Attack Of The Clones – Review Of Huntress #1

We’ve reached the end of the deluge of new #1’s from DC’s universal reboot. With the 52 all new, on-going titles established, DC is now releasing miniseries titles for characters whom they’d like to keep active in the universe but, for whatever reason, did not merit an on-going title. This week’s candidates include Huntress #1, a six issue run that IGN seems to think is set on Earth 2, but actually, according to DC will have events that will play into Birds of Prey (presumably in this universe). DC also released Penguin: Pain And Prejudice #1, which will outline the origins of The Penguin. On October 12, DC will release The Shade #1, which will have a 12 issue run. So, why did DC decide that these characters wouldn’t make the cut for an on-going series over the likes of some of the more marginal Wildstorm characters such as Voodoo or Grifter? The mind of Dan DiDio is a curious place indeed.

1978 Redux, In A Good Way: OMAC #2 Review

“Lemme see,” I said to my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me why his store always smells like a distillery explosion after I leave, “The New 52 week one books that we want to keep getting… definitely Detective Comics. Also Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Justice League International… we’ll call Batgirl ‘on the bubble,’ and, um…”

“Don’t forget OMAC,” Amanda chimed in.

“OMAC? Are you fucking kidding me? You read The Outsiders at the end of its run. Dan DiDio might be a good publisher or editor in chief, but whoever he answers to shouldn’t allow him to write anything longer than his own name.”

“Yeah, but I like Keith Giffen. And I really liked the end of the first issue. So I want to give it another shot.”

Sheesh. Wimmens, man. What’re you gonna do? So I made the commitment to spend another $2.99 a month because hey: I love her, and it isn’t gonna suck itself, and sandwich: I don’t have one, amirite?

Ow. Owwwww. Note to self: don’t write shit like that when you don’t mean it and when your girlfriend is your editor. But I digress.

So this past Wednesday OMAC #2 was, in fact, in my pile of subscription pulls, whether I really wanted it or not. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the better books of the week.

Right There On The Shelf: The Walking Dead #89 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review may contain spoilers. Such as the fact that zombies have taken over the world. Tread lightly.

There’s been a lot of handwringing in the comics / zombie community (Which is a small community, but they throw great parties… except at the end your dick rots off. And not because of the zombie thing. But I digress.) about how AMC fired The Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont – about a week after he hyped season two at SDCC, no less – and how that and threatened budget cuts meant that the The Walking Dead was doomed.

And as someone who watched that show from the first episode and who bought season one on Blu-Ray the day it came out, allow me to go on record to say: who gives a shit?

Sure, the show is fun, and anything that puts comic stories in front of Joe Blow can only be good for the industry (Ghost Rider movies excepted), but the show was only ever second fiddle to Robert Kirkman’s original comic book. And if you’ve ever seen the show and you haven’t checked out the comic book? Well, that’s stupid. And you’re stupid for not doing it.

Flipping The Bird: The Savage Hawkman #1 Review

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. But what do you care? It’s not like you were gonna read Hawkman anyway.

And, as usual, one last Wednesday morning review before the comic stores open…

For good or ill, we’ll end our coverage of DC’s New 52, which officially ends today with a new batch of #2 issues, with The Savage Hawkman #1. The Savage Hawkman is the story of Carter Hall, who has a harness made of Nth metal that allows him to… um… fly and stuff… and he… has… yeah, sorry. The problem is I don’t care about Hawkman. The problem is that nobody cares about Hawkman. The only person who cared about Hawkman was Hawkgirl, and nobody gave enough of a fuck about Hawkgirl to leave her alive.

The upside of that general apathy is that it allows writer Tony Daniel to try almost anything he wants to make Hawkman interesting for a new generation. The downside is that what he tries feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Almost literally.

Daniel opens this new chapter in Hawkman’s rebooted life by showing how exciting it is to be Hawkman… by having him be a depressed alcoholic who hates being Hawkman so much he tries to kill his costume with a flare gun.

Let’s take a moment and examine that, shall we? As a New 52 book, this is meant to make new readers excited about characters they aren’t familiar with. And Daniel has decided to introduce us to this new Hawkman by telling us that:

1. Even Hawkman thinks that being Hawkman sucks, and:
2. Hawkman’s power set is so weak that even Hawkman himself thinks he can be defeated by a roman candle.

A Drop Of The Creature: Venom #7 Review

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers about Spider-Island. It has spiders. Also, some other stuff. You have been warned.

Now if you insist upon using a comic story as a parable about a serious issue, Venom #7 is a much better way of doing it. But we’ll get to that.

This issue is a crossover issue to Marvel’s Spider-Island event that I initially picked up for only one reason: issue 7 of any book Rick Remender writes is the point where it stands a solid chance of going gloriously and disastrously off the rails.

Think about his 2008 run on Punisher, which he started in the middle of the Dark Reign event when Norman Osborne had managed to use public opinion and political intrigue to wrest control of SHIELD from Tony Stark even though he was woefully unqualified and The Green Fucking Goblin. While the X-Men remained neutral and the Avengers wrestled with ways to turn the tide of public sentiment away from Osborne even while it turned against themselves, Remender had The Punisher come up with an ingenious and crafty plan to turn Osborne’s fortunes by shooting him in the face.

That was issue 1. By issue 7, Remender had the straight-ahead, no-nonsense Punisher fighting zombies. And thus began a long, slow train wreck that culminated in the Punisher being killed and resurrected as Frankenstein. Reading Remender’s Punisher was like watching a Kardashian try to redefine pi in a room full of cocaine and NBA players: a hot mess I couldn’t take my eyes off of.

