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SPOTLIGHT ON MORE FIRST ISSUES
Time for another regular feature of Snap Judgments of late, a round-up of new, recent and upcoming first issues. This time out, the focus is on upcoming series from Devil's Due Press and Image's Desperado Publishing as well as new books from Moonstone Books, Dark Horse and several indy creators. Oh, and if you want to look for further information on any of these books, I've put links to the publisher websites with each publisher name.
 Those comic fans who know Scalera's name probably remember him from his humorous writing on books like Deadpool or his time at Wizard magazine. 7 Days to Fame, however, is something a little bit different. It starts from a twisted, morbid premise, a reality show where contestants tell their life story on TV before ending it in suicide, and from that premise, Scalera draws not a black comedy but an interesting story of a producer and star of a struggling late night talk show and what happens when a chance suicide inspires one of them into a different style of show-making. Scalera's characters read as pretty real, and if some of the comedic moments feel forced (like the overly goofy, cliched moment in the elevator), the actual character interaction surely doesn't. It would have been easy to write Marc, the star of "Overnight Live," as an opportunistic weasel, but instead he comes through as genuinely sympathetic despite the questionable practice he decides to invest in to keep his show going. Likewise, Mrs. Wentworth reads like a strong, interesting woman, and it's very easy to believe the transformation of "Overnight Live" into destination entertainment for some viewers, and I like that Scalera doesn't just leap into the suicide element of the story, instead playing it out in a more real way. We haven't seen the ultimate result of this story yet, but I can absolutely see a small TV show like this going down in exactly this way.
7 Days to Fame is not a comedy or parody of reality TV, as I had originally guessed. It's a darker story, some might even go so far as to call it morbid. The opening suicide, and the reason behind it, is so depressing that I had a little trouble getting past it, but it's very effective as something that might shock Marc into his idea. A lot of the office politics feel a little bit forced in, from the run-in with the boss to the aforementioned elevator incident to the less-than-convincing dialogue of comic relief production guy Ty, but when Scalera is digging into the meat of the story, the quiet connection between Mrs. Wentworth, Marc and his audience, the book is very effective.
Nick Diaz, John Statema and Wilson Ramos turn in an art performance that is solid enough to do the job, if not overly flashy. The characters are somewhat limited in their expressions, but there's enough there to get the general idea across, and Diaz's staging is effective enough to convey the shocking moments of death in the issue. 7 Days to Fame is something unusual, a different kind of premise that starts off on a very intriguing note.
 I still remember watching Aeon Flux on MTV's Liquid Television and being enthralled by the unique look and the bizarre occurences despite having no idea at all what was actually going on. Now, someone has actually decided to make a movie and a comic based on this borderline nonsensical world, and while the jury is still out on the movie, the comic captures a lot of what made Aeon Flux work (that's good) and much of what didn't as well (that's bad). To wit, Aeon Flux #1 features a story that has a distinctive look thanks to the Euro-style art of Timothy Green II and some memorable visuals of Aeon engaging in sabotage, but I'll be damned if I can explain exactly what is going on. There's a city of blissful civility surrounded by a garden that is trying to overtake it, and a rebel operative who interferes with... something involving fliers, and a group of sinister-looking bureaucrats who want to unleash a permanent defoliant, but the stakes, and the general nature of this world, are not at all clear. There's no context.
This all makes it hard to really care about the book or take sides, but I can't deny that the moment-to-moment stuff is kind of fun. Green and colorist Jackson really capture the anarchic spirit of the lead character, and the fight sequence as she attempts to escape from the flier factory has some great illusions of movement and action. The overall art style in general is the big success of the book, akin to the work of Travis Charest or Leinil Francis Yu, stylistic but with a completely different stylistic twist than the original Aeon Flux cartoons. At this point, I don't know entirely what's going on, and I think that Kennedy could have laid down the structure for the story more effectively, but perhaps as an ancillary tie-in to a movie that more fully explains the surroundings or a complete story the whole thing will work better.
