August 15th, 2013

"Rapid". "Fire". Alone, they’re short, direct words, not really bad or good, but simple. Put them together and you get “rapid fire”, which is a whole new ballgame. That ballgame doesn’t end well most of the time: a rapid fire in a forest usually kills a lot of creatures and takes decades to recover, rapid fire from a gun results in property damage under the best conditions, and rapid fire responses at a press conference are usually scripted and hiding the truth. Or am I being too cynical?

I’m going to try to give “rapid fire” a bit of positive cred this week. I’m going to review WAY more than my normal amount of books. I’m going to do them fast, right after having read them. And just watch, it’s going to be awesome!

Superior Spider-Man Team-Up 2 (Yost/ Checchet):

The old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” gets taken out for drinks, dragged to a back alley, and thrown around for a while until it starts seeing dead people. I’m not a fan of stories that could have been much shorter and effective if the parties involved talked and listened for two minutes before the fighting, but in this particular case, it works well. Look for the next chapter in Scarlet Spider 20!

Infinity 1 (Hickman/ Cheung): 

Two tense buildups to three reveals, none of which actually say anything that established audiences don’t already know. Is there anyone left that hasn’t figured out A) that Thanos the Mad Titan prefers his everything dead, and B) Earth has a very poor reputation for conquerability? It’s one thing to try to ride popular momentum from a successful movie, but this bends itself backwards so far you can hear spinal bones break to court that audience. Blech.

Herobear and the Kid: The Inheritance 1 of 5 (Mike Kunkle): 

A reprinting of the original Herobear series with a couple pages of additional material. It’s a great chance for new readers to jump onto a wonderful story from the beginning, but a $4 cover price is pushing it. I recommend it, but only if you haven't read it before.

Saga 13 (Vaughan/ Staples): 

It’s back it’sbackit’sbackit’sback!! What stands out to me about this series of fantasy and science-fiction’s blaster-shotgun wedding and the horde of brutes trying to end it is that there are so many slices of life. All too often these genres focus on warriors or royalty, and this has plenty of those, but it also covers hungry tabloid reporters and bored insurance adjusters. It makes this book so rich and interesting that I fall in love with it every issue. I’ve said that before and am risking my credibility, so tell you what: next month, I’ll find some reason to trash it, okay?

Red Sonja 2 (Simone/ Geovani): 

In two issues, I feel like Simone has pushed Sonja further than anyone before. She had human moments of emotional connection with people in the same issue that she hacked and slashed in a major battle. Major range, and it worked at both extremes of the spectrum. I respect that.

Wolverine and the X-Men 34 (Aaron/ Bradshaw):

This book does what no other mutant book is doing right now: it makes being a mutant look fun. Most other book looks at the power mutants don’t ask for or always control, or how a lot of other people don’t like them. This doesn’t forget any of that, but rather than dwell on it, it moves on. Quentin Quire decides being the big bad isn’t what he thought it was, landmasses get into a free-for-all brawl, and the Hellfire club considers restructuring. Boobs get involved. It works somehow.

Deadpool 14 (Posehn/ Duggan): 

This comic is the bastard child of Simpsons and Nightmare on Elm Street. Since Game of Thrones made bastards look cool, Deadpool found self-esteem and is talking to women! Remember in the GLX-Mas Special, when Squirrel Girl beat the tar out of Thanos and the Watcher came down to cement the event into 616 continuity? This flips that.


Star Wars 8 (Wood/ Kelly): 

Nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, ke-pwishhhh, pewpew, nothing’s happening. Hey, that guy’s not letting the Wookiee win. Movies can tell multiple stories at once, but when you try to do it in a single issue, usually nothing happens.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys 3 (Way/ Cloonan): 

From the beginning of this series, a whole two issues ago, the audience was introduced to a young girl wandering the desert from settlement to settlement, a pair of sex robots that couldn’t catch a break, and a revolution that didn’t feel like revolting just yet. The girl’s still walking the wasteland and the revolution found some lipstick that’s, like, so awesome! Someone did do a favor for one of the sex robots though. That’s something.

Batman 23 (Snyder/ Capulo): 

As overtold as the origin of Batman is threatening to become (I mean really, even if you count Jesus, a guy who’s beginning is retold in churches around the world on Christmas Day, and each church counted as a different telling, Bruce Wayne is catching up!), a new twist is presented here. It adds a poetic bit of symmetry, really.

Half Past Danger 4 (Mooney/ Bellaire): 

When you open a bag of really good potato chip, do you remember that time when you kind of lost track? You just sit there eating something perfectly salty and just a bit greasy but crunchy, each in perfect proportion, and next thing you know the bag is empty and you’re left with sensory satisfaction that’s wrapped in anxiety that you’re a bit of a pig. This is like that - an overdose of everything that professionals say is bad for you but dammit you need more.

And with that, my clip is spent. See you later!

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August 8th, 2013

August is here. At least that’s what my phone tells me, my own concept of time varies depending on how much light is in the room, to say nothing of where our part of the Earth is in position to the sun. I know that at some point when there’s not much light, I go to bed, and when there’s more light I wake up and have to clean up whatever mess I made the last time I was awake. It’s fun.

This week, we look at one book ending and three more beginning. A busy week when you get right down to it, and thus so shall we.

Helheim 6 (Bunn/ Jones): The viking supernatural thriller from Oni Press concludes its first chapter this week by killing just about every main character there is. For some, death is pretty final, but this is comics. Comics never say die.

Rikard, the warrior-turned-undead-hybrid that’s being held together with string and community anger, finally gets his confrontation with his wife-turned-creator, with a small viking horde at his back. The viking horde can't fight much since the force they're up against is non-corporeal. The nameless little girl tagging along with these monsters and fighters finally gets into the action, and accounts are just about all settled.

