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Reviews @ Newsarama: The Tooth, DV8, Donald Duck, The Bulletproof Coffin and more

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.”