America’s Got Rising Stars: America’s Got Powers #1 Review

America’s Got Powers is a book that is based on a simple and brilliant idea. That idea is J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars.

Writer Jonathan Ross is a well-known BBC television host who has dabbled in writing comics (he wrote Turf for Image Comics last year), and who has gone on record for saying that he loves comics more than masturbation. Which is a bold statement; I personally buy about 30 comic books a week and spend more on them than I used to spend on my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, but compared to the Happy Slappy? A distant second, my friend… although I must admit I sometimes read my comics with my left hand so it feels like a stranger’s reading them. But I digress.

Ross is writing about American popular culture from the point of view of a European, which means that he sees us from the lowest possible common demominator view: a sporting event and television-obsessed unthinking angry mob, who would not only happily watch and / or attend an event where people are beaten to unholy and crippled pulps, but would bring their children and buy them cheap plastic souveniers of the savagery. Note that I am not saying that Ross is wrong about us. However, it is a little insulting to hear that kind of broad generalization from a lime-sucking buck-toothed rampant practitioner of pubic school buggery. But I’m getting off point again.

Juvenile Pastiche: Danger Club #1 Review

The concept of teenaged superheroes going out of control without adult supervision is hardly a new one – off the top of my head, we’ve got Terra in The New Teen Titans, Kid Miracleman, the unrepentant incestuous relationship between Zan and Jayna, and a little-known book called Kingdom Come… wait, one of those doesn’t sound right… although I’m betting somewhere, as we speak, Alan Moore’s writing, “Form of… a donkey!” Regardless, it’s too early for me to be getting off track here.

My point is, a story about teen heroes running amok isn’t a new thing under the sun, so writer Landry Q. Walker’s and artist Eric Jones’s Danger Club isn’t exactly breaking any new ground. A story about teen sidekicks and what they get up to after all their mentors leave Earth to battle some cosmic villain and never return, it has shades reminiscent of both Kid Miracleman’s rampage and the rolling destructive battles of the first couple of issue of Kingdom Come. So make so mistake: what we’re seeing in this first issue isn’t new.

But then again, neither is baseball, and that’s still fun to watch… as is Danger Club #1. And if this issue is any indication, Walker and Jones are taking admittedly well-used old story tropes and using them to swing for the fences.

Back Into Hell: Spawn #218 Review

Let’s start by me coming clean: I don’t read Spawn. I’ve never read Spawn. I might be the only comics enthusiast who was actively reading back in 1992 who doesn’t have a dusty polybagged copy of Spawn #1 tucked in the back of some yellowing longbox somewhere. This is because, while Spawn #1 had the four words most likely to Pavlovianly excite any early 90s comics fan – “Art by Todd McFarlane” – it also contained one of the worst four-word curses in late 80s / early 90s comics: “Written by Todd McFarlane.”

However, I am familiar with Spawn thanks to the movie and the HBO animated series: Al Simmons, former special forces soldier, is murdered and returns to life imbued with the power of the Hellspawn. Spawn lives as a homeless person, defending the local winos and pining for his former wife, while forces of good and evil war over his soul. I think; Spawn aired on HBO on Friday nights, and it was the rare Friday in the 1990s that were conducive to my ability to form long term memories.

So, armed with that common knowledge, I returned to Spawn with issue 218 for the first time… well, ever, really. So I cracked the book, dove in and…

I have absolutely no fucking idea what’s going on. This, however, is not necessarily a terrible thing.

Involuntary Reposession: Alpha Girl #2 Review

Alpha Girl #2 is what would happen if Night of The Comet and Maximum Overdrive had ill-advised drunk sex, and the prom dumpster infant was a comic book. Depending on your taste in 80’s movies, this is either a spectacularly good or a wretchedly bad idea, and as a child of the 80s who sometimes likes to get hammered and cruise the dusty parts of the Netflix streaming catalog, I am inclined to get on board with a book like that. However, there is idea and then there is execution, and in the same way there are 80’s horror movies like The Stepfather and others like Motel Hell, it’s the execution where this comic falls down.

