October 31, 2013

In-between bouts of sugar shock thanks to early Halloween binges, publishers managed to ship comics to us this week. Despite my own blood threatening to vibrate out of my body (damn you, delicious Charleston Chews!), I’ve managed to read and review a few of them. Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Bad Houses GN (Ryan/ McNeil): We who work with and enjoy comics have gotten used to the idea that comics aren’t as… classy… as other media. It’s an idea that’s slowly but surely being corrected, but it’s also been earned. For every piece of sequential art that truly puts the medium to work and tells something complex and wonderful, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of pieces that would get laughed out of the library. The comic medium has one more piece of high literature under its belt - Bad Houses.

Anne and Lewis find themselves in similar situations. They’re both under the thumbs of their mothers, living in ways they wouldn’t want for anyone. Neither can think of a way out of Failin, their tiny home town. Neither has a father figure in their lives. When they connect, they get under each other’s skin, find they both like things better that way, and start a relationship that brings out more revelations than most of the people in Failin can handle.

The above is probably as simple an explanation for what this story entails as anyone could manage. Anne’s mother is a professional caregiver suffering from a compulsive disorder. Lewis’s mother is a control freak that makes a living selling off what the dead couldn’t take with them. Their histories impact their children so hard that insurance premiums go up. History is forgotten, repeated, avoided. Some come out of their shells, others start building their own.

This isn’t a long book, it’s just shy of two hundred pages. In that time, the reader gets to know, really know, perhaps a dozen different people in ways most people only know longtime friends. These characters interact, grow together and apart, surprise and disappoint, in ways that will take the reader by surprise not because they’re shocking, but because as comic readers we’re just not used to this level of connection with characters. I predict you’ll feel more for Anne sitting at the bedside than you did when Peter Parker passed away, and we’ve followed him for decades.

This is not for every reader. It’s complex, demands careful reading, and it’s not action-oriented. Years from now, though, when comics share space with Chaucer in college classrooms, this will be one of the texts professors teach courses around.

X-Men Battle of the Atom 2 (Aaron et al): The battle is over. Those who walk away carry those who can’t. Lines once crossed are redrawn. And a kitty plays with its new pet baby.

The Brotherhood of Future Mutants’ final gambit is to reveal to the X-Men that S.H.I.E.L.D. has its own stockpile of Sentinels, complete with upgrades, ballistic deployment capabilities, and badges. Yep, badges. What mutants survive don’t stick around long enough to hear Director Maria Hill threaten them over the sound of post-explosive ringing. Those who were hoping for closure are going to be pleased - this thing has four epilogues. I don’t think Return of the King had that many endings.

As jaded as I am about crossovers, I do have to give this one credit. It’s disrupted the status quo into something new, and despite all the time travel pratfalls this issue indulges in, the changes come pretty naturally. I’m even going to break character and claim that this used time travel well… in very tiny bits. The bits where characters meet themselves or their relatives take the opportunity to explore relationships in unusual-yet-revealing ways, ways that I have to admit couldn’t happen without time travel. Well played, horrible narrative device.

S.H.I.E.L.D., the nicest Big Brother Orwell might’ve imagined, developing anti-mutant giant robots isn’t something that should be a one-off threat, and from the promos for upcoming issues, it won’t be. So not only are rosters changing, but now they have something else to do, and that’s what you’re supposed to expect from these kinds of crossovers.

The last issue of Battle of the Atom succeeds in tying up the series, setting the stage for the future of its companion titles, and not ignoring what the characters were doing and feeling throughout. It works.

Damian Son of Batman 1 (Andy Kubert): By now just about everyone interested knows that Damian, the son of Bruce Wayne and Talia al’Ghul, is dead, and that death came at a time when a lot of the audience had started to like the Dark Jerkwad. It naturally got people asking what it would’ve been like if he hadn’t died. Andy Kubert is here to answer your questions.

