Premature Evacuation: Justice League Dark #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers, and saying that backwards won’t make them go away.

We’re six issues into Justice League Dark now, and Peter Milligan is finally putting the actual team (mostly) together after an interminable rampup of what seemed like dozens of tiny solo adventures of the DC Universe’s most Vertigo-like heroes… just in time for a forced crossover with I, Vampire and Milligan leaving the book. Thanks a lot, Pete. Your timing sucks.

At the end of the last issue, we finally had Constantine, Deadman, Shade, Zatanna et al in one place… just in time for each of them to say, “Fuck you, Charlie” (Or in Zatanna’s case, “Eilrahc, uoy kcuf”) and disperse to the four winds. And now they’re all having nightmares; Constantine dreams of London on fire and it being his fault. Zatanna dreams of monsters putting fingers in her mouth (Meaning that, based on finger placement, her definition of nightmare has a lower threshold than mine). Deadman dreams that Dove is dead, unlike most comic fans who have been praying that Hawk would also take the dirtnap.

Adrienne, Warrior Princess: Review of Princeless #1 – #4

If you haven’t read any of the four issues of Action Lab’s comic series Princeless, stop reading this review and go buy them.  Right now, I’ll wait.  You back?  Good.  A princess who is fed up with the locked-in-a-tower trope opts to rescue herself, rather than wait for some charming irritating prince to come along.  That’s my kind of princess.

When her mother reads her a fairy tale as a child, Princess Adrienne is aghast, and makes it perfectly clear how she feels about the typical princess.  Cut to her teenage years, where she is now living the “fairy tale” life: locked in a tower by her domineering father The King, and guarded by Sparky (the cutest dragon ever!)  Shortly after berating and summarily dismissing her most recent suitor, she finds a sword hidden in her room and begins forming a plan to escape and rescue her sisters, who are locked in towers of their own.

Stone Cold Killer – Review Of The Flash #6

The Flash is another one of those books that finds its way into the house that I rarely get around to reading. It’s really Rob‘s thing, more than my own. Not that I particularly dislike the character; hell, I got a kick out of watching him run around the globe in order to pick just the right amount of steam to punch Lex Luthor in the face in Justice League Unlimited. However, my DC superhero tastes tend to run to characters with the word “bat” somewhere in their names and there is no “Batflash”…and if there was it sounds more like a euphemism for an evening of rooftop sex between Bruce and Selina that ends in disappointment.

With Flash issue 6, “Best Served Cold”, I find myself again picking up a book that is smack in the middle of a story arc. And, I do mean “smack” and “in the middle” – as the book opens, The Flash is engaged in an all out brawl with Captain Cold on a frozen lake (? – I always assumed Central City was somewhere out in fly over country), with a boat themed restaurant teetering from a giant stalagmite made from ice that is protruding from the lake’s surface. Will The Flash save the trapped restaurant patrons in time? And why does Captain Cold’s beef with The Flash seem so much more personal this time?

Ahead, prepare yourself for the cold fist of spoilers. Or don’t. Whatever.

Kicks To The Skull, Prices Reasonable

We haven’t talked a lot about Skullkickers here because frankly, it flies a little under our radar despite being one damn fun comic book. It’s a story about two fantasy adventurers – one an alcoholic dwarf, the othe an alcoholic classic Conan type, only with a foul mouth and a gun – for hire to the highest bidder. Or any bidder. Think Lord of The Rings with a quualude habit. Or a messy, serialized Uwe Boll film that’s actually fun to watch.

The Image book became a hit quickly, selling out its early issues quickly enough that for a while it could be hard to find those comics to catch up… not that you need a lot of backstory to understand “Drunks… monster(s)… FIGHT!” The difficulty in hunting down back issues is, however, no longer an excuse for not checking the book out, because creator Jim Zub is releasing the book from the first issue on the Web. A page a day. For nothing. Gratis. Bupkis. Which is not a business plan that the protagonists of the book would embrace.

What the hell, Jim?

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.

Bendis On Powers TV Series – “Still Has Some Life In It”

Bleeding Cool is passing along Deadline‘s news that Lucy Punch has dropped out of the much delayed Powers television. Punch was cast as Deena Pilgrim, partner to secretly super powered cop, Christian Walker (Jason Patric). However, according to Facebook, Brian Michael Bendis says:

lucy punch has moved on, powers tv is not dead. if it was i would tell you honest & true. new scripts have been ordered for more episodes & there will be news in may about how we are going forward. the network is behind us all the way. its quite nice. its going to be a long haul but its all about quality. i desperately want the best show we can make.

Fans are apparently pushing for Katee Sackhoff to pick up the role, which I think would be brilliant casting, personally. How do we get a petition going to make this happen?

Anyway, I still have hope we’ll see this series. It will probably hit the airwaves about the next time Brian Michael Bendis sees fit to actually send another issue of Powers out for sale.

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.