November 27, 2013

I start fires.

Wait, that sounds bad. Lemme try that again: A lit fireplace can be one of the most comforting sights ever. It’s warm and it’s not dangerous so long as you’re aware of it. It’s a source of light, energy, life. It’s also a great place to get rid of inconvenient evidence. Whatever your reasons, we’re getting into the time of year where a lot of people are starting more and more fires.

Yeah, that’s WAY better. The books this week lit a fire for me this week, one way or another. Read on and you’ll get what I’m typing about.

Warlord of Mars 30 (Nelson/ Lanhellas & Abreu): There are five titles right now beating the dead horse that is Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series, and as soon as you look at one of the regular covers for this issue, you’ll understand why it stood out and practically demanded review.

Yep. That. Involuntary body piercing at best, horrific butchering of a sentient, living being at worst. If you can look past the torture, you’ll notice that Dejah Thoris’s reaction to being hooked to the ceiling like one of Jason Voorhees’s afterthoughts is something that looks like constipation. Oh, and the color palette somewhere between puke and poop.

John Carter’s picked himself up a green man hitchhiker (How many thumbs did that guy use? He’s got four options.) to escape the clutches of the yellow man army. I can only assume the rest of the rainbow will get attention at some point, but I digress. They get chased into a dead-end chasm and it would seem the yellow army will claim victory and corpses until an airship armada comes out of the sky so fast, you’d think someone used a cheat code.

The story is barely worth talking about, but I’m not ready to go back to the cover issue yet, so I’ll talk about the story. The artwork, a dirty, unfinished assortment of lines and colors, depicts a humdrum story with racism, a deus ex machina, and an after-school-special lesson at the end that has the audacity to pretend at being funny.

Okay, I think I’m ready. The saying goes you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to comics, that’s just not possible. Covers have always been an integral part of the book. Once upon a time, they previewed the interior with exposition and even panels that heightened readers’ appetites. Today’s covers tend more toward wordless splash images, but still bear the responsibility of reflecting what will be found inside somehow. Having said that, let’s take a look at the other regular cover:

Alright, it doesn’t stand out as much, but we’ve got a pattern at least: Dejah Thoris features if not exclusively, then at least prominently, on the covers. By rights, she should be the main subject of this issue. So how does it make you feel knowing that she’s not seen at all in this book, not even her name is mentioned?

When hipsters, doomsday critics, and blatant haters call modern comics out for abandoning all forms of quality just so new material appears on shelves, they’re talking about books like this. Burroughs produced some enduring pulp-style stories that had merit. Warlord of Mars 30 has none of that merit.

Infinity 6/6 (Hickman/ Cheung): The latest Marvel crossover event wraps up this week! Thanos’s quest to eliminate his bastard offspring has led him to Earth to confront the new Inhuman Thane while the heroes fight through an armada and a planet-breaking bomb.

Thanos’s armada, at one point overwhelming every major power in the galaxy, has been broken. Only Earth is occupied, and the united fleets bear down on it with grim determination. On the surface, Thanos is ready to eliminate his bloodline and commemorate the occasion by blowing up Earth. The first team through the blockade hits Thanos before he can finish Thane off, but Thanos hits back.

This storyline has some very crippling plot holes in it, like “Why does Thanos want to kill his kids?”, “Where does he find these followers when history clearly says he’ll kill anyone that bothers?”, and “What’s heroic about giving your own planet a self-destruct device?”. Individual characters don’t end up having changed much at all, but the last few pages make clear what the purpose of this event was: to change the galactic landscape. As if political stage-setting wasn’t enough, the final message reads like something out of a goth kid’s philosophy-class notebook – the universe tends toward entropy, we’re all dying anyway.

But really, what hurts the most is that, when it came time to make the big plays that shut the bad guys down, the premiere heroes were barely involved. New players and guest stars showed up to take care of business while the characters we pick up these books to read about were off taking care of other things. It’s one thing to promote a series with “a threat even the combined might of the Avengers can’t handle”, but proving the heroes just can’t get their job done? I don’t want to read that.

Thanos completionists can pick this up fairly secure that they can relax for a while. I don’t know who else would want to, honestly.

Saga 16 (Vaughan/ Staples): Regular readers, personal friends, and hermits within earshot of my favorite mountains will know already that I love Saga. Everything Vaughan and Staples have done has been great so far and I expected that opinion to never change, but something happened this issue that I really need to call attention to.

Our starcrossing couple, Alana and Marko, is brainstorming ideas on how to make money while the old fogies chuckle at their own cleverness. Soap operas are just as popular and mind-numbing in the Saga-verse as in ours, but they also pay under the table. The action and threats are actually focusing on the bounty hunters tracking our protagonists down, and one of them has come down with a mild case of knife-to-the-throat. Parties come together rapidly, and no one thought to hire a caterer.

