Adlard is a wonderfully naturalistic artist who's great at drawing people actually just talking, which happens a lot in this story. Particularly in this new volume, if you didn't see the zombies, you could swear that Adlard is drawing some kind of bedroom drama or a character driven piece about people trying to live up to their own personal images of themselves. And that's actually a pretty good description of The Walking Dead for the past couple of years, only with zombies thrown in between the bedroom parts.
It’s a strange, short tale that takes one or two odd turns, particularly a brief passage where Blackburne becomes some kind of carnival act, sharing mystical visions with an audience. It shows just how far Blackburne has fallen from the path of science and inventing. Gallaher’s story is heavy, cramming a lot of plot into the book and Steve Ellis does a good job keeping it moving along.
Levitz practically pioneered the six or seven part storyline in super-hero comics but he seems to have forgotten that you need to focus on the characters to give the story its purpose. Maybe he needs to go back and read “The Great Darkness Saga” and see how it’s supposed to be done.
The best part of Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown #1 may just be that Lemire and Roberson wisely ignore that first part of the title, "Flashpoint." There's nothing linking this issue to DC's mega, continuity changing series. Lemire and Roberson don't feel like they're creating a continuity-heavy tie-in book. They're just writing and drawing the first issue of a three issue miniseries.
With Golden riding shotgun, Mignola puts all the familiar elements of his stories that we're used to in this book but the book never feels as frantic or adventurous as most of his stories usually do. This book, following Baltimore on his quest to find the vampire that killed his family is much sadder than most of Mignola's stories are. Baltimore's tale isn't one of adventure or destiny or even the day-in/day-out workings of fighting monsters; it's the story of one man trying to atone for his sins and that gives it a different feel than almost anything else that Mignola has done.
While Warren has his fun poking at the sexuality of superheroes who run around dressed as animals (could he be right that this borders on bestiality?) and anime fan service pointing out how Maidman's outfit is perfect for panty shots, this comic is disappointingly light on the tease and really doesn't have of anything beyond the story.
Larsen's art in this issue looks easy and fun. It looks like Larsen has fun drawing in a way that too many other artists don't. Each page is exciting and pure as Larsen gets out of his own way and lets the story happen. He's a natural storyteller as there doesn't appear to be much effort put into the book yet the story is tight and well done.
Riley is trapped in the world that he longs to regain and the world that he's stuck in. Brubaker and Phillips give him a lovely moment of clarity at the end of this first issues when the two worlds collide in a dream sequence. As he sees his past, not just as memories but as something that can be regained, Brubaker gives Riley a perfect moment of dark humor, a near perfect cliffhanger that lets you know just what Criminal: The Last of the Innocent is going to be about.
It’s been a while for one of these. While activity here at the Wednesday’s Haul base camp has been fairly dormant lately except for a review of the Thor by Walt Simonson omnibus, I’ve been active at Newsarama while being a major slacker at Popdose. Only now as I’m trying to put this together am I realizing that I went all of May without having anything over there. I’ve got 2 or 3 things for that site, hopefully one that will make Johnny Bacardi happy once I better wrap my mind around one of his favorite books.
(Below you can click on the links to be taken to the full review)
So just this week over at Newsarma, I wrote a bit about Cullen Bunn, Shawn Lee and Matt Kindt’s The Tooth, a book that I had a great deal of fun with.
“While maybe not as intense as either of those stories, The Tooth, a comic that only children raised on Steve Gerber, Man-Thing and a heavy dose of Stan Lee-inspired prose, could create and could love, provides the same thrills with extra doses of pure charm and fun. This is the comic that you wish you made when you were in 4th grade.”
And then there was the mess that was Green Lantern: Emerald Warrior #10:
“Remember when the Red Lantern Corps first showed up and all they did was vomit red age? That was the extent of their power: to be really, really angry and to vomit up red blood. Got that picture back in your mind? If it helps, the only truly memorable member of that Corps was a little, cute kitty cat who could puke rage with the best of them. Now imagine a whole book like that, puking up all the colors of the rainbow for twenty-some pages. Well, the good news is that you don't have to imagine it because Peter Tomasi and Fernando Pasarin give you that book and technicolor vomit in Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors#10.”
At least that week also gave us the collection of the excellent DV8: Gods and Monsters by Brian Wood and Rebekah Isaacs.
“Maybe as kids it's too easy to just become something like friends with the people that you're thrown together with. Maybe it's too easy to become comfortable with them and yourself until you're pushed into new experiences and have to try to figure out who you really are. Those are the kind of stories that Brian Wood is so great at telling, where the characters have to figure out if they're going to remain as kids and immature all of their lives or whether they're going to take on some kind of responsibility and become an adult. With this book, he blends that journey with super powers and creates the superhero equivalent of Lord of the Flies. There's a lovely sense of foreboding hanging over this book as you just know that these kids are completely unable to make the right decisions.”
And if superheroes aren’t your thing, there’s always Disney duck books like Boom Studios’ Walt Disney Treasury Donald Duck Volume 1.
