American Vampire #8

"Devil in the Sand," Part Three
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Whatever I may have anticipated from the closing moments of the previous issue, I certainly didn't suspect that gun-toting Brit Linden Hobbes and crossbow-wielding Abilena Book would have tracked Pearl down to Northern California so that they could ask a favor, and a very big favor at that.  As members of a shadowy organization known as the Vassals of the Morning Star, a name with strange implications, Hobbes and Book need Pearl to inform them of her own mortal weaknesses so that they may kill her creator Skinner Sweet.  It's a devil's bargain, but as these things go, sometimes it's difficult to tell which party is the devil.  Hobbes and Book are fanatics belonging to a fanatical organization with a mission rooted in a precept that unilaterally condemns an entire race for being what they are.  And they're willing to threaten non-vampires, including Pearl's human lover Henry Preston, and seemingly violate their own agreements, such as theirs with Sweet, to achieve their genocidal objectives.  But, with the possible exception of Pearl and self-loathing James Book, American Vampire's vampires have by and large proved to be easy killers, though many—like Sweet—could easily have been villains before their transformation.  It's little surprise, then, that Pearl's refusal to cooperate with the vampire killers is a welcome display of loyalty and future self-preservation.

Meanwhile, Abilena's daughter Felicia and her partner Jack Straw attempt to convince Las Vegas lawman McCogan that the recent bout of murders is the work of a vampire—to quite humorous effect.  Despite his irritation at even the idea of conceding that the FBI imposters may have a plausible explanation for recent events, however fantastical it may seem, McCogan finds himself teamed with them for the evening, chasing down a large, winged vampire killing executives in charge of Boulder Dam.  Snyder and Albuquerque's slow reveal of the responsible vampire is exceptional, pieces of his extremely inhuman form and unique abilities dropping in each issue.

It's a testament to Snyder's tight, labyrinthine storytelling that I honestly didn't see either twist in this issue coming, but in retrospect they make absolutely perfect sense.  Henry, never one fond of Sweet and sometimes frightened by Pearl even if he still loves her profoundly, would be far more likely to cooperate with Sweet's hunters.  Cashel McCogan's father, a ghostly presence whose death has been hanging over Cashel's early tenure as Las Vegas sheriff, was just too heavy a narrative weight not to return. 

[December 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 2 (ISBN 978-1401230692)

Revival #13

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

It's Valentine's Day in the revival event quarantine, a week after Martha Cypress single-handedly killed the murderous and entrepreneurial Check brothers.  Em's babysitting Cooper and young fellow "reviver" Jordan Borchardt while Dana and Ibrahaim go on "the strangest triple date in the history of central Wisconsin" (Revival #13, p. 4) with newly "out" deputy Brent, his boyfriend Ian, colorful and elderly fitness guru Lester, and his date sheriff's dispatcher Bonnie.  Meanwhile, Aaron Weimar—formerly Martha's professor and lover—continues to interview Joe Myers, whose "revival" has unsettled him more overtly than most.

Recently, Seeley has accelerated Revival's central mysteries, even as he continues to introduce new ones.  What seems at first an exceptionally awkward and harassing kiss from interviewee Joe turns out to be a way of stealing glimpses into another's memories through contact or, more likely, ingestion of their blood, one of the first characteristics these "revivers" share with their other zombie kin.  Joe's disintegration/evaporation, after having received the soul ring from his Hmong housemaid as recompense for the long-ago stolen engagement ring, follows in the vein of fellow "reviver" Tommy the Torso.  Unlike Tommy, Joe's disappearance will be noticed.  And then there's young Jordan, who apparently hears the calls of the ghosts in the woods all the time, wherever she goes.

Revival's both an exciting and frustrating series to follow monthly, mostly because its immersive storytelling style is simultaneously dense and nuanced even as its plot is difficult to distill within the bounds of any given issue.  In fact, its central plot—that of the "revival" incident—is nearly swallowed by the bevy of layered subplots and intricate character development.  Generally, this makes Revival one of the finest series currently being published, but it also makes any individual issue seem a little plodding.  Revival #13 is an excellent example of how Seeley's narrative complexity integrates such disparate actions. 

[August 2013]

FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #2 (olim Collider)

"The Paradigm Shift," Part Two
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

It's a rescue mission into a dimensional anomaly.  Five people, including the CEO of a company recently under SEC investigation, get sucked into a Bubbleverse on an elevator in their work building.  Teams of FBP agents are shot (uncomfortably, with science) into the neighboring mirror world to retrieve them before the whole thing explodes in less than 30 hours.  Prodded by his increasingly suspect partner Jay, Adam agrees to volunteer, despite having just escaped a dangerous anti-gravity episode in the previous issue, for which he's still bandaged.

It's an unfortunate consequence of hard sci-fi storytelling that great ideas can get a little hampered by necessary exposition.  The Bubbleverse is a great idea, but for the agents "a little rusty on H. G .I.'s" (FBP #2: 5)—read: FBP's readers—we're treated to a debriefing to explain the fantasy physics and stakes of the phenomenon.  That it remains interesting is a credit to Oliver's ideas more than his prose style.  But once we get to the Bubbleverse, Oliver's vision and Rodriguez's whimsical art style really shine.  It's a clean, brightly colored world occupied by kind-of people who ultimately have no real definition and absolutely no identity.  The play-doh fusion of the falling construction worker and the passing pedestrian is simultaneously grotesque and humorous, particularly the surprised reaction of her floppy-haired dog.

FBP's weakness so far is easily its character development.  In Part Two we begin to get flashbacks and character history which, although compelling, elaborate the characters themselves proportionately little.  In part, no doubt, because the complicated conceits of the sci-fi, the characters have been a little neglected.  Their actions, particularly those of Jay and Cicero, are worthy of the conspiracy mysteries that they imply, but if FBP really wants to establish its footing, it's going to need to make me care about them all more than I yet do.

[October 2013]

The Legend of Luther Strode #1

written by Justin Jordan
art by Tradd Moore
colors by Felipe Sobreiro

Oh my!  Five years after the Greek tragedy that was The Strange Talent of Luther Strode imploded the titular protagonist's life, he's now an urban legend, a bogeyman to the criminal underworld, little more than an impossible rumor and a trail of mutilated bodies.  And his re-introduction is mythic.  His body is so Herculean that it's cumbersome, a massive weight on his inhumanly muscled shoulders.  His physique is hulking and his face shrouded by his thick, languorous hair, but it's his wall of driver's licenses taken off his victims that it truly chilling.  Maybe trophies, maybe reminders of his kills, either way their number and alarmingly methodical arrangement gives Strode's mission a bloodcurdling gravitas.

