Oh, brother (or sister)! Family sure can be a handful -- especially if you're talking about your sibling! You may argue, fight, and drive each other crazy, but for better or worse, you're stuck with 'em! Betty, Polly and their brother Chic all get along now, but did they always? Jughead's baby sister Jellybean is cute as a button, but sure can be tough to babysit! And what other Riverdale residents have siblings you may not have met yet? Join in on some fraternal fun with Archie and the gang as they celebrate one of the closest bonds around -- a brother or sister!
$4.99—comiXology
Last year, in the hottest month of summer, I had to bring our trash to the dump. At that time, I was living with my spouse in what literally was a shed with solar panels on the roof, no other source of electricity. In the hottest months of summer, she relented and we brought in a window air conditioning unit, but we could barely run it without draining all our electricity.
I had to bring the trash out to the dump because we were quite rural, and had no garbage service. We accumulated a can's worth of house and food garbage outside. There was a lid we held down with a bungie cord to keep animals from getting in, but at some point it had become unseated, and rainwater had pooled in the bottom of the can. The initial smell of that rotting soup of garbage was daunting when I went to pull the bags out, so, instead of loading them into my car, I just put the whole can in the back of our farm truck and drove to the dump.
There, I just pulled the lid off and dumped out the entire contents in the big city dumpster. When I did that, however, I had an olfactory experience so powerful, even profound, that I felt momentarily lost in it. When I tried LSD in college (I do not recommend this drug and think its devotees are shallow), one notable feature of the experience was a sense that my entire life before was a million years behind me, remote, obscure, unreal. The next day I went about life normally, my habits easily reasserting themselves, but the creeping sensation was that every familiar thing was also some insane artifact from an impossibly distant past, connected by the merest but toughest of threads to the present.
And in a strange way, that awful, overwhelming smell at the dump that day had a similar effect on me. It is hard to explain what I mean. Of course, initially, it made me want to vomit. It was a struggle not to vomit. But then, beneath that first wave of nausea inducing but recognizably rotten sensations, there seemed an infinite sea of odors: watermelon, savory chicken meat, coffee, rain, flint, the ocean, marshes, mud, strawberries, fungus, feet, cinnamon. It was as if in one moment I travelled down into a parallel universe made entirely of olfactory input, divorced of any context. It took me days to recover a sense of normalcy, though, of course, nothing in the world had changed. I think of this experience as one of the most precious and interesting experiences I have ever had. The Aleph and The Zahir in the rotten water at the bottom of a trash can.
ARCHIE AND FRIENDS: SIBLING RIVALRY, in its attempt to encompass something like the actual spectrum of real human relationships, even if they are reduced to the scale of an almost comically innocent group of high schoolers, managed to remind me of this experience with the rotting garbage. I think it struck me this way because I have read almost exclusively superhero comics for the Comic Roulette, until now, and those books, while struggling to seem gritty, realistic, to feature people with grownup desires and frustrations, often seem to capture only the most trivial, surface details of anything like a real human life. ARCHIE AND FRIENDS: SIBLING RIVALRY, unconstrained by the need to construct simultaneously a world which threatens to upturn nothing, to say nothing and yet still appeals to 13 year old boys, seems almost limitless in its dramatic palette.
The book consists of a series of stories which explore the idea of sibling rivalry from a variety of angles. None of the stories reaches for profundity, but on the other hand, each accomplishes simple contact with real human experience and the variety of those experiences forms a nice melange.
Which isn't to say the ARCHIE AND FRIENDS: SIBLING RIVALRY is a perfect book. While efforts are clearly made to expand the cast beyond the wholesome white kids we associate with classic Archie, the whole story still feels very focused on the core group - with non-white characters, who interact with the characters almost too naturally, serving as backdrop for their stories.
It is pretty hard not to see these comics as at least playfully erotic, with all the implications thereof. Betty, Veronica and Cheryl Blossom, the three female leads, hover always at the edge of pin-up drawings. On the other hand, no one is murdered or shoved into a refrigerator. These female characters, objectified as they are, to some extent, do not form the justification for acts of violence or murder or even, really, for any kind of in your face masculine posturing. It is a really wonderful change of pace from superhero comics, where violence is lurking on every page and where it is justified in the most ridiculous ways.
The final impression is of a series of harmless, soothing stories wherein people figure out important, if simple, interpersonal problems and where the stakes are relatively low. That sounds like a lot of my actual life, and in a way, it's nice to be given a diversion which captures that reality while, at the same time, isn't trying too hard to overdramatize it. The universe is swirling chaos, dark water rotting at the bottom of a trash can, but sometimes we can indulge in a colorful, unthreatening, and peaceful version of it.
Zeb Wells [w], Marco Checchetto [a], Paulo Siqueira [p], Amilton Santos [i]
Marvel Comics
By Vincent Toups
It's Anti-Venom and Punisher vs. one of the largest, most powerful and most ruthless drug cartels on the planet. It's two of Marvel's anti-heroes versus society's worst! Who will win the night?
$1.99—comiXology
I drive a lot. My office is an hour from my home, which is in the country. Living in the country, I see a lot of roadkill. One day, I was driving and a hawk, which must have been eating something on the side of the road, must have panicked, and flew into my tires, where it was crushed. It was so low and fast that I was sure I had hit a rabbit, but when I turned around to check its downy under feathers were moving in the wind where its body hadn't been flattened.
The utter callousness of it all is so stunning to me. This was a creature going about its life. It had killed to eat, yes, but there is a clear utility in that. I killed it on account of convenience and the structures of our lives which are not inescapable, but whose gravitational pull on our habits feels impossible to avoid. If you drive on enough country roads, you'll see skunks, fawns, adult deer, turtles, cats and dogs. The violence of their deaths is not subtle: their bodies will be distorted in all sorts of elaborate and painful looking ways. No dignity in death for these creatures.
Spend enough time driving on country roads and you'll just get sick of violence. You'll wonder if the world needs even an ounce more in either fiction or in life. You'll wonder why Zeb Wells chose to take the idea of "Anti-Venom," a violent anti-hero, and just do the same stupid violent shit with it. Laziness, convenience, the gravitational pull of our habits that feels impossible to avoid.
Venom was originally introduced as an attempt, as far as I can tell, to make Spider-Man a little more edgy. A parasite from outer space that functions like a special costume, but which makes Peter Parker more aggressive and violent. Just the thing to attract the interest of a young adult population in the 80 and 90s. You have to understand something about those days, if you didn't live through them. Then, violence wasn't like it is now. It was before 9/11. Before the Columbine shootings even. While it's true our society has become safer since then, gratuitous violence of the kind which we have become almost inured to, was not yet common. It is hard to describe the late 80s as a naive time, or an innocent one, but then again, it's hard to look back on these sort of writerly shenanigans as anything less than that.
So Spider-Man ditches the costume eventually and it bonds to Eddie Brock and a bunch of other anti-hero types, who use it for violent purposes, sometimes good and sometimes not. Of course, because the one thing you can count on comics to do is beat a horse to death and then keep flogging, Carnage, a similar symbiote by crazier and more violent, also showed up. At this point there are so many dinky edgy symbiote characters its hard to keep up with them, but when I heard I was getting an Anti-Venom book, I was a little excited. Here is this character conceived of as the opposite of Venom. Created from positive energy and white blood cells. Capable of healing peoples diseases. Was it too much to hope that we might seem some bona fide new story telling. Some focus other than violence?
Apparently it was. ANTI-VENOM#3 starts in the most ridiculously transparent way possible: Anti-Venom's love interest is being fed drugs (with a strong suggestion of rape) and we see, in parallel panels, Anti-Venom's preparation for violence. It is hard to imagine a more clear example of the "woman shoved in refrigerator" trope than these pages present to us, since they cast Eddie Brock's violence directly in terms of a possessive masculinity. You don't even have to have my lefty politics to object to this: it's just boring, even as it is cultural gross.
So, the rest of the book is just coasting from the opening sequence. Brock kills some people, rescues his girlfriend or sidekick or whoever, and is almost killed by the Punisher (whose moral calculus here is flimsy as heck). We can literally take a black pen and draw the old Venom on top of these pages (though the artwork by Siqueirra, Santos and Checchetto is pretty good, actually) and the story would read like any from Brock's anti-hero days.
What, then, is the point of all this? What a waste of an idea. Why not take a character famous for stupid violence and really do something different with him, rather than recapitulating the same old dumb tropes. I don't know. I'm tired of it. Our society is less violent than it's ever been, arguably, but violence itself has become uglier, more objectionable, more sad. The shock value has worn off and the little moral justifications which float around the anti-hero and wearing thin. I expect my comics to catch up, to say something new about destruction and its alternatives.
Roy Thomas [w], Don Heck [a]
Marvel Comics
By Leonardo Tomas
The Mandarin is back and he's planning something big! The Avengers scramble across the globe to stop him, but can their efforts really triumph over the Mandarin's villainy? Plus, and unexpected appearance of Ultimo!
$1.99—comiXology
Here's a really weird situation: this comic has all the elements that I usually love, and yet, it bored me to tears. What's wrong with me? Well, aswering that would bore you to tears, but seriously, what's up with this comic? Let me try to make some sense out of it. In short: What makes a good AVENGERS comic, to our writer, Leo?
Well, first of all it has to be colorful and full of action. I really can't stand exposition and setups of big comic events. I don't really care if this dude is the future son of Cyclops and Jean Grey's clone, unless he shows up grown up, like, during the act of intercourse that created him. Otherwise it's just a soap opera. Show me a dude with a bionic arm wrecking stuff up in a well drawn and colorful way, I don't mind if his name is Petronius or Billy. Or if he's just the kind of mailman the X-Men school gets.
So, in this specific point, this comic is very good. We have Iron Man saving an ancient city from destruction via a giant scimitar falling from the sky. We also have Hercules and Iron Man duking it out around page eight, just 'cause Hercules didn't know him. I like that kind of setup. “Who's this golden dude entering the Avengers building? Heck, I better take him down to ask him” works for me. Better than soap opera stuff about ex-wives or whatever.
So yeah, this comic has a lot of good action, even good justifications for the Avengers fighting among themselves. Mind control is one of my favourite gimmicks to show that a lot of power is worth nothing without a good mind behind it. We have the Mandarin using it to make the Avengers fight each other here, and falling prey himself to a miscalculation of it. Heck yeah for saving the day through intelligence in a super-powered enviroment.
Still... the setup to these situations is kinda long (8 pages is a lot in a comic book) and the action itself looks a bit clumsy. I dig some brawls, find them pretty humane even, but the grand finale of something like this asks for some kind of grandiose scene and in that department the comic is lacking. So, I guess I like the action, but feel like it could be better planned. It feels clumsy, as if Stan Lee went “I don't know, do something that looks cool” and the best the artist could come up with was the Avengers punching each other. It is a kickass thing to look at, but feels like a middle point, not an end point. Well, that's a 6/10 on the action department.
