Comic review: Tokyo Ghost #1- Old Man Fear

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Sean Murphy
Creators: Remender/Murphy
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 16th September 2015


I used to love Stephen King, but the last book that I read coming from his ever-prolific mind was about cell-phones and how people will turn into zombies if they use them too much. The idea was dull, easy, and I expected better out of King. I read the entire book and my lasting impression was of an out of touch, out of ideas, old man, looking at the world outside of his mansion, and having a bit of a ill-considered, lazy moan about it all.

That book was called ‘Cell,’ and this book by Rick Remender, is pretty much the same thing. It is drenched in ‘cool,’ with a cool name, a cool protagonist and cool artwork, but the mind-set that it’s all coming from is pretty much the same as Cell. The difference is slight. Cell was about cell-phones making people violently anti-social, whilst ‘Tokyo Ghost’ (see, told you it was cool) is about computer games and the Internet making people violently anti-social.

I’m calling BS on the entire idea that modern technology is making us violent and anti-social, not because I like modern technology, but because I remember the time when all of this technology didn’t exist, and here’s the truth, people were just as anti-social back then, and a whole lot more violent as well.

The only difference between now and 1991 is that in 1991 people hid behind books, Walkmen, newspapers and magazines, whilst today they hide behind iphones. People in big cities ignore each other. That’s how it has always been. If you want some social interaction then move to a small village where people still talk to each other. It’s not about technology. It's about the modern capitalist rat race life, and urban isolation. The violence in these books is just for dramatic effect. It makes the story more exciting, that's why it's there. In the real world it's the isolation that gets you, not the violence, which is actually quite rare today in comparison to the recent past.

Having rejected the initial premise I’m left to fall back on the characters within the book to get some enjoyment out of it. Unfortunately the main protagonist is that ubiquitous protagonist that you always get in comic books these days, that being the attractive young female (normally a cop, or special agent, as she is here) who goes around beating up intolerant, racist, sexist men. In this book we have another perfect specimen of a middle aged writers PC mind, outfitted in hotpants, with the requisite punk haircut and a good line in banter as she roars up and down the highstreet dispensing instant justice to all of the nasty men that she finds. She has a boyfriend in tow, he sucks, and it’s her job to rescue him from not sucking anymore. This boyfriend is a stand-in for an on-line gamer, so the message is clear. Boys suck, they spend too much time on the internet playing computer games, and it’s up to their social justice warrior perfect girlfriends to save them from themselves.

This protagonist girl (I forget her name, but she’s pretty much identical to Tank Girl from the early 1990’s) is the only person in old Rick’s universe that is not plugged into the Internet. Strange that, because in the world that I live, the most plugged in people to the Internet are not men, but young girls. Men are starting to abandon the Internet, and it’s the females that are stuck to it like wars to a government, but you’re not going to see that reflected in a comic book, because in the world of PC delusion the saviours of the world are always pretty young girls.

The most asleep, clueless, half-witted people on the planet today are social science educated young, feminist, liberal girls. They see none of the tyranny of our times, and are used to divide and conquer the population with identity politics nonsense. Their ideology comes from government approved university Marxism, an ideology that reduces everything to class, skin colour, gender and sexuality, thus missing all of the important issues that we need to sort out in order to enact some real change in the rapidly declining western world.

So, yes, I’m fed up of seeing pretty young girls portrayed as saviours in my comic books when in the real world they are anything but.

Rant over, I’ll try to be nice now. So why would anybody like, or enjoy Tokyo Ghost?

I know why. I do. People will like the art, and they will think that it’s addressing important issues about technology and how it’s isolating us from ourselves. They’ll think it’s smart, funny, cool and fun.

I (obviously) have a different opinion on the book. My opinion is that it’s liberal tosh drenched in cool, that says nothing, has a wonky premise, and features a generic protagonist that you’ll find in just about every other ‘independent’ comic book on the market today. So, is it worth buying? If you are a feminist liberal type, yes, go for it. However, for anybody else, for anybody that has broken free from the mainstream paradigm of feminist liberalism, don’t bother, it will annoy the crap out of you, and will make you long for the good old days when comic books still had genuine diversity, and when Stephen King still pumped out genuinely exciting, fresh, insightful and enjoyable books.



Rating: 5/10 (Dripping with generic cool, and not half as clever as it thinks that it is)


 Special thanks to John at the Incredible Comic Book Shop for recommending this book to me. I didn’t like it, but I got a lot out of it, and it gave me perfect ranting material, thanks mate. 
https://www.facebook.com/TheIncredibleComicShop

Comic review: Black Science #16- The death of a pointless comic book

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Matteo Scalera
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 8th July 2015



Black Science #16 begins with the main protagonist feeling like everything he has ever done in his life has been:

‘One giant fn waste of time.’

