Forced Spectrum: The Ray #1 Review

Let’s get the good part of the review out of the way up front: Jimmy Palmiotti’s, Justin Gray’s and Jamal Igle’s The Ray is a fun comic that I intend to keep buying, at least for the time being. It has a likable protagonist, a stack of interesting supporting characters, and an old-school, “Wrong place, wrong time, boom! Dude gets superpowers” attitude toward it’s origin story that reminds me of comics like Nova and Firestorm when I was a kid back in the 70s.

The bad part of the review is that The Ray feels like the obligatory “black best friend” that DC Comics will trot out at SDCC 2012 to prove to extremists in Batgirl costumes that they’re not racists. But we’ll come back to that.

Our hero is Lucien, a lifeguard in San Diego who gets blasted by something called the Sun Gun – probably because if it was the actual Large Hadron Collider that it’s clearly meant to be aping it would imply that he got his powers from something called a God Particle, which would draw out a whole different kind of extremist to SDCC – and gets the power to control light. All of this happens in three pages, and one of them is the opening splash page. Compare that to, say Ultimate Spider-Man, where we’ve gone four issues without even putting Miles Morales in his own costume, and you can tell we’re looking at a fast-paced origin book like, say, the original Spider-Man.

Of course, it takes a little longer than for Lucien to get his costume on because gaining the control of light apparently means losing the ability to wear pants. Everything he touches burns, which means that The Ray will be the first superhero to die of a backup of semen to the brain stem. In fact, a large part of this issue revolves around Lucien’s pants problem, meaning that we spend a lot of time in the company of a naked young man, and that there is a particular demographic who can use the book to make sure they are in no danger of death by semen accumulation.

Recommended Daily Allowance of Carnage

Man, what a busy week. It’s the end of the busiest season for Amanda and me at our respective day jobs, which sadly are not in the comics industry… but then again, that should be obvious considering that we still have jobs.

But as kicked as our respective asses are, we can finally relax for a single evening, because it is Wednesday, which means that this…

…is the end of our (admittedly meager) broadcast day.

But it’s only an evening of rest, because there’s just too much good shit in there to try to review this week: check out that new story about the unkillable, walking dead: Carnage USA! We also have a zombie story to read!

There’s also a new Battle Scars, a J. H. Williams’ Batwoman, the latest New Avengers, and Palmiotti’s and Gray’s The Ray #1!

All of which means that this is gonna be a busy week trying to review it all… but first we need to read some of it. So see you tomorrow, suckers!

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.

Jonah Hex In: A Good Jonah Hex Movie

One of my biggest fears when I heard about DC’s New 52 was that they’d use it as an opportunity to cancel some of their smaller books that never got the attention (or, honestly, the audience) that Batman and Green Lantern got, but that I really enjoyed, like Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray’s Jonah Hex.

I don’t remember why I was so worried… oh yeah – because DC fucking cancelled Jonah Hex.

But I should have known that Jonah Hex is IMPOSSIBLE to kill (If the Goddamned movie couldn’t do it…)! DC’s kept Gray and Palmiotti on to script All-Star Western, which will be starring ALL of DC’s star western characters, including Jonah Hex, and…

Yeah, pretty much Jonah Hex.

This past weekend, DC released a motion comics trailer for the book, which you can see after the jump: