Friday, July 29, 2022

The Owl - J.T. Krul

The Owl - J.T. Krul [Dynamite]

A Project Superpowers offshoot.  The Owl, former police officer Nick Terry, finds himself transplanted to the modern world form the 1940s as a result of being trapped in the Urn, yadda yadda.  Anyhoo, mooning over the loss of his old flame Belle, the former Owl Girl, he comes upon a new, tech-enhanced Owl Girl, all shiny armor and cutting edges.  He wants to know more about this person who has a link to his past, but is repelled by her wanton cruelty.  This is a very basic superhero story, with rough art and rudimentary, by-the-numbers storytelling.  No twists, no ambiguity, and no surprises.  [3]

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Thursday, July 28, 2022

Scene of the Crime - Ed Brubaker

Scene of the Crime - Ed Brubaker

P.I. Jack Herriman, son of a slain cop hero and nephew of a crime photographer, is asked by a woman to find her sister.  He tracks her down easily enough and finds her apparently connected to a cult.  The next day, she's been murdered.  Jack goes looking for answers, and finds out some creepy similarities between this cult and a decades-old sex cult house that ended in deadly arson.  With the help of another friendly P.I., he looks into the cult and finds even more old secrets than he bargained for.  This is one of Brubaker's earliest works, and in my opinion one of his best; he is fortunate to be teamed with Michael Lark early on, whose angular drawing style fits his dark noir stories.  Some people critique that the book is a bit wordy, but I didn't think it was overly so.  I loved the pacing, the twists, and the smoldering anger that drives Jack, slowly revealed over the course of the story.  It first appeared as a four-issue limited realistic detective story that, sadly, never got a sequel.  (However, this volume does include a short and rather depressing short story featuring Jack that appeared elsewhere.)  [5]

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Spider-Man/Deadpool - Joe Kelly

 Spider-Man/Deadpool - Joe Kelly

  1. Isn't It Bromantic? - Deadpool gets it into his head that he wants to be Spidey's best friend, and also that he wants to try to be be good.  Or at least better.  So, naturally, the way to accomplish both these things is to assassinate Peter Parker, an entitled one percenter tech genius who must have an evil agenda.  Makes sense if you're Deadpool.  This is a chaotic cluster of a comic story, jumping from one unbelievable scene (prisoners of Dormammu for some reason??) to the next and peppering nearly every panel with the multiple talk bubbles of these two verbose jokesters.  It gets to be a bit much, honestly, though I do like Joe Kelly's fast-talking silliness usually.  Styx and Stone make good villains and I actually liked the "double date" with demons that Deadpool planned.  Still, once Parker dies and goes to the afterlife, it kind of jumps the shark for me.  [3.5]

Thursday, July 21, 2022

Gold Key Alliance - Phil Hester

Gold Key Alliance - Phil Hester

Four characters from the old Gold Key line -- Samson, Dr. Solar, Turok, and Magnus Robot Fighter -- go about their usual business.  Well, Samon is in a world he doesn't understand and knows is wrong, but the other three act as normal.  Dr. Solar, a black woman, helps out in an African village, Turok is a ranger in a dinosaur park, and the spy Magnus fights a war against AI-driven robots.  Eventually, all of them start to feel wrong somehow, as if they aren't in their real place.  And they're right.  Another Gold Key character that I've never heard of, Dr. Spektor, explains that the infinite varieties of these four characters have been dreamed up by the real Dr. Solar in order to protect the multiverses from his own exploded power.  I'm not very familiar with these characters, but I knew enough to realize that the initial versions weren't the ones from their old Gold Key runs, so I enjoyed the story.  I think it would have been better with a multiverse-threatening Big Bad, instead of "oops Dr. Solar simultaneously endangered and then reimagined the multiverse in order to save it."  But it was a fun read.  [4]

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Maestro: Symphony in a Gamma Key - Peter David

Maestro: Symphony in a Gamma Key - Peter David

Intelligent Hulk wakes up and is told by an aged MODOK that he's been held in a bunker during a devastating nuclear war.  Rick Jones is old, all the heroes are dead.  Mutant animals roam the wastes, but one outpost of civilization is ruled by a figure they call the Maestro.  Enraged that the humans all the heroes worked so hard to protect ended up destroying themselves, Hulk decides to take over and rule with an iron fist.  Although I'm familiar with the storyline, I haven't read any of the Hulk issues that introduced the Maestro future, so to me this was a bit choppy.  I assume that some of the "missing scenes" (Hulk refers to having broken his neck at one point, and he seems to whip up some robotic dogs rather quickly) were actually allusions to things explained in previous issues.  It's a fun story regardless, with a couple of twists and great fight scenes.  [3.5]

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Friday, July 8, 2022

5,000 Km Per Second - Manuele Fior

5,000 Km Per Second - Manuele Fior

Translated by Jamie Richards.  A young Italian girl, Lucia, moves in next to Piero, who is smitten instantly.  And maybe his friend Nicola is as well?  Years later, Lucia is in Norway as an exchange student, living with a woman and her son, Sven. Piero goes to Cairo to join an archeology dig.  Lucia gets pregnant, but her marriage falls apart.  Later still, Piero now has a wife and son, and lives much of the year in Egypt.  They reconnect and reminisce. The title refers to how far away the two are and the slight delay in communication via telephone.  I'm not sure I fully understood the interplay between the characters; the ending took me by surprise, and not necessarily in a good way.  Gorgeous watercolor art, though. [3.5]

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Thursday, July 7, 2022

Trio - John Byrne

Trio - John Byrne [IDW]

A new superhero team from John Byrne.  Come for the art, stay for the... art.  This is old school, '60s era Fantastic Four, but in 2012.  There's a rock guy, a stretchy woman (who talks like that old chauvinist Stan Lee wrote her dialogue) and a man whose arms turn to swords.  They're named One, Two, and Three, but the people call them Rock, Paper, and Scissors.  In the story, a proud fish-man with wings raises an enormous leviathan to attack the city.  Sound familiar?  Then, a gigantic ship arrives and Galactus a giant alien named Kosmos (!) comes to eat the planet's energy steal its water.  It's genuinely comical how slavishly derivative this stuff is of the 1960s FF (there's even a bad guy in armor wearing a green cloak, and he's also a Nazi skull-head).  Dialogue is corny.  Even the sleazeball reporter talks like Stan Lee's histrionic narration box.  But man, can Byrne draw fishermen good.  And I must say, point for diversity in the cast.  [2]
 

Saturday, July 2, 2022

Disquiet - Noah Van Sciver

Disquiet - Noah Van Sciver

A dozen or so short stories, from the comic to the poignant to the fantastic and weird.  In one, a sort of modern take on Hansel and Gretel makes an unexpected turn when the girl finds not a witch but a floating cow head in the woods.  In another, a man falls into a hole while spelunking and discovers a brutal world of underground mole people.  Other stories seem to be slice-of-life autobiographical like Pekar's work, or just tales of everyday people like Daniel Clowes'.  A young man meets his genial but largely uninterested deadbeat father for the first time in a decade.  A girl works at a bakery until she has saved enough for a car to move away.  Mostly black and white art, with meticulously detailed hatching and shading.  The scenes of rocky shores and New Mexico desert are masterworks of freehand drawing by themselves.  [4]