100 Books 42 - Kobo Abe's THE FACE OF ANOTHER

I wrote about this book a little bit last month, just because of the musings it provoked about Facebook and Google. I hadn't yet finished it then, though, and hadn't yet confronted its essential, oppressive creepiness -- it is by far the creepiest book I have ever read, and it's not even horror.

I experienced this story first several years ago via the film adaptation by the great Hiroshi Teshigahara:



One of the things that interests me is the tandem experience of book and film; the film really explores the idea -- a man's face is destroyed in an accident and he creates (or, in the film, has created) a mask so lifelike almost nobody realizes it's a mask at all, only to find that instead of restoring him fully to his life and his humanity, he has become more of a monster than he was when his face was a hideous mass of scars and ruined tissue -- from the exterior. The plot wanders quite a bit from that of the novel, but that's immaterial for my purposes; what interests me now is how book and film complement each other; the film cannot, except in voice-overs, really explore the inner man of the scientist except indirectly (hence the introduction of a sub-plot lifted mostly from a film our protagonist watches early on in the book, of a girl, her face half destroyed in the Hiroshima bombing, who does charitable work for WWII veterans despite her disfigurement, but who is ultimately too isolated by it to continue); for all its startling imagery (get a load of that doctor's office, wholly invented for  the film), it does not begin to come close to what makes the book such a disturbing read.

The book is written in an extended epistolary/diary form; the first person narrator is the scientist (nameless in the book) who has lost his face, writing an extended confessional to his wife. And herein lies the creepiness, for while he believes he has fashioned the mask (in secret, all on his own, in the book) to "restore the roadway" between him and his wife, he has gotten so carried away with the sudden duality of existence it affords him that he has actually come to think of The Mask as another person, a person who quickly becomes his Mr. Hyde, all id and transgressions, all an exploration of what he can get away with when no one knows it's him. Inevitably -- and I give nothing away here that isn't given away in the very opening paragraphs of the book -- he and it decide to see about seducing his own wife; the roadway he sought to restore to her is left forgotten; he takes the long way round and comes back at her as a stranger, and then rages with jealousy when Mask Him succeeds.

Throughout this confession, he reveals that the roadway was washed out long ago; he has created a wife-emulator in his head who is much stupider than she really is, less perceptive and  with no self-determination, and unwaveringly regards his real wife as that lesser being. She is trapped in his imagination, confined to the smallest possible space, surrounded on all sides by him and his limited, limiting understanding of her -- and the further we get into the novel, the more oppressive is his tendency to project onto her most, if not all, of his negative feelings about himself. It's a classic trope, but I've never seen it so elegantly, horrifyingly done as here. The build-up to the actual meeting between Mask Him and his wife treats the seduction as a fait accompli ratchets the depressing creepiness up to eleven; all the time we spend alone (except for the Mask) in the nameless man's skull dials it up to twelve.

I can't recommend this one highly enough, shattering though it is.

100 Books 42 - Justin Gustainis' HARD SPELL

Genre mash-ups seem to be all the rage these days, and Justin Gustainis' Hard Spell is a perfect example of how to do them right. Take out the police procedural/crime elements and it still works as a tale of supernatural mayhem; take out the supernatural elements and it still works as a detective story. I suspect achieving this balance was a lot harder than it looks.

Hard Spell, the first in a new Occult Crimes Unit Investigation series, pits a pair of hard-bitten detectives, Stan Markowski and Karl Renfer, against a one-two punchin' combo of a wizard/vampire hybrid who is racing to assemble the elements for the ultimate everybody's-doomed spell. They're old hands at dealing with this kind of thing, if not to this degree; they pack silver bullets, their handcuffs are made with cold iron, they tend to have some holy water handy, their department keeps a witch on retainer as a special consultant, but this Big Bad is the Biggest Big Bad to ever hit the exceptionally supernatural-ridden city of Scranton, PA.  At least until the next book.

What sells me on this one is this: Gustainis has been at great pains to interweave the supernatural -- not just vampires and witches but also werewolves, hobgoblins (the opening scene in which Markowski has to deal with a bunch of methamphetamine-addled goblins robbing a liquor store is hilarious) and the rest of the canon -- with the mundane. And for the most part it's subtle; enough to make me smile but not enough to jerk me completely out of my reading trance to cry out "I see what you did there!"

Haters will probably say "Oh, it's just like Harry Dresden, except with cops," and they wouldn't be entirely off base. But why should that be an issue? Jim Butcher writes fun books, and so does Gustainis, and there is room on the shelf for both, just like there is room at the corner stop-and-rob for M&Ms and Reese's Pieces: because you're never sure what flavor of brain candy you'll be in the mood for until you start browsing.

I suspect Justainis will keep cranking these out for as long as people are willing to buy them; the formula is dead easy and the ground as well laid by the Dashiell Hammets and Raymond Chandlers and Joseph Wambaughs as by the H.P. Lovecrafts and Clarke Ashton-Smiths and William Hope Hodgsons of the world. All Justainis has to do is raise up a crop, play Mendel and mix up the genes.

Fun stuff!

Sunday Comics Round-Up, Part II - August 7

A brand new day, but I've unfinished business. Without further ado, the rest of this week's SundayComics round-up! Again, it's all two-fers.

SCREAMLAND, Issues 2 & 3

THE CREATORS

This is another Image Comics book - Image is definitely my go-to publisher for interesting, original stuff these days. Writers Harold Sipe and Christopher Sebela, best known for their cryptozoological romp Proof, are covering similar but sillier ground here. Lee Leslie and Kevin Millon (of Hack/Slash fame) are on pencils and inks and Buster Moody, also probably best known for Hack/Slash, is the colorist.

THE SCHTICK

In a world where movie monsters are real, most of them are just looking for work in an industry dominated by 3D, CGI and other scary acronyms. Forced to hustle their past glory on the convention circuit, Wolfman Cal London and 'Space Path' star Travis Walters put their scheduled appearances aside to stop the screening of a legendary monster porn film that threatens to ruin the careers of feature creatures everywhere. - from Image Comics' website

THE TWEETS

Oh man, and I have two issues of #Screamland, two! No wonder the #SundayComics bag is so heavy. Learn from me. Read 'em every week!

Reporting a murder to 911 -- of the Invisible Man no less -- "Of course there's a body. We just can't see it."

I'm still recovering from the Black Lagoonish Devil Fish in a red speedo from last issue, mind.

And so now all the monsters are going to solve the Invisible Man's murder since the police won't? Awesome.

Oh, they're all coming up with scenarios to blame each other. And they're hilarious!

Still can't shake the idea that these two characters are based on @briankeene and @mikeoliveri. Adds to the lulz.

But Travis is probably really based on William Shatner 8)

Moving to the preview for next issue. Light lettering on fancy-ass mauve backgrounded text boxes = unreadable.

Especially when most of the background color is a slightly darker shade of mauve. GRR.

Between the glare off the glossy paper and squinting to read the text boxes I have the start of a headache now 8(

LOL: The Mass, a gelatinous alien, oozing off with a tire, a surprised looking cow, and a kitty visible inside him.

Why yes, sometimes comics should be funny. And #Screamland totally is.

Jason analog (slasher villain): I dunno which is funnier, the 12-step for psycho killers or the love story.

Oh wait: BORN AGAIN reformed married family man Jason analog. Hee hee.

Ah, such pathos. When even a vampire gets chewed up and spit out by the Holywood starlet machine..

THE SUMMING UP

There is a lot that's very wrong with Screamland, by which I mean (mostly) right. On the whole this is, if you can't tell from my tweets, a funny idea being executed in funny ways. We've moved on since the original solicitation - the "legendary monster porn film" is still sort of the McGuffin but as plot devices go it's mostly been replaced by a murder mystery; someone has offed The Invisible Man and it's probably part of an attempt to keep the film under wraps. We're still kind of getting to know all the supporting players here through the device of Cal and Travis's half-assed attempts to follow up on half-baked scenarios casting each character as the murderer: a masked psycho killer named Slasher, a gelantinous alien named Mass and a weirdly aging vampire bombshell. It's all quite ridiculous but it passes the internally-consistent plausibility test: it's ridiculous in just the way a world in which movie monsters are real, with threatened livelihoods, should be ridiculous. And for the most part it's a great looking book, with fantastic, cartoony character designs - but then there are those captions I complained of in the tweets, of which there are quite a lot. And in these, just often enough to be really annoying, weird aesthetic choices have been given precedence over readability. Different characters' stories and perspectives get different colors and the scheme is strictly adhered to, resulting in some unfortunate clashes (mauve on orange, for instance. Ew) and darker colors, like that mauve, with thin black text inside, are all but impossible to read. If that is addressed in future issues, I'll enjoy this book even more than I already do.

