It Is The Massive, And I Am Also Happy To See You: The Massive #1 Review

In The Massive, writer Brian Wood is back in the wheelhouse he established in Channel Zero and DMZ: a story about pragmatic survivors in a world at least two degrees more dystopian than our own. It is an interesting book with action, at least a couple of well-thought characters, in a world that has obviously been carefully planned and built by Wood, with high stakes for everyone involved, and loads in a background enigmatic mystery to boot. It’s tinkering with big ideas – such as, what happens if Al Gore is correct, and we’re about to be joylessly fistfucked by global warming – and doing it using a pragmatic, non-sci-fi viewpoint. It appears ambitious.

So why am I sitting here wondering: where the fuck is that second zodiac speedboat from the Goddamned chase scene? But we’ll get to that in a minute.

I say again for the record: this book is Wood back in his element. The man made his bones looking at How Things Are, extrapolating How Things Might Be In Two Years If It All Goes To Shit, and stacking that world with people fighting that system. Channel Zero is a classic of that style – a story from the late 90s based on the simple idea of, “What if, after cleaning up Times Square by throwing all the winos and junkies in Riker’s Island, Mayor Giuliani could do anything he wanted?” And in that world he put Jennie 2.5, a media hacker raging against the machine with guerrilla journalism that foretold blogging and social media revolution by about ten years… although, to be fair, Christian Slater and Pump Up The Volume not only got there first, but had gratuitous Samantha Mathis jugs and Leonard Cohen tunes. But I digress.

52 Problems But A Goon Ain’t One: The Goon #39 Review

The Goon #39 makes a savage mockery of just about every major superhero comic, and superhero comic creator, of the past five years. It skewers everything from DC Comics’s New 52, to Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night arc in Green Lantern, to Spider-Man’s constant sad-sack internal monologues, and it kicks the shit out of every major – and minor – comics artist that had put pencil to paper (or, apparently, mouse to pixel) since 1986. In short, it denigrates every trope of the superhero comics that I have loved since I was five years old.

And it is fucking awesome.

You might notice that this review doesn’t contain a spoiler warning. That’s because there is no story here to ruin. This is one of writer / artist Eric Powell’s one-off issues that serves no story nor history of The Goon. It is simply a brutal takedown of superhero universe reboots and the tricks that the Big Two Publishers use to whip fanboys like me into a frenzy, and to sleaze mainstream media interest in comics (Example: The Goon is killed, and brought back to like, three times in this issue. On one page. Your move, Matt Fraction).

Ghost In The Machine: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #9 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Into every generation a spoiler is born: one in all the world, a chosen one. 

The kid in me says: “You’ve been willing to accept the concept of a robot Buffy since at least season five. when the Buffybot was introduced. And then, you accepted that a Buffybot was built well enough to fool even close friends, and anatomically correct enough to satisfy Spike’s carnal desires, despite the inevitable sheet metal barbs always found in home robot construction. Why is it so unbelievable, should Buffy’s consciousness be placed into a Buffybot, that she wouldn’t notice the difference between the robot and her body?”

But then the grown-up in me says: “Even if I were unaware that my consciousness had been transferred into a robot, as a human being older than seven, I would notice if I hadn’t taken a dump for several weeks.”

Premature Action: Ragemoor #1 Review

Ragemoor is an ambitious book that tries to capture the feeling of a classic haunted house tale mated with an H. P. Lovecraft feeling of cosmic dread, jacked off over by a morality tale from an EC Comics book. However, in trying to introduce several characters, 3,000 years of history (evil history!) and deliver a concrete payoff, all in 24 pages, it trades dread and suspense one expects from a haunted house / elder gods story in favor of quickie violence, making the whole thing feel less like The Colour Out Of Space than Jason X. It is a misfire, but thanks to Richard Corben’s art, it is a good-looking misfire.

We are introduced to Herbert, the current owner of Ragemoor Castle who declares the property to be evil down to its core because he sometimes becomes lost in its halls, and because he believes that it has caused his father Machlan to go insane because Machlan dances around naked and pisses in hallways. Which makes Ragemoor sound less like a haunted house than it does every college dormitory in America. These are signs of substance abuse, not insanity, to which my current writing of this outside of a straitjacket will testify. But I digress.

Forward Into The Past: Faith & Angel #6 Review

Remember that episode of Buffy where Willow got all twisted on dark magic and couldn’t leave the house? And she was willing to ignore anything else that was going on in the Buffyverse because she was just too willing to roll around in the darkness in exchange for a free taste for a load of evil across her naked chest (Perhaps I’m misremembering the episode… but if I am, don’t you fucking dare tell me)? Yeah, that’s what Angel & Faith #6 is: the crack of the Buffyverse.

Whereas the actual Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic feels committed to advancing the Buffyverse and showing the Scooby Gang pushing forward into adulthood, Angel & Faith as written by Christos Gage, particularly in this issue, feels committed to beefing up and filling out previously mentioned areas of the Buffy mythos. On its face, this can be dangerous; any storyline that is less concerned with advancement and more concerned with its own continuity runs a serious danger of crawling up its own ass and dying (hello, Grant Morrison’s run on Batman!).

