While regular Snap Judgments are on hiatus, I'll be doing these "spotlight" columns on indy books and graphic novels in my review pile. This time out: Two more graphic novels, a complete miniseries and more new first issues.
GRAPHIC NOVEL SPOTLIGHT
JETTA: TALES OF THE TOSHIGAWA-DEFIANCE TPB
by Martheus Wade & Janet Stone Wade (Shooting Star Comics)
Format: Graphic novel
Price: $6.95
Website: www.shootingstarcomics.com
Jetta is a potentially interesting tale that can't quite decide what it wants to be. Feudal epic, superhero story, martial arts spectacular or slice-of-life romance tale? One could call Jetta multi-faceted, but my impression was more that it had a splintered focus, and while there are any number of potentially fascinating directions in which the story could go, it's trying to go in too many at once. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy Jetta at all, as the Wades deliver some solid action sequences, a few memorable characters and a backstory that is overly complex but certainly interesting, it's just that there's way too much going on here and not all of it fits easily together.
Let me see if I can explain the premise of Jetta. No, is too much... let me sum up. Shianndrea "B.B., Jetta" Toshigawa is the warrior daughter of the corrupt Emperor Terminus, who for reasons of vague prophecy wants to kill her, even as she struggles with her secret life, harsh training and romantic interest in a man who has disappeared. Sounds like a lot, right? And that leaves out the long-standing clan that the Emperor is a former part of, the familial relationships between Shianndrea's mentor and her boyfriend and a coterie of regular friends who somehow hang out with a girl who is presented as a shut-in early on. Clearly, a lot has gone on before, but the Wades don't really make the foundation of the story clear. So from the start, I was left with more than a little confusion and a ton of characters and subplots to keep track of.
Which would be OK, as in fairness, this isn't the first Jetta graphic novel, but the second. Except that there's no paring down of story elements here, but an increasing complexity, and some of the elements seem to contradict themselves. "Jetta" has a group of normal friends but doesn't usually escape her mentor to go down to a club, for example. Or Jetta's trainer is ruthless about wanting to kill someone if they have seen her, but still somehow lets her escape into this normal life and lets his daughter escape into the same place without any repercussions or even serious warnings. There's some noise made about him saying harsh things to Jetta, but in the end, he's kind of toothless, which makes all her secrecy feel less important.
There's also a sort of disconnect about some of the setting details. "Jetta" manifests some kind of superpowers, as do her enemies, but up until that point, the implication was that these characters were all powerful martial artists, not metahumans. The Tokugawa Clan goes back to feudal times and the bad guy is the emperor of Japan, and yet this seems to take place in either a modern or futuristic context. The social structures aren't well-defined, and with a shaky background, the reader is often left asking a number of minor questions of context that keep them from focusing in on the story.
Which is a shame, because the story at work here is potentially very interesting. The Wades get into cliche dialogue when Jetta engages her foes, but beyond that, the dialogue is pretty solid, and the burgeoning relationship between Shianndrea and Dan is very well written. In addition, while I think there are too many characters, most of them are admittedly pretty good, from the cocky and streetwise Cat to the "stern trainer" figure Guadient to Dan himself, the outsider in this strange mix of martial arts, superpowers and feudal strictures.
The artwork is likewise inconsistent but shows a lot of promise. A lot of the time, the Wades offer up impressive background detail and expressive faces, an intriguing blend of manga style and the more cartoony realism of folks like Terry Moore and Carla Speed McNeil. The martial arts sequence that closes out the book is a pretty impressive bit of action storytelling that really conveys the speed and strength of the lead character and her foes. And yet... there are other pages where the anatomy of the characters (particularly the women) seems impossible, such as when we're looking up Mestiphilla's dress while she's walking down an alley straight on or the focus on the oftentimes impossibly balloon-like breasts of Shianndrea. And there are some strange storytelling decisions, where panels are placed so that the reader reads backwards, following several arrows in the art for no obvious stylistic reason.
