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SPOTLIGHT ON FIRST ISSUES - NOVEMBER 2005
Originally, the first issue spotlight was my way of clearing out the inbox a little, and it was just one of several spotlight themes I put together. However, it's now become pretty clearly a regular feature, so you can expect these rundowns of recent first issues probably about once a month. This time out, I've got a treat for any fans still reading who are into more mainstream, as I'll be covering about five DC and Marvel books in amongst the books from Dark Horse, Devil's Due, Viper Comics and Harris Comics, among others. Some of these books are released this week, but most are probably anywhere from a week to a month old. Oh, and it's not reviewed in this column because I gave it an early review, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this week also sees the release of one of my favorite recent first issues, Local #1.
As always, 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.
 I go back and forth on whether or not I'm a fan of Kelley Jones. That's not so weird, I'm a bit up and down on a lot of books and creators these days, a sign of either my mercurial tastes, the variability of quality in the current meat-grinder of a market or maybe a bit of both. What's unusual with Kelley Jones is that I vacillate between loving his work and outright loathing it. Currently, I'm more or less in loathe mode, but always hoping to see the project that will remind me what I like about his exaggerated, grotesque anatomy and monstrous designs. The 13th Son isn't it, as it mostly highlights Jones's weaknesses, both as an artist and as a writer.
As a story concept, The 13th Son has a potentially interesting (if not altogether fresh) hook, the idea of a monster that hunts other monsters. However, Jones approaches the story from the most conventional of angles, and the result reads like warmed-over X-Files tale, with a curious reporter/novelist writing a book about the "13th Son" killing off a number of monsters across the country, as reported by normal people who witnessed the events. The story is thin, as we see basically the same events over and over again, with the only variance being the monster that is killed. As a result, there's not a lot of information imparted in the first issue, just the basics, which you can basically get from reading a solicitation or a one-line description of the concept.
This would be fine, if the moment-to-moment stuff were witty or exciting or unique in some way, but it's not. Jones is definitely better suited to monsters than to humans, but while I give him full marks for making his creatures distorted and grotesque, they're just not that interesting. Compare his work with someone like Eric Powell or Guy Davis, also both doing monsters for Dark Horse, and his work pales by comparison. The 13th Son, the key character of this book, is a dull visual design, a skull with one glowing eye, a tattered cape and wild, unruly hair that looks like a bargain basement kids' halloween costume. The backgrounds in the work are extremely lacking as well, and the action stiff, posed and dull. The weight of the storytelling falls on cool looking monster designs, but Jones's monsters are in the "seen one, seen 'em all" school as far as offering up anything interesting or unusual or cool in their appearances.
 My interest in Army of Darkness is very similar to the one I have with, say, Monty Python and Star Wars. I enjoyed the original properties, but the devotees frighten and terrify me. So I'm not really the target audience of a spinoff property, and I haven't really seen the original Re-Animator, the other half of this comic mash-up, though I do have a fondness for Lovecraftian fiction. What we've got here, though, is a treat for devoted fans of one or the other, mostly inaccessible or uninteresting to those with only a casual interest at best in the properties at hand.
I don't know the tone of Re-Animator, but from what I've heard and what I do know of Army of Darkness, I'd say this issue hews closer to the Sam Raimi-inspired Army of Darkness formula, emphasizing humor and bizarre grotesquerie more than creep factor or ominous portents. Writer Kuhoric throws into the mix with Ash an even more gung-ho would-be hero and his sexy, sassy sidekick. Not bad ideas, although Kuhoric falls down in making any of these characters legitimately funny, even on the cheesy, action hero level that Ash was in Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. It's all a bit too straight, a bit too rote, and given that the appeal of these films was a sort of off-kilter sensibility, it's a shame that the spinoff properties delve so easily into predictable formula.
What is less conventional is the artwork, provided by Sanford Greene and colorist Scott Kester. Greene's work is exaggerated and cartoony, similar to Skottie Young (New Warriors). It is occasionally a bit crowded for my tastes (the double-page splash of Ash recounting his adventures early on is damn near unreadable), but in general, it's a style that I like, and there's no doubt that Greene has nice comedic timing and a great design sense. What I do doubt is whether or not his work was the ideal choice for an Army of Darkness vs. Re-Animator book, because the scares are impossible with work this cartoony and the action can't reach the same grotesque or even humorously gross levels that the properties demand with this style attached to it.