Lying Cat is at once the best and worst thing about this book. Over the previous three issues, an idea was teased that The Will was being haunted by his former love into a life away from violence; only in the last issue was the truth revealed. This issue started another thread of that same story, and put it to bed before the reader could turn the page. Lying Cat destroys any chance for an unknown to stay unknown. It can ferret out the truth behind any fiction, delusion, even a chemically-based hallucination, and in effect resolve three issue’s worth of ambiguous drama in two panels.

With any other book, this would mean the creators start hunting for some other way to pad a story, but instead of that, Vaughan and Staples use the extra room for more twists, action, revelations, and awesome. Lying Cat will destroy comics as we know them like your favorite curtains or your child’s homework. On those tattered remains, Lying Cat will build something greater than our feeble minds can comprehend.

Long live Lying Cat.

Adventures of Superman 7 (Lapham, then Seeley/ Norton): This issue of a title I don’t normally read actually gave me mixed feelings, as in two very strong reactions mixed together to form some kind of combustible substance. I hope you’re wearing protective gear.

When Superman doesn’t have kryptonite-powered baddies to thwart, he saves people from more pedestrian threats, such as themselves. This is fine until a cult built around the Man of Steel decides to prove to the world theirs is a true god by forcing him to do the impossible: save two-hundred suicide jumpers across the city of Metropolis at the same time. Sound impossible? Superman agrees, and it also sounds a bit too well put together, especially the part where the cultists all donate their money and possessions to the same, brand-new charity. A back-up story follows a Russian orphan that likes to climbing trees more than talking. Superman manages to give her a pick-me-up between global threats and fights with Darkseid.

Here’s what every Superman comic these days tries to show you:

PANEL 1: Forgoing a utensil, Superman eats a cake at impossible speeds. By the time he’s done, he hasn’t just eaten the cake, he’s eaten the idea of a cake. People all around the globe can’t remember what cake is, that’s how completely Superman ate it.

PANEL 2: Superman still has his cake! He ate it so fast that time looped backward and the cake is back on the plate! The globe hails Superman as the inventor of the cake! Sales of cake mix bring the global economy back to pre-crash levels! Batman smiles! A golden age dawns!

If any character in fiction is going to find the hidden “All of the above” solution, it’s going to be Superman, fine. If that’s the ONLY kind of story we see featuring him, that’s boring. Not every problem is a Sophie’s Choice scenario. Superman using his super breath, a wrecking ball, and a sewage pipe to reinvent the gun is neat, but it doesn’t need to be paired with a cyber cult and questioning how to place value on life to be neat.

Careful readers may notice one detail: the red undies are BACK! That means, by law, DC has to pay the estate of Jerry Siegel royalties for the design!*

So here’s your very own impossible decision, readers: do you pass by a comic with mostly flat art (Norton [regular artist of Revival, also new this week!] does the back-up story’s art and it’s good) and an average-at-best story, or do you support the family whose ancestors helped give us superhero comics as a genre?

No matter what books you pick up this week, we hope you don’t throw them into a fire. They’ll burn up fast, it’s true, but burning ink is sometimes toxic, and there’s probably something better to get rid of close by, so use that instead.

Also, you may have noticed Christmas is getting closer, and Hanukkah starts this Thursday (the next time it does that, we’ll have probably switched to a different calendar system)! If you need to shop for a special someone, come in on Blackest Friday when we’ll be hosting a raffle for over $200 in merchandise! We hope to see you then!

*The lawsuits between Siegel, Shuster, DC, and Time Warner are so many and the rulings so varied that I can’t be sure what’s legal to print in comics anymore. 

November 14, 2013

Our non-local readers (and there are at least two of you, no denying it!!) may not know this, but here in Indiana, our weather likes to bounce around a lot. Yes, mercury takes on the properties of a bouncy ball and gives the thermometer some nasty vertigo. We’ve been enjoying subzero temperatures, can expect them to go up into the 60s before the week is done, and we’ve gotten a bit caught up in the spirit.

No theme this week,\! I’m just going to bounce around from shelf to shelf and go from there. (CC Note: Not so fast! *THWACK*) ...Ooooooor I could start with a book slapped in my face with a bit of help from one of my “generous” coworkers.

Injustice Annual 1 (Taylor/ Xermanico, Redondo, & Miller): This video-game tie-in has been enjoying a long run, longer than I honestly would have expected, long enough that it celebrates getting past the twelve-issue-mark with a story about how the biggest, baddest, mainest man in the galaxy gets his butt handed to him by a nerd girl.  I love comics!

You know how you go to the grocery store with one thing to buy, and you leave with something else, maybe five something elses? That’s Lobo with Earth - dude just cannot get what he came for, and yet he cannot stay away. He was just supposed to take down Superman and bring his body back to some shmuck on Apokalips, but instead he winds up in Gotham hunting down Harley Quinn, and leaving there the subject of a itty-bitty intervention.

Lobo’s never been the most cerebral character, so I don’t know if that makes it more or less plausible that Quinn and her psychology degree mess with his head so completely. The events within actually prove a windfall for a lot of people within: the past year hasn’t been kind to Harley, so she needed a win. Lobo lost some mojo and got an adjustment before he found himself a hobo.