Jetta: Tales of the Toshigawa-Defiance is the rough draft of something better, with a lot to recommend but a lot of small flaws that add up to make it a frustrating read. In fairness, the book is very dense, and a good value for the price tag as far as reading time is concerned, and a little polish to make the art more consistently believable and a narrowing down of the story's characters and storylines could turn it into something truly special. Even as it is, it offers up a lot of potential and I would definitely recommend it to fans of Billy Tucci's Shi and maybe those who enjoy the complex female empowerment butt-kicking of TV's Alias.
MAX HAMM FAIRY TALE DETECTIVE VOL. 1 TPB
by Frank Cammuso (Nite Owl Comics)
Format: Graphic novel
Price: $14.95
Website: www.cammuso.com
If you were filing Max Hamm in a bookstore or a library, you might want to fit it smewhere between The Big Sleep and a Little Golden Book. Cammuso's charming, beautiful and often very funny tale of a pig P.I. working cases in a fractured fairy tale world is a perfect blend of the worlds of Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm and Ryamond Chandler, with maybe a little Tex Avery thrown in there for good measure. The mysteries, especially the one that comes from the collection of the three-part "The Long Ever After" miniseries, are complex, the elements that make up this book a stew of various influences, but the appeal of Max Hamm is quite simple: Beautiful art and great writing.
The obvious comparison to make with Max Hamm is Vertigo's success Fables. However, while the central idea is the same in some respects (fairy tale characters with a different spin), the approach is quite different. I wouldn't go so far as to call Cammuso's work "all-ages," but this is definitely done in a style that is friendly to younger readers as well as older aficionados of pulp mysteries. In addition, while Fables steers clear of the anthropomorphic animal style of most fairy tales, Cammuso's characters are reminiscent of the kind of things you might see in a cartoon. And of course, while the first arc of Fables was also something of a noir mystery, that tone is part and parcel of the appeal of Max Hamm, which doesn't bother itself overmuch with the political structure of the fairy tale characters or how they co-exist with a modern world. No, Max Hamm lives in the fairy tale world 24-7, no matter how much he might wish otherwise from time to time.
Max Hamm is a tale of homages, to pulp fiction and film, to fairy tales, to Little Golden Books, but Cammuso rises above being a mere parody or homage. Instead he crafts a fun and engaging story based around those noir standards, lost love and troubled women, with the flavor of fairy tales mixed in. Half the fun is to be found in Cammuso's absolute perfection when it comes to capturing the voice of those noir narrators, with their street smart metaphors and puns, but just as much can be found in an interesting mystery that takes its basic spine from children's fiction and gives it a new twist. I'm also quite taken with Cammuso's ability to pun and play word games, using one word to mean something else in context. For example, "With the way things were going, the only Prince I was gonna find, were her fingerprints, on the murder weapon" or "The joint had more stares than a showgirl on a Friday night." Cammuso's wordplay doesn't end there, as he also blends the word styles of detective fiction and nursery rhymes in equal measure to create a new patois with elements of both. Things like "Fact is, the lady was yesterday's porridge" and having one of the seven dwarves named "Spanish Johnny" makes for an interesting blend that never fails to elicit a chuckle or a raised eyebrow, or maybe both.
While Cammuso's writing is certainly strong, his artwork is exceptional. The style of Max Hamm is that of an illustrated book mixed with a comic-book. Cammuso uses two styles, the panel-to-panel style of comics and the illustrated text style of novels, using the latter for flashbacks, and it works very well. I'm especially pleased with the black and white "painted" look of Cammuso's illustrations, each of which conveys a lot of information about the scene. One picture of Rose Red really is worth a thousand words, and each snapshot of Hamm's case involving Snow White compliments the text very effectively. These richly detailed panels make for a dense read, and readers definitely get their money's worth out of this book.
Max Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective is a charming and funny book, showing off Cammuso's way with words as well as his attractive artwork. Fans of Fables, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, classic Warner Brothers cartoons or anyone with a taste for pop-culture pastiche will especially enjoy it, but anyone with a funny bone and/or a taste for noir fiction should definitely give it a look.