 Another Batman miniseries? Seems like we get at least one new one each month these days, and most of them are terrible. Then again, most of them aren't written and drawn by Matt Wagner with colors by Dave Stewart. If they were, they might all be as good as the first issue of Batman: The Monster Men. Wagner weaves a tale of a businessman, a crime lord, a mad scientist and of course the Batman together into a compelling narrative. His version of Batman is more human than the modern-day interpretation, and indeed one of the main story points is a relationship between Bruce Wayne and a young woman that seems based on actual affection instead of just a desire to maintain a cover for his dual identity. Not to say that Wagner's Batman is wimpy in any way, though, as a pretty spectacular fight and interrogation sequence proves. Wagner balances the character between his more insane and dangerous side and his more intelligent and human one very well, presenting the most compelling Batman I've read in a while.
To be honest, though, the star of Batman: The Monster Men #1 really isn't Batman, even though he gets a fair amount of screen time. No, it's Hugo Strange, the villain of the piece, who really shines in this issue. From a nice fakeout sequence early on that introduces the character's inferiority complex to his performance at the cocktail party to his chilling final pages, Wagner carves out Strange as a dangerous adversary despite his physical shortcomings. There's a nice mixture here of '50s style monster movie and the "Year One" style crime narrative that has defined early Batman tales since Frank Miller originated it, and the tone of the book is quite promising.
While I was impressed with the story, however, the real standout point of this book is the artwork. Wagner always impresses, as does Stewart, and the two of them together are just as impressive as they were on Trinity. Wagner's characters have great character in their designs, from the diminutive Hugo Strange and his manservant Sanjay all the way to the lovely Julie Madison or Wagner's rendition of "Roman" Maroni, who just looks crooked and slimy at first glance. Then there's Wagner's staging and sense of style, which gives a real sense of speed and power to Batman's takedown of the Roman's thugs, a sense of pageantry to the ball or a clear moment of sheer terror on the closing pages of the book. This book is a visual treat, and Wagner and Stewart bring the tone of the book to life visually as much as Wagner does with his script.
 If you've been following the ABC series Invasion or checking out the Image book Girls, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you might want to give Black Harvest #1 a chance. Like Dead@17, Howard's previous property, Black Harvest draws some strong parallels to other work, but I have to say that I'm more interested in Black Harvest right off the bat then I was in Dead@17 at first. Howard sets up a situation that looks like an alien invasion story and gives it a bit of a supernatural twist, then adds in a bit of weird science, and the resulting mixture has me quite unsure as to what is going on, but curious to find out, which is really the ideal state of mind after finishing a first issue.
I can't help but be reminded of Girls, which also started off with a protagonist finding an attractive, seemingly amnesiac young woman in the road and discovering that she represents a malevolent force. However, these are really pretty surface similarities, and Black Harvest offers up a much different take on the mysterious woman as dangerous outsider story. Zaya's pre-existing status as a missing teen indicates that she's not just an alien or something along those lines, and her actions in the tail end of the book, combined with the two-page "control room" sequence, raise any number of fascinating questions. Is Black Harvest a tale of supernatural menace or superscientific, or some combination of both? I don't know yet, but I want to find out.
Howard's artwork has garnered a fair amount of attention, and for good reason. It draws comparison to the work of Michael Avon Oeming, with a stylized, cartoony look and very clear, clean storytelling. I must admit that I find it a bit annoying that all of Howard's women look identical, save for different clothes, eye colors and hair styles, but seeing Zaya's Aunt Elyse leads me to believe this is a deliberate stylistic choice rather than a failure on Howard's part. Howard also does nice staging, using empty scenery shots or point-of-view panels where you get a sense of someone watching the characters the way a good horror movie does, building up suspense nicely.
 While Howard has moved on to Black Harvest, Viper Comics is releasing a new Dead@17 miniseries by a new creative team. I'll be honest, despite having read two of the three Dead@17 miniseries, I still don't have a really good feeling for what the property is meant to represent, and Dead@17: Protectorate doesn't really clear it up a great deal either. The story features a flashback to the revolting angels being cast out of Heaven, a flashback to a murder in 1945 and the story of a young girl and her preacher father dealing with an outbreak of demonic undead and some kind of holy (or unholy) book. Lots of material, but I'm not clear on how it's all meant to connect or what it all means. However, the moment-to-moment storytelling, especially with Grace and her father, is very strong, and I'll be very interested in seeing if these creators can bring all these disparate threads together over the next issue or two.
