Not that it comes as a surprise. Sales were abysmal and the critical response mixed. Still, Katana is one of the few New 52 characters I like more than the original universe version. Especially visually. Whoever redesigned Katana into a sleek, all-armored killing machine did her a huge favor. The old ketchup-and-mustard outfit was fine in its day, but not particularly memorable and too bright to be intimidating. Now she looks like a human stealth fighter jet, every bit as lethal as the stories make her out to be.
When Katana ends, that will also end my regular purchase of any DC ongoing. I spot-buy when something specific about a book interests me-- a particular story development or a fill-in by an artist whose work I find a "must-buy." I bought the debut arc of the Batman Beyond Batgirl for both those reasons and because the writer has some positive vibes for me due to his sterling work on the Cass Cain Batgirl. I bought the Gail Simone Batgirl because I wanted to see how she handled a character reveal (nicely done). I bought the recent The Witching Hour anthology because it's Halloween time and I'm a huge fan of the original series. I'll buy the first issue of Batman: Eternal because I want to show some support for Stephanie Brown and out of curiosity.
But Katana, while not perfect, was still a fun book I looked forward to buying each month. Too bad there just weren't enough of us out there. Nice try, Ann Nocenti. I appreciated what you were doing!
Showing posts with label Ann Nocenti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ann Nocenti. Show all posts
Friday, October 18, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Katana #1 (February 2013)
Are you reading Katana? Why are you not reading Katana? What's this whole "not reading Katana" thing about that the kids are doing nowadays? Is it a craze? A fad? The new twist? Disco updated for the 21st century?
It's not that Katana is the greatest comic ever made. It's not. But in its first issue (February 2013) wrITER Ann Nocenti and artist Alex Sanchez quickly establish the book as the compelling story of a dour young woman who talks to her sword because she thinks her dead husband's soul is trapped inside it. In the old days, we knew Katana's Soul Taker sword definitely had souls and spirits and demons or whatever inside it and when she talked to it, she was as rational as you and I. Nowadays, the sword apparently doesn't talk back (at least not so we can share in its dialogue via word balloons), so it's anybody's guess as to Katana's mental health. And my guess is she's shaky at best but not just because of the sword.
Katana doesn't feel much like a "New 52" DC book. Granted, I've only read a few of those-- the first couple of Birds of Prey with Katana in the cast, something with Superman, a few odd Batgirls and some of the newer Batman titles-- but despite Katana's presence in other books, this one seems to have largely cut her off from the overall narrative. This means a more self-contained world allowed to breathe on its own and grow. Actually, the whole enterprise reminds me of that classic Chris Claremont-Frank Miller Wolverine mini-series. You know, lone hero who explains herself through first-person narrative captions, swords, blood, enough ninja to choke a Sonny Chiba film. Writer Ann Nocenti pours on the local flavor by having Katana fill readers in on the WWII relocation camps and artist Alex Sanchez gives us some of the most intense reader-engaging gazes ever captured on the comic book page.
But some of the cultural elements bite this book on the ass, unfortunately. One of the first people Katana meets when she lands in Japantown, San Francisco, is a homeless candy-tosser named Junko, a dude. As far as I know, Junko is exclusively a female name. I broached this point with my wife a few weeks ago and she thought it was absurd.
"Is Junko ever a guy's name? Is it unisex?" I asked her, because I had my doubts. I've never met a male Junko, although I've known several women and girls by that name (in real life, plus a supporting character in Ai Yazawa's classic manga Nana).
"No," she told me, flatly. "Never."
Then we discussed the unisex nature of the name Hiromi for way longer than either of us really meant to because we both know tons of Hiromis. But I suppose it's possible for some guy to have Junko as his name, and it's not enough to toss me out of the story by wrecking my suspension of disbelief. It's the kind of teensy little detail I get caught up in occasionally because of my OCD and the fact I live in Japan.
The villain, named Coil-- he's the head of a sword clan, or perhaps THE Sword Clan, and he and Katana have a nasty history-- also mocks Katana for having been a dutiful Japanese housewife, invoking a stereotype of abject submissiveness I think is a bit outdated. On the other hand, Coil probably knows this and is just trying to piss off Katana, as when he evokes the specific imagery of pre-heroic Katana standing outside her burning house wearing fuzzy slippers. That I believe.
