Category: Reviews

Review: ‘The Highwaymen’

On the surface, you’d think a good action movie would be a simple thing to pull off. Take one interesting protagonist, throw a ton of complications at him, have a nefarious villain behind things, add a little mystery and simmer. It’s always surprising, then, when so many bad action movies come out.

There are many things the new The Highwaymen comic (Wildstorm, $17.99) is not: It’s not complex. It’s not very serious. It doesn’t have all that much character development. What it does have, though, are all the elements of a perfect action movie, simmered to near perfection.

Writers Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman follow the action rubric to a T, installing the plot (a young woman has a weapon of mass destruction inside her and everyone’s after her), the heroes (the aged Mr. McQueen and Mr. Monroe are killer and driver, respectively), and the villain (a shady leader of a U.S. government anti-terrorist organization).

I’m sure there will be those who dismiss this book as pop corn, but the thing about pop corn is, it’s hella good ever once in a while, especially when it’s popped just right.

The Highwaymen is pretty well nonstop action along a taut storyline, executed quite well by artist Lee Garbett (his work is similar to that of John Cassaday, except Garbett actually draws backgrounds). In short, the book just tries to be a really good action story, instead of overreaching for some grand purpose. It’s just violent and frivolous and fun, and there’s not a darn thing wrong with that.

DVD Review: ‘Legion of Superheroes’ Vol. 2

Maybe the most surprising thing about how much I’ve enjoyed the first episodes of the Legion of Superheroes cartoon series is how little I enjoy the team’s comic book adventures. I always liked the concept of the Legion, but the futuristic team has too large of a cast and too complex of a history for me to jump into.

The cartoon series (from Warner Brothers and DC) fixes those two criticisms by hemming in the team size to a handful of key characters and streamlining the background: A young [[[Superman]]] is pulled into the future to help a fledgling group of heroes save the world. Simple enough.

In this second volume (containing the episodes [[[Champions]]], [[[Fear Factory]]], [[[Brain Drain]]] and [[[Lightning Storm]]]), the team goes through a series of challenges that manage to be kid-appropriate without being overly simplistic. Like the legendary Batman: The Animated Series, the Legion consists of standalone episodes but also builds a deeper narrative of themes and plots, giving it appreciable depth.

Particularly, this volume highlights the character development of Lightning Lad as he becomes a greater hero, and that of his brother, Mekt, as he becomes a villain. Meanwhile, Superman finds his powers have limits, which serves as a lesson as he tries to become the universe’s greatest hero.

I definitely wouldn’t put this series on the same level as [[[Batman: TAS]]], but it’s a fun, clever and exciting foray into the 31st Century.

Review: Andi Watson’s ‘Glister’

Glister, Vols. 1-3

Andi Watson
Image, 2007, $5.99 each

Andi Watson has had a career more typical of a prose writer than a comics creator: he’s worked on a number of projects, pretty much all of them his own original ideas, nearly all of them with defined endings, for different publishers, and kept the copyright. Some of those projects span more than one volume, but, still, his stuff ends up on a shelf as if they were novels, and he’s hasn’t shown any sign of really wanting to be the next great Avengers writer or to re-vamp the Haunted Tank or do anything else horribly fanboyish and all-too-typical for his generation. And yet his work isn’t particularly literary or self-indulgent, either: Watson may have a bit of autobiography hidden around the fringes of his stories, but he’s mostly not talking about himself.

Watson’s recent books have generally been aimed at adults without being restricted to them; a book like Little Star is about parenthood in a way that teenagers probably won’t be interested in, but there’s nothing about it that would keep them out. His earliest works, though – Samurai Jam and Skeleton Key – were much more obviously all-ages books, and he’s returned to a younger audience with Glister.

Actually, if anything, Glister excludes adults: it’s a series about the continuing adventures of a preteen girl (Glister Butterworth), and its central audience is presumably girls of Glister’s age. Each of the three volumes so far are independent stories of about 64 pages each — the first is a bit shorter, but it also has a Skeleton Key back-up to fill out the pages. (more…)

Review: ‘Secret Invasion Saga’

secinv-4353522A few years back, DC released the super-thick, super-cheap Countdown to Infinite Crisis to lead into the company’s massive Infinite Crisis event. In addition to recapping the years’ worth of hints that led to Crisis, the issue also contained some crucially important events, including the death of Ted Kord (Blue Beetle).

Marvel now has pulled that page out of the summer-event book, releasing Secret Invasion Saga last week as a free lead-in to the looming Secret Invasion of the Skrulls. While I can’t argue about the price, the content was more than a little underwhelming. In fact, I fell asleep while reading it. Twice.

