Hear Ye, Yearly!

I've been writing for Time Out Chicago for a minute now and you can check out my year-end video game list on their website. I tried to do something a little different. I hope GLaDOS likes it as much as I like her Christmas screen. I also did some quick hits in the same vein for Entertainment Weekly.

A for Effort

A few weeks ago, while reading another blog, I stumbled upon the fact that the Washington Post compiled a list of everything that has gotten an “A” grade over the course of 2007 in the Media Mix grid of their Sunday Source section. I’ve been writing about video games and comics for this section of the WashPost for about four years now (I think) and this seems to be the first time that they’ve done something like this.

It’s kinda jarring to look back and see what games and comics offerings I stamped with the first letter of the alphabet. For the most part, I don’t have much Reviewer’s Regret about much of these grades. Out of 52 weeks of the year, I gave out 14 A grades, give or take. (These ain’t super-reliable numbers, since some weeks MediaMix doesn’t run and other weeks I’ll do two reviews or no review.) I did go on to give Rock Band and the Captain America Omnibus A-minuses a week later, so that works out to be a little more than a third of the time. I’m sure somewhere out there someone is grading my grading. It’s what the intarwebs was made for!

Devilishly good

Continuing on the theme of “Stuff Evan Should Be Up On But Isn’t,” I finished reading eight volumes of Hellboy a few weeks ago. I don’t know if it’s everything that’s in print but it seems like it’s the bulk of Hellboy-related material. My first memory of seeing Mike Mignola’s work was either on Marvel’s Alpha Flight or the house ads that were running in Marvel Comics for the Rocket Raccoon mini-series in the eighties. I remember thinking that his blocky, ink-heavy style immediately stood out from other prevailing sensibilities at the time and it still does more than 20 years later.


Hellboy’s a demonic spawn summoned to earth who winds up working as a paranormal investigator. The premise essentially riffs on the Entity That Should Be Evil But Isn’t idea, which probably goes back a long ways. (Of course, now I can’t get the Son of Satan, Marvel’s 1970s-era character of my head.) The thing I’ve grown to love about the Hellboy character is his almost-blasé, workaday attitude when it comes to dealing with bizarre creatures or macabre revelations about the Dark Forces of the Universe. He’s like a shit-talking, gun-wielding plumber (with the Right Hand of Doom, of course). Slimy, tentacled Elder God about to breach the borders of our reality? For Hellboy, it’s just time to make the donuts.



Maybe it’s because I inhaled the bulk of it in a short span but it’s pretty striking how much Hellboy is its own thing. In the trade paperbacks, Mignola’s not shy about citing influences and sources but he manages to make them into a singular experience. There’s a real sense of mythos here that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in comics nowadays. All throughout the collective work, Mignola’s lean plainspoken dialogue really lets the moodiness of his art emanate from the panels.

I’ve never seen the Hellboy movie but loved Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, so I’m looking forward to renting the DVD and seeing what kind of job Ron Perelman does as the big red guy.


If this two-page sequence makes it into the movie, then I'm there opening day.