Is really December 2010???

I am so remiss in keeping up with this. There's been a lot of life going on here lately. I do appreciate the emails folks have sent me. It's nice to know that there are people who have read this blog and want me to do more reviews. Having an audience makes it a lot easier to come back and do more stuff here. A review typically takes 6 to 8 hours - a big enough time commitment that I would not continue if no one was reading what I post here.

Bone is going to be the next review, followed by some commentary on the 2010 shake down of the scanlations manga websites plus updates on popular stuff I've already reviewed like Bleach and Naruto. After that, I want to look at the two classic bandes designees, Tintin and Asterix. i wanted to get Bone done before Christmas but most of December turned into the business trip from hell. I'll get Bone done over the weekend and want to do the rest of stuff I just outlined by the end of January. Please don't be shy to email me and nag me to get off my ample butt and post. The feedback, even the negative feedback, helps me keep going instead of just shutting this blog down.

It's not been easy as of late. The unemployment blues make it hard to be excited about much of anything - and my bum knee is gotten bad enough that I can't even go to martial arts practice for the catharsis of beating other people up legally. My program got cut at the national lab I was working at in 2007. I landed an oil company job and moved to Houston, only to get laid off in early 2009. I looked for a new job ANYWHERE for months and months and sent out close to eight hundred applications - not to mention numerous phone calls to headhunters. After we buried my mom in September 2009, I just plain gave up. GSA in October 2009 was my last gasp of trying to get a research or teaching job. This isn't a total disaster since I have enough in the bank to retire right now if I'm careful with the money - and getting a little cabin up in the mountains in Idaho and spending the rest of my days fishing has a lot of appeal. But the bad times took their toll and I have not done any painting or drawing or leatherwork; I haven't done the relatively small amount of work to finish the boat I've been building; and I haven't written anything for either science journals or non-fiction magazines lately. I have neglected both my blogs all year. But it's time to move forward. Further hiding under a mushroom isn't going to do me any good at this point.

Watch this space for a Bone review - and thanks to everyone who's encouraged me to revive this blog.

I am so bad. I should not be neglecting this blog this way - especially since I do know that there are folks who read it. It's just that there are so many titles out there and, if you've seen my typical review, then you know that I put a lot of time into writing something up. I have several reviews that need doing that I've been procratinating.

Anyway, I have just run into a new manga, not two days ago, that blew my socks off. I'm not going to write it up tonight, especially since I'm on a hacked connection while driving beween Santa Cruz, CA and Houston, TX (in Flagstaff, to be exact).

The manga is called Emma. It's not Jane Austin's Emma. It's a graphic novel originally written in Japanese about an "upstairs-downstairs" romance in Victorian England between a young upper class merchant prince and a maid named Emma. It's good for all ages but seriously, skip getting it for your kids and get it for yourself. It's wonderful. The research alone is damn near perfect but it's the story that makes it special. I'll try to post particulars in a day or two. If you can't wait, check out the splash page for it on Amazon.

Reading Manga online: where to go, where not to go

There are many sites where one can go to read manga for free. The way it works is this: someone in Japan gets the weekly serialized manga installment and translates it. Someone else whites out the Japanese text and puts in the translation in English (or French or Italian or Spanish or...). Then the effort is posted online somewhere and is available, usually for free, by direct download, bit torrent or IRC. The process and its product are called scanlation or scanslation.

Scanslation efforts are almost always amateur operations done for the love of the manga. Since there is often years worth of delay in getting some manga in a translated form, scanslations are actually quite popular. Seeing that some manga and anime have taken, in some extreme cases, decades to cross the ocean, it is not difficult to see why scanslation thrives. People, mostly young folks, form scanslation groups on their own to translate their favorite manga. Now I can't say that the phenomenon of scanslation is exclusively an effort by "kids" since my middle aged spousal unit has been active in such an effort himself not too long ago.

