Some reviews from the first four months of the year … part six!

Moving right along, people! Don’t get left behind!

Godzilla Monsterpiece Theatre #1-3 (October-January) by Tom Scioli (writer/artist) and Jake Williams (editor). $20.97, 120 pgs, IDW.

Scioli writes and draws a story in which Jay Gatsby fights Godzilla with the help of Sherlock Holmes, the “time machinist,” Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, Dracula (although of course he betrays them, because he’s, you know, Dracula), a mummy, and Frankenstein’s monster. I mean, that’s all you really need to know, right? It’s goofy and fun as heck and ridiculous and beautifully drawn (although I do admit that Scioli is a bit of an acquired taste), and it makes no sense and who cares because Godzilla gets electrocuted when it grabs the Eiffel Tower and Gatsby turns into a giant to fight it, among other wacky shit. It’s just fun, and that’s all it needs to be!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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Gotham City: Year One (April) by Tom King (writer), Phil Hester (penciler), Eric Gapstur (inker), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer), and Alex Galer (collection editor). $19.99, 168 pgs, DC.

You would think I’d have learned my lesson by now. It’s Tom King, and it’s only Batman-adjacent, so I thought because it was removed slightly from Batman, it might be ok. I mean, this year alone we have another Tom King book that is absolutely brilliant (see below), yet it’s always the same thing: put Tom King anywhere near Batman, and his brain explodes and he can’t write no good no more. What the crap, Tom King? It is, of course, sometimes more fun to write about terrible stuff rather than good stuff, and I’m going to try to have fun with this. But first:

Dang, the art is amazing. I mean, I’ve been a Phil Hester fan since … Swamp Thing in 1994, maybe? (I think that’s the first time I saw his art, but I could be wrong), so it’s not too surprising that I like the art, but it’s really, really nice. The book is quite dense, but Hester’s layouts work wonderfully to convey a lot of information, and he uses negative space really well, and he gets the look of the early 1960s quite well, and Bellaire’s colors are, not surprisingly, excellent. The book looks amazing, and it’s a bit of a tragedy that it’s in service to this story.

Ok, I’m going to SPOIL the hell out of this, so strap in. Let’s break down the ridiculous things that happen in this book, in which Slam Bradley tries to solve the kidnapping of a toddler and the bad things that stem from that. They are legion, so I will try to keep it as short as I can (he says, laughing along with audience, who knows he has a penchant for rambling):

1. It’s set in 1961, which isn’t dumb at all. But it’s set in 1961 when Gotham City is an almost perfect city, with six murders in the previous year, while Metropolis is the murdery shithole.

2. The Waynes of the story are Richard and Constance Wayne. Richard is an abusive, philandering, spendthrift douchebag, while Constance is sympathetic solely because she’s a battered wife. Other than that, she’s a douchebag, too.

3. Gotham is divided into two sections – the North is the white area, the South is the black area. Yes, Tom King, whose picture is in the dictionary next to the definition of “average white man” (don’t worry, it’s next to mine), is writing a story about race. Nothing can go wrong!

4. The kidnapped toddler, the Waynes’ daughter (Batman’s aunt), is found dead in the South area. This leads to riots by the white population against the black population, because of course it does.

5. Said race riots appear to be the sole reason that Gotham is now, in the present, a shithole.

6. Richard has spent all the Wayne money and is trying to develop industries in the South to regain his fortune. Of course, the local population is not happy about this, but they’re black people, so fuck ’em, right? If you think the riots are good for Wayne Industries, well, congratulations – you’re very clever.

7. Slam Bradley has a black mother but is able to “pass” in white company.

8. At one point, Constance Wayne has torrid sex with Slam, because of course she does.

9. Constance shoots Richard in the head because he’s cheating on her with a variety of women, at least one of them a young black woman.

10. One of the plants Wayne Industries builds in the South – after the riots have burned away the black community – is later bought by the Ace Chemical Company. Sigh.

