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Late night link catchup and public service announcement

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On Friday and Saturday of this week, I'll be wandering around C2E2, trying to stay out of trouble.  I think I may end up covering a panel or two for Newsarama but, at this point, I don't think I'll know what I'm doing until I actually get there.  Thanks to free wi-fi at McCormick Place, my phone, Twitter and Posterous posting to this site, I'm hoping to stay fairly well in touch this year and actually have something that looks like con coverage.  Of course, I may get there and just decide to wander aimlessly about, trying to avoid anything that looks like actual work.

If nothing else, send me a Twitter message (@scottcederlund) and let me know if you're around C2E2 this weekend.  I'd love to stop by and say "howdy, neighbor."

Now onto the business.  Even though I haven't posted here in over a month, I've been busy over at Newsarama.  Popdose or Johnny Bacardi, if you're reading this, I promise to post something at Popdose next week.

Here's a rundown of what I've been up to.  Click on the title to head over to Newsarama and read the full review:

Ruse #1Mark Waid gets to return to his Holmes and Watson, or in this case his Simon Archard and Emma Bishop, his girl Friday who is identified in the newspapers as “a blond woman was also somehow involved.”  Waid keeps the banter between Archard and Bishop quick and witty as these two Victorian characters have to solve the mystery of a murder of an Archbishop. 

Artifacts #6:  After the patient way [Ron Marz] built his plot, it’s a welcome release to have this issue bursting with energy. Every now and then, you need a release and this issue is it as characters hit, punch, shoot and rip apart other characters and demons.

Elephantmen #30:  In this issue Starkings also creates a new dynamic that will be fascinating to watch unravel in the future; the attraction of women to the Elephantmen, and to Hip Flask particularly, has been the unexplored core of the series.

Weapons of the Metabarons:  Weapons of the Metabaron is a beautiful book to look at. Charest and Janjetov artwork visually captures Jodorowsky’s imagination and creates worlds and characters that are mythic and grand. But the story itself doesn’t live up to the vision and its artwork, feeling more like a first act of a larger story, with no second act to follow it up.

Joe the Barbarian #8:  In these stories, it’s not so much the journey that Morrison took the reader on but the destination where he usually left the ending ambiguous enough to leave it open for interpretation; the reader has to be involved in the ending of Flex Mentallo or The Filth to dive into it and almost come to their own conclusion of Morrison’s story. For Joe the Barbarian #8, Morrison gives a very clear-cut ending and it’s far less satisfying than either of its predecessors.

Green Lantern #63:  Green Lantern #63 treads along at the same pace it has since the days of the Sinestro Corps War. In other words, it’s barreling along headfirst into yet another event storyline. 

Freak Angels Volume 5:  Duffield cuts loose, creating a new and exciting visual feeling for the story without losing the foundation that he has built. Beginning with a long monologue by a character previously shot in the head, Duffield keeps to his four-panel layout but just barely. Four panels aren’t enough to contain this character’s near-death revelatory ramblings as his story is so large and grand that it can’t be contained.

Turf #4:  The way Ross plays with these character contradictions pulls in the reader even if Ross and Edwards’ storytelling isn’t always as strong or clear as the story needs. 

Godland #34:  Even if you don’t quite know what is going on half of the time, Casey never loses the feeling of forward motion.

Silver Surfer #1: There’s nothing new in Silver Surfer #1. Instead of seeing the Silver Surfer in new locales and new situations, we see him doing the same old navel gazing almost every story about the characters seems contractually obligated to have.

Magdalena #5:  The lack of character or energy makes Magdalena #5 a generic book, with its pages full of words and drawings that mean nothing to the reader.

Reviewarama-- 2/16/11

Did you see what I did there?

Review-arama?

News-arama?

Get it? 

I'll be here all day, folks.  Tip your waitress.

