What I bought, read, watched, or otherwise consumed – October 2024

“Seriously?” (Me, c. 5.00 a.m., 6 November 2024)

COMICS

Barbaric volume 4: Born in Blood by Michael Moreci (with Tim Seeley for the crossover) (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Fabi Marques (colorist), and Jim Campbell (letterer). $19.99, 130 pgs, Vault Comics.

Moreci and Gooden continue to have entirely too much fun with Owen the Barbarian and his companions, and they end up in yet another pickle (two, actually, as one story is a crossover with a Tim Seeley character and has almost nothing to do with the main narrative) and they have to hack their way out of it. This continues to be a blast to read, because Moreci does such a good job making the dangerous situations seem really dangerous but he also makes sure that Owen, Soren, and Steel (in this volume) know they’re up to the task of hacking their way through it, so they’re never that put out. What makes the book work so well is that Owen seems to understand that he’s in a sword-and-sorcery story, so yet another wizard trying to destroy his soul isn’t going to really upset him, and Moreci has fun with subverting those tropes that we see all the time in s-‘n’-s style stories. It’s still exciting and there’s still a lot going on and he actually moves the story forward (in this volume, Steel leaves the book for a perfectly good reason) while still taking time to make sure the threats at least seem daunting. One thing that’s neat about this series is how much world-building is done on the fly – simply by dropping Owen into a new situation, Moreci can fill in more of the world without slowing down too much. He creates interesting villains, too, as he makes them more interesting than you might expect – they’re still villains, but they’re not just run-of-the-mill, they actually have thoughts about why they’re doing what they’re doing, and the reasons aren’t always bad. Owen and his axe have to slaughter them, of course, but they’re not just there to be slaughtered. The axe, of course, continues to be fun as all get-out, which adds some silliness to the proceedings. It’s a nice balance between humor and horror, and Moreci has been doing it well throughout this run.

Gooden’s dense art continues to be superb, as he fills the page with amazing details while making sure it’s all legible. He continues to make the axe look like an axe even though it has, you know, a face, which is pretty keen, and he cuts loose with the violence quite well, as he always does. He gets to draw a person turning into a werewolf (yep, there are werewolves in this volume), and it’s honestly horrific but also maybe the best transformation I’ve ever seen in comics? Maybe? He also does an excellent job with the characters’ facial expressions, as Moreci’s take-downs of the sword-and-sorcert clichés wouldn’t work quite as well if Gooden wasn’t showing us how cynical the characters are about them. Gooden is always good, and he is here, so that’s all right.

Barbaric just moseys along, telling a very entertaining story drawn very well. That’s not a bad thing!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Come Find Me by a host of people. $8.99, 45 pgs, Dstlry.

And so begins a weird theme for this month – lots o’ anthologies! What the heck, man? Is it Halloween-y tyme, so people are doing horror stories that fit only into anthologies? I dunno, but I have a lot of them this month – this is the first (alphabetically, not chronologically) of … dang, seven (7) anthologies I bought this month. That’s a bunch.

Anyway, this is a frustrating comic, because the art is so, so good, but the stories are somewhat disappointing. Someone named “HamletMachine” does the art for the first story (don’t Google that name unless you want to check out their web site, which is a bit porny), and it’s very nice, although I’m not totally sure what’s going on. I mean, it’s clear enough, but it seems … pointless? I guess? Becky Cloonan does a story about a woman apprenticed to a grave robber, I think? Why is that? Anyway, she’s dumb because she does something he specifically tells her not to do, and everyone pays for her dumbness, but dang, it’s a good-looking story because Cloonan is good. Molly Mendoza has a gorgeous story about a man who … does something? I’m not sure – does he kill his lover and put her in the river, or did she drown and he somehow brings her back to life, and if so, what’s with the other woman he’s apparently banging, who gets pregnant in a very weird way? I don’t know, but Mendoza’s art, which is sort of a cross between Emma Ríos and Alison Sampson, is beautiful. Then Vanesa Del Ray and Andrew Betsch have a story about a widow whose husband was killed because he tried to unionize coal workers and the lengths she’ll go to for justice. Another dumb woman, as of course what happens to her was going to happen to her, and why didn’t she see it coming? Still, it’s nice to look at. The next story is another gorgeous one by Céline Loup in which … well, I guess a dude has sex with some kind of supernatural woman, which does not go well for him, but who the hell knows? To round it all off, E.M. Carroll has another of their inexplicable yet beautiful stories, in which … skeletons are in love? Lust? Loathing? Who knows? It is absolutely stunning to look at, though.

Sigh. I know I’m not very bright, but I just don’t get these tales. The only ones I know I get are the two in which women do phenomenally stupid things, and that’s not great when those are the only ones that aren’t super-opaque. The art is uniformly excellent, but man! I wish I knew what was going on in these stories. That would be nice.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives! by Dan Watters (writer), Ram V (writer), Matthew Roberts (artist), Dave Stewart (colorist), Trish Mulvihill (colorist), DC Hopkins (letterer), and Alex Antone (editor). $24.99, 96 pgs, Image/Skybound.

Unlike the first installment of these “Universal Monsters” books, the Dracula one, Watters and V tell a new story, which I think is a smart idea. Maybe not with Dracula, because the original retains its power (although I don’t think Tynion did the best job with it), but for something more random like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, there’s nothing wrong with doing something a bit new. Our writers give us Kate Marsden, a reporter who was almost murdered by a serial killer who’s she now obsessed with tracking down, and she thinks he’s hiding out in the Amazon, so she’s deep in-country looking for him. She discovers a scientist – a character from the original movie – who’s equally obsessed with finding the creature and studying it. They team up, sort of, and head for the Black Lagoon, where they find that the killer is working with a local drug-dealing gang, which presents some problems, naturally. Of course, the killer captures Kate, and of course, the creature shows up, and of course, the killer seems far smarter and more supernatural than he should be, but while the story doesn’t really give us anything that new, it’s still pretty good reading. Both Watters and Venkatesan are good writers, after all, so they can make this compelling even if the plot is pretty standard. Roberts does really nice work, especially with the creature, which looks both human-ish and otherworldly. He also does particularly nice work with the rain forest and all the plants and swamps and whatnot – there’s really a good sense of the isolation of the characters and the strange things that lurk in the immense greenery that surrounds them. It’s not the most action-packed book, but Roberts does a good job with some of the panels to heighten the action he does draw, including a double-page spread that shows the creature in all its ruthless glory.

These “Universal Monsters” books are pretty nifty, and I’m glad we’ve gotten some really good creators on them. They’re not exactly great comics, but they are pretty good, which is fine with me!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Cruel Universe #3 by a bunch of people. $4.99, 30 pgs, Oni Press.

This is the first issue of these new anthologies from Oni and Boom! that hasn’t really worked, which is disappointing but not surprising – at some point, the law of averages catches up to us all! The four stories feel too slight and obvious – I mean, most of these stories are fairly obvious, but these feel more so. The first story is about Elon Musk, basically – a dude builds AI-powered cars that take over the planet (of course) and he is out for revenge, but of course things don’t go as he plans. It’s by J. Holtham and drawn by Kano. The second story, by Zac Thompson and Dan McDaid, is about a mutiny on board a cargo ship that eventually leads to just desserts for the mutineers, but not in the way you might expect. It’s the best story in the issue, but that’s not saying too much. Ben Winters and Carson Thorn give us a very obvious story about a vile man who wants to erase his on-line presence, and you can guess where it’s going. It’s not only obvious, the art is a bit sloppy, which is unfortunate. Luckily, David Rubín draws the final short story by Cullen Bunn, which is about automated “angels” that keep people in line, morally. Yeah, that won’t go well. It’s another obvious story, but the art is very nice.

I’ll probably keep getting these anthologies for a while, in the knowledge that not all of the stories are going to be great or even good. I do hope there’s more good ones than not in the next issue!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

The Crumrin Chronicles volume 3: The Wild and the Innocent by Ted Naifeh (writer/artist) and Megan Brown (editor). $14.99, 135 pgs, Oni Press.

Naifeh brings his “Courtney Crumrin-adjacent” series to a close, as we get Will Crumrin, Courtney’s younger brother, still trying to find his way in the world after he spent a century in the fairy world. He’s friends with Tucker, who asks him to join them on a wilderness hike because they dig Will but also because they’re unsure how it will go with their girlfriend, Cinnamon, who dresses like a super-Goth but is, apparently, really into outdoor adventuring. Naturally, something bad happens on the adventure, as the kids begin disappearing and then re-appearing, but … changed. It’s up to Will, Tucker, and Cinnamon to figure out what’s going on and stop it, if they can. Oh dear.

