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

COMICS

Listen, I’m not going to lie to you people – we’re all friends here, right? I did not have the best month of September. I mean, it was fine, but I got a little behind on writing this post, then the real world intervened, and I’ve been in a bit of a funk for the past week or so, so I just didn’t get around to writing long, possibly dull reviews of things, when I occasionally don’t even write about the comic I’m ostensibly reviewing. You know, the reason you read my stuff! I will write more about my month down below, but for now, I’m just going to do little capsule reviews of this stuff. I apologize in advance for the brevity!

Batman and Robin #11-13. I mean, it’s Juan Ferreyra drawing Batman in a story that takes place on Dinosaur Island. HOW CAN THIS NOT BE AWESOME?!?!?!?!

Rating: TOO AWESOME FOR MEAGER STARS!!!!

Batman: City of Madness. It looks great, of course, because Christian Ward is a terrific artist. It has way too much Court of Owls in it, and the idea of a mirror image Gotham … underneath? the real one is a bit much to take, even for a comic-book universe. I mean, what would a mirror image Gotham look like? Wouldn’t it be paradise, given how shitty real-world Gotham is? This has some interesting ideas in it, but it doesn’t quite come together.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees. This got a lot of love around the interwebs, and it’s pretty good. A serial killer in a small town goes to the city to do her killing because she doesn’t want to disturb the small-town atmosphere (mainly because people notice things in a small town, and they’d definitely notice a serial killer), but when another killer starts killing in her town, she needs to do something about it before the cops begin to notice her. It’s a good conceit, and Patrick Horvath does a good job with the characters, especially Samantha, our killer, because she’s definitely evil but just personable enough that we’re on her side … for the most part. I mean, she’s still a psychopath and all. Horvath makes the characters anthropomorphic animals, which works pretty well, and the art is quite nice. This is a good comic. They’re not that hard to make!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Crave. Maria Llovet just digs the sex, and she has another comic about people banging, so good for her! A new app shows up on a college campus, promising to give the user whatever they crave, and most people, apparently, crave sex. Of course, there’s a dark side, and a group of collegians try to figure out what’s going on. It’s decent enough, I suppose. Llovet’s art is always terrific, and this is a slightly better story than other stuff I’ve read by her, but it’s still just a sexy horror story. Fun enough to read and nice to look at, but not much more.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Cruel Universe #2. I keep buying them, because I dig anthologies. See more below! This time around: Stephanie Phillips and Riley Rossmo have a story about the food supply that gets pretty dark; Ben Winters and Leomacs have a Frakenstein story with a twist; Chris Condon and Javier Fernandez do a story about a guy who gains the ability to see the future and what he does with it; Christopher Cantwell and David Lapham tell a tale about a cowboy who finds an alien ray gun. All are pretty good!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Dark Spaces: Dungeon. I read something on Facebook a few days ago in which a dude bashed Scott Snyder. Like, a lot. I mean, fair enough, and Snyder can take it, and I’ve done some Snyder-bashing myself, but it seemed a bit excessive about someone who at least knows how to put together a story. He’s not incoherent, in other words, and he entertains, which is more than you can say for some comics writers. It felt a bit personal, especially because when Snyder isn’t writing for DC, he seems to do pretty good stuff. This is a comic about a serial killer who’s been active for some years, and an FBI agent whom the killer kept prisoner when he was a kid but managed to escape is hunting him, and a dad whose son was taken is trying to help (yes, it’s a Snyder story about a father and son – who could have guessed?). It’s gripping and intense and it features gorgeous Hayden Sherman art. I didn’t love Snyder’s first stab at this “Dark Spaces” imprint, but the rest (not all of which have been written by him, of course) have been pretty good. I don’t know – I’ve had some issues with Snyder’s work and continue to do so, but it seems like this dude really had a problem with him. People are weird. Just ignore Snyder if you hate his writing so much!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Epitaphs from the Abyss #3. Jay Stephens and Leomacs have a story of a woman who works in a morgue, and if you think she’s a bit weird from working in a morgue, well, gold star for you! Corinna Bechko has a fun vampire story, beautifully drawn by Jonathan Case. Chris Condon and Charlie Adlard do a story about meeting the devil at the crossroads and how poorly that can go. More fun anthology action!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Hello Darkness #3. Whoo, another anthology! Michael Conrad and Martin Morazzo do a story about, well, competitive eaters. Yes, it’s a horror story, so things get weird fast. Tynion and Dell’Edera have another chapter in their Something Is Killing the Children side story. There’s a World War I horror story by Andy Lanning and Trevor Hairsine. And hey, Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan keep up with their nuclear war story, in which something quite bad happens. Oh dear. More good stuff!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

