Walking Through Mud: The Walking Dead #115 Review

This review is going to be colored by the fact that I am sick to fucking death of Negan and am more than ready for The Walking Dead to move on to something new.

We have been dancing with this character for fifteen months and his crew of douchebags for even longer than that, and for the entire time it has felt like the guy has one note, and writer Robert Kirkman has been playing it over… and over… and over, in an unending loop that should offend the mind of any self-respecting software developer:

while (bool negan.getIsAlive())
{
    negan.sexualizeBaseballBat();
    negan.leaves().
    List ricksPlanToBeatNegan = new List ( { “Take The Fight to Negan!” } );

    ricksPlanToBeatNegan.getIndex(n).execute();
    ricksPlanToBeatNegan.getIndex(n).setSuccess(false);
    negan.threatenMassViolence();
    n = n + 1;
}

See what months and months of reading about Negan has done to me? I develop software for my day job, and I just spent ten minutes trying to come up with a valid Java-ish method rather than contemplate 12 more issues with this fucking character.

But 12 issues should be the long and short of Negan, because The Walking Dead #115 signals the start of the major story arc All Out War, which should give us the final showdown between Rick’s and Negan’s people. And if the check that the title’s floating is any good at all, this showdown will be a straight-out fight, rather than these little insurrections and half-measures and bouts of oneupsmanship that have made reading The Walking Dead since July of (Jesus) 2012 feeling like walking through thick mud: you take forever and a ton of effort to take every step, and yet go nowhere fast.

So things should start speeding up… eventually. Because part one of All Out War is really more of the same.

Sweet Boneless Jesus – Review Of Todd The Ugliest Kid On Earth #6

Ed. Note. This review starts off with spoilers. Ugly, ugly spoilers. And tits, but, mostly spoilers. You’ve been warned.

The world is not what it seems.

That is the message writer Ken Kristensen and artist M.K. Perker are trying to get across in Todd The Ugliest Kid On Earth – and they are succeeding.

Ever wonder why Charlie Rose is so damn popular? Arguably, because he is a national treasure (his words). Also? Satanist. No, scratch that. Satanist-In-Chief.

Yep. Kristensen and Perker have created a world where Rose is a Satanist hunted by a Groucho Marx lookalike, where tits are the mirror of the soul, and local bullies get their comeuppance during a Seven Minutes In Heaven session that rapidly devolves into their own, personal Crying Game. And in the middle of it all?

Todd. The Ugliest Kid On Earth.

Interested? You should be.

Personal Experimentation: Sex Criminals #1 Review

Sex Criminals, the new limited series by writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky, is a book that asks a question about a circumstance that has never even occurred to me: what would happen if something happened to you after sex other than apologies, excuses and shame? You know: that terrible, terrible shame?

Okay, let me try this again. Sex Criminals is a comic book about two people with special superpowers that only manifest when they give each other orgasms. Hey, maybe I’m a superhero! I’m sure I’ll find out just as soon as I manage to give someone an orgasm! That must be why the ladies call me The Flash! I’m kidding, I’m kidding; they don’t think I’m a superhero. They think I’m a cop. That’s probably why they scream, “Help, police!” No? Okay.

Look, this is gonna be a weird book to review for me, because it’s a weird fucking book, okay? It’s a story about a little girl who learns that she comes unstuck in time when she comes, who tries to figure out if that’s normal through the minefield of junior high school, while dealing with her father’s murder and her mother’s alcoholism, combined with dirty jokes, dicks that glow in the dark, a list of sexual positions that look like a gymnastic routine if the Olympics Commissioner was Larry Flynt, and an armed bank robbery.

This book is all over the map. There is no “elevator pitch” for this comic, or at least not one that you could say on an elevator without being taken into custody within ten seconds of the doors opening. It’s a book with a lot of boning and jacking off, but one that isn’t about boning and jacking off. Instead, it’s about someone who grew up thinking everything they felt about sex was weird, dirty and odd, and who as an adult thinks that no one will ever really be compatible with her.

Which means that, for a comic book that includes glowing dicks and a sexual position known as “The Dutch Microwave,” it’s surprisingly relatable. Because my dick glows in the dark. Hey-yo!

Yeah, okay, I’ll stop. For now.

Turbulence: SDCC 2013 Skybound Comics Panel

It is getting late in San Diego Comic-Con, and the true fatigue hysteria is beginning to set in. I personally have not slept longer than six hours in the past four nights, and considering my diet in that time has varied wildly from gourmet triple-creme brie to greasy patty melts to tater tots, washed down with everything from Starbucks iced coffee to Stone IPA to hotel room self-brewed coffee to Coors Light, I am beginning to break down physically. And considering I am writing this with only about two hours to spare before I have to haul my shattered carcass to the convention floor to attempt to obtain some Goddamned thing called a Plush Zerg for contributor Lance Manion (and knowing Lance, this “convention exclusive” can only be obtained in the third stall of the mezzanine men’s room), I am staring goggle-eyed at a notebook full of details from yesterday’s Skybound Comics panel.