The best of the scanslation manga sites will post a warning before you open up any manga issue or anime episode, to tell you to go buy the English translation version as soon as it's available - which is only fair, after all since scanslation sites don't actually own the copyrighted material. Now I'm not sure how they get away with this but I assume it's due to a loophole somewhere in copyright law - otherwise the media jerks would have shut them down long ago (this should give you an idea of just what I think of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, also known as the Digital Protect-Mickey-Mouse-For-Disney-and-its-Lobbyists Act).

What the scanslation sites do give you is a place to preview a manga that you may want to eyeball because your kids may or want to read it. Also, your kids may be using a scanslation site to read manga online. There are good scanslation sites and less good ones. The "free" ones are mostly supported by ads - and that leads me to a not-happy subject. One of the formerly best scanslation sites, iNaruto.com, recently started to include ads for porn. Now I've read "adult content" and put up with the soft-porn garbage that gets sold as romance novel these days, but it doesn't mean I have to like. And the crap the iNaruto now has on their website as ads is offensive and it shouldn't be seen by kids. As an adult, I'm offended and I find the ads repulsive too. If you have blocking software, block this website.

I'm really quite ticked off by iNaruto. It used to be a good place to read and sample manga otherwise unavailable in English. Now they have trash porn ads on their website. Another site I will not use and don't recommend is the stoptazmo site. The guy who runs that site has a nasty habit of swiping other peoples' scanslations, stripping the credits off and then trying to collect a fee from the unwary to read the scanslations he's swiped. And the sagans and sagans of ads you have to wade through to read for free on the stoptazmo site make it a huge chore and an incentive to go elsewhere. The stoptazmo site want to get you to register anyway and I don't like the practice of net registration since it can lead to increased spam and possible id theft.

So: check out the scanslation sites you kids use and block those with bad ads and those that require registration.

Where do I read currently? At onemanga.com, a site with clean ads, not very many ads, no registration and a nice selection of manga for all ages. If they ever change, no doubt I'll go looking for a new site to use. Ads I can put up with - but porno ads are way beyond what I'll tolerate.

There's a nice web page on the Wikipedia about scanlation, talks about the uses and abuses of the scanlsation movement with good balance.

Sea of Insanity Webcomic: Just Because Someone is an Amateur Doesn't Mean It Isn't Good.

Venue: Free webcomic at http://fractuslux.comicgenesis.com,
updates sporadicly.

Sea of Insanity is an online comic written by L. K. Malnassy, someone who is likely completely unknown in the world of professional graphic novels and sequential art. The comic is only available online at http://fractuslux.comicgenesis.com. There has been one collection on CD of the story from 2001 through 2005, originally available only through the comic's website. I have no idea if the CD collection is even available these days.

Like many other online comics that people post on the web, this is an effort by someone who does not depend on sequential art to make a living. LKM, as the author is known among her fans, started this online comic when she was a student. Nowadays, she's a working stiff like the rest of us. In many ways, Sea of Insanity, or SOI for short, is fairly representative of non-professional web comics: the comic is free - anyone with internet access can read it; the comic was started by a student; the subject matter and the plot line would never be touched by an American comics publisher; the art is not Sunday funnies or comic book standard; the art improves with time; the update schedule is random and sometimes the strip lies fallow for long periods of time.

All that being said, SOI has a dedicated following and for very good reasons, mostly because the story rocks.

Setting: SOI takes place during the present, in some nameless Midwestern college town. There's a twist: the Greek pantheon and other mythological creatures of Greek antiquity are alive and well and hanging out here and there. The muse Calliope and the nymph Isle decide that Isle needs a new roommate in the apartment to help cover the rent. There's a problem: Isle accidentally misplaced the living room and replaced it with a wooded grotto with a small lake. There's a giant snake living in the grotto for now which the god Apollo left there to watch over Isle. Now the various shenanigans of these refugees from classical antiquity are usually unnoticed by humans since things can be covered up by illusions and the like. The trouble begins because you just can't hide a lake in the middle of your otherwise normal-looking house. The new roommate is bound to notice something...

