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A review by stilldirty
The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-first Century by Frank Miller
4.0
So, THAT happened.
The overall story of Martha Washington is kinda cool—in a somewhat ridiculous, yet, fun-to-read and don't get too invested sorta way. As a fan of Frank Miller (Sin City, Dark Knight Returns, etc.) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen, The Originals), I was excited to see what these two guys (who I would never have thought to place in the same pool as a possible comic team-up) could come up with for an unconventional and unusual character story.
There are probably some political undertones here that would rub some people the wrong way; people who don't want politics associated with their comics, for one. And that's actually me, for the most part. But since I'm somewhat apathetic about that sort of thing in the first place, it was easy to just take it all in as satire and poking fun at things. You get Miller's tongue-in-cheekiness and Gibbons's "economical" art styling compounded to make a substantial story that's easy enough to like. And the way Dave Gibbons draws in the first place is characterizable as dispassionate and fair, while being very proficient and expressive.
Basically, I'm not shocked that I never even got a whiff of this book in all the years of the contents being produced until I saw the trade on the shelf at a used bookstore, but I'm glad I got the chance to check it out in its entirety after-the-fact because I might have lost interest between the single issues coming out. Kind of like having to watch a good TV show that becomes mediocre in the week-to-week format, instead of bingeing handfuls of episodes over days and liking it more than you would.
The overall story of Martha Washington is kinda cool—in a somewhat ridiculous, yet, fun-to-read and don't get too invested sorta way. As a fan of Frank Miller (Sin City, Dark Knight Returns, etc.) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen, The Originals), I was excited to see what these two guys (who I would never have thought to place in the same pool as a possible comic team-up) could come up with for an unconventional and unusual character story.
There are probably some political undertones here that would rub some people the wrong way; people who don't want politics associated with their comics, for one. And that's actually me, for the most part. But since I'm somewhat apathetic about that sort of thing in the first place, it was easy to just take it all in as satire and poking fun at things. You get Miller's tongue-in-cheekiness and Gibbons's "economical" art styling compounded to make a substantial story that's easy enough to like. And the way Dave Gibbons draws in the first place is characterizable as dispassionate and fair, while being very proficient and expressive.
Basically, I'm not shocked that I never even got a whiff of this book in all the years of the contents being produced until I saw the trade on the shelf at a used bookstore, but I'm glad I got the chance to check it out in its entirety after-the-fact because I might have lost interest between the single issues coming out. Kind of like having to watch a good TV show that becomes mediocre in the week-to-week format, instead of bingeing handfuls of episodes over days and liking it more than you would.