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Scissors, Paper, Stone was the first Adam Warren comic I ever read - and this was whenever it first claim out, maybe mid to late nineties? - and I can still look at it and appreciate today. It does look more and more like antiquarian futurism, but it managed to accomplish some captivating things with it. Future-heroes commenting on how there was no way that super-heroes could have existed as anything more than myth because they would be running around in tights on a planet with actual weather, while they themselves are in an artificial world with a controlled environment. In retrospect, at the base of it I like that Warren had an opportunity to treat the Teen Titans as archetypal figures, when we're more commonly and overwhelmingly exposed to "numbers sanded off" Justice League riffs. The detective/acrobat, the weepy cyborg, the sorceress, the energy-wielding mostly naked alien. It was big, it was fun, it said some things that made a teenager think a bit more about what he was reading, I loved the weird skin design for the cyborg, Gabrielle, venting exhaust and heat.
Livewires is up there as well; it didn't have him on art but had someone at least in the same space-sector of style, and I liked that they were robots -- sorry, mecha -- devoid of Pinocchio syndrome and extrapolated the "hot people as objects" vibe to have them treat themselves as objects, tools, pieces of equipment to be mutated and modified as need be.
I liked Empowered, but I can't really say that I've picked it up since my initial read-through. It's nice to watch the action progress through a book and have the style and substance of the book developing right in front of your eyes - the first bits are one-off gags more than anything, usually repeating the same jokes, up until the characters sponatenously develop because Warren gives them room to. You have to give him props for using fairly intense (relatively speaking) boy-on-boy action in the same chapter as heavy girl-on-girl, not being afraid of the sex, treating sex between the main characters as a positive experience - but, as Decadent says, it's definitely a product of its time in a way.
I read his Gen 13 books recently and was left a little wanting, most due to artistic concerns. Livewires works partly because they got someone with a resumably reminiscent style to do the artwork, whereas with Gen 13 they used artists who favoured good girl art but seemed to approach from a more "realistic" (not actually, but maybe more workman-like and standardized super-hero art beyond the cheesecake) style versus Warren's frenetic, textured, expressionistic manga-style. He very much writes for his own art style and when paired with someone else, a lot of the impact is taken away because while things are exaggerated for a titillating effect, they don't quite get that Warren exaggerates past the titillating point and into some strange, new territory where everything looks a little bit plastic, people and world around them included.
I know deeming the other artists as "realistic" is a massive misnomer, but I'm failing to think of a more useful term. |
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