Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 5/25

DC Universe: Rebirth #1
Story: Geoff Johns
Art: Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, Phil Jiminez, Brad Anderson and Jason Wright, Joe Prado, Hi-Fi Colors, Gabe Eltaeb, & Matt Santorelli

Last week, the internet broke in half twice, and I'm here to tell you about the time that filled me with joy and hope. DC Universe: Rebirth begins a new phase in the history of DC Comics, linking the old with the new, and done through one of my favorite characters of all time, Wally West, the pre-Flashpoint version. I'm not even going to try to avoid spoilers here, since everything was spoiled on the internet days before the comic came out. The book is framed around Wally trying to make his way out of the Speed Force, where he has been trapped since the events of Flashpoint. Through Wally's tour of the DC Universe as it stands, we see hints of the existence of the Justice Society and the Legion of Super-Heroes, we see the return of the idea of legacy, as Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes meet, Ryan Choi has to take up a size changing belt to aid Ray Palmer, and Wally himself sees his cousin, the Wally West of the New 52, and feels his own legacy is in good hands. We get a heart breaking scene as Wally reaches out to Linda Park, his true love and anchor, who can not remember him, and a moment of triumph as Barry Allen does. What Wally talks about, as he tries to break through, is that there is a secret threat, one that has not only stolen a decade from the lives of the DC Universe, but has also stolen love and hope. This is some intense meta-commentary about the state of DC Comics, some that has come through more and more of late (the pre-Flashpoint Superman, who has been living in secret for years and who appears here as well, has commented repeatedly in his recent mini-series how much more cynical this new world is then his own), but coming from Johns himself, it's more palpable, as he is the man who wrote Flashpoint, who wrote the flagship title of the New 52, Justice League, and who has been a driving creative force behind DC Comics for over a decade now. And the use of the characters from Watchmen, while something that will/has polarized fans, is to me a very smart move, as it is the real life story that brought that sense of cynicism to comics, for good or ill. I loved this comic more than any event comic I've read in many many years. The idea of hope and legacy coming back to DC Comics is something I've been hoping for, and this is a huge step in that direction. It's got beautiful art, and engaging story, and the return of a character I love. I could not be more excited to see where DC takes their universe next.

Munchkin #17
Story: Sam Sikes & John Kovalic
Art: Mike Lucas and Meg Casey & John Kovalic

I've talked about my love of games before, and while I have enjoyed playing Munchkin, the game where you rob tombs, kill monsters, and stab your buddies in the back, it's not a game that I play a lot. However, the comic that the game has spawned is a delight, It's a simple, fun comic that is funny and each issue features a couple of bizarre and quirky stories. I've always meant to review it, because it's fun, but never got around to it. Until today. As always, this issue features two different stories. The first one, "My Faire Munchkin" has one of the series two major Munchkins at a faire in his medieval world, attempting to win the PRINCESS (not the capitalization) in the tournament. For those of you who don't know the term, in this case munchkin means a player who plays a non-competitive game aggressively, usually to the detriment of those around him or her. Spyke initially gets trounced, and then spends the rest of the story, well, cheating. Munchkin isn't a series that rewards good behavior, but it doesn't reward bad behavior either; Spyke is a lousy little jerk, and when he wins by cheating, well, the princess he meets is not the PRINCESS he anticipated. The story that made me decide to review the issue, though, was the second, "Munchkin Fu Mikado." Written and drawn by Dork Tower creator, and original Munchkin artist, John Kovalic, this story features Spyke meeting up with a monster and fighting him, before they're both tricked out of their swag by Flower, the series other principle Munchkin. Again, pretty simple story, but what made me love this was most of the dialogue is set to the tune of songs from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. There are notes to what song you can YouTube or Spotify to read along with, but I know most of that music, and it totally works. It is singularly ridiculous, and that just completely sells me on this issue. If you want to read a comic that just gives you a laugh, this is a perfect issue.

Secret Six #14
Story: Gail Simone
Art: Tom Derenick & Jason Wright and Rex Lokus

And once again, we reach the end. The second volume of Secret Six reaches its end as the team raids the League of Assassins stronghold to rescue their lost comrade, Strix, from Lady Shiva. As they face down the guards of the League, we get a bit of narrative from each of them. We see the theme that has been central to not just this volume of Secret Six, but the original as well, that of family. It's a violent, bloody, and bizarre family, but a family nonetheless. It's a big, crazy, issue, with all the blood and guts, and all the humor, that is the trademark of Secret Six, but each of these  people, Black Alice, Elongated Man, Catman, Strix, and Porcelain, as well as the Female Furies, as Knockout calls herself and Scandal, Jeanette, Ragdoll, are a mess, and together they have made something akin to a family. Despite them all being killers, and most of them completely mad, you feel not just sympathy, but genuine affection for these characters because they are all so clearly trying to make something better of themselves. I don't use that in the respect of, "They're trying to go straight and become productive members of society." No. They're trying to become something fuller than what they are by becoming something greater together. And it's heartwarming. But there's a character I didn't mention above, and that is the Ventriloquist, and her dummy Ferdie. And that's because not everyone is wired to be like this Secret Six. Having the Ventriloquist be treacherous and selfish not only makes perfect sense for her character, and also fits well with the history of the Six, as they've had their share of traitors, but because family doesn't save everyone. Some people are just too broken. Although you have to wonder, since the part of her that was Ferdie did really and truly want to help the others, if maybe there's some kernel of light in her dark soul. The final pages are just a smile inducing scene of the team enjoying the backyard of Ralph and Sue Dibny (and they're together and happy! Thanks, Gail!), and Strix, who has been lonely and lost since she first escaped the Court of Owls some time ago, now living in a big treehouse in Ralph's back yard, ends the series with this, "I am Strix. I have a weird family. And that is enough," And I think if that was enough for everyone, we'd be in a better place. So that ends the new volume of Secret Six. As far as I know, there are no plans for a return to these characters any time soon, but I can only hope that we'll meet again.

Star Wars #19
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Lenil Franic Yu, Gerry Alanguilan, & Sunny Gho and Java Tartaglia

"Rebel Jail," the current arc on the Star Wars ongoing, wrapped up this past week, and it ends on a strong note. Leia, Dr. Aphra, and Sana have arrived at the hanger bay, only to find Luke and Han having just arrived and been captured by the armored mystery man who attacked the titular rebel jail, Sunspot Prison. And he's going to blow them up if Leia doesn't kill Aphra, to show to him that she's willing to make what he views as the hard choices. It's a war of ideals, and when the man takes off his helmet, it becomes all the harder. The man in the armor has been Eneb Ray,the Rebel spy from Star Wars Annual #1, so broken by the failure of the assassination of the Emperor that he has become this cold killer. And while things are dicey, Leia is clever enough to find a way to stop him. I love that it's the Princess who saves the men who rescued her at the Death Star this time, but not without Sana and Aphra getting their licks in. Sana and Aphra are the best human characters that have been introduced in the new Star Wars series (I say human because Triple-Zero and BeeTee-One, the evil Threepio and Artoo, are my favorites period), and adding a complicated backstory between them is a nice touch, giving them depth and not depending on their relationship to movie characters to define them. And while Leia walks out of the story with her idealism intact, offering hope and a hand to both Aphra and Ray, the parties hunting the rebels are all the closer, and this seems to be far from the last we've seen of Eneb Ray. I hope to see more of all these characters, and maybe it's time to have a spotlight mini-series for some of these new characters; we've seen plenty for movie characters, but the spotlight on new characters has always been something I've loved in Star Wars fiction. Star Wars often works best when the good guys are on the run and surviving by wits and the skin of their teeth, which is why the period between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back is such a fertile ground for stories, and it looks like the classic characters are in for it as tis series continues.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 5/11

4001 A.D.: X-O Manowar #1
Story: Robert Venditti
Art: Clayton Henry

There are many comic with deep messages that make you think. And then there are comics that are just plain action from wall-to-wall and have giant robots. Take a guess which one this is? The first one-shot tying into Valiant's new event mini-series, 4001 A.D., features a story from regular X-O Manowar writer Robert Venditti and original Archer and Armstrong artist Clayton Henry, and provides the backstory for the giant robot from the first issue of the event series, and how it ties into X-O Manowar's armor. The issue provides a lot of backstory for those of us unfamiliar with the future status quo of the Valiant Universe, like why Japan is an island floating in space, and how the rest of the world reacted when that happened; it's not essential for the main series at all, but it makes for an interesting story. I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that the world governments design giant robots to send after New Japan and its controlling artificial intelligence, Father. We follow the American pilot, as he prepares to take his Manowar up into space to fight Father. He's a hero, with a family, and he's doing what he thinks is best. And things go horribly wrong. Venditti provides a platform for Clayton Henry to go to town, drawing giant robots in a Charge of the Light Brigade style suicide mission against Father. Henry is able to not just draw that extremely well, but the reactions from the American pilot, stuck in his hanger, and the American control room as one of Father's agents, the former Armor Hunter known as Helix, makes short work of them, are intense and heart breaking. This is how a crossover issue should be done. It stands alone on its own, inform a bit about the characters and backstory (or fate, in the case of a crossover set in the future) of its native book, and gives nuggets of information that informs the main event. If you're a fan of X-O Manowar and haven't tried this issue because you were worried you'd be lost if you're not reading the main event, have no fear. And if you just like comics about big robots fighting, you should also give this a chance, and really, who doesn't like that?

