June 27th 2013

I’m pretty sure the printing industry was developed due to rain. See, it didn’t matter if you were a hunter, gatherer, or supervisor, if you couldn’t leave you cave/ hut/ whatever, you couldn’t get food. You had to do something to not think about how long it might be until you could eat again, so what else is there to do but draw on walls. Seriously, what else, TALK to people? Please.

There’s something about reading during inclimate weather that just hits us on a primal level. It’s the earliest form of escapism. It gives the mind something to do when there’s nothing else, and if the distraction is really good, the mind (and eventually, the body) benefits from it long after the reading’s done. If it’s really bad, we’ve got something to complain about. Either way, we win. And speaking of winners, the crop this week is pretty good.

Hawkeye 11 (Fraction/ Aja): This is the issue everyone (CC Note: Ryan…) that I’VE been waiting for ever since I heard they were doing it half a year ago: the Pizza Dog issue. It’s the classic story about a dog and his man, only they cut the man out to make room for more dog. I had this built up so much in my head I was a bit afraid to read this for fear that it wouldn’t hold up. I need not have worried.

Pizza Dog, AKA Lucky, AKA Arrow, has a pretty good life. He’s got a home, interesting neighbors, plenty of food, and one eye. His roommate, Clint Barton, AKA Hawkeye, AKA Hawkguy, barely spends any time in their apartment, but Pizza Dog finds plenty to do. He solves mysteries, he seduces fair ladies with troubled pasts, he fights off dastardly villains that have hideous fashion sense, and basically is everything a good dog should be. And then he breaks your heart.

What floored me about this issue wasn’t the way the story told the reader things, which went beyond innovative and became renovative. It was how much HAPPENED in this issue. This was the dog issue – so long as they told any story from a dog’s perspective well, they’d have done well, and they did that. On top of that, though, there was forshadowing of a family reunion, startling revelations about who exactly lives in Hawkeye’s building, first blood drawn between hero and new villain, and an ending that drastically changes the dynamic of the book. The story progressed in a real, meaningful way, it connected on an emotional level, and it did it from the perspective of a housepet in such a way that it absolutely could not have happened any other way. More happened here than in most mainstream books.

I’m a cat person and loved this book. If you’re a dog person, you will need two copies so you can frame one. If you’re not a pet person at all, you may become one by the end.

Uncanny 1 (Diggle/ Campbell): I’m as surprised as you are, surely, but Marvel has not copyrighted the title “Uncanny”. (CC Note: Copyright doesn’t protect titles. And don’t call me Shirley.) This isn’t about a world that hates and fears a certain kind of person, this is about a world that wants to cheat and take all your money.

Weaver is not a man with a particular set of skills. That would be limiting. Instead, he has whatever set of skills he can get his hands on, and he makes as much money as he can with each set. Lately, that hasn’t been much, and his latest scheme to bluff the ultimate bluffer backfired. He’s pretty sure he’s been set up, he doesn’t know by whom, about all he knows is that it’s time to move on. That doesn’t work out for him too well, either.

It’s going to stand out very quickly that Weaver has the mental part of a certain X-man’s powers. Weaver spends most of the issue mentally kicking himself over how he’s misused himself the past year, even though he’s been in a place where his own brand of enterprise should thrive. He’s fairly clever, very quick on the uptake, and processes new data and situations fast enough, but for some reason nothing seems to gel. It’s a collection of attributes than sound great together, and yet if the reader thinks about it they don’t quite make sense. Diggle broke into comics with Losers, which went on to become a movie of a similar charm, so this isn’t a shock. Campbell brings life to the story, and again it’s nothing groundbreaking, but it is sufficient.

This is classic fun reading – mostly eye candy and fair distraction from whatever else is going on in your life.

Lazarus 1 (Rucka/ Lark): There are no stumbling men emerging from caves wondering why their blanket smells like a burial shroud in this book. Instead, this is about what happens when women’s mixed martial arts, global finance, and Game of Thrones have a baby.