GREEN WAKE, Issues 4 and 5

THE CREATORS

See what I mean about reading a lot of Image's offerings? The company has an eye for interesting ideas and creators, and Green Wake is no exception. I'm pretty impressed with all that writer Kurtis Wiebe has currently got going on, penning not only this series but also The Intrepids, a book that is about as different from this one as it could possibly be. Here Wiebe is teamed up with artist Riley Rossmo, another Proof veteran, here doing some very different, often McKeeveresque, work.

THE SCHTICK

A riveting tale of loss and horror. In the forgotten town of Green Wake, a string of grisly mutilations leads Morley Mack on the trail of a young woman named Ariel, who is the prime suspect. But when a stranger with startling connections to Ariel arrives under mysterious circumstances, Morley unravels a dark plot with a shocking link to his past. - from Image Comics' website.

THE TWEETS

And guess what ELSE I have two of? That'd be Green Wake. What's up, @kurtisjwiebe?

Oh lordy. From melancholy longing to balls-out Grand Guignol in the flick of a page. FWOOM!

Oh, okay. That wasn't Carl she was boning and eviscerating? But it *is* Carl who jumped in to save her from the toothy blob man?

Did Carl's necklace of eyeballs (at least I think that's what it was) just fuse with his head and neck? Yuck!

This is turning, as I proceed through Issue 4, into a bit of a heartbreaker.

"That's what Green Wake is. It's a monster that feeds on the guilt of our past."

Going to have nightmares about Carl's face in that close-up. Every emotion you could think of, all at once.

One more issue of Green Wake. I'm still bewildered but I'm hanging on. Are any of these guys I've seen Carl?

I feel like I've landed in the middle of a Robert McCammon novel. Which is awesome, but ugly!

Still don't like the faux cursive lettering in the text boxes, though at least in this issue its on a simple BG

THE SUMMING UP

For me, Green Wake has been an anomaly: a comic that suffers from the high quality of its art. That's a strange thing to say, but it's true: the ravishing, intricate, occasionally grotesque, expressionist moodiness of Rossmo's work distracted me from grasping what was going on in the story for a long time, at first mostly just because it held my attention so completely, and then continuously because at times the character design is just too ambiguous. My plaint above, wondering if any of the people I'd seen in Issue 4 was actually Carl (the character with the "startling connections" to Ariel)? Not an exaggeration. Who is who (largely, for the ordinary humans, of which there are only a few, a matter of hair color, which is often obscured by lighting and other scenic elements) and which of them is doing what has rarely been so unclear; I've struggled and pored to figure it all out and I may still be wrong. But the fact that I was willing to struggle and pore says something: there is a lot going on here and very little of it is on the surface, not unlike in Ted McKeever's Meta4, my favorite comic from 2010 (and the introduction to the collected edition of which is written by yours truly, btw). The story is taking place in a weird, liminal space that only sort of approximates a town -- a very dark, spooky, Lovecraftian town in which a large portion of the population (none of whom is originally from Green Wake) seems to be in the process of turning into a frog. Everybody is haunted by past misdeeds and an inability to figure out how he or she (but mostly he: the demonic will o'the wisp, Ariel, is the only woman) got there, and hesitant to cop to anything. That all of this seems to be an allegory on the destruction of the author's marriage, just as Meta4 treated largely on McKeever's experience of hard-won sobriety, just adds to the weird, nearly impenetrable dreaminess of this book -- and its melancholy. I'm glad I did the work to finally figure out what the hell was (or might be) going on, but I'm also just a tiny bit wounded for the experience. I will, though, be on board for the continuation of Green Wake, for while the Ariel story arc is wrapped up, there are still lots of questions to be explored -- such as what the hell is up with the frogs.

THE MISSION, Issues 5 & 6

THE CREATORS

OK, Image is totally not paying me to blog these, but yes, this is another Image Comics release. Erich and Jon Hoeber, best known for writing the screenplay to Red, are writing this, teamed up with Werther Dell'edera, whom I know mostly from the bits he's done in the searing Greek Street but most of my friends probably know from G.I. Joe.

THE SCHTICK

Paul, an average working guy, finds his life upended when he's approached by a mysterious figure who tells him he's been chosen for a mission in the battle between good and evil -- the mission is murder. Is it real or is Paul losing his mind? - from Image Comics' website.

THE TWEETS

Head shaky moment. Though for a few panels I'd picked up Jennifer Blood by mistake. The wife resembles her a bit.

"There's nothing you can do to me that's worse than what you're making me do to myself." Uh, you sure? XD

Keep waiting for this to turn into Malignant Man. It is possible I read too many comics. 

See? I knew there was a way to make it worse. But this is all getting a tad predictable.

I'm weirdly distracted by Paul's anime hair.

Gah. With this art style and coloring scheme, wifey's tears look like streams of liquid mercury. Pretty much fail.

Issue 6 of #TheMission and the cover has Paul with a blowtorch. Pretty sure he's not welding. Cringe.

Sinister, melodramatic shadows suddenly cross Luke's (?) face with nothing casting them. Snort.

Bleargh. My cringe was true. Wincewincewincewincewince.

Semi-surprise twist ending to Issue 6. I'm still in. But just barely. Don't dig on torture pr0n too much.

THE SUMMING UP

The Mission may lose me. From the start it's been uneasily straddling the border between being evocative and derivative, specifically of Patricia Highsmith's best Ripley novel, Ripley's Game, in which the titular rogue manipulates the hopes and fears of a man with terminal cancer to make of him a willing tool for assassinating Ripley's enemies. Here Ripley is replaced by a supernatural figure claiming to be an angel, and instead of dangling the promise of better doctors and treatments and money for the widow and child, this figure claims the power to inflict cancer not only on Paul but on his family if Paul does not cooperate. And that's not even where it gets ugly. I mentioned a blowtorch, and torture porn, and predictability. Even the semi-twist at the end of Issue 6 wasn't that much of a surprise; it was an obvious twist to make. I'm going to give this book one more chance but may drop it.

CHEW, Issue 19

THE CREATORS

The Mighty John Layman, veteran of many superhero comics, none of which I have read, is writing this inspired insanity, teamed up with the cartoony awesome of Rob Guillory in what has to be one of the weirdest books Image has ever put out. I'm pretty sure everyone who works on this project is batshit in the best possible way.

THE SCHTICK

Tony Chu is a cop with a secret. A weird secret. Tony Chu is Cibopathic, which means he gets psychicimpressions from whatever he eats. It also means he's a hell of a detective, as long as he doesn't mind nibbling on the corpse of a murder victim to figure out whodunit, and why. It's a dirty job, and Tony has to eat terrible things in the name of justice. And if that wasn't bad enough, the government has figured out Tony Chu's secret. They have plans for him... whether he likes it or not.

THE TWEETS

Ready to dote on something a little more light-hearted now. Though since I'm kind of a sick bastard, I've chosen Chew No. 19

Cover art strongly suggests Tony's sister's gonna maneuver him into a bit of xenophagy. Awesome. And gross. And Awesome.

Talk about starting off with a bang. Actually many bangs. Not that kind of bang, gutter brains.

Bwahahaha. Lettering ambiguities and context from setting led me to read "manifesto" as "manipesto."

"Disclaimer: this never happens." Chew plays that trick a lot - but it NEVER stops being funny.

Nastiest pit stains ever. I often suspect @rob_guillory watched a LOT of Ren & Stimpy when he was a kid.

Oh the Easter Eggs. "FDA: We choke the chicken." Really.

ZOMG. NASA"s mission amidst the avian flu outbreak. Um. Um. Bwahahahahaha. Gasp.

