July 31st, 2013

Hello, everybody! Thank you for indulging me last week with focusing on a single book. I don’t get to cut loose on a single text very often, and it feels good to do so every now and then. Thanks to that, my attention span is back down to internet standards, so let’s look at the highlight books of the week!

Five Ghosts 5 (Barbierre/ Mooneyham): The miniseries ends with consistent numerology, no creative team changeups, and a resolved character arc. This puts it well above the industry standard and deserves a pat on the back for making it this far. 

Fabian Gray is a haunted man many times over, but the only ghost he’s worried about is his sister, the only person he’s ever fully trusted, one who trusted him back, and is the next best thing to dead because Fabian got greedy. To help her ghost find its way, either back to the living or to the afterlife, Fabian's been confronting the ghosts in his dreamstone, gaining their acceptance so he can use their powers more freely, and have a chance at facing the cabal that’s been dogging him throughout the series.

From the very beginning, this book made it very clear it was a pulp series in the classical sense. It’s set in the 1920’s, heavy on the exposition, rooted in fisticuffs-style action but branching into the supernatural, has a token feminine character, and no real end in sight. Oh, and Nazis, I can’t believe I almost forgot Nazis. At least Barbierre and Mooneyham didn’t. This ends on the “End of the beginning” note with the promise of more to come, specifically in October with a one-shot that will eventually lead into a regular series.

I have mixed feelings about pulp stories. On the one hand, they’re formatted to the point where it’s almost predictable. They always have certain elements that present themselves in a certain order. Characters can do some things but can’t do others depending on what role they serve - a sidekick can only chuck rocks during a fight, regardless of how intelligent, experienced, or emotionally invested they are in fighting. Despite that kind of cookie-cutter storytelling, there’s a purity that I can’t help but admire. The hero’s going to be someone you want to root for, the villain’s going to prove him/ her/ themselves absolute jerks, and the world the story creates is something you’ll wish you could physically escape into, not just mentally.

This is a book that would have done very, very well in the prime time of pulp fiction. It’s been doing well in this era, too, and deserves a look. I will say that if you haven’t been following the series so far, you may want to wait for the trade - it’s supposed to be out in September and it’ll just be $10. Preorder with us if you’re interested!

Collider 1 (Oliver/ Rodriguez): Remember how on the Star Trek TV series (in this case, it doesn’t matter which one), every week there would be some problem that just spat in the laws of physics, and it’s be up to the crew to figure out a way to explain it away and/ or fix it with blinking switches or something? That’s fine when you’ve got tricorders and holodecks and can pull techno-Macguffins out of the cupboard, but in our day and age, if we had to deal with that, we’d be kind of screwed. That’s the world of Collider.

The natural world is taking cues from the world of high finance and privacy, and is choosing when and where it’s convenient to follow the rules, not caring when such practices could make ordinary citizens kersplode. (Not a typo. Explosions would be standard form, but KERsplosions are weirder and contain 30% more awesome.) (CC Note: We. Don’t. Care.) To keep Nature in line, there’s the Federal Bureau of Physics. Adam Hardy’s a field agent responsible for welding the world back into shape, and his dad wrote the field manual, so it’s only to be expected that he gets a surprise round-trip through one of these hiccups of the universe. What happens to him next may not be as important as entire city blocks floating away, or that some people are trying to profit from all this chaos.

The idea of having to patch up pockets of scientific instability isn’t new. In any medium. It’s longevity come from, at least in part, the simple fact that there are so many ways in which the universe can go wrong that we’ll probably never run out. Likewise, the idea of government mismanagement isn’t new and has plenty of life left in it. This series is putting them together brazenly, and if it weren’t for the execution, it would read pretty stale. As it is, there’s a modern, semi-dysfunctional father-son relationship that grabs attention right away, dialog that sounds authentic, and enough world-building to give the reader solid footing, even if gravity’s not a constant. The art style is somewhere in between Sean Murphy and Paul Pope, with straight lines where one would expect curves and vice versa in just enough places to make one look closely, but not demanding so much attention to be confusing or distracting. It works well for this kind of story.

It’s too soon to tell if this is going to be a success title for Vertigo in the vein of Fables or Y the Last Man, but it’s a very solid start. There are many ways this can go, and any of them would make for a fun story. Knowing Vertigo, it’ll find a way to fit them all into the same book, and that could be amazing.