It’s a good character study, because Naifeh is dealing with issues that teens go through – identity crises and such. Will didn’t know what kind of person he was when he returned to “our” world, but he’s been able to sort that out a bit, and now he wants to help Tucker. Tucker likes Will, but they also like Cinnamon, but part of that is because Cinnamon is the kind of person they want to be (Tucker is a bit of a nerd). It turns out, Tucker is the kind of person Cinnamon needs, because they ground her (even though she constantly calls Tucker “she,” not “they”). Naifeh does a nice job setting this stuff up and showing how it can poison relationships, but as Naifeh is fundamentally a positive comics creator, the characters manage to work it out. Meanwhile, there’s a younger boy on the adventure whose father has trained him to be anti-homosexual, and there are two dude-bros who like to pick on Tucker, and the leader of the adventure group has a “dark” secret (it’s really not that dark, but it is something that causes some strife in the group). Naifeh does a really nice job with all this, allowing each character some moments so that when bad things happen to them, the reader is invested in them and wants them to come through unharmed. The biggest problem with the book, honestly, is Courtney Crumrin. Because Will is so anti-magic but lives in a world where magic is real, Naifeh has been using Courtney as a deus ex machina, and while he does a good job integrating her into the book, it does feel a bit like cheating. Not enough to ruin the book, but it’s still a bit frustrating.

Anyway, there are some people who don’t like Naifeh, and that’s fair enough. Unlike some of his stuff, this book probably won’t make you like him if you don’t. It’s part of a larger “universe” and his art is very on-brand. I happen to love his art and his depiction of the “villain” of the piece (it’s tough to really say that it’s a villain, but it’s not particularly pleasant) is really well done. But, it’s very “Naifeh-esque,” so if you didn’t like his work before, it probably won’t change your mind (unlike, say, Princess Ugg, which was demonstrably Naifeh but not quite as prototypical of his work). But if you’re a fan, this is a very good addition to the “Crumrin-verse.” Go get it and enjoy it!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Crypt of Shadows by several people. $4.99, 25 pgs, Marvel.

Marvel hits us with a spooky anthology for Halloween, and it’s pretty good. Agatha Harkness acts as “crypt-keeper,” showing us stories about various characters in the Marvel U (that Agatha is young and hot never fails to crack me up, because of course she can’t be old – the youths would never read comics if one of the characters was an oldster!). Steve Orlando writes this, but Claire Roe draws it, and as Roe is a very good artist, it looks neat. Chris Condon and Djibril Morissette-Phan have a Scarlet Witch story, in which she faces off against a hunter who draws her through her weird door and tries to kill her. This goes poorly for him. Morissette-Phan is a very good artist, and his work here is unlike what I’ve seen from him, so I wonder if he’s evolving or just trying to be more “superheroic.” Whatever – it’s nice. Benjamin Percy and Raffaele Ienco do a Man-Thing/Namor story that’s actually kind of interesting – I won’t give it away, but it feels like something that’s never been done with the swamp monsters wandering around the Marvel and DC Universes, so that’s neat. The art is very nice – a little bit of Kev Walker vibes, which isn’t a bad thing. Finally, Jason Loo and Carlos Magno have a Werewolf by Night story, in which he’s hunted by Kraven. I can’t imagine that’s never happened before! It’s a fun little story, and Magno’s art is really terrific. So, overall, this is a nifty anthology. Certainly nothing earth-shattering, but some fun stories drawn very well. That’s not too bad!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

DC’s I Know What You Did Last Crisis by, you guessed it, a bunch of different creators. $9.99, 80 pgs, DC.

It’s yet another anthology, as DC breaks from their recent theme of doing holiday-related anthologies and gives us one in which each story is set during a different DC world-shattering event, which is a clever idea but also reminds us how many times DC has done world-shattering events, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. In order, we have: A Batgirl story set during the original Crisis on Infinite Earths (during issue #4, in fact), in which Babs has to deal with Killer Croc; a story set during Millennium starring the female Dr. Light (hey, remember her? is she even around anymore?); a story that takes place during Final Night in which Black Canary fights the Silver Banshee; a Wesley Dodds/JSA story set, appropriately enough, during Zero Hour; a weird Nightwing story from the Infinite Crisis days; the best story in the collection, a Scarecrow story from Blackest Night; a story set during Final Crisis in which Lex Luthor figures out what Libra is up to; and a Flashpoint story with the Midnighter. What’s neat about them is that they take the reality on the ground at the time of the event and use it, so Oliver Queen, for instance, is dead during the Final Night story. The Batgirl story is a good one, as Batgirl needs to understand Croc in order to deal with him; the Scarecrow story is neat because it features Scarecrow pitted against two ordinary people and shows what they do to get away; the Lex Luthor story is neat because Lex has to use his big brain and it has nice art by Sid Kotian. This is just another solid anthology from DC. Nothing great, but pretty good.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Detective Comics #1062-1089 (+ the 2022 Annual) by Ram V (writer) and a whole crapton of others.

I suppose it’s a measure of how impressed I have been by Ram V that for the first time in a very long time (a decade?), I bought the issues of a run published by the Big Two rather than just wait for the trade. Honestly, I don’t know why I did it – I didn’t read them monthly, although I have read chunks of them over the past couple years, so when it finished, I had already read some of it. I think, somewhere deep down in my soul, I didn’t trust DC to publish the back-up stories, and while they’re not the most crucial stuff in the world, they do fit nicely into the narrative that Venkatesan wrote in the main book (and generally, the back-ups were written by others, so it had to be coordinated), and the art is usually pretty keen (Hayden Sherman’s Two-Face story stands out as a highlight). But I imagine DC did publish the back-ups, so my fears were probably groundless. I don’t know why I bought these issues rather than waiting for the trade. I guess I’m just contradictory that way.

This run is interesting – it’s kind of a baroque, somewhat ramshackle masterpiece, probably easily forgotten in Batman lore, as Venkatesan introduces things that simply don’t fit into the way DC wants Batman to be done these days, giving him an epiphanic ending that will be brushed aside thanks to the continual IP necessities of the character. In a vacuum, this works better, because although Venkatesan has many familiar faces from Batman’s history, it still works better as a self-contained story, showing us the way a man can come to terms with his own mortality and emerge better. As I noted, it won’t stick, but hey, we got two years of a cool story out of it!

The story has plenty of flaws, beginning with its length. Yes, we get 29 issues essentially telling one story, but it feels like Venkatesan could have gone twice as long and it would have been fine. One problem with the length is the actual existence of the Orgham family. I’ll get back to them, but the fact that they’re able to appear so quickly and dominate Gotham feels wrong, and it makes their inevitable reveal as petty villains feel less epic, because we don’t get enough about them being actual philanthropists. Venkatesan has to do a lot of work with the family very quickly, and he manages to at least make Arzen Orgham, the scion of the line, a nuanced character, but it feels like he could have drawn out their ascendancy a bit longer, perhaps giving us some “normal” Batman stories early on while they’re working more behind the scenes to gain power. I think back to the Moench/Jones/Beatty run on Batman, in which they teased the puppeteer villain a lot without delving into him, and it seems like Venkatesan could have done that a bit more (although, of course, the M/J/B run was cut short by the earthquake and we never learned what was going on with the marionette dude, so maybe V was smart to dive right in?). It just feels like the run could have easily been 50 issues, and it wouldn’t have suffered at all.

The existence of the Orghams is vexing, too. I have no problem with Venkatesan creating them and tying them to Ra’s al Ghul and giving the book a nice, West/Central Asian flair, and the Orghams and their retainers are creepy and occasionally terrifying villains. But … they’re linked to the founding of Gotham, and I grow weary of this trope. I mean, I guess I can buy a powerful Asian family owning most of Gotham, but in the late 17th century, that would have been … strange. Not impossible, but strange. In the Annual, we get a flashback to the 18th century, and it’s basically an Elseworlds Batman story, which is fine, but seems unnecessary (although Christopher Mitten’s art is sweet). The Orghams morphing into the Arkhams is nicely done. However, this tying a family or group to Gotham’s beginnings is getting boring, and while Venkatesan does bring in Barbatos (which is also tied to Gotham’s origins) and does decent work incorporating everyone’s favorite Bat-demon into the story, it still has to stop. This is why the book reads better in a vacuum – where is the Court of Owls during this run? As much as I despise the Court of Owls, they’re apparently part of the Batman Universe now, and it seems like DC would have had Venkatesan at least mention them. Things like this bug me. (The mythic component of Gotham’s name cracks me up, too – “Gotham” means “Goat’s Town,” and in Renaissance England, it was shorthand for, basically, “a place where rubes live,” so seeing writers trying to make it something epic is humorous.)

Part of the length problem comes after Batman is defeated. He is taken from the city, which becomes a nightmare for most, but it’s not supposed to be. The Orghams are supposed to be making it a paradise for the rich, yet we see very little of that. Almost immediately, their paradise begins to curdle, and while Batman’s spiritual journey in the desert is handled well, the degradation of Gotham doesn’t go as well. Batman returns to a city that desperately needs him, and while Venkatesan hints around that even the lower classes would reject him when he returns, we don’t really see that. As allegories go, you can squint and see Gotham as today’s America, where people vote against their interests just because one political party (coughRepublicanscough) distract them with shiny things and weird groups to hate instead of the billionaires running this country, but Venkatesan never gets too deep into that (probably because this is a DC superhero book), and it’s frustrating. This feels like it’s always on the verge of being an all-time Batman story, and it ends up being just a very good one. Nothing wrong with that, but it feels like it could have been greater.