So, onto business.  Here are quick excerpts and links to the past week of reviews at Newsarama.  As always, click on the books title to go to the page and you may need to scroll down a bit through the article to find my review.

Price writes a quick, fast paced issue.  While the first issue concentrated on a small group of people, Magus #2 reveals the true scope of their story, as the story builds around from the characters we found in the first issue, carry all the way to the White House with the President and his wife and carry it back to the beginning of time.  But as he creates the vast backdrop for Magus, he rushes through the story, building events and history while brushing past the characters.  We hardly know the two main characters at the crux of magic’s return even as we have to assume that they are starting the fight of their life.  He does give one nice moment for one character, as we get a good glimpse into his imagination of what he can do and then a few pages later we see just what he really is or isn’t capable of. 

As always, Guy Davis pulls everything together. His artwork shouldn’t work but there’s a weight and solidness in his lines that consistently makes B.P.R.D. one of the best looking books.

It’s a whirlwind of action in this issue but it’s like Mark Millar forgot that what made his original Ultimates book successful was the re-imagination of Marvel characters. There’s nothing in these characters in this issue that separates them from their Marvel U counterparts. Captain America is Captain America; Thor is Thor. What was great about Millar’s Ultimates is that the characters were recognizable but different. In this issue, they’re just recognizable.

For Johns, the moral compass of the Rogues has always been Captain Cold. Like Barry Allen, Cold has a set of rules that he lives by. While the Flash is running around trying to solve a murder mystery, the far more fascinating aspect of this book is Cold versus Boomerang. Boomerang needs to prove that he’s still a Rogue and I think that Cold wants him too. Captain Cold wants Captain Boomerang in the Rogues but he refuses to give his old comrade his place back. Johns isn’t just writing villains here; he’s writing brothers in arms. That’s been the best part of his Flash stories (and maybe why Flash: Rebirth feels so stiff— no Rogues in that book.) Sure, the book is called The Flash and it has to star a speedster (does it really matter if it’s Barry, Wally, Jay or even Bart?) but it’s the Flash’s villains and how they deal with the madness of life, death and resurrection that’s far more interesting than the murder mystery being bandied about.

Ollmann comes off completely and bluntly honest in the opening pages. He's funny, painful and deceptively open about how confusing it is to be a 40-year-old man. When he introduces Sherry Smalls into his story, that's where you've got to start wondering how much of this is autobiography. Like John, Sherry is going through her own crisis; mid-30s, single but in an on again/off again relationship more because it's easy than fulfilling. Being forced to choose between who she wants to be and who she's actually becoming, Sherri is actually going through the same turmoil as John. Both characters are going through the same crisis but Ollmann shows how their own life experiences change and affect how they deal with the idea that they’re aging faster than they every expected to.

@ Popdose- Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali

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Here's maybe the greatest Superman story of the last 50 years.

Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali is simply an incredible and outlandish story, beginning with the cover by Adams that features drawing of 170 celebrities, writers, artists, DC staffers and even DC characters.  It’s nice to know that if this fight ever took place in an arena like Madison Square Garden, Lex Luthor and Batman woud be able to get ringside seats next to Sonny Bono and President Jimmy Carter.  But the cover isn’t all just super heroes, villains and Presidents.  It also has Sweathogs on it.  And not the cool Sweathogs like Vinnie Barbarino or Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington.  No, Neal Adams included Horshack and Epstien in it.  (I’m sure that Epstien has a note from his mother getting him out of school for this fight of the century.)  The cover has an “everything and the kitchen sink” aspect to it, as there’s no detail too small or insignificant for Adams to leave out of his likenesses.

If nothing else, I'm happy that I was able to briefly talk about the Sweathogs.  It's the things like that which make writing fun. 

Catching up with reviews from the Mothership

For some reason, January sucked for posting links to my reviews over at Newsarama so, if you're interested in month-old reviews, here's a bit of what I spent January writing about over there.  Click on the book title to find the full review.