It's clear that there's meant to be mystery at work in the pages of Protectorate #1, but Hamby may have gone a bit overboard in terms of mystery while skimping on interesting answers. The book is at its best when Hamby and the Halls are focused on a zombie and demon attack on Grace, the heroine of the book thus far. The Halls provide a truly creepy look for Grace's possessed father, and I really liked Grace's use as a tough protagonist but one whose general attitude and abilities are normal, driven by desperation and a willingness to fight rather than a tough-talking, collected action heroine. It's also worth noting that Hamby quickly establishes a believable rapport between Grace and her father so that the reader is invested in their relationship and cares about what happens to them in the ensuing pages. I'd have been happier to know a little bit more about her father's quest for the book and what it meant right off the bat rather than spending four pages on a "fall from grace" tale that doesn't seem to offer anything particularly new, but that might just be because the sequences with Grace were the best in the book in my opinion.
One of the draws of the original Dead@17 was Josh Howard's stylized artwork. However, Benjamin Hall provides strong artwork that shouldn't disappoint most fans, maintaining a sort of stylized look but one that is quite different from Howard's work. Instead of Howard's sharp-angled designs, Hall has a more rounded style, one that is especially good for the '50s-style beauty of Grace and, oddly enough, the deformed and disturbing demons and zombies.
 When Brian Wood looks into the future, we always get a somewhat dim view, predicated on the current political winds. Channel Zero predicted the erosion of free speech, and DMZ sees the growing rift between American extremists growing into an outright civil war. It's an astute bit of political speculation combined with a bent towards dramatic science-fiction, and combined with the work of co-artist Riccardo Burchielli, what we've got is an all too plausible and relatable tale of surviving a war when you're one of the many caught in the middle. It would be easy to write off Wood's DMZ as a liberal spun nightmare, but that simplistic spin would be completely wrong-headed, because DMZ isn't about the combatants on the right or the left, it's about the moderates trapped between two ideologies, neither of which they wholly agree with, and how much more dangerous it is when the culture war becomes a shooting war.
The really interesting thing about DMZ #1 is how it completely avoided my expectations. Wood does not spend a great deal of time exploring the central nature of the conflict between militias the U.S. government, or exploring the political ramifications or even connecting it deeply to the partisan ideologies of today. Because honestly, who's doing the fighting isn't really the point. The point is, what happens when something so familiar, like New York, becomes something so unfamiliar, the middle of a war zone that most of us are used to expecting as something overseas, something that those of us who aren't in the military will never have to learn about firsthand? That's why Wood's protagonist isn't a soldier or a hard-bitten militia man, but instead an intern photojournalist who also never expected to experience this kind of conflict firsthand. Matty is a great point of view character, and Wood does a fantastic job of portraying his confusion, anger and fear when tossed into a rapidly escalating and dangerous situation. Matt reacts the way most of us would, with a lot of obscenities and the immediate desire to get the hell back to somewhere safe. What makes him the hero of the piece is that he makes a deliberate choice not to seek that safety when push comes to shove, and it's clear from that last panel that Matt's journey, both personally and as part of the DMZ situation, has begun.
Matt's reactions give a clear audience entry-point into the world of DMZ, but the work of Wood, Burchielli and Cox on the wartorn Manhattan is what really drives the horror of this situation home. Any wartime situation is terrifying and horrible, but seeing outright miitary ambushes, torn up vehicles, battered buildings and the like on the streets of New York brings it all home, especially to those of us who still remember the uncertainty in the early days of 9-11, when it felt like it could be the start of the end of everything. Wood is a New Yorker who was there for 9-11, and it's clear that he's channelling a lot of those memories into giving DMZ its jolt of real life effectiveness. Together with Burchielli, he presents a vividly real urban environment, and I love the style that these two use, like a combination of The Losers' Jock and My Faith in Frankie's Sonny Liew, detailed and gritty and raw.
