He Has But One Life To Give…And It’s Fun Sized – Review Of Secret Avengers #23

Rob got into a text exchange today with Crisis On Infinite Midlives contributor Pixiestyx about the size of our weekly pull list. Rob said “addicts…don’t count”. It’s true. We have a filthy comic book habit in this house, between the two of us, that sometimes results in multiple trips to the comic book store. In fact, just yesterday, Rob and I found ourselves early for a get together with some folks at a bar and you know what we did to kill time? Go to that neighborhood’s local comic book store where, despite having dropped about $120 dollars on Wednesday for the week’s take, we dropped another $80 on books. That’s $80 dollars we could have spent at the bar getting shit faced while waiting for people to show up at the get together. We might need an intervention.

With that many books coming into the house, I’ll fully admit that I don’t always get around to reading everything we buy each week. Sometimes I have to, I don’t know, go to work. So I can pay for more comic books and lights to read them by. Secret Avengers, which Rob has reviewed a lot in the past, no seriously, is one of those books. I read a couple issues of the Warren Ellis run and pretty much agreed with Rob that, dialogue-wise, it felt like a Next Wave retread. Now, Rick Remender has taken over writing duties and, with all of the other books to choose from in the pile this week, I decided to pick up the book on a Part Two of an arc already in progress.

Was this a wise use of my time? Short answer: yes.

Alert – Hawkeye is a dick, and other spoilers, ahead!

The Killer In Me Is The Killer In You: My Friend Dahmer Review

When I was 20, my college buddies and I brought our mutual friend Alf – a weirdly hairless mesomorph who was the son of a Federal court judge and therefore utterly naive and fearless when it came to the concept of consequences – to our local mall for a little fun. The act was this: Alf put his hood up, hunched his shoulders over and constantly licked his lips. Jim’s job was to hold Alf’s hand while they wandered about, and Alf would wander up to strangers and shout things like, “SAB-A-TOOO! DERRRR!” Then Jim would tug Alf away and apologize along the lines of, “Sorry about my retarded brother. Mom dropped him on his head. Last week.” Repeat until bored or an of-age friend got off work to buy beer for us.

So it was a little surprising to see almost this exact scene in a graphic novel. Except instead of Jim, it was a dude named Derf. And instead of Alf, it was Jeffrey Dahmer.

Been There, Done That – Review Of Ferals #2

My comics pull list from last week turned out to be heavy on the supernatural. Lots of vampires, even in the cape and cowl books (X-Men #25, I’m looking at you.), magic, and even werewolves. On the upside, nothing sparkled or seemed designed as an excuse to have some former Power Ranger walk around shirtless, and for that I am grateful. On the downside, it feels as though someone in editorial at many of the publishing houses has decided to milk this trend in popular culture until the resultant stories look like Kristen Stewart after she has been even more rode hard and put up wet.

For example, let’s take a look at what turned out to be the best of the lot in this week’s take, David Lapham’s Ferals #2.

Blood, guts, gore and spoilers after the jump.

Smash Cut: The Ray #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a comics Website, at a time when spoiler-free reviews roamed the Earth. One review changed all that. It hit with the force of 10,000 spoilers. It has happened before. It will happen again. It’s just a question of when. Which would be now.

So apparently Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray believe that Michael Bay is the greatest threat that has ever roamed the face of the Earth. Having seen two Transformers movies and Pearl Harbor, I’m inclined to agree, although I’d think these guys would put in a bigger vote for the guy who fucked up the Jonah Hex movie.

This issue of The Ray has more of an action-oriented edge than the first issue, which makes sense; in an origin story you need to spend a certain amount of page real estate setting up the characters and the rules of the powers. But after a certain point, you need to get the heroes and the villains into the trenches to beat on each other. And that certainly happens here, but Palmiotti and Gray take things in a slightly different direction than you’d expect. by which I mean The Ray tries very hard to not beat on people in the trenches.

There’s a key scene in this book where The Ray stops the action and tries to talk the villain down. We’ve got more than two full pages of The Ray trying to calm the villain down, along with a few other scenes of the hero aquiescing to demands from authority as diverse as cops to paramedics to pissed-off parents. The Ray is polite, Goddammit, and it not only all makes sense on a character basis – the kid is the adopted child of two stereotypical pot-smoking California liberals as we saw in the first issue – but it’s interesting. After all, if you stop and think about it, having superpowers and using them to beat on someone would probably only be fun if the guy you’re fighting doesn’t have superpowers. If the other guy has them, then it’s just a plain-old fight, and that’s no fun. Having superpowers is probably a lot like having a gun: everyone has someone that they wouldn’t mind shooting, but nobody wants to be in a gunfight.

Click Your Heels – Review Of No Place Like Home #1

UK creator, Angelo Tirotto, says in the back material of his new book that this story was conceived in March 2009, after watching a television program and being angry “that they had squandered a brilliant idea”. Now, I don’t know about the state of British television in the Spring of 2009, but Stateside that season, for every good program that might have tried to eke out an existence in the choking, murky depths of network television’s prime time schedule (say, Reaper) we were hit with several other series that might have had a shot with better writers, but ended up dying on the sea floor because of poor execution (Crusoe, Harper’s Island, Howie Do It…nah, actually, nothing was saving that one. It just sucked.). But, kudos to Tirotto. Where most of us just take our flaming rants to the water cooler or Television Without Pity, he chose to use his anger for the power of good. He wrote a better story. No Place Like Home is the fruit of those labors.

Grab your ruby slippers. Spoilers and the inspiration for the cover after the jump.