Ok, what else do I like? One thing I talk a lot about is characterization. That is something I don't mind being overdone when the action is lacking. Exposition is boring but super powered freaks interacting with each other is fascinating to me. People calling Iron Man “Shellhead” is something I appreciate a lot. Even Nick Fury, in a great display of why Samuel L. Jackson was perfect for the part, goes:
I love that! He obviously doesn't trust this group of freaks who punch each other for a handshake. Wanda doesn't even care about him either, she's like “WTF? You got a bug here, NSA man? I don't like this shit!” and Captain is all like “Hey – and I know this is weird - but I know this dude from like that really serious World War II – and forget that I'm a freedom popsicle for a second – so let's hear him out, ok?”
That's great characterization. In a couple of panels we know Fury doesn't trust them but needs them, that Wanda doesn't trust or need him, and that Captain America holds it together, but not very much. This is almost The Sopranos in comic book format.
But, and it's two buts, we have several panels of exposition before and after this, when all that was needed was a little good dialogue. I actually stopped reading and came back to it once before reaching this, because before it the comic book starts with several pages of villain set up, and except for a few dialogue exchanges, that was boring as heck. The first but is: show, don't tell. Stop telling stuff to the reader through pep talks. That's boring for adults, and triple boring for kids.
The second but is that I don't actually like the selection of characters here. Feels like the goody two shoes half of the Avengers. There's no Hulk. Hawkeye was still lacking a personality around this time. Ant-Man was Goliath, and he's boring as heck, specially in this “good couple” situation with Wasp. It's like having Flanders and his wife in the team. Sure, Flanders is kinda smart and ripped, but....he's Flanders.
Thor is also too intelligent here, so Hercules steps in to act as the “out of place demigod”. He's fun playing that part, but he only serves to show how Thor is under-appreciated in this issue. Iron Man has no sass to Captain either. Sure, it is a great example of how the Avengers movie and the whole Avengers IP evolved during the years, but as it stands, it feels like the kind of pals your 50's father would like to have, not the kind of friends a kid or teenager can identify with. In short: no Hulk, no Vision, Smart Thor, Chummy Hawkeye and Iron Pal make up for a 2/10. Wanda and Hercules are the only interesting parts of the team, and Hercules was a newcomer here. Looks like they had to come up with something after nerfing Thor. The lesson is: keep Thor and Hulk as 2 Crude Dudes and you'll always have some fun to fall back on. There's an old Hulk movie like that, and I sure hope the new Thor movie learns from it. Also, the villains are boring as heck. The only memorable panel is when even the villains don't care about Mandarin's plan, because he's boring, so he has to scare them into submission by bringing in an hologram of Namor to pretend-wreck his lair. He then pretends to zap him out of existence (by turning the hologram off) and all of these villains get scared of him. I do appreciate the gimmick of ancient magic people being ignorant to technology. But someone else made that point better than me already. In short: the characterization works except for when it doesn't and the roster is lame.
The plot is also weak. I know I said that the justifications for the action don't matter that much to me, but the way it's conducted does, and that's plot too. Or script, if you will, I don't want to get too technical about it, the thing is I don't mind the motives for the punch out, but I think it's weirdly paced here. As I said, after some fights there's the infighting between the Avengers, and after that there's an action sequence in which they have to save Mandarin and the spaceship they're in. It's pretty boring. The fights that precede it are kinda boring too, and it goes to show the kind of weakness this sort of comic can fall victim to.
With a lot of heroes you need a lot of planning and plot for it all to come together. What Marvel came to do after decades is to distill the setup into a lot of comics and save the big showdown to an special issue. It's smart, people end up buying the big one for the big show and if they get hooked they buy a whole backlog of comics. This raises a whole other mountain of problems we talk a lot about in the Comic Roulette, problems that come from the event based business model.
One of them being that this kind of weird story, that was reserved for special issues, ends up being spilled across whatever favourite character you follow, so even if you only buy Spider-man, his stories will suffer being tied to the big event, and you will have to buy into it, or drop comics altogether.
So, plot/script: 2/10, it does have some great dialogues and moments, but overall it’s pretty weak.
This is also the birthplace of both the Avengers and the Crossover Event tradition, but very little from this makes a case for doing it again (except for hero infighting). It surprises me that Marvel looked at this and based their business model on it, but of course, it took a long time for this to shape into that and make that case for itself. But it doesn't hurt to remember that Marvel was always smart about this, and always was savvy to make a quick buck just smashing heroes together. I think it's important to look back and see that there is no “everything was better back then”, that every thing they do today had a seed planted back then, that advertising was always present, and that, most of all, it's important to assess both the strong and the weak points of each moment of history instead of generalizing.
Also, just because something has a lot of elements one usually enjoys, it doesn't mean that one will automatically enjoy it. These elements are just the format, the overall appearance of a story. It's not the Marvel brand or even it's characters that made the stories you love. It's good folks working their asses off. And a bit of luck. I mean, it's hard to have a completely shit comic with someone like Jack Kirby drawing it.
Notice that even with the elements I usually favour, like colorful art and old-timey-fun-action, what I ended up enjoying here were things I didn't count on, like the characters Hercules and Scarlet Witch, and the occasional smart dialogue. Goes to prove the point: a classic character in a classic situation does not guarantee A Classic Comic Book, but putting in the effort into whatever you can usually brings about something worth reading, even an unexpected good surprise, which is actually better than a predictable good time, to me.
Score: Not bad, but I expected better. Still, enlightening to see how many elements of the Avengers mythos were already in place, and how much Marvel learned from this. 2.5 out of 5 stars.
Diesel and Phil inspect the mysterious flying engine with shocking consequences.
$1.99—ComiXology
(free with ComiXology Unlimited)
Hey, this is by Tyson Hesse! I sort of was an internet acquaintance of that guy more than a decade ago. Really nice dude.
(To cut it short, and shed light on an apparently long dead little crawlspace of the internet: the munkki.net forums were an offshoot of the fireball20xl forums, mostly filled with makers and fans of sprite comics. A middle school (middle school!) friend of mine showed it to me, and Tyson (then calling himself “RittZ”) swam in the same pond. We only really interacted a handful of times, but ever since he started something of an impressive professional career I think about that old website (which thankfully does not exist in any capacity I can find anymore; it was nothing but a vipers nest of weird drama.))
That all seems like a fine opportunity to talk about creator-led series in comics.
When most people think about comic books, they think about superheroes, and they think about the superheroes themselves as opposed to the people writing or drawing them. Most people, at this point, know that Marvel owns some characters and DC owns other characters, which is why Batman rarely fights the Hulk.
Corporate ownership of those characters creates a weird situation. Artists and writers are hired by Marvel or DC to write existing characters; let’s say Marvel needs Black Panther creators. The company contacts writers it either has on-staff under contract, or reaches out to authors it thinks might fit the character. Maybe they have an idea already, or maybe they want pitches from the writer. The writer says yes (or no), and then the work of finding an artist begins.
From here, the writer and artist (usually) collaborate on What This Comic Will Be. Obviously Marvel’s editorial team has demands; Black Panther needs to be a part of X event, or cross over with Y character. He needs to have Z costume because that’ll be in the movie, or whatever. The writer and artist(s) work around these ideas and create something hopefully powerful and beautiful and smart.
Then they all get paid and go their separate ways. The artist is mostly allowed to draw the characters at conventions for some spare cash, everyone gets some things in their portfolio and hopefully moves on to more work. Marvel, meanwhile, will utilize this material in their films and make billions of dollars globally.
It’s not a bad gig writing Batman or the X-Men, per se. It’s usually done because of a deep and powerful love for those characters, and for a paycheck. You get to shape stories that sometimes have been running for nearly a century. But, usually, the real capital-a Art? That’s in the creator-owned comics.
These are comics where the writer or artist comes up with their own concept. The Walking Dead is a creator owned comic: Robert Kirkman, the writer, owns the concept. If AMC makes a TV show or pinball machine or touring escape room experience, he gets some money from that because he made the damn thing. Guy is richer than god, now.
There’s a whole company devoted to distributing creator-owned work called Image, which I write about a lot. People call them the HBO of comics, because nearly everything they make is of high quality and bolder or weirder than things by Marvel or DC. Image attracts the best talent because the creators know they’ll have total creative freedom, a powerful distribution service, and can still retain the film, television, and merchandise options for their work.
The trade-off of course is, if you’re making a creator owned comic, you can’t exactly put Batman in it, and people who buy comic books really like Batman. So you don’t get a guaranteed audience if you aren’t making something compelling and fresh and immediately appealing. Anything DC or Marvel makes, you can guarantee will show up on a rack in a comic store. Anything made by anyone else? Well. Roll the dice, let’s see what you got.
(For the record, I don’t mean to imply work created for Marvel or DC is worse or less artistically valid than creator-owned books. People tell amazing stories with those characters; that’s why we’ve had them for so many decades. Some of my favorite comic authors and artists have done some of their best work for those companies, including Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers, Matt Fraction and Dave Aja’s Hawkeye, Brendan Fletcher and Annie Wu’s Black Canary, and (despite how generally terrible he is as a person,) Max Landis’s Superman: American Alien.)
So how is my old e-quaintence’s comic? S’alright.
The story is difficult to pick up from this single issue. We’re thrown into events clearly in progress: a spunky young kid named Diesel is discussing some sort of floating engine with two other characters. After some exposition, pirates attack trying to get back the engine thing. There’s action. There’s a big explosion. There’s a big reveal. It would all probably have a lot more impact if I had read the first issue.
The art is impeccable, though. Kinetic and fluid cartoony designs that communicate personality (while being maybe just a hair too busy in places; does Diesel need the nose bandage? Does the Captain need multiple facial piercings?) Maybe it’s the setting (the entire issue seems to take place entirely on airships) but it feels very French, inspired by the muted palettes and ample use of white space.
It doesn’t quite make me want to keep reading, nor go back and read the first. But you can tell, at least from the perspective of the art, the creator genuinely enjoys the character he created.
Brian K. Vaughan [w]. Fiona Staples [a]
Image Comics
By Pauline Kal-El
When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old universe. From New York Times bestselling writer Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina) and critically acclaimed artist Fiona Staples (Mystery Society, North 40), Saga is the sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the worlds. Fantasy and science fiction are wed like never before in this sexy, subversive drama for adults.
$7.24—Amazon
I was recommended to read Saga by a friend of mine. Let me describe this friend to you. She is a white lady with blue dreadlocks, ski boots, a number of tattoos of fairies and dragonflies, and an obsession with Magic: The Gathering. I dress like a disheveled telephone operator from the 1930's. Our tastes and senses of aesthetics are poles apart. She also owned Suburban Glamour, a terribly written book which looks like a computer learned how to draw by analyzing mainstream gay interest magazines and combining them with the cartoons they put on the back of airplane seats to show you what to do if there’s a crash. I made her destroy it with her boyfriend's band saw.
