Some reviews for the first four months of the year … part five!

I don’t know if I’m going to finish these in the next week, but I’m a-trying!

Babs (volume 1?) (April) by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy (colorist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Rob Steen (editor), and Cory Sedlmeier (collection editor). $18.99, 132 pgs, Ahoy Comics.

Despite some horrible missteps on his part, I remain in the bag for Ennis, and he usually doesn’t disappoint. A satire of barbarian stories drawn by Burrows? Heck yeah, I’m down for that. Burrows is superb, as usual – he’s added a little bit of weight to his line work over the years, it seems, which doesn’t detract from the clarity of it, and he seems to be better at adding lines without over-hatching, so his work looks a bit more sturdy than it used to without losing the marvelous details of the work. He does a really nice job with the many characters, making them look like solid, non-nonsense people from a serious sword-‘n’-sorcery epic but tweaking them just enough so we know we’re supposed to mock them on some level. Some, obviously, are comedic characters, but some – like the mysterious lady on the elven ship – are supposed to be serious, and Burrows does a good job keeping her serious right up until Ennis messes with her. Similarly, the main bad guy of the book looks like a noble knight, but Burrows does nice work with his body language to show what a tit he is, even before you read what Ennis is having him say. Burrows has done a lot of serious work, and he’s good at it, but we shouldn’t ignore his ability to take the piss out of these characters, either.

As for Ennis … well, he’s about my age, and he still thinks dick and fart jokes are the acme of humor, so it’s just something you have to deal with when you read his stuff, and I do, for the most part. He doesn’t go too far in this book (I mean, the ending is a bit much, but it’s actually funny, so that goes a long way), and I do admit that toilet humor has its place, so it’s not bad (and there’s a very funny and kind of gross Chekov’s Gun Situation, which is nifty). Babs is a fun character, just smashing through life without a plan, and even though she becomes a hero in this book, Ennis has her reach that moment in an interesting way. Plus, she wields the worst and whiniest enchanted sword ever, so there’s that. The world he creates is goofy but interesting. He has fun messing with the tropes of the genre, but like all good satire, you have to have good characters and a good plot or it falls apart, and Ennis has both. He gives us some goofy characters – Culpepper, the valiant knight who gets a hard education about what you need to do sometimes to escape a dire situation, is silly but still relatable – and he has fun bringing down some standard “too-cool” characters, like the elves (whose ship is called the “Marillion,” which is definitely a reference to Tolkein’s epic but also, I would imagine, a mocking reference to my favorite band) and the mysterious lady on their ship (who doesn’t appear to be an elf) and even the fun undead characters, as they’re not as effective as you might think an undead character would be. I love how there’s a random, mysterious fellow wandering through the book whom Babs seems to be friendly with, because why wouldn’t this world have random mysterious fellows? Overall, it’s a solid, entertaining, pretty funny story.

But … I haven’t written too much about the bad guy because he, and the entire situation, annoys me a bit. Early on, some dudes accost Babs in a tavern because they think she killed someone they liked. She didn’t, but the dudes still get on her case. Because they’re … well, they’re incels, basically. Ennis doesn’t even try to hide it – they accuse her of killing a dude so she can replace him, and they don’t like it when girls replace dudes; they don’t like that Babs is hanging out with Izzy, another barbarian chick who happens to be black; their leader, Mork the orc (yep), talks about the “Deep Realm” that manipulates things so good dudes like them can’t get a break. They also read up on barbarians and rank them, which sounds to me like Ennis is picking on comic book reviewers. I can certainly take it, but I always like creators who pick on reviewers, no matter the medium. I mean, you put your work out there, and you want people to read it, right? And they can have opinions about it, right? Sheesh. I know Ennis has probably made some good money in comics because his stuff has been adapted for television, but I still don’t know if he wants to bite the hand that feeds him too much, because it’s not like random fans of the television series The Boys know who he is. But that’s just me. Ennis is not subtle at all, and it’s kind of annoying. I mean, yes, we should mock incels (and, I guess, reviewers) incessantly, but Jeebus, Mr. Ennis, you can’t be a bit less obvious about it? The main bad guy, Tiberius Toledo, shows up with his entourage, promising to get rid of everyone who is different and return their town to glory. Gosh, I wonder who this could be? Tiberius and his guys – the Ivory Knights of Unblemished Virtue – even have the “S” rune that the Nazi SS used on their tunics – it’s only one, so it’s not too obvious, thank goodness! Ennis does do some good work with this – not every person in town thinks this is a good idea, and even Mork’s little bunch has their doubts – but it’s frustrating that we get this Trump metaphor as a major plot point of the book, because it does feel a bit wonky. Again, there’s nothing wrong with mocking Trump and the emotionally stunted men who worship him, but it is a bit frustrating that Ennis doesn’t even try to hide it. As usual, I suspect that writers simply don’t think their readers will get stuff unless they beat them over the head with it. That might be true, but it makes reading this stuff frustrating, because it’s just preaching to the choir to some degree, and it’s just not as interesting when it’s basically Ennis saying, “Ha, ha, you guys suck!” I mean, of course they do, but it’s not terribly clever to point it out so blatantly.

