Graphic novel reviews H

Ham Helsing - Rich Moyer 

Han Solo - Marjorie Liu
Solo is tasked by the alliance to run in the galaxy's most dangerous race while also attempting to flesh out a mole.  Decent story with a few surprises.  I think I'd have preferred street-level Solo action.  [3]

HAPPY STORIES ABOUT WELL-ADJUSTED PEOPLE - Joe Ollman [Conundrum]
Black and white sketches in a cramped style.  The lettering is nearly illegible in places.  The stories, slices of life of small-town failures, self-loathers, and go-nowheres, are truly heartbreaking.  Extremely well written but tough to read, they're so grim.  [4]

Hawkeye - Kelly Thompson

• Vol. 1: Anchor Points.  Owing a great deal to Fraction's run in art and writing style, this showcases Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye, as she closes in on an incel-type bro who feeds off of hate to become a sort of hulk-type bad guy.  Starts off strong with some real-world dangers, but the super-powered stuff here doesn't suit the material.  It would have been cool to see some social justice.  Also bringing in Jessica Jones seems less like a team-up and more like, Kate Bishop needs help.  [3.5]

Hawkeye - Matt Fraction
Fun, tongue-in-cheek, everyday street-level superheroics.  Bro!  You gotta read this.  Romance, sex, adventure, a dim-witted yet lovable hero.

• 1. Little Hits - Clint lets a beautiful redhead with a suspicious story talk him into helping her against the bros, much to the disgust of the women in his life.  [5]
• 2. L.A. Woman - Kate ditches Clint and sets up as a detective for hire in Los Angeles, where she is found by Madame Masque.  Fun, full of winks and jokes, but also hard-boiled noir.  [5]
• 3. Rio Bravo - an attack leaves Clint deaf, just as his trouble-making brother comes back in his life to help him out / cause trouble.  But with the help of his tenants, and a newly returned Kate, Clint might just end the scourge of the bros once and for all.  Brilliant. [5]

HAWKEYE VS. DEADPOOL - Duggan
A clever story of Hawkeye and Deadpool teaming up, reluctantly, to stop Black Cat from obtaining a list of secret SHIELD agents.  Over the top and funny, but with a genuine threat and a real sense of what drives the two anti-heroes.  Although I love  Fraction's work on Hawkguy, Duggan mocking the pacing and detailed pictorial maps of Fraction's book is pretty funny.  Library.  [4]

Hellblazer - various

• HARD TIME [146-150] - Brian Azzarello - Well, this is a bit different, innit?  Constantine in an American prison.  Richard Corben art completes the alien feeling.  I'm not sure Azzarello's ghetto noir is a fit here, but it's interesting to se how he has JC deal.  [3.5]
• GOOD INTENTIONS [151-156] - Brian Azzarello - Constantine continues his trek of America, trying to track down why some two-bit grifter framed JC for his murder.  He meets some hillbillies who get up to some rather distasteful things on the "World Wide Cum Web."  JC is far from appealing here, as he directly deals out some nastiness to people who don't really deserve it.  A bizarre Shirley Jackson ending leaves a bad taste.  [2.5]
• FREEZES OVER [157-163] - Brian Azzarello - Constantine finds himself stuck in a small cafe during a blizzard with some townspeople and a trio of killers.  And perhaps a serial killer as well.  There's also a flashback scene in which a young JC cheats a naive young rich man who wants an occult object.  Creepy and well-done.  [4.5]
• HIGHWATER [164-174] - Brian Azzarello - JC tangles with a bunch of small-town skinheads led by a supremacist separatists, in a fine vignette,  He then finally catches up with the rich American who's been pulling all the strings back to when he was framed for murder, and... uh.  He seduces the guy in a bizarre omnisexual game of perverse wills, fakes his own death, and drives the man mad.  Um.  It may well be a fine crime piece, Mister Azzarello, but we must not call it Hellblazer.  [3]

Hello Neighbor: The Secret of Bosco Bay - Zac Gorman

I got this because it looked interesting.  It has a good premise: Jen's older brother vanished at Bosco Bay, a theme park, and it's going to be demolished.  When Jen's cousin Allie comes to live with her, they both go try to uncover the secrets that the park and its designer may hold.  It's a plot very similar to the vastly superior Trespassers, but it's thinner in both length and characterization.  It turns out it's based on a "hit stealth horror video game," so that's the problem right there, I guess.  [3]