Story: The plot hinges around a bet between Aphrodite and Apollo. The bet is that Apollo can't get someone to fall in love with him if they know his true nature and he's not allowed to use his powers like a love charm on them. Basically, he has to woo someone with no extra help, just like the rest of the world. If he wins, Aphrodite will stop Eros/Cupid from shooting Apollo with love arrows for a century. If he loses, he has to serve Aphrodite for five years. That might not sound like a big deal but it is when you consider that every one of Apollo's known love affairs ended in disaster. That's the deep background to this story.

Apollo tries to make Isle fall in love with him. To start off, they had something going already but the problem with nymphs is that they aren't very smart. Most are incapable of any kind of rational judgment of their lovers - and they're nymphs: classical Greek sex machines and not picky about their partners in bed. So to stick with the terms of the bet, Apollo grants Isle with true intelligence so she has enough brains to evaluate his suit. Isle with a brain takes one look at Apollo's track record as a lover and dumps him. Apollo does not want to lose this bet and so he's been making a pest of himself with overly aggressive wooing and not-real-smart intimidation tactics. Apollo is basically the apotheosis of Mr. Wrong.

Enter Finn. Finn is a college student in need of a place to live. He's the new roommate, especially since he didn't totally freak out over the lake in the middle of the living room and the mythological nature of his fellow apartment dwellers. The plot to date revolves around the interactions between Finn and the other humans of the story and the surviving members of the Greek pantheon. There are a lot of good one liners and sight gags at the beginning of the story but it has gotten much darker and more serious as the conflict between Apollo and Isle has evolved. There is still a lot of humor in the story amidst the increasing complexity of the plot, and it is applied with a very deft touch with excellent balance.

The subplots abound. Some of them are quite funny, like that of Isle's shrink. He ran into a drunk Dionysus at a bar and helped the guy home without knowing who he was helping. Dionysus told Gil, the shrink, that he'd grant him a wish as a reward for helping him. Gil said that he would like to be a better fisherman, thinking that the drunk was joking. Dionysus wasn't joking and granted what he thought was Gil's wish and now Gil turns into a fish once every five hours, a never ending source of situation comedy within the comic. Another subplot is that of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and her pursuit of Gil. Calliope looks like she taken a shine to Gil and Gil is working very hard to run in the opposite direction. Calliope also functions as the main narrator of plot exposition, the source of background details for both characters and readers when more info is needed to understand the nuances of the plot.

Art: SOI is done in pencils. This is highly unusual for sequential art which is normally done in inks. On paper, especially in newspapers, pencils are never used because of the cost and difficulty of publishing art in grayscale. Ink has reigned in traditional comics because of the grayscale problem on paper. I can think of only one time that I have seen a comic done in pencils on pulp deadtreeware and that was the earliest published version of Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil. With the introduction of webcomics, the problem of grayscale is now nonexistent and SOI is only one of several online comics I have seen that are done in pencil.

Part of SOI's appeal is the nuanced look of the penciled art. Like many other amateur online comics, the art has improved with time. The early installments of SOI look very much like the sort of thing I used to doodle in high school: not bad sketching done by someone with little training in artistic technique. The later installments are much better with greater detail and sophisticated shading. The later installments also take on much more challenging viewing angles and compositional arrangements. LKM has some real raw talent and her art gets better as she gains more practice in drawing her comic.

One of the problems with the art in SOI is the improvement in artistic quality, as strange as that may sound. The appearance of one of the main characters, the college student Finn, has improved so much over time that he looks completely different in the latter half of the published story than when he started out, from a long face with straight hair to a more square face with tossed unkept hair. I am personally undecided as to which version of Finn I prefer, though the latter Finn is certainly much better drawn. The other obvious problem with SOI is one of consistency. Sometimes the art is just awesome - and sometimes the art regresses a bit. I suspect the consistency problem will go away eventually as LKM gains more experience in drawing sequential art.