Video #1-5 is a story of religion and prophecy, told from the point of view of young twenty-somethings who have more to do with these enormous events of religious significance than it might at first appear. Buell's tale weaves the notions of friendship and love in with the worries of parenthood and the troubles with religion and lays it all out in a style that is part big budget summer movie and part low budget indie talker. The story starts out being about one thing, the coming Rapture, and ends up being something quite different, albeit something that was kicked off by the events of the first issue. It makes for pretty compelling reading, and is worth a look for anyone interested in speculative fiction or just some strong slice-of-life type writing with a stressed-out life as the backdrop.
There's an eerie horror feel that permeates Video, a sense that things have fallen apart and we're sort of watching the last gasps of human civilization. The characters are uncertain what's going to happen next, how it will affect them, and there's a similar unease to everyone they meet. For that matter, while the events at work in Video are world-shattering and big, our window into them is much more small and intimate. The story is told in captions as if we're looking directly into the thoughts of our lead characters, and the circle of characters never really gets bigger than a half-dozen people. This isn't a story of how the world weathers a religious apocalypse, it's the tale of how the threat of that apocalypse reveals hidden pasts and unusual futures for the four main characters of the book.
It's hard to review Video without giving away some of the big twists, because a lot of what really was interesting about the book doesn't really make itself known until two or three issues in. This could be considered a pacing problem, except that each issue does offer up something important or interesting, from the impending doom feeling that's built up by the slow burn first issue or the scrounging for survival that turns tragic in the second. The story really gets going at the end of the second issue, however, when a truth is revealed about Jesse that will drive the last three issues. The story becomes much less about a world facing an apocalyptic event and more about a couple of people dealing with their pasts and how it will affect their future.
I will confess, I think that Buell could have given us more on these characters right up front rather than parceling it out as he did. The big revelations and character interactions of the last couple issues would hit harder if we'd seen a little more of the characters' lives and the people they lost, rather than just having them tell us about it in captions. For that matter, while Pepe and Katy are interesting enough supporting characters, they're sort of superfluous to the action once issue three rolls around, and I'm left wondering if their role in the story was enough to justify the pages used to flesh out their characters, rather than focusing more tightly on Keesha and Jesse.
I also had a bit of a mixed reaction to the artwork in Video. I actually quite like Buell's style, as it's iconography and page layouts remind me in some ways of Brian Wood, but there's a definite inconsistency to the way the characters appear, and some of the artwork, rather than looking stylized, just looks kind of sketchy. Buell is pretty good with the small stuff, the interactions between the friends, but the larger, supernatural elements are not as impressive, and some important moments (such as Jesse's view of the Earth in issue four) are just kind of flat as a result.
I have covered first issues already in these special columns, but as I reach toward the next batch, it's the first category that repeats pretty easily. For all the complaints you'll hear that there isn't anything new in comics, the problem isn't that people aren't creating them, it's that not enough people are paying attention. So here's another batch of new first issues and self-contained stories that you might consider giving a look if you want to add a dash of something new into your comics routine.
ANGEL: THE CURSE #1
by Jeff Mariotte & David Messina (IDW Publishing)
Format: Comic book
Price: $3.99
Website: www.idwpublishing.com
Though I was a huge fan of the Angel TV show, I don't tend to follow the ancillary tie-ins like novels or comics. Just not my thing, in general. That's me, though, and there is a big market for these tie-in comics, especially when the shows themselves are gone and the fans are still looking for more stories. IDW is off to a good start with their take on Angel, as Buffy/Angel novel writer (amongst other credits) Mariotte kicks off a story about Angel that takes place during his time with Wolfram & Hart and has the light, jokey dialogue and solid action of the Buffyverse married to a pretty decent premise. Namely, Angel wants to get rid of the curse that granted him a soul, or at least the part that prevents him from getting a little nookie from time to time. Mariotte spins this motivation and the story of the curse out pretty well, presenting it as Angel wanting to have a real relationship rather than just wanting some cheap sex, and uses it as the jumping-off point to pit modern-day good guy vampire Angel against a cadre of old world foreign vampires in Romania. David Messina's artwork is solid as well, and though the coloring is a bit overwhelming and heavy when a lighter touch was called for, the panel to panel storytelling is strong. If you're not already an Angel fan, The Curse isn't likely to win you over, but if you're one of the many Angel fans who wants more stories of this character, The Curse might be worth your time.