Instead of actually telling a story, this issue is essentially a whole bunch of material culled from the Marvel Encyclopedia (look under "Skrull"). In one of the world’s longest internal monologues, Iron Man thinks over all the events that have led to this point (the reveal of Elektra as a Skrull, etc.). He covers the latest interstellar goings on from Annihilation and Skrull history as well.

While it’s nice to get a primer on things, the issue is extremely high on text and completely bereft of any new developments. If Marvel was planning on hooking new readers to the event, there’s no big eye-grabber here. They may have made some fans among insomniacs.

Between this, the grammar-unfriendly "Who do you trust?" marketing blitz and that bizarre Blair Witch-like video, Marvel’s off to a bit of a rough start to the Skrull invasion. Of course, they could probably shoot themselves in the foot and it would still sell like hot cakes with golden frosting.

Review: ‘Young Liars’ #1

I covered a handful of new series debuting this week in my Weekly Haul column earlier this week, but one new series slipped past. Thanks to the kind folks at DC then for sending over the first issue of David Lapham’s Young Liars, one of the more puzzling series to come around lately.

It’s not that Young Liars reinvents the wheel. It’s actually very similar to another new Vertigo series, The Vinyl Underground, in that both follow spunky young hedonists. The narrator is Danny, a Texas kid who moved up to New York to be a rockstar and failed miserably. But the central character is Sadie, an heiress who took a bullet to the head and lived, although the wound removed every inhibition she had.

The first issue is mostly set in a club, with Sadie alternating between dancing and beating the holy living snot out of people as Danny fills us in on the backstory. The gist is that Sadie’s dad and some unsavory characters are all tracking her down, and unpleasantness is about to meet this small group of friends.

While I was pretty disappointed with [[[The Vinyl Underground]]], [[[Young Liars]]] has at least piqued my interest. More than anything, I’m curious where Lapham is headed, but that’s based more on his past work than on the content of this issue. It’s more of a collection of fun pieces than a cohesive story so far, and it pales next to Lapham’s excellent Silverfish graphic novel from last year.

File this one under too soon to tell.

Review: Teen Titans Year One

teentitansy1-6915716The other day I was talking to James Kochalka, creator of Superf*ckers and the upcoming Johnny Boo children’s books, and he mentioned how difficult it is to find superhero books for his kids. Such offerings are mostly limited to comic book adaptations of cartoon series that were adapted from comics, he said, and “they’ve been pretty bad.”

For DC, the lifeline to younger readers has long been the Teen Titans, most recently through the TV spinoff Teen Titans Go! and Tiny Titans, which is almost too innocent for its own good. Now we also have Teen Titans Year One (issue #3 is out tomorrow), the “origin” story from writer Amy Wolfram.

The book succeeds on a number of levels, primarily in how it manages to be appropriate for kids without dumbing down. There are serious threats and the group faces violence and danger and interpersonal hangups. The art also perfectly fits the tone.

While I’ve enjoyed the series thus far, I doubt it’ll serve as a jumping-on point for any kid looking to get into comics. Another thing Kochalka complained about was how the youth-oriented Marvel and DC comics rely on readers coming into the book to have a firm understanding of the mythos, and that’s certainly the case with [[[Teen Titans Year One]]]. New comics readers will be fairly lost, if not out and out discouraged by the lack of exposition.

The Year One tag also only hampers the series, forcing it into a ridiculously incongruous existence amid decades-old comics. For instance, these Titans use cell phones and instant messaging, devices that weren’t around when the Teen Titans debuted. That’s nit-picking, to be sure, but when an editor’s note tells me this storyline happened right after [[[The Brave and the Bold]]] #54, I can’t help but be yanked out of the plot.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) gmail (dot) com.

Review: Brian K. Vaughan’s ‘Batman: False Faces’

batmanfaces-1-4292282With the recent and much heralded conclusion to Y: The Last Man, the continued strong run of Ex Machina and a gig writing for Lost, Brian K. Vaughan is living pretty high on the hog nowadays. But it can easily be forgotten that Vaughan wasn’t always a superstar writer, and the new collection of comics from his formative years at DC serves as a telling picture of the artist in progress.

In Batman: False Faces ($19.99), we’re taken back to Vaughan as a struggling writer, working a day job at the psychiatric ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. Three stories in the collection feature Batman or his rogues, and the fourth sets Wonder Woman against Clayface.

