tetsukubota

I was all excited to read a comic book about a super-powered librarian and then I opened it up to see ... a foreword by Dave Sim. Famous raging misogynist Dave Sim. I have to admit, this put me off the whole thing before I read a single word of the actual text. Then, in the context of a foreword by woman-hater Dave Sim, I started thinking about the fact that Rex Libris is about a male librarian. Why not a female librarian with superpowers? It's a female-dominated profession, after all. So I was predisposed to be annoyed by this. Unfair? Perhaps. But if the comic had been really outstanding, I might have been able to get past it and I didn't think it was anything spectacular. The story is a bunch of mumbo jumbo about travelling to another planet and communicating with aliens using the gadgets owned by the public library. It's all written in the style of a Stan Lee era Marvel comic. Rex is supposed to be very educated and intelligent, but for some reason he talks with a strange sort of mob guy accent, saying "dis" and "dat" instead of "this" and "that." I never got why. Every once in a while, the story gets interrupted by discussions between Rex and his editor -- Rex actually leaves the story to go talk to the editor, and it's all so meta and clever. I'm disappointed because I think you could do a great librarian superhero without needing to insert lots of stuff about going to another galaxy to collect a fine.

2020-08-27 06:52