11. It is heavily implied that Slam Bradley is Batman’s grandfather.

Ben Abernathy, who edited the original series, is to blame, I think. Well, maybe not him, but anyone at DC to whom this was pitched. “Fucking really, Tom King?” they should have said. “This is the pitch you bring us? Get the fuck out of my office, ya weirdo.” I just can’t imagine anyone thinking any of this is a good idea, yet here we are. I can’t write anything else about this, because, seriously, I’d be here all fucking day. What the actual fuck is wrong with Tom King when he gets anywhere near Batman? How did this guy write The Sheriff of Babylon of Vision or Supergirl or Helen of Wyndhorn (see, again, below) or even Mister Miracle, as poorly as that ended? It makes no sense!!!!!

Rating: TOO STUPID TO BE BELIEVED!!!!

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Hard Bargain by Steven S. DeKnight (writer), Leno Carvalho (artist), Bruno Hang (colorist), Troy Peteri (letterer), and Jake Thomas (editor). $32.99, 168 pgs, Humanoids.

DeKnight gives us a story that he, as a television writer, clearly thinks he can turn into something on the screen, which annoys me at a fundamental level but also doesn’t bother me too much because often we get pretty good comics out of it, so what the hell, right? In this case, we get a cool supernatural noir story set in Los Angeles in the 1940s/1950s, with a tough private investigator who is … too close to a case!!!!! You know it’s true! Frank Harding is our hero, a no-nonsense dude who specializes in weird cases, which is a pretty decent business for him. One night he gets a call from a childhood friend, who tells him that another childhood friend has just come into the hospital where the friend works. He’s missing all his limbs, and Frank’s lucid friend – Irv – tells him that he hacked them off himself with a cleaver and then chewed the remaining arm off. Yikes. We know it’s a bit more complicated than that, because the book begins with Georgie in his apartment with someone mysterious, but Frank doesn’t, so he’s off on the case! Of course, because we have childhood friends, you can guess that Irv and Frank aren’t completely safe, either. That’s just how it goes!

DeKnight does a good job blending weird, demonic stuff with real-world issues, which is always a nice hallmark of horror-ish comics. There’s a very good reason that Georgie took a cleaver to himself and why Irv and Frank are targeted, and it gets into the history of Los Angeles and the country, and it’s fascinating. He also has a sexy demon who fucks anything that moves and a very creepy little girl who kicks ass, but, you know, it’s a horror story. Frank slowly figures it out, of course, and DeKnight does a good job with both the mysteries he uncovers and his plan to set things right. He has a gal Friday (who, it seems, is a genie, although it’s never explicitly stated) and an ally who owns a Kreepy Kuriosity Shoppe, and, hey! this could be a set-up for a nifty television series! DeKnight does a good job with the characters and the ambience, which is keen.

Carvalho does a good job, too, bringing a good noir feel to the book without making it too dark (in color, that is, not tone – I mean, Georgie is hanging out with no limbs!). He does a good job integrating the weird supernatural stuff into the book – the sex demon wears a nice suit, for instance – and he does a good job with the time period, although the prison where “Doctor Wraith” is kept seems a bit ultra-modern for the post-war era. He does good work with the action, and Hang adds some nice special effects to heighten the weirdness. Carvalho and Hang’s version of Death is stunning – she’s a shadowy presence with shock-white hair, and looks completely out of place, which is probably the point. It’s nicely done.

I’m sure DeKnight is pitching this around town, and that’s fine. Me, I’d rather see another printed adventure of Frank Harding, P.I. by this creative team. That would be pretty nifty.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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Hedrek: Night of the Mummers (March) by Laurence Allison (writer), David Hitchcock (artist), Damian Edwardson (artist), Adam Jakes (artist), Steven Austin (artist), Paul McCaffrey (artist), Ess Kaydee (artist), and Rob Jones (letterer). 424.99, 122 pgs, Scratch Comics.