BLACKLIGHT #1
by Scott Wherle, John Toledo & Marc Deering (Image Comics)
Format: Comic book
Price: $2.99
Website: www.imagecomics.com
A hot girl in a typically scanty superhero uniform, wielding darkness powers, spinning out of the pages of Shadowhawk? All the ingredients were there for Blacklight to be, as we politely put it in the reviewing biz, "not my thing." To my surprise, however, the Shadowhawk connection is really tangential, tied in only to the origin which took place prior to the first page, and instead this is an unusual story of a new superheroine who doesn't fit into the superheroine mold. Her life takes place in small-town America, her new flight powers clash with her agoraphobia and she's a superhero groupie whose powers suddenly put her into the position to live out her fantasies. OK, that last part has maybe been done before, but since this first issue mostly delves into the daily life of Lina Juarez pre-powers, where she goes from here certainly has room to be done with as much originality as Wherle brings to her "origin" issue. Will she head out for the big city and try to join a superteam? Fight crime in her small town, which should amount to little more than stopping a drug gang she has more involvement with than she knows? There's potential to be found in the answer to the question of "what's next." In addition to strong writing, Blacklight features some pretty impressive artwork from John Toledo and Marc Deering. It's early work from relatively new artists, and does suffer occasionally from minor inconsistencies in the face and body shapes of the characters, not to mention an unusual fascination that Toledo seems to have with putting the "camera" at odd angles, but the anatomical basics are all there, and the design for the Blacklight identity is a really good one. A little bit of lightening up on the coloring by Kanila Tripp and the natural growth of these artists the more they work, and the art here will really be something to talk about. I'll be honest, Blacklight didn't blow me away as shocking and new the way that books like Runaways, Livewires and Invincible did, but it's an intriguing take on a new superhero that has potential to be something really special.
THE BRONTES: INFERNAL ANGRIA #1
by Craig McKenney & Rick Geary (Headless Shakespeare Press)
Format: Comic book
Price: $4.00
Website: www.headshakepress.com
I've really enjoyed the previous work of McKenney and Geary together (on Blanche Goes to Paris) and separately (on The Magic If and the Treasury of Victorian Murder series, respectively), so I looked to The Brontes with some enthusiasm. However, while Geary's beautiful woodcut-style artwork is solid as ever, The Brontes doesn't really stand alone as well as I'd like. McKenney introduces a number of young characters, many of whom are hard to distinguish from one another, and jumps around a bit in time so that the premise of the book really isn't revealed until the last few pages. Most of the story is given over to the deaths of characters the reader doesn't know and doesn't have any particular reason to care about, and it feels like McKenney didn't make the best use of the limited space in this first issue. The last eight pages of the book are where the story really begins, as a group of 19th century children find their way into a magical land, but just as the story is starting, it ends on a cliffhanger, without ever really introducing us to the characters enough that we're hooked into the dire potential of that cliffhanger. Based on my past experience with these creators, I'm sure that The Brontes will be an enjoyable read when all is said and done, but as a first issue, this one is a bit weak in the knees.
