PvP Volume 3: PvP Rides Again
By Scott Kurtz
Published by Image Comics. Cover Price $14.99. Originally printed as PvP 13-18.
The Plot: The staff of a gaming magazine tackles the issues of the day, ranging from plagiarism and copyright laws to finding the true spirit of Christmas to paradoxical trips to the San Diego Comic-Con to hyper-intelligent cats trying to take over the world. Hijinks ensue.
The Positives: PvP is a celebration of geek culture. From video games to Lord of the Rings to comic conventions to D & D, this is the world that many comic book fans, myself included, live in. There’s just something about being in on a joke that not everyone would get that makes it that much funnier. And there may be no two words in the English language funnier than “roll” and “initiative.”
The Negatives: Since PvP is a daily online comic, Scott Kurtz will make use of current headlines to make a joke for that day’s strip. Some headlines hold up better than others. Marvel suing City of Heroes holds up, because it hasn’t been overplayed. This one, however, does not:
I’m not even sure that was still funny a week later.
There’s really no reason there should be typos in a book published by any reputable publisher, but there are two major errors in this trade. One strip is printed twice. It’s in two completely parts of the book, so it’s not terribly annoying. But in the introduction, half of a paragraph is reprinted directly under itself. Did no one even proofread this thing? Hell, even I proofread these posts before I put them online. Hell, even I proofread these posts before I put them online. Does it make any of the strips less funny? Of course not. But it’s certainly distracting, especially since it would have been so easy to prevent.
The Grade: C+. PvP Rides Again is a fun read, but quite frankly PvP is meant to be read on a daily basis, not in a six-month chunk. If you read PvP, you don’t read it for the storylines. You read it for the jokes, and most of the best strips are just single strip jokes. Relative to other comic strip collections it’s easily an A, but compared to other comic book collections, it just isn’t as good.
And speaking of remembering 52, that leads me to Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #27. The issue opens with a Dominator declaring in a big splash page “Remember the fifffdee-tu.” All kinds of craziness is going down as the Dominators have infected all of Earth’s technology with an AI virus. People are getting killed left and right, including members of the Legion apparently. It’s like Maximum Overdrive, except kind of heavy and intense, as the Legion are struggling to make contact with another planet for some backup without the help of computers or machinery. They can’t even use their flight rings! To show you what kind of stuff they’re dealing with, Invisible Kid attempts to use his Legion ring, and upon activating it, it immediately contracts the Dominators’ AI virus and fights back at him, ripping off his own arm! I don’t know if he bites it or if he survives, because plenty of other good guys get killed and dismembered when Brainiac 5’s teleporter gets possessed. Stuff is getting so bad in the future that I was actually suspecting there might be a surprise end of the 31st century Earth so as to allow for another Legion relaunch to line up with the post-IC universe. Surely there’s more in store for Mon-El…he just came back a few months ago.
I was just surfing around on the Internets, and I found an interesting interview with director Zack Snyder, whose forthcoming take on “300” looks rather promising, and who’s also scheduled to direct the big-screen adaptation of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen.” Word is that they could begin filming as early as this summer. In the interview, there’s a bit of talk about casting rumors and such, most notably that Tom Cruise was, at one point, in talks to star as Ozymandias.