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. It's even worse than I'd dared to imagine from the cover.

Another Fringe shout-out. Also Star Wars, Lost, JFK, Spam... XD

Chalkboard graffiti: "Charlie Sheen is a cylon!" XD

This is one of the most elegantly structured issues yet. Major kudos to The Mighty Layman.

THE SUMMING UP

By now, I shouldn't have to tell anyone that Chew is a great comic. That's what the Eisner awards are for. I've been with it from the beginning and have never been disappointed -- indeed, it's gotten better as Layman and Guillory have developed its uniqueness. From its initial schtick, the story has grown to encompass espionage plots, aliens, cock fighting and yes, romance -- all peppered with outrageous easter eggs courtesy of Guillory. Reading an issue of Chew is an exercise in careful scrutiny for buried jokes -- like "Charlie Sheen is a Cylon." And I mentioned story structure -- Layman is become a master at this, having special fun with the trope of exploring what might have happened had not the events in the actual story happened. Possibilities loop back on themselves with just the right balance of subtlety and obviousness, so when Tony's twin sister punches out an unmasked conspirator seemingly out of the blue, you know exactly why, and what he would have done if she hadn't -- which would only be the case if she didn't have the power of reading the future/intentions from what she eats or bites (just as Tony gets the history), which is how she knows the dude deserves a punch in the nose. Simply awesome.

And that's it for this week's Sunday Comics. I still, though, have a backlog, and probably a good stack waiting for me at Heroes Only come Wednesday. Until then, read your comics!

Sunday Comics Round-Up - August 7

Another Sunday, another giant stack of comics, and I still have a massive backlog - as I observed first thing very early this morning as I was getting ready to leave the house, I could barely lift my Sunday Comics bag. While I'm really only a few weeks behind, for the most part, some of the regular series to which I subscribe have actually published two issues since last I read! So I decided to read through those first.


There wound up being so many "two-fer" titles that back-to-backs were all I had today!

THE LAST ZOMBIE: INFERNO, Issues 1 & 2


THE CREATORS


The Last Zombie: Inferno begins a new arc in this on-going series from Antarctic Press, horror writer Brian "The Rising" Keene, penciler Brian Denham (The X-Files, Sarah Palin: Rogue Warrior, Iron Man: Hypervelocity) and inker Fred Perry (Gold Digger, Time Lincoln). This is Keene's second major comics series; I was a big fan of his Dead of Night: Demon-Slayer for Marvel's MAX line, in which he combined his own military background and experiences with a tale of high deviltry in the middle of the latest Gulf War. He's also written a few horror novels, with which I'm sure my readers are quite familiar. Denham was new to me before I took up The Last Zombie but I've quickly come to admire his work tremendously, and Perry is quickly becoming a favorite because I just love everything about Time Lincoln.


THE SCHTICK

The Last Zombie: Inferno picks up where The Last Zombie left off, as Doctor Ian Scott and his team of soldiers and scientists make their way across the wastelands of a post-zombie apocalyptic America. Infected with the virus that caused the zombie outbreak, Ian struggles to stay alive long enough to see his wife again. As if that wasn't enough, the team find themselves caught between a raging, state-wide wildfire and the radioactive destruction of a nuclear reactor meltdown. - from Antarctic Press's website

THE TWEETS

Note: some of these tweets are actually from last week; I didn't get to finish Issue 1 before it was time to pack up and head for home and start writing on the blog.

Magnificent two page splash in subtle greys. A big long highway and two diagonally arranged insets. I love it.


Way to twist all the emotional wrenches, Keene. Jeez XD

Denham's drawings totally selling the wrenches, too. The face on p. 4 is devastating.

"Definitely there but not life-threatening." "What about nut-threatening?" Klassy!

Passenger jet landed on the interstate, abandoned Amtrak train, radiation alarms, post-apocalypse much?

Oh, and a hundred-mile wildfire. @BrianKeene has the same love for his characters that @ChuckWendig does.*


The fire was maybe a bit too half-tone ambiguous though. Until it was named as such, I thought maybe a tornado.

Getting a big-time BSG vibe out of the civilian/military tension. Good stuff. And again, all in the faces.

Pretty glad I have Issue 2 handy!

The only way I could like the look of this comic better is if it was still being printed on matte paper.

I may be misremembering it as coming out on matte at first but right now I feel certain it did.

Wonder what Kansas ever did to piss Keene off XD

Oh awesome. Thousands of refugees and a big-ass fire. Yeah, better turn back.

Wait, so all of that wasn't enough peril? Christ, Keene.

I keep watching the horizon for mechs. Damn you, @jakebible XD**

As always, our knowledge of the reality of the situation, that most of the characters lack, ratchets up tension.

DUDE! And now I have to wait, uh... how long? I never know with these (awesome) tiny presses.

THE SUMMING UP

The Last Zombie grabbed my attention in its first series last year, and has yet to lose it. To call it a black and white comic is to mis-describe it extremely; it is a wondrous multiplicity of subtle tones of grey with nice black line-work. It may sound boring, but it is not. As I mentioned in one of the tweets above, Denham has a gift for conveying a whole lot of emotion in his faces -- and Keene has made him push his abilities. As we have followed this convoy from a military base across the remains of the American mid-west, the soldiers and civilians here have suffered depression, deprivation and several flavors of terror, fighting and dealing with not only zombies but also lepers (whom they, of course, mistook for zombies with near-disastrous consequences for all and disaster for our hero, Ian; left for dead, he got dumped into a mass grave full mostly of dead lepers, but with just enough double-tapped zombies to give him that disease instead of Hansen's!). The landscapes are bleak and blasted, the characters and figurants desperate and believable. Even if you love all things zombie, this should be a hard book to take in.

THE STRANGE CASE OF MR. HYDE, Issues 3 & 4

THE CREATORS

Another fine one from Dark Horse Comics, this is writer Cole Haddon's comics debut, and I hope to see much more of his work in the future. Though Haddon is playing hard and fast with some characters created by Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson does not seem to be credited in this comic, which I find odd and detect a lawerly whiff about. The pencils are by M.S. Corley, another relative newcomer, though I could have sworn, upon seeing his name and his style, that I've seen his work before (despite having never looked at his bits of Dark Horse Presents). Jim Campbell is the colorist, someone I mostly know from his work in The Art of Tony Millionaire, which I thought superb.

THE SCHTICK

Sometimes good police work just isn’t enough, as Inspector Thomas Adye of Scotland Yard finds out when he’s assigned to the Jack the Ripper case. He’ll need the guidance of imprisoned madman and amoral libertine, Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose mind-splitting serum Jack might be using to commit his bloody murders. Written by Cole Haddon and illustrated by M.S. Corley,  Hyde sets in motion events that will pit London’s two greatest monsters against one another. Will Adye--and his soul--survive intact? - from Dark Horse's website

THE TWEETS

"If your mate be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek." XD

Prepare for swank, walk into rank. How very Victorian. Or Eyes Wide Shut. Or @BooksAndBraun

"I just saw a woman doing the most extraordinary, disturbing thing with a garden vegetable..." Glad I didn't!

Sometimes telling is better than showing.

Am I reading #MrHyde or #Caligula (a new issue of which is also on the pile today)? LMFAO

Ooh! Almost caught him in flagrante (the Ripper, not some guy with a garden vegetable, gutter brains)!

I like Henry's decadence, his insousiance. He's in for the hunt but he's cool about it. Cooler even than Lechter.

And yet: "Is there any point in asking you not to kill him?" "Please."

Apparently the #MrHyde promicin gives Spiderman powers! OK...

Nice touch with the dinner jacket falling to the ground as #MrHyde climbs the side of yon building.

Ooh, and Adye is following the action from a balloon! Neat.

I'm not crazy about Corley's faces but his action scenes are cool. Did the peelers just cut Adye's balloon loose?!

Ha ha! Flying leap to catch the tether. FTW.

I feel a bit thick for not seeing where the "Liberation" sub-plot was heading. D'oh.

Liberation introduces a nice Hunter S. Thompson element to the tale.

So the possibility opens up that there are LOTS of culprits doing the Ripper's work. I like this. Will we go there?