I’m as surprised as anyone, but for what it is, this book is pretty entertaining. There’s action, laughs, and enlightened philosophy regarding moustaches. Don’t blow it off.

Archer and Armstrong 15 (Van Lente/ Evans): I dove into the top shelf of newbies and pulled out a title I haven’t checked in on for a while now. The writer’s still on it, artist has changed up but only briefly. I’m a bit excited- let’s do this!

Armstrong, the immortal from Sumerian times that’s seen it all and done it all, is now determined to drink it all. He’s reconnected with the brother that accidentally made Armstrong immortal (and in doing so banished himself into the timestream and destroyed the city of Ur), and they're going on a pub crawl across time and space, like if Simon Pegg and Nick Frost stole the TARDIS for a night. Archer, meanwhile, stews over finding Armstrong and his love/ hate interest in the sack. He does his wallowing at the bottom of a Happy Meal box.

The tone and style of this book haven’t changed a bit - it still revels in extremes of hilarity and seriousness. It’ll go to one extreme as an excuse to move onto the next, and it’s fun to watch, even when natural disasters claim scores of lives. Evans’ line work isn’t as crisp as Clayton Henry’s, but it communicates everything just as well. It keeps pace with the writing, which can be like sprinting a marathon sometimes.

Regular readers have nothing to worry about. This isn’t a good jumping-on point if you’re new to it, but if you want a cheap laugh and thrill, and don’t care about what happened before, this’ll be fine.

I went to the other end of the alphabet and found a new series...

Umbral 1 (Johnston. Mitten): Grimm and Supernatural make their niches out of the dark fairy tales of old. As far as new fairy tales told in ye olde style, there are few and infrequent… but one’s right now! This is a dark fantasy centered around children and why they should fear what’s under their beds.

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Rascal. She was going to be a thief when she grew up, and she knew that because she was so good at sneaking into the palace to meet with her friend Arthir, the prince. It’s a holiday in the kingdom of Strakan - a full solar eclipse - and the pair are going to sneak into the treasure vault and borrow the Oculus, a relic of unknown power or importance, as a tiny little thrill while the grown-ups are off acting like a day with two dawns is a big deal… until the palace starts getting slaughtered by dark creatures out of nightmares. Rascal falls, wakes up, people aren’t as dead as she thought, but she’s got a new necklace, some demented stalkers, and one less friend.

As first issues go, I love everything about this. It's got a complete world built from the ground up in classic fantasy style - a kingdom, royalty and lower class, monsters, maps, and magical artifacts. The characters have their own voices which say as much about them as the words they utter: Rascal is confident and capable, even if her grammar makes my inner-English-major cringe. There’s beauty and ugliness, peace and war, triumph and tragedy, friendship and betrayal. If the creative team can keep this up, they’ve got a winner.

I don’t get to say this very often, but just about anyone will like this on one level or another. Even children would get a thrill out of this, but I wouldn’t give it to anyone younger than 10.

And we bounce right to the middle of the alphabet where I find…

Manifest Destiny 1 (Dingess/ Roberts): NOT the X-Men storyline of the same name, this is a new series from Image comics. Kind of carrying on the fairy tale track from earlier, this series puts forth a neat little notion. Folk tales from Europe and China had loads of monsters and wicked creatures in their woods, while in the US such stories were tossed out along with the indigenous peoples - colonial tales of the forests are mostly about them being explored, paths beaten, and trees chopped. What if there were monsters in those woods, just like any other forest?

Lewis and Clark had a very simple task: to explore the natural world that was to be the US government’s next land claim. That’s what they wanted everyone to believe. Behind that, tales were told of beasts deep in the country, further than any former Europeans had yet penetrated. If expansion was to take place, such tales would need to be verified, and any threats tamed. It would be just fine if tales is all they were, and the land proved open for exploration and exploitation, but if they don’t find something to worry about soon, the cutthroats press-ganged into working for them are going to get rowdy.

This doesn’t apologize for or whitewash history - early Americans wanted to find the West coast and claim everything between that and the East Coast (which they’d settled and were getting bored with). If anything was in their way, they shot it, and no one bothered to ask why. People today wouldn’t take kindly to that attitude, but I respect Dingess and Roberts for portraying it here. As heroes go, Lewis and Clark aren’t close to Steve Rogers or Clark Kent; at best, they come off more like Malcolm Reynolds, minus the sass. As to the West before we knew what Wild meant, the monuments and monstrosities are distinctly American, yet are twisted with the tension and inhumanity that make horror stories work.

Manifest Destiny as historical fiction is an oddity that hasn't had enough time to prove whether or not it could work. With time, it could grow into just about anything. If you like your horror stories to take place in worlds you recognize, this'll be a good book.

All this jumping around the shelves has given me whiplash, so I’m gonna lie down for a while until the internet stops spinning. See you next week!

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:

Variant Coverage Blog Back Issues