Batman #52
Story: James Tynion IV
Art: Riley Rossmo, Brian Level, Ivan Plascencia, & Jordan Boyd

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo wrapped their run on Batman with issue fifty-one, so the final issue of this volume comes from James Tynion IV and Riley Rossmo, who provide a nice companion to the series.The issue follows Batman as he chases a new villain, Crypsis, who has stolen something from a safe deposit box, while we see a series of flashbacks to Bruce's youngest days after the death of his parents, followed by some others of his training across the world. The narrative device that ties it all together is a journal that Bruce is given at the beginning by Leslie Thompkins, a character I have sorely missed since the reboot; she pops up infrequently and with oddly divergent backstory/characterization. Nonetheless, here she gives a journal to Bruce where he can write ideas on "How to Move On,"and we see how he takes those ideas and uses them to forge his training, and how he uses them in his hunt for Crypsis. And while the battle is very cool, and it's really exciting to see Riley Rossmo, one of my favorite artists in comics right now, doing a full issue of Batman, and him hitting it out of the park with a spectacular design for the villain and a great, dynamic Batman, it's the scenes between Bruce and Alfred that are the spine of the comic, as it has been throughout so much of this volume of Batman. Bruce and Alfred are in radio contact the entire time, as we figure out that the safe deposit box is Bruce's, and we see a flashback to Alfred trying to help Bruce along on his grieving, and that while the young Bruce doesn't take kindly to it, the grown Bruce has learned enough to take the words to heart. Alfred has always been more than just Jiminey Cricket to Bruce's Pinocchio, he's been a father figure, confidant, and friend, and this issue's ending ties that aspect of their relationship together nicely. It gives Batman's mission a warm spin,makes it a crusade and not just a dark mission of vengeance. It's a message that Batman is more than what so many think of him as, more the Knight than the Dark, something this series has been exploring since its inception. I'm going to miss this version of Batman, but I'm curious to see what comes next, and hopeful it can keep up this message.

Southern Bastards #14
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Jason Latour

After a bit of a delay, the final part of the third arc of Southern Bastards arrives, giving readers their first real exposure to Roberta Tubb, daughter of Earl Tubb, the protagonist of the first arc, who was brutally murdered by Coach Boss. Roberta gets back to Afghanistan, and immediately heads to Earl's house, despite having been estranged from her father before his death. And as she gets into the deep South of Alabama, things almost immediately go wrong for her, because while Earl might have been white, it seems Roberta's mother was not, so all the locals near Earl's old house just see her as an uppity black girl in their neighborhood. The police are called when she walks into her own father's house. The neighbor advises her to leave, that there are plenty of houses in other places where she would be better off. And when she finds that her father's riding lawnmower has been stolen and retrieves it? Well, it ends with people on the ground in a lot of pain, and a rude lesson that not even the children in the town can escape the racism that runs through it. As we get to learn more about Roberta, we can absolutely see Earl in her; she stands up to those she sees as wrong without thinking about the ramifications, or probably more accurately not caring about them. She's tough, savvy, and nothing is going to stand in her way. It's clear her mother doesn't like the idea of her looking into her father's death, but that isn't stopping Roberta in the least. I want to go back and reread all of the "Homecoming" arc now, to be ready for the next arc. It feels like Roberta is the last puzzle piece this book needed to move forward, the person out to avenge Earl, as things close in around Coach Boss, and her being a deep and nuanced character makes me all the more interested to see what her next move will be.

Star Wars: Darth Vader #20
Story: Kieron Gillen
Art: Salvador Larroca & Edgar Delgado, Mike Norton & David Curiel

I was talking to my friend and former Dewey's co-worker John Bush not too long ago, and he commented how Darth Vader was his favorite of the current Star Wars series, as it treated Vader as a force of nature, moving silently through the book, spotlighting those around him and how they react to him, sort of like what Garth Ennis did in his MAX run on The Punisher. It's an apt comparison, and as the series begins its final arc, Vader as an unstoppable force seems to be the perfect way to describe him. With the Imperial scientist Cylo, who had been designing cyborgs to replace Vader, on the run, Vader is called before Emperor Palpatine, where Palpatine explains how all of this had been part of his plan to break Cylo and strengthen Vader, which Vader knows is only half the story, as Vader observes Palpatine would be making a version of this speech to Cylo had his cyborgs bested Vader. Vader knows that Palpatine is always playing every side. With that taken care of, Vader goes to meet Inspector Thanoth, the Imperial agent sent to investigate a crime Vader perpetrated through his agent, Dr. Aphra, who has seemingly finally discovered the truth. And it's more than seeing, as Thanoth tells Vader he knows the truth, and knows where Aphra is. But he also tells Vader he has not and will not tell the Emperor, as he serves the Empire, and not the Emperor, and he sees the Empire's future in Vader. The power and manipulations are everywhere in this book, with everyone having their own agenda, Vader included, but it's Vader's agenda that is ventral, Vader who will stop at nothing, even killing the man who has provided him the information (a man who goes willingly, since he believes it is for the best). And as Vader heads off to face Cylo, he sends his droids, Triple-Zero and BeeTee to find and remove Aphra, the last evidence of his treachery against the Empire. We get a fun little back-up story of the two of them visiting a droid maker to repair Triple Zero's arm and get them back in proper torturing shape after the events of the "Vader Down" crossover, and we see again that the two droids are as clever and ruthless as their masters. With five issues left, I can only imagine the swath of destruction that Vader will reap across the galaxy.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 1/27 Part 2

And we're back with more reviews from last week's comics. Today we have books from Image and IDW...

Atomic Robo & The Ring of Fire #5
Story: Brian Clevinger
Art: Scott Wegener, Anthony Clark, & Jeff Powell

So, after spending much of his most recent mini-series as not much more than a head, Atomic Robo has a body again and is on a mission, so of course that means only one thing: Fight with a cybernetic Nazi astronaut while trying to save the world. The conclusion of Atomic Robo & The Ring of Fire is the most action oriented issue of this series, as Robo tries to power up a Nazi space weapon to destroy the Biomega Island, a mass of biomatter that if it reaches land will grow to devour and cover all life on Earth, and Majestic-12s Titan mechs fight to destroy the island themselves. The clock is ticking, not just because the Biomega is nearing landfall, but if Robo can't stop the Island himself, Majestic's only answer is nukes, and, well, we all know that's probably not good for Earth. The Titan battle with the Biomega, which began last issue, continues to be impressive work from artist Scott Wegener, not just because he does a great job of keeping what is a massive fight coherent for readers to follow, but because his monster designs are excellent. Robo's plot is equally as exciting and considerably more amusing, as Robo makes his way through the Nazi Longinus satellite while in contact with his team of Action Scientists. The interaction between Robo and his team is one of my favorite aspects of the series, with great banter; Robo's particularly dry sense of humor and delivery as he's fighting a cyber-Nazi and crashing to Earth in a satellite makes the situation, which is still dire, seem like it will all work out in the end (and it does, of course. The comic is named after him, after all). The end of the issue begins to establish a new status quo, for both Robo and the world at large. The last three Robo mini-series ("Savage Sword of Doctor Dinosaur," "Knights of the Golden Circle," and "Ring of Fire") have left Robo is a strange new world, and it seems like he's interested in changing his own life, but there are new threats hinted at and old ones that might not be as gone as he thinks; the last page of the series is a classic last minute horror movie moment. We'll have to wait a while to find out what's next for Robo, as the next series, Atomic Robo & the Temple of Od, moves us back to an earlier adventure in Robo's life, but be it the past or the present, there are few comics as exciting as Atomic Robo.