The art is frustrating because it’s inconsistent, despite most of the artists doing nice work. Nobody stays on the book very long, and some can barely do one issue. I don’t know what the policy at DC regarding artists, but I wish they would be better at it. Overall, the art is fine, occasionally wonderful, but it’s still inconsistent. I do like that Albuquerque and Raffaele both channel Sergio Toppi at times (and acknowledge it, too), because those pages are keen.

So, now we’re moving on and DC is going All In. I would suggest you read this run, though. It’s pretty nifty.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Dudley Datson and the Forever Machine by Scott Snyder (writer), Jamal Igle (penciler), Juan Castro (inker), Chris Sotomayor (colorist), and Tom Napolitano (letterer). $17.99, 116 pgs, Dark Horse.

I don’t wish to alarm you, but this comic, which was written by Scott Snyder, features … a father-son relationship that informs the plot to a large degree. I know, it’s crazy! I mean, we’ve never seen anything like that from Snyder before!!!!

Seriously, I’m not that nosy about people’s lives, but I really wonder about Snyder and his dad … is it good, and he just likes writing about fathers and sons, or is it bad, and he’s working through things? The dude just digs it, people! Dudley Datson is a teenaged inventor who stumbles onto a centuries-old war between “good” inventors and “bad” inventors – those who pursue things just for noble knowledge and those who want to profit off of their inventions. Guess which category Dudley fits into in the beginning of the comic, and guess which one he ends up in? I know, it’s so hard to puzzle out! Dudley, with the help of that there dog on the cover (which talks) has to stop the bad guys from taking over the world, like they do, but he also has to come to terms with why he wants to invent things, as well. Nothing in this book is all that original, of course, and although Snyder does an interesting thing with the dog and what its story is, it’s still just a morality tale about how money is bad and how people should work solely for the glory of work. Yes, I’m bitter, but I am a bit tired of these kinds of stories, which always imply that nobody actually has to make a living. Sheesh, dog – ease up on the kid whose dad is clearly sick with something and who doesn’t have a mother (like Disney princesses, Snyder’s princes are often motherless) and needs to make some cheddar to pay for health care in this post-apocalyptic hellscape that is Fuckwad’s America … where was I? Oh, yeah – it’s a perfectly entertaining story, and damn, Jamal Igle can draw real good, can’t he? This is a stunning-looking comic, with lots of cool-looking characters (of course, they’re all bad guys, because bad guys always have great fashion sense), and it’s colored wonderfully. Igle is really a good artist for this kind of heroic story, because he does well with action and he’s a very good designer.

I’m a bit unclear about what happens to the bad guy at the end (actually, I know what happens to him, but I’m not sure why he’s not fighting anymore), and in the very beginning, a teacher does something to Dudley that is both not icky but also completely inappropriate, and I wonder if it was in the script or if Igle put it in, but clearly neither of them know anything about teacher-student conduct, but other than that, this is a fun, “Waid/Busiek”-type adventure comic … with Snyderian father-son overtones. You know you love those!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

The Feeding by David M. Booher (writer), Drew Zucker (artist), Vittorio Astone (colorist), Andworld Design (letterer), and Chris Ryall (editor). $4.99, 32 pgs, Image.

This is a nifty little horror comic that I picked up on a whim, so it’s nice when that works out. It’s a nice, twisty tale that ends somewhat ambiguously, which is always good if the writer can pull it off, and I think Booher does it well here. Nolan Ward seems like your typical douchebag, as we’re introduced to him at a hip New York restaurant telling his bros how to guarantee a one-night stand, but then we learn that he’s “haunted” – it seems that when he was a kid, something very bad happened to him and it messed him up good (we don’t know what it is yet). He meets a young woman at a club and she invites him to her gallery exhibition, but when he goes, he’s the only one there and she shows him a horrifying painting that causes him to flee into the night. Or does he? Booher does a nice job subverting what we think we know – he doesn’t exactly use an unreliable narrator, but he does tell the story from a couple of different points of view, which helps with the uncertainty of it all. What makes the story interesting is that Nolan, while, yes, douchebag, is also definitely haunted, and so Booher makes us feel a bit of sympathy for him before he pulls the rug out from under us again … or, to repeat, does he? We’re not quite sure who’s telling the truth at the end, which is a good way to end a horror story, as it leaves things unsettled and unsettling. That’s never a bad thing when you’re reading fiction!

Zucker does nice work with the art – he has an angular, slightly cartoonish style that seems to fit the subject matter, as occasionally he distends characters to show their mindset rather than reflect reality, and it works well. He adds nice details to show that Nolan’s world is slightly in decay as has been for a long time, so it’s not surprising when his life begins to fall apart. He does well with Nolan’s eyes, which are hard and arrogant in the beginning but slowly become, as Booher puts it, “haunted.” The fact that most of the book is fairly brightly colored works, too, because we can see what’s going on, which brings the horror home a bit better, and the few darks panels/pages work better as contrast. I don’t love the digital aspect of the painting that Nolan sees at the gallery, but the final image of the book, which contrasts with the earlier painting, is well done and kind of highlights nicely the strange thing going on with the painting, so perhaps the overly digital aspect of it earlier is deliberate and not the worst way to go. I wonder …

Anyway, this is a nifty little horror story. Give it a look!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Grendel: Devil’s Crucible – Defiance #1-4 by Matt Wagner (writer/artist), Brennan Wagner (colorist), and Rob Leigh (letterer). $19.96, 82 pgs, Dark Horse.

Grendel-Prime has returned to Earth, but he finds that it’s slightly changed from when he left (which was some centuries earlier, to be fair). The Grendel Regime has fallen, and hey! the vampires have taken over – who would have guessed that immortal beings would eventually take charge? Grendels are illegal, but of course, G-P finds a resistance movement, and they have an idea about how to fight the fight. It leads to the final few pages of this series, which are kind of fun. In the spirit of Astro City‘s Dark Age story, this is the first of three 4-issue mini-series about G-P’s return to Earth. I mean, there’s not much to say about this – it’s Grendel! The art is beautiful, the story zips along nicely, and all is well in the world when there’s more Grendel. You can’t deny that!!!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Hello Darkness #4 by a bunch of folks. $5.99, 41 pgs, Boom! Studios.

Ennis and Cloonan continue their nuclear war thing, and things keep getting incrementally worse and more horrifying, but not in the ways you might expect. Ennis’s focus on the small group of characters means he can ignore the larger things going on and really hone in on the horror of surviving a nuclear attack, and he’s doing very well with it. Meanwhile, we get a beautifully-drawn story by Elijah Henry about a woman who is desperate to unplug from the world. She finds a mountain retreat that’s not quite the restful place she thinks it is. It’s written by Shawn Patrick Boyd, and it’s a bit too short to have much of an impact – it’s unclear why what happens to the woman actually happens or who does it – but it’s not terrible. Michael Conrad and John Pearson have a preview of their new horror series, In Bloom, which looks neat. It’s about what happens to humanity when all the weird stuff inside us “wakes up,” which means giving people weird powers that I’m sure won’t have horrific consequences at all. Finally, Chloe Brailsford has a very strange story about a dominatrix and her very unusual … I’ll say “lover,” but there’s more to it. The art, in glorious black and white, is rough and superb, and the story is just weird.

It’s a horror anthology. I mean, it’s much like the first three issues. If you like this sort of thing, it’s a fun read!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

The Last Mermaid volume 1 by Derek Kirk Kim (writer/artist). $14.99, 165 pgs, Image.

Derek Kirk Kim is a good creator, so I figured this would be good, and it is. I’m always vexed by pull quotes, though – I get that they’re meant to be featured on books and therefore the people might exaggerate a bit, but this is just a good, if fairly standard, post-apocalyptic story. I mean, all the elements are there: the lost protagonist, searching for a paradise that may or may not exist; the loner from the wasteland who helps them; the weird villains who trouble them; the strange creatures that menace them; the problems they have staying alive in a poisonous landscape. Kim twists things a bit by making our protagonist a mermaid who needs clean water rather than a human who needs clean air, and the loner is not reluctant to help like most loners are, but, basically, it follows the template of every other post-apocalyptic story you’ve ever read. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because plots are hard, but Kim hasn’t done anything amazing here. Isla, our mermaid, lives in a contraption that can convert to a car or a suit of armor, and the cockpit is filled with water that keeps her alive. She finds a cave full of fresh water, but disturbs a giant, monstrous fish/squid thing, which almost kills her before Torque, the loner who’s been following her, steps in and they kill the fish together. She’s distrustful of him, but he proves that he’s just trying to help her get to a paradise (the ocean, basically) that her mom told her about before her mom was killed. As they go, they’re menaced by “mutants,” human-looking things that have, well, mutated a bit. By the end, they’re near to the paradise, but Isla’s water is slowly becoming poisonous, so they have to decide whether they’re going to go into a mutant base to find the uncontaminated water Torque knows is in there. What will they do?!?!?