All New Henry & Glenn Comics and Stories. I love these goofy comics, and I’m glad Tom Neely brought it back. The main story is about Henry getting a cat and then leaving Glenn to take care of it, and mayhem ensues. In the back-up story, Neely meets London May on a plane, and May gets grumpy with him about his Henry & Glenn comics, but it all works out in the end? These are just fun books, and if you didn’t get them back in the day, this is a perfect chance to pick one up!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

If You Find This, I’m Already Dead #1-3. The collected hardcover just came out, so that’s handy. I just forgot to read this when the third issue came out a few months ago, so I did it this month! This is part of Matt Kindt’s Dark Horse imprint, and it’s not bad. A reporter is sent with a military team into another dimension to a planet that was discovered a while back, and when they arrived, all of them are killed except her, leaving her to figure out what the heck happened. It’s pretty good, although it ends up a bit obvious, unfortunately. Dan McDaid does really nice art, though. It’s just a solid sci-fi thriller, but nothing too spectacular.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Little Black Book. This is a fun Western noir, in which a dude finds a book his dad – a shady character – had with contacts for cleaning up crimes and other interesting people, but of course there’s a gangster after it, too! It’s pretty good, although a few things bug me. The dude needs to clean up a crime, so he uses the book he found in the house his dad left him, but … the crime isn’t really one. His wife hit a person and killed her, but it was totally an accident and there’s no indication the wife was impaired in any way and it appears that the person she hit was somehow mentally impaired and ran out in front of her on a very lonely stretch of the highway. I mean, just call the cops and all will be well! Instead, you get involved in gangsters and shit. Second, early on in the book, a lawyer visits the couple and tells them they’ve inherited this house in “east Arizona.” On the next page, we’re told the house is in Yuma. Yuma is about as west as you can get in Arizona, and a quick look at a map would have told writer Jeff McComsey that. Later, our hero enters a sheriff’s office in Maricopa County, which is where Phoenix is. I guess he might go there, but that’s also nowhere near Yuma (which is in Yuma county). At one point, artist Felipe Cunha, who generally does a pretty good job, puts a character in Phoenix on a street lined with brick rowhomes that looks like it’s right out of Birmingham, England. It certainly doesn’t look like any neighborhood in Phoenix. Sorry, things like this bug me, especially when it’s just so easy to consult a map or do a Google search. Sheesh.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Lobo Cancellation Special. I don’t know why it’s called that, but Kyle Starks wrote it and Kyle Hotz drew it, so I figured it would be fun, and it is. Completely inconsequential, but you don’t read Lobo comics to gain great insight into the human condition. Lobo is stranded on a lonely world, and when aliens rescue him, he does the job they want him to do because he’s bored. The “bad guy” (I mean, there are rarely good guys in a Lobo comic) is clever at first and seemingly gets away with thwarting Lobo, but you know that’s not going to hold. It’s pretty funny, wildly gory, and not really worth 7 bucks. But hey, if Simon Bisley isn’t going to draw it (although he did do that nice variant cover that you see above), Hotz is a pretty good substitute!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Manchurian. Pornsak Pichetsote writes at the beginning of this issue that he and his collaborators are doing one-shots twisting familiar tropes in the hope that they will become series, the first of which is a Chinese James Bond, the Manchurian. It’s a pretty good story, as we get Calvin Low, who does things a bit differently than Western secret agents because, according to Pichetsote, China does things a bit differently when they’re gathering intelligence (whether Pichetsote is right about it or not is something I’m not qualified to judge). Terry Dodson draws it with his usual panache, and it’s a decent spy thriller that hums along nicely. I’ll probably get the four other one-shots coming up under this umbrella, because they sound keen. Hey, remember when Top Cow did something like this and I got the trade and said it’s not like your usual Top Cow stuff in that they were mostly good and a Top Cow apologist (possibly an editor there?) ripped me a new one? Good times!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Wesley Dodds: The Sandman. Riley Rossmo is a terrific artist, so this book looks wonderful – he does interesting stuff with page layouts to make the fight scenes more frenetic, and his rough inks and occasional use of Benday dots and Zip-a-Tone combined with Fco Plascencia’s rich colors make this a book that’s a joy to just look at. Robert Venditti’s story feels contemporary (despite being set in 1940) because we’re still dealing with the same crap – the military wanting to use horrific weapons to win wars, businessmen trying to get rich selling horrific weapons to them – and while the villain in the book is a bit too obvious, it’s still a pretty good character study of Wesley Dodds and what war means to him. This is a cool story.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