But Strode's vigilante activities haven't gone unnoticed, and with the rise of a young, Machiavellian heir to a criminal empire on the hunt for the rumor who keeps eliminating his henchmen, Strode finds himself in the cross-hairs.  Mike Hill has hired a tubby, heavily bearded man who calls himself Binder to confirm Strode's existence and then kill him, much to the displeasure of his (formerly his father's) right-hand man Duvall.  Binder strikes an ominous note, not only for his lethargic eyes and very robust figure but also the fact that he apparently approached Hill with his "expertise."  The surprise of the issue, quite unsurprisingly, comes on its final page: the return of Petra Dobrev.

Tradd Moore's suitability to Justin Jordan's story is increasingly apparent in this issue.  The Strange Talent of Luther Strode was always an elegantly stylized ballet of violence and gore, one that made Strode's actions all the more horrific for the beauty with which they were rendered, but his artwork here is exceptional.  Strode's physicality, from his heavy despondence alone in his grubby apartment to his mostly unseen fighting proficiency, is tense and the action sequences fantastically kinetic. 

FF #1

"Parts of a Hole"
written by Matt Fraction
art and cover by Michael Allred
colors by Laura Allred

It's an introductory issue, no doubt, but one that sets a delightful tone for the series.  Setting out on a year-long quest for a cure for their carcinomic deterioration, which should only take four minutes of Earth time, the Fantastic Four—Reed Richards, Sue Storm-Richards, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm—seek replacements for themselves "just in case."  Enter four of the finest recruitment speeches ever given to Scott Lang (Ant-Man), Medusalith Amaquelin (Medusa), Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk), and Darla Deering (Ms. Thing).

The Thing:  "Look, speakin'a action-- --whatcha doin' next Wednesday morning from, say, ten to about four minutes after?  Or maybe forever?"

She-Hulk:  "I'm...that's incredibly specific yet frustratingly vague, Ben.  What do you have in mind?"  (FF #1: 12)

But as likeable as their replacements are—probably even more so than the original four themselves—it's the kids who steal the show.  Throughout the issue, the attendees of the Future Foundation, an educational complex designed to cultivate future heroes who will ultimately replace their adult predecessors, explain exactly what the Foundation is and what it does.  And they're all, in the words of older Foundation member Alex Power, "like bedbugs with special needs" (16).

But after one issue, Scott Lang is the heart of FF, a father who's recently lost his daughter and is now softly manipulated into assuming the head position at a school for unique human and non-human children.  The sting of this loss is made all the more painful by his evident sensitivity as a parent.  Instead of turning to Richards for explanations, he is the one to ask the students to teach him.

[January 2013, digital]

The Private Eye #3

written by Brian K. Vaughan
art by Marcos Martin
with Muntsa Vicente

Fortunately for our P. I. protagonist and Raveena McGill, De Guerre's masked hit men are terrible shots.  Impeded by their unusual gasmasks, which keep fogging up from their breath, neither could get a clean shot.  Short only a left middle finger and a right ear lobe respectively, P. I. and Raveena make their escape by tumbling out a window and bribing their way onto a city bus filled with anonymously costumed people.  His office—and record collection—and her apartment were torched soon after, and though his identity remains concealed, from De Guerre as well as us readers, Taj's shady past is hard on his heels.

De Guerre may be ruthless—which his actions thus far and the icy, fearful welcomes he gets from his former associates make indesputable—but his motives and agenda are difficult to tease out.  He has revolutionary ambitions, desiring to, in his words, "change a few minds" (The Private Eye #3: 23) but with a huge missile.

Despite its thematic immediacy and the emotional gravity of Taj's murder, The Private Eye maintains a surprising degree of levity throughout.  If De Guerre's quip at the assassination and forensic failures of his masked henchmen—"Whoever said you can't have a revolution without the French should be guillotined" (22)—weren't delightful enough, the perseverance of Blockbuster Video following the crash of the internet cloud is plenty to incite a few giggles.

Marcos Martin's artwork continues to improve with each issue.  Although some pages still have oddly placed negative space, e. g., the flat space behind the door to his room (4), the overall quality is very kinetic and utilizes dramatic perspective shifts to excellent effect.  As ever, the details riddled throughout crowd and street scenes continue to impress and to flesh out Vaughan's futuristic world in subtle and meaningful ways.

Buy THE PRIVATE EYE at PanelSyndicate

Dial H #4

"Into You"
written by China Miéville
art by Mateus Santolouco

The Abyss, Nihil Ambulans, a Nothing Walking has arrived, summoned by Dr. Wald and the Squid through the emptied mind of someone touched by its last visit to Earth.  And it is a fearsome, strange, and above all foreign enemy.  It inspires the simple, profound fear of something unimaginable.  And Dr. Wald, the self-named Ex Nihilo, is a zealot, a nullomancer, trained in the arts of nothingness and emptiness, and furious when her attempts to bind the Abyss fail.  She blames Manteau, whom she kidnaps for information, and Nelson, whom she leaves for dead by the poison of the Squid.

The Squid, though inhuman and somewhat baffled by human behavior and emotion, is not the unequivocal villain he might once have been assumed to be.  When his reunion with the Abyss goes unexpectedly bad and he takes a shot of nothingness to the chest, he spares Jent, attempts to intercede on behalf of Manteau who knows (appropriately) nothing of the Abyss, and ultimately joins with Jent against Wald to rescue Manteau.  The Squid's history with the Abyss—and subsequently his hurt at the insatiable Nothing's betrayal—is very much a surprise, though it makes perfect sense in the context of the story.  He was a wrangler of the darkness between spaces, and he and this Abyss explored the universe together for many years before Dialers banished them both for stealing jewelry, whose glints and glittering the Abyss is so drawn to.  It is an unquenchable appetite for light that drives the now mad Abyss, one that threatens to grow so large as to consume the sun.