Age Groups: SOI is very character driven and some of these characters are Greek gods and nymphs. Greek gods, as we all know, didn't exactly practice modern American family values and nymphs were, well, nymphomaniacs to be blunt. Let's be frank: people have sex in this comic and not the monogamous married-couple variety either. Some of that sex is "Greek love," better known as same-gender sexual relations, though there is really very little of that going on. None of the sexual content is ever explicit, most of it is "off-screen" and doesn't even approach the level of soft porn you get these days in your average bookstore romance novel. I think the worst thing you will find is two nymphs being kissy...but for crying out loud, they're nymphs. Sex is what most nymphs do.

There is no nudity in SOI though it is suggested in spots. There is no strong language. There is no egregious violence. There is some binge drinking in a local bar. There are college-aged males committing typical college-aged clueless, hormone-driven, and/or alcohol-fueled stupidities - realistic ones, not ones out of movies. There are some "adult situations" but none so outrageous that your average sixth-grader would be disturbed by it. Frankly, some TV shows like Married with Children are far far worse than SOI.

SOI is safe for 12 and up. It would have a PG rating if it were a movie. I would even consider letting a mature 10 year old read it. I don't think it would be appropriate for kids younger than that just because of the rather sophisticated and atypical adult situations inherent in the plot. Whether you want to try to shield your older kids from the non-traditional relationships in SOI is a value judgment I can't make. I think they are relatively benign. I know I'd let a kid of mine read it at age 12 but I also know that some of my Mormon friends back in Idaho and Utah would rather upset if they found their high school aged kids reading it. Your own mileage may vary.

Other Comments: Frankly, I can't decide what really drives SOI: the deeply developed personalities of the characters or the totally byzantine nature of the plot. The thing I really like about SOI is that I can't figure out where it's going. The plot is unpredictable - and for someone like me who usually figures out the ending to most books before they are half-read, I find it delightful.

The story does start a little slow, with a predominance of gags early on. The humor is good and well-presented and it keeps you going as the plot is slowly unfolded and explained - or at least, that's how I found it. It feels like the humor content drops off as the plot progresses but it never goes away. That is an illusion - the humor does not vanish. It remains a major portion of SOI. Even when the plot takes sudden turns into rather dark content, the humor keeps going regardless - it's just that some of the developments are so serious that the humor becomes part of the background.

Something I haven't remarked on yet is the rich texture of SOI. The author knows her mythology - I mean, she really knows her mythology. I thought I was rather well educated myself in terms of classical mythology and history, being a survivor of a Great Books university curriculum myself, right down to reading the Aeneid in Latin in college. The author of SOI has put me to shame. She has picked up on and built off of little minor details from antiquity that I had completely missed. For example, it had never occurred to me that all of Apollo's love life was a disaster zone; or that while he didn't technically lie, because he is the God who never lies, Apollo still misled Hector as to the future fate of his son at Troy.

There are some things about SOI that annoy me. First, sometimes there are "guest strips" which were usually included when LKM was too swamped to get an installment out. Some of the guest strips have art that is rather poor and several have art that is very discongruent with the author's. One of the things that I like about SOI is the greyscale pencil art. Bringing in other artists whose art clashes with the author's is a detraction in my book. I'm also not fond of "filler" content, again often thrown in when the author was too busy to finish another installment in time. There is a lot of filler, more than most webcomics. While I did find the filler page of Calliope taking Apollo to see the movie Troy quite funny, the one with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, most of the filler has done nothing more than annoy me. I would rather wait patiently for a new installment of SOI than read more distracting and not very worthwhile "filler" content. Including filler is something that a lot of amateur web comic do, but for me, I find that it rarely adds anything to my reading enjoyment.