Allison gives us an unusual cop story about a British officer named Hedrek who always seems down on his luck and who’s dealing with a sprawling case in which hundreds of people around the country are dressing up in strange costumes that have connections with British folklore and going after corrupt politicians and such as well as technology in general. One of them kills someone, so Hedrek and his partner are on the case! What’s both good and bad about the book is its scope – this is a nationwide movement, and it becomes clear that while it has leaders, nobody is really running things too closely, so events can look connected but aren’t necessarily. That makes the book feel grander, but at the same time, that lack of focus weakens the overall narrative. In the first vignette, Allison introduces us to a filthy rich human trafficker, who then disappears from the book for a long time. He’s certainly important to the plot, but because so much else is going on, by the time he returns, Allison hasn’t done much to show how he connects to everything. He certainly does, of course, but there’s a missing emotional element that makes him less of a true evil presence in the book, which is a shame. I mean, he’s a human trafficker, after all. Allison, however, does a good job with Hedrek, who’s just trying to do a good job and make sure nobody gets hurt, including the ostensible bad guys, who, after all, are trying to keep rich people from destroying the country. Hedrek gets into some sticky situations that lead his bosses to think he’s not a good dude, but Allison does a nice job not making it too bleak (we know Hedrek is a good dude) as Hedrek works through his problems. While the plot might be a bit too sprawling, Allison does a good job keeping the focus on Hedrek, and he’s an interesting character, so it doesn’t get too out of control.

I’ve been a fan of Hitchcock for a while, and he does nice work on the art – he draws most of the book, with the other artists contributing short vignettes throughout. He has a rough, ragged style, which works really well in this book, as he’s drawing a lot of people dressed in costumes with leaves and twigs and other things from nature affixed to them, and Hitchcock makes them both majestic and bit scary. He does nice work with the shading, adding more subtlety to the line work, and he uses sharp blacks to imply violence – there’s some gory parts, to be sure, but Hitchcock also does other things to show the violence without using blood, which is nice. It can be a creepy book, and Hitchcock’s portrayal of Hedrek, as a kind of bland dude, works well to give us an anchor of stability in all the madness. The other artists are pretty good – Steven Austin has a nice Steve Dillon vibe to his work, Paul McCaffrey has a bit of a Declan Shalvey thing going on, and Ess Kayde’s sumptuously detailed epilogue plays us out nicely. I’m glad Hitchcock was able to draw most of it, but the other art is pretty neat, too.

I don’t love this book, but it’s not bad. I don’t know if Allison plans to return to the character, but he kind of interesting, so I certainly wouldn’t mind reading more of his adventures.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

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Helen of Wyndhorn (March) by Tom King (writer), Bilquis Evely (artist), Matheus Lopes (colorist), and Clayton Cowles (letterer). $29.99, 144 pgs, Dark Horse.

Continuing the weird trend of “Everything Tom King writes that’s Batman-related sucks and everything that’s not Batman-related doesn’t” (although, given his Wonder Woman, maybe we should reconsider that axiom), we have this book, which is superb. King basically wonders What if Robert E. Howard had a teenage daughter and what if all the stories he told were basically true? A governess, Lilith Appleton (an extremely loaded name, as I’m sure King knows) is hired to take care of Helen, the daughter, and she finds her in a dusty town in Texas, where she has to get her out of jail. She takes Helen to her ancestral home, a gigantic estate owned by her grandfather, Barnabas, and begins tutoring her, but Helen drinks too much and is obviously scared of something at the estate. She’s right to be scared, as it turns out that Barnabas often travels to distant lands in other dimensions, and sometimes monsters follow him home. Once Helen finds out about this, she wants to join Barnabas on his adventures. Surprisingly, he lets her … after she trains in combat so she can take care of herself.