CONVENTION CONFESSIONAL V.1
by Rob Reilly & Steven Walters (Skatoon Productions)
Format: Comic book
Price: $2.95
Website: www.skatoonproductions.com
From reading Convention Confessional, it looks like Reilly and Walters might just consider comic book conventions to be the ninth circle of Hell. There are a variety of anecdoates here about the frustration of trying to sell small press books to an uncaring market that occasionally verge on the funny, but mostly come off as depressingly true. Certainly I have sympathy for some of the unfair things that happen to these guys, but there's a "woe is me" tone throughout Convention Confessional that I found rather off-putting. Rather than holding themselves up as objects of ridicule as well, Reilly and Walters focus is to paint everyone else they run into as idiots, self-important jerks or prudes. They're not always wrong, but neither are they always right, and this one-sided approach makes the whole thing seem more mean-spirited and bitter than funny. Which is not to say there isn't fun to be had, as there are some amusing moments (the truth of people laughing at signs and then not buying anything is all too common in comics retail as well), but mostly it's a bit too on the nose for me to find funny. Instead it's sort of a depressing "tell-all" about the frustration of working the small press side of the convention circuit, which I can't help but think is aimed at the rather narrow market of other small press cartoonists.
DEAD EYES OPEN #1
by Matthew Shepherd & Roy Boney, Jr. (Slave Labor Graphics)
Format: Comic book
Price: $2.95
Website: deadeyesopen.com
It's funny, there are any number of zombie stories on the market right now, but I'm surprised at how many new spins and interesting takes there are on what seems a straightforward and potentially easily-tapped out subgenre of horror. Dead Eyes Open #1 is another intriguing take on the zombie mythos, and like Speakeasy's The Hunger, it explores things from the point-of-view of the zombie. However, the lead zombie in Dead Eyes Open is a little different, not a mindless brain-eater but a psychiatrist, a sensitive husband and father whose return from the dead has brought with it a number of complications, from the fear his daughter has of his new, smelly form to the patients who are getting wise to something different to the government task force hunting down and destroying these "mockeries of life." Yep, that's right, Dead Eyes Open encourages you to root for the zombie, and you know what? It works. Dr. John Requin is a likable, everyday guy suddenly tossed into a bizarre situation way out of his depth, and Shepherd and Boney keep the poor guy rocketing along in this issue as his life completely derails and, on the final page, he finds himself falling in with... well, that would be telling, but it's another situation with a lot of promise. Some may not enjoy Boney's artwork, which is inked a little heavily and has a fairly simple, blocky and straightforward way with character design and backdrops, but I find his style pretty likable and his storytelling impeccable. Certainly a bit more distinction between zombies and the regular folks (due, I would guess, to the heavy ink job) would have been nice, but the overall flow of the story and emotions that John finds himself feeling are conveyed very well. Dead Eyes Open is a promising new series that turns the zombie genre on its head and shakes out not braaiiiins but a fresh and fascinating premise.
SHAUN OF THE DEAD #1
by Chris Ryall & Zach Howard (IDW Publishing)
Format: Comic book
Price: $3.99
Website: www.idwpublishing.com
Credit Chris Ryall with some brass balls, because for his first comic book writing project, he chose to adapt a beloved romantic comedy zombie film, thus presenting himself with a number of potential pitfalls. First, adaptations of other-media tend to suck, as it's next to impossible to capture the magic in the comics medium, especially if the film used its medium as well as Shaun did. Second, when folks have an attachment to a beloved cult property, if you screw it up, you're going to hear about it louder than usual. In fact, though, Ryall and Howard have crafted a pretty solid comic book in Shaun of the Dead #1. They capture the trickier elements of the humor and story in comic book form, and there's a pretty good sense of the story and the tone in this comic book translation. The trick is, it's still vastly inferior to the movie, and doesn't really bring anything new to the table by being translated into the comic medium. The jokes are still there, and Howard and Ryall even nail some of the subtleties of the humor, which isn't easy, but they're the same jokes, and the same subtleties, without the performances of the talented Shaun cast to give them the same spark of life. Which is to say, Shaun of the Dead #1 is as good an adaptation as could have been done to bring the original story to comics, but I would have much preferred to see new stories using these characters and their world, especially since Ryall, Howard and the rest seem to have such a grasp on the tone and style of Shaun. And of course, if IDW were to publish a comic with the further exploits of the Spaced characters with this skill, that would earn them my devotion forever.