Damian is well into his teens, and the Joker’s escapades have escalated a few steps. His latest installation piece at the docks involves fish and sailors, all dead and deformed. During their standard investigation, a bomb goes off that Batman takes the worst of. Suddenly lacking a father figure, he turns to his only remaining family, the League of Assassins, who give him the kind of support we’d expect: they cut him off and tell him to take his father’s legacy if he misses him so much. Before doing that, he decides he’s going to avenge his dad’s murder in a way his mom would be proud of.

I wasn’t the biggest Damian fan while he lived, but I understood why other people were. Surrounded by characters defined by tragedy and an insatiable need for revenge, Damian gave Bruce and the other Robins a way to express familial affection without threatening their tough-guy acts. Damian beat up Jason Todd and used his mask as a hood ornament, put Tim Drake down constantly, and made endless fun of Dick Grayson’s costume. They all got him back in their own ways, and as a result they connected. It was far from what we’d call healthy, but it brought them out of their shells, something few other characters can claim to have done. Very little of that comes through here.

Instead, we get some explosions, a montage of fights, and a series of people answering Damian’s questions, but because he doesn’t like any of the answers, he ignores everyone. So far, Kubert has highlighted all of Damian’s worst qualities very accurately. If he can make time for the better ones, I’ll get interested.

The Son of Batman has a way to go before he’s ready for the big boy cowl, in many respects.

The Sandman Overture 1 (Gaiman/ Williams III): We’ll end this week reviewing another title many consider literature. For 75 issues and a few spin-off series, the story of Morpheus the Endless unfolded before our eyes and opened new facets of readers’ minds in the process. The trades have been kept in print constantly these past 25 years (if you want to feel old), and we all got sort of used to the idea that we had whole story. While it ended most definitively, there’s part of the story’s beginning that we've apparently missed.

The story opens with Dream administrating the subconscious of an alien race of carnivorous plants. He’s about to deal with an delinquent subordinate when he’s called away by an outside force. This isn’t normal - he’s one of the Endless, gods pray to the Endless - and it takes all his efforts to gear up before he’s pulled into an arena where he’s confronted by… himselves. It doesn’t make much sense to him, either.

I haven’t read Sandman in years, but in picking this up I got brought back up to speed right away. The issue reintroduces the characters, themes, and a number of plot threads without clunky exposition or a recap page. It starts right in and carries the reader from world to world easily, and that’s thanks to Neil Gaiman being one of the best writers working today. Those worlds are so different yet so plausible, and Morpheus is recognizable in all his various forms despite so many transitions, because J.H. Williams III is one of the best artists working today.

What I’m saying is that for once, the creator of a widely popular franchise has made a prequel, and it DOESN’T threaten to ruin said franchise yet. Jaded as that sounds, I’m very pleased by it. I think you’ll be too.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

October 16, 2013

Things sneak up on the most wary of people. Dates, bills, burglars, weight gain, we all suffer from things we don’t notice until it’s too late to prevent. At that point, the only thing we can do to cope is deal with it. Some things, like an empty gas tank, are simply inconvenient, while things like hatchet-wielding maniacs call for more focused action. And panicking. Some flailing is allowed.

This week is all about the titles that slipped under my radar, either completely or long enough that they might as well be fresh titles to me. Let’s see if, now that they’re noticed, they’re worth reading.

Skyward 3 /6 (Jeremy Dale): Fantasy quest stories have been around for at least a century as we know them, longer if one fiddles with the definition a bit (I would count Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but that’s me). It’s hard for new ones to find a unique hook, and while I can’t say if a quest for a questor has ever been done before, this does draw the reader in.

Quinn lost his parents a while back. It would appear that at the end of the last issue, he also lost the ground. It’s coming to meet him at 32-feet-per-second-squared, and will turn him into a pancake soon. Meanwhile, Abigail and her merry band of easily-persuaded warriors are trying to track the boy down. Somebody finds him in non-pancake form, but may not have had his best intentions in mind. There’s also an army that someone should look into at some point.

I could go into how the dialog and characters misstep into cliche, or how the art tries too hard in places and highlights its own inconsistencies. Some might argue that I just did that, but I really don’t want to - it would be like yelling at a puppy. There is so much love and enthusiasm that comes through this book it practically drips off the page. Rather than pool and stain, it tries to sweep the reader up in the excitement of being published and shared, and as jaded as I am, it’s hard to resist.