Miéville's mythology is, even in a highly erudite and dense series, unusually difficult to follow here, but the heart of the series has never been clearer.  Jent's struggles with self-confidence and self-worth are tested.  Abandoned with a faulty Dial, Nelson must become a hero he cannot dial in order to save Manteau from the increasingly brutal Dr. Wald.  With a little motivation from the Squid, Jent comes through as Rescue Jack, an un-dialed hero of his own imagination.  But perhaps his greater achievement is his recognition and complete acceptance of Manteau's true identity, a slender old woman tied to a chair after being tortured.  Respectful of her privacy and sensitive to her alter-ego, he returns her costume to her.

Superheroes:  Baroness Resin, [unnamed muscled hero], Tap-Out, Rescue Jack (un-dialed), [unnamed Swiss Army knife hero]

[October 2012]

Swamp Thing #3

"Come Hither, Child"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Victor Ibáñez and Yanick Paquette

Children are cruel little sociopaths.  Even in the children's ward of a hospital in which everyone has a potentially terminal disease, kids find a way to bully each other, and the target of their creative torture is William, a young kid allergic to chlorophyll, a by-product of photosynthesis that fills the air we breathe.  What the bullies don't yet realize is that this boy is hearing voices, voices of dead things.  He is William Arcane, and he can control the rot, the little pockets of disease and death in their bodies, and he is merciless with it.

The tripartite mythology that's forming between Swamp Thing and Animal Man is compelling if not entirely logical.  Life forces—the Green and the Red—of plant and animal life respectively are established in defense against the Rot, the power of death.  Abby's declaration that the Rot was in part kept at bay in the swamp makes little sense, since decay and rot are proportionately rich in places filled with life.  Many things live and many things die.  The sanctuary of the Rot in the desert is equally baffling, because, however sparse life may be there, death is proportionately diminished, though the absence of life may provide some protection against the defenders of it.  Even if the logic of the set-up is incomplete, the dynamic between the titles' heroes and the emerging villains is excellent.  Snyder has tapped into several details of earlier Swamp Thing runs, in particular, incorporating the Arcane household.

[January 2012]

Animal Man #1

"Warning from the Red" 
The Hunt, Part One
written by Jeff Lemire
pencils by Travel Foreman
inks by Travel Foreman and Dan Green

He may be one of the more unfortunately named superheroes, but Buddy Baker is easily one of the most likeable.  Former Hollywood stuntman turned superhero turned animal rights activist, now playing a fictionalized version of a superhero like himself in an indie drama by Ryan Daranovsky (a thinly veiled fictional equivalent of Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky), Buddy is above all a husband and father.  And his home life is given depth and credibility in Lemire's deft pen.

In a stroke of bleak foreshadowing, Buddy's first emergency for a while as Animal Man is a man violently distraught by the death of his daughter to cancer, who's taken over the children's ward at the hospital demanding that his dead daughter be returned to him.  It's a crisis that strikes Baker close to home.  He readily acknowledges that it's his family—wife Ellen, son Cliff (who's rocking a mullet in 2011), and daughter Maxine—that grounds him and allows him to wander professionally as he has.  Unlike all the millionaire playboys and rich scientists that end up superheroes, Baker's life is very modest.  Baker succeeds in disarming the hysterical father, but it seems something strange is happening with his body.  He's been feeling the life force very strongly lately, a close powerful connection to the animal kingdom, and in the midst of his superheroics, his eyes begin bleeding profusely though the doctor can find no sores or wounds.

He returns home, leaving his boots outside like his wife asked, slips into bed, and drifts into some unnerving dreams.  His young daughter Maxine, dressed in her own Animal Man costume, and her stuffed dog—in his dream, a towering behemoth with unimaginably long fur—lead him into a river of blood, running from three hunters, enemies of the red in pursuit of Buddy and Maxine.  His wife, though not shown, is apparently in great danger, and his son Cliff holds his innards in his hands.  Alarmed, Buddy wakes up, drawn to the backyard by the calls of his wife and son.  Maxine, it seems, denied a puppy of her own, has resurrected the partially decayed bodies of local dead pets.

Lemire's start on his Animal Man run is stellar, and his vision, both gruesome and beautifully anatomical, is perfectly paired with Foreman.  Buddy's family life, a rarity in superhero comics, is one of his defining characteristics, and it has just the right balance of familiarity and danger.  The threat, the three looming hunters, is frightening, but far less so than the strange burgeoning abilities of young Maxine, innocent and yet the early signs suggest very powerful.  As disorienting and foreboding Baker's dream, it's nothing compared to waking to his daughter playing with reanimated animal corpses in the backyard.

[November 2011]

Severed #1

Part One, "Nothing Wasted"
written by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft
art by Attila Futaki

Jack Garron is an old man by the mid-1950s, unrattled by the threat Elvis's provocative hips pose to America's youth.  He's a grandfather, married to a woman who thinks he lost his right arm in the War.  World War I presumably, since World War II would have been in the still recent past.  One day he receives a gift from "an old friend" delivered by the hand of his grandson Jimmy.  It is, whatever the note may be, enough for him to relive a horror from his childhood.

At the age of twelve, Jack discovers that he's adopted after receiving a letter from his biological father—formerly a wandering minstrel, now apparently established at the Majestic Theatre in Chicago—and decides to run away with his viola to join him.  Jack is, above all, vulnerable, and Snyder and Tuft make his vulnerability threateningly immediate.  He is ill-prepared for life away from home in a world rife with people willing to use and discard a young boy.  As a stowaway, he is robbed of his instrument and his resources and then thrown from the train by security, though he is rescued by a band of hobos riding between the cars.  Even they, after saving his life, seem potentially dangerous, though they show him some courtesy.

But, the real nightmare is Mr. Porter.  He seems ordinary enough, dressed in a plain suit and working for General Electric.  By offering an apprenticeship, he obtains Frederick from a boys' home in Illinois, circumstances that would not raise suspicion if he were never seen there again.  Mr. Porter is a predator of the weak, quite literally.  Though Frederick, no doubt, thinks it metaphorical, Porter insists that it is not:  "Behind these pearly whites, I got razor sharp teeth.  I'm serious, Freddy.  These babies are all show.  Underneath...my real ones are sharp as knives.  But sales is all about appearances and it's hard to sell anything if you look like a shark" (Severed #1, p. 12).  And, as it turns out, Jack's fellow hobo is right, "Out here, nothing gets wasted.  Everything gets eaten" (p. 24).