“There are more than jokes to Rosa's stories though. Two entertaining stories show how well Rosa is at doing adventure stories with these characters. Spurred on by Scrooge McDuck's need to own everything, Donald and his nephews travel the world in these stories to bring back exotic treasures for their beloved, yet stingy, uncle. Rosa shows that these characters can do more than the jokey short stories that show how silly and simple they are. These adventure stories are rich and exciting, inspired as much by Indiana Jones as they were by Walt Disney.”
And sometimes you just want slice of life manga like Shunju Aono’s I’ll Give It My All Tomorrow:
“In a fascinating and funny dream sequence, the 42-year-old Shizuo ends up arguing with the 32-year-old, 22-year-old, 17-year-old and 15 -year-old versions of himself, moderated by "God," who looks a lot like a hip Buddha-like Shizuo. None of his younger selves can understand why Shizuo made the decisions and gave up everything until the 11-year-old Shizuo shows up and gives the older Shizuo a thumb's up. That's all the justification and approval that Shizuo needs to continue with his dream.”
Of course, you really want to know about Flashpoint #1 even though Flashpoint #2 just came out:
“Brother Adam and father Joe's artwork carry bigger emotional impacts as their lines and cartooning tend to be more expressive. Kubert, particularly here as he's inked by Wildstorm alum Sandra Hope, tends to look more like Jim Lee or Neal Adams, going for a strong realism in his artwork. He is a fantastic superhero artist, carrying through in his art all of the importance and heaviness that any script requires. There's little subtleness in Kubert's work as all of his characters show exactly what they are thinking. It makes for clear and concise artwork that looks strong and heroic but lacks any emotional punch.”
A book that really has struck me how much I’ve enjoyed lately has been Jonathan Hickman’s FF #3.
“FF is a book of mourning. Hickman is not letting his characters feel anything but numb as Reed, Sue and Ben are understandable emotionally drained but their pallor hangs over the ever growing cast that Hickman's assembling right now. There are no emotional highs or lows in FF #3, just a series of events as lost characters try to find and define their lives in a world that none of them wanted. It's not that any of the characters are good or bad in this issue. It's just that they're searching for a purpose, anything to justify where they are in the world right now, whether they've lost a dear brother and friend or whether they've always been defeated by the Fantastic Four and are trying to figure out how to score a victory.”
Sometimes you know just what you’re getting, like ‘Breed III #1:
“Stoner, who transforms into a large hulking demon to fight other demons, is a hero in spite of himself, kind of like Starlin's Dreadstar or Adam Warlock.”
And sometimes you don’t. like David Hine and Shaky Kane’s The Bulletproof Coffin:
“Comic books need to be dangerous again. They need to be full of seditious ideas that create more than simply an audience of consumers. Comic books need to lead the revolution of storytelling and what a better place to begin that revolution than with David Hine and Shaky Kane's subversive The Bulletproof Coffin, a paean to almost every evil and every mind-warping scenario that Dr. Wertham warned us about in Seduction of the Innocent back in the 1950s. After the comic burnings and Senate hearings, comics may have tucked their tails between their collective legs but Hine and Kane kept on producing their EC like books in secret, continuing The Unforgiving Eye, Shield of Justice and Ramona, Queen of the Stone Age for more issues than any price guide is willing to catalog. At least, that's what The Bulletproof Coffin would have you believe.”
Black Dynamite, a great movie but a not-so great comic:
“The odd thing is that we practically got a Black Dynamite comic book last year in Jim Rugg’s Aphrodisiac. Rugg’s book, while it has nothing to do with Black Dynamite, homages the same blaxploitation movies as well as comics from the 1950s to 1970s. The movie Black Dynamite and the comic Aphrodisiac are both as much about the medium of film or comics as they are about the genre of blaxploitation.”
I usually like to say that there’s two Spider-Man artists, Ditko and Romita, and everyone is trying to be one or the other. Martin is usually in the Ditko camp of Spider-Man artists but there’s something very Romita-ish in that last panel. It recalls this Romita cover:
Is it?
Can it be?
It is!!!!!!!
Going into the book, I wanted to hold it up as a companion piece to Jim Rugg's Aphrodisiac, but instead I talk about how Rugg's book if far more in the spirit of the Black Dynamite movie than this comic book is.Black Dynamite’s infiltration of the slave island and the freeing of the slaves should be a larger-than-life story of pain, of heroism, of wine, women and song. The movie is a good movie not because it told a strong story, but because it lovingly and equally embraced everything that was great and horrible about those movies, from the passion behind them to the lousy craftsmanship that was often on display on the screen. Ash’s script in the comic is played too straight laced to be either homage or spoof. There’s no love for the material or humor in the situation anywhere on display in this book. There’s no exaggeration in this book that gives you any sense that there’s any feelings or love behind this book.
Too many of the characters in Marijuanaman are just types; there’s the foxy babe, the sidekick, the hero, the wiseman and the greedy corporate bad guy. That’s it. That’s all you need to know about any of the characters in this book. Well, you need to know those types and that the good guys smoke pot. There’s sadly no depth to any of the characters or their situations in this book. There’s no investment in them or any nuance that would make this a book you would want to return to over and over again to discover anything new.