Still, I do like the book and wouldn’t mind if Ennis and Burrows teamed up again to give us more adventures of Babs (they team up below, as we’ll see, but I’d much rather they do this!). We shall see!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Conan: Battle of the Black Stone (April) by Jim Zub (writer), Jonas Scharf (artist), Jão Canola (colorist), Richard Starkings (letterer), Tyler Smith (letterer), and Chris Butera (editor). $17.99, 102 pgs, Titan Comics.

I’m a bit “Conan-ed out” these days, as I bought the entire Dark Horse run back in the day and then, when Marvel got the license back, I got their omnibuses of the 1970s/1980s stuff. I avoided the new Marvel stuff, for the most part, and then it moved to Titan, and I’ve avoided the regular series there, as well, although I have been getting the “Savage Sword” magazine format thing, because it’s nifty. It’s not that I don’t like Conan anymore, it’s just that I was a bit burnt out. But Jim Zub is a pretty good writer, and I very much like Scharf’s work, so this self-contained mini-series seemed like a neat thing to pick up. Zub takes all of Howard’s creations – Solomon Kane, El Borak, Dark Agnes, John Kirowan and John Conrad, James Allison – and chucks them into the Hyborian Age, where they join forces with Conan to fight an evil that can cross time and space with ease. A teaser for this story was in Savage Sword (which I’m a bit surprised they didn’t reprint here), but you don’t need to have read that to get this – basically, there’s a weird stone and a weird rune that allows people to travel through time, but it also unleashes a despicable monster that can (and does) kill you at any point in the span of your life. Zub has fun with that, you can be sure. There’s not much else to say about this – it’s an epic sword-‘n’-sorcery joint with very good art, and Scharf has fun with the violence and the horrific monster that stalks our heroes, and there’s a possibility of a sequel, which I would enjoy reading (but might end up in the regular Conan book that Zub writes, so who knows). It’s just an enjoyable, hell-for-leather yarn. There’s nothing wrong with that!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Damaged People (March) by Damian Connelly (write/artist), Ezequiel Inverni (letterer), and Martin Casanova (editor). $19.99, 100 pgs, Alien Books.

Connelly is an interesting creator, as in his brief career, he’s shown a nice adeptness with multimedia, which he uses sparingly but effectively alongside his delicate brushwork, which makes his art soft and haunting, fitting the stories very well. He uses thin lines, lots of hatching, and gouache to create these eerie but slightly hard-edged landscapes, filled with, as the title tells us, damaged people. It’s beautiful work, and I hope Connelly gets a higher profile so more people can enjoy it.

The people in these four stories are damaged – they narrate as much in the first sentence of every story – but this isn’t a bleak comic, as it’s about people figuring out how to heal even though they are damaged. Yes, they’re all stereotypical Goths who listen to far too much Nine Inch Nails and The Cure, but Connelly does a good job showing how they’re able to get through their pain. In the first story, a girl in 1999 visits a haunted house and befriends the ghost that lives in it. The ghost has a secret, and the girl helps her. In the second story, which is set in both 1988 and 1998, a girl stumbles upon a dilapidated house in the woods where a creepy old man lives, but it turns out he’s not really creepy and she becomes friends with him. The third story (set in 1984-1085), the only true horror one in the bunch, features a young girl who happens to be a vampire and the boy who loves her. He wants her to turn him, but she doesn’t, and that becomes a problem. The fourth story is about a young dude in 2001, obsessed with Robert Smith, who befriends a dude who he thinks is much cooler than he is. Unfortunately, his friend also has issues, and our hero can’t really help him, and he has to figure out how to live with that. All the stories have some sadness and gloom, but Connelly does a nice job showing how the people in them try to make the best of things. Some succeed better than others, but it’s a nice comic in that regard, because Connelly recognizes the tragedies in life without allowing the book to become like a random Batman comic these days, something with absolutely no hope. It’s a good balance.