For another thing, the offenses are minor at best. They don’t take away from the story, they just prevent it from being better. The stereotypes and common fantasy tropes (a magical sword, bumbling henchmen, a wayward adventurous daughter, even a faithful animal companion) act like training wheels. Dale relies on them, and it’s hard to be impressed by anything knowing he’s using them, yet he’s telling a story that makes the reader want to see more.

This is a good book for little readers wanting fresh fantasy, training for when they get into stories with a bit more challenge to them. This may also a book for someone that wants “before they were great” artifacts - if and when Dale takes his training wheels off, the dude might just fly.

Strain: The Fall 4 (Lapham/ Huddleston): From the title alone, one could guess what this is about: muscle spasms suffered after an unscheduled trip to the ground. Would it offend if instead this was a vampire story set in Manhattan?

Zephram “Eph” Goodweather is a doctor that was dropped into a hot zone that first looked to be some blood-borne pathogen, but turned out instead to be a viral form of vampirism. Its victims lose skin color, genitalia, mortality, and free will, becoming obedient pawns of those who sired them, ultimately to one Master. That patient has some powerful backers that want a taste of living forever, and is exercising that power to turn the world into its own all-it-can-eat buffet. It’s been planning for centuries, and all it has to deal with are a few hooligans and disavowed doctors.

I’ve read the first few prose books this series is based on. It’s a bold take on the vampire mythos, but it treats its own quirks like nuclear launch codes and doesn’t give them up without a lot of pain and suffering. This makes it very hard to follow, even if the reader’s read it before. The artwork favors style over detail as well, but in this case it works; a more photo-realistic style would have killed this concept.

The Strain is a unique story no matter what medium you read it in, but take heed: if you don’t start from the beginning, you’ll find nothing to hold on to and no reason to read more.

X-Files Season 10 5 (Carter & Harris/ Walsh [no relation]): Do you own so many tin foil hats that your home interferes with cell signal? Does the Bigfoot Society not return your calls anymore? Are there not enough conspiracy theories for you and you know who’s behind the cover-up? Or did you just like The X-Files on tv? If any of those answers are yes, give this a look.

Mulder and Scully had gone above and beyond the call of duty as FBI agents. They saved lives, protected their country, and revealed truths that would otherwise stay hidden. They deserved a break. Not everyone agreed, so they tracked the couple down and brought them to Yellowstone National Park to be sacrificed and offered to heavenly beings. Things didn’t work out so well for those guys.

This feels just like the tv show. No surprise, Chris Carter being directly involved and all. Dana Scully is still a stoic analyst right up to the point where the people she loves are threatened, at which point she’s an angel of death. Fox Mulder is still driven to the point of obsessive and would be insane if he weren’t right all the time. Awkward after-action reports, the Cigarette Smoking Man, and figures even more shadowy are all here in just the proper proportions.

This also has what I didn’t like about the show. It’s very, obviously, excruciatingly plot-driven. Plans make sense until they get in the way of where the series needs to be, then they’re thrown out, regardless of how much merit they may still have. This was determined to get the main characters back into the FBI, heedless of the events that drove them away before. Reading it may cause scratching of the head at things that get in the way of the fun bits.

This book flows seamlessly from where the tv show ended, regardless of whether you liked the last season or not. Let that determine whether this is a title for you or not.

And just to sneak one up on you…

S.H.O.O.T. First 1 (Aclin/ Selma): There are some topics in popular culture that aren’t necessarily taboo, but don’t get much time because they are so controversial. Religious violence, accuracy in faith, things like that. It takes a very careful, deft approach to explore these topics delicately. S.H.O.O.T. First may have a lot of guns, explosions, and censored language, but it avoids the pitfalls and comes out being a very readable book.

When someone preys on blind faith for profit, we call that fraud. They are punished when caught. When that someone happens to be from another species with the ability to look and act like something out of ancient religious texts, their punishment gets a bit trickier. S.H.O.O.T., the Secular Human Occult Obliteration Taskforce, proves it’s not impossible. They’re not always able to prevent bad things from happening, but they make sure those responsible can’t profit from it. The team’s made up of members from various races and former creeds so diverse they could have been test-marketed, but at least one has a pretty big secret.