The last thing I want to say about SOI is about the balance of art vs. story. I like the pencil art but I like the story more. The art does enable some good sight gags, a tool that a print-only author doesn't have available. The story is the kernal of this webcomic, however, and I have asked myself more than once whether SOI might not be better off as a book instead. The plot and the characters are so well developed that I think SOI might make it as a main-stream fantasy genre novel whereas now it's just another amateur webcomic. It's something that the author should consider in my opinion.

Life in the hectic lane

After several months, it's time to get back to work on this blog. Since the last post, I've found a new job and moved to Texas (life as an geogeek - you go where the work is...); spent a month in Perth, West Australia working; bought a new house; coped with the hubby graduating from college, trying to play housewife, and finding his own new job - all without my murdering him; and now surviving Hurricane Ike (the tree that hit the roof thankfully did no damage whatsoever - yay!).

There are some very exciting new online comics to cover plus some thought on some of the better independent (i.e., non-DC and non-Marvel) comics to get to. Maybe I'll get back into pace later this weekend.

And thank you to the folks who have been leaving me comments! It's nice to know people actually read this stuff. (It's hard to write a blog with an audience of nobody...)

censorship and fansubs

I was catching up on reading Bleach last night on a fansub site. This sort of site is where folks scan in the latest episode of the manga as so0n as it's published in Japan. Then they clean up the text bubbles to remove the Japanese text and replace it with their own English translation. These sorts of sites are free or available for a small subscription price. The ones that are free are covered with ads - no big surprise there...

On my favorite free-online-manga websites, the f-word appears in the most recent installment of Bleach, issue 306. When Viz catches up with the Japanese manga, the Viz version of issue 306 will likely have no profanities whatsoever. I am not sure if the Japanese version uses the Japanese equivalent of the f-word - but that's not the point. The point is this: English translations on fansub sites sometimes use profanity while the English-language trade paperbacks of manga are devoid of profanity almost all of the time. That's because manga publishers censor what goes into the thought and speech balloons.

You may decide to prevent your kids from reading online manga - and that is a justifiable course of action. The counter argument is that most kids already know a whole rack of profanities by the time they leave grade school. Even if you stop your kids from reading fansubs, your kids already know a lot of profanity. How can they not know profanity when words like shit and motherfucker are thrown around like candy in shows like South Park? Based on this, one could argue that a manga with profanity is no worse than television - so what good does it do to prevent your kids from reading online fansub manga? Personally, I myself would still ban online manga for kids and teens. Just because one knows profanity, it doesn't mean that it's okay to use it. YMMV!

As I remarked in an earlier post, American versions of manga and anime censor their artistic content. I have already mentioned the attempts to cover up the genitals of the child Goku from Dragon Ball; the cover-ups are crude and actually quite funny. Sexual content is not the only thing that's censored by American manga publishers. Certain religious symbols are also censored. One good example of this is the death-of-Greed scene in Fullmetal Alchemist. The original Japanese version had Greed tied to a cross-shaped mass of rock. In the American publication of this episode, the cross was converted into an oval lump of rock instead. Perhaps someone was worried that the doomed Greed would be killed and resurrected as some kind of messiah figure...

I have a bit of a cynical view that the censorship is viewed as good business for manga publishers. Once a title has gained some popularity in the American market, it is not at all uncommon for publishers to release uncensored versions of an anime or a manga at a price higher than the censored version. What a racket...

Kingdom Come - Superman's Midlife Crisis...

Venue: Kingdom Come, written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross, published by DC, published first as a four issue miniseries in 1996 and then as a trade paperback in 1997 priced at $US 14.95, which is still its list price today. Don't buy it at that price without first checking to see if folks like Amazon sell it for a discount, which they often do. If you, like me, prefer to give your business to independent book stores, lest they vanish from the landscape entirely, then I suggest you buy this work from your local comic book shop. A good comic book shop will always give you better service and better advice on comics than anyone like Borders or Barnes & Noble. Bookstore chains just don't understand this genre, which is why your local comic book store deserves your custom.