Skybound is, if you are not familiar, the personal publishing imprint at Image Comics for creator of The Walking Dead Robert Kirkman. Meaning that, if you have picked up one of Kirkman’s comics – The Walking Dead, Invincible, or Super Dinosaur, off the top of my head – it was a Skybound book. But it is not a vanity imprint by any stretch of the imagination; Kirkman has been bringing other creators into the fold to release books, including the recent Thief of Thieves. And based on what we were told in the panel yesterday, there are a variety of other books on the way, covering genres from westerns to horror to 70s grindhoue-style revenge flicks, indicating that if we wait long enough, we will eventually see the Skybound bullet on a romance comics, if not some form of furry yiff-tacular.

Jesus, I’m tired.

Bouncing In Many DIrections: The Bounce #1 Review

When left to his own devices on creator-owned material, writer Joe Casey produces comics that are, in the language of critics, some pretty fucked-up shit.

Be it Automatic Kafka or Butcher Baker: The Righteous Maker,  Casey seems to like to traffic in higher-concept superhero stories, loaded with sex, drugs, psychedelia and other stuff that you won’t normally find in a standard superhero story. Like robots with existential malaise using drugs to find meaning in an empty life. Or a dude in a truck killing all comers and fucking anything that walks, moves or crawls. And no matter what, at some point you will find yourself reading and muttering, “Just what in the hell is goning on here?”

Welcome to The Bounce. A comic story that, in 20 short story pages, features not only superhero action, but copious drug use, cop murder, interdimensional travel, and government funded quasi-religious partical experimentation to fracture the nature of reality.

So as is often true to form on a Casey book, I really have no fucking idea what is going on. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t enough good stuff here to stop me from wanting to find out.

Fruit Forbidding: Apple App Store Refuses Sale of Saga #12

Update, 4/10/2013, 5:50 p.m.: As contributor Lance Manion pointed out in the comments, it turns out that Apple isn’t the party that censored Saga #12. It was Comixology themselves. Details at the end of the original story, after the jump.

———————-

The Internet is an interesting place. It’s a place where, by simply closing your eyes, pounding on your keyboard with your fist and pressing the Enter key, you can see pictures, in living color, of a woman with a substance abuse problem blowing a horse.

It is also a place where you can obtain anything that can be turned into ones and zeroes that you want, completely for free, much to the consternation of major media producers. But thankfully, most of those media producers have embraced the possibilities of the Internet, making their content instantly available to anyone with a credit card – you know, adults – instantly, and at a reasonable price. And all across a medium that only fifteen years ago was best known as a delivery vector for animal pornography and autopsy photos.

Well, unless you’re trying to ply your wares through Apple’s App Store. A company and a store who have, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to accept Image Comics’s Saga #12 for sale via the iOS Comixology app due to two images of gay sex. Because God forbid that a consenting adult be allowed to decide to purchase a cartoon that includes two panels of sex acts on their iPad – a device widely used to make it possible to view and masturbate to high-definition pornography in a public toilet stall.

So, what with Apple acting in a manner similar to Wal-Mart and other prudish, yet powerful, corporate overlords who want to tell you what you can and can’t read or watch, I imagine Saga creators Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and their little publisher Image, have agreed to self-censor their book in order to gain access to iPads, yes?

Yeah, no.

Nearing The End – Review Of Glory #33

Ed. note – Ahead lies a blood soaked tale, rife with blood, sacrifice, and spoilers. You’ve been warned.

Glory #33 is the penultimate issue in Joe Keatinge and Ross Campbell’s sadly abbreviated relaunch. Why only 12 issues? Keatinge had this to say when asked about it by Comics Alliance back in December:

Sometimes, what you start off doing and what you end up doing are two different things. When I first came on, even before I had an artist, I wanted to have a massive story that went on for 70 issues, but the combination of actually working with Ross and, it’s so cliché to say it but it’s so true, the characters kind of take over sometimes. In this situation, it wasn’t really as grandiose a story as I initially thought as much as it was a story about the relationship between these two different people, Riley and Gloriana, and how they each affect these huge and small situations. When we really started re-plotting things out as it went along, after the 12th issue, without saying too much, it would become a totally different book. So maybe we should just leave the party early before our welcome’s worn out and tell this one story that seems to be what it’s about anyway.

Glory was shaping up to be an epic war story with a complex plot line spanning across the reaches of time, gorgeously drawn by Ross Campbell. Having now read issue 33 and seeing where the story is going, I get what he’s saying about the characters taking over. Riley and Glory’s relationship is the thread that ties the tale together, but I do still wonder, perhaps selfishly, if maybe Keatinge and Campbell are leaving the party a little too early.