Cry Havoc #1
Story: Simon Spurrier
Art: Ryan Kelly, Nick Filardi, Lee Loughridge, & Matt Wilson

When I choose a new series from Image to readm it's usually based on the writer. But the ads for Cry Havoc declared, "It's not about a lesbian werewolf going to war. Except it kind of is." And if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know how I feel about werewolves, so I thought Id give it a shot, despite having little to no experience with Simon Spurrier. And it's a very solid debut issue. The issue takes place in three distinct time periods: The first is "The End," the farthest down the timeline, with our lead, Louise Canton, in a cage and partially transformed; "The Beginning" is the farthest back, showing Lou shortly before she was attacked by a werewolf and moves through shortly after the attack;  and "The Middle" shows her arrival in Afghanistan with the military. All are drawn by Ryan Kelly but colored by three different artists that give each section a different feel. That style is one of the things that makes this comic such an engaging read. Not only is the alternating timeline keeping you off kilter and as lost as Lou clearly feels, but those different colorists really bring out different aspects of Kelly's art. It's also easy to keep track of the time periods as the panel borders are a different color for each time zones: red for the end, blue for the beginning, and yellow for the middle. There's a lot going on in this issue, with three plots that are all really one plot all running at once, and Lou is a likable lead, even though I don't feel like we get a whole feel for her as a character yet. Each Lou is different, and part of the series journey to me will be seeing how she moves from one phase to the next. There's not a lot of monster action, but the glimpses we get of Kelly's werewolf design is phenomenal, a large monstrous beast. I also like the way he represents Lou's senses kicking into the heightened werewolf ones, these blue lines that radiate out from her, be they representing sound or scent. There are a lot of questions posed in this first issue, questions about the werewolf that turned Lou, about whether the military will really cure her, what the motive of Lynn Odell, the woman Lou was  brought into a war zone to hunt, are, and I'll definitely be back to see where all these questions lead.

Ghostbusters International #1
Story: Erik Burnham
Art: Dan Schoening & Luis Antonio Delgado

The team of Burnham and Schoening return with the continued adventures of the original Ghostbusters. After the past couple of adventures the team has had, meeting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other dimensional versions of themselves, the team is back to fighting ghosts and not gods (so far anyway). A big shaggy werewolf looking ghost is attacking the UN, and what seems like a run of the mill capture job turns into something more as an unrelated haunting pops up at the same time and Egon is injured. The boys are still able to pull it out and stop the ghost, and the additional fees to the UN are paid be mystery industrialist Erland Vinter, who asks to meet with the Ghostbusters to discuss a business proposition. The tile of the series sort of gives away what Vinter's plan is, but we won't learn more about that until next issue. Aside from the initial capture, the issue is filled with little character moments.The Burnham/Scoening Ghostbusters comics have done a really solid job of developing the characters around the Ghostbusters, so a scene with Janine and Jenny Moran, a comics original character who is currently the team's liaison with the city, is as interesting as when Ray, Winston, and Peter go out for a drink to share information about Vinter. And Egon, recuperating from an acid spitting ghost attack, is clearly into something, but it's something he doesn't share with Kylie Griffin, a character from the late-90s Extreme Ghostbusters cartoon who has been a regular in the series for some time now, and who I really like. I'm hoping for more interaction between her and Egon in the future. There's also a two page "Haunted America" short at the back of the issue in the form of a report from FBI agent, ally, and sometime Ghostbuster Melanie Ortiz, about a haunting in Florida; these shorts that have been a regular part of IDW's Ghostbusters comics are a nice bonus, and always mean a little more bang for your buck. There are a lot of seeds for upcoming plots in this issue, lots of little moments. Since Burnham started writing Ghostbusters he's played an almost Claremontian long game, dropping little hints and moments that don't pay off for some time. I'm curious as ever to see where these new threads take us.

Southern Bastards #13
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Jason Latour

OK, this might not be much of a shocking confession, but I'm going to say it up front: I don't care about football. Sports in general don't do much for me, and fiction about sports can be interesting if it's dealing with the personalities, but actually reading/watching the game? Meh. So when I saw this week's Southern Bastards was going to take place during the homecoming game, I got a bit worried. This is one of my favorite comics out there right now, and football is an integral part of it, but I wasn't sure if I could take twenty-four pages of football. I shouldn't have been surprised that Jason Aaron and Jason Latour kept the issue engaging, mixing the football game, which I admit did keep me interested as I didn't know which way it was going to turn out, with Coach Boss before and after the game. This avoided a problem I often find in sports fiction. You know the team of scrappy underdogs you're rooting for is going to pull off a miracle and win in the end. In Jason Aaron's usually dark universe, victory is never quite as assured. The game does not go Craw County's way, as nothing seems to be for Coach Boss, the antagonist of the series who we've frankly spent more time with than the protagonists at this point. It feels like Boss is surrounded by troubles on all sides. The mayor and his wife are coming down on him hard, his longtime friend Coach Big has killed himself, and his team is doing a piss poor job. It's fascinating that you can empathize with a character who was introduced as such a stock, southern-fried villain, but I actually feel for Boss. I don't like him, and he's deserving of this crapstorm he's in, but I can't help feel a pang of sadness for him. But Boss is a guy who goes down swinging, and his post-game confrontation with the gigantic running back from arch rival team Wetumpka County Warriors shows that Boss still has plenty of fight in him. It's a very solid showing from Southern Bastards, and while I might not care about football, I care about what happens to these characters, and the series works like a good game of football, where every hard fought inch gets you closer to a touchdown and the end of the game. And this endgame is going to be bloodier than any ever in a football stadium, I have no doubt.

Recommended Reading for 1/29: The Other Side

Jason Aaron's writing seems to be haunted by the Vietnam War. Wade Rouleau, father of Dashiell Bad Horse, the lead of Aaron's opus Scalped, is a Vietnam vet, as is Earl Tubbs, the lead of the first arc of Aaron's current breathtaking Southern noir, Southern Bastards. Aaron also had a healthy run on mainstream comics most famous Vietnam vet, Frank Castle, in his Punisher MAX series. But early in his career, Aaron wrote a series set firmly during the Vietnam War, The Other Side, and it stands as one of his best works to this day.

Billy Everette is a young man drafted into the Marines to serve in Vietnam. Vo Binh Dai is a North Vietnamese villager who gladly joins his countries army to aid in the liberation of South Vietnam and the unification of his country. They are two men from different worlds, with very different motivations, but they are both bound for the same place, the muddy no man's land of Khe Sahn. The story of the mini-series follows them both from their training to their arrivals in country, to their first sights of bloodshed, and to the final moments of their time at war.

It's very easy for a writer telling a war story to tack on a very pat statement about how everyone on both sides of a war are really the same under it all and that we should remember that before killing each other. And I'm not saying Aaron doesn't explore our common humanity, but he does it with story and not grand speeches. While both of our leads are sympathetic characters, are both human, and are really the same, just young men thrust into a conflict bigger than them, Aaron never relies on cliches and stereotypes to tell his story. They might be broken by the war, and they'll never be the same, the one who lives anyway, but there's no speech about the folly of war. The book is too grounded in the way people are for that.

Billy Everette does everything that he can to not go to war, and when he gets to basic, he's awful at it. He can't shoot, he pisses off his drill instructor, and he... sees things. He is followed by a dead soldier without a jaw. And he hears his rifle talking to him, telling him to kill others or himself. And as he goes to war, this gets worse. He sees more and more of the dead who have come before him.

Vo Binh Dai marches south to war because it is what his family and his gods would want him to do. He carries the watch his father took from a French soldier at Dien Bien Phu. He marches, confident that he is doing what is right and that if he dies, he will die for a good cause. And as things get worse, as his brethren die on the march, he begins to have visions. Visions of tigers, of dragons, of gods.

The question of whether the visions of either of our leads are real or something their own minds have conjured is left to the reader. The book is gritty, realistic, and it's easy to immediately write all of it off as a mind broken by the horrors of the world around them. And that's a perfectly valid. But there are moments, moments where the line between fantasy and reality is a little thinner. Aaron plays with this kind of heightened reality in his grittier work in other places; the half-mad Catcher in Scalped also has visions, ones that prove oddly incisive and prescient. And so maybe there's something here to this, something we can't touch or understand.

I admit to an initial Western bias, as I don't believe in the gods that Dai worships, thinking that he is seeing things while Everette's ghosts, something more in my mental wheelhouse, those could be real, or at least more than simply a coping mechanism. And the realization that I was casting a cultural judgement because of my own beliefs made me rethink every reaction to Dai's statements, statements that are outside my normal cultural understanding, and to empathize more fully with his character.

The faiths of the two characters are so different, with Dai confident in his pretty much to the end while Everette questions the existence and beneficence of his god. A letter from Everette's mother that talks of the local preacher, her prayer group praying for him, and that he is doing God's work, is used as narration, and when we see Everette reading it, he is in a room filled with the horribly wounded spectres that follow him. And the reaction of the other soldiers when he asks about God are telling as well. The old saying about there being no atheists in foxholes goes right out the window, with a line that stuck in my head, "God don't live in I Corps, man...just us grunts do."

But for all their differences, there are commonalities. It's amazing to see how both the North Vietnamese and the Americans accept the non-humanity of their opponents, thinking them cannibals or worse. There are soldiers on both sides who don't want to be there, who seek some way to escape the war. And on both sides, the conditions are horrible, lonely, full of trenches, disease, and the constant fear of death, be it from a Viet Cong sniper or an American air strike.