Hereville: How Mirka Met a Meteorite - Barry Deutch [Amulet]
In a sequel to a story that I haven't read, Mirka, a young Jewish girl warns a witch about a meteorite, which them gets transformed into her double.  Mirka tries to continue with her life, but finds it hard to have a faster, stronger, willful alien double of her around, so challenges the doppleganger to a test to see which one will stay.  Detailed cartoony color drawings with lots of sly subtle humor; a cracked fairy tale leavened with the values of Jewish love and family.  Not flawless, but well done.  [4]

History Comics

HOPELESS SAVAGES: GREATEST HITS 2000-2010 - Jen Van Meter  [Oni]
A compendium of stories about an extended family of retired punk stars given to getting entangled in spy dramas, punch-ups, and bad relationship drama.  The black and white art, from a very long list of contributors, is often shoddy, and even when the lines are crisp and clean, it's very difficult to tell the father from the son, or a daughter from a girlfriend (no one is old, even though the children are grown).  This combined with Van Meter's trying way too hard to make these characters tough, cool, insouciant, self-aware, and satisfied (only the youngest daughter is in any way fragile), made me fairly uninterested in what ought to have been my cup of tea.  Library.  [2.5] 

Hutch Owen - Tom Hart

• Collected Hutch Owen: Volume 1 - Hutch Owen, an hunchbacked old hobo rabble-rouser kicking against capitalist cronies and everything superficial, is an irascible, demented gnome who lives in a shack, angering the local magnates who want to monetize everything from skateboards to Malcolm X.  The original story, in which Hutch and the CEO are revealed to have history together and then shows that Hutch himself is monetized and made into a brand, is really very well done.  After that I expected it to sort of tread the same ground without that wonderful final scene, but the story in which Hutch meets an old friend who is now in publishing shows that not everything is so one-sided.  Very crude black and white drawings definitely fit the theme. [4]
  

Graphic novel reviews I

Iceman - Sina Grace

• 1. Thawing Out - Bobby Drake discovers he's gay and fights off anti-mutant bigots, all while trying to have a sane relationship with his judgemental parents.  Appeals to the emo teen crowd. [3]
• 2. Absolute Zero - Bobby gets the old team back together (not that old team, the Champions) to "pour one out" for their dead companion Black Widow.  A nice moment, but marred by the fact that comic book death is meaningless.  Also he meets gay people and thinks about moving to LA.  Heavy on the personal life quest and coming to terms with being yourself.  [3]

The Immortal Hulk - Al Ewing

1. Or Is He Both? - Intelligent, sadistic Hulk looking for wrongs to brutally right, finding out that Banner can die but he never can.  But an even more malevolent force is tracking him, and using Sasquatch as bait.  Creepy and fun. [4]
2. The Green Door - The Hulk is captured by the Avengers only after using a last-ditch Armageddon weapon; he is cut into pieces and studied, but escapes.  Hulk hunters use a powered-up Crusher Creel to attack Hulk, but in doing so open up a doorway to a Gamma-radiated hell.  Really well done horror stuff, creepy and suspenseful and pulse-pounding.  [4]
   
3. Hulk In Hell - With the Green Door opened, Puck and the rest of his Gamma Flight hulk hunters, plus Betsy Ross, try to reunited Hulk with his Banner half and face down the evil ghost of his father.  Plus: the return of Doc Samson!  [4]
   

Immortal Iron Fists - Kaare Andrews

Danny Rand has taken Pei, a tween monk from K'un-Lun, under his wing (but mostly leaves her in the care of  a mysterious older lady?).  He's meant to teach her everything she needs to know about harnessing her chi and being a hero, but he keeps getting distracted by monsters that keep trying to destroy New York, and he's clueless about how she should fit in at a New York City public school?  It's a great idea to have Rand pass on the Iron Fist legacy, but a bit lacking in education.  I did not like the manga-style cartoony art at all, which depicts the kids as way younger than they're said to be.  And as a Iron Fist trufan, I hated the depiction of a clueless, idiotic Danny Rand.  Still, a lot of it was light-hearted fun.  [3.5]