SHUCK THE SULFURSTAR #1
by Rick Smith & Tania Menesse (Sulfurstar)
Format: Comic book
Price: $2.95
Website: www.sulfurstar.com
Truth to tell, I expected if we ever saw Rick Smith's Shuck back, it would be in a graphic novel from Top Shelf, but here it is, the first issue in a new 12-issue bimonthly miniseries. For this new story, Smith has gone back to the beginning, when the demon Shuck first retired from the business of collecting souls and was about the business of finding a place to spend his retirement. Smith shows us the first "meeting" of Shuck and his friend Thursday, as well as showing how Shuck came to adopt the mask of a kindly old man and find his way into the town of Thicket. It's got all the charm and the unusual phonetic dialogue of the original, and the artwork is as effective as I remember it as well. If you've never read Shuck, you've never experienced Smith's unusual dialogue style, where "late" becomes "laterly" and a passing motorist, upon spying a lightshow in the air, tells Shuck he's "gonkfer a lonker look!" It seems a little impenetrable at first, but after a few pages, the reader is absorbed into the unique charms of this storytelling choice, and indeed it's a key element of Shuck's strange, country charm. An effective mix of charming ruralism and imaginative supernatural elements, Shuck the Sulfurstar remains a unique book in this market.
Jetta is a potentially interesting tale that can't quite decide what it wants to be. Feudal epic, superhero story, martial arts spectacular or slice-of-life romance tale? One could call Jetta multi-faceted, but my impression was more that it had a splintered focus, and while there are any number of potentially fascinating directions in which the story could go, it's trying to go in too many at once. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy Jetta at all, as the Wades deliver some solid action sequences, a few memorable characters and a backstory that is overly complex but certainly interesting, it's just that there's way too much going on here and not all of it fits easily together.
If you were filing Max Hamm in a bookstore or a library, you might want to fit it smewhere between The Big Sleep and a Little Golden Book. Cammuso's charming, beautiful and often very funny tale of a pig P.I. working cases in a fractured fairy tale world is a perfect blend of the worlds of Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm and Ryamond Chandler, with maybe a little Tex Avery thrown in there for good measure. The mysteries, especially the one that comes from the collection of the three-part "The Long Ever After" miniseries, are complex, the elements that make up this book a stew of various influences, but the appeal of Max Hamm is quite simple: Beautiful art and great writing.
Video #1-5 is a story of religion and prophecy, told from the point of view of young twenty-somethings who have more to do with these enormous events of religious significance than it might at first appear. Buell's tale weaves the notions of friendship and love in with the worries of parenthood and the troubles with religion and lays it all out in a style that is part big budget summer movie and part low budget indie talker. The story starts out being about one thing, the coming Rapture, and ends up being something quite different, albeit something that was kicked off by the events of the first issue. It makes for pretty compelling reading, and is worth a look for anyone interested in speculative fiction or just some strong slice-of-life type writing with a stressed-out life as the backdrop.
It's hard to review Video without giving away some of the big twists, because a lot of what really was interesting about the book doesn't really make itself known until two or three issues in. This could be considered a pacing problem, except that each issue does offer up something important or interesting, from the impending doom feeling that's built up by the slow burn first issue or the scrounging for survival that turns tragic in the second. The story really gets going at the end of the second issue, however, when a truth is revealed about Jesse that will drive the last three issues. The story becomes much less about a world facing an apocalyptic event and more about a couple of people dealing with their pasts and how it will affect their future.
Though I was a huge fan of the Angel TV show, I don't tend to follow the ancillary tie-ins like novels or comics. Just not my thing, in general. That's me, though, and there is a big market for these tie-in comics, especially when the shows themselves are gone and the fans are still looking for more stories. IDW is off to a good start with their take on Angel, as Buffy/Angel novel writer (amongst other credits) Mariotte kicks off a story about Angel that takes place during his time with Wolfram & Hart and has the light, jokey dialogue and solid action of the Buffyverse married to a pretty decent premise. Namely, Angel wants to get rid of the curse that granted him a soul, or at least the part that prevents him from getting a little nookie from time to time. Mariotte spins this motivation and the story of the curse out pretty well, presenting it as Angel wanting to have a real relationship rather than just wanting some cheap sex, and uses it as the jumping-off point to pit modern-day good guy vampire Angel against a cadre of old world foreign vampires in Romania. David Messina's artwork is solid as well, and though the coloring is a bit overwhelming and heavy when a lighter touch was called for, the panel to panel storytelling is strong. If you're not already an Angel fan, The Curse isn't likely to win you over, but if you're one of the many Angel fans who wants more stories of this character, The Curse might be worth your time.
