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Snapshots for 8/3/05
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.
 Atheist #1 was no fluke, the book really is that damn good. In this issue, doubting cynic Antoine and his lovely NCIS partner visit a man whose body is made up entirely of living cancer to find out what's going on with the plague of ghosts taking over the bodies of the young. If that sounds like something out of Global Frequency, you're not far wrong, as Hester's approach to The Atheist does indeed read a lot like Ellis's strongest work, only without lapsing into the predictable tropes that Ellis all too often falls into these days. The Atheist has a lot of the same dark sense of humor and fascination with the weird edges of science and the supernatural exhibited in Ellis's work, but the characterization is also a bit stronger, the characters a little more human and likable, and there's as much attention given to plot and suspense as to exploration of the wild ideas. Atheist is full of big ideas and has art perfectly matched to Hester's "just this side of the real world" tone. Think of it as "X-Files done right" if you need a shortcut, but however you think of it, pick it up, as it might be my favorite new ongoing series this year.
BATTLE POPE #1
by Robert Kirkman & Tony Moore (Image Comics)
 Though many had their first exposure to Kirkman's work with Invincible and The Walking Dead, I knew the guy's name before that from a ridiculously fun and perhaps borderline blasphemous book called Battle Pope. Now that he's made it big at Image and Marvel, Kirkman is not only owning up to the early comics roots he shared with Tony Moore, he's actually republishing them, with new color by Val Staples, so that his wider audience might get a taste of that early stuff. It's a bold move, especially given the comparatively rough craft that Kirkman and Moore have on Battle Pope when you set it next to Walking Dead, but it's a good move, because Battle Pope, whether in its original black and white or decorated with Staples' colors, is still a really fun book. The Pope's attitudes towards casual sex, booze and violence make for a fun contrast with his religious role and costume, and there's a similar "street level" approach to the other characters in the book, who include Lucifer, Saint Michael, God and, in Kirkman and Moore's most inspired bit, Jesus as a gun-toting sidekick with the awareness level of your average doped-up surfer. The pages are full of cute gags, like Jesus's "What Would I Do?" t-shirt or the Pope's "Come get a peace (embodied by the peace symbol") thong, but really, the big selling point is that Kirkman and Moore give off a vibe of knowing that this is potentially offensive but not caring because it's just kind of funny. I'm a bad judge of this kind of thing, but I don't think Battle Pope actually is the kind of thing that would offend your average Christian (Catholic or otherwise), because it's done in the spirit of parody and good fun, rather than as an attack on any Christian values or institutions. Maybe not for those who have no sense of humor about their religion, but lots of fun for the rest of us.
BODY BAGS: FATHER'S DAY #1
by Jason Pearson & Jason Martin (Image Comics)
 Body Bags is unrepentantly nasty and violent, and there really aren't any good guys to root for, just bad guys and worse guys. Despite that, I found it to be kind of fun in the way that '70s grindhouse fare can be fun, as a visually appealing orgy of violence and badassery. You get a taste of what the series is going to be about when, five pages in, the protagonist of the piece shoves a knife into a rival's pregnant wife, deliberately killing her baby as an interrogation technique in. A few pages later, his daughter, the other protagonist, reveals herself as someone with a violent temper and proclivity for violence as well. Like I said, not a lot of sympathy for the "good guys" in this book, but Pearson's over-the-top violence is damn entertaining to watch and beautiful to look at. Clownface, one of his heroes, can "throw a knife at a velocity that makes its impact like a mortar round," and that makes for some entertaining explosive action sequences, and is plenty of fun despite the patently ridiculous nature of that kind of training. That's actually a pretty good overview of Body Bags as a whole. It's willfully ridiculous and over-the-top, from the bulked-up Clownface to the sexed up fetish cheerleader costume his daughter wears to the copious amounts of blood, beatings and mutilation, but if you're in the mood for that kind of thing, it's actually done pretty well.
FEAR AGENT PREVIEW
by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, Cory Walker & Sean Parsons (Image Comics)
 This preview, available at some of the summer conventions, features 6 pages of issue #1 and 6 pages of issue #6 of the monthly Fear Agent series. In those twelve pages, it contains four scenes of alien dudes getting clobbered, a couple more of alien dudes getting blasted with freeze rays, two different aliens with their brains exposed inside glass domes and two big cliffhangers. If the preview is any indication, Fear Agent is going to be as action-packed as Remender promises, and as true to the spirit of Wally Wood sci-fi as he's hoping as well. Moore just continues to get stronger and stronger with each project, and his work here, with inker Sean Parsons, is on par with his best Walking Dead work, while Cory Walker is miles beyond his impressive Invincible work. The exposition is a bit on the short side, but the basic concept (slightly redneck human troubleshooter busts up alien beasties) is plenty clear, and the action and imagination is there in full force. Fear Agent Preview does its job well in terms of priming my interest for the Fear Agent series.