Starman #2

"Mercy"
Sins of the Father, Part Three
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

"Is it me, then, growing old?  Or do all the costumed do-gooders begin to blur into one annoying mess after a while" (Starman #2: 5), the aging Mist quips to the ageless Shade.  He might as well be talking about the entirely ordinary Theo and David Knight, but Jack Knight is proving to be something different, a reluctant superhero with a fondness for antique trinkets and an eye for practicality, less dogmatic and more feeling than his predecessors.  Jack is beginning to find his way as a superhero.  Or at least his costume...and his cosmic staff.

But "Mercy" is mostly about two women:  the Mist's stammering daughter Nash and the mysterious new fortune teller Charity, culled from her own early-70s DC title Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion and clever enough to verbally spar with Jack.  Nash, however, proves the more tantalizing prospect, more poetic in her metaphors and hostage to their fathers' self-perpetuating feud.  She lets Jack go, against her knowledge of her father's wishes and even though she has him easily trapped on a rooftop.  She is—among all the loud, self-important men running around Opal City, swelling their egos and verbally fortifying their self-identities, and bashing one another where it hurts—a quiet, soft spot, not exactly vulnerable but susceptible to other rules and an idea of another world, neither war nor opera, much better than the one the men are playing out.

If Starman had a puppetmaster, it would be the Shade, who after seemingly allying himself with the Mist to annihilate the Knight clan, promises instead their safety.  For unknown reasons, he seems invested in Jack Knight becoming a hero.  And, by force of circumstance and not a little temperamental inclination, Jack is well on his way to doing so.

[December 1994]

Note:  Although release date and interior copyright dates read accurately "December 1994," the cover incorrectly lists Starman #2 as December 1995.

Northlanders, Book Three

Blood in the Snow
written by Brian Wood
art by Dean Ormston (#9-10), Vasilis Lolos (#17), Danijel Zezelj (#18-19) and Davide Gianfelice (#20)

The third collection in Brian Wood's stellar series Northlanders assembles Wood's shorter and stand-alone episodes early in its run.  The first, "Lindesfarne," narrates the famous raid on the rich Saxon monastery in 793 A.D. by Norse pillagers from the perspective of a young boy Edwin, raised by a brutal and zealous father in the shadow of the rich monastery.  In his mind, factions of gods—his father's weak, distant, joyless Jehovah and his dead mother's wild, terrible Germanic pantheon—battle for followers and power.  Abused by his father, whose religious fervor cultivated by monks after the untimely death of his mother in childbirth he blames for that abuse, Edwin turns to Woden and his followers, the viking invaders, who he thinks have arrived to save him, an answer to his prayer to the mighty god.  Edwin directs the Norsemen to the oppressive monastery and, after the massacre which orphans him, wins a place among the invaders by wounding their leader in single combat to first blood.  But years later, leader of his own raiding parties and faithful to his heathen gods, he remains a Saxon outcast among his Norse peers, still a victim of the ruling and religious factions which wrecked his childhood.

In "The Shield Maidens," three women—Grettr, Thyra, and Lif—living in the ninth-century Danelaw flee from Saxon invaders seeking to reclaim land north of Humber River.  Having fled their villaige with Thyra's husband's hoard, they make their stand in an abandoned Roman fort near the tide plain against a siege of Saxon warriors.  The women's perspective is welcome here.  Though women had played key roles in earlier storyarcs, they were fundamentally about men.  The strength of the Norse women as well as their vulnerabilities remain foreign to the men.  The threat of rape and slavery as well as death is unknown to their abusers, and their ingenuity at escape is unexpected.  "They were in a full panic, and if this is what viking was like, I forgave my husband his long absences" (Blood in the Snow, "The Shield Maidens": 109 [19: 11]).  Its ending is also a welcome respite from violence.  Having weathered the onslaught and improbably escaped their Saxon attackers, the three women reconvene in triumph and grateful for the mercy of their fates.

"The Viking Art of Single Combat" is a one-shot that narrates a duel between champions Snorri the Black and Egil Sleggja, a practice abstracted from centuries of custom and distilled into a single narrative.  Though each fighter receives characterization—Snorri, the crude bastard son of the lord with only legitimate daughters, and Egil, second son to the lord, once a leader but now dim and brain-damaged from an arrow to the head—this episode's interested in the anthropology of the duel, the archaeology of its weaponry, and the psychology of a culture of violence.  It's refreshingly non-judgmental about any of it.  There's a bleakness and a futility to the feuding cycle, but there's a conscious recognition of its place in a hard world, an unfair one, one that favors Loki over Thor.  "Little consolation to the conquered, but the gods only made one Earth.  Probably to laugh their asses off while we fight over it.  So be it" (Blood in the Snow, "The Viking Art of Single Combat": 67 [17: 15]).  Quite honestly, "The Viking Art of Single Combat" may be one of Northlanders' quirkier issues, but it's also one of its finest.

Blood in the Snow's other one-shot, "Sven the Immortal," revisits characters from Northlanders' first story-arc Sven the Returned.  Sven, now an old man, an exile living with his wife Enna and their two children on Faroe, is the subject of famous songs sung about his return to Orkney, his vengeance against his abusive, usurping uncle, and his fight against the Saxons.  As such, he is a target for fame-mongers, foolish young men seeking to aggrandize their own reputations by killing a legend.  The men find him far fiercer than they anticipated.  They lose a "holmgang" and kidnap Enna to force his hand in the face of their humiliation.  But these men never return home; none survive.  It's a fine conclusion to a collection that gives a satisfying story to one of Northlanders' most charismatic figures.

Collects Northlanders #9-10, 17-20:  "Lindesfarne" Parts 1 and 2, "The Viking Art of Single Combat," "The Shield Maidens" Parts 1 and 2, and "Sven the Immortal"

ISBN:  978-1401226206

Día De Los Muertos #3

Tres
"Return of the Dead"
written by Alexander Grecian
art by Riley Rossmo

"Lonesome"
written by Kurtis J. Wiebe
art by Riley Rossmo

"Day of the Dead 3000"
written by Joe Keatinge
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Megan Wilson

Día De Los Muertos #3 begins with a silent, mostly black-and-white horror story "Return of the Dead" and ends with the color-blitzed, futuristic apocalypse tale "Day of the Dead 3000."  Violence against children has featured prominently in each of the previous Día De Los Muertos collections as well, but "Return of the Dead" is a more classical serial killer tale told, however, entirely without words.  At a Day of the Dead festival, a young boy is kidnapped by a burly man with a Hulk Hogan mustache and a butcher's apron, collared, and taken to an isolated barn filled with torture equipment and the trophies of former kills.  As the murderer prepares for his newest victim, the spirits of his five previous arrive to exact vengeance and save the boy.  The story is straight-forward, but it is made all the more creepy for its silence, which forces the reader to work harder for the story and dwell longer on the stark images, as well as its sparse use of color—only red for the festival face paint and blood and pale teal for the ghosts of the dead children.