Truth of the matter is I’m a bit disappointed in this series. For one thing, the closest anyone came to having a character arc is the homunculus that’s maybe 60% human. That arc was Rikard's concluding that he was used in a harmful way - his physical self underwent way more change, and scars do not a storyline make. The resolution of the book puts it firmly in the “tragedy” category, especially when you consider this particular viking tribe was dead once their women and children were killed issues ago. That’d be one thing if, by the loss of this tribe, a violent form of necromancy also left the world, but it didn’t. Tragedy works best when it hits characters the audience cares about, characters that matter to the state of the world. It’s harder for the audience to care about a failed colony of scared people that just wanted to survive another winter, and that sad truth makes the tragedy about the audience. And that’s a bit disappointing.

Helheim has the chance to come back from the dead with a new run, they’ve said as much. I don’t think it’s earned a resurrection.

Burn the Orphanage 1 of 3 (Grace/ Freedman): I was very excited to see this hit the shelves - I mean I know how I would burn down an orphanage, but I’m always open for new techniques. Of course, I opened the book and remembered that this was an action-revenge story and that burning orphanages is wrong. Maybe or maybe not in that order.

Rock’s an orphan. He grew up in an orphanage. He didn’t get along with everyone, but he made some close friends. None of them were happy when their orphanage got burned to the ground. So they beat up people until they figure out which person started the fire. When they find him, they beat him up more. That’s their day.

There hasn’t been a full-color comic that’s been this black-and-white in a long time. A rich guy commits a little arson to be petty, and a few people that aren’t rich notice something bad happened and decide to make sure he’s punished for it. There’s not much more cut-and-dried than that. The art’s not much deeper, but it complements the writing well. The odd thing is that a whole story got told in 22 pages, so it’s hard to even guess what kind of story’s going to be told in the next 44. Maybe there are more orphanages sitting there all flammable.

Anyone needing a break from the ever-darkening gray morality in mainstream comics will find a vacation spot in Burn the Orphanage. 

Sidekick 1 (Straczynski/ Mandrake): Now if infinite shades of gray is more your cup of tea in comics, this is what you want to pay attention to. While the title is a reference to the word for an assisting character that contributes little, I think it’s more accurate to say this book takes what you’d assume and kicks it in the side of its head.

Flyboy was a sidekick, and proud of it. He loved stopping bad guys doing bad things, he loved being best friends with Red Cowl, one of the most popular and powerful heroes around, and he loved every time he got to use his flying powers and make them stronger. He didn’t love it when someone got on top of a book depository and shot his friend in the chest. This JFK-Captain America-style assassination blend is left to play out for a few years, none of which have been kind to Flyboy, who swore to avenge his fallen comrade and has nothing to show for it. Nobody wants to associate with the fledgling hero that got his sponsor killed, even if there was nothing he could have done. Part of him thinks he deserves the suffering. At least two people know he doesn’t.

Anyone who has read JMS’s superhero comics know they’re getting into some edgy stuff, especially when the superheroes he’s writing about are his own and has no obligation to keep them intact. This is the same writer that gave us Rising Stars, in which all superheroes were a self-perpetuating cosmic energy source that planted itself in human fetuses. He patched up Mary-Jane Watson and Peter Parker. The man knows how to twist a plot, and he has a blank slate with no limits here. It’s a bit early to say where things will go from here, but it’s already an intense read. Mandrake’s art makes me think of a younger, tamer Neal Adams, but while he’s matching the story well, the talent isn’t as strong.

Sidekick is off to a strong start. Grab a copy and see what it’s like when I’m right.

Trillium 1 (Jeff Lemire): Last we heard from Jeff Lemire, he was telling us the story of a tasty human hybrid that was so nice, no one could bring themselves to eat him. Not that I’ve ever run into that particular moral quandary, but it made for a successful book, anyway. This book is sort of food-focused as well, only this time the food isn’t trying to keep itself from being eaten. It could save the human species, all 4,000 remaining members.

This issue is split into two parts that meets in the middle. You’ll have to go with me on this, just let me assure you that there’s no wrong place to start - if you’re one of those readers that just has to read the last page first, you’ve been outsmarted. One part follows William, a soldier that survived his war but couldn’t live in peacetime, so he signed on with an expedition into an unfriendly jungle. He survives that experience in much the same way he survived the war, only instead of getting to a nearby foxhole, he finds an ancient temple with a strange figure approaching him. The other part takes place about two millennia in the future and follows Nika, a young xenosociologist negotiating with an alien race to pick a few flowers. See, humanity is being wiped out by a thinking virus, and the only thing they’ve found that can offer strong resistance is this one plant that only grows inside the walls of the alien’s city, whose natives don’t speak humanity’s language. The flower, along with being humanity’s key to survival, is also a bit like peyote, and when Nika wakes up from her sanctioned sample, she sees a strange figure approaching her.

This issue accomplishes something I didn’t think could exist - straightforward surrealism. It takes completely disconnected things and links them up. It shows how far apart things are that we take for granted as being basically identical. It suggests a kind of evolution of human society that challenges Star Trek as far as saying people could become a race of beings that respect each other and other species even in their most desperate times. It’s sad and uplifting at the same time. There are a lot of contradictions in this book, but considering you have to literally turn it upside down to read the whole thing, that shouldn’t be surprising.

Lemire has started something beautiful here, and while his regular audience would say that’s not surprising, new readers should take a look at this as well. I like where this is headed.

Thanks for reading, everyone! We’ll be back next week with the usual comic reviews, but a quick question - would any of our readers be interested in a special edition update regarding GenCon? If our gaming guru has the gonads, he could try his hand at reviewing some of the new and updated games that are featured next weekend! Think about it...

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