Kingdom Come is now also available as a DC "Absolute" hardcover edition, c. 2006, for $US 75.00. If I had the money to spare, I'd own it by now in the Absolute edition as I love the art and my trade paperback version is worse for wear. There was also a novelization book version of Kingdom Come issued in 1997; I have a copy of this somewhere in the house - it was actually quite good, as far as that sort of thing goes, though it had to tweak some of the story's particulars to cover that which was taken on faith in the visuals of the graphic novel original. Try as I might, but I can not find any info on the novelization anywhere, not even amazon.com... If I find my copy, I'll post the ISBN and any other info I can find on it being in or out of print.

Setting: This is a DC comic set in the DC universe. Within the DC universe, the story takes place one or two decades from now - in Metropolis, Gotham City, Keystone City, Green Lantern's orbitting New OA, and many other places on DC's planet earth. The comic is part of what DC was calling its Elseworlds series. According to their own promotional blurb: "In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed or might have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist." In many ways, this is another postmodern setting for a comic book in a time and place close to our own. It is not as cynically deconstructionist as Watchmen was, but it is well within the genre of near-future nuclear-holocaust apocalyptic stories. But this is a nuclear-holocaust apocalyptic book with Superman in it, so it has to all come out right in the end, right?

Story: It's a sad sort of world one or two decades from now, with the demise of the Nobel Prizes, Major League Baseball and the Olympics. (Face it, the only thing worse than a world where the Yankees can beat the Red Sox is a world without any Red Sox at all...!) Worse yet, the old-school superheroes, now known as the first generation of metahumans, are at odds with the younger generations of metahumans which have come into being since the glory days of Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman. At the start of Kingdom Come, Wonder Woman is at odds with the rest of the Amazon nation over some of her actions in the outside world so she has been exiled from her homeland. Batman is a wreak after 40 years of physical abuse while fighting crime in Gotham City; he now hides in his underground cave where he guides a small army of sentinel robots to keep order in Gotham City for him. Hawkman has turned into an ecoterrorist in the Pacific Northwest. Superman has quit the scene and plays loner in his Antarctic fortress home in protest over humanity's preference for newer Metahuman superheroes for whom the ends justify the means.

In this world, a post-modern metahuman "protector" of Metropolis named Magog, along with his metahuman support team, has pursued a metahuman criminal from St. Louis west to the farm fields of central Kansas. This pursuit is ongoing despite the fugitive's pleas for mercy - these pleas are ignored. In Kansas, the containment suit for one of the metahuman pursuers is ripped open by the fugitive. The problem here is that this metahuman is essentially a thermonuclear reaction confined only by his special clothing. The breach of his containment suit has the same effect as a multi-megaton H-bomb. Kansas and large tracts of surrounding states are devastated.

An elderly minister (denomination unknown) by the name of Norman McKay has been having apocalyptic visions straight out of the Revelations of St. John the Divine and other related New Testament books. After the nuclear devastation of Kansas, McKay is visited by an old DC character some older folks may recognize as The Spectre, in his role as delegated angelic judge of good and evil. He comes for McKay because McKay has the visions and therefore is The Spectre's appointed partner and foil in judging the upcoming nuclear-abetted apocalypse. This apocalypse will result from the conflict between the old-school metahumans like Superman, the newer generations of metahumans like Magog, other metahumans who are trying to play the middle-ground like Batman and Lex Luther, and the normal human race which has a nuclear arsenal controlled by the UN.

In a conflict where Superman has lost his empathy for humanity, it's not Superman who ends up saving the day. Superman here is very solidly part of the problem. The two people who serially manage to "save the day," if you could call it that, are not anyone I would have guessed ahead of time - and as someone who frequently figures out the end to books half way through reading them, this left me very pleased the first time I read Kingdom Come. It's a good ending - a double ending actually - but not an ending I expected. In a way, I was a little disappointed to find that someone really did save the day in a very DC superhero manner after all. I was hoping that the plot might end with something that could be taken symbolically for the apocalypse - just like the beginning of the story explicitly proposed in the conversations between The Spectre and McKay. But this is DC where someone saving the day is part of what you pay for. Regardless, Kingdom Come is a good read, especially if you already are familiar with the DC universe and its superheroes.