The plot concept behind this book is that a cosmetic company has created a pheromone that has the unfortunate effect of turning women into fast zombies. Which is a simple and interesting little concept as comic horror comic books (Or is it comic comic horror books? Horror comic comic books? Ray Jay Johnson? Christ, I need a drink) go, but the problem is I had to learn that from the Image Comics solicitation for the first issue. The concept behind what’s happening here isn’t anywhere in this issue. The closest we get to an explanation is on page 24 (of 27), and even that only tells us that whatever’s going on is only happening to women. So if you’re like me and this is the first issue you’ve seen, you’re not going to have a Goddamned clue as to what’s happening and why.

Sympathy For The Devil: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… spoilers.

Now that everything is all said and done, it turns out that writer Justin Jordan has done something very interesting with The Strange Talent of Luther Strode: he has created a superhero comic book in which the hero is well and truly an unstoppable killing machine from a 1980s slasher flick. It is Halloween from the point of view of Michael Myers, or Friday The 13th as told by Jason Voorhees, only written as tragedy and I’m not getting my first handjob in a sticky theater back row during one of its Roman numeraled sequels (yet).

Jordan has made a leap in logic that I don’t think I’ve seen before except maybe by those millions of Generation X’ers who bought talking Freddy Kreuger dolls and traded his best kill quips in study hall, and certainly never codified in print. And that is that if an 80s slasher film villain is unstoppable, unkillable, and has some great catchphrases? And if they wear an easily-identifiable costume and or a mask (Freddy’s sweater, Michael Myers / Jason Voorhees masks)? Then the only difference between them and a comic book superhero is motivation and (sometimes) method. After all, where the rubber hits the road, the only difference between Freddy and Wolverine a surface level is the word “bub” over “bitch” and the violent murder of Johnny Depp, to which Wolverine can still only aspire.

It Was A Civil War Of Period: Saga #1 Review

The first thing I noted while reading Brian K. Vaughan’s and Fiona Staples’s Saga #1 was that, with every page – and sometimes every panel – this team was raising the required budget of any possible film adaptation by several million dollars. And movie studios simply don’t spend that much on an NC-17 flick.

The second thing I noticed was that this comic book is an imaginative, large-scale space opera that simultaneously hits all the expected and classic tropes of the genre, while chucking in enough weird and mad ideas to make Grant Morrison mutter, “Shit; nice one,” and tying the whole thing together with an out-front, genuine sense of humor about itself that you won’t find outside of a Star Wars parody. This is a very, very good comic book.

Impending Doom: The Walking Dead #94 Review

Well, Andrea’s dead.

Oh, not literally; at the end of The Walking Dead #94, she’s still walking around, hovering around Rick now that they’ve hooked up, vowing that she won’t leave his side and leaving him filled with apprehension for her safety and us filled a feeling that Andrea must have a hair trigger to be this involved with a man with no dominantly coordinated hand. Either that, or that Colt pistol isn’t the only Python that Rick’s packing. But I’m digressing already.

The point is that early in this issue, Andrea says something that feels so much like the kind of line someone says in a horror movie right before they’re run through by Jason Voorhees that I immediately thought that she might was well be wearing an “Eat Me (Not You Rick)” t-shirt. It’s the kind of thing that any savvy horror movie fan would take to mean that it’s time to butch up on your bladder control, because someone’s about to get butchered. In other hands, it would be an amateur’s move… but in writer Robert Kirkman’s, it feels like it serves an important purpose. That purpose being that these characters feel indestructible. And, considering they are still living in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, they should probably stop doing that.

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?

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.

We’re All Going To Die, Die Standing Up! Peter Panzerfaust #1 Review

And then he appeared from nowhere. Like he had been there all along, just… my eyes had failed to see him. He loved a grand entrance. That was Peter’s way.

Peter Panzerfaust is billed as “Red Dawn” meets “Peter Pan”… how can you not be interested in reading that?

The setting is the port city of Calais France, May 1940. The Nazi blitzkrieg is sweeping though France, Calais is falling and a quarter of a million allied soldiers are about to evacuate France at the port of Dunkirk. It is one of the darkest times of the Second World War.