Ian Gibson (2)Critiques

Not my cup of tea. Not the best writing when in comparison to others.

Feminist dystopian science fiction, and officially one of my favorite comic books ever.

That was ace, really fun and interesting.
The art was a bit difficult to start with, dark and dense, but it either improved or I got used to it and then it was brill all the way through.

This was pretty entertaining. Boba Fett gets hired by Darth Vader to find a certain artifact. However, Vader is not the trusting type, so he sends assassins to kill Fett once he finds the item. Will the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter succeed? The volume features a second short story where Fett finds an empty ship. It looks like a basic salvage that could bring some coin, but things are not as easy as they seem. If you like classic Star Wars, you will probably like this.

I had fond memories of this DC Comics mini-series from 1988, but oh boy it hasn’t aged well. The basic premise of the hidden ‘manhunters’ trying to stop the next evolution of heroes is a pretty solid one, but the execution falls short. Too many rambling plot lines, many familiar heroes seemingly off character, new characters with stereotyped nationality traits, and a narrative that has huge holes in it as many of the major events happened in cross-over issues not included in this collection. I should have left this one on the shelf and stuck with my memories.

Set before ANH, Fett is sent by Vader to collect a box with the explicit instructions that he must never open it. Part heist, part psychological thriller, this TPB comic was just not up my alley. Especially considering Fett and Vader are not my favorite characters. Doesn't help that the only woman in the comic was a disembodied head who had lost almost all agency (because, you know, NO BODY) that was being fought over for men to use for their own advantage and was ultimately killed as a means for one man to one up another. It was all just bad and I hated it!

this edition isn't nearly as good as the much bulkier, glossier original book edition Rebellion issued in 2009 in marvellous black and white. although the story's okay, this part is really just a minor adventure in the long arc of Halo Jones. the draw(?) of this three-volume set is that it has been colourized, which is actually disappointing as it lessens the impact of Ian Gibson's sharply etched penwork. a better choice would have been for Rebellion to re-print the 2009 version of the whole (absolutely essential) Halo Jones saga.½

I had always assumed Halo Jones was a bit cheesy, but I ended up liking it quite a bit. Lots of fun experiments by Moore, and a crazy variety of stories. The art is so very 80s, but once you adjust to that, it's nice.

This one gets three strong stars. Moore's work for 2000 AD is in the EC Comics tradition, so expect plenty of corny ironies and pun-based plots. That said, even at his fastest and least detailed, Moore is a very smart writer. At the age of ten, I would've adored this collection.

This was my first encounter with Alan Moore and I really liked it. I liked being plunged directly into a new world and learning about it as the story unfolded. I enjoyed the social commentary on materialism, media inanity, wars off stage conducted for bad reasons, and the demonisation of the unemployed. The comic first appeared in the ultra materialist Thatcher years, but it feels very relevant still. The characters were all believable, and there was a good mix of action, tension and pathos.

Halo is an intriguing character. I liked her because she was normal, average, unremarkable in so far as she was aimless in her boredom, innocent of the worst aspects of other people, liked shopping and clothes but wasn't that bothered about shopping and clothes, and was gauche around men, unfazed or oblivious to celebrity. I liked her because she realised that her life on The Hoop wasn't enough and she took control of her life in order to change it. I liked her because she was true to herself, even when she didn't know she had anything to be true to and was stumbling through life. I liked her because she startdd to wake up to what was going on around her and because, even when it seemed that she'd lost everything, she didn't give up. She still saw that she had a future. She never had a game plan. Her only ambition was to live, and to live to the best of her ability. I like her most of all for that. It's what we all should do, whatever circumstance we find ourselves in.

It was really obvious that Moore and Gibson had put a lot of work into creating the world that Halo inhabits. The story builds gradually, and drops in hints of what has gone before without laying it all out on a plate. With each new plot development, too, just enough is said to allow links to be formed and anticipation for the next chapter to build. It's such a shame that legal wrangling with the publishers meant that Moore and Gibson stopped after three books, rather than completing the nine they originally intended.

It never took me this long to finish a comic book volume/novel TPB. While interesting (and sometimes terrifying) it feels terribly anachronistic. It's the dystopic future of the past... one can't really swallow it in big chunks.

Millennium is the last DC crossover I'll read prior to Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!-- like Legends, it has some light connections to Crisis on Infinite Earths. In this case, that's the presence of Harbinger, having finished writing History of the DC Universe, and that the plot spins out of when the Guardians of the Universe departed the universe, which happened in the Crisis.