Decent art, blah book.

I know exactly how he feels. I’ve been reading this book for sixteen issues now, and I don't understand why I bothered with it in the first place.

The overall message of Black Science #16 is that you shouldn’t bother doing ANYTHING. If you try to do something extraordinary then bad things will happen to you.

Therefore, you might as well spend your life in safety, living in the suburbs with your wife and kids, going to their baseball games, not spending too much time at work, and keeping your head down in order to have a safe, unexciting and uneventful life.

Whenever I read this book I read the writer, not the characters. That’s not good.

I read the characters and I see familiar clichés and a guy heading up a creative writing course, showing you how to put the pieces into place, but with no real desire to say anything dangerous or to kick against a system that he’s perfectly happy with.

I read a guy with a comfortable career, and a nice wife and kids at home, so why cause trouble when tea is ready at five and the grass needs to be mown before suppertime?

There’s nothing wrong with that kind of life, but when that mentality seeps through into the comic book narrative it doesn’t exactly set my world on fire.

How could it?

What I am reading in Black Science is a desire to compromise and to play it safe. Okay Rick, play it safe, I wish you the best, but you are writing safety when I want revolution, and as I see a world badly in need of revolution, not safety and compromise, why should I keep on reading your safety, career and suburban isolation comic book narratives?

Middle aged bloke + girl to have affair with.

Rick won’t respond, and why should he? He’s doing fine, and I’m just a no-nothing guy on the Internet. He’ll keep on pumping out this stuff, and his name alone will keep on selling these mediocre narratives for a good few years yet, so why should he change?

I don’t hate the book, but it’s just a book, just another comic book sci-fi narrative, that reflects nothing, and so, why should I bother with it?

I can’t find a reason to care about this book anymore, so after sixteen issues of reading it, I’m off.

How do I feel about the experience?

I feel like it was a waste of my time, and a waste of my money, but no hard feelings.

Oh well, that’s old Rick off my list then, let’s see if I can find a writer who has something to say, and is desperate, no matter what the cost, to say it.


Rating: 5/10 (A well constructed comic book, but ultimately, it’s pointless)

Comic review: Black Science #13- Kill everybody and start again

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Matteo Scalera
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 1st April 2015


It looks like Rick Remender is going old testament on his Black science creation, realising that things have got a bit messy he’s deciding to change things up, and changing things up means lots of death and lots of nastiness.

It had to be done. The book was getting far too convoluted with various versions of the same characters popping up from different dimensions, and with these different characters interacting with different dimensional versions of themselves, their friends and families it was getting almost impossible to follow, or care about what was going on.

Issue # 13 is a recognition that the book went off the rails, and as the issue concludes Rick even admits that he’s going to start killing people off. He doesn’t admit that his book was becoming a convoluted, confusing mess, but he’s not exactly going to do that in his own book, is he?

Issue #14 is going to be the interesting one, which unfortunately means that issue #13 is in a nowhere land of reversing mid-stream, setting the stage for what is to come, but not really being an essential book in and of itself.

There are telling moments in the book where the writer acknowledges within the text that he is peddling clichés. The first is when a character acknowledges that he is a ‘The cliched breadwinning, middle-aged workaholic.’ You sure are mate, blame the writer. The second moment is when a character acknowledges the weakness of his own dialogue by stating that he's just saying it because, ‘I read it in a comic'. That’s not funny, it's just very poor, very lazy writing that is attempting to cover itself with a knowing joke.

It doesn’t work. Lazy writing is lazy writing, and covering it up with moments of Kevin Smith over analysis of everything that is happening as it bloody happens, doesn’t cover up your lack of creativity, imagination and inspiration.

There’s also the Kevin Smith swearing thing going on in this book as well, using creative (and disgusting) swearing to try to convince people that what they are reading is ‘adult.’ I find it painfully, depressingly tiresome, and it’s another pointer that the writer is running out of narrative ideas. Swearing isn’t big, or clever. I thought we all knew that? We do, it’s just that some fanboys put their ‘cool’ goggles on for certain writers, and forgive them when they really should be demanding better writing from them.

I’m going to finish off this review by neatly summing up the issue, as you’re supposed to do in a review, so who says I’m completely out of control in my writing? Okay, so I usually am, but I’ll contain myself here.

Black Science #13 is a smash and burn book. It’s the moment in a series where a writer begins to realise that he’s lost control of his project, and even though people are still reading it, the ideas are running thin and it’s starting to go a bit off the rails. The book is lazily written and focussed on family drama issues that verge on the cliché, thus removing any emotional resonance or connectivity the reader would feel to any of the characters. Added to this the fact that the characters have multiple versions of themselves, so death doesn’t even appear to matter anymore, and you’re getting a situation where you stop caring because nothing that happens seems to matter.