But both Nocenti's writing and Sanchez's art both have a delicate melancholy. Nocenti gives Katana a dry sense of humor and a loneliness, a need of someone other than a sword for companionship. There's a moment that deliberately drifts into eroticism when she awakes from a sexual dream and, out of guilt, literally takes the sword to bed, then appears nude in her bathroom before strapping on that sleek black armor and its deadly jewelry (a very cool touch). Shades of Kazuo Koike's Lady Snowblood. Whether her husband actually is in that sword or not, these are the acts of a disturbed person.
Sanchez's Katana has wide, staring eyes, but he takes pains to avoid the kind of supermodel appearance favored by other artists dealing with the female form. His Katana is all about the business at hand. He's helped by Katana's redesign, the absolute best in this whole "New 52" fiasco. The old Katana flitted about in bright red and yellow, a color scheme a friend of mine used to call "ketchup and mustard." The new one is all black with white makeup with a red rising sun symbol on her half-mask. Very cool.
The book's soft color palette invokes a kind of contrast with Katana's sleek armor and weapon of choice, kind of like a splash of blood on cherry blossoms.
It's enough of a start I've bought the next three issues and I hope to discuss them a bit more here sometime soon whenever I get a chance to sit down and read them. I've only been able to page through them a little and my initial impression is the art has moved towards something more traditionally feathered and hard-edged and Junko has hidden depths that are only slowly being revealed. The main thing is Katana herself. Are you interested in what she does, what swords she sleeps with and why? If you are, you really need to pick up this book. It's off the familiar paths of all those other DC books and really deserves a wider readership and some greater appreciation.
It's not that Katana is the greatest comic ever made. It's not. But in its first issue (February 2013) wrITER Ann Nocenti and artist Alex Sanchez quickly establish the book as the compelling story of a dour young woman who talks to her sword because she thinks her dead husband's soul is trapped inside it. In the old days, we knew Katana's Soul Taker sword definitely had souls and spirits and demons or whatever inside it and when she talked to it, she was as rational as you and I. Nowadays, the sword apparently doesn't talk back (at least not so we can share in its dialogue via word balloons), so it's anybody's guess as to Katana's mental health. And my guess is she's shaky at best but not just because of the sword.
Katana doesn't feel much like a "New 52" DC book. Granted, I've only read a few of those-- the first couple of Birds of Prey with Katana in the cast, something with Superman, a few odd Batgirls and some of the newer Batman titles-- but despite Katana's presence in other books, this one seems to have largely cut her off from the overall narrative. This means a more self-contained world allowed to breathe on its own and grow. Actually, the whole enterprise reminds me of that classic Chris Claremont-Frank Miller Wolverine mini-series. You know, lone hero who explains herself through first-person narrative captions, swords, blood, enough ninja to choke a Sonny Chiba film. Writer Ann Nocenti pours on the local flavor by having Katana fill readers in on the WWII relocation camps and artist Alex Sanchez gives us some of the most intense reader-engaging gazes ever captured on the comic book page.
But some of the cultural elements bite this book on the ass, unfortunately. One of the first people Katana meets when she lands in Japantown, San Francisco, is a homeless candy-tosser named Junko, a dude. As far as I know, Junko is exclusively a female name. I broached this point with my wife a few weeks ago and she thought it was absurd.
"Is Junko ever a guy's name? Is it unisex?" I asked her, because I had my doubts. I've never met a male Junko, although I've known several women and girls by that name (in real life, plus a supporting character in Ai Yazawa's classic manga Nana).
"No," she told me, flatly. "Never."
Then we discussed the unisex nature of the name Hiromi for way longer than either of us really meant to because we both know tons of Hiromis. But I suppose it's possible for some guy to have Junko as his name, and it's not enough to toss me out of the story by wrecking my suspension of disbelief. It's the kind of teensy little detail I get caught up in occasionally because of my OCD and the fact I live in Japan.
The villain, named Coil-- he's the head of a sword clan, or perhaps THE Sword Clan, and he and Katana have a nasty history-- also mocks Katana for having been a dutiful Japanese housewife, invoking a stereotype of abject submissiveness I think is a bit outdated. On the other hand, Coil probably knows this and is just trying to piss off Katana, as when he evokes the specific imagery of pre-heroic Katana standing outside her burning house wearing fuzzy slippers. That I believe.
But both Nocenti's writing and Sanchez's art both have a delicate melancholy. Nocenti gives Katana a dry sense of humor and a loneliness, a need of someone other than a sword for companionship. There's a moment that deliberately drifts into eroticism when she awakes from a sexual dream and, out of guilt, literally takes the sword to bed, then appears nude in her bathroom before strapping on that sleek black armor and its deadly jewelry (a very cool touch). Shades of Kazuo Koike's Lady Snowblood. Whether her husband actually is in that sword or not, these are the acts of a disturbed person.