A hot girl in a typically scanty superhero uniform, wielding darkness powers, spinning out of the pages of Shadowhawk? All the ingredients were there for Blacklight to be, as we politely put it in the reviewing biz, "not my thing." To my surprise, however, the Shadowhawk connection is really tangential, tied in only to the origin which took place prior to the first page, and instead this is an unusual story of a new superheroine who doesn't fit into the superheroine mold. Her life takes place in small-town America, her new flight powers clash with her agoraphobia and she's a superhero groupie whose powers suddenly put her into the position to live out her fantasies. OK, that last part has maybe been done before, but since this first issue mostly delves into the daily life of Lina Juarez pre-powers, where she goes from here certainly has room to be done with as much originality as Wherle brings to her "origin" issue. Will she head out for the big city and try to join a superteam? Fight crime in her small town, which should amount to little more than stopping a drug gang she has more involvement with than she knows? There's potential to be found in the answer to the question of "what's next." In addition to strong writing, Blacklight features some pretty impressive artwork from John Toledo and Marc Deering. It's early work from relatively new artists, and does suffer occasionally from minor inconsistencies in the face and body shapes of the characters, not to mention an unusual fascination that Toledo seems to have with putting the "camera" at odd angles, but the anatomical basics are all there, and the design for the Blacklight identity is a really good one. A little bit of lightening up on the coloring by Kanila Tripp and the natural growth of these artists the more they work, and the art here will really be something to talk about. I'll be honest, Blacklight didn't blow me away as shocking and new the way that books like Runaways, Livewires and Invincible did, but it's an intriguing take on a new superhero that has potential to be something really special.
I've really enjoyed the previous work of McKenney and Geary together (on Blanche Goes to Paris) and separately (on The Magic If and the Treasury of Victorian Murder series, respectively), so I looked to The Brontes with some enthusiasm. However, while Geary's beautiful woodcut-style artwork is solid as ever, The Brontes doesn't really stand alone as well as I'd like. McKenney introduces a number of young characters, many of whom are hard to distinguish from one another, and jumps around a bit in time so that the premise of the book really isn't revealed until the last few pages. Most of the story is given over to the deaths of characters the reader doesn't know and doesn't have any particular reason to care about, and it feels like McKenney didn't make the best use of the limited space in this first issue. The last eight pages of the book are where the story really begins, as a group of 19th century children find their way into a magical land, but just as the story is starting, it ends on a cliffhanger, without ever really introducing us to the characters enough that we're hooked into the dire potential of that cliffhanger. Based on my past experience with these creators, I'm sure that The Brontes will be an enjoyable read when all is said and done, but as a first issue, this one is a bit weak in the knees.
From reading Convention Confessional, it looks like Reilly and Walters might just consider comic book conventions to be the ninth circle of Hell. There are a variety of anecdoates here about the frustration of trying to sell small press books to an uncaring market that occasionally verge on the funny, but mostly come off as depressingly true. Certainly I have sympathy for some of the unfair things that happen to these guys, but there's a "woe is me" tone throughout Convention Confessional that I found rather off-putting. Rather than holding themselves up as objects of ridicule as well, Reilly and Walters focus is to paint everyone else they run into as idiots, self-important jerks or prudes. They're not always wrong, but neither are they always right, and this one-sided approach makes the whole thing seem more mean-spirited and bitter than funny. Which is not to say there isn't fun to be had, as there are some amusing moments (the truth of people laughing at signs and then not buying anything is all too common in comics retail as well), but mostly it's a bit too on the nose for me to find funny. Instead it's sort of a depressing "tell-all" about the frustration of working the small press side of the convention circuit, which I can't help but think is aimed at the rather narrow market of other small press cartoonists.