Kim does a good job telling the story, even if it’s familiar. He doesn’t overwrite, so there are a lot of pages with no or very few words, and he doesn’t rush the big action scenes, which means they unfold nicely, as we get to see how difficult it is, for instance, for Isla to fight inside her tank and how dangerous it is, as it might crack at any time. He does an excellent job putting them both in danger, and while I tend to think her contraption would have broken more, we do have to suspend our disbelief just a little bit. He does a nice job making Isla, who looks fairly delicate, the cynical one, as she doesn’t want to help two other travelers of the wasteland who get captured by mutants because she knows how futile it is. Torque acquiesces, but it’s clear he’s more of a “jump in and help” kind of fellow, and Kim does a good job contrasting them. Isla isn’t heartless, she’s just practical, and their relationship is a nice one. Kim’s art is excellent, too, which is nice. He has that “animation” style, with soft but strong lines when he wants them. Usually, he just uses colors to create shapes for the landscapes while using stronger lines for the characters. His designs are very nice, too, especially the monstrous fish and the mutants, who look like they might come from the fire pits of Apokolips. Kirk even manages to give them a bit of personality, so they’re not mindless monsters. The comic is amazing to look at, which is not really a surprise.

I enjoyed The Last Mermaid, certainly, and I will get the next volume whenever it appears, but I do hope that Kirk is going to do something a little bit different with the post-apocalyptic story. That would be nice.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Money Shot volume 4: Comes Again! by Tim Seeley (writer), Gisèle Lagacé (artist), Carlos Badilla Z (colorist), and Crank! (letterer). $19.99, 102 pgs, Vault Comics.

I enjoy Money Shot, as it’s just weird enough to be interesting even when Seeley goes a bit predictable. It feels a bit like Seeley wasn’t sure this would come back, as the scientists’ happy ending gets upended a bit, so they have to go back to making money by banging aliens. This time, however, Seeley goes after billionaires, as one of them has left Earth and corrupted a planet with capitalism, and the weird jellyfish creatures who run things don’t like it and want our heroes to go after him. It’s a bit of an easy target, sure, but Seeley has fun with it, as the billionaire creates AI robots that are based on existing IPs that are programmed to defend him. “Mickey Mouse,” “Captain America,” “Iron Man,” “Sailor Moon,” and others all show up (they’re thinly-veiled, except for Mickey, as that one version of him is in the public domain), but the main AI robot is Cherry, who is actually used with permission (Larry Welz is credited on the front page, so presumably he allowed it). It’s somewhat goofy, but Seeley does a nice job examining artificial intelligence and what it means, and our heroes defeat the billionaire in a fun way. Billionaires are certainly natural villains, and Seeley does get weird with how evil they can be.

I like Legacé’s artwork, but I don’t love it with Badilla Z’s coloring. It’s that heavily rendered coloring that can work with some artists, but doesn’t seem to work as well with Legacé’s crisper line work. It makes it look a bit too mushy, and it’s frustrating, because Badilla Z’s work on, say, the giant jellyfish is very nice, given that they’re a bit more amorphous and they don’t rely on the line work as much to look nifty. The book is nice-looking enough, because Legacé knows what she’s doing and the coloring isn’t awful … it just doesn’t mesh as well as it could. Such is life.

Seeley isn’t quite done, it seems, as there’s at least a one-shot coming down the pike. I will probably keep buying it, because it remains an interesting book. It’s not great, but it’s still fun.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Nottingham volume 3: The Final Tithe by David Hazan (writer), Shane Connery Volk (artist), Luca Romero (colorist), Justin Birch (letterer), Brian Hawkins (editor), and Chas! Pangburn (editor). $17.99, 118 pgs, Mad Cave Studios.

Nottingham, a series far better than it had any right to be, reaches the end, as the sheriff returns to town and tries to rally the people against the invasion of Richard Lionheart and Robin of Locksley, who are trying to stop Richard’s brother, John, from taking over and don’t mind slaughtering innocent townspeople do get their point across. What has been interesting about the series is not that Hazan takes familiar things and puts unusual twists on them – in this book, the sheriff is basically the good guy – but that he takes familiar stories and tries to make them more “realistic” for the time period. I mean, yes, Marian is far too prominent in the town’s political affairs, but that’s ok. Richard was kind of a tool, and if Robin Hood had been a nobleman, he would be far more like Locksley than Errol Flynn. Plus, Hazan has done a good job showing the brutality of medieval life, and he ends the story fittingly, as well, as it ends up aligning with the stories we know … but for a good reason. Volk’s hectic, angular, occasionally abstract art remains impressive, as his harsh lines and use of blacks take us deep into what the 1190s must have felt like, even if he does take some creative liberties. His fight scenes are brutal, and his characters do look like the world has beaten them down – even Marian, who’s the “attractive” one. It’s a very cool-looking book, and I hope Volk gets more work.

If you haven’t been getting this, you should check out the entire series, including the volume of random short stories (which fill in some holes in the narrative). I mean, Mad Cave could probably do a nice hardcover collecting all 21 issues of the series (15 of the “regular” series plus the 6 “tales from Nottingham”), but until they do, you should hunt down the paperback volumes. It’s a keen series.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Poison Ivy/Swamp Thing: Feral Trees by G. Willow Wilson (writer), Mike Perkins (artist), Mike Spicer (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer), Arianna Turturro (editor), and Ben Meares (editor). $5.99, 40 pgs, DC.

This is labeled as an ALL IN book, but it’s clearly just a one-shot that has nothing to do with the initiative, so I’m not counting it. One thing I have been remiss about with the ALL IN books, though, is lauding the return of … the DC Bullet!!!!

Whoo-hoo, look at that glorious thing! I know we should embrace new things, but one thing that always bugs me is that occasionally, marketers get ahold of something and decide “We need to fix this even though it’s not broken.” DC did it with their logo, which has gone through a bunch of different incarnations since this one, and none of them have been any good. Yes, this is a nostalgic feeling for this logo, but it really is a good one. It’s simple, direct, exciting, and just really well done. This happens far too often, and I don’t know why. Sports teams do this all the danged time for no reason. The Eagles had superb kelly green uniforms, but their new owner in the 1990s decided they were “bad luck” – associated with the old owner, who was terrible – and changed them to the midnight green they wear now. You know what’s bad luck, Jeff Lurie? Having shitty players and coaches, not kelly green uniforms! I will never understand companies fixing things that aren’t broken. The DC logo is excellent. Long may it reign.

Anyway, this is a comic in which Ivy and Swampy team up against suspiciously violent trees. What’s going on? You’ll have to read it to find out! It’s a bit sad, but dang, the art is excellent. This is not surprising, as Perkins is very good.

I don’t know – it’s pretty good. And it has the DC Bullet on it!!!!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

The Principles of Necromancy by Jackson Lanzing (writer), Collin Kelly (writer), Eamon Winkle (artist), Jay Fotos (colorist), Shawn Lee (letterer), and Mike Ford (collection editor). $19.99, 96 pgs, Magma Comix.

This is a creepy-ass comic in which a doctor tries to figure out how to make people live forever. You know, like you do. Lanzing and Kelly create a weird, quasi-medieval, quasi-Renaissance, quasi-Enlightenment world ruled by a powerful king, in which Doctor Eyes (not his real name, but in this world, the doctors are called after their specialties) performs abominable experiments on people in his attempts to prolong life indefinitely, which puts him in conflict with the other doctors of the realm. Their work is just as abominable, as we see, but they are the establishment, so they’re able to proscribe Doctor Eyes and put him in the power of the king, which is not as bad for him as it sounds. It’s, as I noted, very creepy, and Winkle does nice work with the art, creating horrific characters and letting them get to work. He makes most of the characters long and spindly, adding to the creepiness, so while he has a bit of 1995-era Greg Capullo in him (one character looks like she stepped out of the pages of literally any Image comic of that year), the art works quite well. Doctor Eyes is a bizarre character, but when he’s put against some of his colleagues, he looks downright normal. Winkle is also quite good at creating the various implements he uses, as well as clearly showing the horrifying lengths he’s willing to go. Lanzing and Kelly make sure that there’s at least one sympathetic character (and it’s not the good doctor), but even when they’re giving us despicable people, they manage to humanize them quite a lot – there’s more humor in this book than you might expect. It feels a bit too short (it’s four issues long, 24 pages each, but it does feel like it could have gone maybe one more issue), but other than that, it’s a really cool, creepy comic.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

The Sacred Damned by Sabir Pirzada (writer), Michael Walsh (artist/colorist), Toni Marie Griffin (colorist), Becca Carey (letterer), Will Dennis (editor), and Pornsak Pichetshote (editor). $3.99, 26 pgs, Image.

The second of Pichetshote’s one-shots that twist traditional tropes is pretty good, as he gives us, as he puts it, “a Muslim John Constantine” – Dr. Inayah Jibril. Inayah is called in by a professor who has seen one of his students become grossly overweight and begin eating everything … including some of his girlfriend, which gets him sent to a psychiatric hospital. Dr. Jibril says it’s obvious he’s been possessed by a djinn, and she can get it out of him. She has some ulterior motives, however, as we learn when she begins the exorcism. Things do not go exactly the way the patient thinks they will, and we learn why Inayah is so interested in the spirits.

