Still having problems at Schoolhouse Supplies with books being where they shouldn't be. I found this on the shelf with the fairy tales:
I yanked this one off the shelf too because TVTropes had led me to believe ElfQuest was about a bunch of pointy-eared hobbits who had sex with each other a lot. After I took it home I didn't find anything objectionable in it at all, sans one shot of full-frontal nudity (it was a baby).
The painted illustrations are pretty and all, but....you know how I complained before how fantasy books were confusing? This one is SO confusing that I couldn't understand a single sentence in it. That's pretty bad.
I don't get it. I think the authors are more interesting than the comic itself -- they're a husband and wife team who have been writing and drawing ElfQuest together for over thirty years.
This....I
understood a little better, but only in the sense that I could
comprehend the words. It's about a little girl who befriends a
robot panda that can shoot projectile weapons when threatened.
They're trying to save her father from an evil talking goat named
Pollo who keeps saying "goat" instead of
"got" in every sentence, for example "You haven't
goat much time!" In the meanwhile she's pursued by a
Victorian secret agent named Mr. Poppington and a roller-skating
swordsman named "Wikkity." The two-letter title is
never explained.
I don't know how many copies of it Powell's sold.
This....I understood a little better than "PX!" It's a half-novel, half-comic hybrid about a cartoonist whose wealthy and powerful father gets kidnapped by an equally powerful rival from Scotland. He breaks out of boarding school and travels there to save him, gaining the all-too-coincidental help of an attractive Scotswoman his age. I'm going to assume you're not reading this book in the near future and spoil that she was the bad guy's daughter all along and was leading him into a trap the entire time, so the bad guy could imprison them both. Once he's trapped, of course she frees him and tearfully confesses that NOW she loves him for real, blah blah. He doesn't believe it and spurns her, but she returns to him in the end for no reason.
The real test of romantic fiction is if you want the couple to get together as badly as they do, and I didn't want this one, because the girl came off as creepy even before her alliance was revealed. There is one part where he breaks into the bad guy's house and finds a room with pictures of himself all over the walls. The girl later admits that it was she who took the pictures. The fact that she'd been stalking him for months was played as completely romantic.
In between chapters we get to read the comic he's been drawing, and it's wretched. I couldn't tell if that was intentional or not.
THIS one.....was pretty good. Out of all the graphic novels I've pulled out of Powells boxes, this is the best one I've read yet. Mind, I haven't read one that completely blows me away, I'm saying this is the best of what I've found. The sequential panels are easy to follow, the pacing is perfect and the dialogue is natural. These tasks seem to be hard for other people.
Boy almost runs over girl, girl laughs it off when they meet in a bookstore later, boy takes girl home, boy and girl fall in love. Girl loses job, girl creates her own tutoring business, business takes up all of girl's time, boy misses girl. Boy feels angry and threatened when most of girl's clients are randy fratboys who just want time with her, so boy dresses up as completely different boy and pays for all of girl's tutoring time. Girl falls for it. Shenanigans ensue.
I'd say, buy it. I only have two complaints. One, the characters' faces look kind of fugly sometimes:
Two, the main character is a complete dope. After he pulls the disguise routine ONCE, the girl comes to her senses on her own and scales back her worktime so she can spend more evenings with him. That should have been the point where anyone sensible would have thought "Eveything's fixed, so I should stop now, and admit I did something creepy ONE TIME." But he feels stuck and he keeps going with the disguise well past plausibility. He has to work more than one job behind her back to pay for her to tutor him. When they finally CAN date he's too exhausted to do anything. By the time it's all blown open, the poor girl is so humiliated than I not only wanted her to break up with him, I wanted a meteor to fall on his head.
Was their
resemblance to the South Park kids intentional, or what?
"Haaaaaan-keeey, the Christmas Poo.....lah lah lah, Kenny's
poor!"