Venom 38 (Bunn/ Jacinto): Flash Thompson has spent the last few years proving himself to just about everyone he’s ever met, and he’s had a very rough audience. Captain America, Spider-Man, his father, his ex-girlfriend, the US government, Eddie Brock, just to name a few. And now, just when he’s got his feet under him (CC Note: Dude, not cool)  in his new home, he’s got some neighbor drama trying to blow up in his face.

Eugene Thompson is a high-school athletics teacher without legs. That his arrival in Philadelphia happens to coincide with the appearance of the military-trained Venom, an elderly nun, and four men of different hairstyles all with a taste for black and white clothing is purely coincidental and no one should think otherwise unless they want to be rude about it. The polite thing to do, as reporter Katy Kiernan demonstrates, is to help immerse them into the city’s community so that they can feel at home and contribute to society. Now if you wanted to be REALLY rude, you could act like the gothy teenage girl in Coach Thompson’s school, figure everything out, and try to talk to him about it. That has mixed results.

Comics and their fans seem to love tragic origin stories, and it’s not hard to figure out why. People lose pieces of themselves all the time, and sometimes that loss is so profound that the only way to go on is by hoping that something constructive will come out of it. Peter Parker lost his father figure and became the crimefighter Spider-Man. Flash lost his legs and earned the chance to become the most upstanding version of Venom yet. Watching that tragedy play out isn’t pretty, but it’s what gives the audience a sense that something new is starting. That tragedy was supposed to play out here, and it didn’t. There was loss, there were screams and tears, and yet none of it really connected. It wasn’t so much upstaged by the fighting as much as replaced by it, which is a bad way to go. Almost in the same way, the artwork was needlessly busy. Lots of heavy lines and sharp angles suggesting depth to panels when there’s simply not much going on.

The debut of Phenom Venom (CC Note: If that name sticks, I will cry) (Would you prefer Ingenue Thompson?) (CC Note: I hate you so much) is lackluster at best, if I’m going to be honest about it. It’s sad because all the ingredients are there for something special, but I’m just not reading it here.

3 Guns 1 (Grant/ Laiso): I didn’t know much about 3 Guns before picking it up. It’s fair to say I know as much about it as its prequel, the movie 2 Guns starring Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington (CC Note: It’s not a sequel, is it?). If 3 Guns is any indicator, 2 Guns is about the misadventures of undercover agents from different agencies tripping over each other’s investigations. (CC Note: Well, I’m sure that’s just got to be a coincide- wait, this IS a sequel. How did we not know that?)

Bobby Beans is being pulled out of retirement by the short hairs to help a radical separatist militia stop themselves from committing honest capitalism. He’s not sure how that all works either, and would be happy to bow out if it weren’t for the fact that people’s he’s met will die if he doesn’t. One wrinkle in his plan: Marcus, an associate of his, is planning to pull the same scam for the other side of the transaction. They think they can both do their jobs and not get in each other’s way this time, and agree to make every effort to do just that. The biggest hurdle, as it often is, ends up being the one neither notices. 

The action speaks volumes louder than the words in this book. The characters don’t have much to say that doesn’t come off as exposition, and (accents aside) there’s not much variety in the “voices” either. These are physical characters that prefer to punch people in the face when they want some quiet time, and the ones that are picky about who they punch and when end up being the “good guys”. Laiso carries most of the storytelling, a bit young in his career to have that much responsibility, but he proves himself capable - the art has a blockbuster-movie style that goes for exaggerated angles and anatomy to sell itself, but has enough consistency and motion to pull it off.

If you want to show up to this summer’s big-budget buddy-action movie with your spectacles on and need some authentic way to accessorize hipster style, then we have got what you need. As reading material goes, it’s not bad either.

I hope you’ve had a fun July, everyone! Who knows where August will take us (GenCon), but we’ll be here to help you find your way (unless we’re at GenCon). See you next week!

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July 24th, the All Arsenic Article

Something came out this week that really stood out in a few ways. For one thing, it’s an oversized hardcover, and so can be easily weaponized against whole families of living creatures.

For another, it features the high priest of evil elder immortals, Cthulhu, in a dapper suit prominently and consistently. Only 500 of these books were printed, and each one has a hand-drawn sketch from the creator. The art style is fun and cartoony and if you let a child see it you should be arrested immediately. That’s right. Arsenic Lullaby is back with The Big Stall (Douglas Paszkiewicz).