"Lonesome" echoes Kurtis Wiebe and Riley Rossmo's early collaboration in Green Wake.  It's a brief story of coming to terms with lost love.  During the morning of his funeral, young woman Natalie revisits her relationship with her lover, the unnamed narrator, through the sites of their first meeting at a bus stop and early dates.  He follows as a ghost.  However strong Green Wake, this chapter is somewhat hollow, and the narrator's anxiety over the substance and authenticity of their relationship seems all the more warranted for it.  Despite the impending funeral, she is listless and distant, melancholy but unmoved.  He may have loved her for the rest of his life, seven weeks as it turns out, but whether or not enduring, Wiebe leaves unsatisfied.

"Witness the end of all worlds!  The final reckoning for every known civilization!  No man, woman or creature will survive the unrelenting celestial wrath coming on a day many millenia in the making!" (Día De Los Muertos #3, p. 25).  The final contribution in Rossmo's series is this homage to futuristic pulp horror, a nod to exploitation science fiction, a welcome change of pace from the first two very somber stories, and generally a romping good time.  Facing off against a horde of robot skeletons armed with reaping scythes on a skull Mount Rushmore, bearded hero Ultra Muertos sacrifices himself, so that his unsuspecting grandson Kit Kidall, a fashion photographer with an addiction to a drug that allows him to glimpse the afterlife, may assume the mantle.  "Day of the Dead 3000" stylistically hearkens to an earlier era of comics which forces unrealistic dialogue with needed exposition into the mouths of its characters:  "I may not be able to kick this addiction to extinction red, but it's the only way for me to see my dead parents again!" (Día De Los Muertos #3, p. 29).  After such a conventional if fantastical beginning, the twist is both unexpected and quite bleak:  the young man, estranged from his superhero grandfather and seeking pharmaceutical escape into death, does not resist Mother Slaughter, the enemy of his predecessors, but welcomes the annihilation she promises.  He is a man fully welcoming to oblivion and extinction. 

Dream Thief #4

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

Despite his pattern of possessions and his complete loss of his body to his possessor in his sleep, John Lincoln shows a little more self-confidence in Dream Thief #4, more comfortably asserting his independence from the competing spirits:  "I'm not Frank," he repeats on two occasions.  Frank Best, Lincoln's latest dead spirit body-companion, was a con man and a gambler, and a good one, who seemingly ran afoul of a loan shark.  This time, Lincoln (and Frank) are burdened with Father Tommy Logan, a local priest and another apparent victim of hitman Joe Ferragamo, the dead body in the sinking car.  Against Frank's wishes and for the first time since the mask, John Lincoln saves a life.  It's little moves like this that allow Lincoln to continue to be quite likeable despite the string of murders that's carried him across the South.  He is, at heart, a good guy with a strong sense of humor and profound sympathy for the dead folks who keep using his body for their revenge.  And he internalizes their perspectives with admirable ease:  an Hispanic boxer; a gay, ex-Army porn star; a Black, female lawyer; and a con man.

To Lincoln's surprise, the near-dead priest recognizes his condition and seems able to help...in exchange for help of his own and over half a million dollars won in a poker tournament.  Lincoln, being generally short on explanations for his activities or the supernatural mask, accepts his offer.  And he cuts a rakish, charming figure at the poker table.  Brereton's cover illustration gets the swagger right, but his devil-may-care stare down the barrels of three pistols misses Lincoln's sly charm.  Instead, newly bearded Lincoln, posing as Vernon Wells in his grey suit and open-collar black shirt, wins the table and the chips with his good looks and his borrowed poker skills.  The twist comes at the table:  "Father" Tommy isn't much of a priest at all, but a con man who's been turning confessional secrets into revenue for forty years, and Lincoln's just the latest of his marks.  So, Lincoln turns him over.

In the issue's denouement, and a scene which sets a fraught tone for the miniseries' final chapter, John returns to Atlanta from Memphis to find his sister Jenny held captive in his apartment by a man with a painted mask.  John's final thought before taking a baseball bat to the head:  "If he knocks me out, I have no idea who is going to wake up" (Dream Thief #4, p. 22).  Nitz has developed several threads in his story, none more prominent than the letter from John's father and Jenny's possible knowledge of or participation in Claire's murder of Cordero, which haven't yet been resolved, and as a consequence there's a lot he needs to address in the final act, but the density of story in Dream Thief has remained high.  Here's hoping Nitz's closing chapter is as excellent as his first.

American Vampire #7

"Devil in the Sand," Part Two
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco

If, like McCogan, we suspected Skinner Sweet of being responsible for the recent spat of murders and de-sanguinations in Las Vegas, it seems we would be wrong.  Sweet's certainly taken up residence in the burgeoning "Sin City" as a pimp and businessman whose employee was one of the last to see Mr. Beaulieu alive, but there's another vampire on the loose, tracking down the bosses of the consortium tasked with the building of Hoover Dam.  And Felicia Book and her partner Jack Straw, under the pretense of being an FBI agent and his assistant, are in town to find the murderer.  They are, instead, representatives of an organization called the Vassals, whose mission seems primarily to track down and kill vampires, a turn which expands the universe of American Vampire considerably.

Likewise, although the evolution of Sweet into something new in contrast to the pack of European entrepreneurs in Hollywood necessarily entailed the possibility of variety in vampire species, the glimpse into the world of the Vassals also opens up that variety.  Felicia's forensic investigation into the death of Mr. Beaulieu allows her narrow the species of vampire which could have perpetrated the murder, all of which seem to be documented in her research materials.  This killer is a species we haven't seen before.

And what should we make of Sweet's arrangement with the Vassals?  Under what conditions could a vampire known to be a killer even in his human form be granted immunity from an organization whose purpose is to hunt down vampires?  It's a suggestive tease, one that Felicia is particularly troubled by, but one that grants even further grey over Sweet's ambiguous character.