The plot of Millennium is that a Guardian and a Zamaron have decided to jump-start evolution on Earth so that humans can take the place of the Guardians, which they will do by picking ten (or eight, or seven, or some other number) of special humans. But the robotic Manhunter cult is opposed to this, and so they activate their hidden agents to destroy the special humans as well as superheroes in general. This means that anyone could be a Manhunter-- only in practice, the only significant Manhunter is Lana Lang (I don't know how this was resolved, because she's still around in later comics, and I assume not an evil android by that point). Most of the Manhunters are "revealed" as characters I've never heard of, and whose significance to the superheroes isn't really explained. There's also a hilarious scene where Booster Gold discovers a Manhunter by overhearing telling another Manhunter that he hopes he isn't discovered-- with security like that, no wonder they end up soundly whomped on.

The frustrating part of Millennium is that though it has a much more complicated plot than, say, Legends, we never get to see many of the important moments of this plot. One issue ends with heroes going off to attack the Manhunter home planet; the next begins with the planet having been destroyed, in an issue of some other comic book from 1988 that I'll never read. This means mostly you read about the heroes talking about what they have just done, or what they are going to be doing... but you never get to see them do it.

Meanwhile, the Guardian and the Zamaron tutor the chosen "New Guardians" in a lot of cod-mysticism that makes The Empire Strikes Back and Death Comes to Time look deep and complex. Then they "evolve"; as you might have guessed, "evolution" in this context means "assume the identity of a superhero that could have only been thought of in 1988." One of them becomes the superhero RAM-- Random Access Memory. His power is, of course, "computers".

Poor Harbinger doesn't fare well here-- her history is used by the Manhunters to discover the secret identities of the superheroes, and she gets tortured by the Manhunters. She's not quite the powerful, mystical being she was during the Crisis; she comes across as a pretty "ordinary" superhero, alas.

Famously, this is the book where it was established that in the DC universe, Britain is a fog-shrouded fascist dictatorship, which I find hilarious. I wonder if Paul Cornell dealt with this in Knight and Squire? Also Ronald Reagan makes a return appearance after Legends. Is it noteworthy that this is the third big DC story in a row (after Crisis on Infinite Earths and Legends) where Firestorm gets a decent amount of focus? Were they trying to push his solo book or what?

The art of Joe Staton and Ian Gibson is more stylized than is normal for a mainstream DC book, but I really liked it for that reason-- it gave this book a little more oomph than it might otherwise have had. But overall, Millennium is an exercise in eight issues of frustration.

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This trade volume collects the entire run of "The Ballad of Halo Jones" from the English comics weekly 2000 AD. This mid-1980s material was some of Alan Moore's early work, and it shows him tackling class oppression, military imperialism, personal trauma, and cultural anomie, all in the context of a 50th-century dystopia-cum-space opera. Protagonist Halo is an underclass nobody whose discontent carries her across the galaxy. The real moral heft to these stories keeps them from being careless and speedy reads. At the end, the major plot elements have all been resolved, but Jones is on her way out to some new experiences, having survived nearly everyone with whom she has been involved during the three major parts of the story: her origins in the floating "Hoop" off the New York coast, her adventure off-planet as staff on a space liner, and her military service in the Tarantulan War. Moore clearly left room for more story, although he never filled that room.

Ian Gibson's art is effective in the black-and-white panels, and the pages reproduce well enough at the full-page magazine size used for this volume.

This graphic novel, originally appearing in Brit mag 2000 AD in 1984 is a great read and fantastic to look at. The pictures are all black and white, as were almost comics in the UK at the time, and very detailed. The artist, Ian Gibson, has worked on Judge Dredd and Robo-Hunter, among other things, since then. Alan Moore, prolific writer of Top Ten, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, The Watchmen, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and more, was at the top of his form with Halo Jones.

Halo Jones herself is a kind of unintentional, everywoman hero, who can't help being talented, pretty, adventurous, and in some of the right places at the right times -- and in some of the wrong ones too. She's a sympathetic character in the 50th century, who needs to escape the slum she lives in "Hoopside" and go find life. And she does.