As Vaughan writes in his introduction: “[A]nyone who thinks that pitting a character made of magical clay against friggin’ Clayface isn’t a totally awesome idea is a dirty communist.” True enough. But while the setup is golden, the execution isn’t. What could have been a deeply introspective story is more cursory and trivial, while also moving a bit too slowly in places.

The Batman stories (which Vaughan wrote later) show the expected improvement. Further exploring issues of identity, Vaughan takes a thoughtful look at Batman’s two-bit-criminal alter ego Matches Malone in one story, and then he explores the diseased mind of the Mad Hatter. When Hatter says, “The only way you shall ever comprehend insanity is by ducking the shallow gerund,” Vaughan reveals the savvy and linguistic dexterity that would go on to make him a star.

[[[False Faces]]] isn’t for everyone, but for Vaughan devotees or those interested in the development of a talented creator, it’s a must-have collection.

sunderland-4216629

Review: Bryan Talbot’s ‘Alice in Sunderland’

sunderland-4216629

Alice in Sunderland
Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse Books, 2007, $29.95

Even for an artist as hard to pin down as Talbot, [[[Alice in Sunderland]]] is odd and unique: it’s one-half a local history of the town in northern England where Talbot lives now and one-half a popular history of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) and Alice in Wonderland. And then both of those halves are wrapped up in a metafictional package, since there are two narrators (the Pilgrim and the Performer, both of them Talbot) and one audience member witnessing this performance (the Plebian, who is also Talbot). To make things even more confusing, about half-way through the book Talbot breaks down and admits that Sunderland, the town he claims he lives in, doesn’t actually exist!

Except even that is a trick: Sunderland is a real town in the northeast of England, on the coast near Newcastle upon Tyne. And the various facts Talbot presents, about the history of Sunderland and of Alice, and the many connections between the two? Well, there’s an extensive list of sources in the backmatter, so I think they’re real. At least, most of them. I think.

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Review: Manga Sutra Volume One – Flirtation

 
It used to be, if you wanted to reach for the comic art form for your sex education you had to send a couple bucks to those want ads in the back of the cheesy magazines for “Comics – the Kind Men Like!” That stuff was a bit distorted; well, in the case of the ones that featured [[[Popeye]]], I’d have to say they were quite a bit distorted.
 
Trust the Japanese to get real. After all, they’ve been using the comic art form to foster all kinds of truly educational venues: business, economics, history, language, and so on. You’d figure sex ed would be a no-brainer. 
 
Be that as it may, doing sex ed comics in the form of a genuine story with a plot and character development is uniquely Manga. And TokyoPop brought the first volume of this series, Katsu Aki’s (Futari H) [[[Manga Sutra]]], to American shores. 
 
Manga Sutra is a sweet and sensitive series that focuses on the psychological aspects of sex as much as – actually, more than – the mechanics. The story is about a young couple, Makoto and Yura, who met through an arranged “marriage meeting.” This is sort of a counseled dating service, but one where the ultimate intent of marriage is upfront. The two 25 year olds dated, liked each other, got married, and only then discovered they were both virgins with a lot of understandable insecurities and a lack of any clue.

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Review: Locke & Key #1

You can understand why Joe Hill waited so long to publicly acknowledge that his father is famed writer Stephen King. For several years, Hill used that shortened version of his name (Joseph Hillstrom King in full) so that he could test himself in the fantasy/horror writing world without the spectre of his father lurking about.

Now jumping into comics for the first time with the new series Locke & Key ($3.99), Hill saw that experience affected by the elder King even before Locke & Key #1 hit shelves. While publisher IDW didn’t promote the famous father angle, it didn’t stop some such as Rich Johnston from playing up that lineage as a bit of comics speculating.

Those who actually read the book and didn’t just seal it away in plastic to put up on eBay at a later date were treated to a very good first issue that succeeds in areas a lot of novelists-cum-comics writers fail. That is, Hill clearly understands the medium. He knows when to rein in the verbiage and let artist Gabriel Rodriguez drive the story. 

The narrative is split in three parts: the teenaged protagonist Ty witnessing his father’s murder, sobbing through the funeral and relocating to a spooky house in the ominously named town of Lovecraft, Mass. Aside from a few awkward transitions, the story runs seamlessly.

First issues, of course, are incredibly difficult to do well, making it all the more surprising that in his first 32 pages of comics, Hill establishes a great deal of depth to his characters and lays out a handful of intriguing plotlines to follow. The last few pages are particularly effective, as Hill takes what was previously a down-to-earth story and shifts to a more supernatural paradigm.

It’s a series to watch, even if you aren’t just looking to make a buck.

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