The sheer raw visuals of the book bring the horrors of war into sharp relief. Cameron Stewart is an amazing artist, whose work shows a style that can adapt to the grittiness of Gotham City when he worked with Ed Brubaker on Catwoman, to the surreal with Grant Morrison on Seaguy, to the nostalgic and warm in Multiversity: Thunderworld. His work on The Other Side is some of the best I've seen of his, grounded it reality at most times, showing battlefields littered with bodies, rats everywhere (and lord that made me shiver, because I hate rats), and people with looks in their eyes of rage, hurt, and loss. The dead who follow Everette are horrifying things, missing parts, burned, and reminding us at all times of the cost of war. But there are strange moments of beauty as well. The tigers that Dai sees are drawn to look truly majestic, as are the gods in his visions. The scene that stands out as the perfect blend of horror and beauty is a butterfly flying through the battlefield, its lovely wings juxtaposed against all the horror around it.

I read The Other Side in trade, and I want to quickly mention the backmatter and associated essays, because there's some really interesting stuff in here. I'm old enough to remember when most trades had some sort of interesting features to stand them apart from just buying the floppies, versus the opposite now, and this book has some great features. Cameron Stewart's photo journal of the trip he took to Vietnam to get the proper reference for the work features both pictures and words that get you inside both his trip and his thoughts. Aaron's piece is absolutely fascinating, a remembrance of his cousin, Vietnam vet and writer Gustav Hasford, best known for writing The Short-Timers, the novel that became the film Full Metal Jacket. Aaron's story of his relationship with Gus is great, and it makes it more clear why this book is so powerful and important.

War comics aren't usually my speed. The Golden and Silver age ones often present a simplified version of war, while the modern ones can be so gritty and real that it's painful to read them. And The Other Side is painful. It's a story that has no winners, only losers, only those scarred and killed by war. And that's what makes it important to read. Sometimes you need to be reminded of how ugly war is, how imminent death is for those who aren't sitting and reading comics. And be reminded, as Captain Dale Dye USMC (ret.) mentions in his introduction, that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. And The Other Side presents a past that no one wants to repeat, in a way that will hold you riveted from page one.

Doing my research, I was surprised to see The Other Side is currently out of print. However, a book from two such well known creators won't stay out of print too long, and it should be easily located at most better comic shops.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 1/20

Batman #48
Story: Scott Snyder
Art: Greg Capullo, Danny Miki, FCO Plascencia

Well, here it is: the next confrontation between Batman and the Joker, and it is honestly like none you've ever read before. As Bruce Wayne, his memory slowly returning, sits on a bench in a Gotham park, he is joined by the Joker, seemingly normal, healed, and doing fine. And they just talk. Talk about life, about peaceful places, and about life. It's a strange scenario, with the Joker now being the one who is talking about how important it is to simply be and to let your actions carry forward. There are moments where it's clear that both of these old enemies are fighting their true natures, although I think this arc has made me question of that nature is true or just a construct of what they lived through. I knew that it would be devastating to watch Bruce give up what he had built in this life to once again become Batman, and while he hasn't taken up the cowl at the end of the issue, it's obvious that's where it's going. The only thing sadder is seeing Alfred, denying, ignoring, hoping that Bruce will keep the happy ending that he has wished for him for so long. I think, when Snyder's run on Batman ends I'll miss his Alfred even more than I'll miss his Batman or Jim Gordon.

The conversation between Bruce and Joker only takes up half the issue, as the rest spotlights Mr. Bloom and exactly what his plan and thinking is. We lean exactly what Bloom believes, why he made his move now, and why he's the perfect arch-enemy for Jim Gordon's Batman. His beliefs about a twisted almost natural selection about how the city is a failed experiment, stands in direct opposition to Jim Gordon, who has always fought to keep order and keep the city alive. I give a lot of credit to artist Greg Capullo, who makes Bloom this distorted, twisted monster, whose physiology continues to morph and change, and whose minions are equally strange and monstrous. And part of the climax of the issue guarantees even more monsters by the end of the story. The last three pages of this issue are some of the most tensely paced and put together pages of any comic I've ever read, the first ending each of the plotlines running in the book on a dark note (if this were a different kind of comic, I'd think there was no going back), the second dealing with Alfred, and the final is one of the best, most exciting splash pages I've seen in a long time. He's coming back next issue, folks, and while Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo are winding down their run, it looks like it'll end on a high note.

Lucifer #2
Story: Holly Black
Art: Lee Garbett & Antonio Fabela

Mike Carey's Lucifer is one of the best series ever produced by Vertigo, maybe second only in my estimation to Sandman itself, and so a new series with the character made me leery. But the first issue was strong, and this second one was as well, strong enough to want to call out for anyone else who loves Lucifer Morningstar and had my doubts. Holly Black, a writer I'm mostly familiar with from various fantasy anthologies, was clearly a fan of the Mike Carey series and hasn't thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Lucifer retains the scars, both physical and mental, from the previous volume, and he's in a buddy cop drama with the Archangel Gabriel, the same one from Garth Ennis's run on Hellblazer; we're deep in the weeds of Vertigo continuity without getting lost, and that says a lot for Black as a writer. In their quest to find out who killed The Presence (the DCU/Vertigo codephrase for God, although both of our leads just call him father) and assaulted Lucifer with a weapon of the same metal, this issue takes Lucifer and Gabriel to Hell, because where are there going to be more beings who want God dead, not to mention Lucifer suspects Hell is the source of whatever hurt him and killed God. But Hell seems to be in a state of civil war, with Lillim and some demons serving the current queen, Lucifer's former lover Mazikeen, while others seek to place a demon upon the throne again. Lee Garbett draws some great demons, and the battle between Lucifer and Gabriel against one of Hell's army is phenomenal. While Lucifer is still the star of the show, and rightly so because he's amazing, Gabriel is sort of the comedic foil to Lucifer, making glib comments and giving someone for Lucifer to talk down to; also, didn't this guy learn his lesson about consorting with demonesses in Hellblazer? Sheesh, We do get to see Mazikeen again, and Lucifer and she have a brief reunion before she gives him his next lead, sending him and Gabriel off to another famous Vertigo location for next issue. But as is the way with most comics that exist in the same world as Sandman, we also get to spend time with some mortals who are being drawn into the workings of these mighty beings. Teena Hornick has found the jar that contains the demon Azazel from Sandman with the expected malign results, and I'm curious if we find out how Azazel's jar escaped the Dreaming next issue, and Lorin Hammon, a young man who found a feather from the wing of an angel, continues to feel the pull of the feather to who knows where. Holly Black is beginning to weave a tapestry like all great Vertigo series, with threads that will intersect in hopefully unexpected and new ways, and in a way worthy of the name Lucifer.

Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat #2
Story: Kate Leth
Art: Brittney L. Williams & Megan Wilson

After Dan's sterling review of issue one, I couldn't resist picking that issue up, and loved it so much I added the book to my pull list, and I'm very glad I did, as issue two is just as fun as issue one. So, Patsy Walker now has an idea, to set up a temp agency for super powered folks who don't want to be either superheroes or supervillains, but she needs capital to start it. So she gets a job. A retail job. A retail job at a mall. I don't know how many of you out there reading this have done that, but I worked for a year and change at the Borders Books (remember Borders? I miss Borders) at the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey, and boy howdy does Kate Leth capture the nightmare of mall retail.  But this is a superhero comic, so Patsy has bigger problems than being recognized by Millenials as Patsy from the comics or her painful 17 year old manager (I never had that problem. I was the 17 year old shift supervisor! Take that establishment!). When a superpowered shop lifter shows up, Hellcat gives pursuit, and not only doesn't catch her, but she hears that a mysterious "she" has ominous plans for her. But one of the charms of the book is that supervillains don't seem to be the biggest pain in Patsy's life. No, that's Hedy Wolfe, the Veronica to Patsy's Betty in the comics Patsy's mother wrote about Patsy's teen years, and the current publisher of those comics. Patsy dealing with Hedy is the highlight of the book, as Patsy reads Hedy the riot act and Hedy doesn't care. I like that Hedy doesn't seem to be supervillain evil, just mean, selfish person evil, which is way more difficult to deal with, just like it is in real life. But Patsy doesn't just have enemies. We get some more time with Ian Soo, Patsy's new roommate, and he's a great guy, and an excellent entry point into Patsy's world; she's been a superhero for so long now her life is super crazy and Ian reacts like most of us would when she casually mentions having been dead. And after the crappy day at work, Patsy calls a bunch of her friends, who all happen to be superheroes (they're all on that cover above), and they go out for burgers. I would love to see a series that as just superheroes hanging out doing normal stuff if Kate Leth wrote it; even f it's only two pages before crazy superlife interferes, it's absolutely fun. I'm glad that Marvel continues to publish these kind of fun, all ages titles, and Patsy Walker is a great addition to the bunch.