So when I saw Venom had reached the critical seventh issue, I wanted in on the ground floor of the implosion… so imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a damn good book, and arguably the best part of the Spider-Island event so far.

I, Read This – Review Of I, Vampire #1

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: guy meets girl. Guy becomes vampire. Guy bites girl. Girl turns into psychotic hell bitch bent on world destruction. You have? Well, then apparently you’ve met my downstairs neighbor. Or, more likely, you read I, Vampire, either in its current release or in it’s original incarnation, as a short story series in House of Mystery, when it was written by J.M. DeMatteis, between 1981-1983.

The relaunch is written by Joshua Hale Fialkov, whose run of good luck will soon see him taking over writing duties at IDW for Doctor Who as well. He is joined on I, Vampire by Andrea Sorrentino, whose work can previously be seen on God Of War and X-Files: 30 Days Of Night, published by Wildstorm.

Now, to the important question: should you read this book? Answers (and spoilers) after the jump.

No Nukes: The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men #1 Review

The one thing I’ll give the first issue of Gail Simone and Ethan Van Sciver’s first issue of The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men is that it compelled me to go on an all-day hunt for the 1978 first issue of Firestorm: The Nuclear Man.

I called my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me not to come in to the store until my sinus infection passes and I stop dribbling green snot on the copies of Obama The Barbarian (or at least until I start pretending that I’m not doing it on purpose), but as good as he and his store is, he didn’t have what amounts to an obscure back issue just lying around. Or maybe he had ten of them, but allow me to refer you back to the whole snot-dribbling thing.

I had reached the point where I was willing to purchase it as my first digital comic from Comixology, who has the issue available for less than a buck… right up until I reached the point in my registration process when I discovered that they don’t take my credit card and worse: that I don’t own an iPad, so I couldn’t read their comics even if I wanted to. Sure, they have a Web reader, but if I’m going to blind myself I’m going to do it the old fashioned way: frantic masturbating. But I digress.

The new Firestorm made me want to find the old 1978 origin issue, which I haven’t read since I was seven or eight years old, because I have vague memories that Gerry Conway wrote the relationship between Ronnie Raymond and Professor Stein as an examination of the generation gap. And why is that something so important that it made me spend a drinking day hunting for a 33-year-old comic that’s nobody’s idea of a classic and when at the time I liked Nova better anyway?

Because if that element to the characters were, in fact, there, then I can extrapolate that Simone and Van Sciver made high school race relations a cornerstone of Firestorm in an attempt to modernize Conway’s original character intentions. If it isn’t, then this book just is a ham-fisted racial parable that’s a sparkly vampire away from being Twilight with nukes. Which is, actually, a book I would line up to buy. The new Firestorm? Not so much.

Geoff Johns Gives Aquaman A Hand: Review of Aquaman #1

According to USA Today, Geoff Johns has the following to say about Aquaman, the latest superhero to get the patented Johns Silver Age spit polish:

“Everybody around has at least heard of Aquaman, and they’ve probably heard all the jokes — the same jokes Aquaman’s heard — and they have their opinion on Aquaman,” the writer says. “Whether it’s good or bad, that’s what the book’s all about.”

All you need to know to jump into this book is

He talks to fish. And he swims.

What? I’m not going to need to bone up on my knowledge of The Elder Gods, the way I benefited from my previous knowledge of Greek mythology while reading Wonder Woman (which I still think was pretty awesome, but Rob resented having to, you know, know stuff)? I can just sit down and blow through this without having to think about it or have any real knowledge of the DC continuity? Really?

Ok.

Tell Me A Story. And Make It Good. – Review Of Teen Titans #1

Call me a pessimist, but after reading Scott Lobdell’s take on Starfire, Red Hood and Roy Harper in Red Hood And The Outlaws, I wasn’t entirely sure that Lobdell could write his own name correctly without the intervention of special education services. I mean, sure he’s been writing comics for over twenty years, but people also buy art made by zoo animals, so the fact that people kept buying his X-Men titles after Chris Claremont left Uncanny X-Men means they call Marvel fans Marvel Zombies for a reason places a, perhaps, suspect light on the buying habits of Joe Q. Public. However, I found myself pleasantly surprised by Teen Titans #1. Still, I’m going to proceed with caution; it’s just the first issue and we haven’t met all the players, yet.

Neither, Nor: All-Star Western #1 Review

I really wanted to like All-Star Western #1 because I was a big fan of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray’s Jonah Hex, and if you were too, great to meet you! I was wondering who the other one was!

If you were a western fan the way I am – by which I mean you think “western” means “starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone” – then Jonah Hex was about the perfect comic. The stories were solid shoot-’em-ups, set in the wilderness and the boomtowns of the still-unsettled west, filled with saloons, crooked lawmen, morally-questionable entrepreneurs, and filthy, gunslinging outlaws. They were stories where then Men were Men and the Women were Whores with Hearts of Gold and Groins of Chlamydia.

And at the center of it all was Jonah Hex: a bounty hunter with a face like Clint if Clint never bothered to get that thing on his lip looked at. Fast with a gun, implacable, unstoppable. A man of few words and fewer baths.

You know: a fucking western.

Alas, to my disappointment, Jonah Hex was canceled last month to make way for DC’s New 52 and replaced with All-Star Western. All-Star Western stars Jonah Hex. However, All-Star Western is no Jonah Hex.