The book needs a re-boot, and that’s what they are going to do, but not in this issue. You’ll have to wait until issue #14 for that reboot, which means that issue #13 is just filler, not very good filler, and a book that isn’t really worthy of a purchase.



Rating: 3/10 (I’m finding it difficult to care about anything that happens right now, so a reboot of the book is absolutely vital)

Comic Book Review: Black Science #8- Anarchy and Science

Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Matteo Scalera & Dean White
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 27th August 2014


Black Science is a book that I picked up mid-run for two reasons. Firstly, I didn’t have that many books to read this week, and secondly, I read the preview and it said something about ‘anarchism.’ Of course when ever people read ‘anarchism’ they get images of black face mask wearing goons chucking bricks through the windows of Starbucks, but you have to bear in mind that this image is about as far from anarchism as you can get. The black mask wearing goons are usually cops, or idiots paid by the cops to cause some chaos, thus giving the cops a reason to declare martial law and kick the crap out of all of those pesky, peaceful protestors who are concerned about banks raping and pillaging the planet.

Anarchism just means freedom from state control, or as it should be called, state imposed slavery. An anarchist wants people to live free from state-sanctioned coercion and the threat of imprisonment for the mere act of peaceful non-compliance, that’s all. You can see why the mainstream media demonises anarchists, can’t you? It’s simple. The anarchist wants freedom. The corporate whore mainstream media career obsessed journalist wants state-sanctioned slavery. I’ll discuss how this theme relates to the comic a bit later on in the review, but first off I want to briefly discuss the narrative core of the issue.

Black Science #8 has a very clever beginning with a first person narration helping the reader to build empathy for two children as they battle against weird alien creatures. The kids mouth the usual clichés about hitting back against bullies, but even though the message is verging on the cliché it’s still a good, positive thing to hear.

This action scene involving two apparently lost children fighting against a strange alien threat is duplicated at the end of the book. This means that the book begins with action and threat, and closes on action and threat. I like the technique as it gets the readers straight into the story and leaves them on a high as well. The middle section is not as exciting as the two sections with the kids, but I understand that this is a standard technique when writing comics. You begin and end with some action, and you put the slower, story/character based stuff in the middle.

This middle section consists of a team of ‘scientific anarchists’ having tense conversations before one of their previously taciturn members goes into narrative exposition mode, giving the readers a brief history of the strange device that they are all using. From what I can understand it’s an alien machine that causes more trouble than what it is worth. That’s where the ‘Black Science ‘ of the title comes from. This device appears to be alien technology that offers great benefits to those who possess it. The device offers huge technological advantages, but corruption inevitably follows.

This book is arguing that having high scientific technology in the hands of centralised human control systems is always a recipe for disaster.  Perhaps the only way to avoid disaster is to stop letting these centralised control systems exist in the first place? That’s where the idea of ‘anarchism’ comes into play.

This book is exploring what happens when a group of anarchist scientists get powerful technology that is usually only in the hands of the state. There is no such thing as an anarchist scientist who works for the state. These anarchist scientists must be working independently, free from state control. The question is, will they act any differently to the states that have always had this power in the past, or will human nature dictate that they act just as badly as their supposed opposites? I say ‘opposites’ because anarchists don’t use ‘Black Science’ technology to completely obliterate civilian populations, but states certainly do. The United States has done it twice quite recently, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Black Science is a comic book obviously put together by an experienced comic book professional. Rick Remender has been doing this for a while now, and for an issue mid-way through the story-arc it is very easy to follow. The art has a frenetic energy. It looks dirty and exciting, and although it took me a while to get to grips with the underlying themes of the narrative I think I have it now.

Some of the readers of this review might think that I’m projecting a lot of my own ideas into this book, making it into something that I want to read, rather than what is actually there. Perhaps you are right, but that’s what all good art does. It makes you think about the important things in your own life, and you take and consume it to fit your own needs. This book surprised me. It’s a grower, a book that made me think, and after a couple of reads, and a good amount of time digesting what I had read I’m very happy to recommend it to all readers of this review. Of course I now realise what I have to do next. I need to get those first seven issues, and get my thinking cap on. I want to know more about this group of anarchist scientists, their philosophies and their individual personalities. It’s going to be a real pleasure to go through those previous issues and discover the context behind what has happened in issue #8.  I’m so happy that I took a chance on what I thought would be just another silly comic book about evil anarchists. It’s not that, it’s a lot better book than that.

Rating: 9/10