Connelly hasn’t done too many comics, but he’s a neat creator. I look forward to more from him!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Flash Gordon volume 1: Escape from Planet Death (February) by Jeremy Adams (writer), Will Conrad (artist), Cliff Richards (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer), and Chas! Pangburn (editor). $17.99, 132 pgs, Mad Cave Studios.

Adams does something keen in issue #0 (yuck) of this series: he destroys Mongo. Flash Gordon and his allies are trying to stop Emperor Ming from using a planet-killing machine against Earth, but in the process of saving Earth, Mongo gets ripped apart. Now, how Flash and Ming and Dale Arden survive the destruction of Mongo is not told us, but it’s still a cool way to kick off the series. Flash ends up a prisoner on “Planet Death” (which is, yes, how it’s referred to), which appears to be Thunderdome on a planetary scale, where he finds out that Dale is the “consort” of a prince of some sort, and Ming is busy making deals with the locals. Eventually, in order to get off the planet, Flash and Ming have to team up. That will go well, I’m sure!

This is a fun space adventure, far better than what I’ve read of Adams’s DC work (which isn’t much, I admit). He doesn’t do anything too shocking (well, besides destroying Mongo), but Adams just gives us a grand space opera, hitting familiar beats but doing it with confidence and verve. It’s tough to really quantify why this works, as it does feel so familiar, but there is something to be said for just powering ahead and overwhelming the reader with action and adventure. We can see where things are going, and I doubt if Adams will alter the road map too much, but it’s just fun to be along for the ride. Conrad does solid work – again, nothing spectacular, but very solid – and Loughridge’s colors are, as usual, well done. The book looks very cool, as Conrad blends both the weirdness of the world Out There with a good, “Prison Break-meets-Gladiator-meets-The Old West” sensibility that, again, feels familiar but still resonates. I’d like to say more about the book, but it’s just an old-fashioned action adventure. I guess the best thing I can say about it is that Greg Hatcher, I’m sure, would have loved it. That seems like a good stamp of approval!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Universal Monsters: Frankenstein (March) by Michael Walsh (writer/artist), Toni-Marie Griffin (colorist), Becca Carey (letterer), and Alex Antone (editor). $24.99, 98 pgs, Image/Skybound.

Walsh’s art is the highlight of this latest Universal Monsters thing that Image is doing, as I figured it would be, because Walsh is a good artist. His monster is terrifying, sure, but Walsh manages to give him some humanity, too, which is important in this story, of course. “Henry” Frankenstein’s lab assistant, Fritz, is a creepy villain, with tiny, piercing eyes and a menacing posture, and he lurks through the book nicely. Henry himself is a proper gentleman, and Walsh does a nice job keeping him “normal-looking” while allowing the deeper insanity to come through at a few crucial moments. Frankenstein’s lab is your stereotypical mad scientist lab, but Walsh makes it feel eerie and damp, unlike the lab in the original movies (which were, of course, nice clean sets). And he does a wonderful job with the endgame, when the monster kills the girl and the mob comes after him. From the beady eyes of the mob that link them to Fritz and his evil to the burning windmill, the ending the book is nicely apocalyptic, and it makes the entire point of the story – that we’re all monsters, ain’t we? – better than the writing does.

It’s certainly not a bad story, but it is a bit wonky. It doesn’t completely follow the plot of the 1931 movie, although it tells basically the same story. Henry Frankenstein brings the monster to life pretty early, and we zip back and forth in time to see how he built the monster and what’s going on with it once it’s alive. Walsh uses a young boy whose father has died and whose body Henry uses for the monster as our POV character, which works fairly well, but the story still doesn’t quite work. In the novel, we get a good sense of Victor Frankenstein and his motives, and as twisted as they are, we can see why he’s doing what he’s doing. In the movie and this comic, he’s just a mad scientist, basically, who wants to play God. There’s also not a good sense of his romance with Elizabeth – she’s just a prop, someone to marry because of course a handsome, successful doctor would marry someone. When the monster menaces her, there’s no real emotional resonance, because everyone is just going through the motions. There’s also the fact that nobody seems that bothered that Henry is fucking around with such weird things – they’re all convinced that the love of a good woman will steer him from this path without thinking, “This dude is fucked up.” I get that it’s a time of proper manners, but Jeebus, people, my guy clearly has some issues. In the book, Victor was kind of a despicable person, but people didn’t really know it, and his romance with Elizabeth works a bit better and is more tragic. The movies and this comic seem far more concerned with plot churn, which is fine, but it means that they don’t dive too deeply into the characters, which makes them a bit shallow. It’s a familiar monster story, in other words. It looks very nice, but doesn’t really stick with you too much.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Geiger volume 2 (February) by Geoff Johns (writer), Gary Frank (artist), Brad Anderson (colorist), Rob Leigh (letterer), and Brian Cunningham (editor). $14.99, 141 pgs. Image.