Vertigo is currently home to some of my favorite series, such as Fables, Losers and Y: The Last Man. The tail end of 2005 sees them launching four new ongoings, and that's exciting. It's even more exciting when they turn out to be as immediately gripping and engaging as DMZ #1.
 I'm a bit late in reviewing this one, but that might be just as well, as the critical consensus seems to be that it's great, and I'm gonna be the one pissin' in the punchbowl. Which is to say, I found Giant Monster to be... well... kinda OK. That cover is genius, and immediately spells out what the book is about, a giant monster book that isn't afraid to show all the gorey fallout a big monster stomping around is going to cause, but the book itself isn't quite as focused. Niles spends a fair amount of time on setup here, introducing characters and backstory that just seems irrelevant to such a deliberately B-movie premise, and so we get only scant amounts of giant monster stomping going on. When the giant monster is doing his gorey business, the book is a lot of fun, and Jones and Fotos really pull out all the stops in making the creepy, zombie-looking monster scary and bloody in his business, but most of the book is devoted to the general, the guys at NASA, the astronaut at the center of the monster, and it feels a bit unnecessary, especially when the book ends just as the really good stuff is going. It's kind of like the film burning out right when you get to the middle of a Godzilla flick. Basically, it seems like this should have been pared down of the subplot elements that aren't germane to the purity of the concept (as expressed on that cover) or the whole thing should have come out as one graphic novel rather than a two-issue story where all the really good stuff is probably going to happen in issue two.
In fairness, there's not a lot of giant monster rampaging in comics, so even a book that spends more than half its time on boring setup should be worth a look for those seeking this kind of entertainment, but I was really hoping for a purer jolt of giant monster entertainment than what Niles and company gave me here.
 I've long since learned that Brian Azzarello doesn't really write in a pace that benefits from the single issue. I love 100 Bullets, but the first issue didn't hook me immediately, for example. Loveless #1 has that same quality, with some hyper-stylized (and unnecessarily confusing) dialogue and a story that you have to read exceptionally carefully and more than once to really get, and it's not as strong as I think a first issue should be. That said, I have every expectation that Loveless will become a must-read once a few more issues roll out and the shape of the story becomes clearer. So I'm recommending Loveless #1 on faith and on the strength of some of the moments of the issue, despite what I think is a misfire in terms of using the serial format.
Azzarello seems reluctant to tell his readers what's going on, preferring to let them work it out on their own, and including such a degree of ambiguity that one can never be entirely certain about what is really going on. Thus, Loveless #1, wherein you can easily work out that the lead character is a stubborn, ornery Civil War veteran bitter about the loss of the south, but you might have a harder time figuring out why he gunned down his former comrades or exactly what he's planning on accomplishing with his loud, violent tear through his former hometown. For that matter, if you're like me, you'll probably have a hard time working out the deal about his wife Ruth and the related reveal on the last couple pages, which seems like obfuscation for no real good reason. And you might find yourself scratching your head at some of the stylized dialogue, with call and responses like "Somethin' in yer eye, Barsom?" "Besides nothin' I don't see every time I shave my face?" (what the hell?) or "Now 'less you don' mind the idea of yer friend here never havin' another one, you will remove your yankee self not jus' from my porch... but my land as well." (Another one what? A porch? Weird threat.)
However... while the flow of the story is anything but clear, and the dialogue sometimes maddeningly difficult to decipher as well as seeming wildly unrealistic, there can be no doubt that Azzarello continues to excel at building atmosphere. His lead character is a rough and tumble bastard and badass and the place he's returned to is in that strange gap between being lawless and having new laws and regulations. It's clear from the last panel that Wes Cutter is not out for the mundane revenge on a person or two that drives many westerns... he's still fighting a war that everyone else thinks is over.
The artwork by Frusin and Mulvihill seems at first glance very similar to Risso's work on 100 Bullets, but Frusin doesn't quite have Risso's impeccable storytelling chops. Azzarello's confusing script is matched with visuals that don't always clearly convey what's going on, and again, it's a question of atmosphere versus storytelling. Frusin excels at bringing the setting and the characters to life, but it's not always easy to tell them apart, and it's not always easy to read what their expressions mean. His characters are often dispassionate, not showing off their emotions at all, and while this may be an interesting character trait for some, when almost all of the characters have that same deadpan look, the story has a certain emotional flatness that makes it difficult to connect to. Really, if none of the characters appear to care overmuch, how can the reader be expected to?