The final scene throws a wrench in the proceedings of the second story arc, reintroducing us to Abilena and her so-far unnamed partner who have traveled to rural California to kill Pearl Jones, in her words "the deadliest vampire on Earth" (American Vampire, Vol. 2, p. 52).  This is, of course, another mystery, since Pearl may be deadly but her seemingly idyllic life with Henry seems far from requiring Abilena's attention, except that she is the only known offspring of Skinner Sweet, the American vampire.

[November 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 2 (ISBN 978-1401230692)

Revival #12

written by Tim Seeley
art by Mike Norton

Martha Cypress's body is turning into something unrecognizable and foreign to her.  Her wintertime swim in the river, which is overlaid with her and her father's conversation during a game of horseshoes, is an eerie marvel.  She is able to withstand the Wisconsin winter cold of the river an the air, her eyes bleed into the water, and her body is covered by the scars accumulated during her revived life.

Cooper's comics, while nothing really like what children draw or write, provide a delightful, clever perspective on both the "revival" events and the comic book medium.  "So, do you eat brains?" one reviver asks another.  "No.  Do you have any bacon?" (Revival #12, p. 5)  But it's Cooper's recollection of his trauma with the Check brothers, his kidnappers and black-market body parts dealers, that strikes the last, best, and most tantalizing chord.  He knows something's wrong, at least sometimes, with Martha. 

In recent issues, Revival's started dropping more concrete(-ish) details about the revivers themselves.  Joe, the older man seen earlier trying to dig himself a grave, begins talking about his memories:  an encounter during death with a black-winged young woman who tried to save him and the fresh lack of love-hurt for the woman who jilted him as a young man, the way he always knew he was alive.  But if Joe is hollow and depressed, Jeannie Gorski is unsettlingly perky even in her task of cataloging the body parts collected from the barricade accident.  The mysterious ghost in the woods too is coming to the fore.  Its disintegration of Tommy the Torso in the previous issue revealed it to Martha, but Cooper writes about it in his comics, which his mother has now seen, and young reviver Jordan Borchardt's father has captured footage on his trail cam.

As usual, Skottie Young does a stellar job filling in for the series' regular cover artist Jenny Frison.  His quietly creepy moment between Cooper and the forest ghost seamlessly incorporates Norton's style, rendering the ghost quite similarly to its interior representation, into his own quirky vision.  And it sets the tone perfectly for some of the issue's finest elements, including Cooper's own comic-book adaptation of events from his young perspective.

[July 2013]

Día De Los Muertos #2

Dos
"Mine"
written by Joshua Williamson
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Megan Wilson

"The Skinny One"
written by Ed Brisson
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Megan Wilson

"Hellqueen"
written by Jeff Mariotte
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Jean-Paul Csuka

The first collection in Día De Los Muertos was occasionally dark to be sure, as any exploration of death is likely to be, but the second installment of Rossmo's themed comics is decidedly darker than its predecessor.  "Mine" initially seems little more than a stylish murder mystery when Gwen disappears during a Day of the Dead festival while on a Mexican vacation with her friends.  Her apparent champion is our unnamed narrator, a man with a very imposing physique and a dogged personality who discovers Gwen to be the latest victim of a serial murderer who specializes in beautiful blonde women who get their faces painted for the festival.  It seems for a while that, like George Sluizer's film Spoorloos (The Vanishing), her lover was about to share her fate, but quite unexpectedly it turned into a battle of competing serial killers, one ambushed by the other seeking revenge for stealing his special target.  Rossmo is responsible for all the artwork in Día De Los Muertos #2, and the variety of styles really testifies to his range, but his work in "Mine" is probably the most beautiful in the issue.  In particular, the two-page spread during the narrator's drug-induced trip (pp. 6-7) is very fine, beautiful and unsettling.

"The Skinny One" is far more straight-forward than "Mine" and a fine companion story to "Reflections" from Día De Los Muertos #1.  It is a story of bringing the truth to light.  On the Day of the Dead, the spirit of a dead, young train-hopper returns to the station of the abusive Mexican policeman who killed him, who is himself hoping for a visit from the spirit of his beloved wife.  But the boy doesn't come alone; he brings with him many other of the policeman's victims as well as Marissa, the policeman's wife.  In feeble defense of himself Jorge continues to throw slander at the ghosts, attacks their credibility as outsiders, and refuses to acknowledge his violence, but to no avail.  Hearing none of his excuses and denials, she leaves him, an embarrassment to her memory and no longer her love.  At first "The Skinny One" is a little difficult to follow, since there is little visual distinction between current events and the memories of its ghost, but once it settles in, it is easy to appreciate.  The strangely 'toon-ish aesthetic works well for its victim children, and the generous use of page-white throughout sets up Rossmo's evocative isolation of Jorge on the final page.  It is the account of a man who, though not held accountable for his corruption and cruelty during life, is by the dead, whose judgment is ultimately more important.

In contrast to the sobriety of "Mine" and "The Skinny One," though each uses it to widely differing effect, "Hellqueen" is a surprisingly humorous if morbid contribution.  Low-level, would-be gangster Gilberto and his younger brother Gabriel, whom he's trying to recruit into the life, are tasked with spiking several severed heads on a local bridge for dramatic effect on Día de los Muertos.  Gilberto is as puffed up about his newly discovered "importance" as he is wrong, convinced of his own power and the desirable things it brings, but in Mariotte's words, he's quite pathetic.  The gore is gruesome, but played for laughs, both absurd and brutal.  When visiting the grave of their grandmother after finishing the job, they are suddenly captured by demons and dragged through a hellmouth, summoned by the queen of Hell, who as it turns out is their grandmother.  And she's not happy with their lifestyle choices.  She berates them, scolds them, humiliates the demons under her rule with her magic spatula, and sends her grandsons back to the graveyard, freshly terrified and motivated to clean up their lives before they burn in Hell with the others.  Their first demonstration of their reformation:  picking up the litter in the cemetery!

East of West #5

Five:  The Message
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

How do you write an abstraction as a character and still keep it an abstraction?  I have no idea, but Hickman seems to have cracked that nut.  For the first four issues of East of West, Death was largely himself, for lack of a better word.  Sure, he exhibited several behaviors that would seem to violate his essential nature, but little was known about his motivations and even less was seen.  His companions—Wolf and Crow, witches it would seem—the same, and his siblings even more so, if possible.