Shark Infested Waters: The Legend of Luther Strode #3 Review

Editor’s Note: Did you know a young boy drowned the year before those two others were killed? The editors weren’t paying any attention… They were making spoilers while that young boy drowned.

Justin Jordan needs to stop, take a breath, and be very, very careful from here on out. Don’t worry, I will explain.

If 2011’s The Strange Talent of Luther Strode was inspired by a 1980 horror movie, then its sequel, The Legend of Luther Strode, is clearly shaping up to be at least somewhat inspired by a 1980s sequel to a horror movie: Aliens. I say this in the sense that, where Alien was a moody, claustrophobic story about an unstoppable monster picking people off one by one, Aliens instead was a big damn action movie that used the trappings of the original movie, like facehuggers, soldier aliens and acid blood, as a plot device to allow people to blow a bunch of shit the fuck up.

And for most of the first three issues of The Legend of Luther Strode, writer Justin Jordan has delivered a very similar experience. He has taken the details set up in the original series – superhuman strength and speed, the ability to see and foretell the physical effects of pending violence, and being pretty much all but bulletproof – and used them to set up not only big action setpieces of Luther stomping the crap out of gangs of criminals who are a motion tracker and a “Game over, man!” away from being Colonial Marine cannon fodder, but long battle sequences between Luther and similarly-powered Binder. Throw in Luther’s friend Petra – a regular woman with a surfeit of cojones running around this superpowered mayhem with just a gun – and Jordan even has his Ripley, albeit in a supporting role. All we’re missing is the damn ship’s cat and Lance Hendriksen… and based on his current filmography, he’d probably show up if Jordan asked nicely and offered a hot meal.

But if this latest Luther Strode series is, in fact, Aliens, then there must be an alien queen. And in The Legend of Luther Strode #3, we meet a contender – I say “contender” because halfway through the series is a little early to be really meeting the final Big Bad – and this contender is… shall we say, problematic. Problematic in the sense that his identity is such a bold move that it can really only elicit one of two responses.

Those responses being either, “Wow!”, or “…are you fucking kidding me?

Brand New Day: Invincible #100 Review

Editor’s Note: We can’t afford to be innocent. Stand up and face the spoilers.

Over ten years, Invincible has evolved from a book about a teenaged hero learning both his powers and how to balance being a superhero and a high school student, into an experiment in comic superhero universe building. Seriously: this book has gone from a relatively small-scale story about a dude whose dad was basically Superman, fighting small-scale villains like mad bombers blowing up high school kids, to a seriously ambitious epic about interstellar travel, interplanetary war, politics and intrigues across multiple race, numerous superteams, and a pinkish, one-eyed powerhouse named Allen. Okay, some parts were more ambitious than others, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Invincible, over the years, became something that in almost no way resembled what it started out as: a simple superhero book that was pretty reminiscent of early Spider-Man. And as with The Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible has built up a huge amount of continuity that could make the book inscrutable to new readers. Which means that, as with The Amazing Spider-Man, it seems that writer Robert Kirkman has decided that, with Invincible #100, it’s time for a good, old-fashioned reboot.

Steampunk Ghostbusters: Witch Doctor: Mal Practice #3 Review

Witch Doctor has always been a book that has been pretty unabashed about wearing its influences on it’s sleeve. If you take a step back – and not even a big step – and unfocus your eyes a little bit, you can see past the characters on the page and see Ghostbuster jumpsuits, with Dr. Gregory House peeking out from Dr. Vincent Morrow’s eyes, and if you could get your hands on the plans for any given building, in the book, you’d probably see “Tim Burton, Architect” signed at the bottom.

This should be a recipe for disaster. After all, think about every groundbreaking hit movie you’ve seen, and then think about how many “homages” to that hit that came out a year and a half later, and how good they actually were. Sure, everyone loves Raiders of The Lost Ark, but a dare you to find me someone who pops wood over, say,Nate & Hayes, orHigh Road to Chinaor even someone who remembers them without resorting to IMDB – and one of those even starred the guy who was originally cast as Indiana Jones. Sure, the parts are all there, but just because they were magic in one place doesn’t mean they can work when you grab them and drop them someplace else.

So yeah: if you stop and think too much about Witch Doctor: Mal Practice #3 too much, you’ll see all the pieces working under the hood. And, depending on what kind of reader you are, that might prove too distracting to really get into the book. Which would be a shame, because even though you can see all the influences at work, writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner has put together one hell of a fun book, with entertaining and funny dialogue, nifty gadgets, and satisfying action. Sure, you’ve seen some of what underpins this story before… but you don’t see it done well often.