The High Price of Nostalgia: Creepy #7 Review

While on one level it’s admirable that Dark Horse Comics has resurrected Creepy Magazine as a comic book, it’s playing to a sense of nostalgia that simply can’t exist. With its mascot Uncle Creepy and short horror vignettes, it clearly calls back to the old EC Comics horror books, which went under thanks to a conservative panic about them in the 1950s. Considering the median age of comics readers is roughly Generation X, we have no frame of reference for comics like this. The people who do have that reference are my dad’s age, who won’t ever find this book, because they’re too busy having a conservative panic about comics.

So the audience for a book like Creepy is questionable at best, but that’s okay, because the book’s not all that good anyway. It’s something different, and some of the art is fairly impressive, which might be enough reasons to pick it up, but there’s only one story of the five contained in this book that feels like the old EC ironic twist stories… and that’s because it’s a reprint from the original Creepy in 1962. Which honestly is the best reason to consider paying five clams for this book, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The book opens with a story by Joe R. Lonsdale about a kid who hatefully creates a vengeful mud monster that Should Not Be… which easily describes every Saturday morning in my bathroom since 1990. The story is just light and simplistic, containing a child delivering dialogue like – honestly – “If I was bigger and stronger, they’d pay… if I was big, I’d show them.” Really? If an actual nine-year-old had written that dialogue he’d backspace it out while muttering, “No nine-year-old actually talks like that.” It was particularly disappointing because I generally like Joe Lansdale’s stuff; I’ve got his entire Hap and Leonard series of novels on my Nook Color, and his stuff on Jonah Hex back in the 90s still holds up for me. This story felt like Joe sneezed with the pen still on the page after writing “By Joe R. Lansdale” and sent it in. If you’re buying this book because of Lansdale’s name, skip it and look for The Dunwich Horror instead.

Stalking Horse: Dark Horse’s Digital Pricing Controversy

It is the twenty-first century, and it has been a week, so that must mean that someone tried to do something tricky about digital comics that pissed almost everybody off.

Earlier this week, Dark Horse Comics announced that, like DC and Marvel’s Ultimate line, they were going to make their books available digitally on the same day as the print copies. The problem is that they didn’t specify any details about their pricing model, which, for older books that they’ve made available digitally to date, is generally a buck ninety-nine, compared to the normally $2.99 print editions.

And then the comics Internet shit its tubes.

I Was A Teen Vampire, er, Vampyre – Review Of House Of Night #1

Stephanie Meyers inflicted Twilight on the world in 2005 and reminded the everyone that light pop horror sells big with teen girls and soccer mommies. Many authors took advantage of this and the market has been pretty well flooded with many books by hopefuls looking for a piece of the emo-oriented action. The House Of Night series, written by mother-daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast and first released in 2007, is one of these.

I didn’t know this, when I picked up House Of Night #1, written by the series creators and adapted by screenwriter Kent Dalian. All I knew was that Dark Horse was putting out another vampire book and it was just a dollar. I read the whole thing from cover to cover thinking, “Wow, I feel like this story, this story that is the first issue of what is going to be an on-going series, seems to be dropping me in the middle of events that I should already know about and feels like a pitch to the CW that got turned down because The Vampire Diaries was going to be similar and cheaper to make.” And then I read the inside of the front cover and discovered that:

This series takes place between scenes from Betrayed, the second novel in the House Of Night series.

Oh.

Spoilers that may or may not include the trials and tribulations associated with being a teenage vampire vampyre after the jump.

No Knife To The Eye – The Goon #36 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. Such as the fact that burlesque dancers will apparently show off their tits. This review also ruins at least one of the best jokes in the book. Such as how burlesque dancers can sometimes drive men to try to write their names on the elderly. Plus, it spoils earlier Goon stories. Like how Franky has a knife. Which I guess we spoiled with this review’s title. Ah, nuts. 

In 2009, Eric Powell announced Goon Year: a year when he upped his production schedule to once per month to tell the epic tale of The Return of Labrazio, which featured The Goon learning that he was literally doomed to unhappiness, followed by watching the love of his life die while we readers learned of a son that The Goon would never know he had.

It’s 2011. This month’s Goon features Franky wearing a fake moustache while peeing on an old woman’s head.

I love The Goon.

Pretty Colors And a Powerful Stink: Tom Morello’s Orchid #1 Review

Can’t… make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit.
– Stephen King, Misery

When it comes to Dark Horse Comics’ Orchid #1, I want to give writer Tom Morello the benefit of the doubt, the way I did a few years back when Scott Ian from Anthrax wrote a couple of issues of Lobo for DC Comics. I really do.

After all, based on Morello’s interview with Rolling Stone last week, he grew up a comic geek just like Ian and the rest of us. And what with me being a former FM rock radio DJ, I will gladly admit that Morello gets sounds out of a guitar that neither I nor Scott Ian could get out of a woman with a million dollars in blood diamonds, a vibrator and a non-Irish dick.

And Morello’s even coughing up an original song you can download with every issue, which Dark Horse is calling “a free piece of musical score by Morello,” which although harder to type, sounds a hell of a lot nicer than “multimedia bribery”… which WILL be the name of my Rage Against The Machine tribute band. But I digress.

But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that if Alan Moore showed up at Epic Records waving a copy of Watchmen and demanding a record deal, he’d be laughed out of the lobby just before and extensively after security mildly tased him for being an insane person. Dark Horse should’ve done the same when Morello knocked.