Tales for a Halloween Night: Brooklyn Stories. John Carpenter’s Storm King Comics has done some fairly decent comics, and while I don’t love Frank Tieri, I figured he might do better away from the Marvel salt mine, and Cat Staggs is a decent enough artist, so I thought this would be fun. It is – Zombie Frank Tieri narrates it, telling us horror stories set in Brooklyn. Lots of gangsters, ghosts, and douchebags getting their comeuppance, with a Revolutionary War story thrown in because why not, and a story set in a disco, because why not? Goofy and gory fun to be had!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Trident of Aurelia volume 2: The Storm. I continue to enjoy the comics Battle Quest puts out, and this is no exception. The mermaids from volume 1 are faced with a new threat, and they recruit allies to help, and some things work out and others don’t. It’s just straight-forward fantasy adventure, and Lee Moyer keeps it all moving along nicely while Melissa Spandri draws it well, giving us a nicely realized world. I don’t have too much else to say – it’s a good adventure comic!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Weatherman volume 3. It’s been a while since volume 2 came out, but that’s ok: basically, a weatherman on Mars turns out to be a terrorist who helped kill everyone on Earth but wiped his memory so he wouldn’t remember, but now he has to rejoin the terrorist group to stop them from doing the same to all humanity on Venus and Mars. Is he truly reformed? Will he return to his terrorist roots? Oh, the conundrum! It’s a pretty good sci-fi thriller, helped immensely by Nathan Fox’s stunning art. Get all three volumes and enjoy!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

World’s Finest volume 4: Return to Kingdom Come. We find out what the dude from volume 2 has been up to, and it’s basically … turning into a super-villain in the “Kingdom Come” dimension (words cannot express how much I hate that every “Elseworlds” ever created now has its own dimension, but oh well). Lots of mayhem, and there’s Darkseid, and Waid doesn’t end it the way we exactly expect, which is nice. I know the time frame for this series is a bit wonky and DC doesn’t care that much anyway, but the fact that “our” Batman and Superman have never heard of Booster Gold yet is a bit weird. Anyway, it’s another good, solid superhero story from the Waid and Mora team. Superheroes are cool, aren’t they?

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

W0rldtr33 volume 2. Tynion’s weird “malevolent internet” tale continues, and it’s still working quite well. We get a few more answers, especially about tattooed naked lady, but there’s enough of a mystery about her to keep things moving, and Tynion doesn’t show us any more of the future, which I think is a good idea because we don’t need it. This continues to be a nice, creepy, horror/sci-fi story with really good art. There ain’t nothing wrong with that!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

BOOKS

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra. 329 pgs, 2004, Random House.

I think this is a book my wife bought at the fabled VNSA book sale, because it has that price sticker on it (which, I know, is very common, but we don’t buy used books all that often, and when we do, it’s at that book sale) and this seems like the kind of thing she’d like. I like these kinds of books, too, but I don’t tend to get them at the VNSA book sale, because I don’t tend to troll through the genre fiction area and she does. Aren’t you glad you read my posts so you can find out uninteresting trivia about my life?!?!?

Anyway, this is a perfectly fine historical thriller, in which a Dominican monk who works for a secret organization in the Vatican that functions, basically, as a police squad, making sure that heresy doesn’t spring up anywhere in Catholic Europe (given that the book takes place in 1497, the organization is about to fail spectacularly in that role). He is sent to Milan because a mysterious figure is sending the organization letters claiming that a certain painter is doing something nefarious in his latest painting. The painter: Leonardo da Vinci. The painting: The Last Supper. Oh dear!