The world’s wealth and resources are controlled by just a few families, who employ just a few of the rest of the people because if they employed them all, the families wouldn’t have as much money. The rest of the people are treated like Waste and called as much. These families fight each other for more, but since conventional warfare is expensive, they opt for less conventional warfare. They invest in one member of their own to create nigh-immortal superweapons to defend their own interests and offend everyone else’s. These people of mass destruction keep the title of Lazarus, and the Carlyle family’s Lazarus is named Forever. Forever’s developing a nasty habit: she’s starting to think for herself, and that thinking doesn’t mesh with the rest of the family’s. Maybe she’s taken too many bullets to the everything.

This is a very gritty parable of Occupy Wall Street, with all the power of the world held by 0.0000000001% of the people. There’s a very consistent and different mentality behind everything that goes on in this world, which makes the most extreme alternatives to the world remarkably believable. Forever balances being a diamond-hard badass with emerging layers of empathy. Rucka’s a veteran writer with novel series and multiple Batman titles under his belt, and Lark has about as many artistic notches on his own bedpost. These two bringing all their talents to one project means a beautiful book with plenty of depth, character, and intrigue.

This is your chance to get in on the ground floor with a brand new series from creators that are known to create enthralling series. I do suggest you take it.

Batman Superman 1 (Pak/ Lee): It just wouldn’t be Variant Coverage if there wasn’t a book I tore apart. The winner of the short straw this week goes to some sort of prequel/ alternate universe type thingy. Seriously, if anyone out there can figure out what this is, let me know. This is as close as I can figure…

This issue looks back to the first time Batman and Superman teamed up in the New 52 universe: in an age before the two had ever met, someone is killing Wayne Enterprises employees working in Metropolis, and intrepid reporter Clark Kent is working the story. He finds a lead sitting on a bench in grubby street garb – boy billionaire Bruce Wayne. Between the two of them, they chase down the most likely suspects and find their alter egos at the scene of the crime with a fresh corpse. The misunderstandings start from there and they don’t stop.

Stylistically, this is a very interesting book. Juxtaposing children at work and the HR Giger-planned city that is Gotham City is a difficult job for the best of artists, and Jae Lee makes it work. It’s a shame he can’t render Batman or Superman as interestingly. As far as the story goes, it completely shifts at least three times, awkwardly and without any kind of connection. It doesn’t just jump genres, it jumps time periods, multiverse, personality traits, and in the background I’m pretty sure I saw a shark get jumped. Burn.

A retelling of the beginning to one of the greatest superhero team-ups of all time would be an exciting thing to read. Maybe we’ll see it one day.

And I’ll see you next week!

June 21st, 2013

Hi, everybody! No, this isn’t Dr. Nick, this is Ryan with another installment of Variant Coverage! We’ve got three beginnings and an ending to look at this week, and with a side of metatextual content to spice things up. Let’s get right to it!

Brother Lono 1 (Azzarello/ Risso): 100 Bullets ended years ago and left a distinct impression on its audience, an impression that some may still feel. Now, the original team behind that series revisit one of its central characters with the miniseries Brother Lono.

Lono’s in jail. He’s perfectly fine staying there, and when word of work comes up, he’s perfectly fine doing that. While he’s moseying around Mexico, others are looking to set up more aggressive means of employment for themselves, moving things like drugs and corpses. Even the nicest involved, those who befriend old travellers and take in orphans, are involved in the dirty deeds of evil men in some way.

Lono seems like the most average character in the book, and when you consider this man walked away from multiple gunshot wounds, that’s something of a new role. Aside from his presence in the book, I honestly can’t say how this is related to 100 Bullets. What I can say is that, while it’s not clear what’s going on in this series yet, the characters get established quickly, and they’re very distinct from each other. The stakes are set high, even if it’s unclear what the game is yet.

New readers should really enjoy violent noir stories if they’re going to invest in this. Fans of 100 Bullets have no reason not to pick it up.

Wild Blue Yonder 1 (Raicht/ Howard): The friendly skies aren’t always friendly. Excess luggage isn’t a concern to every flyer. Security is a concern, though long waits through a checkpoint don’t have to be the least convenient aspect to it. If you ever wondered how riding an airplane could be made even worse after all the changes we’ve seen, there’s now a worst-case scenario: Wild Blue Yonder.