 See book get buzz. See buzz book not sell. See buzz book get cancelled despite fan petitions. Rinse. Repeat. This has been the pattern for as long as I've been reading comics, but DC and Marvel seem to have gotten a new idea, the "second season," to try and capitalize on the buzz. Sometimes it works, as it did in boosting Runaways numbers, and I had hopes that the relaunch of She-Hulk would have a similar effect. I don't know what the sales effect would be, but I have to admit, the second first issue of this series didn't kick off as strongly as I'd like. There are some fun moments and a couple of really clever uses of Marvel continuity and pseudoscience in combination with the law that are the book's best asset, but a little too much continuity and some uncertainty with Bobillo's artwork made it a middling outing for me, where I was hoping for a home run.
It was, I suppose, inevitable that She-Hulk's involvement in the Avengers would lead to recent Avengers events being dragged into her book. Slott has danced around what happened to her during Geoff Johns's run and incorporated it pretty easily into his more easy-going and fun take on the character, but this issue he's called upon to introduce the grim events of "Disassembled," and the resulting dissonance between fun She-Hulk and... ahem... less than fun Avengers made for a bit of a disappointing return for the series. It also doesn't help that Slott piles on the continuity from the first She-Hulk series, so that any new reader is going to be immediately bombarded with the feeling of "Look at all that happened and you missed" rather than "Look at the cool stuff we've got going on now." The book isn't inaccessible, not really, but genuinely new readers will probably feel a little bit like they're not getting the whole story unless they pick up the She-Hulk trades. If that works, it's great, but to make them really seek out those She-Hulk trades, Slott and Bobillo would have been better off serving up a home run done-in-one tale that shows off the book's strength like the Spider-Man story in She-Hulk #4.
Though the book is full of continuity references, though, it also contains any number of cute moments that stand alone. She-Hulk's use of alien training moves is fun, a nod to previous storylines for those who've read them but just a cute bit for those who haven't. The unusual case that Jen and Pug take on, and the way they deal with the jury pool, is a fantastically clever idea, the kind of thing the She-Hulk book is revered for. And while I'm wary of the inclusion of Hawkeye, given that Bendis's lame treatment of the character in "Disassembled" and House of M has wrecked him for me for at least a while, I like the angle that Slott is taking here. Slott also gets into something else he had been doing in the tail end of his previous She-Hulk run, meta-commentary on industry trends, with Stu talking about "waiting for trades" and six-part story arcs, and, as with these elements previously, it feels more self-indulgent to me than funny, although I give him credit for presenting it in a clever manner.
Juan Bobillo has returned as artist on the book he helped originate, which will make some people happy and some very sad. I'm not sure what camp I fall into yet. When Bobillo is on, he's fantastic, and I love his work on the opening pages of this book, but a lot of his more stylized looks here seem overly blocky to me, particularly his designs for Ox and the Vision. Bobillo has a unique style, but unfortunately I like about half of the exaggeration he does and dislike the other half just as much. It's good art, but I'm still not sure I wouldn't rather see the more straightforward style of Paul Pelletier on the book instead.
All in all, She-Hulk Vol. 2 #1 is a tad on the disappointing side, but that's largely because I'm comparing it to a previous run that I enjoyed a great deal. There are still enough fun moments and enough of a unique voice to the book that I recommend it, but what I really recommend is to pick up the first two trades, and what I really hope for is that the book will pick up steam the way the first book did and the creators will start knocking it out of the park again.
 After a well-received run (and recent relaunch) on She-Hulk, Dan Slott seems like the perfect guy to tackle the FF's other strongman member, the Thing. Maybe if this works out, he can go for the hat trick and write a new Power Man series? At any rate, while I was a bit let down by the first issue of She-Hulk Volume 2, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Thing #1. Slott brings the same sense of fun to Thing that he has to She-Hulk, throwing a little spice in the mix in the form of Straczynski's recent addition of wealth to the character's profile and making great use of Marvel's B-listers and one of my favorite goofy villains for a fun and interesting first issue.