If you haven’t noticed by now, I like to summarize the books I review. For one thing, it proves that I read the things, and that I can read. (Take that Mrs Phelps!) For you readers that follow the titles I review, it provides a sense of where an issue takes place in the larger story, so you don’t have to spend time scratching your heads about what happened when. For those that don’t follow the title, I try to give an impression of what kind of book it is, so you can get an idea of whether or not you’d want to pick it up. Douglas Paszkiewicz foils this format of mine with different stories, setting, characters, all within the same book, so no summary is really possible. Not a problem.

I’m angry at ol Doug, and not just because he’s working outside the box I play in all the time. I’m angry that he’s got so much talent and putting it to such dark and sinister use that I laugh and immediately want to turn myself into the police for laughing at the thing I just laughed at. So many beloved characters from pop culture meet horrible, brutal, violent ends, but the trips that bring them there are so real and common that the reader almost forgets that they don’t live in a world where walking pastries complain about their jobs. I love seeing it, I just hate that it didn’t come from my hands, and so I am angry.

It might help, at this point, to mention that Arsenic Lullaby is what the kids call dark humor. See, one day Humor and Horror got married, had a kid, had their house foreclosed on when Horror’s job got outsourced and so Humor had to move in with her sister, and when Horror took their kid on a camping trip, Horror had a bit too much to drink near a teenage camp, and yada yada yada, Horror’s not allowed in Turkey anymore. The parents spent a fortune on the kid’s therapy sessions, and all it did was ruin the therapists’ careers. That kid is dark humor, and he’s seen things, man. Things. And on dark humor’s best day, he’s Arsenic Lullaby.

So maybe I should try to talk about what’s in the book. See, the recession is still hitting everyone hard in different ways. Mascots don’t have the same products to promote, or their PR people don’t have the same imagination they used to have. That’s the dark part. Humor comes along in watching familiar scenes play out with completely new and wildly inappropriate contexts. This happens again and again, crossing geographical borders and genres as easily as streets. It’s a wild, fun, emotionally traumatic ride, and you’ll chuckle with every step.

This book isn’t just great, it shows you how it got to be great. There’s the normal stuff, like showing unique settings, having dialog that’s witty but not too full of itself (CC NOTE: Yeah, wish we saw more of that...), colorful art. These are things that aren’t standard, but really really should be in comics. I get it when a creator’s young, still finding their style, mistakes are going to get made, and that’s fine, that’s great, but when seasoned veterans can’t drawn a man standing at attention without proportions that could only be cancerous, that’s a serious problem.

This book also has some of the lesser-known qualities, like directional panel layout and creative use of vanishing points. Confused by what those are? Well, he explains, demonstrates, and deconstructs them in the back of the book. That’s free education. You can thank him later.

I really appreciate this little gesture on his part, because it’s something that doesn’t happen nearly enough. Take another artform, like cooking. People hoard their secret ingredients, they’ll take their best recipes to their dying graves, and what does that accomplish? A few people talk about how one time they tasted something special, that nothing since has tasted quite as good, and maybe they remember the name of the guy that made it. Big picture is that future generations lose out on a special experience and future creators give themselves ulcers wondering if they can ever do the same thing. Well, guess what? If you think you’ve done something special, someone probably did it already, and even if they hadn’t, someone else is going to figure it out eventually. David Mamet said it best, if without political correctness: “What one man can do, another can do.” So, that being the case, doesn’t it make more sense to teach others how to do well so the world can be filled with better things, and that things can only get better from there? Doug thinks so, and so do I.

Yet another reason this stands out is that it started as a Kickstarter project. Even better is how this project became a success. Not only did the project get more than double its goal, but one of their contributors was the one and only Comic Carnival. Yep, we got in on the ground floor with this one, and because we proved to be such people of vision, we’re able to sell this internet success story for just $12, not the $20 cover price. Again, you’re welcome.

Short version: I like this book. There are a lot of other books coming out this week, many of which could draw the eye, but nothing has quite as much story behind its arrival on our shelves as this one. So I think and hope you understand why, this week, it deserves a review all by itself. See you next week!

July 10th, 2013

The dog days of summer are here, though I don’t know why they’re called that, because mine want absolutely nothing to do with the evil humid space that is a traditional Indiana summer. Enough heat to melt cheese, enough humidity to choke someone, it’s enough to make any sane creature – or even a dog – to stay inside. And while inside, it only makes sense to read something. A lot comes out this week, and this week, I’m reviewing five issue 1’s. Brace yourselves.