Sanchez's Katana has wide, staring eyes, but he takes pains to avoid the kind of supermodel appearance favored by other artists dealing with the female form. His Katana is all about the business at hand. He's helped by Katana's redesign, the absolute best in this whole "New 52" fiasco. The old Katana flitted about in bright red and yellow, a color scheme a friend of mine used to call "ketchup and mustard." The new one is all black with white makeup with a red rising sun symbol on her half-mask. Very cool.
The book's soft color palette invokes a kind of contrast with Katana's sleek armor and weapon of choice, kind of like a splash of blood on cherry blossoms.
It's enough of a start I've bought the next three issues and I hope to discuss them a bit more here sometime soon whenever I get a chance to sit down and read them. I've only been able to page through them a little and my initial impression is the art has moved towards something more traditionally feathered and hard-edged and Junko has hidden depths that are only slowly being revealed. The main thing is Katana herself. Are you interested in what she does, what swords she sleeps with and why? If you are, you really need to pick up this book. It's off the familiar paths of all those other DC books and really deserves a wider readership and some greater appreciation.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
A slow Cass news day...
One of my favorite things to do as a blogger is check my "search keyword" traffic sources. How do people find this blog? Sometimes the results are amusing. Sometimes they're saddening. Today they're neither, but in the absence of any real Cass news here we are. Let's check 'em and see.
1) ann nocenti kurosawa
2) cassandra cain deadly viper assassination squad
3) cassandra cain escher girl
4) cassandra cain, 2013
The rest are just searches of my blog on my blog, which I don't understand and shall ignore.
Ann Nocenti has name-checked Akira Kurosawa in interviews leading up to the debut of her new Katana ongoing. And I've reported on it. Unless I've dreamed the whole thing, which is a possibility. So the first one isn't a surprise. One person did this search today. That person is cool. Unless that person was Akira Kurosawa himself, in which case he's a miracle because the master director passed away in 1998 and I still haven't fully recovered from the loss.
The second one is a surprise. I thought I was the only person to link these two concepts, Cassandra Cain and Quentin Tarantino. Obviously someone has either heard rumor of my silly blog post or else we've both tapped into the collective unconscious. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. This one is probaby just a nice coincidence.
Cassandra Cain as an Escher Girl. Escher Girl is a concept created by a very smart blogger and turned into a very smart Tumblr. Being that Cass is an acrobatic female superhero of the modern era it's more than likely she's been escherized a few times. Shoot, she wouldn't even have to be acrobatic for that to happen. All it would take is for some hack artist to draw her in the now-classic two-thirds standing figure pose showing both her butt and her boobs at the same time. No feet. Possibly no hands. But butt and boobs, with a waist as thin as Batman's wrist and as twistable as a bath towel. I've never posted an Escher Girl Cass, but I might do so sometime in the future. In the meantime, Escher Girls is approximately more useful, popular and fun than this blog as the sun is more massive than the earth, so if you want to see Cass twisted and mal-proportioned by some highly-paid ass trying to draw "sexy," then I suggest you go there and have a blast. I certainly do!
Cassandra Cain, 2013, huh? That one was probably me!
Anyway, there's no way of knowing if any of these people actually navigated to my blog and read it, but if anyone recognizes his or her search term here and did take the time to read this crap, I thank you! Keep Cass alive in... well, unfortunately it doesn't rhyme... 2013!
1) ann nocenti kurosawa
2) cassandra cain deadly viper assassination squad
3) cassandra cain escher girl
4) cassandra cain, 2013
The rest are just searches of my blog on my blog, which I don't understand and shall ignore.
Ann Nocenti has name-checked Akira Kurosawa in interviews leading up to the debut of her new Katana ongoing. And I've reported on it. Unless I've dreamed the whole thing, which is a possibility. So the first one isn't a surprise. One person did this search today. That person is cool. Unless that person was Akira Kurosawa himself, in which case he's a miracle because the master director passed away in 1998 and I still haven't fully recovered from the loss.
The second one is a surprise. I thought I was the only person to link these two concepts, Cassandra Cain and Quentin Tarantino. Obviously someone has either heard rumor of my silly blog post or else we've both tapped into the collective unconscious. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. This one is probaby just a nice coincidence.
