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Snapshots for 3/31
There's no way that Don and I can cover all of the material we have for review in full reviews, so these capsule reviews will offer some brief comments on other recent releases.
THE GIFT #1-3
by Raven Gregory, Tyler Kirkham & Marco Galli (Raven Gregory)
 The Gift reads and looks almost exactly like a Top Cow comic, from the overly bloody-minded horror tone to the unnecessary T&A. It's clear that Gregory has put a lot of love into this work, so I can't bring myself to tear it apart, but I can say that it just wasn't for me. He's got some interesting notions here, exploring the darker side of the human condition, but it all feels like it's aimed at prurient interests, with the boobs and violence and torture playing into our darker impulses and the revenge gained upon the evils of the book feeling less heroic and more like just more darkness. There's a cartoonish quality to the writing, as we get stereotypical mobsters, rapists and serial killers rather than more well-rounded and thus more interesting antagonists. Gregory's stories want to look into humanity's darker heart, but he only succeeds at hitting the surface, and rather than answering any questions or examining this darkness, instead he serves up mystical forces as an answer to the whole thing. Kirkham, Galli and the colorists serve up vivid artwork with some striking moments, such as The Ancient One calling down a storm or the creepy as hell cover to issue three, but there's also a lack of consistency in the anatomy, including the usual over-exaggerated female form, that puts me off the artwork as well. If you're a fan of books like The Darkness and Witchblade, you should definitely check out The Gift. If, like me, you're not really a fan of those books, The Gift probably won't be up your alley either. 4/10
MORTAL COILS #3
by A. David Lewis, Jason Narvaez, Evan Quiring & Darren Merinuk (Red Eye Press)
 Mortal Coils is an unusual series in today's market, a science-fiction anthology reminiscent of the Twilight Zone that is entirely the vision of one writer, but with a variety of different artists. Like so many anthologies, it's hit and miss, and Lewis's ideas don't always translate as clearly to the page as I'd like, but there's always something intriguing in his ideas and many of the stories have really resonated with me. Issue #3 is actually the weakest of the issues I've read thus far, with a loose theme of medical experimentation tying both stories together and neither one quite feeling like it had enough room to move. Both of them suffer somewhat from Lewis's decision to be less straightforward in the telling, jumping around in time and place rather than telling the story in a straightforward fashion and saving the shocks for the endings. However, these structural flaws aside, both stories do have pretty good shocker endings, and they both feature pretty intriguing premises, especially the notion of all the evil that can come from the potential good of an unapproved experimental cure. This issue of Mortal Coils isn't as good as the two before, but it still definitely has something to recommend it to fans of suspense horror and psychological science-fiction. 7/10
THE PULSE #2
by Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Bagley & Scott Hanna (Marvel Comics)
 I really, really liked The Pulse #1. Good characters, interesting premise, fun continuation of sorts of Alias that also served as a fresh approach. Which is probably why I was so disappointed in The Pulse #2, which has basically none of that. Instead, Bendis gives us a clumsy Lois Lane homage (Terri Kidder? Seriously?), an overload of text early on and a story that couldn't feel more inconsequential or disconnected from what I thought The Pulse was going to be about. The end of the issue reveals what this whole thing has to do with the story introduced in the first issue, but all that did was reinforce for me that this was something of a waste of space, the kind of thing that gets people complaining about Bendis's pacing in the first place. I have no doubt that The Pulse will recover, and Bendis and Bagley will serve up an interesting story for the remainder of this first arc, but this issue was a huge, unnecessary stumbling block in an otherwise promising launch. 4/10
STAR WARS: EMPIRE #17
by Welles Hartley, Davide Fabbri & Christian Dalla Vecchia (Dark Horse Comics)
 "To The Last Man" has so far been a terrific science-fiction military story, and another example that the people doing the best Star Wars stories these days have little to nothing to do with the actual films. Hartley's tale of a principled, intelligent military officer having to fight his way through cowardly and incompetent superiors in the midst of an unwinnable battle is almost on the level of a morality play, since our lead character and his mentor are flawlessly good and the cowardly officers undeniably rotten, but somehow it all still works. Probably because Hartley's story maintains a level of surprise that isn't possible when using the Star Wars icons. It's entirely possible, maybe even likely, that this story will end with the death of all the characters involved. Or there could be a rescue. Or something else could happen. At any rate, there's a delightful lack of predictability in the story's eventual direction, and I find that I've been won over to see these soldiers as sympathetic, even though they fight for the wrong side of the war. In addition, the artwork, by Fabbri, Dalla Vecchia and Sno Cone on colors, is terrific, very unusual and filled with stunning detail. 8/10
USAGI YOJIMBO #73
by Stan Sakai (Dark Horse Comics)
 Sakai never fails to impress with his ability to touch upon a specific piece of samurai lore or history and turn it into a fascinating story that resonates with Usagi specifically, all the while avoiding too much similarity to the many stories that have gone before in these pages. This time out, Sakai explores the transition of Japanese economy, one that saw the merchants replacing samurai as the most important class, and what this did to the strict honor code of those samurai. He does this by using another father and son pair, which means that mixed in amongst this larger plot is a continuation of the themes and overarcing question of Jotaro and Usagi and their relationship as father and son. I continue to really like Jotaro, whose mixture of youthful enthusiasm and desire to do right make it clear that the apple doesn't fall to far from the tree, but I've also come to expect a touch of tragedy in Usagi's stories, so my guess is that Jotaro may be leaving the book soon, with Usagi forced to swallow a truth that is clearly eating at him. Once again, Sakai turns in a self-contained story that new readers can greatly enjoy, but this is simultaneously a story that moves forward character development and plots that have been going for quite some time. It's impressive story construction, interesting story material and gorgeous artwork. 9/10
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