That’s the gist of it, but there’s a lot more going on, and King does a very good job telling it. The story begins with a writer interviewing Lilith when she’s old, and her reminiscing about what happened. That adds a good layer of mystery to it, because Lilith could very well be an unreliable narrator, but King doesn’t stop there, as the writer’s research itself goes through a journey, and although that’s only a small part of the story, King does a nice job showing how old stories can become legends and what people do to force meaning into their lives. Meanwhile, he does an excellent job with the relationship between Helen, Barnabas, and even Lilith (plus the butler, who’s more interesting than he first appears to be), as Barnabas comes to accept Helen even though he doesn’t want to, Helen learns more about her past and what it means, and Lilith tries to “cure” Helen of her alcoholism. Helen doesn’t seem like someone who deserves the grace Lilith gives her, and Lilith is surprisingly kind-hearted for someone who seem like a hard-hearted British governess, but she understands that Helen had a difficult childhood and doesn’t believe she needs more harshness in her life (even though she is stern with Helen often). King does a marvelous job showing how alone Helen is, how scared Barnabas is for her, and how empathetic Lilith is. Why can’t he do these kinds of things with Batman (or Wonder Woman)? It’s a mystery!

Evely and Lopes are phenomenal as well, which is less surprising because Evely is always good. She creates a fantastic estate for Helen to explore, and the details she puts into each room of the house are staggering. She makes sure that the line work in the “real world” is a bit more solid, using blacks and more etched hatching to create a sense of weight. Her line work in the other world is still wonderfully rich and detailed, but she loosens up the pencils just a bit and her hatching is a bit softer, creating places that seem to shift out of reality a bit more easily. Her creatures in the other world and dazzlingly weird and ferocious, as we get a terrific sense of how bizarre these places are. Lopes does his part by using darker colors in the “real” world and brightening things up when Helen and Barnabas enter the other worlds. This is a stupendously gorgeous book, and you can look at each panel for several minutes, discovering new things in them.

I don’t know what happens to King’s brain when he writes a certain Caped Crusader, but let’s hope he’s gotten the Bats out of his system and can continue doing other things. Even if some of his other work has been disappointing (I didn’t love the end of Mister Miracle, as I’ve mentioned), it’s still so much better than his Bat-work that it remains confounding. Helen of Wyndhorn is just another example of that, and while I’m not sure if it’s his best work, it’s pretty close. So that’s neat.

Ratin: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

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Hellblazer: Dead in America (February) by Simon Spurrier (writer), Aaron Campbell (artist), Lisandro Estherren (artist), Kelsey Ramsay (artist), John Pearson (artist/colorist), John McCrea (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Patricio Delpeche (colorist), Francesco Segala (colorist), Mike Spicer (colorist), Aditya Bidikar (letterer), Steve Wands (letterer), and Chris Conroy (collection editor). $39.99, 304 pgs, DC.

