Matteo

The ending in a story represents maybe the most important part of it. A great final section of the narrative remains forever in the mind of a reader/viewer/player, with all the emotive pathos arriving at his peak. A great last occasion to show the best of what you can offer, among a splendid plot twist, new discoveries, a cliffhanger for the future of a franchise or an epic melancholic search for eternity. Babel offers a remarkable ending, but the problem is that all the contents we find inside the novel run out in the few conclusive pages.
Babel is an historical low-fantasy book which promises for great events and strong worldbuilding while never fulfilling this ambition. It is a story about racism, cultural appropriation, colonialism and imperialism. It is both a praise and a critique to the entire academic system, and it is the representation of the worst moments in the history of Britain. Our protagonist, Robin Swift, arrives in Oxford after being raised to eradicate his Chinese origins and appear as pure English at all. The problem is that the branch of Oxford in which he studies, the Institute of Translation called Babel, sees him as a sort of instrument. As soon as his objective should arrive at an end, he could be thrown out and substituted. In this setting the steampunk inspiration of the Victorian age is changed using the concept of silver. The “silver tablets” are this sort of magic object whose property of channeling the forgotten meaning of words in their different translations is used to enhance the common life. All the ideas of poverty, overusing of resources inside the colonies and disparity between riches and humbles are maintained as we have studied them.
The problems starts as we see how Kuang has inserted her fantasy grounds inside the real part of the world, without creating substantial differences and most importantly focusing the story more on the academic life than on the main plot. Babel feels like this enormous rush to the end in which the pages of diaries of a frustrated student finds place, adding just the glimpse of magic we all experience every day. While all the meanings, the way you arrive to hate the terrible persecution made in that period represents the core of a brutal, violent and distinguished ending, the lack of personality of the setting and the frustrating passages around exams and all the anxious and the stress lived by the students kills the possibility of a great fantasy tale.

STYLE: 4,5
STORY: 4
WORLDBUILDING: 1,5
RHYTHM: 0,5
PROTAGONISTS: 3
ANTAGONISTS: 5
ARTISTIC FEATURE: 4
ATMOSPHERE 3,5
EMOTIONAL IMPACT: 3

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐

My relationship with pop culture links the modern arts with fragments of my life. Cinema (with Movies, TV Series and Animations), Literature (among Novels, Comics and Books) and Video Games (without forgetting everything which could be declared as part of Pop Culture) are glimpse of eternity inside our existence, other than motivations of community, discovering new people, making new friendships and living the development of artistic moments. Goodbye, Eri takes exactly this meaning of infinity and turns it into an instrument for talking about multiple original arguments, rarely used in modern manga. The little fantasy of our life, the expectations destroyed by reality, the idealization of important figures of our life arriving at peaks of meta-narrative I rarely have seen inside this medium, going beyond it in creating a true compendium of what Cinema aspires to be. The story focuses its attention on Yuta, a boy in love with creating films, with the mother asking for videos of her life until the last moments, forced by a terrible illness. All the material created by the boy becomes a scandalous movie, whose presentation in the Festival of its school is slowly transformed into a way of making fun of the boy. When Yuta decides to end his life, he meets Eri, whose passion for cinema shows the kid clhe has the abilities for creating another project, this time around the mysterious girl. As it seems a normal slice of life, Goodbye Eri excels in creating twists, bringing the genre in lots of different directions (from dramatic moments to fantasy glimpses, with surprises and complete breaking of the screenplay rules). The creativity of Fujimoto explodes into a marvelous mosaic of ideas and messages, in which every single phrase counts, seeking for the last perfect scene, a searched closure for readers and for the protagonist itself. No one in Goodbye Eri appears as it seems, or at least as it is shown by the lenses of a camera, despite those moments appearing as more real than the madness of what happens in the absurd and death-linked Yuta's life. Because in the middle of the depression of never leaving the world, never truly loving its limitative nature, and the existence of constantly perish visions, only explosions create a sort of shock, and in this way, giving sense to everything.