I must take my refined taste more seriously than most, because later that week we’d spend an entire evening make a life-sized cardboard effigy the guy who made Suburban Glamour, using Google Image Search for reference, with the intention of ritualistically burning it on the beach. Only, I had to leave before we got the chance to carry out the deed, and so the effigy just stood in her living room for a whole week, looming over her and dominating the room. Then one day she got in a heated argument with her boyfriend and, their tensions and anger at breaking point, they kicked apart the effigy and threw it out for the garbage man. Then they made passionate love. So it goes.
So when this girl recommends a book where a chick with green hair and fairy wings runs around with a guy with ram’s horns, and the first line is “Am I shitting? It feels like I’m shitting!”, this is where I step back and take stock of the fact that she and I are into different things and that’s fine. I would listen to The Doors in the car, she would listen to Harry And The Potters, but that doesn’t make me cooler or better than her, ok?
Here’s one final note on my refined (and frankly impeccable) taste (that does not make me cool (or special (at all))). Taste is NOT linked to intelligence or talent. Let me make that clear. You can have wonderful taste and be frog-stupid. You can also have terrible taste and make the best thing in the world.
Whoever made Elfquest has very questionable taste, for example, and yet they are unquestionably smart people. I cannot impart enough how much I did not want to read Elfquest. That book looked like hot and cold running garbage to me. And yet it turns out Elfquest is warm, funny, human, and cleverly written. It built a rich world that the creators absolutely believed in, and once I'd read an issue, so did I. There is so much care and love and craft in that artwork that after a while, you start to wonder why you ever thought it looked amateurish. And then you check out interviews with Wendy and Richard Pini and you discover just how intelligent and devoted the creators of Elfquest are, and just how nice and entirely deserving of their fanbase. Suddenly you begin to curse your good taste for denying you access to this wellspring of humanity. A curse! Good taste is a curse!
* * * *
Saga is the kind of thing I would normally take a hard swerve on for the exact same reasons. My experience with Elfquest was the lesson that taught me why I shouldn’t. Elfquest taught me that if something looks bad, I should forgo my initial instincts and give it a chance anyway. And I did. And now, for teaching me that valuable lesson, may I say to the creators of Elfquest: fuck you.
Nah. Look, that's unfair. Saga wasn't a horrible experience. At a glance, though, Saga looked like it embodied everything I don’t like about modern comic books. Here's a description of what I thought of Saga, on first impression. I’m going to bang a gong whenever I mention a horrible comic book cliche that I wish would die a quick and sudden death. Get ready.
The one word title (BONG!) that lets you know this is an attempt at making a subversive modern fairytale (BONG). The character designs that are from the “good enough” school of videogame concept art (BONG). The sharp, machine-typed word balloons (BONG!) that float on top of the pictures like they’re beamed in from another dimension, and have the effect of making the well-constructed but static figures look all the more static. The art, deftly slashed out on a digital graphics tablet just like every other comic today (BONG!), and which reminds me of something Hali said:
“The mass produced stuff like this all looks like it could devolve into pornography at any second. Like, those screengrabs of Redtube videos where they crudely draw clothes on the Adult Actors and Actresses, and ice cream cones over the dicks, tambourines over the pussies, stuff like that. That’s all I can see when I look at these probably computer-generated comics, like somebody is about to get fucked in every panel.”
Saga looks like that and IS like that. Sex, reproduction and base vulgarity is an omnipresent feature of Saga. In some cases, this is thematically necessary. In others, not so much. It starts with a pretty grisly childbirth where we learn that our main character is a mother who will readily yell “suck my haemorrhoids” and other Tank Girl-isms. (The book is full of Wildean zingers like this. Later, someone will tell someone else to “fuck the fuck off”). 20 pages in we get to see a huge panel of two robots with chiseled, perfect bodies doing it Game Of Thrones style- and by that I mean in a rote, pointless and gratuitous fashion. It’s either meant to be funny or sexy but it’s hard to tell, since it’s neither. There’s a sense that no-one involved with the art of this book really cared enough to make it too much of one or the other.
The writer will sporadically return to pursue this porno-lite aesthetic. Later, one of the characters will spend an issue on a brothel planet, and walk past a parade of curiously unimaginative "crazy" lovemaking before eventually rescuing a child prostitute from her life of servitude. (Because, you see, this book really wants you to know how mature it is. This ain’t your daddy’s space opera, pilgrim! Ain’t no fuck planet kiddy rescue in STAR WARS, son! )
There’s also a throwaway mention of rape camps to let us know what an evil regime the wacky (and evil) Prince Robot IV runs, which is not quite as tonally jarring as if we found out Squidward raped somebody behind the Krusty Krab, but it’s close.
Look, I love sex in comics when it’s done right. There are comics creators who use sex as a natural part of their storytelling, like Daniel “Dreamboat” Clowes. He writes about life, and in life people have sex, so naturally sex is a part of his work. Then there are guys like Manara and Crepax, who pay the bills with throwaway erotica, but whose sexual obsession bleeds naturally into their serious and very beautiful other work. Then there’s Robert Crumb who will fucking explode if he doesn’t draw an ass every ten minutes.
These guys, I love. I do not love the “sex = maturity, yeah?” writers, who tote sex around like the kid in the sixth form common room who stands reading his copy of Slaughterhouse 5 vertically so everyone can see the cover. Whose brandishing of said totem either denotes an intellectual insecurity and desperation to be taken seriously, or just that he's trying to impress teenagers. In terms of talent, at the top of this scale you might have Alan Moore. Brilliant writer, one too many grisly rape scenes, but we let it slide because his work is good. At rock fucking bottom you’ve got Garth Ennis (BONG!), who'll expect you to be emotionally invested in worlds where a man with an arse for a face is called "Arseface", where Superman gets his dick sucked by a super-hooker and where the dialogue is peppered with as many hilarious gay blowjobs as Garth Ennis can possibly think up, which is about six million. Saga is somewhere at the midpoint of the scale, though edging closer to Ennis than Moore.
Now look- some of the problems I have with this book might just be all on me. I am not invested in these characters or their high-octane adventures. It might not be the book's fault that I did not warm to this impossibly attractive couple of bickering (but so in love) runaway soldiers who just want to show their little girl the universe, incandescent and beautiful as it is with its murderous robots and bare-breasted spider-centaur ladies who are definitely ripped off from Dark Souls. Likewise, one needs to take into account my personal distaste for the Joss Whedon school of dialogue, where no matter how impossibly dire the stakes (giving bloody birth in a locked room while murderous gestapo gather outside the door) the patter remains light and wakka-wakka-wakka.
Other problems are less my fault. This thing is just not as clever or as cute as it thinks it is. The fairytale anything-can-happen jag this book is going for is a thin skin over the narrative which mostly fades to translucent, and feels almost jarring whenever we’re reminded of it. This is not a universe of wild and untethered imagination, no matter how many Rocketship Forests it throws at us. "Rocketship Forest", besides being a good name for a soccer team, just feels like someone tossed a bunch of little kid sci-fi and fairytale words in the air and plucked two out at random. We can do a lot better, and people have. Speaking of a wild anything-goes universe, there is also something in this book called the “Uncanny Bridge”, which is called that solely so they can imply that the expanse it traverses is called the “Uncanny Valley”. Because… that’s a thing nerds have heard of. I can see literally no other reason for that to be in there- besides to jar you violently out of your immersion in the story, I mean. It's a curious wink at the reader that signifies nothing, and is more confusing than anything else.
* * * *
Alright. Now listen up. I’m about to stop listlessly taking shits on these nice people’s hard work and say something positive.
I’ll do it right after I say this other thing. See, there’s a character in here who is the ghost of an edgy sarcastic teenage girl whose legs were blown off by a landmine. And this girl is like, so over being dead. Her guts are hanging out under her as she floats through the ether, as if the writer reused a character from a comic he wrote to be exclusively sold in Hot Topic. It raises a couple of questions about who this book is really aimed at, exactly. “A show for 13 year olds for 35 year olds”, to quote Hali again. But, surprisingly, this character is responsible for the one moment in this book that I found to be real and tender.
Alana, the mother, is feeding her baby. Ghost Girl says “She’s not hungry, she’s gassy. You’ve been burping her all wrong.” She teaches the new mother how to burp her baby, and then says “Oldest of seven here. I’m guessing you were an only child.” It might not sound like much, but on the page it’s a simple and human moment that has an authenticity that shines out from the rest of the book like a glowing ember. I’m guessing that’s because Brian K. Vaughn wrote this book when he and his wife already had one baby and were about to have their second, and experiences like this are part of their life's fabric. Interviews with him shed a little light on this matter.
"I wanted to write about parenthood…”
“…I realised it would be less boring if I set it in a crazy sci-fi fantasy universe and not just have anecdotes about diaper bags.”
Alright, well: strongly disagree, Brian K. Vaughn. I contest the notion that setting this book in the middle of a space war was the right choice at all. These characters do not talk like ex-soldiers who just gave birth in the middle of a bloody and brutal intergalactic holocaust, because Vaughn can’t (or doesn’t want to) project himself into those shoes. They talk like prickly milk-fed 30-somethings from Cleveland, Ohio. I’d rather take the anecdotes about diaper bags and trips to Walmart. And so, the only times when the characters come close to feeling real and believable is in the small moments when the war recedes and no-one is talking about being a ghost, or a dragonkin, or whatever, and their humanity shines through.
I don't think Brian K. Vaughn is a terrible writer. I just think he probably owns a lot more Magic: The Gathering cards and Buffy The Vampire slayer DVDs than I do. We probably wouldn't have a whole lot to talk about if we ever hung out. I find this book stylistically repellent, from the art to the writing to the presentation, and the nuggets of emotional truth that are definitely in there just can't be seen clearly through the murk. Brian K. Vaughn also wrote for ABC’s Lost, another thing that is considered to be a technically adept piece of writing but… isn’t my cup of tea either, let’s put it like that. Saga, though, is a cup of tea made for someone else entirely, in a cup I don’t like, poured from a cracked teapot in a Rocketship Tree on a collision course with Planet Fuck.
You meant well, Brian. Just, don't get mad when I give this tea to the plants.
Dan Abnett [w], Emilio Laiso & Luke Ross [a]
Marvel Comics
By Vincent Toups
The world's first super hero is getting back in the game to remind everyone why he set the bar for valor in the first place. Make way — Hercules is back! The creatures of ancient myth lingering in the present day are on the brink of extinction, with no place in the modern world. But Hercules has moved with the times, and only he can protect them against the crushing weight of the future. Clean, sober and determined, the Lion of Olympus gathers his deadliest weapons to face the Uprising Storm that threatens to wipe out the old ways forever — but which old friends and unlikely allies will stand with him? An age-old warrior battles to be a modern-day hero — and it will be legendary!