Matt Fraction's writing is surprisingly honest as he paints Stark as someone who's aware of his own self-inflicted problems but is powerless to overcome them. His problems have made him who he is and, in their own way, are bigger than just himself.  As Fraction points out many times in this issue, Stark’s alcoholism is just one of the many weaknesses that Stark faces on an almost daily basis.  The character has taken big steps over the years but his addictive nature is always going to be there. "Drinking, working, women. It was like some kind of self-destructive multitasking,” Stark says, a bit smugly appreciative at his own self-reflection.  That pretty much sums up Tony Stark's life.  His problems are his and he owns them even if he has trouble controlling them.  And even after he’s poured out his heart and talked about all of his own personal issues, in the end you have to ask just what he’s learned in life as we see him about to make familiar mistakes again.

Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1
Over on the art, Keith Giffen is channelling his own inner-Jack Kirby here, striking poses and creating energy right out of an old issue of The Fantastic Four.  Giffen has always worn his artistic influences on his sleeve and his panel compositions here just scream Kirby homage, from the upshots of characters to the poses his characters strike are practically culled from any Kirby book post-1965.  Kirby never drew a Legion story so this annual is the closest we’ll ever get.  Unfortunately Giffen also employs his patented 6 panel grid, the workhorse layout he used during DC’s 52  While there it kept the story unified and running on time, here it dampens Levitz’s story, making every page look the same.  Page after page of 6 panel grids makes everything flow together, giving almost no break or excitement to any individual page or scene.  Everything blends together until the story is just a uniform mass of even-tempered beats and plot points.

While the story feels like an interesting blend of something old/something new for the writing duo, getting John Severin to draw the story makes this issue something special. Over his long and distinguished career, Severin has proven time and time again that he can draw almost anything but the man shines even 60 years after his first EC story was published. Severin has a grit to his drawing, creating heroes and villains through texture and expression. His artwork is the complete opposite of Mignola’s. Where Mignola is moody, dark and hidden, Severin is solid, fluid and descriptive. He takes the world that’s been so established to exist in shadow and secrecy and gives its past a concrete figure. Everything is fully formed and detailed, from the stage coach that brings Grey to Utah to the tracker to helps Grey escape a bar fight.

Even as the art is a new experience, Bastian creates a world that’s simultaneously old fashioned (or what we’d want a Victorian fantasy world to look like and wonderfully modern. The Cursed Pirate Girl herself is an incredibly modern character, filled with a zest for life and adventure. Bastian takes a pirate story, which is almost always a boy’s story, and makes it a fun and exciting story about a girl on a grand adventure to find her father, to share in his own adventures on the seven seas. The Cursed Pirate Girl does not let anything get to her. When she loses an eye, wearing an eye patch is just a rite of passage for a pirate. As she fails to find her father on one ship, she knows that there are other ships out on the sea that he could possibly be on. Everything that happens is just part of the adventure she has to be on as she searches above and below the sea for some clue of where her could be.

For one brief moment in Uncanny X-Force #4 Rick Remender and Jerome Opeña look like they’re going to take the easy way out and fall back on the clichéd optimism that is a staple of X-Men stories, displaying an unearned optimism about the future. Luckily Remember and Opeña show us just why this isn’t your standard, run-of-the-mill X-Men book.

Bunn and Hurtt have built this series for the long haul, creating a rich cast and giving their characters plenty of room to succeed and to fail. The story of the six guns is really still just beginning and I think there’s going to be a lot more dark days for Sinclair and Becky before they are relieved of their burdens.

Luckily, Fraction's modern story are wrapped around his story of the future of the Stark family and that’s where this issue gets really interesting. The fears and worries of Tony Stark in 2011 are the realities of Tony Stark in 2052. Those designs that exist in his mind that no one but him could actually build with modern technology are possible for his enemies to build and control. And if it’s a weapon, someone like the Mandarin won’t just build one of them; he’ll build ten. Providing the balance for the modern-day sequences, we see the reality of Stark’s nightmares and his own failures at controlling them. By playing out this future in Iron Man #500 Fraction shows us why today’s Tony Stark should be as desperate as he is. The future sequences justifies the modern day story in this issue and create something more than just another Iron Man story.

