{"id":11191,"date":"2010-04-24T22:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T03:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=11191"},"modified":"2010-04-02T15:31:05","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T20:31:05","slug":"neno-michael-the-signifiers-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/?p=11191","title":{"rendered":"Neno, Michael &#8211; The Signifiers #1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nenoworld.com\/MainPage.html\">Website<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/signifiers111.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"signifiers11\" src=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/signifiers111.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"394\" height=\"606\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Signifiers #1<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Jack Kirby, eat your heart out.\u00c2\u00a0 That sampled page below, the cover, the first fantastic page of this book (a close-up of a screaming man, so close that you can make out his\u00c2\u00a0back teeth), everything you look at screams Kirby\u00c2\u00a0while still sticking to a very clear (if a little hazy to the reader) vision.\u00c2\u00a0 There are three stories in this book, and I&#8217;m starting at the back for reasons that&#8217;ll be clear in a minute.\u00c2\u00a0 Last up is the story of the heat-seeking dwarf (the sampled image), who is held captive by a mysterious group and eventually makes his way free to a hippie commune.\u00c2\u00a0 In the middle of the comic is a tale of invasion, giant guns and sudden love, all told in a different format (panel-wise) than the other pieces, and it&#8217;s the only piece in here that can be read by itself with any hope of understanding fully what&#8217;s going on.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally there&#8217;s the bulk of the comic, the main story of the Signifiers.\u00c2\u00a0 It turns out this story started in Reactionary Tales #1, which Michael put out something like 5 years ago, so forgive me if I&#8217;m a little hazy on how that connects to this issue.\u00c2\u00a0 This story is a mess, but that&#8217;s mostly because we&#8217;re still mostly without context in this first issue.\u00c2\u00a0 He very clearly has a master plan here (he stops the story briefly to map out the important parties, something that may have made more sense at the start of the comic, but who am I to judge?), and I&#8217;m happy to be along for the ride.\u00c2\u00a0 What we do see in this issue is a society of freaks, a peace rally (in which a young woman gets transformed into a dog creature), some thugs try to exert their will with varying degrees of success, a mysterious Voyst is referenced several times, and a mysterious man in bandages becomes real.\u00c2\u00a0 Like I said, it was a bit tough to follow (although if I wasn&#8217;t still in moving transition and could locate that older issue it might help), but I could stare at this art for days, and as long as Michael knows what he&#8217;s doing a little confusion from the reader in the first issue isn&#8217;t the worst thing in the world.\u00c2\u00a0 He also has a letter&#8217;s page where he addresses some of the more confusing elements and shows that he does have a plan, and has no intention of letting so much time lapse between issues this time around.\u00c2\u00a0 Sounds good to me, but forgive me if I&#8217;ve gotten a bit cynical about that claim over the 8+ years I&#8217;ve been running this site&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 $4.95<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/signifiers12.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"signifiers12\" src=\"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/12\/signifiers12.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"515\" height=\"786\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Website The Signifiers #1 Jack Kirby, eat your heart out.\u00c2\u00a0 That sampled page below, the cover, the first fantastic page of this book (a close-up of a screaming man, so close that you can make out his\u00c2\u00a0back teeth), everything you look at screams Kirby\u00c2\u00a0while still sticking to a very clear (if a little hazy to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3160,975],"class_list":["post-11191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-michael-neno","tag-the-signifiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11197,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11191\/revisions\/11197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticalsloth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}