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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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!

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!