 From a look at the cover of that first issue, you might guess that Belle Starr is a high action story of a sexy young cowgirl outlaw, but Belle Starr couldn't be further from that kind of thing. Instead, Belle Starr is the story of a young woman at the end of her outlaw days, telling her tale to a reporter and flashing back so that the reader can see some of the events that took place in her wilder days. Though there are plenty of violent sequences, this isn't an action book, but instead almost a morality play about the dangers of being an outlaw in the west. Ricketts presents Belle Starr as a contradiction, a wild woman who tried to do the right thing but more often than not was very wrong, and the inclusion of her son and daughter and their role in the story is shocking and effective.
Ricketts is accompanied on art by Steve Buccellato, best known for his coloring work elsewhere in the industry. There are occasions in the art where the characters' proportions seem a little strange, most notably with faces that elongate and appear rubbery, but in general, Buccellato's cartoony style serves the story pretty well. There are some especially effective moments when a teary Belle emerges from a house where she's been forced to gun down some of her own gang, or the flirtation between Belle and Jim Younger, and Buccellato does a nice job in conveying the rougher side of Belle alongside a visual that portrays her as a young, attractive and regular girl whose experiences have turned her into something else.
The story feels a little compressed in just two issues, and the resolution is a little bit on the uncertain side, but the overall effect of reading Belle Starr is to feel like you're getting a glimpse into the realer, rougher side of the post-Civil War west, with an unusual narrator to tell the tale. It's not Deadwood, lacking that stylization and the compelling characters of HBO's hit western, but there's a similarly dour and realistic take on the price paid for living on the frontier in the pages of Belle Starr. It all reads better as one story and probably would have been better served as an original graphic novel, given that the first issue feels very unfinished, but when read all together, Belle Starr offers up a gritty, effective tale of the outlaw life and the dire consequences of living it.
 When you're writing a book like Chronicles Of A Bounty Hunter, there's a fine line between the fine noir tradition and just a bunch of cliches. Chronicles Of A Bounty Hunter steps onto both sides of the line, although ultimately it lands in the territory of well-intentioned amateur comic more often than not. The art credits list Jason Embury as inker, but the artwork doesn't look heavily inked, instead mostly looking like tight pencil layouts, and Truesdale is clearly still learning how to use his space effectively. There's a full-page splash early on that shows an empty apartment, and it really comes across as a waste of storytelling space, especially when a full quarter of the page is basically just white space. Then there's the first appearance of corrupt D.A. Bastian McGowan, where a failed attempt at perspective makes him look about twelve feet tall. Truesdale's art seems to draw a lot of inspiration from the Image guys, including Jim Lee (on the more promising side) and Rob Liefeld (on the less promising side, and mostly notable in terms of perspective and overly exaggerated anatomy). There's some solid potential and some well done panels, but the overall effect is a little sketchy, light on the backgrounds in a lot of the work and featuring some questionable storytelling choices and anatomy.
The story, written by Ben Hooper, is a little bit more solid, although it has its failings as well. There's a strong emotional component in the longing of a discredited bounty hunter for his old life and his lost child, and when Hooper is writing the narration of Kincaid about what happened to his life, the book is at its most effective. Unfortunately, a lot of the narration and the plot is given over to noir-ish cliche, from the one good cop to the corrupt empowered D.A. and spoiled rich boy thief. The futuristic element of the story also seems a bit thrown in, as this could easily have been done in a more realistic modern setting rather than a fictional city, and probably would have gained a touch of verisimilitude from a more strongly researched real backdrop.
 The bar is set so high with the success of the Conan ongoing that these spin-off miniseries have a harder time than usual overcoming the "spin-off" stigma of being unnecessary cash-ins on a successful property. Conan and the Demons of Khitai is the strongest of the three spinoffs released thus far, exploring territories that won't be seen in the regular Conan book and delving into the "King Conan" era instead of the traveling rogue days that currently occupy the regular book. I've got some misgivings there as well, notably that this story may hinder Busiek and company if they do get to the King Conan days at some points, but they are minor misgivings, as this story seems relatively harmless in terms of continuity and certainly that day is a long ways away to be worrying about.