In a world where the surface is toxic, everyone moves upward just to survive. The ultimate home is any airplane, and the ultimate airplane is one that doesn’t need fuel. There’s one such airplane, the Dawn, and it is being aggressively househunted. Society has broken down into classes of flyers or miners, where the former live in a constant state of hunter-or-hunted for precious resources, while the latter work painful hours in dangerous conditions hoping that they can find enough fuel to allow the planes overhead to move on and not carpet-bomb them. Cola, a flyer, likes recruiting new crewmen from the miner ranks, and finds a down-on-his-luck man called Tug to help her out. His first day is more than he bargained for.

There’s a bit of Indiana Jones, Waterworld, and Star Wars in this. The leader character likes brown leather jackets, headgear, and ignoring basic protocol, this version of planet Earth is only habitable in tiny amounts, and a kid yanked out of his dusty boring life and thrown onto a mythical roller coaster. It’s got all the ingredients a growing story needs, and plenty of room to grow as well.

Wild Blue Yonder takes some classic, well-known elements and puts them together not in a very new way, but in a competent way.

Extinction Parade 1 (Brooks/ Caceres): The world is preparing itself for World War Z, the story of the very fantastic zombie outbreak and the very down-to-earth way the planet tries to confront it. The mind behind that story, Max Brooks, figures that if one species of undead could exist, it’s not much a stretch that another one could get involved.

Not all undead are created equal. Some are slow, stumbling, and insensate, and then there are those that stalk the night, philosophize, and shun light and gravity. Vampires and zombies don’t coexist so much as they trip over each other. Zombie outbreaks have been happening off and on for millennia in this reality, but never more than a small area, contained and put down almost before the larger world notices. They passed through quickly enough that the world thinks zombies are a myth, and so slightly inconvenient that vampires think they’re a joke. But when the “subdead” somehow decimate the human population (AKA the vampire food supply), the joke stops being funny.

In one sense, this is another monster mashup: Undead A vs Undead B in an eating contest. In another sense, this is a “Tortoise and the Hare” retelling with a contemporary twist. In a competition between two predators, the quicker and more clever should win every time, the only exception being if the quicker one doesn’t start competing until the race is already over. In a “published by Avatar” sense, this is a gorefest complete with heavy lines and dark palettes, nightmare-borne scenes of decay, and a few lovely ladies (if you can look past the spatter).

If for no other reason than a tribute to the son of the man that brought us Spaceballs, you should give this a very serious look. This has more than enough quality elements in its own right to merit study as a spin-off story to one of the most elaborate zombie stories in this generation, though it will prove too much of a niche book for most people.

Age of Ultron 10 (Bendis/ Various): The event of the year, in which Ultron launched a full assault on the world from a few years in the future, comes to a resolution in this issue. What calamities the heroes managed to avoid are in fact traded for new conundrums that they deem unworthy of breaking the space-time continuum to undo. This is customary. What’s not customary is the revelation of what the whole event was really about, but more on that in a bit.

Sue Storm and Wolverine return from their little errand into the past, not accomplishing what they set out to do in the first place, but getting the result they wanted anyway. This issue flashes back and forth between the newly-saved present and the very recent (and quite screwed) past, when Ultron first arrived on Earth after his little adventure in space, with artistic license exercised. What at first would appear to be a consequence-free win becomes something else, something much more chaotic than the ordered global fire Ultron was trying to orchestrate.

Events like this rarely work for me. More often than not, they change nothing except to get rid of or add characters that executives want to move around for marketing purposes. Age of Ultron doesn’t just continue this tradition, is puts on boxing gloves made of ham and gives the reader’s face a rough fisting. It’s the kind of offense I didn’t expect from Marvel and was all set to hate on them for it, but then I realized just WHY it was so out of character, and now it made total sense to me. It actually helps redeem the event altogether.