The Last Supper, in case you don’t know, is a fertile ground for fictional speculation, because Leonardo was a weird dude and the painting itself is kind of odd. Sierra does a nice job creating a puzzle embedded in the painting, and of course, murder is involved, and the mystery zips along fairly nicely. He brings in Church history and his “solution” to the weirdness of the mural makes some sense (I mean, I’m sure it’s not correct, but Sierra makes it work!), but, like a lot of these kinds of books, it feels vaguely unsatisfying because he can’t, after all, change the history of the Church (which these books always imply will happen if the news gets out). So things stay the same, and it feels more like just a fun exercise in code-breaking rather than something more momentous. I get it, but it remains somewhat frustrating. The interesting parts of the book, for me, are the parts that are actually historically … maybe not accurate, but at least somewhat keeping with actual events. Many people in this book were real people, and it’s clever how Sierra works them into the narrative. What is frustrating, however, is that he seems to force the characters to change their minds based on the plot – Agostino Leyre, our “hero,” seems to veer between admiration for and condemnation of Leonardo, depending on who he’s talking to. The letter-writer is obviously an evil dude, yet Leyre is technically on his side, and he doesn’t necessarily condemn his evil. It’s a bit weird, because while I get that Leyre, as a 15th-century monk, would not be “modern” in his attitudes, Sierra does make him more open-minded than we might expect, simply because readers have to relate to him a little bit. It’s just a bit jarring, because the characterization isn’t that consistent.

Sierra also does something odd that might work better in Spanish than English, but I’m not sure. Leyre narrates about half the book in first person, while the rest of the book is told in omniscient third-person narration. Now, I’ve read books before where the POV shifts from first- to third- or even second-person, but Sierra isn’t all that good at it, so it just feels clunky. Why have it in first person at all? Why not have it all in first person? I get that if you have Leyre the narrator throughout, we miss some crucial stuff, but maybe that’s an argument for having it in third person, or maybe find a better way to work it into the narrative? The transitions are just odd and they don’t work very well. It was frustrating.

The Secret Supper is a perfectly fine beach read. It’s entertaining but forgettable. I liked it but will not make space in my memory for it. Let’s move on!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Jim Silke’s Jungle Girls by Jim Silke. 83 pgs, 2010, Flesk Publications.

Silke is a good artist (and he’s still going strong at 93 years old!), but he worked most of his life in other media than comics, so his comics work is very limited. His love of gorgeous women, however, is unlimited, and his love of cheesy B-movies from the 1930s and on is also a powerful driving force in his life, so he put together this book (which I bought from him in San Diego a decade ago or so and which he was nice enough to sign for me) about women in those movies, from Ursula Andress in She to Maureen O’Sullivan in the Tarzan movies to Hedy Lamarr and Marlene Dietrich and Anna Mae Wong. He fills the book with his own paintings of these women (he does very well with their likenesses) and with publicity stills from dozens and dozens of B-movies and with comics covers of these kinds of stories, and the book is just a lot of fun. There’s some risqué stuff, but this is more a celebration of the wackiness of these kinds of movies and the strength of the beautiful women who starred in them than just a celebration of their hotness (although it’s certainly that, too!). There’s not much to say about this book – I imagine it would appeal to a lot of readers of this blog (I can’t imagine Greg Hatcher wouldn’t have loved this book), and it’s a fun, breezy read.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

TELEVISION

Orphan Black: Echoes season 1 (AMC). Krysten Ritter stars in this quasi-sequel to Orphan Black (so far, no sign of Tatiana Maslany, but maybe she’ll be in a later season?), set 30-40 years or so in the future, when Ritter discovers she’s not exactly a clone, but a “print-out” of someone else. A scientist has figured out how to use DNA to create her own humans, and of course nefarious people want the technology, and so we get a thriller in which everyone is trying to figure out who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy and what everyone really wants. There’s a teenager who may or may not be a print-out of the same person Ritter is based on, there’s another teenager who may or may not be a print-out of the super-rich dude who may or may not be a bad guy (I mean, he’s a super-rich dude, and in pop culture, that generally means he’s evil, but there is some doubt, at least!), and two characters from the original show do show up to link it to that, which is nice. It’s fine. It’s nothing super-special, but it’s a fun show nevertheless. As usual with shows like this, if people actually talked to each other every so often, things wouldn’t get as dire as they do, and if the buildings were lit a little better, it wouldn’t look so creepy (lighting in television shows really vexes me), and I don’t really buy Ritter as this devastating beauty (she’s a perfectly fine actor, but drop-dead gorgeous she is not), so some people’s reactions to her are a bit odd, but it’s fine. It’s not quite as weird as the original, but it’s fine.