So, all the meta stuff about spinoffs and diluting the property and such aside, how is Conan and the Demons of Khitai? It's... OK. Yoshida and Lee serve up a very effective battle sequence with a nicely Eastern-flavored turtle/demon looking monster, and Lee certainly does a nice job on the exotic setting of Khitai and its various Asian influences. Yoshida doesn't quite capture the intelligence of Conan that Busiek has, portraying him as a little too quick to anger, a little lunk-headed, especially for a king who has experienced much in his time, but he's not portrayed as a complete idiot either. The ruse that brought him to Khitai is a believable one, and while the actual story is very much in the setup stages in this issue, I'm certainly interested in seeing where it goes from here.
The biggest difficulty that Demons of Khitai faces is in comparing it to the near perfectly paced ongoing Conan series, and it falls short on that score. A lot of pages are given over to the fight, and the culture of Khitai seems a little vanilla given the source material that Yoshida had to work with and the effectiveness with which Busiek has brought the lands of Cimmeria, Zamora, Hyperborea and more to life. That said, if you're a Conan fan who isn't getting enough of the character in the monthly book, or you're curious to see a story of the character's later days, it's worth checking into this first issue.
 Tim Seeley's B-movie (B-comic?) concept graduates from one-shot to miniseries, with Dave Crosland (of Puffed) handling the art chores, and the results are... well, pretty much the same. Hack/Slash is a great concept, pitting a tough teenaged girl and her monstrous sidekick Vlad against a variety of slasher foes, but I can't deny that there's a bit of repetition in the way it's being executed, and there's not really the kind of character growth I'd like to see to make the property really jump. That said, it still remains an absolute must-read for those who grew up on Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and the like, a clever twist on the concept that gives the slashers' victims something to bite back with.
Land of Lost Toys #1 does suffer a bit from the transition between one-shot and miniseries, because this issue does feel a tad padded, and I wonder, based on the first issue, if Seeley wasn't better off sticking with the one-shot format. This issue introduces the antagonist, and the setup is sort of long-winded for what is a pretty predictable twist on his origin. Despite that, however, it's a perfectly classic origin for a slasher, and Seeley has Cassie raise the interesting point of how she fights someone like that with her more physical powers, which should provide interesting fodder for future issues. The story feels at this point like something that could easily have fit in about half the space allotted, but hopefully the next two issues will redeem the miniseries format decision.
I've enjoyed the art on the previous Hack/Slash collaborations to one degree or another, but this was the first one that excited me, as I'm a big fan of Crosland's artwork elsewhere. The art doesn't disappoint, as Crosland's twisted sensibilities serve the project well in the slasher sequences, notably the "My Pretty Pony" takeoff in the opening pages that is just disturbing (and darkly humorous) and the closing slasher sequence that is suitably gory.
 My interest in Khan was piqued by the appearance of Don Hudson as artist, given how much I enjoyed his recent work on Gunpowder Girl & The Outlaw Squaw, and I was also intrigued to see Tom DeFalco's name popping up again in comics. Khan #1 is very much an old school comic, comparable in style to the Roy Thomas Conans, but that's certainly no bad thing, and if you enjoyed the Marvel Conan stories, it might be worth giving Khan #1 a look. DeFalco presents this true-life tale with a more epic, fantastic spin, and if his narrative captions are filled with a little bit of purple prose, at least it's a style that seems appropriate to the type of fantasy storytelling he's engaging in here. The copy editing on the book is somewhat amateurish, featuring a number of dropped letters or typoed words, the most egregious of which is when a raider threatens that Khan will be "separated from his skill" (it's meant to be skull), but it doesn't undercut the storytelling too much.
The big draw of Khan #1 is Don Hudson's artwork, which looks pretty strong in black and white. It's comparable to some of the work done by realistic artists like Butch Guice and Greg Land while they were at Crossgen, although it has a classical feel that's more comparable to John Buscema as well. The art is not as stunning in black and white as it would be with a good colorist or on the sepia-toned paper of Gunpowder Girl, but it's solid, classic artwork that really helps to sell the surroundings of Khan and his story.