DC absolutely LOVES this kind of event, the kind that allows them to amend their own universe. Kryptonians punches reality, Superman’s foes try to break Earth, Flash delights in his personal attempts to mimic Dr. Emmett Brown, and the Lantern Corps gets agricultural by digging up graves and negating the finality of death. Sometimes, something good comes out of it, but the usual reaction to such things is a lot of resentment from long-time fans for their favorite characters being fixed when they weren’t broken. Minor scandals have been effective at keeping this kind of behavior in the limelight, and in all that time Marvel has stayed pretty quiet. But now we have a mega-event involving time-travel, a malevolent artificial intelligence, and the unpredictable disruption of the natural order. Marvel is reading from DC’s playbook and has given their audience a greatest-hits compilation.

As a crossover event, Age of Ultron is one of the worst things Marvel has ever published. As a satire of their biggest rival’s standard practices, Age of Ultron is one of the most biting commentaries ever published. I want to smack the people behind this and give them a medal at the same time.

Happy Summer, everyone!

June 12th, 2013

Salutations, comic readers! It hardly feels like any time has gone by, yet here we are with another week’s harvest of comics! Let’s dive right in.

Superman Unchained 1 (Snyder/ Lee): The other day I talked about the cover to Action Comics and how iconic it was to depict Superman breaking through chains the way us humans would burst through wet toilet paper, which is proportionally accurate. Here again is Superman, tearing through obstacles that would to us seem impossible barriers, but for him are not troublesome enough to be inconvenient.

Superman and Clark Kent have something in common: they can both multitask. Superman is able to handle as many as seven crises at once, and Clark Kent can start and maintain his own fledgling news business. Both are working on the same mystery as well – someone’s hacking into defense satellites and setting them off. Whoever’s doing it may not be as big a threat as who else is interested in those satellites.

This issue has something that looks like a pull-out poster, but it’s actually a page of the comic, a page that makes splash pages look like itty bitty panels. It reminds me of early issues of Pathfinder, which would include maps and game sheets that, among other things, added bulk to the book. It’s appropriate, considering the main protagonist’s dump stat is 23, and Lex Luthor demonstrates that he’s THAT player in the group. You know the kind I’m talking about, the one that found a loophole that gives his character five new Skill points every level and refuses to play any new editions of the game because that loophole was written out. He rule-lawyers, ruins everyone else’s time, and he’s smug about it. Everyone else in the game hates him, but he insists that he’s just a misunderstood chaotic good character, and if the other players would just let him play through one instance they could see that- (CC Note: Stop it stop it STOP IT! This is too much gamer speak, even for us!!)

I don’t read a whole lot of Superman stories, but this one isn’t bad. Scott Snyder brings dialog that amuses and informs, and Jim Lee brings his usual level of quality. If you’re looking for something to read while in line for a new movie, this would be a good choice.

Batman 21 (Snyder/ Capullo): Snyder again. It makes me nervous when one man has control over more than one franchise. Knowing that JJ Abrams is in charge of both Star Trek and Star Wars, even though I think he’s great, gives me the chills. I just don’t trust monopolies, even though I find top hats fetching. Whereas he’s taking Superman into a near future with holo displays, Batman is going back to his first days in Gotham, when Bruce Wayne had been declared dead.

When Bruce Wayne was old enough, he ran away from home determined to learn what he needed to track and bring down the criminal element wherever it might hide. He didn’t tell anyone about this, and those he left behind declared him dead, even while they continued to search for any sign of him. He expected to find a Gotham City much like the one he left, but instead Bruce comes home to something even worse, a city so wracked with crime and abuse that he decides things would be better if Bruce Wayne was still believed dead. This way, he can focus on fixing Gotham and building a suitable persona to do it with.

This reads more like Will Eisner’s The Spirit than a Batman story in some ways. Our hero believes he can do more in street clothes than a uniform, trusts maybe two people, and has all but divorced himself from the person he was. Unlike the Spirit, this hero has more trouble with people trying to bring him back to his old identity than with the criminals he faces, and the criminals he faces are no laughing matter (yet???). When you consider how much family and identity mean to Bruce Wayne in the “present”, this version reads like a different person altogether, certainly not the Bruce Wayne Snyder’s been showing us until now. If he can bring the character around in a way that makes sense and engages the reader, and I have every reason to suspect he can, then this should prove to be a good run.