The Diplomat season 1 (Netflix). This is a pretty good political drama/thriller, in which Keri Russell stars as a woman who expects to be sent to Afghanistan to help with the plight of the women who are being hunted by the Taliban but instead gets sent to London as the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. because a British ship was attacked in the Persian Gulf and the president thinks she’ll be able to handle the fall-out. He’s also vetting her for the vice president job (the current one is about to resign thanks to a scandal, but very few people know that), but she doesn’t know that when she gets the job (she finds out fairly quickly). So she has to calm the nerves of the British and maybe figure out who exactly attacked the ship – was it Iran, which everyone thinks, or someone else? Russell does her usual excellent job in the role, and the fact that Rufus Sewell plays her husband makes this show 10% better than it would be otherwise (Sewell makes everything 10% better). Sewell is a former ambassador himself, so of course he still thinks he can play the game, and he and Russell have a very contentious relationship that weirdly works for them. The cast is solid – Ato Essandoh is Russell’s right-hand man, Ali Ahn is her CIA liaison, David Gyasi is the British foreign minister, with whom Russell has a flirtatious relationship, and Rory Kinnear (who my wife and I always refer to as “Frankenstein”) is the prime minister, who wants to act tough in foreign affairs because his domestic affairs aren’t going well. The politics are well done, the thriller parts work well, the show is often very funny, and the stakes are high. There’s a new season starting soon, so now’s your chance to catch up!

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Here’s the money I spent!

4 September: $117.95
11 September: $128.38
25 September: $444.09

Here are the publishers!

Ablaze: 3 (2 graphic novels, 1 manga volume)
Avery Hill: 1 (1 graphic novel)
AWA Studios: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Battle Quest Comics: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Boom! Studios: 2 (2 single issues)
Dark Horse: 4 (4 single issues)
DC: 6 (3 single issues, 3 trade paperback)
Fantagraphics: 4 (2 “classic” reprints, 2 graphic novels)
Heritage Comics: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
IDW: 2 (2 trade paperbacks)
Image: 6 (3 single issues, 3 trade paperbacks)
Living the Line: 1 (1 manga volume)
Marvel: 9 (1 “classic” reprint, 8 single issues)
Microcosm Comics: 1 (1 single issue)
Oni Press: 4 (1 graphic novel, 3 single issues)
Pantheon Books: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Storm King Comics: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Vault: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Viz: 1 (1 manga volume)

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Ok, a few things. If you missed my comments on several posts, we had a bit of a problem here at the blog for the past few days. Something was going on with WordPress, we think, so we couldn’t save or publish any posts. It’s happened before, and it will probably happen again, and it’s frustrating, but it always sorts itself out, and now we’re good. I was ready to publish this on the … 2nd, I think, but then everything went wonky. That’s why it’s so much later than it was going to be already, and that’s why there aren’t any Airwolf panels. It takes a while to scan and add the images, and I just wanted to get this out there. That’s all I had to do anyway, except for this little postscript. I certainly hope that next month, everything is back to normal. Wouldn’t that be nice?

As for the reviews being short … well, I had a weird September. I was a bit behind already, and then, in the middle of the month, I went to Pennsylvania for a few days for our 35-year reunion (I had never been to a reunion before, so I thought it would be fun). Then, on the plane home (I assume), I got COVID. Fun! It didn’t mess me up too bad, but it did take me out of commission for the following week, and I really didn’t feel like writing anything. I couldn’t get my comics that week, and I had a lot to read the next week (as you can see by the amount of money I spent on the 25th – that was two weeks’ worth, of course, but it was still a lot), so I was just so far behind I decided to skip longer reviews. I hope you guys can forgive me!

I’m hoping to be back on track in October, although the scorching heat is filling me with lassitude (I’m certainly happier with the heat than with, you know, devastating hurricanes – a high school friend of mine had her entire property wiped out), so we’ll see. I’m very glad that global warming/climate change is a myth! We hope the blog is back to some semblance of normal, and I hope everyone is staying safe if you’re in the vicinity of a hurricane and … well, if you’re any other place, too. Have a nice day!