Like The Manchurian, this is a pretty good issue with a nice set-up for a series, which is what these one-shots are supposed to do (whether they will go to series is not necessarily the point, although I imagine it would be nice for all concerned). We get a different perspective on traditional possession, and Inayah is as nasty as John Constantine, so there’s that, although she does have her reasons. There’s not a lot to say about it – it’s a solid story, drawn beautifully by Walsh, who does a nice job turning Kyle into both a monster and someone who’s both pathetic and pitiable and contemptuous, which is a nice trick. The djinn are creepy and scary, which is always nice. It’s a good set-up issue, and like The Manchurian, it could easily become a good series. We shall see!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

The Savage Sword of Conan #5 by your barbarian purveyors! $6.99, 58 pgs, Titan Comics.

Jason Aaron has a long lead story in this issue, and it’s not even done yet, so there’s that. The other two stories are very short – Jim Zub’s is just two pages, and it’s a bit of a joke story (but it does have nice art by Roberto de la Torre), while Michael Kogge and Dan Parsons have a story about Conan’s youth, which is fine. Aaron is the main draw here, as King Conan travels to Brythunia to discuss a treaty with their king and gets caught up in a witch hunt. It’s a pretty good story, and setting it so late in Conan’s life is smart, because he’s certainly wiser here than he shows himself to be in younger days, as he correctly figures out that the witch is not all she seems (I mean, she’s a witch, yes, but perhaps not as evil as some Conan has encountered in his earlier life) and perhaps there’s more going on here than he knows. There’s nothing terribly original about it, as we can figure out that maybe the ruling men are kind of douchebags and maybe the female witch isn’t quite the evil whore they say she is, but Aaron knows his way around a Conan story, and while it’s difficult to force a “Christianity is bad” theme into a Conan story, he still gives it the old college try! Geof Isherwood, whose name I haven’t seen in a comic in a long time, does very nice work with the art – his thick, rough lines work well for a Conan story, and he really packs each panel so that we feel immersed in the world. The visual difference between Conan and the king of Brythunia is obvious but well done – Conan has his thick, manly beard, while Fabiano (yes, Aaron names him Fabiano, which should clue you in to what kind of dude he is) has a thin, long mustache and a douchey chin strip, plus he’s wearing a hat with a peacock feather in it. I mean, come on! … but it still works well. Anyway, this is a pretty cool story, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Aaron does with it!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Sink #11 by John Lees (writer), Alex Cormack (artist), and Shawn Lee (letterer). $4.99, 25 pgs, ComixTribe.

Sink is back, which is good because it’s a very good horror comic, and it’s nice that Lees and Cormack are able to continue it a bit longer. If you don’t know what it’s about, it’s about horrific things happening in Glasgow, specifically a not-very-nice part of Glasgow, but it’s also about the people who live there and what they have to go through on a daily basis. In this issue, for instance, we meet Chrissie Woods, an old woman who’s wildly unpleasant – she commands her dog to piss in the general direction of her neighbor and her neighbor’s kid – and who also sees ghosts, because of course she does. The neighbor’s son goes missing, and Chrissie is convinced it’s the ghost, who’s a monster she heard stories about when she was young. Lees is very good at this kind of thing – creating a horrific situation that looks like one thing, but might be something completely different. Chrissie is not as unpleasant as we think she is, and she’s not as insulated as perhaps she’d like to be. There’s horror, but it doesn’t come from where we might expect, and Lees, like a lot of good horror writers, blends both the uplifting and the downgrading quite well. Cormack is a good artist, so the book looks great … although, as is often the case with Sink, parts of it are a bit dark and it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on. The final page, for instance, could be a tiny bit lighter, because the stinger at the end doesn’t quite hit as hard as it takes an extra few seconds to figure out exactly what’s happening (it’s not a bad stinger, to be sure, but it doesn’t land as well as Lees wants). Still, I’m glad Sink is back, and it seems like Lees is going to use Chrissie (whom he based, very loosely, on his grandmother) more in this arc. So that should be fun.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Spillblood by Jonathan Hedrick (writer), Stefano Cardoselli (artist), and Leo McGovern (letterer). $6.99, 34 pgs, Keenspot.

As you might recall, I dig Cardoselli’s art with a digginess that is perhaps not completely healthy, so I will buy anything he draws. This presents a dilemma, because his comics usually aren’t “good” in the traditional sense, because everything is in the service of his artwork. Now, I don’t have a problem with that, as I just love checking out his art, but it’s something to be aware of. Like this comic – there’s a priest who hears confessions from people, and if they confess that something criminally bad has happened to them, he goes out at night and kills all the bad people who did the thing. Is the priest supernatural? Can he be killed? Let me tell you, good people – it doesn’t fucking matter. I imagine the conversation about this comic between writer and artist went something like this:

Hedrick: What do you want to draw?
Cardoselli: How about a priest just straight-up slaughtering bad guys?
Hedrick: Done and done!

This book is the emptiest of calories, but you know what? Who gives a shit? It’s just 30+ glorious pages of Cardoselli’s wacked-out art, drenched mostly in red, and it’s stupendous. If you’re not on board the Cardoselli Express by now, I can’t help you. You’re obviously too genteel for it, and that’s fine. Listen to that Brahms concerto while you read those fancy comics! It’s all good! I’ll be over here, watching a priest with a skull for a head ruthlessly lay waste to criminals with Uzis. We can all co-exist!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ (this rating is literally simply based on the artwork, by the way)

One totally Airwolf panel:

Suicide Squad: Kill Arkham Asylum by John Layman (writer), Jesús Hervás (artist), David Baron (colorist), AndWorld Design (letterer), and Katie Kubert (collection editor). $19.99, 100 pgs, DC.

On the back of this comic, there’s a “17+” notation right by the bar code and ISBN, and other than that, there’s no labeling that this is for “mature” readers – it’s not a Black Label book, in other words. It looks like every other regular DC trade paperback out there, yet Layman is allowed to have characters say “shit.” Now, this is a “prequel” (blech) to a video game, which I assume is an “M” game, but I’m sure 14-year-olds around the world are playing the game, just like I’m sure, if they read comics, 14-year-olds around the world would be reading this comic, and DC knows that. So why is “shit” ok in this comic but not another comic that DC also knows kids probably aren’t reading? It makes no sense.

Anyway, I don’t care about video games, so I don’t care if this is a prequel or whatever – I bought it because Layman wrote it, and Layman on a book that is basically unleashed chaos is a good combination, and this is a fun as heck comic. Amanda Waller takes over Arkham Asylum and, after making a lot of noise about how amped up the security protocols are to a skeptical Batman and Jim Gordon, turns it into Thunderdome by releasing the prisoners, who take revenge on the horrible guards and basically try to kill everyone they see. Waller did this, naturally, to find the best of the best, which she then turns into the Suicide Squad. There’s not a ton of surprise here – we get a set-up issue, and then we learn that in this world, something bad has happened as the Justice League isn’t around, and then, beginning with issue #2, we get the mayhem. Layman begins each issue pretty much at the same time and place, but then follows different characters – no points if you figure out which ones – as they try to escape Arkham. The fun thing about the book is that it’s set outside regular DC continuity, so Layman can slaughter pretty much whomever he wants, and it’s fun because we honestly don’t know who’s going to die. It’s just a crazy, chaotic kill-fest, which can be fun, which can be fun every once in a while. Layman does pretty good work with the characters, especially King Shark, who’s quite humorous when he’s not biting the heads off inmates. Meanwhile, Hervás is a pretty good artist, and he gets to go waaaay over the top with violence, so he has fun with that.

This is pure junk food, but you know what? it’s well-done junk food, and Layman never takes anything too seriously (even when he’s doing a serious book), so he just has a blast doing this. If you’re going to read junk food comics, you might as well enjoy it as you get bloated on empty calories!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Untitled Walker Young Project #1-2 (although the second one is called … Untitled Walker Young Progress?) by Walker Young (writer), Matt and Shawn Fillbach (artists), Daniel Caval (artist), Brandon McKinney (artist), and Manny Bello (artist). $5 each, 55 pgs (total), Front Door Comics.

“Nepotism” has a negative connotation, in general, but I don’t think it necessarily should. This is a tough old world, and anything you can use to get ahead is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it’s benign, which nepotism often is. I mean, sure, it’s annoying that these “nepo-babies” get cast in movies because their parents are in the business, but that’s probably better than sleeping with the producer, right? And if you think that their parents didn’t have some help getting to the top … well, I have some bad news for you. So I don’t have the animus toward nepotism that some people do. I mean, when it’s used to guide the policy of this country in a bad direction, sure … but if it means Bryce Dallas Howard gets cast in a movie, who the fuck really cares?

Speaking of which, Walker Young, if you don’t know, is the son of Larry Young, the World’s Greatest Comics Publisher and Raconteur, and these two comics are clear examples of nepotism, as Young is still in high school yet he has very good artists drawing his comics for him. Do I begrudge him that? Of course not! Getting comics drawn is hard, as artists are often super-busy and not cheap, and if my father, the World’s Greatest Comics Publisher and Raconteur, offered to help out with that, I would jump on that like a cat on a tennis ball. Why the hell not? You take the opportunities you are given. My father-in-law once arranged a job for my sister-in-law in her field of study for the state of Pennsylvania (a government job!) and she didn’t even set up an interview – not because she didn’t believe in nepotism, exactly, but because she was lazy. A crappy marriage and several crappy jobs later, I wonder if she regrets (or regerts) it. Young had an opportunity, and he took it. Good for him.