The problem is that as Hopps and Weisman try to show us the downtime in these characters lives, those characters haven’t been built up enough.  We barely know these versions of Kid Flash and Superboy; we haven’t seen enough about them yet.  And while this issue tries to be the “character building” story, we still don’t learn anything more about them.  Why is Kid Flash as impulsive as he is or why is Superboy as brooding?  You don’t have to answer these questions in this comic, but if you’re going to try to show them as “normal” teenagers, you need to show a bit about why they’re not normal -- and it has to be more than “he runs fast” or “he’s Superman’s clone.”  Issues that focus primarily on building characters should show us something more than what we already know about those characters.

Casanova: Gula #1
Fraction’s writing in Casanova: Gula #1 feels more immediate than anything he’s done yet in Iron Man or Thor. While you can see aspects of Casanova in those Marvel characters (the parental issues, trying to figure out how they fit in with a future and world that they didn’t want), Casanova is a much younger character than those, not weighted down by almost 50 years of continuity. He’s building everything in Casanova: Gula and he’s also able to tear everything down. The Fraction who writes Casanova is a dangerous writer, maybe even slightly crazy, if Casanova has been any indication. As this issue shows, he’s willing to demolish everything he built in the first storyline by getting rid of his main character. He’s pulling out some big concepts for his Marvel work, but Casanova has the added weight of being pure Fraction.

Dear Marvel, here’s how you get me to buy all of your comic books in 2011 -- put the flame headed Nikki on the cover.

The first issue was a download of information but this second issue is a feast of story, a fine taste of the story and art that Byrne can still produce.  The original run of Next Men remains one of Byrne’s best comics of the last 20 years and John Byrne’s Next Men #2 feels like he’s picked up right where he left off.

Vision Machine TPB
More than just a cautionary tale, Pak writes an entertaining and thrilling story as three friends face this new digital frontier together.  With RB Silva and Dym on art, Vision Machine is a graphic novel that has a strong story to take on the questions that Pak is asking. As this trio of friends have to figure out who’s really using the iEye technology and who’s looking out for them, Pak and Silva form an alluring future that feels possible and hopeful. This isn’t an idealistic or dystopian vision of our future; it’s something that could be our tomorrow for all of the wonder and horror that idea generates. Pak makes this story for everyone who waits eagerly for the next Apple announcement or who watches all the tech blog, looking for the next gadget that is sure to change our lives.

The art in both stories works with the character designs of the TV show but takes them in different directions. The main story is drawn by Scott Wegener of Atomic Robo fame. He actually stays fairly faithful to the look and feel of the show, aided heavily by Beaulieu’s flat, animated cell-like coloring. If you like the look of the cartoon, you’ll love the look of Wegener’s take on the Avengers. Scherberger uses the character’s designs but fit them completely into his own artwork, creating a story that looks cross between the cartoon and Humberto Ramos. Scherberger’s approach creates a more dynamic and visually exciting story.

@ Popdose-- Sweet Tooth: In Captivity

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I've got to try and do a better job of crossposting my reviews here.  Here's a piece from two weeks ago, reviewing Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth: In Captivity from Vertigo:

Lemire’s books are filled with melodrama as he pushes the emotional boundaries of his characters. There are no happy characters in his stories and life is a burden that we have to decide whether we want to embrace or not. That makes his books tough to get through. Sweet Tooth: In Captivity isn’t a life-embracing walk in the park. Lemire is exploring what it means to be one of the survivors left after the world has ended and he’s still showing us the ugliness that we carry over from our normal life.