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I think that the real protagonist of Batman stories is Gotham itself. The corrupted, twisted city represents the perfect cursed place where everyone is forced into madness, but not only the chaotic one, but also the diverse spectrum of psychoses and the way people interact with it. Because the justifier, the inspector or the villain are three different mad dreamers in a destroyed world, a hell on earth where fear will always reign unchallenged. And yet, for a twist of fate, the actions of the “goods” of this story always makes Gotham return to their new happy dawn.
Batman Year One is an origin story which takes everything I have quoted and uses the personalities of Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon as the new arrivals in the city forgotten by God himself. Since this premise you can immediately see how these figures, so dutiful and obscure at the same time, are only the completion of a world made of different souls and characters, of enemies and criminal bosses, of masks and hard-boiled clubs, arriving at the menace of the Asylum, peering from upon its further reality. Frank Miller is exceptional in representing a terrific Gotham, unpredictable but colorful, powerful and alive while its fundamentals are dying. A great help arrives from the style of David Mazzucchelli, in which the lights and shadows are marked by a heavy china, in which pop tunes borrowed by the best Japanese productions mixes itself with expressive characters, iconic for costumes and appearances. The way all the main actors of Gotham are here represented has made school not only in the comics medium, but also in the cinematographic one, where “The Batman”, “The Dark Knight Trilogy” and even the Tim Burton's iterations on the crusader takes inspirations, for style and writing, from Year One. This labyrinthic, deep immersion inside the quoted city, however, weakens the emersion of the two faces of the quoted franchise. Because Batman and Gordon soon lose their interesting points for the human essence they shows, for being so run in and for the choices they make which never evades from their known archetypes. Furthermore, the absence of iconic Batman villains, substituted by escaped patients, violent military men and corrupted members of the police never evokes the extraordinary cases in which Batman has investigated in the past. In this sense, Batman Year One is a foundational comic about the superhero and its modern presence in Pop Culture, in an epic origin story which sees Gotham as the absolute selling point.

STYLE: 5
STORY: 3,5
WORLDBUILDING: 5
RHYTHM: 3
PROTAGONISTS: 5
ANTAGONISTS: 3
ARTISTIC FEATURE: 5
ATMOSPHERE 5
EMOTIONAL IMPACT: 4,5

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

My love for Dungeons & Dragons starts during the pandemic. The beautyness of the stories told using the most famous roleplaying game of all time captured me and brought me in this wonderful world. As a huge fan of D&D, one of my greatest curiosities was around the birth of this tabletop experience, and while searching for a gift for a friend, I have found “Rise of the Dungeon Master”, a graphic novel about the theme. This comic is the adaptation of a famous Weird article about Gary Gynax made by David Kushner, with the drawings of Koren Shadmi, an isreali author. The style of this creation is not one of my favourites. I don't like the “adult-swim” inspiration Shadmi has, and I find the amount of content found by Kushner impossible to reduce to a single volume. Despite that, those are little critiques to a huge operation.
The entire production starts from the rise of D&D, his first ideas and the debt it has with the tabletop war games, coming to the last moments of the creator of this marvellous universe.
Rise of the Dungeon Master is an heartwarming tribute to a cultural movement more than to a simple game. Using he great technique of investigative journalism, Kushner and Shadmi perfectly portrayed all the figures who contributed to this success: Dave Arneson is the light-hearted dreamer searching for the funniest game; the videogame developers are personalities ready for tributes and new creations expanding the base; William Dear is a meticulous private detective ready to hunt down D&D and than chaning the opinion on the game. All these names are little encounters in the life of a hero. Gary Gynax is the tormented author the readers loves these days, but he shows so hard his geek lifestyle to represent those kids fighting for their passions. The atmospheres and the emotional impact of this incredible reportage have the power of memories and meloncholy, with a supported rhythm similar to one-shots and campaings made with friends.

STYLE: 3
SCREENPLAY: 4
RHYTHM: 5
REPORTAGE QUALITY: 3,5
CHARACTERS: 5
ATMOSPHERE: 4
EMOTIONAL IMPACT: 5

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Look Back is an intimate One-shot created by Fujimoto. The author of Chainsaw Man and of Goodbye, Eri reduces, but not eliminates, the supernatural elements in favor of a story about the sacrifices made by Mangaka to follow their dreams, asking himself if it's worth it following this road. Look Back intertwines perfectly the stripes, styles and concepts of friendship of the two protagonists with a world which doesn't understand their passion, considering the artists as otaku you should exploit to have fun or immerse in great stories, and never following it as a true art to avoid distancing yourself from the social mass. Serialisations and personal achievements affect the frustrations of the multiple people who don't obtain success in a cruel world, with a destiny broken by individuals lost on the streets. In this sense when “Look Back” returns to the weird peaks to which Fujimoto has accustomed us, proposing “what ifs” and temporal connections made with different realities based on comics, we observe genius ideas mounted on the edgy artistic style of the author. Instead, when the slice of life and construction of the world of mangakas takes over, it forces the reader to notice the exaggerations and the plot holes which the other projects turned into strengths. Look Back is a production which doesn't abandon the road of the eternity of the art and the remembrance, but yet it works less because of an excessive realism linked with telling a more personal set of events.

STYLE: 4
STORY: 4
WORLDBUILDING: 5
RHYTHM: 5
PROTAGONISTS: 4
ANTAGONISTS: 3,5
ARTISTIC FEATURE: 5
ATMOSPHERE 5
EMOTIONAL IMPACT: 4,5

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