VERY nice touch at Tussad's, with #MrHyde surveying his own diorama. "There was no pram." XD

OK, so my theory is already KO. We're going a more traditional route. Looks like Issue 4 will be a villain hunt. OK.

Cover is a hoot. The creators' names on banners along the bottom suggest Jekyll is @colehaddon and #MrHyde is M.S. Corley.

Any finale that begins with a bobby being launched through a roof and across a garden is a promising one.

I wish the character faces were better differentiated. There's pleasing ambiguity and there's total confusion.

Aha. Thought this might have to happen. As how could it not?

Ew. Nicely done, Corley. I believe I can smell Abbey Mills. Thanks for that.

This is now reminding me of that BBC series "Filthy Cities." Heh.

"When I am gone everything will still be shit." Well, yes.

Aaaaaand... many, many slapstick deaths. Excellent!

That's as good a finale to a limited series or story arc as I've seen in quite some time.


THE SUMMING UP

The original Stevenson tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become quite a chestnut - everybody born after, say, 1970 probably new the schtick from the Warner Brothers Cartoons that riffed on it long before they were old enough to handle Robert Louis Stevenson's prose style. So when I saw this book in the Diamond Preview guide, I sort of shrugged and ordered it as a curiosity; I'm always interested to see how hoary old classics like this get translated to comics. In other words, I didn't read the actual solicitation. I was, therefore, very pleasantly surprised to see someone doing something truly new and different with the characters. The comic takes place years after the events of the novel and is its sequel much the same way Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs was one to Red Dragon. The first details the rampage and capture, the second sees a detective turning to the maniac to help catch another. It's kind of a goofy thing to have done, but it totally worked for me (and this is why I have developed a creative crush on Mr. Haddon, who is also a charming tweeter and amusingly easy to cause to blush). What almost didn't was some of the art. As I complained of in a tweet or two, the resemblances between characters were often close enough to be confusing; even our two leads, Adye and Hyde (and didn't I just notice the names are near anagrams of one another!), can only be differentiated most of the time by a line or two meant to suggest sharper cheekbones on the latter. Corley more than made up for that, though, with some superb action sequences, with balloons and coaches and flying bobbies and swirling capes and splashing blood. It's all very cinematic, which is fitting as this is supposedly under development as a film. I'm sure it will be a grand one, but meanwhile, I'm more interested in Haddon's hints that more miniseries might be in the offing. Yes, please.

THE SIXTH GUN: BOUND Issues 12 & 13

THE CREATORS


Full disclosure: I have drunk "margatweetas" and (shudder) "bloody marias" with writer Cullen Bunn, who has described himself as "formerly the world's youngest hypnotist," so I may not be entirely objective here. And while I do come from Wyoming and so might be expected to have a certain taste for Westerns, I'm also a geek (duh) and so I like my Westerns a little bit weirder than your typical Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey -- so even before I choked down that vile brew of tequila and bloody mary mix (shudder) I was primed to like this book. And I haven't been disappointed yet. Bunn and partner in crime Brian Hurtt and colorist Bill Crabtree have made a reliably enjoyable piece of eye candy that is also telling an unusual and entertaining story with -- pay attention all you people who are hating on DC for its supposed low female presence -- a nifty firecracker of a heroine in Becky Moncrief. Oni Press are putting out a great book, here.


THE SCHTICK

During the darkest days of the Civil War, wicked cutthroats came into possession of six pistols of otherworldly power. In time, the Sixth Gun, the most dangerous of the weapons, vanished. When the gun surfaces in the hands of an innocent girl, dark forces reawaken. Vile men thought long dead set their sights on retrieving the gun and killing the girl. Only Drake Sinclair, a gunfighter with a shadowy past, stands in their way. - from Oni Press's website

THE TWEETS

Wow. Missy Hume looks like hammered shit. Awesome.

Do I want to know what she considers a "pick me up?" XD

Ooh! Ooh! I can haz train robbery? Apparently so!

And a classic bit of zombie-rising slapstick XD

"A spirit as foul as General Hume's... well, it might be best to keep that bound to flesh and bone." Yikes!

Have I ever mentioned how much I dig Bill Crabtree's coloring on this comic? Because I really do.

This two-page-wide panel with the robbers chasing the train into the sunset is GORGEOUS.

I'm foggy. This is the first time we've really seen the guns in action, no?

"I thought we were done with dead men!" quoth Becky "There's more than one variety of walking corpse in this world" quoth Drake.

Aaaaand holy crap, am I glad I've got the next issue to dive into immediately.

And the train robbery is far from over. Yee and also haw.

Ahh, possible nod to Robert Bloch and #ThatHellboundTrain?

Ouch. I don't think Becky's ever been grabbed quite that way before.

But she recovers well. Damn, but Becky is becoming a badass.

So. Freaking. Good.


THE SUMMING UP

The Sixth Gun was one of my very favorite comics of last year. It's been a blast watching these characters tramp to and fro across a good swath of 19th century America -- a story arc prior to this one even had them passing some time in New Orleans and the surrounding swamps, giving Bunn and Hurtt a chance to mess around with voodoo tropes along with the cowboys-and-zombies that started off this hot mess. And their heroine, Becky, has grown as a character. When first the mystical gun came into her possession, I'm not sure she even knew how to fire it accurately, but now she's kicking ass all over the weird west (though not entirely insuperable; an icky dude named Kirby got into her pants for a while and almost got away with the guns). With this arc we head west again and the original villain, General Hume, who is dead and chained up tightly in his coffin, looms large again nonetheless as his widow searches for him and the guns they consider rightfully to be his. I have seen a giant mummy attack a moving train, and it is GOOD.

I,ZOMBIE, Issues 15 & 16

THE CREATORS

Unlike a lot of the books I've been digging on lately, I,Zombie is the work of a bunch of old pros; Vertigo can afford to bring the best to bear on anything it likes, I suspect. Chris Roberson (whose work I praised last week on Elric: The Balance Lost) is writing this supernatural soap opera of a story, with Mike Allred (who seems to have turned his hand to just about everything in comics at one time or another) on pencils and Laura Allred on colors -- it's Laura who takes the fellas from awesome to eye-poppingly spectacular; I could just lick the page every issue (but of course I won't because, yeah).

THE SCHTICK


Gwen Dylan is a gravedigger in an eco-friendly cemetery...and a zombie detective. Once a month, she has to eat a human brain – both to keep from going all “Night of the Living Dead,” and to keep her own memories intact. As a result, Gwen’s mind is crowded with the dead person’s thoughts. And lately, she feels compelled to fulfill their final requests. Torn between a mysterious mummy and a dashing young monster-hunter, Gwen is set for adventures beyond imagination! A were-terrier, a swinging ’60s ghost and a pack of paintball blasting vampires complete the cast of I, ZOMBIE. - from Vertigo's website

THE TWEETS

Yet another #SundayComics two-fer, #iZombie. I think by now it is not news how much I love this book.

Gorgeous pencils, gorgeous colors, MATTE PAPER, fantastic story, great characters, undead soap opera goodness.

Chock full of Michael Allred easter eggs, this issue is. Funny that.

Grandpa Chimp to the rescue! I love it!

"Meanwhile at a comic book convention in Portland.." - man, sure seeing a lot of action set at cons this year. Tired.***

Yes! Cave o'zombies!

It's a special comic in which a vampire, performing an autopsy, looks in a medical book and says "Ooh creepy."

Well, yes, Gwen. Right in the middle of his zombie-killing spree would be a bad time to tell him you're a zombie.

Oh, yeah #TheDeadPresidents. Had totally forgotten about them. Huzzah!

Bwahahahaha. Looks like the storylines are due to collide.

On to Issue 16 of #iZombie, and we've definitely moved from the soap opera plots to more of an adventure story. Cool.

Oh, and yep, straight into #DeadPresidents, fighting off teh zombies.

Even closer to @jakebible land. "I don't heal too well, and most of my original meat has been replaced with metal.