Star Wars #15
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Mike Mayhew

After the "Vader Down" crossover, it's nice to get a little break from the main action of the Star Wars ongoing, so going back into the journal of Obi-Wan Kenobi is an excellent choice  for Jason Aaron. Making the issue even more exciting is the choice of Mike Mayhew, best known to Star Wars fans as the artist on The Star Wars, the comic mini-series based on George Lucas's original draft of the Star Wars screenplay. Mayhew's art, which he colors himself, looks painted, although as I'm no expert, I'm not sure if it's done with actual paints or digitally. Still his character look phenomenal. He's doing a great job transitioning Kenobi from the Obi-Wan of the prequels to the Old Ben of A New Hope, and the same can be said of his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru Lars. I will say the artistic high point of the issue is two pages of Obi-Wan going toe-to-toe, unarmed, with a raiding party of Sand People. It's a reminder of the great Jedi Obi-Wan was before the dark times sent him into hiding. The story has Obi-Wan trying to help young Luke Skywalker in a way that isn't just stopping thugs from interfering with his life or saving him from sand storms, which is a nice touch. It's not like Obi-Wan had much to do for the nineteen years he was on Tatooine other than watch out for Luke. The highlight of the issue for me, though, is a scene where Owen shows up at Ben's hut with some parts that Ben acquired for Luke's skyhopper (picture a flying go cart) and had Jawa's give to the boy, telling Ben to take them back and leave Luke and the Lars family alone. For a character who appears in three of the first six Star Wars films, Owen has very little story of his own. And while this scene is still just him talking about Luke, it really cements something that was strong subtext in A New Hope; Owen really cares about Luke and honestly thinks he's protecting him. Sure, he's gruff, but when you see things from his perspective, you can sympathize more with him. I'd like to see a similar small spotlight on Luke's more patient Aunt Beru in an upcoming issue. And from the end of this issue, I assume we have at least one more of these Obi-Wan stories in the future, as we get an appearance by the Wookiee bounty hunter Black Krrsantan without the facial scar he has in the present, a scar that could easily have been inflicted by a lightsaber. Jedi vs. Wookiee, huh? That's an issue I look forward to seeing.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 12/3

Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire #4
Story: Brian Clevinger
Art: Scott Wegener, Anthony Clark, & Jeff Powell

Things are looking bad for Earth. An island of Biomega, this undifferentiated mass of monster that spawns kaiju, is heading to make landfall in Tokyo, and only Atomic Robo can stop it. Well, at least stop it without causing nuclear winter or a mass extinction in Tokyo. So really, it's just another day at the office for Robo. With the Biomega island getting near land, Robo makes a Hail Mary to stop it, heading to Kazakhstan to board a Russian space rocket to use a Nazi-launched space weapon to blast the island to nothingness. And that sentence is why I love Atomic Robo. It combines the real world history with crazy science ideas and conspiracy wackiness to come up with something that is more than the sum of its parts. And now that Robo has a body again and is up and about, the book is complete. It was nice to spend more time with the Action Scientists and get to know them better, but there's a reason this book is called Atomic Robo! Robo's cool under fire reactions to the possible extinction of everything on Earth is part of his charm. What also makes this issue prime Robo is the time table is ticking on two ends; not only is the Biomega threat looming, but Robo has only limited power in his system, so has only a couple of hours before he powers down again to save the world. It's a tense situation made all the tenser. And it wouldn't be an issue of Atomic Robo if even more wasn't happening. That's the beauty of Robo's comic; creators Brain Clevinger and Scott Wegener make every panel count. Robo's Chonese allies are trying to figure out exactly how Robo is powering himself, which won't bode well when they find out he's draining from their grid, and Majestic/Ultra, the international science army, are sending in their giant mechs to fight the Biomega. Wegener hits that sequence out of the park, drawing not just incredible giant robots, but equally incredible monsters. This is where comics succeed where most other visual media fail: there's no budget, no limit aside from the imagination of the people writing and drawing it, The issue ends with Phil (my favorite Action Scientist other than the maybe-late and lamented Jenkins) arriving on Hashima Island, a locale familiar to the Robo faithful, and after pulling off a pretty hilarious fake out, heading down below the surface to meet an old... let's be nice and say acquaintance of Robo's. The set-up for a climactic issue has me really excited for next issue. Before the switch to IDW, I read Atomic Robo in trade, and now I don't know how I missed out on these monthly doses of Action Science!

East of West #22
Story: Jonathan Hickman
Art: Nick Dragotta & Frank Martin

The silent issue is a tricky beast. It can sometimes come off as lazy, or something the creators are doing as a stunt. But when it's pulled off right? It is a sight to behold. And this month's issue of East of West? This, my friends, is a sight. East of West is often a title that spends issues building up to an explosion, with the politics and hunting boiling over into an explosion of action and violence; it's masterful slow burn. This issue is all burn in the best way, as assassins invade the palace of the house of Mao. I want to spend a whole paragraph explaining, analyzing, talking about the countdown clock that runs through the issue, but I don't want to spoil anything. Artist Nick Dragotta, who started this series as an artist I liked and has become an artist I adore, hits a homerun, scores a midcourt shot, hits a hole in one, insert your chosen sports metaphor here. His storytelling has never been better, cleaner, and without anything to distract from his art, he shines. There's a fight scene that could very easily have come across as tawdry and exploitative, but instead shows the power of a principle character in a way that is breathtaking. If you've never read East of West, this may not be the perfect jumping on point for you, but if you're a fan of comic art as a form, there's not a better comic to see a master craftsman at work than this one.

Robin War #1
Story: Tom King
Art: Rob Haynes, Khary Randolph, Alan Mauricet, Jorge Corona, Andres Guinaldo and Walden Wong, Emilio Lopez, Chris Sotomayor, Gabe Eltaeb, & Sandra Molina

This is how you start a crossover! Robin War, the event tying in all the comics featuring everyone who has, in current continuity, ever warn an "R" on their chest, is more than just a comic about teen superheroes fighting for their right to be teen superheroes. It touches on issues of policing and government, and, along with Batman #44, shows how the Batman titles are DC's best attempts to touch on some of the society's real issues, When one young Robin inadvertently shoots not just a criminal but the police officer who has arrived on the scene, This quickly spreads into "The Robin Laws," which basically make underage vigilantism, or even the possession of anything Robin related, illegal. We see limits to freedom and the abuse of power by the police. If the individual panels of the police tasing and beating kids aren't enough to make this clearly a problem, we see Duke Thomas, lead of We Are Robin, arrested not because he's out in costume, but because he's wearing red sneakers and, "Red means Robin." Duke is considerably smarter than the arresting officer and escapes, and calls a meeting of all the Robins. Meanwhile, two other factions are getting involved. Red Hood and red Robin are in communication, trying to decide what to do, especially when a certain x-factor returns to Gotham. And we see that Councilwoman Noctua, who is spearheading the anti-Robin legislation, is working with the Court of Owls to set off the Robin War, not exactly a surprise after last week's We Are Robin and the cover to this issue. The Robin gathering is broken up by the arrival of Damian, angry to see what in his mind are a crowd of posers using the name he's earned, but his beatdown of the Robins is interrupted by the arrival of Jim Gordon as Batman, who Damian is equally not impressed by and who he proceeds to take out with ease.When Damian doesn't listen to the Reds, they call in the one person left he will listen to, Dick Grayson, and all the players are in place, especially as the Talon of the Court makes sure the Robin responsible won't be able to come forward. That coming forward, that discussion of taking responsibility for one's actions, is another key theme here, as Duke believes it's what needs to be done, not just to put things right, but because it IS right, another reason to love Duke Thomas. As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of artists involved here, and these jam issues can often look like a mess, but the whole issue has breakdowns by Rob Haynes, and so there is a unity to the general look of the comic that helps keep the flow constant. With its strong characterization and fast-moving plot, Robin War has the potential to be the best Bat Family crossover of the post-Flashpoint era.



Dan Grote reviews another sterling issue of Doctor Strange this week...

Doctor Strange #3
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Chris Bachalo & Tim Townsend

A good creative team can convert a nonfan into a new fan with minimal effort. Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire turned Blue Beetle and Booster Gold into DC heads’ fave besties. Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting turned a lot of people into flag-waving Captain America devotees. Mark Waid and Fiona Staples showed naysayers the beauty in Archie Comics.

And Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo have me wondering what I’ve missed all these years in the Sorcerer Supreme.

Of the many All-New, All-Different Marvel series that have launched since October, Doctor Strange may be my favorite. Aaron and Bachalo have woven a wonderful, swirling tapestry in which there is weirdness all over the mundane to the point where, to a mystic like Strange, the weird is mundane.

Until it’s not.

Something is chasing magical beings across dimensions, leading to infestations on Earth of creatures that, while hideous and possessed of many eyes and teeth, are not so much deadly as hungry and scared. Strange has seen bits and pieces of this so far the first three issues, but when he steps into Fandazar Foo, an interdimensional nexus conveniently reachable via a doorway in his house, he discovers the full scope of what is happening. Other dimensions’ sorcerers supreme hang slaughtered from the trees. A plane that should be rife with rainbows is gray bordering on dead (Note: Bachalo’s color game is as strong as his pencils, and in fact the art is at its best when the two work in contrast). The Empirikul, like winter, are coming.