You can read the full review here

The mythology of the newstand

Yes, I'm re-purposing a forum post.  If you've already read this, I'm sorry.  More exciting and original content soon.

In a discussion about the cancellation of Pixar and Muppet comics by Boom Studios and the lackluster sales of proven commodities like Darkwing Duck and the Muppets, talk on one forum has turned to newsstand distribution, like it always does.

What makes people think that's the answer?  

Archie pays to be upfront and by the registers.  That's where it's success comes from.  How much competition between Archie, People, Teen Mother and National Enquirer is there for that prime space?  And what do you think more people are going to want to pick up?  A People magazine about the latest Lindsey Lohan scandal or an issue of Superman walking across America? 

Has anyone even checked out these fabled newstands anymore and the selection of magazines in the section of your local store?  Unless you get a prime spot on the checkout line, mostly reserved for gossip rags, most grocery and drug stores I've been too have a fairly negligible selection of magazines.  Stores don't want newstands so why would they want comics?  

Maybe we've got to accept that we're a niche market.  We're all told that print is dead or dying.  Why would we want to be part of a distribution system that's designed for newstands and mass market?

Put it this way, if there aren't enough people out there to support an Oprah magazine, what makes you think there are enough people out there to support a Muppets comic?  Or, worse, yet, an Atlas or Thor: The Mighty Avenger comic.  

Finding some truth in THE INCAL


In a 1973 interview with Penthouse (the link is to non-Penthouse site and is relatively safe for work),  Alejandro Jodorowsky talked a bit about this approach to storytelling in his movie The Holy Mountain:

We are searching not for our inner faith. What we are searching for is our inner humanity...


When a man says, "I am alone" it is because he does not know how to be with himself. When I speak of the collective man I am not speaking of being with more people. I am speaking of a man who feels in himself the whole of humanity....


There are two kinds of prayer. The prayer to ask for something or the prayer to say "thank you" for everything I am having. This last prayer is that of the universal man. The universal man cannot feel guilty. The past is finished. There is a moment when you can say to your karma, "I love you. All the mistakes I have made were to reach this level. If I didn't do what I needed to do it is because I am not like what I am now. I was learning, I was fighting, I was making myself. I cannot feel guilty. The only thing I can do is to never repeat the same mistake. If I repeat the same mistake then I will be guilty."


You must transform yourself from the ill man to the healthy man. Because really we need to cure our society's ills. There are war, there are pollution, we are killing the planet, so many have nothing to eat. So we are like the samurai. We win or we die. Now I think is a fantastic moment for all of us because now we are fighting for our world, our life. Now is the moment to be awake or to die. We are not alone.


This interview is around 7 years before Jodorowsky and Moebius’ The Incal, their five part story that came out of their aborted attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune into film before David Lynch’s debacle.  In The Incal, Jodorowsky and Moebius tell us the story of John Difool, a ineffective private eye, pulled into a bodyguard gig just to make a few bucks and then finding himself on the other side of the universe, fighting for the salvation of everything.  It’s a simple, noir-ish beginning, as a beautiful woman hires him for a job-- protect her for one night and make sure she’s home by midnight.  It’s almost something out of a fairy tale until it becomes a story about saving the universe from an all-devouring darkness.  But as the story goes on, Jodorowsy keeps upping the ante until John Difool is face to face with the ultimate being.

John Difool is one of Jodorowsky’s earliest heroes created for comics and still one of his most fascinating.  While he would go on to expand the universe that The Incal takes place in with books like The Technopriests and The Metabarons and create more philosophical and action heroes, Difool is the least likely kind of hero.  Borrowing aspects and an the name from the Tarot, John Difool is the fool, the child-like man in search of experience even if he usually gets in his own way and ends up looking goofy and witless.  In the story of The Incal, you have the more heroic looking Metabaron and the boy he raised Sunmoon, the chosen host of the power known as the Incal.  These characters look much more the hero part.  In anyone else’s story, they would be the heroes, the ones to save the day.  The Metabaron is a man of action, big, tall and knows how to fight.  He should be the obvious hero of Jodorowsky’s story but if Jodorowsky is interested in finding an inner humanity, the Metabaron can’t be the lead lead in this book.  He’s too perfect here.  There’s little internal struggle to focus on with the Metabaron as he’s the obvious fighter and has a clearly defined role but there’s no room for growth or development of this character.  With Difool, Jodorowsky has a character that should be kept as far away as possible from having to save the universe but there he is, with all of his faults and foibles needing to represent mankind at the end of everything.