In "The Message" Death is, if anything, human.  He appears sitting alone, under guard, and more than anything, defeated.  Strange, considering his overwhelming victory against Mao and the forces of New Shanghai in the previous issue.  His quest is, it seems, his penance as well as his revenge, his relentless attempt to make things right.  He is also a lover and a husband, and a convincing one.

Xiaolian's seduction of the horseman is equally mythic and human.  Xiaolian—beautiful, but steely and Spartan in earlier issues—is here both fierce and hurt, unyielding in her censure of Death and vulnerable as a lover and a mother.  And she is captivating.  At war during the first raising of the Four Horsemen and confronted by Death on the battlefield, she spares an enemy combatant not to grant mercy but to defy Death, an action both in keeping with abstract death and one worthy of romantic notice and flirtation.

East of West has excelled early, but "The Message" coalesces the very best that it has going.  This is not to say that the explanations are comprehensive, because they're not at all, though East of West #5 has several notable revelations, but it shows exactly why these explanations are worth waiting and working for.  Five issues into the series and Hickman's vision for his story seems complete.  Details are many and meaningful.  Bel Solomon, for instance, Governor of the Republic of Texas and last seen in #2 by my recollection, arrives in this issue fully formed, a man of independent thought and motivation, considered and regretful.  We may have met him before, but we did not know him.  And, it turns out, I very much like him.  It seems we have just barely seen the tip of Hickman's iceberg, and by all accounts, this one's going to be worth the ride.

East of West is also, bar none, the single most beautiful series on the shelves right now.  Dragotta's realization of Hickman's vision is so compelling and evocative that it would likely be worth the cover price just for his contributions.  I continue to be impressed especially by his depiction of Death and Xiaolian's physical affection before he was first supposed to die, before he turned white.  The four-panel series on p. 13 could tell their story without the series' strange and, I believe, unknown narrator.  His full-page images of their son, the Chalice, on p.18 and the final of Death riding off into a particularly violent sunset demonstrate just how adept Dragotta is with both the series' futuristic and old-style western aesthetics, and their marriage in East of West is immaculate.

[August 2013]

Lost Vegas #4

"Fourth Hand  |  Know When to Run"
written by Jim McCann
art by Janet Lee

If gambling could be a philosophy for life—which I suppose it can be and has been in the right hands—its most vehement and articulate advocate would be Roland.  Lost Vegas—despite its escape plans, heist ambitions, and grassroots freedom fighting—is really the story of how Roland learns to, in his words, play with the table, to conspire with your fellow gamblers against the house and to trust that they won't screw everyone else over for their own hand.  The table:  Roland; Loria; his telepathic, amorphous roommate Ink; dreadlocked technician, Rinny; abdicated princess, Lady Kaylex; her large, stoic deer (with science) Atho; and now, somewhat ambiguously, the very same Godspark that destroyed Roland and Loria's home planet years before.

McCann's conclusion to the short series is satisfying precisely because it is incompletely resolved, even if its execution is a little stiff and heavy-handed.  If this were a more essentially political story, an unequivocal victory for the insurgents would perhaps have included the overthrow (or perhaps the death) of authoritarian despot Ensign Scotsorn and the Akians, who are responsible for the war and the subsequent oppressive "peace," the reinstatement of Lady Kaylex as the ruler of her people, the restoration of Loria, and the universal freedom of all the prisoner-servants aboard the Lost Vegas.  That its core characters escape alone in a stolen spaceship to explore personal freedom—and perhaps to return Loria to her adopted home from which she was unjustly exiled—and that we have little knowledge what becomes of the rest of the disabled and all-but-destroyed ship and its passengers, both gamblers and staff, make its ending only rewarding within the personal scope of the series.

The same may be said for the actual plan itself.  Lost Vegas may aspire to heist cleverness and action thriller, but the series of events leading to the Godspark explosion in the combat arena are underwhelming, relying on little more than the extremely convenient special skills of its conspirators.  (A less jaded way of articulating the same point would be that Roland creatively used precisely the skills to hand.  I am jaded.)  His denouement on board the getaway ship is, on the other hand, delightful.  It playfully teases the competitiveness of the ladies, both queens in their own right and both vying in some manner for Roland's attention, whether romantic or not.

But if McCann's action sequences are less than thrilling, Lee's artwork remains beautiful.  In particular, Ink's loopy, organic arms provide interesting and intricate page designs.  Atho, whose substantial mass often pushes out of the insufficient frames, as well remains one of the most physically compelling figures on the page.  And Lee's two-page spread at the center of the issue withdraws from the ship itself to allow an epic perspective on the ship's explosion from space, suggesting both the enormity of the ship and the even greater vastness of space in which it is now stranded. 

I had fleeting hopes leading up to the release of the final issue in this mini-series that, like Lost Vegas #1, Lost Vegas #4 would feature a glorious wrap-around cover by series artist Janet Lee.  And certainly, the cover delivers, even if it's not the panoramic spectacle of the first issue.  It's a portrait of space destruction, the floating detritus of a wasted spaceship, which is itself a mirror of the extravagant Earth city.  Only after finishing the story do we discover that it is a first-person perspective, from the eyes of protagonist Roland astride the magnificent science deer Atho, whose horns—one broken—peek out from the bottom right of the composition.

American Vampire #6

"Devil in the Sand," Part One
written by Scott Snyder
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Leave it to Skinner Sweet to monetize vice in the most notorious party city in the United States at the very inception of its reputation.  You could even say Sweet lent Las Vegas its character.  Just over ten years after turning Pearl and taking down several Hollywood moguls, Skinner Sweet has set up as a brothel owner in Las Vegas' red light district, a city once relatively small and obscure made bigger and famous by the construction of Hoover Dam (olim Boulder Dam) twenty-five miles to the southeast and the economy of gambling, drinking and whoring that blossomed to entertain its massive workforce.

Enter Cashel McCogan, newly minted chief of police following the untimely death of his father the former police chief, father-to-be, and increasingly frustrated citizen of the growing metropolis.  He already has a history of run-ins with Sweet, whom he knows as Mr. Smoke and whom he suspects of orchestrating his father's murder.  If opening sequence in Colorado is anything to go on, he will have at least one more bloody confrontation with the vampire, one that leaves his as-yet unborn child a vampire himself.  And re-enter Felicia Book, daughter of Jim Book and Abilena Camillo and now assistant to FBI agent Jack Straw, both of whom seem fully aware of the existence of vampires and are readily capable of identifying their handiwork.

