Category Archives: Comics

Book Review: Wizzywig by Ed Piskor

Books, Comics

wizzywig

Wizzywig: Potrait of a Serial Hacker is compelling comics fiction from Ed Piskor, who tells the story of a hacker who moves from the early thrill of discovery to serious trouble with the law. Kevin Phenicle is a nerdy, picked-on kid who likes figuring out–and exploiting–systems, whether it’s buying the right punch to make his own bus-transfer passes or whistling the perfect tones for free long-distance calls.

His grandma gets him an early computer for his birthday one year, and he’s soon exploring BBSs and making money pirating games. Eventually he’s breaking into Ma Bell headquarters, inadvertently distributing massive worms and turning to life on the lam and eventually in prison.

Kevin’s an interesting character. He’s mistreated, sure, but he’s a schemer too, unafraid of boundaries he doesn’t respect, which is most of them. He’s not above working on the margins of the law, especially when he’s on the run, but he never seems eager to steal or hurt anyone who hasn’t hurt him first.

Piskor covers a lot of ground here, from teenage hijinks to the desperation of staying one step ahead of the feds and finally a brutal life in prison. He does it skillfully, with a cartoon-realism style. (He started by doing work with Harvey Pekar.) He likes big hair and weird faces and makes good use of single-shot “talking heads” to open chapters and offer commentary on the story.

Ultimately, the book suffers from a lack of subtlety. It’s openly on Kevin’s side, but it would benefit from giving more serious consideration to the people who are alarmed and afraid of what he’s doing. The media coverage is embodied in a cartoonishly monstrous buffoon of a local news anchor, and those scenes are the weakest in the book. You understand the author’s point with the character, but he could make it better with less, not more.

But Wizzywig is an imaginative exploration of a culture that pushed boundaries and broke the law. It also highlights the official overreaction to its existence, leading us to wonder what a just punishment, if any, would be for Kevin’s exploits.

Review: Mouse Guard Fall 1152 by David Petersen

Comics

Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 is a kind of Knights Templar for the murine set. This roaming band of guardsmen live by a chivalrous code that has them protect the roadways of their tiny society, ensuring the ability of mice to trade and travel without becoming lunch.

The society is sword-and-cloak stuff, a Middle Ages vibe with castles and wooden houses, hand tools and ye old shoppes. It’s a solid start on a compelling world, although I wish more time had been spent exploring it. Instead we’re thrown right into the action, which feels pervasive.

The art is the high point. Peterson creates vibrant, water color-styled pages with an evocative interplay between light and dark. These mice live in night and day, sunshine and storm.

The writing isn’t as strong; a lot of the big lines feel borrowed from other stories, as if he’s still writing his way to a firm voice. But it works, and if it continues to improve to match the art–and add some more characterization to the storytelling–the series could be something special

Review: Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box by Warren Ellis

Comics

Would I enjoy Warren Ellis’ Astonishing X-Men: Ghost more if it weren’t an X-Men story? Yes. And not only because he takes characters I’m familiar with in directions that don’t seem consistent with their histories.

The X-Men here are as savage as I’ve seen them. The team, composed of Cyclops, Emma Frost, Beast, Wolverine, Armor and a visiting Storm, seem to have lost their way. They’re nihilistic, prone to torture and murder, jumping in and wrecking things with no regard for consequences. Only Storm voices disapproval or surprise. The rest have grown accustomed to new ways of action, anchored in a sense that extinction is possible for mutants as a group.

This could be an interesting new direction for the X-men; indeed, it looks to be the way the franchise is trying to go (I’m not fully up to date). But what would be a new angle for a cohesive franchise seems like more grist for the mill for one that scatters its output—and viewpoints—over multiple channels every month. To argue “the X-men are changing,” you need to have a definitive take on who the X-men are, which doesn’t seem possible these days.

Ellis has to shoehorn his dimension-spanning story into an awkward set-up revolving around the old “no more mutants” House of M crossover. While he largely succeeds, it’s hard to feel it wouldn’t be better if he could set his own clean slate.

There are other small problems with the narrative. All the pieces needed to solve the mystery drop neatly into the characters laps. The characters are all a little too quippy; the dialogue can be amusing, but it also feels like Ellis fills too much panel space for a few world-weary takedowns.

The X-men are exempt from the carnage they dole out. In key scenes, a laser passes through a defensive shield only where it can do the least damage and a human-level combatant goes toe-to-toe with some monster. Worse, the miniseries dismissively discards a longstanding character only to conclude he was basically right. It doesn’t feel like much care was put into the overall tone and cohesiveness.

Simone Bianchi’s art doesn’t add to the appeal. It’s detailed but murky, with an overall low-contrast approach that has little leap from the page. The action is stiff and confusing.

But for X-men fans, the minseries is still worth reading. Ellis has enough fun concepts to burn that you wish he had more issues to devote to them. Reading it, I imagined it as part of an ongoing series, with space between issues to build the mystery—and its implications.