$17.99—comiXology
How do you write about comic books when your culture seems to be in the middle of a violent crisis? Or at least at the turning point of a decades of racism, extrajudicial killing, and the systematic suppression of one group of people by another.
Of course, I can hand wave this one: HERCULES is about a demigod adapting to the world around him, a world which is constantly changing. His own struggles with that world are contrasted with those of Gilgamesh, who is having a lot harder time of it. In Hercules, we can read in ourselves our own complex relationship with culture, which often changes faster than we want it and in ways we don't understand. Sure, we can write that article. But should we?
It is hard to sympathize with people who are having trouble accepting that fundamental change needs to happen. If sympathy is to be given to anyway, if it is to be pulled out of my comfortable, lazy head, I'd much rather pull it out for the people with the short end of the stick. Not the conservatives who are scared of what a more just world might mean for their comfortable place in it.
I live in a country which institutionalized racial slavery. A country which had the will to eventually destroy that institution but not the will to solve the underlying problems of race. A country which utterly defied and defiled the idea of the rights of human beings while holding itself up, at every opportunity, as an exemplar of those rights. Unfairness is written into the history of our treatment of black people, and that has often resulted in their outright murder.
And we haven't even gotten into our apparently unresolvable obsession with guns and its staggering two-facedness. In that context, what am I supposed to say about HERCULES?
Of course, I can hand wave this one: HERCULES is about escapism, fun. The world is a terrible place but at least we can all, sometimes, just tune it out and enjoy a nice story. That would be fine, except the world isn't really that hard of a place for me, personally. My life, except for the psychological discomfort of living in a world which seems intent on drinking, again and again, from the very fountain which is poisoning it, is peaceful, wealthy, quiet, comfortable, full of leisure and reflection. So praising HERCULES as escapism seems pretty sad.
I live in a country which is so intent on ignoring its problems of systematic racial and economic oppression that it has to come to people literally being murdered in the streets, and those murders being uploaded to youtube and tweeted about endlessly, before we start to think about solving the problem. And a country where as soon as we perch on the cusp of that discussion, the anger of the oppressed boils over, threatening to wipe out any chance for a meaningful discussion. Progress seemed so close until recently, and now, violence, which prompted that progress, threatens to shut it down, and to usher in decades of further stalling, oppression, and terror.
What can we say, then, about HERCULES?
Of course, I can hand wave this one: HERCULES is a story about the use of force and its opposites, about the way our own little powers can be dramatized, processed, and redirected. About how we can face violence and move past and through it while keeping our heads on our shoulders.
Maybe there is something to this, final, interpretation. When I was a younger man I went to the Angola Prison Rodeo (a fitting recollection for a review filled with our shameful problems with racism) and there I saw prisoners risk their bodies for trivial prizes. That was a spectacle which now seems unbelievably terrible in retrospect, but I can say one thing about it: if you watch a person bucked from a bull get up, dust himself off, and walk away to riotous applause, and if you can, for one minute, separate that from all the insanity of the world, you can reflect a little: hey, maybe we aren't as fragile as we think we are. Maybe I can stand in a little more, take a little bit more of the damage the world has to dish out onto myself, rather than letting it all pile onto the dispossessed, the discriminated against, the weak. Fear is what keeps me quiet. Keeps me from the protest lines. If a little cartoon of violence helps me face that fear, then maybe that is enough to ask of pop culture.
It seems unfair to ask all this of HERCULES, but media needs to stand up to a world which can be horrible as well as beautiful. It needs to stand up in peace and in strife, and it doesn't really get to choose.
Ben Templesmith's Wormwood moves beyond the simply bizarre and into the sublime lunacy that is Lephrechaunia as Wormwood and his posse search for the Leprechaun Queen, the only being capable of lifting the terminal curse that our hero has contracted. But if rabid leprechauns and inter-dimensional travel isn't enough to get your head spinning, enter the Squidmen, a terrifying collective of "gatherers," hell bent on ingesting everything they can get their tentacles on!
$7.99—comiXology
Wormwood reads like a quilt made from the contents of the wastebasket next to Mary Shelley’s toilet. Wormwood is a lie I'd tell in middle school to impress a boy. Wormwood’s author walked into a Costco and asked how many Draculas he could buy for a dollar.
I would not ever allow Wormwood to housesit for me, let alone water my plants. The guy who wrote Wormwood did his field study in the parking lot of a Spirit Halloween store. Wormwood needs to start wearing a shirt when it goes jogging because it’s making everybody sick.
Wormwood’s clothes smell like hot dogs and pee because it’s too busy jerking off to do laundry. Wormwood’s favorite candy is reduced price candy corn from Walgreen’s the day after Halloween. Wormwood’s OKCupid profile lists its favorite TV show as “all anime”.
When I finished Wormwood, I called both my parents to apologize. Then I asked my mom for my biological father’s phone number, and she pretended not to have it. I saw Wormwood being auctioned off at a charity benefit, and some guy yelled “NEGATIVE 100,” and four hours later, the auctioneer was writing a check for 2.5 million dollars. The President of the United States read the first four panels of a copy of Wormwood he found on the bus and proceeded to forget all of the amendments, permanently, which got him fired.
I can’t tell if I should warn the human race about Wormwood, or let them find out about it themselves as a punishment for World Wars I and II. Wormwood is a preschooler’s 401k. Wormwood is the net worth of the Nebraskan mafia. Wormwood is The Matrix if Neo spat the red pill into Morpheus’ toilet and then climbed out the bathroom window.
Wormwood is a straight-to-VHS documentary about a grown man who forgot how to tie his shoes. Wormwood is a quilt made from all the frowning Tweety Bird sweatshirts at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, IL. Wormwood is the comic your dad said you couldn’t read until you turned 15, and when he snuck into your room to flip through it while you were at school, he was relieved.
Wormwood is an argument you had outside of a Taco Bell with a guy who leaned up against your lime green Honda Fit and scratched the passenger side door. Wormwood is a 1 hour and 30 minute flight with no air conditioning. Wormwood is patient zero of paternal disappointment. Wormwood goes to the County Fair every year exclusively to find a girlfriend.
Wormwood keeps its eyes shut in the shower so it doesn’t have to look at its body. Wormwood is the reason you can’t bring more than one lighter on an airplane. Wormwood’s favorite platitude is “it is what it is”. Wormwood writes “God is dead” in hotel bibles. Wormwood is the artistic and literary equivalent of Heinz E-Z Squirt Purple Ketchup.
Wormwood sprays Axe Bodyspray on his genitals instead of washing them. Wormwood cuts in line at the DMV. Wormwood bought its 15 year old niece wine coolers because it was too spineless to say no and went to jail, and its uncle paid the bail because his aunt told him to because she didn’t want her sister to get mad at her. Wormwood is the perfect inverse of arduous physical exercise and a healthy diet.
Wormwood will not listen to Elvis because it’s afraid of dying on the toilet. Wormwood habitually skips his community college courses to go hang out at Panda Express. If you opened up the dictionary to the word “Impotent”, you’d see a map to Wormwood’s house. Wormwood yelled at its mom because it couldn’t find its Guitar Center membership card.
Wormwood is neither the alpha or the omega. Wormwood is the Chaotic Evil of adult coloring books. “Wormwood” is the password to the VampireFreaks account you made when you were 13. Wormwood won’t just cop up to enjoying the Harry Potter books. If Wormwood had three wishes, the first one would be for a butterfly knife, the second one would be for a girlfriend, and the third one would be for another butterfly knife.
Wormwood can flush the toilet, but just chooses not to. Wormwood got mad when they blocked porn from the free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s. Wormwood carries around a semiautomatic weapon for no other reason than open carry being legal. Wormwood eats Slim Jims at the BP near his duplex and walks out without paying for them. Wormwood threw up on the floor of a Wal-Mart and left without telling an employee. Wormwood has been wearing the same underpants for six days in a row. Wormwood is The Addams Family’s poolboy. Wormwood is the shoplifting of misdemeanors.
Wormwood Periscoped itself fucking a Jack-o-Lantern. It got seven views.
Fred Van Lente [w], Wellinton Alves [p], Scott Hanna [i], Guru EFX [c]
Marvel Comics
By Roger Burton
Will the fearsome flesh-eaters gain access to dimension-hopping technology that will make the entire multiverse their all-you-can-eat buffet? All that stands between them and their slaughter on infinite earths is the resurrected team of Earth's Moldiest Heroes!
$1.99—comiXology
This MARVEL ZOMBIES franchise is, itself, a zombie. It has survived for far longer than it should have since its inception in 2005. It has become increasingly mindless as time has passed, if we assume a perfectly average start and measure the progress (or lack thereof) between 2005 and 2009, when MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN #5, the subject of this review, was published. It shambles on to this day, and it will likely take a Herculean effort to kill it for good.
Most importantly, it stinks.
This is the second time the all-knowing Comic Roulette has spat out a zombie-themed comic for me to read and review. If you’ll remember, the first one was very not good. This one is better, although that’s not saying a lot. It trades trashy male-gaze sexuality for Marvel Characters while keeping the one common thread that connects most zombie-centric forms of media: gratuitous gore and dark “comedy.” I put the word comedy in scare quotes there because more often than not these forms of media are not funny. I recognize that’s a matter of personal taste, but let’s be real.
Whatever the lowest common denominator is, I don’t think I’m a part of it, and I’m thankful for that. I don’t want to be the kind of person who laughs at jokes like this.
Hahaha, he said “butt.” He’s the Hulk, and he’s a zombie, and he said “butt.” I was scientifically engineered to equally appreciate all three of the levels this joke works on. I am the person from your creative writing elective at high school and/or college who always volunteered to read his story first and included the TARDIS in one of my stories and also wrote precisely three blog posts about how the girl I used to think was cute didn’t know the difference between Marvel and DC, ugh.
Granted, the word “butt” is intrinsically funny. But it unfortunately got canceled out by the other two things.
But yeah, the whole thing is like that. “It’s zombies, but they’re Marvel characters too!” is both the title and pitch. And there’s obviously an audience for it. I’d imagine the Venn diagram of “people who like Marvel” and “people who think zombies are cool and/or funny” has a pretty big midsection. As a result, there have been like a fucking dozen iterations of MARVEL ZOMBIES since 2005. Honestly, I hadn’t even heard of this phenomenon at all until I got assigned this comic. That shouldn’t be too surprising, though, considering I’m outside the jurisdiction of that aforementioned Venn diagram entirely.
It’s not that I don’t like Marvel, it’s that I just don’t care. In my first CR review I opened with an admission about my jack shit prior knowledge about the X-Men universe. It gets worse, folks. I have seen the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man flick as well as the two Amazing ones, but when we get to that elaborate, intricate, cash cow “Marvel Cinematic Universe” shit just goes totally out the window for me on a personal level.