In between all this, we get giant slugs, mushrooms straight outta Wonderland, a sweet ax, a heart-shaped grenade, New Yorkers barfing en masse, unfortunate knocks on Cleveland, floating Easter Island heads with third eyes, the brutal execution of a floating space whale and a naked Stephen Strange, because why not?


I know writers and artists work in different parts of the world, communicating via pdfs and Dropbox files. But in my heart, I picture Aaron and Bachalo exchanging ideas back and forth in person, and high-fiving when they stumble on something batsh** enough to put into the book. Those imaginary high-five moments are why you should be reading this book.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 11/18

Bizzaro #6
Story: Heath Corson
Art: Gustavo Duarte  & Pete Pantazis with guest page from Tim Sale & Dave Stewart

Bizarro and Jimmy Olsen's road trip ends with quite a bang, an issue full of guest stars, guest artists, and some really heartfelt moments. After last issue when Bizarro found out Jimmy was travelling with him to produce a photo book of the trip, Superman's imperfect clone left Jimmy in the Nevada desert and headed back to Metropolis. While Jimmy is quickly captured by Queen Tut, the nemesis he and Bizarro made back in issue one, seeking revenge for Bizarro hypnotizing her dad, King Tut (the pharaoh of used car sales), into thinking he's a chicken, Bizarro meets Superman. This is the first meeting between Bizarro and Superman in the new continuity of the post-Flashpoint DC Universe, an d it's a very different meeting than you'd expect. No blows are exchanged, and Bizarro simply gets to talk to Superman, the conversation starting with a beautiful splash page by Time Sale in his Superman for All Seasons mode. The Superman who appears here feels like the wiser, more worldly and friendly Superman of the pre-Flashpoint world (there's even a joke about the missing red trunks), and his conversation with Bizarro about friendship and Bizarro listens and understands, heading out to save Jimmy when Queen Tut threatens Jimmy on national TV. During the battle, all the friends Bizarro has made, from bounty hunter Chastity Hex, to Kilowog, to Zatannam to a pair of FBI agents that look suspiciously familiar if you followed a certain '90s TV show about the paranormal, come in to lend a hand, even Colin the alien chupacabra, who returns from space. It's a big, silly, exciting action comic, and ends with Bizarro and Jimmy reconciling, working on the book together, and arriving at Canada to the nicest bum's rush you've ever seen (they're Canadian after all). With the adventure over, the pair return to Metropolis and whatever adventures might remain in the future. Bizarro was one of the best mini-series that came out of the most recent DC wave of titles; it was fine, all ages fair, and I hope that we get another adventure from Bizarro and Jimmy soon. By the way, I considered writing most of this revue in Bizarro speech, but after two sentences, I wanted to smack myself, so I could only imagine how you would have felt. You're welcome.

Harley Quinn #22
Story: Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti
Art: Chad Hardin & Alex Sinclair

Harley Quinn is one of those books that is so consistently good that it sometimes falls off my review radar because it's hard to find something new to say. But this week's new issue is such a perfect example of everything that's great about this book, it's a good time to call it out. After an adventure in Hollywood, Harley is returning home with a bunch of new acquisitions, courtesy of Deadshot's stolen credit cards, only to find plenty of problems waiting. Zena Bendemova, Russian femme fatale and nemesis of Sy Borgman, the geriatric cyborg who lives in the retirement home that Harley works at in her day job, has been resurrected by her grandson, and she has sworn revenge against Harley and Sy. Plus, Harley's current boyfriend, Mason, is in jail for manslaughter and has a hit out on him in jail. These are the kind of things Harley has to deal with on a day to day basis. After being attacked by some of Zena's amazonian warriors (amazonian with a small a; they're big and tough and female, not from Paradise Island) in a fight scene that is equal parts funny and brutal, Harley gets home to find out about Mason and the fact that Zena, or since Harley doesn't know she's back from the dead someone who is working out Zena's vendetta, has kidnapped Sy, Harley has to divide and conquer. She splits up her Gang of Harleys, taking some to save Mason and leaving the others to track down Sy. That's a lot to happen on one issue to begin with, and its interspersed with Harley getting some revenge on rude construction workers,  a scene of Mason narrowly averting being murdered, and Harley having a sweet talk with a nice man she met on the plane back from L.A. Writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti have created a wide and diverse cast for Harley, from her gang of Harleys to the tenants of her building and the people at her nursing home, and we get to see a little bit of everyone in this issue, which never feels overwrought or busy. It's a great comic, and if you're reading a title like Deadpool and haven't tried Harley Quinn, you should really jump on now.

Orphan Black: Helsinki #1
Story: John Fawcett, Graeme Manson, Heli Kennedy, & Dennis Tipton
Art: Alan Quah, Jeffrey Huet, & Chris Fenoglio

IDW's first mini-series based on the best sci-fi show (and a contender for best show period) on TV right now, Orphan Black, filled in little details about the backgrounds of our principal clone cast. This new series tells the story of events hinted at in the most recent season of the show, the wiping out of a group of clones in Helsinki. It's a completely different cast from the show, so all bets are off on who will and won't survive, and since the story comes from the show's creators, this is official canon. Our principal clone this series is Veera Suominen, a teenage clone with burn scars in her face we met briefly at the end of last series. When Veera finds the uncle she has been living with had spying devices in her room and the name of two other girls on his computer, she runs away to find the nearest of those girls and expose her uncle's child pornography operation. Of course, readers know he's really monitoring them for the cloning project, but Veera doesn;t know that, and so she heads to find Niki Lintula, who lives nearby. To do this, the socially isolated Veera, a girl who's scars make her stand out and who has been home schooled to keep her away from other children, infiltrates Niki's scool. It's heartbreaking to see Veera try to interact with other kids and freezes up when doing it, and to see what happens when she sees Niki, who is a flawless, blonde version of herself. The issue doesn't have a lot of the science fiction and action that are a part of Orphan Black, but it succeeds in being a strong study of a character, really getting into Veera's head in a way that TV can't, with a story narrated exclusively by her. It also succeeds in capturing the atmosphere of Orphan Black, with a sense of disconnection and paranoia as a clone begins to understand so much of what she believes about the world isn't right, multiplied in this case tenfold by Veera's isolation. It's a strong start to the series, one that looks to add an important chapter to the overall mythos of Orphan Black.

Star Wars #12
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger, Justin Ponsor

Back when he was writing The Authority, Warren Ellis talked about widescreen storytelling in comics. He was talking not just about page layouts with big panels and lots of action, but a certain way stories should be told, with those same sensibilities in mind. If there is any comic that should have that kind of thinking, it's Star Wars, the movie franchise that defined modern widescreen movies. The last part of the second arc of Marvel's new Star Wars series is a widescreen story, packed to the gills with action and adventure. We get a small battle between Han, Leia, Chewie, and the bounty hunter Dengar, followed by a huge battle in Grakkus the Hutt's arena with monsters and stromtroopers that ends with a visually stunning moment or two that I don't want to give away. I know some purists will be bothered by that moment, but it's one of those things that I have to get past my inner fanboy and embrace my inner child, what it would have looked like if I was a kid see certain characters doing something that you never saw them do in the movies that is just plain awesome. I want to see more of Grakkus, a Hutt who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty, and Sgt. Kreel, the stormtrooper undercover in Grakkus's operation. But mixed in with all the action, we get some nice character moments for Princess Leia and Sana, the woman claiming to be Han Solo's wife, so the issue isn't a wall-to-wall actionfest. Add in a last page cameo from Darth Vader, and you get a comic that any casual Star Wars fan would love, and one that does some nice things for us diehards. This week also saw the release of the one-shot that kicks off the first Marvel Star Wars crossover, "Vader Down," which is also an excellent comic and a great jumping on point if you want to try out some Star Wars comics before The Force Awakens.