Of course, he still has to write the stories and get them drawn, and that’s where these two comics come in. Larry Young sent these to me a little bit ago, and with September turning into such a clusterfuck, I didn’t get a chance to review them. Then the blog was being weird a lot in October and now the entire world is a clusterfuck, but let’s forge on with these! Larry has been selling these in San Diego the past couple of years, but I’m not really sure how you can get them. I guess you can contact Larry and ask for them – he is, after all, the World’s Greatest Comics Publisher and Raconteur. But are they worth it? [Larry let me know that you can find the issues here if you’re interested. Or you can go to the convention in San Diego next year and get them!]

Sure, they’re pretty good. The best story is the first one, “Going Dark,” not only because the Fillbachs – who are really good – draw it, but because it’s where Young flexes his writing muscles the most – the plot is pretty much non-existent, so he has to write well to keep us engaged. It takes place during a war (heavily implied to be World War II, although it’s never established where or when it takes place), with two soldiers out in the snowy woods after a battle, one of whom has been blinded in an explosion. The other soldier needs to get him back to their lines. It’s a short story – 9 pages – but Young does a very good job making Tommy’s plight harrowing, as he has to trust his buddy, Sean, entirely while still trying to move blindly. At one point, Sean has to leave Tommy briefly – he hears something in the forest – and Young does an excellent job trusting the Fillbachs and using as few words as possible while still getting across Tommy’s terrified state of mind. There’s a tiny bit of sappiness on the final page, when we get the “if I don’t get out of here, tell my parents I love them” speech, but even in so short a space, Young has earned the right to be the smallest bit sappy. The Fillbachs, who continue to not get enough credit for how good they are, do gorgeous work with the forest, using a lot of thick blacks to create trees and leaving a lot of white negative space to give the sensation of an overwhelmingly wintry world. As always, their art is a bit factor in making the story work so well. (In the second issue, we get the pages of this story with the Fillbachs’ notes, which is kind of neat.)

“Safeguard,” the first story of the second issue, is a fun superhero-ish story drawn by Brandon McKinney. (It’s a rough story, and I’m not sure why it looks un-inked, but it’s still clear.) It’s set in the world of Planet of the Capes, a comic I did not like but which, I think, put me on Larry’s radar almost 20 years ago. In “Safeguard,” it’s years after PotC takes place, and a high school senior, Franklin, tells his parents that he wants to be a superhero. Now, he doesn’t have any powers, so I guess he’d be more of a “costumed vigilante,” but they’re supportive of him, which is nice. His first case involves a missing cat, which turns out to be a bit more than he thinks it’s going to be. Young’s writing here is charming, as he does a good job showing the good relationship Franklin has with his parents as well as how goofy being a superhero/costumed vigilante can be – when he’s talking to the girl whose cat is missing, he has a nice exchange that shows the inherent silliness of the endeavor, and when he finds the “villains,” Young does a nice job making him sound a bit more “superheroic,” which is inherently weird. McKinney has always been a solid artist, so the story looks perfectly nice, and Franklin’s DIY outfit works very well.

The other two stories in the issues feature Jack Fry, Young’s noir private investigator whose catchphrase is, honestly, hilarious (I don’t want to ruin it, but it’s simple and funny). Of course, because it’s a comic, he gets involved in supernatural cases, but that’s fine. In the first case, he investigates a missing husband, and in the second one, a man who appears to have been attacked by an animal wants to figure out what happened to him. In the first one, Young does a good job subverting the clichés of the genre – when the wife hires him, he quickly zips through all the reasons the husband might have disappeared, because they’re the standard reasons. It’s not a standard reason, of course, but it’s nicely done. In the second story, Young does a good job alluding to some things about Jack’s past without being too obvious about it, while he also shows how clever Jack is, as it seems he figures out what’s going on with the man far rather quickly and he just needs confirmation. In both stories, like the others, Young knows when to let his artists do the storytelling – in the first one, Jack discovers what’s going on with the man, and we get almost four pages of almost wordless story as Jack confronts the “bad guys.” Daniel Caval has a nice, cartoony style that flows very well, so the brief action scene in the book is well done, and while his style doesn’t seem suited to a noir-ish character, he uses blacks and some rougher lines mixed into the more fluid, cartoony line that helps create a bit of a darker atmosphere. Manny Bello, who draws most of the second story (some pages remain undrawn, and we simply get Young’s script on those), has a more stolid, solid style – his Jack looks much more like a 1940s P.I., which his rumpled clothing and five o’clock shadow. He inks very heavily, so the book both looks and feels darker. Both styles work, with Caval’s being a bit more dynamic but Bello’s looking more in line with the kind of character Jack is.

I have gone on a while about these issues, mostly because I appreciate Larry sending them to me and I feel like they deserve the attention. Also, I had to get my thoughts on nepotism off my chest, didn’t I? These are pretty good issues, and they’re worth a look. Young is still a teen, so he’s going to continue to grow as a writer, but these stories show that he knows what he’s doing. I kind of wish I could be more critically constructive, but there’s not really anything bad about these stories. “Safeguard” is a bit bland, but still fun, and the Jack Fry stories are a bit too quick, but that’s kind of to be expected. Plot-heavy stories like them need a bit more room to breathe, unlike “Going Dark,” which is just a character study. I don’t know when another “Walker Young Project” is coming out, but I’ll be interested to check it out!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Voices in My Head by Joe Pruett (writer) and a bunch of artists. $5.99, 43 pgs, Image.

Pruett, who I think of as “the Caliber guy” from the 1990s, is back with some short stories, one of which is a reprint of his first comics story but the others of which are brand new. The reprint is the first appearance of his “Kilroy” character, in which a German vigilante takes revenge on a neo-Nazi for killing a foreigner. The savage irony given that, 30 years later, Americans have embraced the ethics of the murderer in this story, not the vigilante, is not lost on me, but we old-timers can point to it when the childrens come to us hesitantly and ask, “Was there ever a time when we thought Nazis were bad?” and we can say, sadly, “Yes, but those days are over.” Good times ahead, people!

Anyway, the other stories are fun. Andrew Robinson does very good work on a story about a Victorian-era woman who is too proud to marry and how she eventually finds the perfect match. Phil Hester draws a story about a very unusual boy who is desperate to find people as unusual as he is, but is that a good thing? Juan Doe is the artist on a story about a dude who’s actually trying to find evil things, but why? It’s an interesting, somewhat oblique story that is both hopeful and sad. Michael Gaydos does a story about … well, Frankenstein’s monster, sort of, but it also ties into a specific mythology, and it’s an interesting look at what makes someone feel alive. The art is exquisite, frankly – Gaydos can nail these kinds of stories quite nicely.

This month has been particularly rife with anthologies, and this is another good one. If you’ve been wondering what Pruett has been up to (and I know you have!), check this out!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

Zawa + the Belly of the Beast by Michael Dialynas (writer/artist/colorist/letterer). $16.99,135 pgs, Boom! Studios.

This came out under Boom!’s kids/YA imprint, Boom! Box, so it’s a bit kid-friendly, but in many ways, it’s more mature than a lot of superhero books you find. Superhero books, as depressing and dark as many of them are, tend to reinforce the notion that the hero will make it all better in the end, but Dialynas shows that that’s not always the way the world works, so even in a world like his, where natural spirits are humanoid and can interact with people, there are serious consequences to actions that don’t always end well. In many ways, this is a fairly standard story – there’s a bad guy who’s corrupting the Earth, the spirit of the island on which the characters live doesn’t like that and wants to fight back but the latest manifestation of the spirit, Zawa, is in the bad guy’s prison, some kids who always want to change the world™ find out about it and help Zawa do the right thing, the bad guy fights back and things get apocalyptic. We’ve seen it before, sure, but that doesn’t make it a bad story, and, as always, it’s in the details that we find the goodness. Dialynas does a nice job with the characters, making them interesting and conflicted, especially Zawa, who generally just likes to eat tasty food (a lot of the book revolves around food) and doesn’t want to kill all the humans who provide her with said food. The teens who help her are a brother and sister (and their friend, but he’s not in the comic as much) whose father is dead and whose mother works hard to provide for them, but is possibly doing some shady things just to provide. The mayor, who’s the bad guy, is a generic evil dude, but Dialynas also tries to flesh his character out a bit and make sure the people around him aren’t just stereotypes. While the plot feels familiar, Dialynas does a nice job moving through it, throwing some nice twists into it so that we don’t always see everything coming and unfolding the way we think. Plus, his art is superb. He’s been doing nice art for quite some time now (it’s the reason I got this comic), and here, it’s just tremendous. He has a nice, cartoony style that lends itself to big expressions, so the fact that Zawa has big eyes and a wide mouth without a nose mucking things up means that Dialynas can really work with her as she goes through a lot of emotions throughout the book. He does an excellent job creating this quirky town, which looks charming at first glance but becomes a bit darker as we spend time there, because the mayor has sucked a lot of the life out of it. Dialynas’s work in the last issue, when things get bad, is wonderful as well, as he darkens the pages (the action takes place at night) without losing clarity, and he makes the monstrous things in the book truly scary but also somewhat sympathetic. His coloring and lettering is excellent, too, as he uses the colors in place of hard line work quite a lot and the spirits communicate in bright and expressive lettering. It’s really a gorgeous comic.