THE SUMMING UP

I,Zombie was another of my picks for favorite comics of last year. Since the original solicitation the relationships between Gwen, Ellie and Scott/Spot (gotta love a were-terrier!) have deepened, Gwen has had to spend a lot of her time wrapping up other people's storylines (she has to eat a brain at least once a month to say pretty, alive-looking, and intelligent. She only eats those of the recently dead, but when she does, she gets a full dose of the eaten brain's personality, memories and priorities) and started a new one with her own: a romance -- with a professional monster killer! -- who doesn't know Gwen is a monster! Throw in a former sorority, all turned vampires, and a whole new gang of monster/government agents, The Dead Presidents (who seem destined to have their own series, expanding the I,Zombie universe), and things, I suspect, are only beginning to get weird.There is a whole weird set of complicated metaphysics explaining how ghosts and zombies and were-terriers (and how Scott's grandfather is now a dead ringer for DC classic character Detective Chimp) can actually exist that I've decided not to bother sorting out; I turn into a complete girl for this book, and I like the beautiful colors, the lush character designs, and the pulpy, soapy stories. Delicious.

That's going to be it for today. As with last week, I'm breaking this post into two parts so I can go about my evening's business. If you saw my tweets, you already know what else I read today; if not, well, surprises are nice, aren't they?


*Chuck Wendig is the author of, among other things, a blog post that's been making the rounds called "25 Ways to F*ck with your Characters." It's a good read even if you're not, as most of my friends are, an aspiring author yourself.


**Jake Bible is another author friend, inventor of the drabble novel, who has completed two of them now set in a world that has not only seen a plague of zombies but is now beset by giant robots piloted by zombies.


***Why, oh why, are we going so meta with this, comics creators? Seems every other comic I pick up sets significant action or story developments at a comic book convention and treats us to a parade of cosplaying nerds. Twilight Guardian did it, I,Zombie has done it and, as you'll see tomorrow, so has Screamland. And that's just three recent examples off the top of my head from my personal, highly idiosyncratic pull list.

Podcasting Zelig: You thought I was kidding?

On a lot of my online profiles I refer to myself as a "podcast crasher." I've allowed my own podcast to fade because it's a lot of work and I've got no local help, but I still get a kick out of doing stuff on other people's podcasts.

Above is my latest appearance, in the triumphant return of "Calls for Cthulhu", the Great Old One's call-in talk show. I asked a very provocative question -- so provocative that Cthulhu, in his terrible rage, admitted that he is responsible for the film version of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

If this is your first time seeing this great little show, check out the rest at the creator's YouTube channel.

Other 'casts I have crashed include...

Orange Alert - reading an awesome story by Jeremy C. Shipp

Several appearances on Shadowcast Audio, a horror anthology podcast - reading stories by Shipp and other authors.

I've also had bit parts in a few podcast novels over at Podiobooks.com, including that of a distraught mother who needs the heroine's help in Starla Hutchins' lovely fantasy novel The Dreamer's Thread.

And of course there is my own podcast, now mostly defunct, but it may soon revive in a weird form late in the year. See if it doesn't.

I love doing story narration and voice-overs and am always happy to help. If you need me, find me on Twitter.

Sunday Comics Round-Up, Part II

So yesterday I began a trial of doing a more formal blog entry around my #SundayComics tweets and put up a balloon on Google+ to see if people want me to keep doing it, because I don't want to waste the considerable effort it's taking to do what little formatting I'm doing (It took 2 1/2 hours to assemble yesterday's post, and probably only about 45 minutes of that was actual writing). I'm still open to feedback on this; a few people have said they dig it so.. I think I'll be template shopping after I finish this one, because half of why the formatting is such a PITA is that this template forces me to hand-code things like paragraph breaks and italics/bold and the like. Ugh.

I broke off yesterday to go to bed after getting as far as Dollhouse -- which means that really, the best is yet to come out of my Sunday Comics extravaganza!



CRIMINAL MACABRE/THE GOON: WHEN FREAKS COLLIDE

THE CREATORS

This is a cross-over of two popular titles from Dark Horse Comics, a mash-up of the work of two sets of creators whose work I adore. Steve Niles writes Criminal Macabre, a series of comics and novels concerning the adventures of hard-boiled detective Cal McDonald, most of whose cases hinge on something unsavory and supernatural; while Eric Powell is responsible for The Goon, a giant palooka who specializes in monster-killing and wisecracks at the expense of a certain sparkly vampire franchise. Christopher Mitten, who seems a relative newcomer, took care of the art and did a fantastic job of making the two worlds blend seamlessly.

THE SCHTICK

Cal McDonald, the drug-fueled paranormal private dick, goes head to head with Lonely Street's zombie-pulverizing Goon, in a weird in-between world full of monsters, horror, and humor! - from Dark Horse's website

THE TWEETS

On to something I've long anticipated. #CriminalMacabreGoon. @steveniles and @goonguy drawn by Christopher Mitten. Jesus.

When Freaks Collide indeed.

Snort. Story by @SteveNiles Farts and Negativity by @goonguy (Eric Powell). Credits page win.

"Scrapin' cake and two-thirds of a hog off the ceiling ain't no way to spend a birthday." XD

"Hey Mo, check it. The Little Rascals did steroids like Carrot Top" - Cal McDonald on first beholding the Goon and Franky XD

Crossovers are mostly silly, but @darkhorsecomics does them well

Bwahahahahahhahah.

THE SUMMING UP

This was fun. As much a dialogue between Niles and Powell -- witness the snarky observation from Cal re the Goon's appearance -- as an actual installment in either series. Something has brought both parties into a strange new world (nicely skirting the problem of blending milieus) full mostly of Mafia werewolves; at first the two protagonists blame each other and brawl, while their smarter sidekicks try to assess what's really going on. As sometimes happens, though, the impulse to, as Andrew Rilstone likes to describe it, take the Cal McDonald action figure and Goon action figure out of their boxes and put them side by side is driving the issue more than an actual story, which is too bad. The goofy amusement of watching them interact was burnished to a nice sheen, no denying, but I found myself not caring why they were there, so when Mo'Lock (Cal's ghoul sidekick) and Franky found a magic book that could make anything happen I just sighed. But maybe this is just setting up all the pieces for more story later, as is strongly suggested by the last page's hoovering up of yet another beloved Dark Horse monster-fighter into the mix (hence the laughter of the last tweet). We'll see!



ELRIC: THE BALANCE LOST #1

THE CREATORS

BOOM! Studios is releasing this book, an adaptation of a beloved character -- or, arguably, characters, as I'll touch on below -- from a whole bunch of Michael Moorcock novels. Chris Roberson, classically famous for his DC superhero work on titles like Superman but beloved to me for the amazing I, Zombie, is writing and Francesco Biagini, whose work is new to me, is the artist.

THE SCHTICK

For 40 years comic fandom has thrilled to the exploits of Elric since his introduction in Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian in the early 1970s. Neil Gaiman called Elric’s creator Michael Moorcock “my model for what a writer was” while Warren Ellis said he is one of the “eight core sites in my creative genome.” Now the godfather of the Multiverse teams up with hot New York Times bestseller Chris Roberson (SUPERMAN, iZOMBIE, STAN LEE'S STARBORN) for an ongoing series that sees a crisis break out across multiple worlds with Moorcock's other two most famous fantasy franchise characters, Corum of the Scarlet Robe and Dorian Hawkmoon! The workings of Fate are being tampered across the Multiverse, upsetting the Cosmic Balance. Elric is on a quest to restore The Balance and save the Multiverse from ruin! Elric, Corum, and Hawkmoon are forced into action far and wide, but will they fight on the side of Law...or Chaos? - from BOOM! Studios' website

THE TWEETS

Looking at the cover art.. I dunno. I never pictured #Elric with a six-pack...

OK, #Elric is doing some pretty interesting stuff with the Eternal Champion and ripping it from the headlines. Digging it.

Wow. It's like a roll call. Will I see Jerry Cornelius too? XD

The chaos critters in the #Elric scenes are gloriously OTT icky.

Nice afterword by @neilhimself. Glad to see I'm not the only one whose entire allowance once went to Moorcock books.

