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!

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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