One of the cool things about Dan Slott is that he seems to go into the nooks and crannies of Marvel for characters, rather than sticking to the big names. So this issue sees the use of Black Goliath (now operating under just Goliath, but I don't want anyone to think I'm talking about Hank Pym), Nighthawk and the Constrictor alongside the Thing, as well as a villain that I don't want to spoil but that old school Marvel fans will probably figure out long before the big splash at the end gives it away. Given the Thing's history with Marvel Two-in-One, bizarre team-ups seem perfectly natural, and the use of this particular villain signals a certain sense of whimsy at work. Of course, the introduction of Cauldron, The Scalding Man in the open is a big tipoff in this regard as well.
Which isn't to say that Slott is just doing funny here. We get some great insights into Ben's character here, both from his inner monologue (which is dead-on true to the character) and from the outside, as we learn a little about how Reed has always looked out for his friend or see how Thing's rich friends really feel about him, which surprises our lead character as well. Slott also plays out Thing's riches on more than a humorous level, exploring the changes its brought about in everything from his lifestyle to his poker games, and it's a great use of an intriguing plot element introduced by Straczynski.
The big pleasant surprise for me in this issue was Andrea DiVito's artwork, which is just flat-out gorgeous. DeVito does a great design for Cauldron, presents some terrific action sequences in the opening fight and the battle with a robotic adversary and shows plenty of imagination in the background designs, from the city to Thing's penthouse to that last-page splash. What I really like, though, and what makes DiVito's work stand out as a perfect match, is how he draws the Thing. Just about every artist can draw the Thing, just like everyone can draw, say, Wolverine or Spider-Man. But some artists, like John Byrne or Scott Kolins, draw a really great Thing, and so far, DiVito looks like he might fit in that category. Expressive and inhuman, powerful yet real, this is a great take on the Thing. I also have to single out Villari's coloring for being bright and lively without being garish, and her work definitely helps to sell the look of Cauldron as well as DiVito's take on the Thing.
 I know what you're thinking. "Vampirella? The cheesecake character with the dental floss costume?" I know because that's exactly what I was thinking. I've got no love for this character, despite her long and storied history. And to be honest, I still have trouble getting past that obnoxiously cheesecake costume, which seems so impractical and unrealistic that I can't quite buy into the story while the character is wearing it. And yet... in the course of this first issue, Carey and company present a character with an intriguing history, a compelling reason for existence and an interesting blend of superhero, horror and science-fiction elements. If only she didn't look like a stripper!
If you've never read Vampirella before, have no fear, Vampirella Revelations is a true jumping-on point, with no references at all to past continuity. Instead, the references are to a past, as this is essentially an origin story for Vampirella, told in flashbacks while we see what her current job is. That current job is vampire hunter, working with a government liaison, but the reason for her vampire-hunting is an unusual one, and casts her in the role of anti-hero rather than heroine. In fact, there's a nice bit of moral ambiguity in Vampirella, as she'll happily drink the blood of an adversary and confesses love for a mother who's clearly a demonic being bent on world domination, but she is out killing vampires, so she can't be all bad, can she?
Carey has shown an ability to make demons sympathetic in Lucifer, as well as the ability to tell tales of epic legend, and he's putting both to good use in Vampirella Revelations. The story of Vampi's origins, a mixture of science-fiction (alien planet) and legend (Hell), has a nice bit of mystery as we wonder what's true, but the mystery never overwhelms the clarity of the storytelling. There's also plenty to be said about some straightforward and enjoyable action as Vampirella clears a room full of vampires. Basically, Revelations offers up an enjoyable story that's easy to just ride along, but there's a depth of story as well. It's a nice bit of writing.
In terms of art, Vampirella Revelations scores high as well. Lilly can't quite resist the cheesecake allure of Vampi's costume, which includes giving her permanently hard nipples, but together with Almond and Fotos, he provides a lush visual landscape and some exceptional storytelling. Beautiful backdrops like the planet Drakulon or Lilith's kingdom and terrific monster designs like the one for Lilith's beloved or the demons who attack at the end of the book combine with clear, classic comic book storytelling for a book that is visually enticing.
Truthfully, while I'm often surprised by liking or disliking something, it's rare that I'm outright shocked by how much I enjoyed something I expected not to. Vampirella Revelations, if you can get past the cheesy costume element, is a fun and gorgeously rendered read.
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