THE SUMMING UP

I might as well be genetically programmed to like this book. BOOM! et al would have to really cock it up before I'd drop it -- but given Roberson's wonderful track record that's highly unlikely. This first issue is setting up a doozy of a premise and, as I observed, hauling in many aspects of the Eternal Champion - Moorcock's Hero With A Thousand Faces, different incarnations of whose stories he has told in multiple series of novels, most of which I devoured as a teenager. As I tweeted, most of my allowance and a lot of my paychecks from lifeguarding went into Moorcock's pockets. Rather than adapting any of those into comics form, this book is boldly creating new material, though adhering to the classic trope of something disturbing the Cosmic Balance between Law and Chaos throughout the multiverse. Our title character, the albino ex-emperor Elric, is traversing the multiverse and finding that many worlds are hopelessly lost to Chaos, overrun with outrageously mutated monsters -- Biagini did not hold back on imagining grotesqueries aplenty (an overall trope for these monsters is mouths full of big sharp nasty pointy teeth erupting all over parts of the body that do not ordinarily have mouths); meanwhile Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon, other aspects of the Champion, are encountering their own difficulties, and a young man in our own world, Eric (another albino; his last name of Beck strongly suggests he is a member of the family Elric founded centuries ago during a prior visit to our world) is watching aghast as his twin brother is whipping up support for a Tea Party-esque Law & Order party complete with scarily armed militia. It all feels very Moorcock and again, I'm so in.



WITCH DOCTOR #1 AND 2

THE CREATORS

Witch Doctor is coming out from Image Comics' and Robert Kirkman's Skybound imprint. The writer is Brandon Seifert, whose work I've only seen a bit of in Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan; the art is by Lukas Ketner, who has done a Walking Dead cover and worked in the same bit of Transmetropolitan that Seifert did; the two seem to be a pretty solid team.

THE SCHTICK

HOUSE M.D. MEETS FRINGE IN THE FIRST SKYBOUND ORIGINAL FROM ROBERT KIRKMAN's NEW COMICS IMPRINT! Meet Vincent Morrow, a doctor looking for a vaccine... for the apocalypse! In this stand-alone first issue, a family needs Dr. Morrow's help with their son's illness: Demonic possession. But when Morrow attempts an experimental cure, he discovers the boy's disease isn't all spinning heads and pea soup - it's like nothing you've seen before! Horror gets a brain transplant in WITCH DOCTOR, the book WARREN ELLIS calls 'Mental.' - from Image's website

THE TWEETS

My Sunday is loaded with Grand Guignol. On to #WitchDoctor which promises more of the same it appears. Two issues here.

Oh, and it's set in Arkham, at least this first scene, but it's Arkham OREGON. Hmm.

Ha ha ha ha. Priest/faith healer vs physician but the latter is a combo of House and Alice Hotwire XD

"Get a C.T. scan." "A what?"..."A sciencey thing at the doctort place" XD

"'Possession' is just infection by a BABY BOTFLY FROM HELL." Oh yes, I like this #WitchDoctor yes I do.

"I've only seen one case this bad in the literature, and it was in the Bible!"

And I have Issue 2 of #WitchDoctor, which makes me unreasonably happy. Hilarious cover art too.

Lukas Ketner really likes to draw saliva ribbons stretching across open mouths. Even human ones. Ew.

But seriously. If you like grotesque art, Ketner's right up Jacen Burrows' alley.

So yeah, #WitchDoctor is a keeper, and possibly my favorite so far today.

THE SUMMING UP

Witch Doctor did indeed turn out to be my favorite reads of the day. The protagonist is hilariously irascible, though as I observed he reminds me at least as much of Alice Hotwire as of House; he partakes of her angry contempt for people who take a superstitious view of the supernatural phenomena of which he has made a lifetime's carefully scientific study and I can definitely imagine him saying, as Hotwire's dad did "Fine. Give it all back and die at age 30 like you're supposed to" to the anti-science cranks who oppose, e.g., childhood vaccinations. It's all very stylish and witty and visually grotesque -- Ketner really does remind me of Jacen Burrows, the current go-to guy for really wrong art that crawls with detail and demented lines. Issue #2 continued just as strong and funny and sick and weird and this all bodes well for this becoming a book I really look forward to every month.



ROBERT BLOCH'S THAT HELLBOUND TRAIN #1 AND 2

THE CREATORS

IDW is publishing this adaptation of a Robert Bloch short story. The task of adapting it into a comics script has been given to John and Joe Lansdale who between them have a long history of deftly handling just this kind of task as well as being responsible for a lot of prose fiction in horror and other genres. The art is by Dave Wachter, another guy I've only seen doing bits of Transmetropolitan but who has a resume full of horror comics that I'm not familiar with but might have to dig up because he does great, moody work.

THE SCHTICK

Take a trip back in time on Robert Bloch’s That Hellbound Train! Join Martin, an out-of-luck orphan, as he struggles to fulfill the American dream. As Martin comes of age, fate conspires against him at every turn. On the verge of giving up hope, our young protagonist is visited by a monstrous train, one whose conductor might just have a ticket to fame and riches... if Martin is willing to pay the price!

THE TWEETS (I didn't tweet a lot on these, partly from running out of steam and partly because I just got absorbed in reading them)

I'm not familiar with the original story so I've been curious to see what the Lansdales would do with it. #ThatHellboundTrain

I like the skull forming from the smoke of #ThatHellboundTrain even if it is an obvious trope

Is that an Al Capone cameo I see? Awesome #ThatHellboundTrain

Nice touch on panel where Martin paints - his roller is in the process of either generating or obliterating the image

Continued high quality in second issue of #ThatHellboundTrain. @MrsJwNic is very quiet over there reading the first 8)

THE SUMMING UP

It's hard to go wrong with source material like a Robert Bloch story, even if most of the prose is stripped down; what's lost in verbiage is gained in dark and moody art and haunting, creepy faces -- even our protagonist, as an innocent youngster, looks more than a little wicked, as he should. As I said, I hadn't read the original story and when I saw this comic coming I decided to wait and see what the comic did with it first. This is a pact-with-the-devil story with a neat little twist; Martin hasn't asked for wealth or fame or any of that stuff that can easily be twisted, Monkey's Paw-style; instead he's come away with a watch that will stop time, but can only be used once. His intent is to stop it when he achieves happiness (quite a challenge for a kid who's had such a poor start in life); his challenge through the rest of the tale is to find the right moment to stop the watch, made more complicated by the machinations of the conductor-devil who gave it to him. This looks to be as much a melancholy as a scary book based on these two issues I read on Sunday.

I finished one more and started another on Sunday, but I feel like I overdid it and didn't give the one the attention it needed and didn't get the finish the other, and so I'll stop here. And, I guess, start looking for a template that doesn't force me to do quite so much hand-coding to do this simple bit of formatting I've done here. Grr.

Sunday Comics Round-up

My Twitter followers are already quite familiar with my #SundayComics tweets, in which I live-tweet my way through my current stack of single issue comics to be read. I started doing that about a year ago when I realized my backlog of stuff that was showing up in my subscription drawer at my Friendly Local Comics Store (the awesome Heroes Only) but not getting read was getting out of hand. Since I was already making a small name for myself as a comics critic/reviewer, people were always asking me what I thought of this book or that, and so this seemed a way to share my enjoyment of what I had with at least that part of my Twitter following who were interested in, or at least curious about, what the world of comics has to offer these days.

But tweets are ephemeral, as my good friend and occasional publisher Ommus pointed out when I first started doing this. He encouraged me to find a way to preserve and aggregate them. Yeah, great idea, I'll see what I can do...

But I tweet a lot, and not just about comics, even on Sundays. There's a lot to comb through there, even with the #SundayComics hashtag to help (though as of recently that is no longer a help, since Twitter messed with its integrated search and made it useless. That might just be for those of us who have dug in our heels and resisted the bloated horror that is #NewTwitter, but it's still a major inconvenience that cripples a service that I love). So weeks, then months went by and I was still just tweeting into oblivion -- except, of course, in that my tweets have led to some fun interactions and conversations, as I'll share a bit below.

But so enter FriendFeed, which I've been using and shunting my twitter feed to for quite a while just because it hangs onto stuff longer, and my oh duh moment this morning when I was trying to catch myself up on the story so far in one of the comics I was resuming after way too long since I'd read the prior issue. And because FriendFeed is not infected with bloat and spam and other clutter, voila! It's very easy for me to harvest those tweets.

But to make this more of a reader friendly entry, I shall expand on those tweets a bit. So get ready (note: to spare your eyes a lot of pound signs, I've slashed out the hashtags from the individual tweets).

MALIGNANT MAN #4

THE CREATORS

Malignant Man is published by Boom! Studios; written by James Wan, in what I believe is his major comics debut, and Michael Alan "Zombie Tales" Nelson; and drawn by Piotr Kowalski in what appears to be his American debut. All three are new to me, since I missed Zombie Tales.

THE SCHTICK

Alan Gates, a cancer patient with a terminal diagnosis, is resigned to his fate...until he discovers that his tumor is actually a mysterious parasite! Granted a second lease on life and incredible, otherworldly powers, Alan must fight against an evil army buried beneath society's skin, all the while unlocking the secrets of his forgotten past. -- from Boom! Studio's site for the comic

THE TWEETS

Grabbing from the #SundayComics bag more or less at random, I have Issue 4 of #MalignantMan. Paranormal powered tumors FTW XD

MalignantMan is pretty interesting to read with this week's speculations on cancer as new, mutant species in mind

Why just have a fist when you can have a FISTFUL OF LEAD? XD Also: yuck!

Interesting tactics with the sphere. Also: yuck!

Rather matrix-y panel full of bad guys in suits. "He WAS expecting us." XD

Classic mentor and former protege confrontation. A little stale..

OK, but the thing with the bullets is very cool.

Ah, and so The End is just the end of this first serial. Must pursue the weirdness back to its origin eventually.

Not 100% sure that I'm on board for another story, though. It's cool but I'm not sure it's THAT cool.

THE SUMMING UP

Issue 4 brought the story up to kind of a predictable conclusion. As I tweeted, the mentor or creator/former protege or creation thing has been done to death; it's just the twist, that this guy's tumor gave him regenerative and other paranormal powers, that's new. What really kept me sticking around was the art; I hope Kowalski, who seems to have had a decent little career in Europe, gets a chance to do more here, if such is his desire. He's good with action and with creepy crawlies and gives these characters way more personality than the script, which really has kind of petered out, did.



ABATTOIR #6

THE CREATORS

Published by Radical Comics. There are too many fingers in this pie to mention. Click on the link above to see. Like a lot of Radical's books, this is basically a movie pitch, so one guy (film director Darren Lynn Bousman, he of Saw II fame) came up with the concept and another the story and two other guys wrote it and lots of people worked on the pencils and inks and I'm tired just writing this paragraph.

THE SCHTICK

From director Darren Lynn Bousman comes a chilling supernatural tale set in the cold beauty of Middle America. After a brutal massacre takes place in a mansion, real estate agent Richard Ashwalt is assigned the impossible task of cleaning the blood-soaked grounds. When a twisted old man journeys to the house with a sinister and terrifying purpose, Richard is drawn into a web of shadows, murders and massacres that will shatter him to his very core… and make him run for his life. -- from Radical's website

Basically, the twisted old man has lived for at least 100 years and goes around buying properties where particularly grisly murders have taken place. He then removes the actual part of the house or grounds where the deed was done and spirits it away; as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs sought to make a dress out of women's skins, creepy Mr. Crone is building a house out of crime scenes. Pretty cool concept...

THE TWEETS

This creep has built a house out of snatched pieces of other crime scenes. What happens now?

Abattoir is an intriguing mess. And so is this finale.

I have a weird-ass sympathy for Crone in this late hour.

Ew. Gross. Wait, what?

A little underwhelmed with that finale.

THE SUMMING UP

What I said in that last tweet: I'm a little underwhelmed. Which is a pity, because I started out liking this comic. The slow build to the discovery of what Crone was doing was pretty well handled, and the truth came as a surprise. The art was always pretty much just so-so; Radical is evolving a house style that aims at photorealism, probably because, as we know, Radical is mostly making movie pitches in comic book form; it's only when someone like Steve "Hotwire" Pugh gets involved or, as in Radical's first book Caliber, they bring in an established comics artist like Garrie Gastonny, that we get visual standouts (but oh, when we do, we really do. Go have a look at Hotwireespecially. I reviewed it in detail for Indie Pulp last year. But anyway, my attention was theirs to lose, for Abattoir, and they lost it. See that tweet where I just said "Ew, gross. Wait, what?" I have no memory now, just a few hours later, of what made me say that, nor do I recall why exactly I was feeling sympathy for Crone. And -- and this is what is important -- I can't be arsed to go look again right now because I don't care all that much and I have more interesting things to share with you. Moving along.



HELLBOY: THE FURY #2

THE CREATORS Hellboy comes to us from Dark Horse Publishing and is the brainchild of Mike Mignola. Google him and Hellboy too, for that matter, if you don't know of them. I'll wait. Meanwhile, this issue was written by Mignola, penciled by Duncan Fegredo, and colored by Dave Stewart. These are all also big names; Hellboy is big stuff. You may have heard of a film or two by Guillermo del Toro (though I, for one, shudder at the second one, though mostly because of the ludicrous inclusion of Barry Manilow tunage, ironic in intent, intolerable in actual presence).

THE SCHTICK

While Hellboy makes one last stand against the Queen of Blood the war between the forces of good and evil rages on the battlefield with heaps of dead monsters and knights! - from Dark Horse's website.

Basically, Hellboy has been established as King Arthur's heir and is combatting various evil forces out of Arthurian legend and Celtic mythology -- which is exactly the kind of stuff for which I love this comic.

THE TWEETS

Hellboy next. With loads of @duncanfegredo. Happy sigh

Oh, there's gonna be a dragon? Yes, please.

"Your fall should be like the fall of mountains... But I was before mountains." Positively Lovecraftian!

Sigh. That poor, poor cathedral.

Oh that poor bridge. And those poor buildings.

Dude. Enjoying the hell out of this Arthurian/Nordic heap that is this arc.

THE SUMMING UP

As you might guess from my clucking over the fate of the buildings, this was an action-heavy issue. A cathedral, the Leicester Council offices, and Edinburgh Castle took a beating. The colors were glorious and the fight between Hellboy and the current big bad, who as you see liked to trash talk, was equally so. This book is famous for a reason and the torch is still being carried proudly. I was thrilled with it.

But that's not all!

See, Duncan Fegredo is on Twitter. And he saw my starting tweet, with my happy sigh. And he responded with the hope that I would enjoy it. And because, what the hell, you never know, and because I have interacted with him a bit before on Twitter, I tweeted him back, teasing him about how mean he'd been to all those buildings. And soon we were having a very enjoyable conversation and joking about how Hellboy must employ an amazing army of contractors to repair all that damage because as far as I know all of those buildings are intact already/again, and how he also must have hellacious tailoring bills for all the overcoats that get trashed and, you know the kind of silly conversations that can happen about comic books. And it lasted well into my other tweets about other comics and was altogether delightful. So here we have a textbook case of why Twitter makes comic books more fun. It's like a letters column with instant gratification and sometimes, repeat contact. How do you think I know exactly which buildings got trashed? The artist himself told me. Simply awesome!



B.R.P.D.: Hell On Earth: Monsters #1

THE CREATORS

B.R.P.D. is another Dark Horse book, a spin-off of Hellboy, also created by Mike Mignola. This issue, though, was written by one of those trusted helpers I spoke of above, John Arcudi. It's also the debut issue of artist Tyler Crook, with whom we are greatly pleased; colors by the great Dave Stewart.

THE SCHTICK

While the Bureau's off fighting giant bat-eared beasts in Texas, Liz Sherman is kicking hillbilly ass in a trailer park! - from Dark Horse's website

B.P.R.D. stands for Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, a government agency and Hellboy's sometime employer. Many freaks of nature and supernature work for it, including Liz, who is a firestarter and who has taken her training as a sort of supernatural cop very seriously as we soon shall see.

THE TWEETS

So hey, why not follow that up with a look at the latest BRPD that I have. Looks like Liz in Redneck Central. Hmm

Wow. Did she just break a dude's jaw with her foot? Apparently so.