This might be a YA book, but that shouldn’t deter anyone from picking it up. It tells a pretty good story, it has great art, and it doesn’t take easy ways out. Isn’t that what we want from our comics?

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

One totally Airwolf panel:

BOOKS

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville.

As I’ve explained in the past (I think), some years ago, a fellow teacher expressed a bit of shock that I hadn’t read a bunch of “classics,” and I told her that if it wasn’t assigned to me, I probably hadn’t read it, because when I was 15, if there was a choice between reading fucking Middlemarch and Roger Zelazny … yeah, there’s no choice there. It’s not that I didn’t want to read “classics,” it’s that I had a lot of other shit to read, people! I noted to her that I read a lot of more “modern” “classics” that she hadn’t read, so who’s the troglodyte now, eh? However … I do think it’s not a bad idea to read some “classic” literature, and I have picked some up over the years, and generally enjoyed them (except Crime and Punishment, which is shit). When I got to “M” in my alphabetical reading order, I picked up Moby-Dick …

… and promptly put it back on the shelf. I was not ready to tackle it! Well, I was, but my wife, who read it when she was but a lass, claimed that Melville went on for “hundreds” of pages about rendering the whale, and that scared me off. I wanted to read a red-blooded adventure, not hundreds of pages of shredding a whale carcass!

Also, as I may have explained in the past, I read almost every night to my daughter. She likes the sound of my voice (when I’m unable to read to her, my wife does not, as my daughter claims she has no interest in that), and while it doesn’t put her to sleep, I think it calms her down. Over the years, I’ve read a LOT of books to her – the Bible, the Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, for examples, but also lots of novels and non-fiction. It doesn’t really matter what I read to her – she can’t understand 99% of it anyway – but that I’m there reading and helping her relax. In July, I was looking for another book to read to her, and I thought, “Why not Moby-Dick?” It took me three months to get through the 624-page Penguin Classics version I own, but finish it I did? And you know what?

Moby-Dick is a fucking awesome book. I mean, yes, there are a lot of pages about whale rendering (not exactly “hundreds,” as my wife puts it, or if there are officially “hundreds,” they don’t come all in a row), and yes, there are a lot of pages about classification of whales, but even that stuff is pretty gripping. The actual narrative, the apocalyptic search for the whale, is tremendous, full of rage and glory and foolishness and power and madness. Ishmael (who essentially disappears from the narrative after about 150 pages or so; it’s clear Melville wrote this in fits and starts and probably meant it to be a more straight-forward, first-person adventure narrative before it turned into something else) is, when his presence is felt, an interesting counterpoint to Ahab, the ego to Ahab’s id, and his friendship with Queequeg (which probably wasn’t supposed to be homosexual) is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of someone who has been told one thing all his life (non-whites are “savage”) and is confronted with something that shakes that foundation (the entire book is like this, honestly, as Melville never quite escapes the reductive language used to describe non-whites in the mid-19th century but still creates these characters in a humanistic and sympathetic way). Ahab, meanwhile, is a superb character, one of the best in literature, and his burning desire to kill Moby-Dick is a harrowing quest that destroys everything it touches. It’s just a gripping read, and Melville’s experiences on whaling ships give it a tremendous realism that makes Ahab’s mad voyage all the more powerful. The fact that Ishmael almost disappears from the book means the ending actually lacks a bit of pathos, as everyone dies and Ishmael doesn’t even mourn his buddy, who is barely mentioned in the final chapter (I mean, Melville couldn’t even have Queequeg nailing the flag to the mast – that final act falls to Tashtego), but it’s still very powerful. The book was, shockingly, out of print when Melville died in 1891, and it was only in the 1920s that it began to be recognized as one of the greatest works of literature. It’s definitely something you should check out. We can crap on other classic literature, but not Moby-Dick!

Rating: IT’S FUCKING MOBY-DICK, PEOPLE!

The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France by Willa Z. Silverman. 325 pgs, 1995, Oxford University Press.

Sibylle Aimée Marie-Antoinette Gabrielle de Riquetti de Mirabeau, who wrote under the pseudonym “Gyp,” was born in 1849 and came of age at the end of the Second Empire and the beginnings of the Third Republic, and she’s the subject of this biography by Silverman, who taught at Penn State until her death last October. Gyp is a strange person, a woman who hated women, a prodigious writer who hated writing, an avowed anti-Semite, an admirer of Napoleon who hated monarchism but also hated republicanism … she was a lot, in other words. Silverman does an excellent job following the course of Gyp’s life, as she begins writing early in her life and becomes ridiculously prodigious, writing over a hundred novels as well as essays in magazines and brief sketches that she occasionally turned into novels. Early on in life, she was very much influenced by men – her maternal grandfather most notably – and by her ancestors, both Honoré Mirabeau, a famous revolutionary orator, and his brother, Mirabeau-Tonneau, who was reactionary. She realized early on in life that she would need to support her dissolute husband (she was married when she was 20), and she turned to one of the few things a woman could do at the time: writing (under a male pseudonym, of course, because women could write, but nobody could know they were women). She wrote “dialogue-novels” – breezy, satirical books with very little except people speaking to each other, but they became a sensation, and Gyp was one of the most famous writers of her day. She was a nationalist, and she became very involved in the politics of the day, railing against the Republic after the Franco-Prussian War and becoming deeply involved in the Dreyfus Affair, which turned out to be her high-water mark in terms of influence. After Dreyfus’s exoneration, Gyp’s form of nationalism and even anti-Semitism fell out of fashion, and while she lived until 1932 and continued publishing, she never quite reached the heights of fame that she did in the 1880s and 1890s.

This is an odd book because Gyp is such an odd person. Some feminists have claimed her as an early feminist, but the reason Gyp was a “feminist” – in that she did things that women weren’t supposed to do and didn’t “know her place” – was because she hated being a woman (but very much wanted to be a mother, and it seems she was reasonably happy with her children). She was a mess of contradictions, and it makes her fascinating but frustrating, because she always seemed to be veering from one pole to another. She was able to live how she did because her family was aristocratic, but she was also always trying to make money because her husband was so profligate and she was expected, as a famous writer, to entertain constantly at her own salon at her house in Neuilly. Her long-time publisher, Calmann-Lévy, was a Jewish family, but they often printed her anti-Semitic tracts, even as they often tried to get her to tone down the anti-Semitism. Silverman points out the fact that money rules all (it’s why Calmann-Lévy printed anti-Semitic works and why Gyp occasionally did tone it down), but she also gives us a good view of France at the time, when money was a major factor in how people lived but not the only one. Gyp’s anti-Semitism was, oddly, largely theoretical – she certainly wanted to clear all the Jews out of France, but she and others of her ilk didn’t do much about that. They spent their time ranting about Alfred Dreyfus, who was certainly a convenient target but still just a straw man. One wonders what Gyp would have thought of the Nazi “solution” to the Jewish “problem.” She hated the Germans but, sadly, would probably have approved of their methods.

Gyp comes across as a not particularly admirable individual, but at the same time, she’s weirdly compelling. Just the fact that she wrote so much and was blocked from so much by the society in which she lived and was so brainwashed by said society (she had no interest in fighting for women’s rights because they didn’t deserve them) makes her somewhat sympathetic even if a lot of the opinions she held were regressive and even vile. Silverman isn’t the greatest writer, but she does a pretty good job of encompassing all of Gyp’s life (with much more emphasis on the years 1849-1900 than 1900-1932) and French society at the time, which was as contradictory as Gyp was. We often get history books focusing on the major political or economic events of the day, and while this is a biography, it does give us a very good social history of a particularly volatile time in France and Europe in general. So, that’s neat.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Bloody Crime, A Beautiful Grifter, A Gilded Age Sensation by Bill Shaffer. 312 pgs, 2022, Citadel Press Books.

This is a strange book, because it’s a true crime story, so it doesn’t really conform to a fictional narrative, with straight-forward problems and straight-forward resolutions. Shaffer isn’t a bad writer, so the narrative zips along, but he also doesn’t seem interested too much in delving into what formed this crime and its aftermath, especially with regard to his main character, Evangeline Steele (if that was, indeed, her real name). It’s a fascinating story, and the book is worth checking out simply because of that, but it feels like Shaffer leaves a lot of meat on the bone.

