Weekly Sharing

So, let's kick this off with a catchy musical number.

Batman The Brave and The Bold:  Birds of Prey

Brave and The Bold has officially rivaled Animaniacs in the realm of 'getting crap passed the censors'.

On a less interesting note, something occurred to me last week as I read some of my old comics, among them a volume of the Dragon Ball Z manga.  I think I may prefer manga to western comics just a little bit.  I'm not sure if I've ever made my stance on anime clear but to be simple:  For the most part, I don't like anime.  There are certainly series I like but there are many many more that I can't stand.
Anyway, that's what made it odd that I found myself enjoying the manga more than the western comics I own.  I thought about it for a little while and I came up with the three main reasons I think bring about this preference:

1.  Formatting.  I can't say I've ever been confused or lost while reading a manga, and the panels are usually shaped and organized in a way that do an at least decent job of accentuating what they tell.  On the western side it's a bit of a crapshoot.  You might get something with solid presentation but you might end up with a total mess of panels and words, older Marvel X-Men comics being a particularly good example of this.  I can think of a few where the formatting is just downright horrible; speech bubbles and narration boxes litter the pages so densely that it's near impossible to figure out what you should read first or the layout of the pages were just incredibly boring and/or ugly.  Classic though the story may be, The Dark Knight Returns is a prominent example of extremely dull formatting.

2. Continuity.  A simple matter.  I've never encountered a manga where I've had to know 80 years worth of continuity to make sense out of everything.  Plus, even when I know the stories, it can get frustrating when some writers refuse to ignore some of the worst pre-existing plot threads that should have been forgotten forever.

3. Rob Liefeld doesn't draw any manga.