The big question you probably want answered before giving this a shot: is this a propaganda piece for atheism? Answer: no. Religion itself is not the bad guy, and is itself a victim. While many of the characters have crises of faith, it does explain that they have not proven the non-existence of God, they’ve just proven that at least two kinds of alien beings use the ideas behind religions to benefit themselves at the expense of human lives. It does suggest God doesn’t exist, but that suggestion comes from a character with a concussion and a few dozen doses of adrenaline holding him up, so it doesn’t carry much stock. I’m sure somebody will argue that this actually is propaganda against religion, (there are several points where it almost sells itself as one), but they’re not reading it close enough.

This does something that I didn’t expect, something I’m not sure they even intended, but I truly enjoyed. It suggests a world that’s going through the same violent, oppressing, depressing stages of humanity that we are, full of religious extremism turning toward horrible acts of violence, and saying it’s not any person’s fault. It postulates that our fellow man is, at heart, not capable of this kind of monstrous behavior, and that only because of malevolent outside forces could we believe otherwise. It’s a naive concept, but it’s one I could get lost in.

The writing is a bit dense, the art’s a bit hard to follow at times, and the concept’s a bitter pill, but put it all together and you’ve got a neat little book.

And like a ghost, I’m gone! See you next week!

October 3, 2013

Ever get a craving for something crappy? For example, I don’t fully understand the appeal of tenderloin sandwiches - they’re pork pounded so flat the flavor is spatter on some wall, and it's fried so that whoever made it hopes no one notices - and yet every now and then I just have to order one from someplace. It doesn’t make sense, but maybe that’s part of the appeal.

This week is dedicated to that phenomenon. This week is devoted to the comics that don’t make you think, or challenge any of your beliefs. They’re the kind of comics you make a big bowl of buttery popcorn for, then remember that butter will damage the pages so you put the popcorn away, then read the comic and hope it’s so decadently bad that it makes you forget you could be eating buttery popcorn.

(CC Note: Sorry about this. Next week we’ll be sure he’s eaten before he writes, we promise.)

Grindhouse - Bee Vixens from Mars 1 (di Campi/ Peterson): Grindhouse fiction, perfect example! No icky substance to get in the way of explosions, blood, and physical exploitation. At best, it promotes counting because you’ll be tempted to invent some drinking game for it. 
There is a little town out in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows everyone, and usually the only thing cops have to do is remind everyone to not be a jerk, that is until a Breaking Bad reject is found without heads. (Not a typo.) Officers Jimmy and Garcia share a six-pack of cheap beer and racial insults before investigating the scene when a vicious bee attack cuts Jimmy open in multiple vital parts of the body, leaving him barely able to drive himself home buzzed. He expects to find his wife and her girlfriend waiting for him, but instead finds a few honey stains and untimely death. Then things get weird.

This is not for children. It’s not as racy or targeted as, say, Sex Criminals, but it doesn’t leave a whole lot open to interpretation. There is gore, drugs, alcohol, vigilantism, and sex in this book, and occasionally they team up in single panels. That said, this isn’t mature, either. The mature thing would be to question a person’s expectations when blatantly neglecting his partner’s needs. Such things don’t come up. They don’t get a chance. No one involved is interested. And for what it is, it does that very well.

If you need a break from superheroes or anything high-concept, this is your break. Unless you’re allergic to honey products.

Robocop Last Stand 3/ 8 (Miller/ Grant & Oztekin): If there’s one franchise that’s determined to never die AND exploit any tool to attract viewership no matter how many other viewers it pushes away, it’s Robocop! Let’s see how the comic format is doing…

You want a summary? Watch Robocop 3. A few things are mixed up, but the changes are, at most, cosmetic. Right now we’re at the part where OCP is calling in its Asian partners to wipe out the less affluent parts of Detroit with their humanoid superweapon. They added another sociopathic cyberneticist with a huge rack of brain cells to try and get inside Robo’s head at the same time, because that worked so well in Robocop 2.