I have seen one MCU film. It was Guardians of the Galaxy. I enjoyed it a great deal, but it functioned mostly as a stand-alone film (although there was some obvious setup for later connections to the rest of the gang) so I didn’t walk away with any need to binge-watch Everything Else. And, like, I’m sure it’s good. I’m sure there’s good stuff there. A lot of my friends are really into it. And when it comes to, hang on a second, actual comics, it’s been crystal clear for pretty much the past decade that Marvel has a way better handle on shit than DC does.
My sense of urgency for engaging with the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time (eleven fucking figures) just isn’t there. I don’t think there’s one cause for it. For one, I was a Tumblr user when The Avengers hit theaters, which means I actually have seen that entire movie, albeit in the form of gifsets focusing on haphazardly assigned sexual tension and, ahem, feels by the 90% of the userbase of that website that was wildly rubbing their asses against it.
For two, Robert Downey Jr. is a slimy guy.
For three, I just … don’t see movies in theaters anymore. I can count the number of movies I’ve seen in theaters this decade on one hand. I already mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy, I saw the latest Star Wars twice (my first engagement with THAT franchise), and then before that you have to go all the way back to Pacific Rim, Skyfall, and, like, I don’t know, Kangaroo Jack.
This is all coming from the same guy who hadn’t watched Finding Nemo until two years ago, so make sure you take it with the recommended grain of salt. I also haven’t seen any Lord of the Rings film, any Star Trek film, any James Bond film that doesn’t star Daniel Craig, any Fast and the Furious film, or any Star Wars film prior to The Force Awakens. I haven’t seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. Never saw E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? I actually have seen that one. It’s really good. But I haven’t seen The Godfather or its sequel, although I do know enough to know that the third one isn’t worth my time anyway. Haven’t seen Jurassic Park, either. The list goes on. You name it, there’s like a 90% chance I haven’t seen it and don’t especially care to any time soon.
So maybe that grain of salt should be more like a mound.
Jamie Delano [w], Richard Piers Rayner [p], Mark Buckingham [i]
Vertigo Comics
By Greg L. Mercer
Dabbling in the arcane arts can get you killed--but for John Constantine, macabre experimentation led to some far, far worse! Uncover the worst event of Constantine's life in part 2 of the 2-part tale that unearths the Newcastle incident.
$1.99—comiXology
One thing that tends to get on my nerves with stories about gods and monsters and superheroes is the timescale, though probably not in the way you think.
I do a Transformers podcast, so let’s take that as an example. The Transformers are more or less immortal. There’s guys around who have been alive since the dawn of time, guys who were present around the time God created existence. They’re treated as being Old, but since we are humans and only know how to treat and write and be humans, they are portrayed simply as Old Men.
Even the youngest, snappiest, baby-like Transformers tend to be millions of years old. The Autobot-Decepticon War lasted four million years, and nobody blinks an eye at that. A war, for four million years! World War II lasted six years and a day, and has some of the most dramatic events to occur in our species entire history. Imagine the types of battles and events that happen over four million years. That’s 666,666 World War IIs.
But, because humans only know how to write human things, four million years is pretty much treated exactly like six years and a day. There’s very little to explain what happened in those four million years. Instead we just get the names of big events, like Simanzi, the same way we have Pearl Harbor and such.
A being that lives for over a million years would behave totally incomprehensibly from what we as humans know. Look at how different a 30 year old acts from a thirteen year old, and that’s only a seventeen year difference. If you’re a million, you’ve gone through things absolutely unknowable for anyone else.
This goes doubly with any of the fashionable dystopian young adult fiction around these days. You built a form of society that can’t stand up to one unruly teenager? Like, teens aren’t hard to figure out, dude. They want to fuck and destroy things. They’re growing hair in weird places and swimming in hormones. If they are able to ferment a rebellion that overtakes North America (it’s always North America in these stories, we never find out what’s happening in Europe or China) then you did not do a good enough job providing them with pornography and victory gin. Try again.
The reason I bring this up is because it really distracts me any time we have a comic where humans interact with the supernatural. Hellblazer has John Constantine killing Nergal in this issue. Nergal has been around since the dawn of time, a demon of the highest order. Why does it make sense to anybody that John Constantine, some weird asshole born in the 20th century, would be able to kill Nergal after billions of years of this dude being super evil? Why does Edward Cullen, a vampire who has been alive since the Spanish Flu, fall in love with a girl who is born hundreds of years after him? Why does magic in Harry Potter become evident to muggles sometime in the early 21st century after hundreds of years of it being badly kept a secret?
The answer, of course, is because we’re humans and don’t have very good ideas of scale.
Hellblazer, at least in this instance, does a good enough job of convincing me. John is doing his thing: sweating out Nergal blood in a trailer somewhere and looking like Darryl Hall.
There’s a bunch of lead-up as to what is actually happening, but suffice to say, Nergal is not happy with John and wants to kill him. John would like that not to happen. Nergal is an all-powerful demon god and John is a dork who knows some spells. How’s he do it?
This rad new invention called Computers. This comic is from 1988. Neuromancer came out four years ago. Cyberspace, baby.
John’s old friend Ritchie conveniently happens to have uploaded his brain to a computer forever and is trapped inside. He sends John a gas bill for $20,000, which is a pretty funny joke for a 1988 comic book about demons and computers. Constantine picks up some hardware Ritchie left behind after his body vaporized, and we’re off to the races.
I think this is kind of a cute way of doing this. John goads the demon into playing a game; sure, demons like to play games. Unbeknownst to the demon, plugging his mind into a virtual world puts him and John on the same level in terms of power. It’s a new technology, made by humans, Nergal wouldn’t know anything about. With all my weird skepticism and lack of doubt-suspension about billion year old demons, even I would admit they probably don’t know what VR is.
The art for this issue is good. Constantine is never glamorized as a Cool Guy; he spends most of the issue covered in boils due to Nergal messing with him.
Part of me is a sucker for this kind of superhatched pop-art style. Maybe I’ve taken the bait and fully associated it with critically acceptable comics, like Sandman and Transmetropolitan. But I like the flat toning of the colors, and all the figures are very grounded and weighty. Everyone looks like they exist within a fully realized space, even if they’re literally not existing in a space.
As a modern lover of cyberpunk, it’s neat seeing these stabs at the genre from its prime, the late 1980s. Back when nobody really knew what computers could do, which meant they could do anything, including magic. It’s obvious people knew they were Powerful and Exciting, but other than play games and launch bombs they were totally amorphous in capability. Why not enter an infinite infoscape where data cowboys can outsmart demons? Beats getting tracked by the NSA.
Cullen Bunn [w], Drew Moss [p,i], Ryan Hill [c]
Oni Press
By Jesse Knowles
The touching story of a girl and her T-Rex ... with a healthy dose of collateral damage and monster conflict on the side. When the scientists of Cosmos Labs punch a hole through time and space, they pull a ferocious dinosaur into the present. The dinosaur imprints on teenage Jessica, proving to be more mischievous than vicious. But he is not alone. Strangely mutated prehistoric monsters begin attacking our world. What's a girl and her dinosaur-fighting dinosaur supposed to do?
$1.99, or Free with Membership—comiXology
Ah yes, your classic girl-meets-dinosaur story.
Terrible Lizard is about a fourteen year old girl named Jess who lives on what seems to be a secret military base where her father is under contract to help the military with their cool new science project, so she doesn't really know a lot of kids her age. One day something goes wrong with the “chrono-science” project her father is working on after they activate it for a brief test run and lo and behold, a Tyrannosaurus Rex appears! But the T-Rex isn't attacking anyone, and seems to have actually imprinted on Jess instead, and now wants to protect her. Jess gets the friend she always wanted, but is everyone else okay with just letting a T-Rex exist, even if it does seem relatively friendly?
I dunno, it's a cute story idea I guess. Who isn't a sucker for child/monster bonding stories? I immediately think of the upcoming Team ICO's The Last Guardian and how crazy people are for the premise of that game that it's still being talked about despite being repeatedly delayed for nine years, but also there's more than one instance in just this first issue that Brad Bird's The Iron Giant comes to mind. Military is your typical antagonistic role in this kind of story, immediately wanting to neutralize the potential threat without assessing the situation on a human level. I wonder if Colonel Brickchin will want to capture the T-Rex or use the temporal distortion for his own personal gain down the road?
My first instinct was to like Jess' design, but the more I thought about it the easier it was to figure out that Jess as a character is designed and written with as little feminine traits as possible (jagged hair, beanie, jeans and jacket, I mean she even skateboards which is pretty traditionally masculine), so as to get the best of both worlds: your protagonist is a girl, but boys will be okay with reading it too because there's no girl stuff. I'm not gonna dunk on Terrible Lizard for doing something lots of stories do, but it's increasingly frustrating to notice that writers will steer clear of writing more feminine characters in an otherwise all-audiences kind of story for fear of alienating half of their audience because Boys Won't Read Girly Stuff.
The dialogue is not great and kind of bad in some spots. Comics can sometimes get away with it because you're not hearing actually speak it, but for the people who verbalize dialogue in their head it makes parts cringey. Like their insistence on letting you know the computer voice is repeating “Sequence Initiated” for three solid pages despite serving no purpose and being actually quite annoying to listen to, or when Jess remarks that large dinosaurs make large messes and quips “No wonder they call you a T-Wrecks!” I know I'm being picky, but these are things that took me out of the story, not that the especially generic premise had me really engaged or anything.
The art's not terrible, but it's not great either. I'm not really interested in seeing where the story goes either because I'm willing to put money down that “Wrex” (yes she really names him that) will either die or disappear in the end, and it won't cover the same emotional impact or themes other stories with similar story beats accomplish. I don't see where this story has set itself up to surprise me in any way, and it's a shame because I was hoping I'd find it more charming or cute than I did.
There's just not a whole lot of interesting room to cover for a story like this, I feel like! I don't see how The Last Guardian is going to do anything unexpected either – stories like this tend to have a bunch of cute bonding moments, the audience is charmed by the monster role, and a crisis happens and the kid and the monster are separated, but not before both growing from their experiences. The Iron Giant nails this better than most because it's also a story about the Cold War and treating people who are different than you, as well as a story about having all the power in the world to choose who you want to be despite what people say you are. And it hits a lot of those same story beats, but it's smart about how to hit them and what hitting them means for the story it's telling. It's not just trying to make you cry, it's trying to teach you something as well.
How to Train Your Dragon is a pretty nice version of this kind of story as well. Similar story beats, another lesson about how to treat people who are different than you and doing away with traditions, but it doesn't rely on the death or departure of the monster to pull emotion out of you, and instead says humans and monsters can live together if they just took the time to understand one another.