Ghosted 1 (Williamson/ Sudzuka): What do you get the man who has everything? Alan Moore had some thoughts on that question, but the neat thing is there’s no absolute answer to that question, for no one has everything. In the case of Markus Schrecken, owner and curator of several private islands and the world’s foremost collection of occult artifacts, it’s perhaps appropriate that what he wants most is a soul.

Jackson Winters used to be one of the best thieves on the planet until he and the rest of his team died. He was the only one resuscitated, and he was put right in the slammer for his reward. Years later, he’s busted out to retrieve a ghost from a haunted mansion before it’s demolished. Personal feelings aside, he will not go back to prison, so he and a handpicked basket of basketcases get straight to work.

This is Ocean’s Eleven meets Ghostbusters, with just a bit of Snatch’s tone to kick things up a notch. The premise is shaky on its own – a cast of characters come together despite their conflicting personalities to see if a haunted house is actually haunted sounds a bit too much like Scooby Doo, even if there’s no dog involved. This avoids that particular trap with a very clear background for everyone, followed by regular one-liners that wouldn’t be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino production.

This is a fun little ghost story for people that love rooting for the bad guys. And it’s a pretty good production to boot.

Dawn - The Swordmaster’s Daughter & Other Stories (Joseph Michael Linsner): I should preface this by saying I haven’t really read Dawn material before. I’ve met JML (bear with me, his name is a huge thing to type!), only briefly, but that still SHOULD have pushed me to exploring the material. It didn’t, and I really can’t tell you why.

This is a collection of three short stories adapted from different cultural texts, but all in the context of JML’s Dawniverse. The cultures mined for their tales span the globe, and JML is careful to give the reader enough information that they could find the material on their own. Well, on their own with help from your local library or Google, but you get the idea. Two focus on Dawn’s lover Ashoka, the third a separation of two other lovers. She seems to have a thing for guys that know how to handle a big sword.

I just remembered why I didn’t jump in when I’d met the man. On the surface, this looks to be a book about a hot chick with a sword, generally known to be good for eye candy, not much else. When you look at this one, there’s something you are completely unprepared for: substance. The substance isn't just adapted classics or how deep this man’s love of hot chicks or swords goes. This – the character, the world, everything – means something to him, and he’s trying to communicate not just the message, but how much it means to him. It’s intimidating to look at, I remember telling him this, and I wondered aloud if it might be easier to get into from the beginning. He didn’t have volume 1 at the time, so I bought nothing. I kind of regret that now.

Dawn fans will be glad to see “new” material, but anyone not already involved will have way more questions than answers by the end of it.

Boneyard The Biggening 1 (Richard Moore): I love things like the Addams Family or the Munsters, stories where the monsters may be horrible creatures bent on mayhem and destruction, but no more so than anyone else, and so humans can get along with them. It’s this love that brought me to Boneyard years ago when the series was regular (quarterly, but regular). And it’s that same spirit, not worn by age or distance at all, that’s back in this spin-off/ sequel.

Michael Paris inherited the graveyard of Raven’s Hollow from his grandfather. He was ready to accept a check for the property from whoever handed him one until he actually saw the place, and got to know the residents. A vampire, an exiled demon, and a bench-pressing werewolf make up the most regular cast, but far from the most unusual. They’ve fought the devil, the mother of all vampires, and the IRS. This issue covers a bit of what they do in their downtime.

The art, writing, characters, everything about this is technically dark horror/ comedy, but that doesn’t fit. This is comedy first. The banter is funny, characters pull pranks on each other, and more than anything, you’ll want to laugh. Between the black-and-white palette and the dour outlook on human-monster relations, dark is ever-present, but it’s a distant, secondary tone. Occasionally, there’s a horror element, and it scares people, but it goes away. It doesn’t showcase the supernatural brought down to our level, instead it shows one of us rising up to meet the supernatural. And our kind ends up doing okay.

Fans of Boneyard will be able to jump right back into the saddle. For those that haven’t read any of it before, this is a decent place to jump in on – there’s plenty that goes unexplained, but all the important points begin and end within the covers.

Ballistic 1 (Mortimer/ Robertson): I’ve rather liked my introductions so far. They’ve been touching and revealing without giving up any of the wit that I would be a hollow shell without. Of course, everything I’ve reviewed so far has connected to me on some level. Ah well, here’s Ballistic.