Frank Miller wrote Robocop 2 & 3. They’re not the best movies in the world, but they’re consistent with the source material, at least. Miller knows how to progress a Robocop story, but instead he’s rehashed two. He fell back on what had worked (to some extent) in the past. That leaves the art team to carry the book. The color palette’s dark in too many places and the linework is dicey, but there is a lot of fire, bullets fly everywhere, and every opportunity is taken to show of Dr. Fazz’s chest.

If you’ve successfully avoided the Robocop movies but want to know what you’re talking about when the new movie comes out in 2014, grab this book. That’s kind of a narrow margin of readers, but hey, we work with what we have.

Shadow Now 1 (Liss/ Worley): Wait wait, stop, please, Marvel NOW is NOT spreading to other publishers. This is about Lamont Cranston, having defied aging for the past few decades, fighting for a safer New York in the current era. Yes, it’s another reboot, but at least this is of a concept that dates back before most of us were born so, you know, let it go.

A city under seige. An information network crippled. A name stolen: Khan. Nope, it’s not the Star Trek/ Shadow crossover no one asked for, but it should sound a bit familiar. The big bad in the movie starring Alec Baldwin was Shiwan Khan, peer to Cranston in mental power and ferocity. In this book, he’s aged while Cranston has not, and has apparently given up his fight, leaving Cranston to struggle forever. A zen form of revenge, though not exactly “living well” either, and no matter how you look at it, Cranston seemingly has no stone left to turn over. Which sucks when his base of operations gets infiltrated and he gets shot.

This was supposed to be a noir-ish Punisher type of story. Guy in black melts out of shadows and kills hooligans, and an hour later retreats to a club full of classy femmes and cocktails, or in this day and age, co-eds and kegs. Instead, there’s domestic terrorism, teammates unable to trust one another, and an apparent immortal thinking very hard about whether or not he wants to pursue some creepy could-have-been-cest. 

People, I went in hoping for fluff, but while I wasn’t paying attention somebody put something weird in there.

Fantomex Max 1 (Hope/ Crystal): What’s just as guilty a pleasure as watching sexually-charged aliens eat condiments? Not much, but a superpowered thief that romances his pursuers and donates to worthwhile charities is pretty good too.
Fantomex has a lot going for him. He’s in peak physical condition, he has a sentient ship that’s in lust with him, and he can make millions of dollars in his sleep. He keeps himself busy and supplements his income by stealing ridiculously valuable things from naughty organizations. Still, he steals, so Special Agent Rhona Flemyng (again, not a typo) is determined to bring him in, as her oath to law enforcement demands. Fantomex just loves that about her, and so does Grover Lane, director of a special task force assigned to bring Fantomex to justice. Or are they?????

This is trying to evoke a lot of themes from the classic Bond movies - tricky gadgets, exotic weapons, scantily-clad ladies - which is all well and good, but it’s not clear which character is supposed to be Bond. Seems as though they split the role up among a couple of characters. The AI on the space shift never lets an opportunity for fan service or a double entendre go by, and the artist is careful to follow through on the fan-service aspect of things.

Fantomex Max doesn’t worry about continuity or character development. It worries only about how long it’s been since you, the reader, have seen cleavage or a bad pun. And it wants to make sure it hasn’t been long at all. This is fun reading.

This update is late enough as it is, but before I go I need to remind you about the CBLDF Liberty Annual 2013 edition. Comics’ best creators come together once a year to promote the main organization that fights for your rights to read and buy whatever you want in stores like ours. It’s a great-looking book, and if you find the $5 cover price too high, just leave a little something in the CBLDF jar we have by the register. We really can’t support this organization enough.

See you next week!

Looking for older Variant Coverage Blogs by Ryan Walsh for Comic Carnival?  They're here: Variant Coverage Blog Back Issues

September 25, 2013

Crazy Blogger Ryan’s back, everyone! What zany, madcap format does he have for us this week?!?!?