You know, it continues to disturb me how much I like these “Ghost Machine” books by Geoff Johns, because so much of Johns’s DC work was so unpleasant. I know he’s had fans for years and they love very DC book he ever wrote, but they always just seemed unpleasant to me, what with the decapitations and other awful violence, the obsession with returning his childhood icons to their former status, and his desire to give an origin for literally everything, even Hal Jordan’s stupid bomber jacket. Johns was everything that was wrong with DC from 2004 to 2011, when it got so bad they had to reboot their entire universe (but never blamed Johns or DiDio, weirdly enough). But now, doing his own thing for Image, Johns has toned down the unpleasantness and showed why he’s been a pretty good writer all along, and I’m enjoying the interconnected series he’s doing about these weird heroes of his. I mean, sure, there’s some violence in the books, and “Mr. Geiger” (as his sidekick in this book calls him) uses his radioactive sticks to kill people, and the sidekick himself cuts some dude apart with his sword, but as you know, I never object to violence in my funnybooks, just the kind that Johns often perpetuated in what are ostensibly superhero books. Do we need to see Black Hand blow his brains out in a Green Lantern comic so graphically? I say no, which is why I objected to Johns when he worked for DC. But with his own creations, he can have at it a bit more, but so far, the violence has been … not exactly tame, but not terribly unpleasant. Meanwhile, Our Geiger Dude gets a sidekick who provides some comic relief and some humanity (a bit schmaltzy humanity, but Johns isn’t alone in sliding a bit toward mawkishness when he wants to be heartfelt, and I can forgive him for it because he doesn’t go too far), plus we get an entire issue in which Tariq’s two-headed dog gets his mojo back after the main bad guy in the arc treats him poorly, and it’s a very keen issue that doesn’t feature our titular hero at all. Franks draws it all beautifully, of course, and Anderson’s coloring is spectacular. It’s just a good post-apocalyptic adventure, and it’s keen that Johns is able to rein in his worst tendencies while still showing how brutal life can be in this harsh new world. There’s another Johns in this series of posts (I’ll get to it!), and it’s also good, so whatever he’s doing with this “Ghost Machine” imprint, he can keep doing it!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Get Fury (January) by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (penciler), Guillermo Ortega (inker), Nolan Woodard (colorist), Rob Steen (letterer), Kaeden McGahey (assistant editor), and Nick Lowe (editor). $17.99, 120 pgs, Marvel.

This got some love around the interwebs when it came out, but I can’t really share it. Burrows is excellent as usual, like he is on Babs above – his violence is horrific, his faces are expressive without him using a lot of hatching, and he has gotten very good at giving us a good sense of the space the character occupy. He might not work on a standard superhero book (and from what I know of Burrows, he wouldn’t want to), but for war stories, his art is perfect.

What I don’t like is Ennis’s story, which is too bad. Nick Fury is captured by the North Vietnamese, and because he knows so much and the CIA is sure that he will crack under torture, they want Frank Castle to go in and kill him. There’s a bit more than that, of course, and eventually Castle rescues Fury, but I don’t want to give too much away. It has everything Ennis loves – real soldiers doing real soldiery things while their superiors act like their real soldiers but are all about rules and selling them out for money; CIA guys who look like they spent the day at the country club with Muffy and Viv and then showed up in Vietnam to throw orders around; bad guys being kind of rude (they kill Fury’s fellow prisoner in a particularly gruesome way); and nihilism being the very order of the day, eventually. This is a bleak-as-fuck comic, and that’s part of the problem. I mean, exactly what’s the point? That the U.S. sucks for going into Vietnam in the first place? Thanks, we get that. That no matter what, the innocent people of Vietnam are going to suffer while the perpetrators of violence get away with it? Thanks, that’s always been clear, too. It’s just frustrating, especially because Ennis does not do a terribly good job with Fury, who does not take well to torture. I get that he’d be haunted by what happened to him, but it seems like he breaks awfully easily, and it doesn’t “feel” right. There’s also an extremely deus ex machina ending that feels like Ennis just ran out of pages, so he had to wrap things up. I dunno. This isn’t a bad comic by any means, but Ennis’s first combination of Castle and Fury, My War Gone By, is much better than this. This feels like Ennis woke up feeling kind of grumpy (maybe he foresaw a Trump election?) and took it out on the characters. Those poor characters!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

All right, that’s enough for now. Thanks for reading, everyone. Come back next time, because my first second review is a book I absolutely hated, so that’s always fun!