If I could do that, I would probably go to a lot more bars. So it's probably for the best that I can't XD

Oh, dude. Come on. This is the Mignolaverse. You think that frog you kicked was just a frog?

Um, wow. And gross. And wow. Sick Bastard Is Sick.

Aw. Poor broken jaw guy!

THE SUMMING UP

Very little can ever really be taken at face value in this comic, and that was certainly true here. Crook obviously had a lot of fun drawing these hillbillies and their icky homes, and gave them a lot of personality -- especially the big guy whom Liz kicked in the face early on, who totally seemed to deserve it at the time but later, in a neat story turn, garnered my sympathy. Not a totally unexpected development by that time, but still nicely handled. And note this contrast: where I couldn't be bothered to go back and see what grossed me out in Abattoir, I could sure as hell tell you in excruciating, gory detail, without having to look again, what got to me here. I won't, though; go get the book your own dang self.



THE LAST MORTAL #2

THE CREATORS

The Last Mortal comes to us from Top Cow's Minotaur imprint and represents the comics debut of writer Thomas Mahoney, working from ideas by Filip "Witchblade" Sablik. Thomas Nachlik is the artist and is simply blowing me away with his sketchy lines and fantastic and stark black and white work.

THE SCHTICK

Immortality is the most sought after gift in human history. When does it become a curse? When the only thing you want to do is die. Alec King is a small time criminal and three time loser. When he gets his partner and best friend killed, he tries to commit suicide and finds out the hard way that he can't die. Now he has to find a reason to keep living. - from Top Cow's website

This is basically a revenge story. Both Alec and his best friend were supposed to die in a staged botched assassination, but of course Alec didn't die, as some people are about to find out here in Issue #2.

THE TWEETS

On to Issue 2 of #TheLastMortal. Amused by the "story so far" on the inside cover.

"Shooting yourself in the head sucks. Waking up afterwards is infinitely worse" As is graphic B&W puking XD

Setting this in a train yard turns this into a weird riff of Vertical Features Remake. Freight cars every panel.

Really digging the line work in this. Thomas Nalchik. Go Thomas!

I like the Jack Daniels roll here. Everybody's done it.

And WOW with the expressionistic violence.

College flashback now? Really? Um, okay.

These characters have awesome taste in music.

Just once I'd like a mysterious ability story not to feature a whole secret cabal of people with it. Sigh.

THE SUMMING UP

Man, oh man do I love what Nachlik is doing here (yeah, I spelled his name wrong in the tweet). This is stark black and white (as in no grey tones) at its finest. The train car backgrounds are just heavily shadowed enough so many panels have strong, broad vertical lines that make the visual suggestion that everybody is already in jail. Nachlik's figures are done with contrastingly fine lines that remind me weirdly of those intricate drawings that were in, I think, Highlights for Children when I was a kid that were all done in one line (the challenge being to follow that line all the way to its unexpected stopping point). It's really this art that is selling me on this book, which is not to say that the story is bad, it's just not extraordinary so far -- my disappointment at the suggestion at the end of the book that Alec might not be the only immortal out there and is either going to join or be hunted by a bunch of others was real and may be slightly colored by having just read Malignant Man about an hour before but still, that got a meh from me. Had it not been accompanied by such wonderful eye candy I might have been angry.



BLUE ESTATE #4

THE CREATORS

This one's from Image Comics, my go-to house for good stuff. The story is by Viktor "Heavy Metal" Kalvachev and Andrew Osborne, with art by Kalvachev, Toby Cypress (whose done everything from Batman to X-Men to Star Trek, but whom I chiefly did for the issue he did of C.B.G.B and Nathan Fox.

THE SCHTICK

A powerhouse team of Hollywood and comic book veterans (along with special guest artists) presents a fast, funny, 100% cool new series for readers of all stripes. On the mean streets of Los Angeles, an alcoholic hit man and a desperate starlet dodge Russian mobsters, Italian gangsters, ninjas, hippies and the L.A.P.D. in a scheme to steal millions from a psychotic action movie hero. - from Image's website.

THE TWEETS

Another deliciously OTT lurid pulpy cover.

Reading the little recap at the beginning and suddenly I'm thinking of Southland Tales. What a hot mess THAT was.

LMAO at the Russian-dominated film set.

"Why for you sabotage my film debut?" XD

Moviemaking as money laundering scheme. Would be surprised to learn this is not a real thing XD

That's a ridiculous place to put a cell phone.

Amusing as #BlueEstate is, I don't feel too motivated to dig deeper into it online. Too many other floppies! Next!

THE SUMMING UP

Blue Estate is so Hollywood I'm surprised it didn't come from Radical. This is straight up pulp-y crime with a gloss of glamour and, in the form of Russian gangsters who are making a movie starring the boss's girlfriend as a money-laundering scheme, very trendy villains. All of Image's marketing stresses that it is 100% cool and, well, therein lies a bit of a problem I'm having with it as it goes on. It's trying, a lot of the time, a little too hard to be cool. It's so arch. It's so hip. It's so tongue-in-cheek lurid. The ridiculous place to put a cell phone? The front of a woman's bikini bottoms. And it's vibrating. Like that. So trashy I need a shower. But I'll probably keep reading, just to watch what might well be a great slapstick ending.



DOLLHOUSE: EPITAPHS #1

THE CREATORS

Dollhouse was, of course, originally a TV show created by Joss Whedon, about which I had a thing or two to say when I first started up this blog. In what has become a tradition for shows that only ever found a cult audience on the Devil's Fishbowl, the story is being concluded more properly and at a more leisurely pace in comics form; in effect we're to accept it as Season 3 of the show, or beyond if it continues. Joss didn't do any of the writing here that I'm aware of, but his brother Jed, who was one of the writers on the show, joins fellow alum Andrew Chambliss and Maurissa Tancharoen (who helped bring another Whedon creation, Dr. Horrible, to comics) in penning this. Cliff Richards, a pro with heaps of superhero and other stuff under his belt, has the pencils here.

THE SCHTICK

The fight for free will starts now! Alpha was the perfect product of Rossum Corporation's mind-altering technology, until he snapped, burdened by the dozens of personalities they'd downloaded into his brain. Now the technology has gone viral, turning the entire population into murderous automatons, and it's up to the psychotic Alpha and a small group of survivors to save mankind.

Basically, someone, probably the evil corporation, has taken rogue the technology it once used to wipe the minds and memories of attractive people who agreed to work as "dolls" and imprint them with new personalities and skill sets to please the clients of the Dollhouse. Not only that, but the tech has gone viral, as depicted in those weird flash-forward season finales of the show. The comic is, I gather, going to fill in the gaps between the regular show and those "epitaphs."

THE TWEETS

Haven't bothered with the Buffy or Angel comics but love the Serenity ones, so giving #Dollhouse a try

Off to a nicely creepy start in a telemarketing tank

Nice! Matrix-style skillz uploads! William Gibson territory FTW

Multiple Ivies. And they went there. "I'm hooking up with myself?"

So I am intrigued by the "Wielders" and their mysterious directives. And Alpha is still fascinating.

THE SUMMING UP

This is a great looking comic, faithful to the appearance of actor Alan Tudyk, who played Alpha in the series, but not slavishly so. The overall impression, visually, is that it is pro work -- so mostly, I don't notice it and I'm just there for the story, which is unfolding nicely. We're not yet into what promises to be a quest narrative to find Echo, the heroine of the TV show; it's a marshalling of forces and Alpha and his many personalities are making due and assessing the real horror of the situation, which is grim. Intercut with Alpha's scenes is a capsule story of how the tech starts going viral; a nasty electronic tone is robocalled into a telemarketing center and everyone who answers the phone gets zapped. But they're neither zombies nor homicidal maniacs (the two basic kinds we saw in the TV episodes), but something new, with a directive that involves building devices out of whatever crap they find lying around that spread the imprint and the directive. Scary stuff. I'm in!

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OK, I hate entering stuff in HTML and making all of these links and embedding images is way more work than just writing so I'm breaking off here for now. I'll do Sunday Comics 2: Electric Boogaloo, tomorrow. Comics nerd's honor.