Yet Another Music Moment: Matraca Berg

Matraca Berg is probably my favorite Nashville-based songwriters. Heck, she's one of my all-time favorite singer-songwriters period.

Most of you right now are saying "Who?"

Here's Matraca singing her CMA-winning song "Strawberry Wine" (originally recorded by Deana Carter):



See what I mean?

Her 1997 album Sunday Morning to Saturday Night--long out of print--is spectacular. If you listen to "Back When We Were Beautiful" and don't shed a tear, you're not human.

Here's her official Website: http://www.matracaberg.com/ where you'll find a few more videos and lots of other info.

She almost never tours these days but sometimes appears at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. If you live in Glasgow or South Yorkshire then I'm very jealous because she's appearing in a couple of weeks with Gretchen Peters & Suzy Bogguss for a couple of concerts.

Quick OEL Manga Reviews

Snow vol. 1 by Morgan Luthi (TokyoPop, $9.99) features one of those galactic future milieus where humans and aliens exist side-by-side, and an oppressive galactic empire seeks to run roughshod over the various worlds for no apparent reason. The empire's key weapon is The Ghost, a humanoid being that is dropped onto an uncooperative planet and runs roughshod over everything. On the ass-end of the universe is The Hub, whose newest arrival, Snow, bears a remarkable resemblance to The Ghost. Luthi--another of TP's Rising Stars finalists--manages to work in libertarian ideas without being too obvious or preachy, or leaving out the many warts. In fact, there are a lot of good ingredients here; but they don't quite gel into a comprehensive whole, and the story is a bit too obvious in places.


I shouldn't have liked Nathaniel Bowden & Tracy Yardley's Riding Shotgun vol. 1 (TokyoPop, $9.99) for it's senseless, over-the-top violence, but it was gleeful and charming enough to win me over in its nihilism. Set in an alternate world where assassination is legal and regulated, Doyle Harrington and his partner Abby are up-and-coming assassins looking to make the jump to the big leagues. But their plans go awry when one of their targets turns out to be Doyle's old high school girlfriend. Yardley's art is appropriately energetic. The car chase sequence that runs for about 17 pages at three-quarters of the way through is one of the best I've seen represented in comics. Riding Shotgun doesn't quite measure up to Bambi and Her Pink Gun in the ranks of violent nihilistic comics, but it's a good read for fans of that sort of stuff and I'll be looking forward to the next volume.


With Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness (Oni, $11.95) I think I'm finally getting into the groove of Brian Lee O'Malley's video games-meet-emo world view. I laughed quite a bit, and actually looked forward to the crazy fight scenes that pop in to resolve existential and emotional conflicts. I'm a bit concerned that the plot doesn't seem to be moving forward much, but we get enough drama, back story, action and humor to carry us through this volume at least. And I still feel sorry for poor Knives Chau, whose only mistake was falling for the charming but self-centered Scott.



Ratings:
Snow vol. 1: 2.5 (of 5)
Riding Shotgun vol. 1: 3 (of 5)
Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness: 3.5 (of 5)

Quick Boom! Catch-Up Reviews

I've fallen way behind on my review copies sent by Boom!, so here's an attempt to get caught up:

Talent #3-4 bring the miniseries by Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski & Paul Azaceta about Dane--the lone survivor of a plane crash who has the abilities & memories of all the other passengers--to a satisfactory close, although it is left open enough for the story to continue should the creators & Boom! so desire. The story here is as much about the various groups that seek to control Dane as much as it is about Dane's compulsions to make things right in the lives of those he has 'absorbed.' Paul Azaceta's art--definitely in the Michael Lark-style mode--fits the story being told well, and hopefully we'll see more from him in the future. Hopefully Talent will continue as well in some form; its high concept seems perfectly suited to be a television series so maybe some enterprising Hollywood producer will give it a go (just as long as it doesn't meet the same fate as Global Frequency...)


Second Wave #6--by Michael Alan Nelson & Chee--would also seem to be the end, as AFAIK there have been no further issues announced. This series has been plagued from the beginning with a format chnge from color to black & white (which appeared to be unknown to Chee when he was doing art on earlier issues) and a title change seemingly every other issue as well. At least there are tones and backgrounds in most of the art in this issue, which I'm guessing means that Chee was finally planning on his art being reproduced in black & white, and the art is definitely improved for it. The story about a second alien invasion from Mars (following up on the initial War of the Worlds) started out strong, but along with presentation issues the story also degenerated into clichés and by now I've pretty much lost interest.


I expected to lose interest in Warhammer 40,000: Damnation Crusade #1 within the first three pages, but surprisingly I didn't. I have virtually no familiarity with the tabletop miniatures game on which this comic is based; as is typical with these sorts of thins there appears to be a huge amount of world building and back story to the game with which I'm sure its adherents are intimately familiar but casual readers are not privy to. Surprisingly writers Dan Abnett & Ian Edginton provide just enough information so that I'm not totally lost (and there's a two-page text feature at the end with background info should I care to learn more). It would seem that there's a galactic war going on, with the factions combing backwater planets to recruit warriors to fight for them. It's overly violent, which is to be expected from this sort of thing, and ale illustrated by Lui Antonio. At $2.99 it's cheaper than Boom!'s typical output, so I'm assuming that they're planning on increased sales from a known licensed property to make up the revenue. Let's hope that's the case because I'd hate to see the production quality take a nose-dive like it did with Second Wave.


What Were They Thinking: Monster Mash-Up #1 is another of those comics where they take old comic stories and re-mix them with new dialog. It's pretty much the standard stuff you'd expect, and would be completely forgettable if not for blogger Kevin Church's "Hairy Grrls," in which a frustrated narrator to the story is the real star, with laugh-out-loud bits in nearly every panel. Worth the $4 for those seven pages alone.


Ratings:
Talent #3-4: 3.5 (of 5)
Second Wave #6: 2 (of 5)
Warhammer 40,000: Damnation Crusade #1: 2.5 (of 5)
What Were They Thinking: Monster Mash-Up #1: 3 (of 5)

(Review copies of the above comics were provided by the publisher.)

YACB Bulletins

ITEM! Sara Ryan lets us know (via her blog) that there's a second issue of Flytrap in the works, with art this time out by Ron Chan. (Character sketches at the link.)

ITEM! Jorge Cham memorializes Ramen Noodle inventor Momofuku Ando (1910–2007) in Friday's edition of his Piled Higher & Deeper strip.

ITEM! Your local Borders has all Viz manga at Buy 3 Get the 4th Free through Jan 29th!

New Library Comics: Week of January 1, 2007

Here are the comics we added to our library collection last week:


The art of My neighbor Totoro /San Francisco, CA : Viz, 2005.

Barr, Donna. Stinz : the bobwar /Seattle, WA : MU Press, c1995.

Saudelli, Franco. Otto Porfiri : red moon /Milwaukie, OR : Venture, Dark Horse Comics, 2002, c2001.

Yoe, Craig. Craig Yoe's Weird but true toon factoids! /New York : Gramercy Books, c1999.

Monkey Covers

Sunday is Monkey Covers day here at YACB. Because there's nothing better than a comic with a monkey on the cover.

We kick off monkey covers for 2007 with a monkey reading ghost stories on the cover of Monkeyshines Comics #8 from 1945.

Image courtesy of the GCD. Click on the image for a larger version.

YAFQ: How Do You Read YACB?

The return of Yet Another Friday Question:

How do you read Yet Another Comics Blog? Do you have it bookmarked? Do you follow a link on your or someone else's blog? Do you use a feed reader?

I'm just curious...