Wrath of the Eternal Warrior #1
Story: Robert Venditti
Art: Raul Allen & Patricia Martin

When we last saw Gilad Anni-Padda, the Eternal Warrior, at the end of Valiant's Book of Death event mini-series, he was, well, dead. This issue shows readers what happens when Gilad dies, but before he returns from the dead, and after seeing the fields of the Deadside filled with monsters,we see where he awakens, and it is not what you might expect. Gilad arrives in a heaven of his own making, with his wife and children waiting for him and excited to see him. But they all know that it's only temporary. Leena, Gila's wife, is especially saddened by the fact she knows Gilad will be leaving them again sooner than they'd like. The issue is mostly an idyllic domestic scene, with Gilad playing with his children, eating a fine dinner, and lying with his wife. I'm curious to known a little more about Gilad's heaven, as the children clearly have different mothers, and I wonder if these are all the children Gilad has fathered in his six thousand years of life; also I am curious to see what more wwe will learn of Kalam, Gilad's eldest child in this realm, who spends his days stubbornly shooting arrows into targets Robin Hood style, splitting arrow after arrow. Is he . Gilad is so often portrayed as this unstoppable, resolute force, the fist and steel of the Earth, that it makes for  very different scene to see him not only with his family in a place where he doesn't need to fight, but more to see how tired he seems as he tell's Leena of his most recent "trip." And to think that Gilad and his family views this afterlife as his true home and the world of the living as the place he goes on business trips makes it even sadder than Gilad knows that he must return. And as the issue ends and he hears the voices of the monsters that exist in the Deadside waiting for him to begin his trip back, we know that it isn't a simple thing for him to just will himself back to life. Robert Venditti's script is excellent, but Raul Allen's art takes it to a whole other level. He draws both the agrarian beauty of Gilad's farm haven and the nightmare of the blasted Deadside with equal adeptness, and his Gilad in particular is expressive; you can see in his eyes all six thousand years he has lived. Eternal Warrior was my favorite character from classic Valiant, and I've enjoyed his other series and his appearances in other titles, but the first issue of Wrath of the Eternal Warrior feels like the beginning of the series that this character deserves, a blend of magic, history, and character. If you've never read a Valiant title before, this is the time to start.

And because we know you can't get enough, Dan Grote reviews this week's new Deadpool...

Deadpool #2

Story:  Gerry Duggan

Art: Mike Hawthorne, Terry Pallot, & Val Staples

Something is rotten in Deadmark. More on that later.

The first issue of the all-new, all-different adventures of Wade Wilson & Co. set up all the players on the board, both new and old, but this issue focuses largely on Deadpool’s new team of mercenaries, who have grown tired of running pro bono missions and generally doing more good works than good-paying ones, “like we’re Santas that bring justice,” per Terror.

To teach them a lesson, DP sends them on a paying gig in which a landlord aims to evict to the decent, hard-working tenants in his building so he can turn the units into condos. Suddenly, some of the mercs develop a conscience, and we see what they do with their ill-gotten gains.

While they all begrudgingly wear the same costumes and are obsessed with getting paid, the creative team is doing a good job of making each member of Deadpool’s Heroes for Hire a distinct personality. Slapstick, who should be another irritating source of comic relief, a la Deadpool or Madcap, is completely miserable but still looks like someone sprayed silly string all over the Joker’s head and then drew him into an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Madcap is obsessed with hats and speaks in his now-trademark Courier New balloons, while all the other Deadpools speak in Wade’s classic yellow balloons when the masks are on. Solo is the handsome one in the James Bond/Jason Bourne vein and among the earliest to develop a conscience, with Stingray, the former Avenger and lone Deadpool capable of flight, not far behind. Foolkiller is the most hardened of the lot, still money uber alles in the face of everything. Terror, the human organ harvester, appears to be the same way, then gives his cut of the inappropriate-eviction gig to the wife and son of an abusive man whom he proceeds to beat the living crap out of.

Issue’s end returns us to Deadpool HQ, where we sadly are forced to say goodbye to a member of Wade’s now-former family. I won’t say who, but I will say that someone is pretending to be the real Deadpool, the one in the black-and-red suit with the hood whose fashion sense I so highly praised last time around (seriously, get on the POP variant, Funko). Who the impostor is is not revealed, but it does have something to do with the truth about who killed Deadpool’s parents.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go pour some sizzurp on the concrete for [redacted].

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 10/7

Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire #2
Story: Brian Clevinger
Art: Scott Wegener & Anthony Clark

Atomic Robo is back! Again! After the first issue of the current volume of Atomic Robo, where a few of the action scientists of Tesladyne were able to retrieve the head of Atomic Robo from a warehouse currently controlled by the international super-science secret police, Ultra, we get a return of everyone's favorite super genius robot. Well, his head in a box anyway. The first few volumes of Atomic Robo had our heroes with nearly unlimited resources, but now, on the run from Ultra, they have to make due. I've missed Robo himself all these months, and it was wonderful to see that, as much as I missed him, those who work with him miss him more. I can only imagine what a great boss Robo must be to inspire so much loyalty in his employees, and how much joy in  his return. But there's much more for the team to do, and so they set off for the Disputed Zone, a stretch of the South China Sea that has dubious political ownership, where sales the Vasilia, a ship with the international super science black market (God, I love writing sentences like that), which comes from the remnants of Department Zero, the Soviet Tesladyne-analogue, which just screams for a story of its own. While the team is working on getting together everything they'll need to restore Robo, Ultra continues to prepare for the Biomega threat, which I'm sure will have nothing to do with the plot going on involving Robo, nothing at all... And back with the Tesladyne crew, well, things go well and they're able to put together a temporary body for Robo, only to be raided by Project Zero's security guards, led by... Phil, one of their old coworkers! I love that we're slowly getting the band back together, and I love the genre awareness that Robo has, when he's told that Jenkins, his right hand man of butt-kicking's body wasn't found, and Robo is completely sure he's not dead. This scene also has a great Hackers reference, which every comic should have more of. Oh, and a Biomega attack. Biomega are naturally big scary kaiju things, which are designed incredibly by artist Scott Wegener; they feel right at home in the tradition of kaiju without looking like Godzilla knock offs.  So, two issues into the new volume, we've got more of Tesladyne together, Robo back (well, he doesn't have one, but he is anyway), and giant monsters. Yup, it's Atomic Robo, and it's wonderful.

Nailbiter #16
Story: Joshua Williamson
Art: Mike Henderson & Adam Guzowski

After declaring Nailbiter my favorite horror comic on the racks a couple weeks back, how could I not review this excellent one off issue this week? It's Halloween in Backaroo, and you'd think that a town filled with so many day to day horrors wouldn't celebrate Halloween, but I looks like they do it in spades. But being Backaroo, there are certain very specific traditions, as we follow a group of kids who plan to knock on the door of the current local boogeyman, Edward Charles Warren, the Nailbiter. There's a lot of typical and classic kids out on Halloween in a spooky story/urban legend, with the one kid who's kind of reticent and his friends who keep egging him on and teasing him. And when they arrive and knock on Warren's door, they find it... unlocked. And when they go in to investigate, well, they find more than they bargained for, but less than what they might have feared. Warren is such a complicated character. I know he's a monster, a killer of multiple people in the coldest of blood, but it's very hard not to like him. He has his principles, he's a monster with a very particular code, and his kindness to the kid left behind, like telling him how he did he same thing when younger at the home of another the Buckaroo Butcher, the Bookburner, is the kind of thing that makes you hope there's something in Backaroo making people monsters and there's a cure. Of course, Nailbiter is an ensemble book, and we spend a few pages off in the hospital with Sheriff Crane at the bedside of her daughter, Alice, recovering from her stabbing and talking with Morty the Mortician, and Agent Finch runs afoul of the FBI, finding out not only that Carroll, his fiend and the instigator of so much of what has happened, has awakened and disappeared under the auspices of FBI Agent Burke, who we know has been infected with some of Buckaroo's madness. Things aren't looking good for Carroll, and Finch's hot temper has once again gotten him into trouble, which is par for the course for him. But this issue is Warren's, further digging into his mindset, and setting him of on a roadtrip. The final pages look like they're setting up a new Butcher, and the title of the next arc, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," has me already haring fiddle music. Nailbiter is a comic perfect for a Halloween issue, and this one did not disappoint.

Paper Girls #1
Story: Brian K. Vaughan
Art: Cliff Chiang & Matt Wilson

Credit where credit is due, Brian K. Vaughan has range. Paper Girls, his third series currently running through Image Comics, is a completely different animal than either his space opera/love story Saga or his revolutionary tale We Stand On Guard. Set in the '80s, Paper Girls starts on Halloween night, as Erin goes out to deliver her paper route, and quickly runs into three toughs who are scared off when three other paper girls, Mac, Tiffany, and KJ show up. Erin is taken in by this sisterhood so they all have cover on this particularly dangerous night, only to encounter weirdoes in robes who steal from them and lead them to a house with a device that looks alien in the basement, and once it goes off, they find themselves in a world with a strange sky. Even stranger, when they confront the berobed men again, they are something less than human underneath and drop a device with a version of a logo familiar to us but foreign to the 80s. This is Vaughan hearkening back to Runaways, his last teenager coming of age story, but adding in psychedelic prophetic dreams with elements of the Challenger disaster, fewer evil parents, and more weird alien languages. The first issue spends much of its time giving us a feeling for Erin and Mac, who interact the most, but still spends time making more Tiffany and KJ more than cardboard characters. As always, Vaughan is working with an impressive artist, in this case Cliff Chiang, who is a favorite of mine from his work on Wonder Woman, Zatanna, and Human Target. One of the important things about Chiang in relation to this title is when he draws teenage girls, they look like teenage girls, not shrunken adults. They are also wonderfully expressive. But along with the normal stuff, he also draws a great alien machine and freaky guys under robes. And Erin's bedroom has a movie poster from The Monster Squad up in it (Seriously folks, it's around Halloween, and if you haven't seen that movie, or seen it in a while, do yourself a favor and go out and watch it. It holds up). With a wealth of mysteries, well thought out characters, and excellent art, Paper Girls looks like it will sit nicely with Image's current crop of series.