I didn’t love Spurrier’s work on Hellblazer, but it was decent enough, so I thought I’d pick up his wrap-up of his time with John and the gang, which is an 11-issue epic journey across ‘Murica. Yes, it’s another Brit telling us Yanks what he thinks of our country, as Garth Ennis is so fond of doing, even though furriners get grumpy when ‘Muricans do it to them. Screw off, furriners!!! Spurrier ultimately doesn’t come down too hard on our fair land – like Ennis, he seems to have a fondness for the U.S. even though he often writes scathingly about it – and he doesn’t say too much that’s new about it, but he does say some things in interesting ways. The movie industry being a metaphor for ‘Murica isn’t the most original thought, but Spurrier has fun with it once John and his crew make it to Hollywood. He delves into the immigration debate a bit in one issue, and while he’s a bit more optimistic about those who think all immigrants are illegal and evil, it’s still a powerful story. Any comic with John Constantine has to have some dark humor, and this collection is full of it, which keeps it from being too gloomy. The place where John goes looking for Swamp Thing, for instance, is hilarious and says more about ‘Murica just through the artwork than almost anything else in the book. The plot relies a bit too heavily on Sandman, however, which is a bit disappointing. Morpheus – Daniel, that is – visits John and tells him that he needs John to get any sand that was in his pouch back. You know the one – the one that was stolen from him back in Sandman #1 that ended up with an ex-girlfriend’s of one John Constantine. The use of these grains of sand has allowed something evil to “slither” into ‘Murica, and Daniel says that if John gets them back, he’ll … well, it’s a bit unclear what Daniel will give John, but considering John’s condition at the beginning of this collection (dead, that is, or at least mostly dead), it has something to do with that (although John does meet Death in this comic, so who knows?). Anyway, that callback is … fine, I guess, but Spurrier relies a LOT on our knowledge of what happened early on in Sandman, and while it’s probably ok on his part to think that anyone who reads this has probably read Sandman ad infinitum, it still means that he doesn’t do all of the heavy lifting here, and that always frustrates me. Plus, the bad guys in this book are “evil” almost exclusively because of our foreknowledge – sure, they’re unpleasant in this book, but we only dread them because of what we already know about them, not because, necessarily, of what happens in this book. I mean, they do some nasty things, or at least inspire them, but they don’t seem to be destroying the soul of ‘Murica all that much. As always with these kinds of stories, I’m uncomfortable ascribing the shitty behavior of people who are supposed to at least resemble the real people of the world to supernatural things, because it lets them off the hook. Spurrier doesn’t do it too much, but enough to be annoying. The weirdness of the movie industry, when he gets to it, is a bit better because it’s just Constantinian bonkers shit, and John is caught up in it. There’s a whole lot of stuff going on in this book (it’s a chunky 11 issues, not your usual 20-page slim things), and I haven’t even scratched the surface. Like the other Spurrier Hellblazer stuff, it’s pretty good, but not great. Campbell does most of the art, and he’s good as usual, with his heavy lines and quasi-photo-realistic people that occasionally don’t look like they’re in the same panel but generally works well. He has entirely too much fun with Swamp Thing turning up in odd places, and the weirdo Hollywood epic at the end looks very nice. Estherren does a marvelous issue #8, when John goes to Hell, giving us a more simian and furred Etrigan than we usually see. It’s bizarre, but it works.

This is a more interesting Constantine than the one who shows up in the regular DCU these days, which isn’t surprising. I don’t know what DC plans to do with this one, but usually, a writer does some neat things with ol’ Johnny. The ending of this seems to imply that maybe DC is putting him on the shelf for a bit, but I don’t know. We shall see!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

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Into the Unbeing volume 1 (January) by Zac Thompson (writer), Hayden Sherman (artist/colorist), and Jim Campbell (letterer). $19.99, 100 pgs, Dark Horse.

Sherman has reached that point where I’m going to be at least interested in anything they draw, and Thompson has done some good work in the past (earlier in this series of posts, I wrote about Blow Away, which was fairly solid), so I thought I’d give this a whirl. It takes place a decade from now, and we’re out in the Gibson Desert in Australia, where four women are on an expedition. The women – Abby, Selva, Zara, and Hildur, the leader – are investigating ways to save the planet, when, one night, their scans indicate that a new mountain just appeared not too far away from them. Because this is fiction and everyone acts stupidly in fiction, Hildur insists they check it out before reporting it to their bosses – the Scientific Institute for Nascent Ecology and Worlds (which sounds like Thompson really wanted to use S.I.N.E.W. as an acronym and worked backward from there) – because they’re a bunch of jerks anyway. Hildur has some issues, as we learn, but so do all the others. The mountain, it turns out, is a … giant body. That has fossilized to stone. The mouth is a convenient opening, and in the night, Hildur disappears inside. The others go inside to find her in case she’s, you know, not dead.