This is the story about Butch, a good repairman that wants to go bad and wave his meat gun around. Oh, it might help if I mentioned that in this world, all “technology” is really a different form of biology, so everything is kind of made of meat. Now that I think about it, calling it a meat gun was redundant just then. If someone didn’t know better, they’d think I was trying to get attention via shock tactics. Anyhoo, his first big score is supposed to be the target of a Korean crime middle-manager, only he and his talking gun (not all guns talk) got pretty crazy last night and neither really recovered before showtime.

Shock tactics can work wonders. That’s Butch’s strategy for pretty much everything he does in the book, and it’s a strategy the creators also hope will pan out. Biomechanical everything isn’t a step aside from the normal, it’s at least three, and this team tries to make each step count. Mortimer is able to bring complexity out of Robertson I haven’t really seen since Transmetropolitan. I’d like it if it had the same power and purpose as Warren Ellis’s work, but this will do.

This doesn’t have much balance to it – the art carrying so much more weight than the writing – but to be honest the art steps up well enough that I could almost forgive it. You might just like it.

Quantum & Woody 1 (Asmus/ Fowler): There are brothers – male offspring of the same parental grouping – and there are brothers, the kind that inspire unconditional love at the same time as unquenchable anger, knowing everything worthwhile about each other, despite no genetic similarity. There are some classic brotherhoods that are based on this idea: Kirk and Spock, Michael Knight and KITT, Quantum and Woody.

Eric and Woody Henderson grew up together watching each other’s backs, keeping each other from being harassed by anyone with a different last name. As they grew older, they grew apart. Eric strove to enforce the law and make the world a safer place, and Woody strove to test just how generous the world was by taking as much as he could whenever it’d let him. With their father’s recent passing, they’ve got a small window to find some answers before they’re all swept away. Their inability to stop being brothers leads to bickering and shoving when neither is smart, and they get more than they could imagine. Like murder charges, for one thing.

This book is very precise with its handling of the sibling relationship. This one issue spans something like fifteen years, and packs in some of the most critical moments in those years. Some of it’s funny, a few things are almost hurtful to read, but it all builds up into a connection that comes across as genuine. The Valiant relaunch has proven to be more than many expected, and this ups the ante again, as far as I’m concerned.

This isn’t a family book by the traditional definition – I wouldn’t let kids read it. Anyone interested in a modern twist on dysfunctional siblings will have a good time with this, though.

With so many number 1’s out this week, I suppose it’s only appropriate that I note that this blog is over a year old. Can you believe that? I didn’t! I completely missed it, but we passed the 1-year anniversary almost two months ago! Thanks for joining us this long, everyone, and here’s hoping the next year proves even better!

July 3rd, 2013

When in the course of comic events, it becomes necessary for one reviewer to dissolve the storylines and characters of popular culture, and to assume among the superpowers of whatever books we like, the separation between my feet and the ground in whatever degree I choose, a decent respect to the opinions of market demographics requires that they should declare which books are worthy and which are not.

I hold these truths to be self-evident that all books are worthy of criticism, that their creators are mortal creatures, capable of mortal failing, and thus must be called out on when those failings are published. The consumer has the inalienable right to buy satisfactory reading material – books of character, emotional gravitas, and thrilling plots – and when that material becomes destructive to that purpose, it is the duty of vigilant reviewers to mock it ceaselessly.

On this week of celebrating the independence of these United States (suck it, England), I look at four powerhouse titles of the publishing world and, heedless of their position, commit myself to absolute honesty about their successes or failures.

(CC Note: So you’re going to do the exact same thing you do every week, you lazy slob?) (Shut up!)

Guardians of the Galaxy - Tomorrow’s Avengers (Bendis/ Oeming, Doyle, & del Mundo): The latest iteration of Guardians of the Galaxy has been in production for a quarter year now, and has no signs of slowing down. So naturally, this is the perfect time to actually introduce some of the major players in that book.

This is an anthology of sorts, consisting of four short stories, each focusing on one of the non-human members of the Guardians and what they do when they don’t have to play nice with others. Each Guardian gets their own artist (except for the two Gs, Gamora and Groot - they have to share). Each episode showcases just how much trouble each character can get into on their own, the implication being they’re capable of that much more when they work together. Some act more selfishly than others, but everyone has their own agenda.

This is a good introduction to characters that are usually part of an ensemble cast get individual moments in the spotlight. The problem is that they’re brief moments about half a year too late. The other problem is that these moments are quickly snatched away by the all-knowing somewhat-human that takes them out of their solitude just when it’s getting interesting. The artistic styles compliment the differences between the characters well enough, and while none of them are standard, they’re not especially challenging to the standard either.