I don't know. Terrible Lizard is fine I guess if you really love this kind of premise and are looking for another story like this to enjoy, but I personally think you could do a lot better. Hopefully I won't feel the same way about The Last Guardian, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Naif Al-Mutawa & Stuart Moore [w]
Lee Bradley & John McCrae [p]
Sean Parsons [i]
By Gilbert Smith
Things are really rockin' in Seville, where the 99 Steps Foundation is throwing a party to get to know their new neighbors. The problem is, it isn't just the band that's doing the rockin' but Tremor, a villain with some earth shaking abilities. Oh, and there's an 800 pound gorilla in the room too.
$1.99—comiXology
Fighting game combos are based on a bug in the release of the original Street Fighter II. Or maybe Turbo or Arcade Edition. I don't know, not gonna look it up. In any event, combos were not introduced into fighting games on purpose. In whatever Street Fighter game it was that first had the bug, players discovered that if you performed certain sets of moves, you could attack your opponent two or more times without their being able to block or move away or counter attack. This wasn't intentional, but it turned out to be the perfect gameplay mechanic to reward a player's ability and to force them to really earn every little piece of the opponent's lifebar they're taking away. For the next installment, Capcom decided to emphasize and expand the bug rather than fix it.
At a certain point, the smart thing to do is adapt to your audience. Would we still be playing fighting games today, at all, if Capcom had just patched that bug out, or would Street Fighter II be remembered as a neat little experiment that had this really cool exploit that you could do?
Without some kind of artistic purpose behind the process of adapting to your audience, all you've got is metrics and analytics and algorithms chunkin' out stuff that nobody really likes but people keep buying.
But what I'm talking about is Happy Accidents. Hanna Barbera used to have scenes where Magilla Gorilla would play in a band because a three minute pop song is three pages of script you don't have to write, and an opportunity to loop five seconds of animation for three minutes of screentime. Feature two songs, three songs on a show and that's half an episode for an afternoon of work. Hanna Barbera characters all sing lousy surf-rock songs because Hanna Barbera knows how to save money.
But isn't a rock band with an ape for the lead singer kind of a cool idea?
Superhero tropes are largely built on Happy Accidents that become deliberate artistic choices. Superman has that S on his chest because printing was so crappy back in the day that you wouldn't be able to tell which character was which without a chest-sized emblem to tell you. Then Batman did it, then everyone else did it, and now we go watch movies on IMAX screens where the characters still have the first letter of their name on their chest.
It's kinda neat that superheroes wear their names on their chests. What if we all took that much pride in our name and what it means?
Some of these things become important signifiers. The chest emblem lets us know that this is a superhero. Complex combos let us know that we're playing a skill-based fighting game. Some day, eating will be a distant memory, we'll all be drinking some junk like Soylent. But the sweeter protein shakes will still be dyed the color of fruit. Everything evolves away from purpose and towards the abstract with language and symbolism calling back to more pragmatic considerations.
Drop everything that signifies a superhero story and... you're not really doing a superhero story anymore, are you? ScarJo has godly superpowers in Lucy, but where's her cape?
In the past I've talked about comics being a medium of symbols. However elaborate the artwork may be, the image of Superman in a comic book registers as quickly as the word Superman does, the pictures are words. A panel is a sentence, a page is a paragraph, and comic book artists are just writers who are working way too hard.
Language is just stuff that has adapted to its audience so incredibly well that it doesn't even need to be depicted literally anymore. You can refuse to adapt to the audience, but sooner or later, you're not going to be speaking the same language as the people you're talking to anymore. And where will your artistic integrity get you when there isn't even a point in sharing your thoughts?
The 99 #27 mixes all the important superhero staples with a rock band that features a singing ape on vocals. It's an efficient, immediate way of establishing itself in terms of tone and content. A lot of the heroes in this story are little kids, so that's pretty fun.
It has the same vibe as like a Disney Adventures comic from the 90's... Or from the 00's or 2010's, I wouldn't know, I haven't read that magazine since the 90's.
On sight, you can instantly identify The 99 for what it is, and what it is is my favorite kind of comic book: a breezy way to kill 15 minutes on a summer afternoon. I'm not saying that that's the best thing that comic books can deliver, but it's considerably more than most do.
VERDICT: 3/5 Stars
Alexander Grecian [w], Riley Rossmo
Image Comics
By Leonardo Tomas
Hundreds of babies die! Elvis fights a half-naked old lady! Fairies are murdered! And El Chupacabra brings Joy to the world! All that, plus four extra story pages, in the conclusion to "Goatsucker." This may be the strangest comic book you'll read all year.
$1.99—comiXology
Good God, I fucking hate Wes Anderson and his whole generation. I hate it. You know what I'm talking about. The whole "quirky" thing was always style over substance, and it's OLD now. It's that meme with Steve Buscemi dressing as a skater kid and trying to relate to young people. Not that Anderson is aware of that. He's one of the "nostalgia" fools.
Let me tell you right now: Nostalgia is a waste of time. But nostalgic people are usually stuck in a moment where they believe their lives were better and held more promise, which I don't agree with, but understand. They miss being able to delusion themselves, which is a terrible idea. Now, what is even worse, is the habit of the people in the generation that is now between 30~40 years old of being stuck in their teenage years, the 90′s, in which culture was a big ball of cynicism. I get it, you thought Kevin Smith and South Park were funny when you were 15. You're 35 now. The joke is on you.
Now imagine what somebody stuck in the 90′s IMAGE comics would write in 2008. That is PROOF #5.
I’ve mentioned this before: unoriginal people have the terrible habit of taking something well-known and trying to make it quirky. It is a big part of what happened in the 90's. Popular culture reached exhaustion, people were too lazy to learn classical culture, and associated it with rich snobs. At the time, part of it made sense, having a formal education was what separated people into classes, and disillusioned with the whole system, regular folks noticed that being rich and famous wasn't actually something to strive for (Kurt Cobain affected all of us). So, y'know, gone was the idea that if you were a really good artist you could "get into" the high society. People didn't want to be part of that, and along with it they threw away the symbols high society held as status: classical culture.
It is interesting and does make sense, after a whole century debating high brow and low brow culture, people noticed some of the so called classics were not all that, and that some of "low culture" were actually good. It was a really weird cultural place; everyone knew Picasso was a genius that smashed expectations, but no one would want to be "a painter".
So a whole generation of nerds put the stuff they loved atop pedestals and circle jerked to it, demanding to be taken seriously. At a certain point they noticed their old heroes were not satisfying their desires anymore, so they decided that Comic Books Would Have To Grow Up With Them. The thing is, everyone spent their lives rejecting anything that was considered "adult stuff" and now their notion of "maturity" was Friday the 13th, so most "adult" comics were about tits and gore.
And since so many comic books were founded upon the skeleton of old myths and folk tales, a bunch of people decided to revisit them. It's fair enough, after all, so many of these stories were much darker in their inception. The thing is, these writers were raised on entertainment and anti-intellectualism, so instead of pointing out all of the ways in which Little Mermaid or Red Hiding Hood were about female coming of age situations, they simply said "Hey, what if Snow White fucked all the 7 dwarves?"
Which is why SANDMAN stands head and shoulders above everything else that was happening at the time. I imagine it has something to do with Gaiman being an english bloke, so he probably had at least a bit of a classical education. I mean, he riffs on Shakespeare, and it is more interesting than "hey, some of these expressions mean sex". He probably had to read a book or two, and as we can see, wanted to be a book writer all along. But the dude was too polite and too smart to consider Comic Books below him, so instead of doing that "frustrated movie maker doing comics" thing he actually made Comics That Defied Stereotypes.
Sadly the other "scene kids" wanted to do something "as cool as what Gaiman did" but didn't know what that could be, or didn't have the intellectual tools for it. So they did what they could. Some of them did some actual good. Some of them put capes and chains on Venom.
WATCHMEN was such a good example of an adult comic book. Of what super heroes would be in a world like ours, of how to analyze super-hero discourse and how it corresponds to our actual world. But so many kids were educated to only pay attention to the bright colors instead of the colorful dialogue, or simply didn't have the understanding that a lot of it was satire, and decided to double down on it. It's like someone watching Spaceballs and instead of seeing it as the joke it is, thinking "Heck yeah, that's what Star Wars needed, a Big Space Robot at the ending" and deciding to do that movie.
So, the 90′s were a weird moment. A lot of people were trying to make fun of old stereotypes, of taking things seriously, while doubling down on stuff they didn't understand were satiric all along, and making them extra serious. The kind of people who don't see how WATCHMEN is satire and get mad at any mention of fun in BATMAN. People who are so afraid of growing up and taking responsibility, they want to be a teenager forever, and want you to understand how Serious it is to make a movie that talks about Hulk's penis, and how pointing out that's dumb is censorship. Yeah, these guys are nothing new.
It's a paradoxically ridiculous state of mind, perfectly exemplified by googling “Kevin Smith Jorts”. (I'm all for wearing what makes you comfortable, it's more of a dig on not being able to decide between pants and shorts, which is totally okay btw.)
So, below the Vertigo Serious Players, were the Vertigo try hards. Garth Ennis figures in that team in his worst moments, but let's not forget the dude was pumping out like 20 comic book scripts a month in the 90’s (I'm serious, look it up). Below that was Marvel and DC putting jackets and hoodies on their heroes. Below that was Chester Cheetah and Sonic, mascots made for kids, disguised as a kid's notion of what being adult and cool means. Below that was Image comics.
All you have to do is look at Spawn. Spawn is what you get when your 15 year old kid shows his 12 brother's friend Venom and the younger kid tries to impress the older one. And Spawn was one of the least shitty things Image had to offer.
So, those demented menchildren not only made a living making shitty comics, they inspired a generation of people who think that is the apex of culture. And PROOF is written by such people.
I don't even need to get into the undertones happening here. This is plain crap. The art is actually not that bad, but the story is pretty much "fairy tales that fuck and kill", with the whole trope of "that traumatic event you lived at age 15 was actually caused by a being from another dimension, and by the way, you're the chosen one, but like, ironically" nosing in.
I'm sorry for talking so little about the comic and so much about the kind of crap that inspired it, but there IS nothing to this comic, it's a bunch of tropes smashed together, because that's what the majority of people who are making comics and books and movies and videogames do now. They were raised on empty epiphanies and cynicism, taught that any kind of earnest relationship or work is fake, and never bothered defying that. They were raised with rebellion as the biggest marketing trend and never noticed it was just another buzzword. They watched Nirvana on MTV but didn't pay attention to a word that Kurt Cobain said. They are all Arseface, for those who have read or are watching PREACHER. With the difference that Arseface noticed his mistakes and changed his heart, earnestly trying to be better after his accident. Which is why he gets a happy ending.
These fools can only speak in and repeat references to pop culture and so they're fated to keep consuming and regurgitating it. Steer away from this crap.