Then what about Sunmoon, the young androgynous boy chosen to be the host of the Incal and the dual-gendered leader of the universe.  While Sunmoon was raised by the Metabaron, he is actually John Difool and Animah’s, the protector of the one of the halves of the Incal, son.  We learn about Sunmoon’s true parentage early in the series and he serves as a reflection of what Difool could be.  From Difool, we have this perfect-looking child who’s able to bring a peaceful unity to the universe but Sunmoon lacks the character and humanity of his father.  The chaste and perfect son, raised by the perfect warrior, doesn’t reflect the true face of humanity but shows us an ideal image of it.  Sunmoon has Jodorowsky’s “inner humanity” already at the start of The Incal so there’s no journey or quest to take with him.  

I wonder how much of Difool is Jodorowsky, or at least an aspect of Jodorowsky who may be on his own path to his “inner humanity?”  Even as he knows he has to help save the universe, all Difool really wants to do is drink, smoke and screw.  It’s all that’s ever on his mind.  From later in the Penthouse interview, you can see that sex is a natural, and Jodorowsky would say essential, part of his life.  It’s part of that humanity that he’s searching for and should be embraced as such.  John Difool’s own journey begins with drunkeness and debauchery.

I never drink, I don't take drugs. I am not against anything human beings do to reach their completeness. Drugs can help some experience. But I am against taking drugs to have fun. This kills your health.


The world changes from alcohol to marijuana. That is good. Marijuana is better than alcohol. Magic is better than reading. I don't know what you read in the U.S. Love stories? War stories? Idiocies. Magic goes with marijuana. It really prepares the person to have real, new magic. The real solution is man without any kind of dependencies. The real conquest of the complete man. Now we are children playing games.


(from the Penthouse interview linked above)  


“Children playing games.”  That’s a great description for Difool, who has every chance in the pages of The Incal to grow and to develop but can barely see past his own wants and needs.  

Joining Jodorowsky on this search for an inner humanity is Moebius.  The Moebius.  From the American west of Lt. Blueberry to the far reaches of space and the Airtight Garage, Moebius had already proved by then that he was an artist who could draw anything.  Moebius’ range and skill gives Jodorowsky the freedom to go crazy with his story.  For the 10-15 years before The Incal, Moebius was searching for his own inner humanity as he created stories like The Detour and his Arzach short stories.  You can see his creative search for something new and different as Jean Giraurd took on the name Moebius and went from drawing westerns to writing and drawing these science fiction fantasy stories that were more about his and our journeys through the world than it was about the science fiction or fantasy.

As Jodorowsky wrote about the search for our inner humanity, Moebius drew the world that hides that from us.  The cities of drawn by Moebius are worlds of distractions and temptations to get lost in.  The wilderness in Moebius’s drawings are barren stretches or lush forests, tempting and dangerous.  The world shows us beauty and distractions in Moebius comics, trying to lead us and seduce us.  More so than his Blueberry stories, Moebius’ fantasic artwork is about the mystery and potential that exists in every line on the page.  