I bought this because I noticed that the art work was done by Ian Gibson, who is a wonderful and vastly under-rated artist, who I first came to know through his work with Alan Moore on 'The Ballad of Halo Jones'. As it turns out the story here is fairly entertaining in its own right. There's certainly a quirky sense of humour at play here which fits well with Gibson's style.

Early Alan Moore. The Future Shocks themselves are of mixed quality with a few standouts, but I found the real gems to be in the Time Twisters also included in the collection. The use of time as a plot device has seldom been used to better effect.

While a classic, has weathered the decades quite well.½

Halo Jones has no superpowers, she's just a girl. Lives in the 50th century, inwhich the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer (same old), and Halo's mired in the latter category. The centuries have not been kind; Earth is a backwater planet, humankind aren't such superior beings after all, life everywhere is dangerous. For Halo and her friends the last best option may yet come down to joining the mindless glombies (who 'nod, nod, nod, all the time, in unison').

As the story begins Halo's friend Rodice is the take-change character, her friend Ludy has the talent, and her friend Brinna has the brains; Halo's only burning ambition is to be somewhere other than there. Jobs are a thing of the past, especially on the Hoop, but she does speak some Cetacean, so it's Halo who almost accidentally makes good on her own promise. Alan Moore is plainly having some fun here: they go on a really perilous shopping expedition armed with zenades, and vanquish a gang of stylista checkout hags with a Jackson Pollock Spatter-effect. Brinna's tastes lean to 46th century philo-gothic sitdrams (Halo calls them philosophy-nasty) like "John Cage: Atonal Avenger" and "Wittgenstein Has Risen From his Grave". There's a fabulous character called Glyph that nobody notices, and his (very) little life in the book margins is poignant. Halo contemplates death and even religion, drinks Catsblood, accidently starts a ratwar, resolves a doomed love affair, and even gets to dance to her own different drummers... and stays alive, which as we all know tends to be the tough part.

'Where did she go?' says one title page. 'Out. What did she do? Everything.' The story is terribly small, but it's chockful of everything. Which makes the students in 6427A.D. studying Van Eyck's seminal work on the subject, 'The Halo Jones Myth in Modern Concordian Folklore', question the subject matter: After all, 'she wasn't anyone special'. What the story is all about, the lecturer maintains, is what Halo Jones herself is quoted as having said about herself: "Anybody could have done it." So true, but luckily, it's Alan Moore who did. Me, i'm totally looking forward to the publication of Book #2. It's like a mindmeld of Alan Moore and Joss Whedon, and how sweet is that, in the small? So till the day, stay slappy, watch out for Fleurs du Mall, try to dodge those drangsturms - and keep flying.

A great collection of Alan Moore's early work for 200AD. Mostly very short and sharp stories from the Future Shock thread. Normally with a sting in the tail. Also includes Time Twisters and Abelard Snazz which is mental fun.

I have read this numerous times. And it is always good. Especially Book 3 when Halo ends up in the army. A damn good story.

Halo Jones is an ordinary girl living in The Hoop. The Hoop is where the poor are put so that anyone with money doesn't have to look at them. It is no solution to poverty and unemployment, it is just a place to be. Nothing is really known of Halo's parents and it is assumed she was born on The Hoop and that they died when she was very young. She lives in the house of Brinna (considered to be a wealthy woman), Ludy a musician, Rodice another girl similar to her and Toby an animatronic dog who belongs to Brinna. Halo has always dreamt of leaving The Hoop and when Ludy becomes one of the Drummers and Brinna is murdered she siezes her chance to board a space ship as a hostess and travel to other planets.

She has became something of a legend in the future. She was supposed to be a war criminal who aided in the slaughter of millions and that she met many of the famous people of her time. The reality is somewhat different, she was more in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place depending on your viewpoint). Her real story sees her losing many of her friends and fighting in a strange war at super slow speed due to a different gravity on the planet Moab.

I really enjoyed this graphic novel. The heroine Halo was most interesting as she was so ordinary. She "could have been anyone" (her most famous quote). It had many elements of more male based comics like spaceships, guns, war etc, but she was strong in her own right and didn't succumb to many of the female stereotypes like taking her clothes off and fainting a lot which was something Moore and Gibson felt important. The ending saw some earlier storylines tied up nicely and there may even someday be a fourth book (this collection is made up of the three books previsuly published) to continue her story which I would definitely read. I also liked that dolphins ended up taking over the earth, being more intelligent and sensitive, very Douglas Adams.½

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