Cassandra Cain as an Escher Girl. Escher Girl is a concept created by a very smart blogger and turned into a very smart Tumblr. Being that Cass is an acrobatic female superhero of the modern era it's more than likely she's been escherized a few times. Shoot, she wouldn't even have to be acrobatic for that to happen. All it would take is for some hack artist to draw her in the now-classic two-thirds standing figure pose showing both her butt and her boobs at the same time. No feet. Possibly no hands. But butt and boobs, with a waist as thin as Batman's wrist and as twistable as a bath towel. I've never posted an Escher Girl Cass, but I might do so sometime in the future. In the meantime, Escher Girls is approximately more useful, popular and fun than this blog as the sun is more massive than the earth, so if you want to see Cass twisted and mal-proportioned by some highly-paid ass trying to draw "sexy," then I suggest you go there and have a blast. I certainly do!
Cassandra Cain, 2013, huh? That one was probably me!
Anyway, there's no way of knowing if any of these people actually navigated to my blog and read it, but if anyone recognizes his or her search term here and did take the time to read this crap, I thank you! Keep Cass alive in... well, unfortunately it doesn't rhyme... 2013!
Sunday, November 11, 2012
At least Katana is getting her own book!
That's a little something, huh? We can't have our favorite DC martial artist, but we can have our second, third or perhaps fourth favorite, right?
I wrote about this on my other blog back during the summer when everyone expected Katana to spin off solo-style in September. It was a little speculative at the time, but here we are a few months later and it's official and what little I know of it so far has me interested.
Ann Nocenti as writer, Alex Sanchez on art. I really don't know much at all about Sanchez. Maybe I've seen his art and I've forgotten it, maybe I've never seen it, maybe he just hasn't rung my bell yet.
I'm vaguely familiar with and have always gotten a positive vibe from Nocenti because she was editing and writing back when I was going through my "golden age" of comic book readership. At Marvel, Nocenti edited New Mutants (one of my all-time fave series), had a run on Daredevil and dropped a large number of single issue stories into their other titles and annuals. While her work at DC doesn't seem as extensive, she's got a lot of outside-of-comics credits that I'm only just now discovering in the wake of this announcement: film writing, travel writing, co-directing a documentary, teaching film. Her take on Katana seems to involve some Akira Kurosawa (as I asked for in my little blog post) and Sam Peckinpah, which has me very intrigued. I've read Kurosawa's Something Like and Autobiography and the Donald Richie book A Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema so I get what Nocenti's saying about Kurosawa's films "[sharing] the spirit of American Westerns." If anyone happened to write a Cass Cain series ever again, I'd hope for some similar influences rather than going to the Joss Whedon well and dipping out cutesy-pie stuff. Applying them to a character I like and who has hands down the best costume in the entire DC universe?
Well, that convinces me to buy the first two or three issues at least. The only thing she could have done that would have excited me more would have been to toss in some Takeshi Kitano or Kinji Fukasaku for good measure.
Or casually mention Cass as a guest star.
I wrote about this on my other blog back during the summer when everyone expected Katana to spin off solo-style in September. It was a little speculative at the time, but here we are a few months later and it's official and what little I know of it so far has me interested.
Ann Nocenti as writer, Alex Sanchez on art. I really don't know much at all about Sanchez. Maybe I've seen his art and I've forgotten it, maybe I've never seen it, maybe he just hasn't rung my bell yet.
I'm vaguely familiar with and have always gotten a positive vibe from Nocenti because she was editing and writing back when I was going through my "golden age" of comic book readership. At Marvel, Nocenti edited New Mutants (one of my all-time fave series), had a run on Daredevil and dropped a large number of single issue stories into their other titles and annuals. While her work at DC doesn't seem as extensive, she's got a lot of outside-of-comics credits that I'm only just now discovering in the wake of this announcement: film writing, travel writing, co-directing a documentary, teaching film. Her take on Katana seems to involve some Akira Kurosawa (as I asked for in my little blog post) and Sam Peckinpah, which has me very intrigued. I've read Kurosawa's Something Like and Autobiography and the Donald Richie book A Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema so I get what Nocenti's saying about Kurosawa's films "[sharing] the spirit of American Westerns." If anyone happened to write a Cass Cain series ever again, I'd hope for some similar influences rather than going to the Joss Whedon well and dipping out cutesy-pie stuff. Applying them to a character I like and who has hands down the best costume in the entire DC universe?
Well, that convinces me to buy the first two or three issues at least. The only thing she could have done that would have excited me more would have been to toss in some Takeshi Kitano or Kinji Fukasaku for good measure.
Or casually mention Cass as a guest star.
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