 Though Oz and Wonderland have been public domain for some time, it seems that both have sparked in the minds of comics creators of late, with a number of Oz, Wonderland or both projects coming down the pike. The Looking Glass Wars: Hatter M is somewhat different, having spun off from a novel that Frank Beddor wrote, one that seems to posit a more militaristic land beyond the Looking Glass, with Alice as existing royalty rather than normal girl visiting. The actual content of the novel is somewhat irrelevant to those reading Hatter M, however, as the story is pretty accessible, and makes clear the important parts of the setting in both a text piece at the beginning of the book and in the comic story itself.
The tone of the book is odd, almost comedic at times but featuring a large amount of violence and a somewhat trippy premise. I think it may not be for traditional fans of the Alice in Wonderland saga, but more for fans of off-to-the-side-of-reality storytelling like The Maxx. Actually, it kind of reads like what The Maxx would have been like had it been done in the style of the movie The Last Boy Scout, if you can imagine that kind of bizarre pairing. The Hatter is a deadly soldier who makes his way through 19th century France, wielding blades with supernatural accuracy and trying to find his errant hat in what is a (hopefully intentionally) somewhat comedic throughline. The actual story doesn't make an emotional connection with me, but the wild ideas and supreme action skills of the Hatter are certainly entertaining.
Ben Templesmith is one of those "love him or hate him" artists, and I fall into both camps, depending on the project. His work here is closer to the work he's done on Fell, which means I generally like it, but I do think that Hatter M would have been a stronger project if it had featured someone who made the story a touch clearer. Some elements of the story, including the Hatter's emergence from a puddle on the street or the exact nature of his blades and his hat, are obscured by Templesmith's moody, gothic storytelling style, although there can be no denying that this style does perfectly fit the project in general. Basically, if you're enjoying Templesmith's work on Fell, you'll probably like it here, although he doesn't seem as perfectly suited to Hatter M as he does to Fell.
 One of the downsides of reading as many comics as I do is that even the most original of concepts is something I've probably encountered elsewhere. Take Lost Squad, about a World War II squadron specializing in the supernatural, which has some similarities to DC's excellent Light Brigade miniseries. Where Light Brigade was more like Band of Brothers, however, Lost Squad is closer in tone to Raiders of the Lost Ark and owes an acknowledged debt to the war comics of Kubert, Kanigher and Goodwin. The characters at this point are a tad sketchy and cliched (the crazy sergeant, the kid from rural America, the stuffy commanding officer, etc.), the story and its resolution a bit on the cliched side as well, but there's certainly enough of a solid skeleton upon which to hang more interesting tales. Robinson provides black and white artwork that has a nice, clear, midly cartoony style, kind of like Dave Crosland and Andy Kuhn, and the action sequences are certainly engaging. Lost Squad doesn't grab me right off the bat, but there's enough promise in what I see here to make me come back and see what else the creators have up their sleeves, now that they've established their premise and characters.
 It's always a joy to find something original in any medium, and Mr. Scootles is definitely an original story. Sure, the tale of a pair of college students who unwittingly find an object of supernatural import isn't unknown, but when that story is a reel of a lost cartoon character, and the other players involved in the plot thus far include a corrupt professor at the animation school and the animated character himself, well... that's a little more unique. Mr. Scootles #1 introduces a lost cartoon character suffering in cartoon limbo, and links to a story about a stolen film reel that may serve as a gateway to hell. It's too early in the story to know exactly how all of these things might pay off, but Noel succeeds in giving the book a spooky, haunted feel despite the cutesy nature of the art and the mcguffin. Noel's character interactions ring true, especially between his two lead characters Jason and Kelly, and his artwork is terrific, a solid cartoony style that nevertheless succeeds in conveying the more frightening and grisly aspects of the story. Definitely bears watching.