It's funny, there are any number of zombie stories on the market right now, but I'm surprised at how many new spins and interesting takes there are on what seems a straightforward and potentially easily-tapped out subgenre of horror. Dead Eyes Open #1 is another intriguing take on the zombie mythos, and like Speakeasy's The Hunger, it explores things from the point-of-view of the zombie. However, the lead zombie in Dead Eyes Open is a little different, not a mindless brain-eater but a psychiatrist, a sensitive husband and father whose return from the dead has brought with it a number of complications, from the fear his daughter has of his new, smelly form to the patients who are getting wise to something different to the government task force hunting down and destroying these "mockeries of life." Yep, that's right, Dead Eyes Open encourages you to root for the zombie, and you know what? It works. Dr. John Requin is a likable, everyday guy suddenly tossed into a bizarre situation way out of his depth, and Shepherd and Boney keep the poor guy rocketing along in this issue as his life completely derails and, on the final page, he finds himself falling in with... well, that would be telling, but it's another situation with a lot of promise. Some may not enjoy Boney's artwork, which is inked a little heavily and has a fairly simple, blocky and straightforward way with character design and backdrops, but I find his style pretty likable and his storytelling impeccable. Certainly a bit more distinction between zombies and the regular folks (due, I would guess, to the heavy ink job) would have been nice, but the overall flow of the story and emotions that John finds himself feeling are conveyed very well. Dead Eyes Open is a promising new series that turns the zombie genre on its head and shakes out not braaiiiins but a fresh and fascinating premise.
Credit Chris Ryall with some brass balls, because for his first comic book writing project, he chose to adapt a beloved romantic comedy zombie film, thus presenting himself with a number of potential pitfalls. First, adaptations of other-media tend to suck, as it's next to impossible to capture the magic in the comics medium, especially if the film used its medium as well as Shaun did. Second, when folks have an attachment to a beloved cult property, if you screw it up, you're going to hear about it louder than usual. In fact, though, Ryall and Howard have crafted a pretty solid comic book in Shaun of the Dead #1. They capture the trickier elements of the humor and story in comic book form, and there's a pretty good sense of the story and the tone in this comic book translation. The trick is, it's still vastly inferior to the movie, and doesn't really bring anything new to the table by being translated into the comic medium. The jokes are still there, and Howard and Ryall even nail some of the subtleties of the humor, which isn't easy, but they're the same jokes, and the same subtleties, without the performances of the talented Shaun cast to give them the same spark of life. Which is to say, Shaun of the Dead #1 is as good an adaptation as could have been done to bring the original story to comics, but I would have much preferred to see new stories using these characters and their world, especially since Ryall, Howard and the rest seem to have such a grasp on the tone and style of Shaun. And of course, if IDW were to publish a comic with the further exploits of the Spaced characters with this skill, that would earn them my devotion forever.
Truth to tell, I expected if we ever saw Rick Smith's Shuck back, it would be in a graphic novel from Top Shelf, but here it is, the first issue in a new 12-issue bimonthly miniseries. For this new story, Smith has gone back to the beginning, when the demon Shuck first retired from the business of collecting souls and was about the business of finding a place to spend his retirement. Smith shows us the first "meeting" of Shuck and his friend Thursday, as well as showing how Shuck came to adopt the mask of a kindly old man and find his way into the town of Thicket. It's got all the charm and the unusual phonetic dialogue of the original, and the artwork is as effective as I remember it as well. If you've never read Shuck, you've never experienced Smith's unusual dialogue style, where "late" becomes "laterly" and a passing motorist, upon spying a lightshow in the air, tells Shuck he's "gonkfer a lonker look!" It seems a little impenetrable at first, but after a few pages, the reader is absorbed into the unique charms of this storytelling choice, and indeed it's a key element of Shuck's strange, country charm. An effective mix of charming ruralism and imaginative supernatural elements, Shuck the Sulfurstar remains a unique book in this market.