Moebius goes everywhere visually in this book.  Personally, you can see this transition from his 70’s underground-influenced style to his latter classic and clean look as he progresses throughout the nearly 10 years it took to produce the complete story.  Even as there are changes from the Blueberry-era Jean Giraud to the Moebius who first drew The Horny Goof, you can see changes in Moebius as he ages and becomes more comfortable in his own skin.  His artwork becomes more refined and more simplified.   Maybe it’s the acceptance of his own ever-changing role in comics as he went from being the brash rebel upstart to an undeniable master to maybe even a statesman by the end of the 1980s but Moebius’s own personal development gives The Incal a feeling of progression and time.

While there is the natural progression that happens with any artist present in The Incal, you’ve also got to pay attention to the conscious choices that Moebius makes throughout John Difool’s story, particularly the physical appearance of Difool.  Difool’s appearance changes as his role in the grand scheme of things changes.  He starts out as a bit of a slob, a man who has to pay for any sexual experience.  He’s a long, lanky character whose most predominant feature is the nose that matches his stature.  For being the “hero” of Jodorowsky’s story, Moebius makes him one of the least physically stunning characters in a story full of near-goddesses, heroic metabarons and wickedly evil technopriests.

That is until the third part of the story where Difool becomes an Adonis even as he starts to play his greater role in the story.  As he actually does become somewhat enlightened and the hero, Moebius begins to draw him as a handsome god-like man, with smooth features and flowing hair.  Maybe it’s Difool becoming the hero he wished he could be but he certainly looks like the traditional messianic hero a story like this needs.  Or maybe it’s Moebius drawing the inner character of Difool and showing us the brief bit of beauty in John Difool before the last half of the story reminds us that for all he can do, John Difool is incapable of change.


In the end of The Incal, we’re actually right back to the beginning as Jodorowsky and Moebius have John Difool falling through space just as he was in the beginning.  The universe has been rebooted, everyone has moved on except for John Difool.  That was never his role or his destiny in this story.  John Difool isn’t the hero who gets his reward in the end.  His karma doesn’t allow that.  He’s told point blank that he still has much to learn so he gets to do it all over again.  He helped save the universe but he didn’t save himself.  To bring it back to that Penthouse interview, Jodorowsky wasn’t interested in making John Difool into some noble heroic figure; he wanted to find a bit of that inner humanity in his character.  Difool is doomed or chosen (depends on your point of view, I guess) to be on that journey forever.  That may be Jodorowsky’s way of telling us that our own searches should never end.

@ The Mothership: reviews of Sweets #4 and Who Is Jake Ellis #1

If all goes well over the weekend, look for the first post of hopefully many throughout the year about Alejandro Jodorowsky and The Incal here.

Both reviews can be found here.

Sweets #4:  Through his visual and color choices, Chamberlain subtly shapes the tension in the story. It may feel like we’ve read this story before but we haven’t read the story the way Chamberlain’s telling it.

Who Is Jake Ellis #1:  Too many comics nowadays lack a hook. And that’s doubly true for first issues of brand new series that get lost in world building and spend no time actually creating a riveting story. Nathan Edmonson and Tonci Zonjic’s Who Is Jake Ellis #1 has that killer hook that leaves you wanting more pages to magically show up at the end of the issue.

@ the Mothership: Edge of Doom #3

As part of the fast paced life of a Newsarama Best Shots review (i.e. sitting on the couch trying to bang out words on a Macbook,) one of my New Year's resolutions is to try and read a bit broader spectrum of books than I regularly do.  I don't have to like them, just read them.  So I was kind of surprised by how much I just liked Steve Niles and Kelly Jones' Edge of Doom #3.

Kelly Jones has always been great at delivering these dark horror comedies. His shadowy style is just loose enough to let you know that they’re not playing this as a straight horror. Doing his best Bernie Wrightson impersonation, Jones perfectly captures the tongue-in-cheek horror that Niles is going for, creating exaggerated images that make you focus purely on the horror while building up those images for a giant release that’s a bit shocking but completely absurd. Kelly plays Niles’ story up, creating larger-than-life images that are a bit frightening but completely enjoyable in a dark, twisted way.

You can read the full review here.