This is a perfect jumping on point for readers that haven’t been keeping up with Batman, and a new serving of backstory to those that have. Give it a look.

Savage Wolverine 6 (Wells/ Madureira): When I first opened this book and saw the intro page, I was pleased. It explained where this story takes place in continuity, and it did so with just a bit of mirth. It said, to paraphrase, “We’re making this the way we want it, complain to someone else.” Such a statement better be backed up with a decent story, and despite the ho-hum first run of the series, I think this one might deliver.

The best find ways to come back, even if they’re the worst. Take Bullseye, formerly the most accurate assassin in the Marvel Universe. Oh wait, someone else took him. The ones that did also took Elektra and Wolverine at one point, and they’d just as soon they not give Bullseye back in any manageable number of pieces. There are strange allegiances everywhere in this issue, and a creepy doll thing that’s become almost standard in resurrection stories.

There’s not much special in this. The villains challenging other villains has a theme that might turn out to be interesting, but likely end up a one-off joke. That said, this at least has what the previous run didn’t have: the essentials. Logan is where Logan thinks he should be because he wants to be there. Logan wants to apply Occam’s Razor to problem people, as in his six unbreakable razors, but this doesn’t work with most of his teammates. It’s Wolverine being what he hasn’t been in a long time: savage.

This is an average book that does what it sets out to do. More Hollywood blockbuster than anything, and far from the worst book on the shelves this week.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys 1 (Way & Simon/ Cloonan): There’s some benefit to the dead not staying dead in comics. As escapism goes, you can’t get much further removed from reality than watched beloved characters that were killed come back as if they never died. Sometimes escapism is all we want. It’s certainly what the characters in this book want, but they don’t have the same avenues we do.

The Killjoys were a team of vigilantes that may or may not have had superpowers. They were super popular, with merchandising deals and everything. To up their marketability, in the tradition of the Superfriends, they even had a young girl tag along with them. They went up against the local military industrial complex, the BLI. They died. The girl didn’t. Nameless herself, she survives with a pet cat walking the wastes left behind during the Killjoys’ last stand. Some people are taking up their cause, perhaps without their motives, continuing the fight against BLI, and they pull her back into the fray.

Despite not knowing her name, the reader actually learns a lot about this girl. For one thing, she’s smart, not too proud to be picky about where or how she sleeps, and absolutely out of place with her peers. There are a few other women in key positions, now that I think about it: two desperate androids identify as female and have a sizable amount of page space devoted to them, and the apparent CEO of BLI is a woman with more than enough sociopathy to make her a believable businessperson. There’s also a lot we don’t know as readers, like what our nameless protagonist is surviving for, or what’s left for BLI to conquer. Gerard Way began his previous series, The Umbrella Academy, in the same way, and most readers agree that patience paid off there; having Shaun Simon, another musician, assist with the script should provide a different enough voice to keep readers guessing. Becky Cloonan’s art provides enough information and emotion to engage the staunchest reader. It caught me, anyway.

The Fabulous Killjoys will not be everyone’s cup of tea. It is something genuinely new, though, and something you should at the very least take a look at.

And speaking of things to look at, I think I saw something shiny just now. I better investigate, but before I go, I’ll remind you that this Sunday is Father’s Day, and if you haven’t gotten a gift yet, our gift certificates make great presents for the man who has everything you can think of, or have already borrowed. See you next week!

June 5th, 2013

I look outside at clear blue skies and green plants. The temperature isn't too hot, the humidity’s not too choking, and the insects haven’t blotted out any major light sources. It is, to be blunt, a remarkable season.

And among the fruits in this season’s first crop are a few titles that we haven’t seen in a long time, each feature new number 1's. They're all recognizable, popular, and haven't missed a beat in all the time they've been away.

Let's look at Kick-Ass 3 #1 (Millar/ Romita Jr.) first. The juvenile vigilante hits the streets again with a fresh crew and a brand new agenda.