It’s an intriguing premise, despite the stupidity of the characters. It’s four issues, and Thompson focuses on each character for one issue, so we get into all their thoughts and find out that they’re all kind of jerks. I mean, they’re all damaged in some way, and it makes their efforts more interesting, but they’re also jerks. It’s still a compelling story, as Thompson knows his way around a horror story, and there are strange things lurking inside this body that might not be evil, but they’re certainly not friendly. I doubt if it’s a spoiler to say the Hildur is alive (there’s not much point to her chapter if she simply dies), and it’s clear she’s figured some things out while she was separated from the group, but bad stuff happens to them all, and Thompson does a good job with it. I do get a bit annoyed that characters in this kind of fiction are often jerks, but such is life. Thompson has a bigger story in mind, obviously, as we don’t find out too much about the giant body they’re exploring, and we’ll see what happens moving forward.

Sherman continues to dazzle with both their inventive design work and beautiful page layouts. The colors in the book are superb, too, so that’s nice. They do a remarkable job showing the vastness of the desert, which makes the giant head sticking out the sand even more impressive, because it’s gigantic but also small in the context of the wide desert around it. When the ladies go inside the body, Sherman gives us some truly creepy … lifeforms (I don’t want to say too much about them!) and weird chambers and arteries inside, as it is, after all, a body. They do some neat things to show how disorienting it would be inside a giant, strangely alien body, but they always do a good job keeping the focus on the women, so that we’re not simply overwhelmed by the largeness of the body through which they’re traveling. It’s a very cool-looking book, which is not shocking at all.

I’m certainly intrigued by this book, so I’m curious where Thompson will go with it. It feels like he’s setting up some kind of “Evil Corporation Swoops In And Does Horrible Things” plot, which would be disappointing, but I’m willing to see if that’s where we’re going!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

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All right, a couple of short reviews of older things before we wrap this section up!

The Collected Will Eisner’s John Law (March) by Will Eisner (writer/artist) and Gary Chaloner (writer/artist). $24.99, 151 pgs, Titan Comics.

The legend of John Law is probably well known by now – Eisner wanted to do a group of different genre comics under his own supervision in the late 1940s, but the market wasn’t there and it never really got off the ground, and Eisner repurposed his John Law stories – which were never published – into some Spirit stories, one of which is the Sand Seraf introduction everyone loves so much. Yep, it wasn’t originally a Spirit story … but you knew that! In the early 2000s, Gary Chaloner and Kitchen Sink produced some new John Law stories, and all of them – Eisner’s stuff and Chaloner’s stuff – are included in this nifty book, which also includes some text pieces by Chaloner and Denis Kitchen going over the history of the character. Eisner’s work is a delight, of course, and Chaloner does a good job using his own style but making them in the spirit (yep) of Eisner’s work, so they fit nicely in with the original stories. They’re just nifty comics, and it’s always cool to check out work from the olden days, especially if it’s one of the greats!

Rating: I’m not rating this – it’s a keen historical artifact!

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Rebellion Presents The José Muñoz Collection (February). £16.99, 122 pgs, Rebellion/2000AD.

This book collects three strips Muñoz did for “The Lion” in 1973-74, and they’re all fun. A rambunctious Earth boy is recruited by an alien super-being to be his assistant, and he and the other assistant – a boy alien – get into all sorts of shenanigans that the super-being has to get them out of; a bookworm gets zapped into a world where the Norse myths and legends are alive and he has to get out of there; a man wakes up on spaceship and has to convince the people there of his mission, which could destroy their world as they know it!!!! They’re fun and occasionally silly strips, and Muñoz’s art is excellent throughout. He takes whatever the writers – an unknown one for the first, Chris Lowder for the second, and Frank S. Pepper for the third – throw at him and makes it look great. He’s equally adept at the outlandish and goofy and the dark and more mysterious. If you’re a fan of Muñoz, it’s definitely something to check out, and if you haven’t seen his work, this is a pretty good introduction to it.

Rating: Once again, I’m not going there!

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Slowly but surely, I’m getting through these! You know you’re having fun!!!!