Mercury Heat
May. 25th, 2015 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ericadawn16With the combination of his run on Iron Man and Uber, I came to the conclusion last year that I didn't actually like Kieron Gillen and my enjoyment of Young Avengers and Journey into Mystery were flukes.
Free Comic Book Day 2015 proved me wrong and I'm glad.
I promised you an entry on Mercury Heat and this is it. This is the comic book that made me fall in love with Kieron Gillen while The Wicked & the Divine firmly cemented it.
Mercury Heat has some great dialogue and a pretty good concept, but it's a preview so hard to judge these things. The best part was the 18! pages of Gillen discussing the comic and why they made the artistic choices that they did.
First of all, he mentions Tank Girl. This endears me because aside from my mom, I don't know anyone who has actually SEEN Tank Girl, much less read it. I've tried describing it to people as "Mad Max but with a girl" except now we seem to have that and Tank Girl is even more left in the dust.
There's some mentions of other things, personal projects and then, the good stuff:
"Thinking about all my smart women peers turning thirty, looking at their twenties with a shudder and reaching up to find nothing above them but glass."
Damn, it's poetic, horrifying and true all at the same time.
"Me looking at the then-present wave of post-apocalyptic fiction in comics and pop culture generally, and being annoyed. I like the genre, but its predominance spoke to something else-a culture with an inability to imagine a future. Post-apocalyptic fiction is literally giving up, saying it's all over and a complete abdication of trying to imagine how the future could be. What's the best riposte to that? I decided it wasn't actually Utopian sci-fi. That's merely its inversion. It was to create a future where we've managed to deal with several of what presently seem as unsurmountable problems...but a world where there's a whole separate bunch of problems to deal with. There will be a future. It will have problems in it. We will have to deal with them. Grow up."
YES!
"Obvious question: 'Why the skin?'
(explains how on the planet Mercury, there are bases and they get very hot especially while wearing armor)
This led to a back and forth dance between Omar and myself, with me alternatively going, 'MORE SKIN!' and then, 'LESS SKIN!'
This is true for everyone who's in any of the bases, of course, no matter what sex. If I'm going to show skin in a book, I'm showing it equally. I've written on this before, but the biggest problem in comics isn't the costumes, it's how an artist chooses to frame a character in the storytelling. A character can be in jeans and a sweater, but if she's pulling ass poses for the reader, it's much more objectifying than a Jamie McKelvie Emma Frost."
Free Comic Book Day 2015 proved me wrong and I'm glad.
I promised you an entry on Mercury Heat and this is it. This is the comic book that made me fall in love with Kieron Gillen while The Wicked & the Divine firmly cemented it.
Mercury Heat has some great dialogue and a pretty good concept, but it's a preview so hard to judge these things. The best part was the 18! pages of Gillen discussing the comic and why they made the artistic choices that they did.
First of all, he mentions Tank Girl. This endears me because aside from my mom, I don't know anyone who has actually SEEN Tank Girl, much less read it. I've tried describing it to people as "Mad Max but with a girl" except now we seem to have that and Tank Girl is even more left in the dust.
There's some mentions of other things, personal projects and then, the good stuff:
"Thinking about all my smart women peers turning thirty, looking at their twenties with a shudder and reaching up to find nothing above them but glass."
Damn, it's poetic, horrifying and true all at the same time.
"Me looking at the then-present wave of post-apocalyptic fiction in comics and pop culture generally, and being annoyed. I like the genre, but its predominance spoke to something else-a culture with an inability to imagine a future. Post-apocalyptic fiction is literally giving up, saying it's all over and a complete abdication of trying to imagine how the future could be. What's the best riposte to that? I decided it wasn't actually Utopian sci-fi. That's merely its inversion. It was to create a future where we've managed to deal with several of what presently seem as unsurmountable problems...but a world where there's a whole separate bunch of problems to deal with. There will be a future. It will have problems in it. We will have to deal with them. Grow up."
YES!
"Obvious question: 'Why the skin?'
(explains how on the planet Mercury, there are bases and they get very hot especially while wearing armor)
This led to a back and forth dance between Omar and myself, with me alternatively going, 'MORE SKIN!' and then, 'LESS SKIN!'
This is true for everyone who's in any of the bases, of course, no matter what sex. If I'm going to show skin in a book, I'm showing it equally. I've written on this before, but the biggest problem in comics isn't the costumes, it's how an artist chooses to frame a character in the storytelling. A character can be in jeans and a sweater, but if she's pulling ass poses for the reader, it's much more objectifying than a Jamie McKelvie Emma Frost."
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Date: 2015-05-26 01:41 am (UTC)Of course, I'm a pretty big fan of a lot of Image titles, have been for a long time, but this one is a current favorite.