 Freshmen #1 comes from a neat idea, has solid artwork and even has some pretty decent moment-to-moment writing, but it commits the all-too-common sin of presenting a first issue where nothing... seems... to... happen. Sterbakov spends the entire first issue setting up his characters, but they never get much beyond stereotypes even with all this attention (the bickering couple, the Amish guy who is comically amused by technology, the superhero geek, the computer geek, etc.) and the end result is that we spend about twenty pages with a bunch of college students who don't entirely ring true (more like the movie version of college than real life) and two pages on the more interesting notion of their unusual powers. The Top Cow Triple Play preview, which introduced the powers but not the context, was a better-paced intro to these characters, and while I'm curious to see if Sterbakov will pick up the pace now that he's done all this establishing work, the characterization and writing is going to have to get either a lot funnier or offer a lot more verisimilitude if its going to compete in a crowded superhero market. Seth Green's name as co-creator will take you only so far, and the book has to deliver once the curiosity factor has drawn in the reader. So far, The Freshmen has nothing new to offer.
 2005 is looking like a great year for Rick Remender. Sea of Red (also with artist Kieron Dwyer) started off strong, Fear Agent looks great and Night Mary, his newest book from IDW Publishing, is quite promising as well. The story starts off in sort of a weird place, an Alice in Wonderland style world where a woman named Mary tries to help a woman named Jill overcome a murderous Big Bad Wolf and Three Pigs, but the truth is quickly revealed: It's a dream. But not in a cheesy, cliche way, because in the world of Night Mary, dreams have consequences in the real world, including a previous patient of Mary and her father's dream intrusion therapy who committed murder/suicide and has left quite the psychological mark on Mary. As the exposition spools out naturally, Dwyer provides plenty of haunting imagery in a beautiful blue and red duotone wash coloring style, until the truth of these murders and their potential recurrence starts to unveil another piece of the mystery to Mary and to the reader. Night Mary is a pretty intriguing suspense offering, and while true scares can be tough in comics, a combination of shocking moments and evocative images will leave an impression on most readers akin to an effective suspense/horror film.
 Most of this issue is a "best of" look at 16 of Kurtz's PVP strips, but before you cry "ripoff," be aware that this book is 50 cents and aimed at new readers, and so really, there's nothing wrong with that, especially when Kurtz really did select some of his best work for the strips included. However, regular readers of PVP are rewarded in PVP #0 as well, not just because Kurtz cleverly tweaks TV clip show conventions with his two-page bookend story, but because the book features a five page "Secret Origin of Skull" that is a welcome glance back into the early days of PVP magazine as well as a very cute (and hell, even touching) look at why Skull lurks around the PVP offices. I've said before that I like when Kurtz works in non strip format, and while the strips contained herein show why I continue to read PVP in its daily strip format, the short Skull story is a good example of what Kurtz can do when he works in a more traditional comics format, and I think its one of the best stories he's done, making this more than worth the two quarters it'll cost even for PVP fans who already have the rest of the material in the book.
 Western Tales of Terror goes out with a bang, and while I'm sorry that the series ends with issue five, I can't say that I'm disappointed with the notion of going out on a high note. It's almost forty pages long, and it features contributions from Tom Mandrake, Steve Niles, Tony Moore, Scott Mills, Jason Rand, Juan Ferreyra and of course editor in chief Joshua Hale Fialkov. Mandrake's "The Devil's Gate" is a great tale of post-Civil War witchcraft and insanity with the usual evocative artwork you expect from him. Rand and Ferreyra, creators of Small Gods, turn in "The Tale of Chili Pete," a fascinating story of a search for a magic chili recipe that is essentially a long setup for a weirdly off-kilter punchline, but while the ending left me a little cold, the rest of the story is the perfect weird old west tale. There was a similar disconnect for me in Niles and Mills' work on "Gold Miners' Slaughter," a zombie tale that was an odd fit for Mills' geometric shape-based style, but I liked the tale, even if I think that Mills would have been served better on another story and the story with another artist. "Know When to Hold 'Em" by Matty Field, Tony Moore, Nate Bellegarde and Jacob Baake is, like "Chili Pete," a long story setup for a punchline, but it's got gorgeous art and a nice tense poker sequence. "Six Shots" by Jason Rodriguez and Marco Magallanes and "The Wind" by Joseph Gauthier & R.H. Aidley are both quick and dirty horror pieces that get their point and get out, and while they may not have the punch of a longer story, they're a good example of how to tell good stories in short form. On the flipside of the coin, Fialkov finishes up another multi-part story with a miner facing down a dragon and it's as enjoyable as his previous tale of Indian zombies. Like all anthologies, Western Tales of Terror has featured some hit and miss storytelling, but there was at least one gem in every issue, and there were rarely any stories that out and out disappointed. Happy trails to you, Western Tales, and hopefully we'll see you again someday.
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