Score: “Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing” out of a Birdman
Nick Abadzis [w], Elena Casagrande [a], Arianna Florean [c]
Titan Comics
By Jesse Knowles
The Doctor and Gabby are still caught between two factions as modern humanity is born. Neanderthals and Cro Magnons clash, and their actions will shape the direction taken by humankind in the millennia to come! Plus: Cindy discovers an alarming secret back in NYC... and in deep space, Anubis grows impatient!
$2.99—comiXology
Am I being punished? Did I do something to deserve a Sherlock Holmes comic followed immediately by a Doctor Who comic? And how can I make it up to you so that this situation never happens again? At least with Sherlock I can walk away entertained.
That brings me to my big problem with Doctor Who, actually – I genuinely don't understand the appeal of this series. I don't think I've given it a fair chance, honestly, but I've seen enough of it by now that I would normally have a general idea of why people like it, I think. It worked for me and Star Trek, a series I didn't have the pleasure of growing up on but absolutely see the appeal of now. But Doctor Who completely eludes me. Is it supposed to be cornball and goofy and fun to laugh at or with? The way fans get totally invested in it says otherwise to me.
Maybe it's really enjoying the various actors who play the Doctor. In that case I'm at a loss – I typically don't enjoy much of anything based on actors alone. But also the concept of a character played by multiple actors as various reincarnations is a really fascinating idea to me and I want to explore the series just for that idea! I mean the fact that the show has managed to exist for this long and gotten a second wind is a pretty cool feat on its own, right?
Unfortunately my few experiences with Doctor Who have been largely unfulfilling, and this comic is not much different. It stars the tenth Doctor, whatever that means to you, and it's the end of a story that's been told over several issues I can only assume, about the Doctor and his current companion arriving at a time/world where there's a bunch of primitive men and women, and also I think a few aliens from the future/present maybe are watching them? There's a crisis, though, as an alien race has been kidnapping these prehistoric-like men and these aliens are infamous for reselling primitive races to the highest bidder for whatever nefarious purpose they may be buying them for. The Doctor uncovers one of them disguised in plain sight, a conflict ensues, uh also I guess the entire world is revealed to be a simulation in a giant room or something? I don't know, I'm at the tail end of a sci-fi story that's worth about as much as a quarter.
Prior to this comic the only episodes of Doctor Who I've seen were the tail end of a weird monster one which I barely remember anything of, and a Christmas episode that took place on a ship I think? Some wild stuff happened there including I think the sun possessing some people and killing them? Also I remember a new episode at the time airing and this ridiculous sequence where the Doctor drove a motorcycle up the side of a heavily windowed building. All of this sounds cool as heck! I don't mind a story getting weird for the sake of being weird, and I can certainly dig sci-fi for entertainment. But like, I don't know, none of it grabbed me when I was watching it at the time. Neither did this comic.
Maybe it's the way the Doctor carries himself in general? I'm sure there are lots of interesting little quirks each incarnation of the Doctor has, but in general he's a character that knows more about the universe than you do at all times. I never thought something like that would bother me before, but it makes it extremely difficult to relate to him or get too invested in the stakes. I mean, sure, there are definitely major conflicts we need to solve, but if we don't even fully understand how the immediate universe works and our protagonist does but refuses to explain himself until he needs to, then what's the point? I'm clearly watching a protagonist who doesn't care if I watch him or not. And if his many companions are supposed to be our relatable point, I've never seen enough of them that makes any of them differ from each other beyond Attractive Hip Young Go-Getter Woman. I'm sure I'm wrong about that too, but I don't know! I never hear anything about anyone in this show but the Doctor.
I think... in the end Doctor Who is way more interested in fun sci-fi elements and worlds than it is character storytelling, which I think is what holds me back from enjoying a series like that. Also I think my time to enjoy Doctor Who has come and gone – the second wind has all but come down at this point as people move on to other, newer long-form series to obsess over.
Ah well. It's just one of those things I'll write off as not for me I guess. Anyway, this comic honestly isn't that bad. The art is pretty good, the writing is coherent even completely out of context, and if I were a diehard fan I'd probably really dig it.
Michael Bracco [w,a]
Alterna Comics
By Roger Burton
Novo, the wasted messiah of the Aquans and the Terans, finds himself stranded on a new and foreign world, populated by a powerful feline tribe known as the Xennons. Finding an immediate connection with a species whose women and children are threatened by horrid beasts known only as The Enemy, Novo realizes that he may be able to help this world in a way he could never help his own.
$6.99—comiXology
RATING: 2 OUT OF 5
This review contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Why? Well, you’ll find out.
This week’s comic, NOVO VOL. 2, was described to me as some “off brand Aquaman shit. Or Cthulhu maybe, I dunno.” It’s not really anything like Aquaman, outside of the main dude looking like a fish man. Cthulhu is a bit closer, but not close enough. It’s like what if Quantum Leap and Thundercats crossed over.
I should mention I’ve never seen an episode of Quantum Leap.
As this is the second volume of a comic that ostensibly has an overarching story, I’m put in an interesting place since I have not read and admittedly do not plan to read the first volume. The story is not so far advanced as to be completely inaccessible to someone unfamiliar with the universe, but it has progressed enough to where there are some very basic things I’m going to know approximately jack shit about.
Before we get into anything, we’re greeted with a portrait of our protagonist (who I guess is the titular Novo) and his mother with the quote “Every hero has a purpose.” So this story is very upfront about what kind of a story this is. It’s a journey of self-discovery, self-realization, of someone who doesn’t know what their place in the universe is finding out what that place is.
He obviously hasn’t found that place yet, and neither he nor I seem to have any idea where the fuck he is or what he’s doing. But there’s cat people involved, and also an abomination exiled from his people returning for revenge, and then some good old-fashioned self-sacrifice.
Yeah, our main dude dies. He delivers the Promised Child back to the Promised Land but the Promised Archers mistake him for a Promised Enemy and 360 no-scope him. Turns out that seems to be the point of the story.
This is I guess the afterlife and I guess that’s his mom. Good god those titties are saggy. Interesting artistic choice. Anyway. He served a purpose, died, and learned a lesson. But wait! His work is not yet done, because you can’t very well kill of the titular character in a story and keep them dead unless you are one hell of a storyteller. So we reboot, I think.
A rock lands on a distant planet and some people find it and our main dude is inside. Gotta learn another lesson! Gotta benefit some other people!
I can’t help but think of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. [AUDIENCE GROANS] I know, I know, it’s been run into the ground, but hear me out. If you’re not familiar with it somehow, here’s a quick primer. Link has 72 in-game hours to stop the moon from crushing an isolated town and probably fuck up some tides too. Link can travel back to the start of that timer whenever he wishes, retaining the player’s memories and key items that are collected, but—and this is important here—everyone else starts back at square one.
The best part of that game, the thing that sticks with me after all these years, is a sidequest associated with completing the “Bombers’ Notebook,” which is basically a game mechanic that tracks the people you encounter and how you can help them during your journey. A pair of the characters in that notebook are named Anju and Kafei, who are engaged to each other. Kafei, however, goes missing shortly before the events of the game. Oh no!
As it turns out, he was turned into a child by the Skull Kid and the ceremonial wedding mask he had was stolen by a thief. Yikes! The quest to reunite him and his betrothed is long and convoluted, so much so that to fully complete the quest you need to go through the entire three-day cycle twice. And if anyone out there says they completed it without consulting some sort of strategy guide or walkthrough, they’re likely lying. But the reward is worth it.
Ninety in-game minutes before the moon crashes, you are present as Kafei and Anju reunite, exchange their vows and ceremonial masks, and offer you the Couple’s Mask as thanks. Then, they say that they are going to “wait for the morning together,” a morning that will never come. When Link resets, which pretty much has to happen, their memories are gone. All that work vanishes into the ether.
What does it mean for the player that the characters lose their memory? When you do finally stop the moon and beat the game, will the things you worked so hard to make happen in other timelines still happen anyway? This sort of narrative works a lot better for a video game than a static work like a graphic novel, because it removes a level of disconnect between the player/reader and the main character. I quite like it, and I don’t have satisfactory answers to those two questions I asked. But that’s fine.
Sometimes asking questions is more important than knowing answers.
Ulises Farinas, Erick Freitas [w]
Jelena Dordevic, Adrian Bago Gonzalez, Hyeondo Park, Victor Puchalski [a]
IDW
By Roger Burton
Tales for the bold. Ideas for the strange. Ulises Farinas, Erick Freitas, and a cavalcade of new talents bring to life amazing fantastical tales: A world where dogs are more than they seem! A town terrorized by the devil's own horse! A murder-bot who's done killing! And cuddly teddy bears invade the planet!
$1.99—comiXology
This is the second anthology-style comic book I’ve been assigned to review. If it’s anything like the first one, we’re all going to have a bad time. So what are we waiting for? Let’s dive into AMAZING FOREST #4. Well, actually, you can’t dive into a forest. I mean, you could, I guess. Whatever. Review time.
My hopes for this anthology are immediately higher than that Other anthology. For one, I’ve actually heard of IDW. Two, instead of trying to tell several different story arcs, these all appear to be self-contained stories in each issue. IDW’s own description of AMAZING FOREST #1 pretty much confirms this: “A modern anthology that lends itself to a time when stories were short and ugly.” Was … was there ever a time like that?
“EDITH AND THE MURDERBOT”
Edith, an old woman, offers a Murderbot shelter even though no one else in this town seems to believe that it truly does not wish to hurt anyone. And then I think she frames him for murder?
In terms of story, I’ve seen worse. In terms of art, it’s actually pretty nice. It’s very rough, sure, but in a way that intentionally conveys a mood. Did any of the words I just said mean anything?
“CABALLO DE MORTE”
The title of this one translates to “Horse of Death.” Sounds right up my alley.
Wait a second.
I have no fucking idea what’s going on here. Let’s try another page.
Hmm. One more.
I think this comic is “too smart” for me.
“DOG EAT WORLD”
Thankfully, the next one up is pretty straightforward. If you guessed this was your standard fare “what if HUMANS were the PETS” story, you guessed right.
It’s pretty much average? Like, nothing bad about it. It’s just a story that’s been told before and probably more interestingly.
“THE LAST OF THE HUGABOOS”
Ahem.
This comic is also “too smart” for me.
OVERALL
I don’t know if it’s my taste being too highfalutin or not highfalutin enough, but none of these comics really spoke to me. Not even in an aggressively negative way, because at least with THE ASTEROID #1 I was able to roast it like a Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner for the whole family. I can’t really find anything here other than the fact that a story whose title translates to “Horse of Death” managed to find a way to deeply disappoint me.
So here’s my pitch for a much better story titled “Horse of Death.”
Picture if you will a perfectly average horse in every way, shape, and form. There is however one way that horse is not average and that is the fact that he is an immortal horse. He has no way to communicate this information to anyone else because he is a horse and cannot talk. His wishes, wants, needs, and desires are that of a perfectly average horse. He wants to eat oats and hay, shit wherever he wants, and occasionally find a mare to hook up with.