The story concerns Robert Ray Hamilton, the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton and one of the great scions of the Gilded Age. Ray became infatuated with Eva in the mid-1880s, when he was in his mid-30s and she was in her mid-20s, and they married – in some secrecy – in early 1889, soon after their first child – Beatrice – was born. In August 1889, Eva stabbed their wet nurse during an argument with Ray that the wet nurse tried to stop, and during the course of her trial, many, many things came out about Eva, one of which was that she may have been already married when she officially married Ray. He began divorce proceedings, which she contested, and then … well, that would be telling. I mean, this all happened, so you can check it out yourself on Wikipedia if you so choose, but it’s quite the crazy story. Shaffer goes over it quite well, keeping track of all the twists and turns, and it’s never a boring book. It’s just … a bit shallow. Eva was clearly a grifter, and Shaffer doesn’t have too much sympathy for her because she was clearly a criminal, but it’s strange that he doesn’t point out why, perhaps, she was a grifter (Eva left no personal journals or anything, so we don’t know her state of mind). In the 1880s, she was in a relationship with a man, and they often told people they were married. It’s clear even from the court proceedings how biased the men in charge were against a woman, and it seems logical to conclude that Eva wanted to be in a relationship with this man but knew that society would judge her harshly if she was screwing around with someone but wasn’t married to him. Shaffer never brings this up, which is odd. Again, Eva is clearly not a Good Person, and she was also what we would definitely call a Fame Whore (I can’t imagine her with an Instagram account), but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t treated horribly by the male authorities. It’s just kind of odd that Shaffer doesn’t dig a little deeper into this.

As I noted, I don’t want to give away the weird twists in this story. Eva and Ray clearly had a toxic relationship, and while Eva should garner some of our sympathy, Ray isn’t completely unsympathetic either despite having all the advantages of being a rich man during the late 1800s. It’s clear neither of them quite fit into Gilded Age society, and unfortunately, there simply weren’t a lot of options for either of them at that time, so they were trapped. It’s a tragic book in so many ways, and Shaffer does a pretty good job tracking the tragedies. I guess I shouldn’t fault him too much for not making this more of a societal critique or even a psychological drama. It’s a pretty interesting book in its own right, and maybe that’s all it needs to be!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

**********

Here is the money I spent this month:

2 October: $123.25
9 October: $71.07
16 October: $345.27
23 October: $203.74
30 October: $243.78

Money spent in October: $987.11
(Oct. ’23: $859.84)
(Oct. ’22: $860.22)
(Oct. ’21: $662.60)

YTD: $6010.88
(2023: $5779.10)
(2022: $8992.21)
(2021: $6859.07)

Let’s break it down by publisher and format:

Boom! Studios: 3 (2 single issues, 1 trade paperback)
ComixTribe: 1 (1 single issue)
Dark Horse: 5 (3 graphic novels, 1 single issue, 1 trade paperback)
DC: 25 (1 “classic” reprint, 23 single issues, 1 trade paperback)
DC/Marvel: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
Dead Sky: 2 (2 graphic novels)
Dstlry: 1 (1 single issue)
Fairsquare: 1 (1 graphic novel)
First Second: 1 (1 graphic novel)
IDW: 1 (1 single issue)
Image: 8 (1 graphic novel, 5 single issues, 2 trade paperbacks)
Keenspot: 1 (1 single issue)
Mad Cave: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Magma Comix: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Marvel: 15 (1 “classic” reprint, 14 single issues)
Oni Press: 3 (2 single issues, 1 trade paperback)
Penthouse Comics: 1 (1 single issue)
Random House: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Titan Comics: 1 (1 single issue)
Vanguard: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
Vault: 2 (2 trade paperbacks)
A Wave Blue World: 1 (1 graphic novel)

4 “classic” reprints (44)
10 graphic novels (66)
0 manga volumes (9)
53 single issues (144)
10 trade paperbacks (99)

So far this year, we have these pubishers:

Ablaze: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 3 (3 graphic novels, 2 manga volumes, 1 trade paperback)
About Comics: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (2 “classic” reprints)
Abrams: 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (3 graphic novels)
Ahoy: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
Antarctic: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel, 1 trade paperback)
Avery Hill Publishing: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 (2 graphic novels)
AWA: 0 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (5 trade paperbacks)
Battle Quest Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (2 trade paperbacks)
Black Panel Press: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Bloomsbury Publishing: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Boom! Studios: 1 + 1 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 3 + 2 + 3 (1 “classic” reprint, 6 single issues, 6 trade paperbacks)
Cartoon Books: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint)
Clarion Books: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Clover Press: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (2 “classic” reprints, 1 graphic novel)
ComicMix: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint)
ComixTribe: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 single issue)
Dark Horse: 3 + 3 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 4 + 5 (5 “classic” reprints, 3 graphic novels, 15 single issues, 4 trade paperbacks)
DC: 1 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 8 + 6 + 25 (4 “classic” reprint, 39 single issues, 18 trade paperbacks)
DC/Marvel: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
Dead Sky: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 (2 graphic novels)
Drawn & Quarterly: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (2 graphic novels, 1 single issue))
Dstlry: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 (2 trade paperbacks)
Dynamite: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (2 “classic” reprints)
Epicenter Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint)
Fairsquare Comics: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 +1 (3 graphic novels, 1 trade paperback)
Fantagraphics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 4 + 0 (5 “classic” reprints, 4 graphic novels)
First: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
First Second Books: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (2 graphic novels)
Floating World Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Heritage Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 (2 “classic” reprints)
Humanoids: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 0 (3 graphic novels)
IDW: 0 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 1 (1 single issue, 7 trade paperbacks)
Image: 4 + 3 + 2 + 5 + 6 + 8 + 3 + 3 + 6 + 8 (2 “classic” reprints, 7 graphic novels, 15 single issues, 24 trade paperbacks)
Invader Comics: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel, 1 single issue)
Keenspot: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 single issue)
Living the Line: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 manga volume)
Mad Cave Studios: 2 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 1 + 3 + 0 + 1 (1 “classic” reprint, 3 graphic novels, 4 single issues, 5 trade paperbacks)
Magma Comix: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 trade paperback)
Magnetic: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 graphic novel)
Marvel: 3 + 3 + 2 + 4 + 1 + 3 + 3 + 10 + 9 + 15 (9 “classic” reprints, 38 single issues, 6 trade paperbacks)
Massive Publishing: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
MCD Books: 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Microcosm: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 single issue)
NBM: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (3 graphic novels)
Oni Press: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 2 + 2 + 4 + 3 (1 graphic novel, 8 single issues, 4 trade paperbacks)
Papercutz: 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (3 “classic” reprints)
Pantheon Books: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Penthouse: 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 (5 single issues)
Random House: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (2 graphic novels)
Rebellion/2000AD: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 (2 “classic” reprints)
Scout: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 (2 single issues)
SelfMadeHero Books: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Silver Sprocket: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
SLG: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Storm King Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
T Pub: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Ten Ton Press: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Titan Comics: 0 + 4 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 +1 (1 graphic novel, 5 single issues, 3 trade paperbacks)
TKO Studios: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
Top Shelf: 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (2 graphic novels)
Valiant: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 single issue)
Vanguard: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
Vault: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 2 (1 graphic novel, 5 trade paperbacks)
Viz Media: 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 1 (6 manga volumes)
A Wave Blue World: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (2 graphic novels)
White Hart Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel)

**********

Look, I was going to show you Saquon Barkley’s amazing run from this past Sunday … you know what, I still will:

SAQUON BARKLEY IS NOT OF THIS WORLD.

: #JAXvsPHI on CBS/Paramount+
: https://t.co/waVpO909ge pic.twitter.com/UtCENDw6no

— NFL (@NFL) November 3, 2024

THE 180 HURDLE??? DID SAQUON JUST INVENT THIS?!

: #JAXvsPHI on CBS/Paramount+
: https://t.co/waVpO8ZBqG pic.twitter.com/tYThjnbdgG

— NFL (@NFL) November 3, 2024

He’s going backwards. Never seen anything like this. pic.twitter.com/2XrrmSeNdG

— Kevin Negandhi (@KevinNegandhi) November 3, 2024

But that’s all the joy I can find in recent American history. This just fucking sucks so hard. My wife is actually seriously researching countries to move to, but you know what? Far too many countries are looking at us and saying, “You know, that fascism thing seems pretty cool, let’s give that a go.” This is probably the first time in my life that I’m ashamed to be an American. Jesus fucking Christ, this sucks. You know how bad it is? I know several people who voted for Mentally-Challenged Hitler. Some are women, some are men. I’m hoping that either they or their female relatives get sexually assaulted in some way so I can say to them, “Well, that sucks – if you know who did it, maybe you can vote for them for president.” I’m hoping that the daughters or grand-daughters of these voters get pregnant in some bad way so that they can’t have an abortion. That’s not who I am, but that’s what these fuck-nuts have turned me into. Fuck them all, and I hope Dictator Fuckhead gets everything he wants and they all spiral into poverty because his policies are so fucking stupid. If any Democrat votes for anything they try over the next four years, they’re fucking dead to me. Why would you? I hope the Democrats do all they can to shut this government down, because fuck those people. I hope climate change floods out these fucking people’s homes and a bunch of Democrats block any kind of relief for them and then they wring their hands and say, “Gosh, I’m sorry about your flooding – maybe you could try to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Or maybe Elon can help. Have you tried calling him?” Fuck these fucking assholes. I hope the Orange Asswipe and his Toady VP and that fucking simpering Speaker of the House all die of syphilis in the next week. I’m disgusted.

Fuck. I hate being so angry. I knew I’d survive the first time around, because I’m a straight white middle-class man. I’m honestly not so sure any of us are going to survive this time around. Fuck.

Hey, try to have a nice day. We still have comics .. for now. That means something, doesn’t it? Shit.