Well, none, actually. Been a crazy couple of weeks at the store. Pair that with all our excitement over things like Iron Man 3 on DVD and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hitting the airwaves, and we could use a bit of normalcy. 

Of course, “normalcy” for us isn’t what the general public would call it. I won’t use their words because I try to keep this page somewhat family-friendly. But enough about that, let’s get to some reviews!

The Trial of the Punisher 1 (Guggenheim/ Yu): Before the Geneva convention, before a trial by one’s peers, before written law, there was punishment - smacking the guy that done you wrong. Frank Castle lost respect for “more civilized” legal systems a while back, but now he’s going to get a new perspective on them. 

Manhunts organized by police, armies, and superheroes couldn’t capture the Punisher, but his own code of ethics might. He visits a NYPD precinct to confess for the murder of an assistant district attorney and a few weeks later, sees the inside of a courtroom. He’s treated poorly by his prison neighbors and some of the guards. His court-appointed attorney is trying to do right by him, went to law school because she was smart, and concludes that whatever brought Castle to court, it wasn’t a guilty conscience.

Last we saw Castle, he was doing community service with the Thunderbolts, that bunch of rare-do-wells on a slippery path of reformation. Before that, he lost an eye and helped break a cop-killer out of jail. He’s mercurial. He goes through phases. In other words, people write him differently. People don’t really read a Punisher story for the character because he changes all the time. People read Punisher stories because they want to see how many bad guys he can break before it ends. Only a few go down in this issue, but it promises more. I mean it, the only way it could more blatantly promise is if Castle wrote and signed an affidavit swearing he would kill X+4 more people each issue or something. 

As serious in tone as this is, I’m not sure what to make of pushing an organized legal system onto someone that’s built himself on the idea that he doesn’t respect that system’s ability. I could be overthinking it, but I doubt it.

Sex Criminals 1 (Fraction/ Zdarsky): If you’re looking for a book about strange people engaging in criminal acts for a sexual thrill, why? And for that matter, why are you looking for them in a comic shop? You don’t need to, and even if you were, you wouldn’t find them here. As one might expect from Matt Fraction, Sex Criminals is a lot more complex that what it looks like.

Suzie has daddy issues. Books are about the only thing on the planet that taught her anything useful, and she loves them for it. Like many book lovers, her head can get cluttered, and there’s one thing in particular that’ll calm it down. It’s not something she shares with many people, people having proved poor subjects to share with. Then a guy named Jon comes along, quotes some literature-inspired-song lyrics, and her quiet place suddenly has a visitor.

At the risk of sounding genophobic, I’m pretty sure Sex Criminals is trying to hurt its readers. It builds one concept up, gradually and naturally, only to blindside it with a concept that, while not contradictory (CC Note: heh heh, “dic”), is NOT where you expect it to go. It does this several times throughout the book, which is a well-endowed (CC Note: you’re doing this on purpose now, aren’t you?) 33 pages long. (Don’t know what you’re talking about.) It is absolutely only for mature readers, which it explains in plain language on the back cover right above the barcode, yet it’s the best bang on the market for the $3.50 asking price. (CC Note: That! That right there, that’s what you’re doing!)

I really, REALLY wanted to use this entire blog entry reviewing the latest issues from the creative teams of Vaughan/ Staples and Casey/ Kowalski so I could devote an entire week to explaining how Saga is better than Sex, but instead I’m going to just take a bit to say this is a smart, darkly funny book. It’s not a book to prove to anyone how mature you are, but if you’re legally able it’s worth picking up.

Batman 23.4 - Joker’s Daughter (Nocenti/ Jeanty): I haven’t been digging the Villain’s Month books, personally. Sometimes they’re barely veiled tributes to other stories, other times they come off as reinventions that don’t explain crucial changes, but they’re not all bad. The threat of Joker’s Daughter has been quietly building for a few months now, mostly in the “Channel 52” blurbs, so now that there’s some full attention being pointed at this mystery, we can figure something out.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was born into a nice family that would give her anything she wanted… so long as it was pretty. The girl liked ugly things; shaggy mutts, broken toys, dog-eared books, they all made her smile, but her family wouldn’t let her keep them. So she ran to where the ugly things are, the underground waterworld of Gotham City. She found a way of life too ugly for even her to be comfortable with, a leader far too pretty for her comfort, and a new face, one that was last seen beaten off the Joker by his arch-nemesis. With a face like that, very few people are going to tell her “no”, and those that do are going to have to deal with her amateur plastic surgery hobby.