Never Judge A Book: Ultimate Spider-Man #7 Review

We’re now seven issues into Brian Michael Bendis’s new Ultimate Spider-Man, and Miles Morales is in his costume, Peter Parker is in his heaven, and there is finally superhero action in this superhero action comic book. Man, I’m liking this book a lot more now that something’s actually happening in it. Who woulda thunk it?

However, the book gets a rough start thanks to Kaare Andrews cover. Sure, it’s beautifully rendered with pseudo 3D / photorealistic backgrounds, and unlike the cover in the last issue we reviewed here, it doesn’t look like Spider-Man’s so excited to have superpowers that he’s double-ejaculating like some kind of pornographic Chow Yun Fat while busily sucking his own dick. No, in this cover, Spider-Man is overlooking the city, demurely and quietly squatting… and apparently crapping a giant golden dook. Right on top of the American flag. Look, I really like Kaare Andrews work – his stuff on Spider-Man: Reign was excellent – but the man draws these Ultimate Spider-Man covers like he’s trying to see what weird shit he can sneak into them. I’m guessing that either we’re two issues away from a cover where Spider-Man sprays webs onto Black Cat’s upper lip, or that I just have a filthy, dirty (sanchez) mind and should stop reading perversion into these covers.

Things, however, are a little more plain vanilla between the covers (Ha! Get it?).

An Epic Tale of Blood and Drool – Review Of BattlePug

Riddle me this Batman…

What do you get when you combine Conan the Barbarian, giant baby harp seals, a massive, drooling pug, Santa Claus, a thousand angry gophers, and a tattooed naked woman lying in bed relating the whole story to her two talking dogs? A giant bucket-full of awesome, that’s what!

If Robert E. Howard and Boris Vallejo had a love-child, and it wrote a boy-meets-dog/revenge story while tripping on mushrooms, BattlePug might be the result.

Blue Velvet: Blue Beetle #6 Review

Blue Beetle #6 is a weird book. Good, but weird.

First off, I still maintain that, of all DC’s first round of New 52 books, Blue Beetle is one of the best at accomplishing its supposed mandate: making the hero generally relatable and understandable to not just new readers to the title, but to new comics readers in general. This is a series in general where you don’t need to know almost anything about the DC Universe at all to enjoy it. And this particular issue, while still part of the overall origin arc, functions as a pretty decent one-and-done that tells you everything you need to know to enjoy just this issue if you want a place to jump on.

Unfortunately, some people are going to have trouble enjoying this issue because, frankly, it includes some action that’s likely to disturb and upset some readers, no matter how good and self contained the issue is in general. This book includes scenes of the hero smacking around a teenaged girl and threatening a mother and her child at gunpoint. Now, if your reaction to that description is immediate and context-free outrage, just hold on and I’ll get to that. If your reaction is to mutter “Awesome!” or to find a discreet place to masturbate, fuck off and find a different comics site, okay? Or better yet: find a different hobby; no superhero’s power is a donkey punch, you spastic.

Raider of The Last Arc: Grifter #1-6 Review

Finally, a reboot you can sink your teeth into.  As I stated in an earlier review, I’ve been trying to get back into the game and the New 52 has been somewhat of a disappointment.  I say disappointment because no title I’ve read so far has been a true “reboot”. Everything so far has relied on at least some previous knowledge of character and/or story to truly get the most out of it.  Then a Grifter came to town.

Shortly after my Voodoo review , I noticed a Daemonite on the cover of a Grifter book, so I cracked the cover. Lo and behold, we have a parallel to Voodoo’s alien invasion arc!  So once more I find myself with a character I’ve never heard of, which is great, because with so many established “mainstream” characters, I love to experience the joy of discovering something new, even if it is only new to me.

Cole Cash (They do love their alliteration, don’t they?) is a former Special Forces Operator, an expert in infiltration and combat. For reasons yet to be explored, he’s deserted the military and become a small time con man, moving from mark to mark with his girlfriend Gretchen.  He’s about to see behind a curtain that he didn’t know existed… and he’s going to have a very bad day.

Pretty Vacant: The Dark Tower: The Way Station #3 Review

Like most guys who came of age during the 1980s, I grew up as a Stephen King freak. And like many of those guys, I was a Dark Tower fanatic, initially because you just couldn’t get the Goddamned thing. The first Dark Tower book was listed in King’s C.V. starting with Pet Sematary, but until 1988 it was only available in a long sold out limited edition that, provided you could even find a copy, would requiring beating off other like-minded fanboys to get it. Possibly literally.

But once it, and its sequels, started reaching the mass market, it hit the sweet spot for comic book fans. It was a fantasy, but not one about some other wimpy pretty boy with a magic sword. No, Roland was a bad motherfucker who was well-trained with a gun – medieval Batman with a sandalwood-handled .45. And as the series went on, it tied into King’s other stories. And his other stories tied into the Dark Tower (which is one of the only redeeming reasons to read King’s Insomnia). He built an entire, cohesive universe tied to the actions of Roland and his hunt for the Tower, turning his entire body of work into a continuity-laden universe. This shit was crack for a comics fan.

The Dark Tower series officially ended in 2004 (although King’s dropping another book of short stories set in the Dark Tower world called The Wind Through The Keyhole later this year), but King kept feeding the fans’ back monkeys by authorizing Marvel to produce Dark Tower comic books, which they’ve been doing since 2007. The initial pitch to stir up the rubes – including me – was that the comics miniseries would fill in gaps in the stories from the novels. And some of them, like The Fall of Gilead and Battle of Jericho Hill, have done just that. Unfortunately, others have just retreaded parts of the original novel in comic form as straight adaptations.

The current mini, The Way Station, is a straight adaptation. It’s an adaptation of a part of the first Dark Tower book that takes place in and around one building, where a lot of the dialog is internal in nature. This isn’t probably the best thing to try to make into a comic book.