The Art: The illustrator is Alex Ross, who is probably the single best American graphic novel/comic book artist alive today. He doesn't pencil, ink and color in the traditional comic book methodology. He uses mainly gouache (opaque watercolor). Got that: he paints his comic book art. The result is amazing. Anything illustrated by Alex Ross is a feast for the eyes. The story of Kingdom Come is really quite good, as good as it gets for something within the confines of the DC universe - but the art is what really makes Kingdom Come special. Ross is the same guy how did the art on the wonderful Peace on Earth Superman special where the Man of Steel realizes that not even he can solve the problem of world hunger, probably the most profound Superman story ever written. (I should probably do a review of Peace on Earth at some point...). Basically, anything that Ross does is good but in Kingdom Come, he outdoes himself in the huge scope and composition of his illustrations, which are best and grandly displayed in the battle scenes in chapter four, especially the two page splash scene of pp. 160-161 and the full-page descent of Batman's forces on p. 168. I am particularly fond of the arrival of Captain Marvel page, which is the last page in chapter three. I could make a list of all of my favorite pages but it would be too long for a blog review... Without Ross's art, Kingdom Come would be just another decently-written comic book which I probably wouldn't bother reviewing. There are bonus pages at the end of the trade paperback edition where Ross demonstrates how he did his illustration for Kingdom Come. I assume DC included the bonus pages in the Absolute edition too since these pages are offer a detailed and interesting look at a master artist's working methods.

Other Comments: Kingdom Come won three Eisners in 1997.

'Yo Folks, this is DC Superman title we're taking about here. While Kingdom Come is a more mature work than your normal drug store comic book-rack Superman issue, it's still a Superman title, even if it is in the Elseworlds series. The violence is more tasteful and less egregious than your average modern TV cop show. Other than the spit-curled perfectly-muscled guys in skin-tight long-johns (with and without capes) and the beautiful statuesque full-figured women with perfect hair in skin-tight bodysuits (all of which are still far less revealing than your average bikini), there is no scary sexual content to speak of. Bad language is not even an issue. For a story that features nuclear devastation on two occasions, there are no disturbing depictions of victims of nuclear explosions. The sort of parade of horrors you read about after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not present, so there are no worries about your kid in fifth grade having nightmares after reading Kingdom Come, at least as far as visualization of nuclear horrors are concerned. The worst we see in this work are the bleached fleshless bones of metahumans caught in a thermonuclear blast - which is not at all realistic of what would happen in a real thermonuclear event. I guess the bare bones are to convey the deadly consequences of a nuclear exchange without showing any of the icky drippy bodily fluids and charred and burnt flesh of victims who escaped vaporization... While I can point out the unrealistic depiction of post-nuclear effects, the upside is that we get to skip looking at all that stomach-turning stuff. Kingdom Come is essentially safe to give to any kid old enough to appreciate the story, which in my estimation is middle-school aged kids and up (grade 5 and higher). They'll follow the story at least at a surface level, and there's enough action going on that most will like it. It's the older kids, the mature junior high school kids and up who will appreciate the more sophisticated setting, especially if they grew up reading a lot of DC.

It is interesting to note that anyone lacking familiarity with the Bible isn't going to have the background to fully appreciate the biblical references and nuances that run through Kingdom Come.

Ross used real people as models for the characters he illustrated. It's strange but I find that the face on the character of Donna Troy, the one-time protege of Wonder Woman and former Teen Titans member known as Wonder Girl, looks remarkably like the Fantasy author Diana Paxton - and ever since I first read Kingdom Come, I've wondered if Ross knows Paxton from somewhere. If I ever have opportunity to run into Diana again, who I met years ago in the Society for Creative Anachronism, I'll have to ask her. I find the resemblance is uncanny.