SPOILER ALERT: She is NOT the biological product of the Joker. She’s not a fan or a groupy, and she’s got no beef with anything Batty. I like this. She’s a unique character with her own agenda, her own methods. Why adopt Joker’s ID? Because it was there for the taking, she wants cred fast, and Mistah Jay’s not in a position to call foul anytime soon. It’s a high-stake move, but one that she can get away with for a while, maybe long enough to adopt a moniker more suited to her own methodology. The story is about a 20-minute takeover of an entire Gotham City district, the writing a bit exposition-heavy, but not too much so, and if anyone’s reading Buffy right now, they know just how well Jeanty can portray young women fighting the world.

This isn’t the best book on the shelves this week, but it’s far from the worst. If you’re curious at all about the new kid under the block, this would be a good investment.

Criminal Macabre The Eyes of Frankenstein 1 (Niles/ Mitten): I look at the calendar and realize it’s the last week of September. Next week will be October, and the Halloween season will be in full swing. Only fitting then that a new chapter of Criminal Macabre start up. Let’s take a look.

Cal Macdonald likes to complain, perhaps for good reason. He saw his first death of another person at the age of six, he’s been haunted since he hit puberty, and now he’s dead. That said, he’s gainfully employed, friends bring him cars, and for a dead guy he’s still finding tiny joys as well as walking among the living. Seems like a sweet gig to me. Now the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein, he’s got worries. He’s never going to be able to walk among the normals, the guy’s got more daddy issues than a team of therapists could possibly imagine, and to top it all off he’s losing his eyesight, and for a guy that loves to read, that truly blows. Cal’s got about 99 problems (his fellow ghouls are laying down and dying, which shouldn’t be possible), but he’s gonna help the freshly named Adam find a new pair of peepers.

This is a great jumping-on point for readers unfamiliar with the series. Who, What, When, and Where get covered in the first three pages, and Why builds throughout the issue. It’s hard to get lost. For a horror book, a little lost is a good thing, so as far as tone goes this feels very off. This should be where more experienced fans will find their footing. There’s plenty of history behind everyone and everything in this book, which’ll make returning readers feel right at home.

Criminal Macabre isn’t for everyone, but then it never was. It treats the monstrous with a casual form of dark humor that strikes me almost as vaudeville noir. If that’s your thing - or if you want a book that’s just like Supernatural but don’t want to fall into that clique - then this is a good book for you.

(CC Note: Hey, wait a minute, these are all issue 1’s! I thought this was supposed to be a standard review blog update!)

(They are standard reviews. Of number 1’s. Sucker!)

That’s it for this week, everyone! Let’s try this again next week, shall we?

Looking for older Variant Coverage Blogs by Ryan Walsh for Comic Carnival?  They're here: Variant Coverage Blog Back Issues

August 15th, 2013

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

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

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

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

Infinity 1 (Hickman/ Cheung): 

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

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

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

Saga 13 (Vaughan/ Staples): 

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

Red Sonja 2 (Simone/ Geovani): 

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

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

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

Deadpool 14 (Posehn/ Duggan): 

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


Star Wars 8 (Wood/ Kelly): 

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

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

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

Batman 23 (Snyder/ Capulo): 

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

Half Past Danger 4 (Mooney/ Bellaire): 

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

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

Looking for older Variant Coverage Blogs by Ryan Walsh for Comic Carnival?  They're here:

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August 8th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for older Variant Coverage Blogs by Ryan Walsh for Comic Carnival?  They're here:

Variant Coverage Blog Back Issues

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!

Looking for older Variant Coverage Blogs by Ryan Walsh for Comic Carnival?  They're here:

Variant Coverage Blog Back Issues