In the last volume, the most capable junior justice distributor, Hit-Girl, was arrested buying time for Kick-Ass and the rest of their newfound gang of costumed crusaders to escape. This volume opens with an intricate escape plan to bust her out, with the largest obstacle not involving laser grids or unpredictable guard schedules, but adolescent attention spans.

I can honestly say this series has the same feel and tone of the first two. Dave Lizewski is the same awkward, well-intentioned young man that puts himself over his head on a regular basis. Everyone around him loves the concept behind what he’s doing, but lacks the passion to fully commit like he does. And like the previous volumes, I just can’t comprehend why this is so popular. It’s not gritty or realistic – Dave would and should be persistently vegetative or dead by now. It’s not because this is inspiring – any time someone does something noble or strong, they’re somehow punished. Near as I can tell, the biggest standout quality this book has it that it provides the most socially-acceptable forum to watch teenagers beaten up outside of YouTube. And thinking of it that way, it makes some sense.

Any fans of the first two volumes are going to find plenty more to love in this one. If you haven't been following it, you will miss little in passing the title by.

Astro City #1 (Busiek/ Anderson) is a slightly different beast. Astro City has never followed a single character, instead looking through an ensemble cast at a location that seems to hold everything anyone could want. Just like Serenity in Firefly, the location is treated as a character, with its own interactions, highlights, and troubles.

There’s a lot going on in this issue. A grand, celestial doorway appears just outside the city limits, a new superhero emerges whose physiology could only sustain herself with some reality-bending aid, and the fourth wall gets some aggressive renovation so that it can accommodate a service window complete with its own rude, overactive attendant. And along with all the cosmic conflicts and international intrigue is an average man entering his twilight years looking for something new to do with his life.

What’s always impressed me about this title is the balance it provides to its scope. Superhero comics take a top-down approach literally, where the impossible people look down upon the normal folk; in Astro City, the story is told from the ground up. Jane Doe has to save herself from student loans and insufficient parking, and when that gets stressful, she can always look up and know that at least she doesn't have to defend against sentient meteors with abandonment issues. With this, not only does Astro City read as a place the audience could seem themselves, but its heroes read as people a reader might actually meet. It’s a singular take on the genre that no one else has been able to capture, much to the industry’s loss.

This comic is a clear summer day that makes you want to take a walk as see the world with your own eyes, just to make sure the world's still there and having a good time. Buy it.

Last, and far from least, we welcome back Herobear and the Kid (Mike Kunkle). This is a one-shot prefacing a mini-series that'll be on shelves in August, an appetizer before the main course. Since many readers were drooling as soon as it appeared on the menu, I don't know how necessary such a thing is, but we're eating it up.

Tyler is a young boy that has just a little more to deal with than most kids his age. He moved into a new house, one his parents inherited from his grandfather. There’s a pack of bullies, each at least twice his size, that delight in torturing him. He’s noticing the difference between the girls he likes and the ones he doesn't. And lest we forget, his toy bear, another inheritance, can turn into a talking polar bear that could give Superman a decent fight, but would much rather take him out for a root beer. This issue starts with the bane of schooltime drama that is Picture Day and becomes an adventure to stop a techno-villain’s latest heist. Like any day a child gets to hang out with their best friend while wearing capes, it's the best day of his life.

Mike Kunkle took a break from this title to work on a couple projects in animation that a few readers may've heard of. That style of art hits the eyes clearly, even if the lines themselves have a rough appearance. As far as I'm concerned, it just hammers home the fact that this is a hand-drawn comic, a personal love note. Herobear is the kind of character that would just as soon hug the world's problems away, but proves wholly capable of laying a beat down to a school of rowdy robotic fish when the situation demands. Tyler's imagination gets the best of him, and rather than punished and replaced with cold, hard reality, that imagination gets encouraged at every opportunity. That's a feat of magic.

This is a kid's comic in the sense that it connects to every child, especially the ones that've grown a bit. It's a book many will enjoy, especially if it's shared.

Okay, if anyone needs me, I'll be at the dentist, because this week's entry turned out so sweet I gave myself cavities. Happy reading!

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