineers trapped in a nuclear plant, and the solution, using Golgo's unerring accuracy to find a way to shut everything down, is very clever. The second, shorter story, "Route 95," is more engrossing, and places our "hero" amidst a murder mystery, only to learn that he has a nasty, secret reason for being in the wrong place at the wrong time... Recommended for readers who've sampled some of the other volumes.



Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi (The Salon) look at a day in the life of Houdini, preparing for and executing an event in Cambridge. It is an entertaining and detailed little story, which weaves elements of Houdini's life and mythology in and around the spectacle, but in the end, I felt that the price point was awfully high for a story so slight, and was actively aggravated at myself for spending as much as I did, even with a generous discount. $16.99 might have been fine for a life story in 96 pages, but, and this may be the plot-heavy 2000 AD fan in me talking, there's an awful lot of space given over to scene-setting at the expense of story. Not recommended without a pretty substantial discount.



A pretty typical Showcase offering, about 550 pages which reprint every Batgirl appearance from her 1966 debut into the early 70s. For a time, she was a recurring guest character in the Batman stories before getting her own monthly series in Detective Comics, with a long stretch of two-part eight-page adventures. The character was semi-retired around 1971, and, in one of the most credibility-straining ideas in DC's history, Barbara Gordon was elected to represent Gotham City in the US Congress, which didn't leave her very many opportunities to break out the cape and cowl. There's some pretty good artwork by the likes of Don Heck, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane in this volume, but the stories are pretty slight and not particularly engaging. Not recommended.

(Originally posted November 12, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Batman from the 30s to the 70s

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



I never had a copy of this book as a kid, though it seemed, growing up, that so many of my friends had either it or the companion Superman volume. Must have been a common enough Christmas present. It's a pretty good cross-section of reprints, about 400 pages, mostly in black and white. The goofy late 50s stuff is probably the most entertaining; the more critically-praised Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams stuff from the 1970s is damned, in the cold light of modern eyes, by a whole lot of coincidental plot exposition right when the hero hides from "somebody coming," that somebody being a motormouth who needs to explain how far along the evil scheme is. Come to think of it, the same creators' lauded Green Lantern/Green Arrow run is completely full of that as well. I prefer the silly old story where Luthor and the Joker team up and launch an incredibly successful business selling robots to industry, but then blow it all by using the robots to steal money instead of just sitting back and earning it. Recommended for nostalgists.

(Originally posted October 29, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Showcase Presents Batman vol. 2 and One Pound Gospel: Hungry for Victory

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



The second big Batman Showcase book (~500 pages of black & white reprints) covers all of his appearances in Detective Comics and Batman from September 1965 to December 1966, so it's material very much inspired by, and in turn inspiring, the Adam West Batman show. One of these strips, "Batman's Inescapable Doom Trap," showed up three months later as a TV episode, with the criminal character of Carnado revamped into Zelda the Great, played by Anne Baxter. Since there was a need for more female foes on the TV show, the comics writers created Poison Ivy, who, interestingly, has nothing to do with the "mad botanist obsessed with plants" iteration of the character, and is instead a typical va-va-voom '60s femme fatale. As they got word that Frank Gorshin was not going to return as the Riddler in the second season, they created the Cluemaster, who's exactly like the Riddler, only he wears orange.

Oddly, despite tailoring new, easily-adaptable scripts, the comic writers found their work quickly ignored by the TV people, who never used these or several other new TV-friendly characters. They even pilfered an old Superman foe called the Puzzler to sub for Gorshin instead of using Cluemaster in the second season. Anyway, this is highly recommended if you enjoy the Adam West show, but if you don't, you can safely give this a pass.




This volume compiles a pair of five-part stories from the early 90s; Rumiko Takahashi typically writes and draws a single multi-part One-Pound Gospel story every other year or so. Kosaku's boneheaded inability to pick up on anybody's feelings is a little ponderous, and it reaches a new low in the second story when it's revealed that he had no idea that Sister Angela's vows preclude her ever dating anybody. But the first story, in which an early KO of Kosaku's has been working to keep up with Kosaku's weight to get a rematch, is very good, and there's a two-thirds-splash page of Kosaku drowning his sorrows in a bowl of noodles which is just about the funniest thing I've seen in months. Recommended for Takahashi fans.

(Originally posted September 30, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)