Rowan's Ruin #1
Story: Mike Carey
Art: Mike Perkins & Andy Troy

Mike Carey's comics work usually has a touch of horror; Lucifer had it's share of monsters, as did The Unwritten, and even his run on X-Men had a giant consciousness eating monster. But Rowan's Ruin is the first time in a while Carey has dived in to pure horror. Opening with a young woman being pursued by some sort of revenant, we flash back to see the woman as Katie, who has just agreed to swap houses with a British girl, Emily, so Emily can see the States and Katie can see England. Arriving at Rowan's Rise, the house she will be living in, Katie gets a bad feeling, but she ignores it, and goes about seeing the local landscape. But things are off, and Katie's bad feelings about the house get worse; it seems to eat electricity, for one, and is old and lonely. Most of this first issue is dedicated to getting to know Katie. Narrated by her blog, we get inside her head, and even see her starting to get involved with a local constable, James Hallam. But there's a pall hanging over Rowan's Rise. Inside Emily's bedroom, locked but suddenly mysteriously opened after a fuse blows, we see the room of someone disturbed; not necessarily insane disturbed but haunted disturbed. Mike Perkins is a great artist, but the scene that really sent gooseflesh up my arms was Emily's room. Festooned in horseshoes hanging from the ceiling, with a circle of salt around her bed, and a booby trap of nails under the window, this is the room of someone who is trying to protect herself from something. More disturbed than ever by this, Kaie confides in Hallam that as a child she had feelings about places, and after years of therapy she got past it, but now those feelings are creeping back. Carey plays with atmosphere, contrasting the beautiful English countryside near Stratford with the dark foreboding of Rowan's Rise. Even without the opening flashforward this would all have the feeling of a classic haunted house tale, but with that it takes on the drumbeat of the inevitable, moving inexorably, horribly towards the monster's coming. Tension is the key to a good scary story, and Rowan's Ruin #1 sets up the tension for the remaining issues perfectly.

Southern Bastards #11
Story: Jason Aaron
Art: Jason Latour

One of the best parts of any of Jason Aaron's books, and especially his crime comics, is the depth and ambiguity of his characters even the blackest of villains has a side that is not so dark, and nearly all his heroes are far from spotless. The new issue of Aaron and Jason Latour's southern crime epic Southern Bastards introduces a new character, and one who I found absolutely fascinating, a character I couldn't take my eyes off of. Boone is a southern man, a woodsman. He is a bow hunter, but not for sport. He kills to eat. He's a self professed holy roller and snakehandler. He is a man of faith, who goes to church, but who kills a man because that man committed an unspeakable crime, and this is what God would want him to do. He might be the first character we've met in this entire series who can't stand football. And he hates Coach Boss, the series' principal antagonist. Listen, I'll be up front if you haven't figured it out yet: I'm about as much the stereotypical Yankee intellectual as you can get. But this issue so deeply dives into Boone's mind that I get a real feeling for the man. In one issue, Aaron has found a way to define a completely different southern man than any other we've seen, a study in contradictions in many ways, but a man who is confident in what he's doing, because he has his faith. Jason Latour's art is stellar as always, crafting the world of Craw County, and this issue really drew my attention to the colors he's using. I wouldn't say the color pallet is muted, but it's unique to the book, really setting it apart from everything else on the racks. The scenes of Boone in the woods, of him facing down some of Boss's men as they encounter each other on boats travelling along the river, and of snakes crawling all over him at his church are indelibly grafted onto my memory. Aaron and Latour are setting up a board with many different pieces in place, and this new one, Boone, strikes me as far more than a pawn. He's a knight, maybe a tarnished one, but an important piece that will be making his move against Coach Boss soon enough, and I can' wait to see what that move is.


And Dan Grote brings two reviews for two of this week's most anticipated launches...

Jughead #1

Story by Chip Zdarsky

Art by Erica Henderson

When I found out Chip Zdarsky (Sex Criminals) and Erica Henderson (Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) were going to be teaming up on the all-new, all-different adventures of Archie’s be-crowned best friend, I pretty much yelled “Shut up and take my money” at my phone.

I was not wrong.

Jughead’s solo sojourn fits perfectly in the retooled Archieverse but also stands perfectly on its own. Whereas the main Archie book by Mark Waid and, until recently, Fiona Staples, is more teen soap, Jughead is quirky teen comedy, hence the creative team, which specializes in quirky characters and generally laugh-out-loud comics. There’ll be no talk of the Lipstick Incident here, but there will be plenty of talk about hamburgers.

With the new series comes a shakeup in Riverdale’s status quo. Longtime Principal Weatherbee is out, clearly not of his own volition, and a younger, leaner, angrier-looking Principal Stanger is in. Stanger is immediately positioned as Jughead’s nemesis when he changes the cafeteria menu, replacing lasagna Mondays with a high-nutrition gruel. As someone whose one true love is food, this will not stand.

This leads into a terrific parody of Game of Thrones, complete with a dragon, an incest reference and football player Moose in the Hodor role. Such dream sequences and other flights of fancy appear to be a regular part of the book, as next issue teases the return of Jughead’s Time Police.

The thing to remember about Jughead is that he appears lazy, but he can be quite resourceful when compelled to action (which we saw in Archie #1 when he set about his own plan to reunite Archie and Betty). The book opens with him spending an entire night killing people in a video game, then, upon arriving at school, mocking Betty for protesting the clear-cutting of trees by Veronica’s developer father. Once Stanger implements the new food policy, Jughead makes his own protest sign, has the home ec teacher show him how to make his own burgers, then bypasses Stanger’s rules by selling burgers for charity in the cafeteria, piggybacking on Betty’s open-space initiative and turning the new principal’s face new shades of red.

Also, he dispenses this nugget of wisdom by which I will now live my life: “Teach a man to fish, and he’ll bring home fish, which are gross. Teach a man to make burgers, and he’ll be the hero Gotham deserves, or something.”

Doctor Strange #1

Story: Jason Aaron

Art: Chris Bachalo and Tim Townsend

Stephen Strange has an odd place in Marvel’s pantheon. As the Sorcerer Supreme, he’s arguably one of the most powerful people in the universe. As a member of the Illuminati, he’s helped manipulate events over decades. Heck, in this summer’s Secret Wars, he was literally the right hand of God (till, you know, God killed him).

Yet the one thing he hasn’t been able to do, at least in the past few years, is carry his own book.

But with a movie coming out next year, Marvel can’t afford to let its top mystic ride the bench anymore. And so, in the first week of the All-New, All-Different age of Marvel, we get Doctor Strange by Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo.

First of all, how has Chris Bachalo never drawn Doctor Strange before? His dark, psychedelic, heavily inked style is a perfect fit for the doctor. Artwise, this book is all giant-mouthed soul-eaters, tentacle porn, mystical bacteria, and floating teddy bears. Everything is in constant, swirling motion, even Strange’s cloak, which he can ride like a magic carpet or tie around his neck like a hipster scarf. (His tunic also transforms into a sleek denim jacket when he’s on the street).

Storywise, Aaron is creating a Doctor Strange for new readers, much the same as he’s done with Thor in the past couple years. An intro page quickly retells his origin, reprinting classic Steve Ditko art, but that’s all the continuity you need for this book. Baron Mordo, Clea, Dormammu, Wong and the rest of his normal supporting cast are all on the shelf, at least for now. This Strange is too busy making house calls, casting interdimensional bogeymen from children’s nightmares, wrestling soul-sucking leeches on the streets of Brooklyn, hitting on women of all planes of reality, and showing up late for drinks with his fellow Marvel mages.

Aaron’s Strange eschews shadowy meetings with Namor, Black Panther and Reed Richards in favor of pub crawling with Doctor Voodoo, Shaman of Alpha Flight, and the Scarlet Witch, all of whom take pot-shots at Strange as if he were their version of Andre from The League. I quite like this unexpected circle of friends, both for its diversity and the fact that no one is treating Wanda like the delicate continuity wormhole she’s been for the past decade.

The book’s long game appears to involve some sort of interdimensional migration (there should probably be a blanket ban on the word incursion after Hickman’s Avengers run/Secret Wars), with all sorts of be-fanged nasties fleeing other realms ahead of a coming slaughter (“Great. Another one of those,” Wanda says casually). There’s also some talk about keeping the cosmic balance by sacrificing a life for every life saved through magic. As of right now, I plan on sticking around to see how these themes play out.