There is another twist. It is always good to have a second twist that generally does not get mentioned when you mention the first twist. The second twist for “Horse of Death” is that anyone who rides this horse is cursed to die within twenty-four hours. Fate will find a way. I think what I’m describing here is basically just “Final Destination But With A Horse.” And you know what? That’s fine. I never saw any of those movies but like any other form of media ever, it would definitely be a lot better if you threw a horse in there for no reason.
I should also mention that the horse in question is the hero and protagonist of our story. All humans are strictly minor, fleeting characters. Eventually, you could piece together the fact that humans would start to figure out that there’s a sort of curse associated with this horse, and also that it does not age or die. But it’s not malicious. It’s just a horse. A horse … of death.
[“THEME FROM TWIN PEAKS” PLAYS]
I will take my millions of dollars in royalties and sales now, please and thank you.
This would also be a very easy series to franchise, which is important because nothing is worth anything if you can’t make a sequel to it. I mean, even “The Nut Job” is getting a sequel. Because the horse is immortal, his fun-for-the-whole-family adventures are quite literally never-ending. They made like fifty “Land Before Time” movies and I’m sure we can squeeze “Horse of Death” for far more. Maybe we can even do like the Air Bud franchise and make a spinoff where we follow the wacky adventures of the Horse of Death’s kids, who can talk now.
Did you know Don Knotts was in Air Buddies? Did you know it was his last film?
Well, now you know.
I’m going to go now. I have to get ready for the “Horse of Death” media tour. The international market really loves it.
RATING: COULD YOU IMAGINE THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW WITH ANDY AS THE COMEDIC FOIL TO BARNEY. WELL THAT’S ORIGINALLY HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO GO. HOW DIFFERENT DO YOU THINK THE WORLD WOULD BE IF THAT HAD BEEN THE CASE. THIS IS SOME BUTTERFLY EFFECT SHIT WE’RE ON. IF THEY EVER MAKE A SEQUEL TO THAT MOVIE (WHICH THEY ABSOLUTELY WILL AT SOME POINT IN THE NEAR OR FAR FUTURE) IT SHOULD BE ABOUT WHAT WOULD BE DIFFERENT ABOUT THE WORLD IF BARNEY FIFE HAD BEEN THE CAPABLE CONSTABLE AND ANDY TAYLOR THE BUMBLING BUT LOVABLE SCAMP. FOR SOME REASON I AM INCLINED TO ARGUE THAT THE GULF WAR WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, BUT I DON’T KNOW IF I COULD JUSTIFY THAT.
Scott Snyder [w], Greg Capullo [a]
DC Comics
By Gilbert Smith
After having his face sliced off one year ago, the Joker makes his horrifying return to Gotham City! But even for man who's committed a lifetime of murder, he's more dangerous than ever before. How can Batman protect his city and those he's closest to? It all leads back to Arkham Asylum...
$16.99—comiXology
From the first chapter, of the main five-issue clothesline of this thirty-issue arc, Batman #13, I'm impressed at the extra effort that has been made to sort of “follow the story.” So much comic book writing feels like it sticks so strictly to the outline. The outline for a crime story tells you who steals what, who kills who, and who takes revenge over it. It's the nuts and bolts, the mechanics that move you from one scene to the next, but it's very hard, in an outline, to get to the place where Commissioner Gordon is hiding his stash of cigarettes around town and challenging his squad to find them. It's tough for an outline to get you to the place where the Joker's big scary reveal is that he knows about the cigarettes, and he knows about the pack in Gordon's apartment, under his bed, where the Joker has been hiding while Gordon sleeps.
You probably don't start writing a piece of a sprawling comic book story arc without an incredibly detailed outline, and that's probably why so many comic stories are a template-driven series of action scenes, command-room relays and investigation sequences. It's difficult enough developing character through a list of story beats, and even more difficult to write a decent Joker tale with a blueprint for what's supposed to happen at what point in the story. In Batman #13, there is a feeling that writer Scott Snyder, while getting us from point A to B to C in a way that doesn't contradict the rest of the arc, found many opportunities to let the Joker's behavior surprise him.
Capullo and Glapion do some stunning work throughout, especially that big splash panel of the Joker at the end, revealing his new look. In the art and the writing, there is a clear effort for this to not be a business-as-usual Batstory, but one of the ones worth reading.
The next issue kicks off with Batman trapped in a tank slowly filling up with green glowing goo, and then there's a surprisingly effective moment where Bruce realizes Alfred is missing. Batman goes to visit Gordon at home, who's now paranoid and keeping a gun in bed with him. Like a solid suspense writer, Scott Snyder takes the time to build a tense, unsettling mood. So many superhero stories jump efficiently from point to point, Death of the Familyshows us the rising storm, the overcast skies and the warm breeze blowing through the heroes' hair before the hurricane hits. It's more than I expect of a superhero “event” arc in the 2010's.
We get a lot more shots of the Joker with his severed face strapped to his head this time in a sequence where he has an almost-Deadpooly monologue about how routine his encounters with Batman have become. Then he poisons an aqueduct instead of using it as a threat to dangle over Batman's head.
At this point I'm just listing cool stuff that's in the comic. But how often do I do that? Death of the Family takes the reader on a ride. It's one of those stories that comes along every decade or so in order to darken up the Joker, to make him less predictable, less of a talking-killer cliché, and more of the madman he's supposed to be, a guy who's actually kind of difficult to write for because he shouldn't be doing the things that lazy writers have their villains do in order to generate clear goals for the heroes and enough content to keep the wheels turning.
A lot of the superhero comics I review for this blog, you could replace the heroes with any other heroes and the villains with any other villains. Death of the Family couldn't be told without Batman as the hero and the Joker as the villain. From the opening moments with its superstitious omens to the climactic showdown with a flaming horse and a Joker-toxin-fueled brawl among the Batfamily and flies buzzing around the rotting face Joker has strapped to his noggin, the finale where Joker chooses death over hearing Batman whisper his real name, into the resolution with the Joker's indifference to what's behind the Batmask and the twist with the Joker's little book, this is absolutely a Joker story, and one of the best. When a writer is really having fun with the Joker, the aim is to stay true to the character by taking him to demented new heights. Exploring a new angle on the Joker is not an act of reinvention, it's how you stay faithful to what's come before.
Y'know what this story arc is is it's an act of creativity, an effort at doing something more than push out the monthly content demanded by an increasingly niche market. It's so easy to just churn stuff out and keep the lights on, and so few professionals in any field aim for remarkability. Snyder, Glapion and Capullo try harder and deliver more.
Dan Abnett [w], Luke Ross [a]
Marvel Comics
By Vincent Toups
Hercules is back in the game, and the world is starting to remember why he set the standard for heroes right down through the ages. But has he left his reinvention too late? He's clean, he's sober, he's determined...but the world is fighting back. It's a darker place than even he imagined, and an all-powerful force is rising that could wipe out his kind and all the ancient ways of myth forever.
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Throughout my life, I have had dreams of human spaces succumbing to, integrating, or growing into more natural configurations. The earliest of these dreams, so remote that it seems as real as anything else from that period of my life (which is to say, not very real), involves buildings at the University of Lafayette being connected by elaborate, almost vermiform, passages, the hallways of which were filled with old books, Eames era orange couches whose attached cushions throw up enormous exhalations of dust when thumped, metal trash cans whose segments are peeling apart where they have been kicked and dented, their beige and green paint scratched and their exposed surfaces rusting. In the most recent dream the old house on our property, which we had torn down, and whose ceiling had collapsed in what must have been a torrential downpour, leaving the kitchen a stifling, obscure pile of lumpen shapes, had grown enormous. Through steep stairwells and narrow hallways, you could navigate this space, which was packed with old things, fallen apart, any pile of which might reveal some interesting slice of a past, defying solipsism by waiting there, existing, apart from you.
When I was a child my mother read to us from the book Mouse Woman and the Mischief Makers, a 1978 collection of stories based on the exploits of a Native American narnauk trickster who maintains the balance of the world by mediating between the human and the supernatural. People often pay mouse woman for her help by giving her string or fabric, which she loves to pull apart with her fingers into airy, fluffy balls of fiber. Thermodynamics as payment. In my own mind, there is a mouse woman who always wants to take stories and tear them into little nimbi. Knowledge is what is left over when you've torn apart everything which can be torn apart.
The Death Of The Corpse Wizard, a game I am working on, takes place in a universe (one utterly supernumerary to the game) where one set of gods has died and a new set of gods, conceivable as the scavenger organisms which are devouring their bodies, is coming into prominence. Cultural evolution as an organic process as an extraction of meaningful action at the expense of decay. Thermodynamics of culture.
In HERCULES #3, these forces are at work. Hercules, who lives in a pleasant urban setting and who shares an apartment with an even older mythical figure, Gilgamesh, seems to be embroiled in a conflict that involves the appearance of new cultural forces which may mean the end of his existence.
Marvel Comics has always been more interested mundane life than DC, but this interest seems to have become more pointedly directed at domesticity these days. Spider-Woman isn't just pregnant, that pregnancy involves lying around the apartment being uncomfortable, eating ice cream, and worrying about riding motorcycles. Hercules doesn't just live in an urban apartment with his mythical buddy, Gilgamesh is clearly depressed, laying around in sweatpants and watching a lot of television. Of course, super-reality reasserts itself eventually, in the form of cries for help from mysterious mystical forces or trips to outer space alien maternity wards, and, in this way, the comic book is a sort of mirror of our own lives, where mundanity is the rule, rather than the exception.
Even if all these characters leave their domestic situation eventually to re-engage with a larger-than-life universe, that simple grounding makes their stories intuitive to us, if not understandable. A frequent problem with these serial comics is that their elaborate stories and complex pile characters and abilities can be bewildering to the new reader. HERCULES #3 seems to offset those issues with its touches of domestic life. We may not be able to understand all the ins and outs, the portents and omens, the heroes and villains, we see on the pages of HERCULES #3, but we all have had a depressed roommate who isn't that bad of a guy but is going through a hard spot.
The teaser for HERCULES #4, I want to mention, shows the enormously muscled demi-god, cradling the dead or seriously injured, but also enormously muscled Gilgamesh. I like this. For one thing, Hercules's sexuality is not 100% hetero, although Marvel has talked its way around this issue in the past. But even homo-eroticism aside, I like the idea of men expressing actual emotional attachment to one another. Anything which widens the acceptable modes of being for masculinity is ok with me (as long as they aren't widened at anyone else's expense).
So, HERCULES #3 is a well illustrated, engaging, not particularly obscure, well-grounded piece of work. I'd like to read more of it, I think, just on the strength of a novel set of characters interacting in a novel way, in a relatively familiar environment.