Invincible - Robert Kirkman

1. Family Matters
2. Eight Is Enough
3. Perfect Strangers
4. Head of the Class - I went into this from the TV version.  The show is brilliant, nuanced, diverse, funny, and gory.  This series is... well, it's pathetic in comparison.  One of the most juvenile and poorly-executed comics I've read in a long time.  The idea is great, but... everyone is white, the best friend isn't gay, there are tedious asides about mundane silliness like William wanting his name to be "William" and not "Bill" (??!), absolutely no moral ambiguity or shades of humanity in the villain, shallow pastiche parodies as characters, bizarre character behavior like worrying about school after discovering everything you've known is a lie, girls throwing themselves at Mark for no reason... Just boring, poorly thought out, adolescent fantasy stuff. No nuance.  And so weirdly, weirdly fixated on teen sex and abstinence.  It's very disappointing.  However, after a while it gets better.  [2]
5. The Facts Of Life - In this volume, another killer undead cyborg threatens Marks' campus; Mark tells his girlfriend Amber his secret; Even goes off to help solve world hunger; Robot tries to help Monster Girl with her de-aging problem while guarding some secrets of his own; and Allen the Alien reports to a space council about Mark and how he might help in the fights against the Viltrumites.  Kirkman certainly knows how to keep the pages turning, although some parts are astoundingly riddled with grammatical errors and the bizarre fixation on celibacy and "purity" is quite off-putting.  [3.5]
6. A Different World - With this volume, I began to feel Kirkman got into the groove of things.  I still think there are streaks of immature writing (and come on, "Black Samson"?), but it's vastly improved.  Mark is contacted by some insectoid aliens who take him to their leader, who happens to be... his dad!  It seems that, Kirk-like, Nolan has taken a bug with boobs as his queen.  Together, they try to stop a squad of Viltrums from destroying the planet and taking Nolan away.  Meanwhile, Robot continues his machinations, while the Mauler twins help create a dimension-spanning supervillain.  [4]
7. Three's Company - Mark finds himself torn between his girlfriend Amber and his fellow superhero Atom Eve, who, he finds out from her future self, loves him.  Also, he is sent dimension-hopping by the insane new villain Angstrom Levy, who seems unstoppable.  Robot reveals himself as a clone of Rex.  Now the story is really rolling, and Kirkman keeps all the balls in the air more or less (though the idea that his college friend could be missing for months with Mark doing or caring nothing about it seems a little off-character). [4]  
8. My Favorite Martian - Mark and a team of heroes, including the newcomer Shapeshifter, head to Mars to mop up the sequid take over from several issues ago,  Also, he finally gets around to noticing that his classmate has been transformed into a mindless cyborg slave, and picks one of the two women in his life.  [4]
9. Out of This World - More development on Allen the Alien and a new Viltrumite named Anissa comes with a new ultimatum for Mark.  His brother decides he wants to be a superhero also.    [4]
10. Who's the Boss? - Mark makes some fumbling attempts at romance with Atom Eve, which, while sweet, lands with a thump because while this is superheroic science fiction, it beggars belief that these superpowered beautiful people who face every day would be acting like Archie in 1950 and not crawling all over each other.  Kirkman just has this weird idea about chastity that he keeps horning into the story.  Mark also butts heads with his mother over her new romance, which also strikes me as a little odd for a worldly teen with the burdens he has.  More dramatically, Mark makes a final break with Cecil and his government contract after discovering that Cecil has been lying to him about certain assets he's developing.  [4]
    

Irredeemable - Mark Waid

Ivar, Timewalker - Fred Van Lente

 

Ivy - Sarah Olesky
An artistic high school girl from a working-class single parent family tries to make it through high school.  But her friends start to drift away, and after a fight with her mother, she runs away to live as a nomad and squatter with an unbalanced boy.  Pretty grim stuff at times; painstakingly detailed, if cartoony, black and white art.  [3.5]

Iznogoud - Goscinny

• The Wicked Wiles of Iznogoud - A series of not-at-all in continuity, and very much tongue-in-cheek, comedy shorts about the adviser, Iznogoud, who wants to be Caliph instead of the Caliph.  But all his plans, which usually involve some magic trick, come to nothing, and it all backfires, as when he has been turned into a frog, or been captured as a slave.  And then the scheming all starts over again.  I love Goscinny, but this is not exceedingly funny or charming.  It's fun enough, but like a newspaper comic.  Acknowledge the silliness, and move on.  [3.5]