This is a fair collection of vignettes to one of the more interesting space soap operas being published today. The high cover price will dissuade casual readers, but fans will think it’s worth it.

Superior Foes of Spider-Man 1 (Spencer/ Lieber): The role of Spider-Man has been filled by one of his greatest villains for a while now, who’s decided to be better than the original ever could be. In a few ways, he’s succeeded, mostly by becoming Big Brother where the supervillain community is concerned. It’s making it very difficult to “earn” a living under such conditions, but not impossible.

Boomerang has a good pitching arm, a decent sales pitch, and absolutely nothing else going for him right now. Now that Spider-Man’s rounded up all the serious sinisters, all Boomerang has to work with are newbies and C-listers. With so little to work with, it’s no wonder he gets pinched five pages in. His hard-gathered cabal of allies are happy to let him rot in prison and let his pet die, so he has to let them in on a big score he’d been saving up on.

What this issue accomplished was to demonstrate - not tell, demonstrate - how low-rung the characters are. They want way more than they can grasp, they don’t even try that hard to get it, and the smartest, most dedicated among them is an abusive punching bag whose grand strategy is that the Law of Averages will one day work out in his favor. The climax of this story won’t be when Spider-Man takes them down. At this rate, it’ll be a dramatic success if he even notices they’re around.

Before I first opened this book, I wondered why I should be interested in what the bad guys are up to. Having finished the book, I still don’t know.

Green Lantern 22 (Venditti/ Tan): I haven’t read a Green Lantern book in a long time, certainly not since the main title’s creative change-up. A colleague pointed this out to me with  the end of a yard-stick, and in the interest of fairness (and to get him to stop), I agreed to give it a look.

The Guardians of Oa are gone. They left a distinctive gap in the hierarchy of the cosmos, and Hal Jordan is doing his absolute best to keep this universe running. Larfleeze, the paragon of Greed, doesn’t see this as a hindrance so much as an opportunity - just as Jordan advanced his position, Larfleeze wants to advance his collection by robbing Oa blind. Oddly enough certain pieces of Oa’s collection would just as soon strike out on their own.

Here’s a Green Lantern book that accomplishes a very tricky balance well - it gives Hal Jordan critical character moments and recognizes at the same time that he’s not the most interesting character in his own book. Jordan has been given command over a universal police force, and with that command, he’s got an excuse to hand off the emotional action and doubts - in short, being human - to the aliens. It’s odd, but it works.

This seems like an odd place to jump right in, so I wouldn’t advise new readers to pick it up. Regular readers should be pleased.

Dexter 1 (Lindsay/ Talajic): What is it about people named Dexter being lab jockeys? It seems like gross typecasting to me, but maybe I just don’t know enough Dexters to get a real sense of things. Any readers out there named Dexter, please shout out and help us understand whether or not your name is a sentence to 2,000 hours of clinical trial.

What if there was such a thing as a well-adjusted serial killer? That’s been the driving force behind the Dexter franchise throughout all its incarnations. In this story, he’s driven to his high school reunion by his wife’s insistence that they go so she can get a better sense of where he came from. That’s like saying “I want to know how fruit bowls are made so I’ll talk to a table saw”, but he’s willing to go through with it anyway. That might be a mistake, for one of the people from his class got to see a side of him not many survive encountering, and that bit of knowledge running around is bound to cause problems.

Mass-murdering sociopaths didn’t care for high-school. The people they love most in the world can piss them off and make them do stuff they hate. They get agitated when their professional and personal lives get mixed up. According to the world of Dexter, mass-murdering sociopaths are not misunderstood creatures, they are exactly like everyone else, they just have a lower tolerance for annoyances than most. Lindsay, the author behind the novels, continues to make at least one mass-murdering sociopath likable. Talajic has an understated style that lends itself well to the story and character.

Anyone that has read the novels, watched the show, or has thought to themselves how much nicer things would be if certain people just weren’t around anymore, will find plenty to like about this book. Younger readers won’t, unless they happen to call cornfields home.

Over two-hundred years ago, some people across the pond read something that changed the world forever after. I’m not suggesting that anything at Comic Carnival could spark a revolution, just some imagination. If nothing else, buying a comic would be a great way to capture the color and brightness of fireworks without the burning smell or possible ear damage. See you next week!