 Despite having read some of the "Expanded Universe" novels and comics before, I've never read any of the well-regarded Rogue Squadron stories, following a squadron of Rebel pilots headed up by popular supporting character Wedge Antilles, so I can't say how this compares to those prior tales. I can say that Blackman builds up a decent cast of characters made up of a couple familiar faces and a handful of newer ones, and tells a story that takes place in the immediate mop-up after Return of the Jedi, which is a promising post-Empire storytelling period. The only problem is, with both Wedge and Luke on mission, the consequences become a little bit preordained, and I'm more intrigued by a cast-off line about the military action to retake the Imperial throneworld of Coruscant than the story of a ragtag group of fighter pilots heading into Corellia on a less-specific mission.
While the overall plot leaves me a little bit bored, however, the moment-to-moment storytelling is pretty good. Giorello and colorist Atiyeh serve up some lush panels of Endor, including an amusingly designed giant monster for a couple of the Rogue squadron members to fight, and the space scenes are equally impressive. Giorello's ability with the larger frontiers of the setting make me wish that the story itself was more involved in the spaceflight aspects of the universe, rather than a somewhat plodding story about wandering through a city on a vaguely defined mission.
 Phil Hester has done it again. Hester wowed me with his suspenseful, imaginative horror tales in The Coffin and Deep Sleeper and his teen superhero/monster story Firebreather, and with Stronghold, he serves up a story of superhuman abilities, secret societies and the nature of good and evil that is reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. Hester sets the reader up with a mystery, sparked by a single superhuman event, and then widens the story to include more conspiracy elements and a deadly, despicable adversary. Despite the clear evil of the adversary, Hester leaves some questions about the nature of the story, wondering whether "The Stronghold" is a force for good, a delusional cult, a corrupted secret society or maybe all of these things, and letting the reader wonder about the nature of Michael Grey, the lead character, and the nature of his abilities.
Tyler Walpole's art on Stronghold is a photorealistic grayscale approach similar to the work done on Image's Small Gods, and he's equally adept with the real world aspects of the story and the more science-fiction aspects. His vision of the Stronghold remind me of John Byrne's sterile, ornamental Krypton, and his vision of stylized urban squalor is reminiscent of the design on The Wachowski's Matrix films, which fits, given that Stronghold's layered reality and "everything you know is wrong" nature has some elements in common with The Matrix.
Hester's moment-to-moment writing elevates a good concept to great levels. Michael's halting, uncertain conversation with his doctor about his birthday, or the narrative captions describing his realization about some of his abilities, give us a sense of the fog that Michael lives in. Meanwhile, Claire's respectful yet rebellious interaction with her mother and the leader of The Stronghold tells us everything we need to know about her character and those around her as well. Stronghold draws a lot of strength from its concept, but it is the excellent character work and intriguing development of its mysteries that turn it from potentially interesting to must-reading.
 It was the name Justin Gray, plus that gorgeous Kalman Andrasofszky cover, that drew my attention to Vengeance of The Mummy, even though a monster title from Moonstone didn't hold any intrinsic interest for me. As it turns out, Vengeance of The Mummy has more in common with Sam Raimi than Boris Karloff, a modern tale of "nanotech bandages" that bring a vengeful anti-heroine back to life when a mad scientist kills her and her fiancee. Gray's tale starts off with a solid action sequence rendered by Zeu that shows off the Mummy's regenerative abilities and superhuman agility and strength, and then flashes back to her origins in a secret research project, with a little sidetrip for the tabloid reporter chasing down reports of "the urban mummy." It's a fairly standard superhero structure, and it makes for pretty interesting reading if you like that kind of thing. The relationships between the three scientists are exaggerated for dramatic effect but believable at their base, and the escalation from jealousy to murder to atrocity is pretty believable as well. Zeu's artwork is also pretty solid, like a rougher version of Terry Dodson's work, and he is especially good with the action and the violent scenes that drive a lot of the story. I'd call Vengeance of The Mummy a modern pulp, and would definitely recommend it to fans of Raimi's Darkman especially.
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