Interestingly, McCogan and Sweet receive similar artistic treatment.  They've got similar coloring, handsome facial features (even if McCogan lacks the sinister snarl Sweet achieves), comparable builds, and the same hat casting the same shadows out of which their eyes seem to pierce through.  The similarities are so convincing that I wasn't certain at first that the figure with the baby wasn't in fact Sweet himself.

[October 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 2 (ISBN 978-1401230692)

Colder #2

written by Paul Tobin
art by Juan Ferreyra

This is what it is to be crazy in Tobin's universe.  One constantly exists in both worlds:  the one all sane people know and see and live in and the other the world of hungry monsters feeding on the insane, sucking them slowly dry like Nimble Jack, haunting them with voices only they can hear.  And, as fate—or possibly Jack—would have it, Declan can cure the insane, rescuing them from the Hunger World by poisoning it with his coldness.  Ferreyra's vision for the Hunger World is truly grim, a metropolis of crumbling, improbable architecture and populated by strange, cloaked feeders.  The detail is impeccable, ghosts of a real city lost in a gothic, Escher-esque wasteland.

Meanwhile, Nimble Jack takes them there to stimulate their fear even more, conjuring up their worst nightmares, devouring their spirits, and leaving them to kill what remains of their bodies.  Ferreyra works in these stories into the background details of his artwork.  Following panel by panel the violent death of the runner with the three dogs, for instance, is part of Nimble Jack's drama that largely gets lost in the immediate story around Declan, but it contributes considerably to the texture of Tobin's tale.

Now that he's awake, Declan's relationship with his longtime nurse Reece gets complicated.  Perhaps the urgency of the situation now that Jack has resurfaced in his life, perhaps his catatonic condition makes human contact all the more rewarding now that he's awake, perhaps because after five years in her care Declan has cultivated real trust and a kind of silent friendship with Reece, he is very quick to open his world up to her.  Perhaps because of his constant presence in her life, Reece is willing to listen to him and, against her better professional judgment, trust him.

Trillium #1

chapter 1:  3797 - the scientist

chapter 1.2:  1921 - the soldier

by Jeff Lemire

The opening chapter of Jeff Lemire's newest creator-owned series is stunning, an issue that utilizes the flip-book format as a powerful creative tool rather than an easy novelty gimmick.  The premise is as simple and elegant as it is provocative:  Nika, a scientist from a distant time at the edges of the known universe looking for a cure for a sentient virus which has nearly wiped out the human race, and William, a former soldier in World War I suffering from PTSD and obsessively in search of the lost Incan temple somewhere in the Amazon, stumble on each other at the very site they both seek.  And the book itself materially mirrors the curious temple, as it unites Trillium's two protagonists at its architectural center.

It is a testament to Lemire sense of archaeological mystery that the future of the human race, even the physical remnants of Spanish conquistadors at the alien temple gate, is more compelling than the known past.  Although William's motivations for his almost monomaniacal quest for the temple at the expense of his brother and his search team remain undefined, his story is far less vivid than Nika's all-too-familiar future, the details less interesting.  Nika's encounter with the mysterious alien race with access to the titular flower is fascinating, mostly because it remains as mysterious to the readers as it does to Nika herself.  Her translator is patchy, if improving, and her interactions with the strange blue people unprecedented by the human colonists, and she seems to have inherited some burdensome task from their former leader.

Lemire's artwork here is as handsome as any he's yet produced.  Faces in particular, which in some other of his efforts are captivating if a little queer and somewhat emotively stiff, are in Trillium dynamic and humanly subtle.  His colors, on which he collaborated with José Villarrubia, are electric, a soft but rich palate in which the future world has more variety but less strength of color.  Lemire has also sprinkled his artwork with some very cryptic, and possibly very revealing, imagery.  In particular, Nika's entrance into the pyramid greets her with complementary wall sculptures (Trillium #1, "the scientist": 14), inversions of one another which suggest multiple pyramids connecting from different places or times and at their center the face she sees emerge from her ingestion of the flower.  It is also notable that some of the design work featured on the walls of the aliens' civilization are repeated in the body art of the Amazon natives in William's expedition.  In short, unlike Lemire's beautiful artwork in some of his other publications, such as Sweet Tooth and Underwater Welder, Trillium really rewards close scrutiny of its artwork.

[October 2013]

Y: The Last Man, The Deluxe Edition Book One

Unmanned and Cycles
written by Brian K. Vaughan
pencils by Pia Guerra
inks by José Marzán, Jr.


It's a fine sci-fi premise, if one that would seem to lean toward the sensational:  all men on Earth, save one, drop dead simultaneously.  Fortunately for us, that one is Yorick Brown, one of the most infectiously likable protagonists in comics, who along with his service-capuchin-in-training Ampersand survive the male mammalian apocalypse.

Vaughan has established a compelling central mystery:  what caused this devastating phenomenon?  An ancient amulet recovered in Jordan?  A plague sent to punish Dr. Mann's cloning experiments?  A virus?  Divine justice?  And he assembles an equally compelling cast of characters poised to investigate:  Yorick himself; his mother, Representative Jennifer Brown; Agent 355 of the Culper Ring; Dr. Alison Mann, leading researcher in asexual reproduction; and a Russian agent from Moscow trying to recover the men in the International Space Station.  But thanks to the re-shuffled world power dynamic and the proliferation of fanatical sects of religious and political ilks, there are also a number of characters set to threaten Yorick and his supporters:  Israeli militarist Alter Tse´elon; Daughters of the Amazon, gangs of women convinced the men deserved their fate and bullying other women out of their food; Victoria, their leader; Yorick's sister Hero, who's taken up with the Amazons; boxcar pirates; and communes of former convicts.

However, it's in the practical and social ramifications of the event that Vaughan's survival epic excels so strongly in early episodes.  His willingness to employ significant time jumps, giving the inevitable complications caused by the event time to take their effect, and the realization of the consequences of losing the entire male population to sink in.  Overwhelming percentages of workers in vital occupations, religious leaders, rock stars, soldiers—thanks to wildly disparate military policies in different nations—and disproportionate losses in political parties for elected officials are all swept aside in one swift catastrophe.  In that wake, women have responded in ways both realistically bleak and refreshingly noble.  If Victoria—a pompous megalomaniac who preaches against the oppression of the patriarchy so righteously snubbed out but who has assumed the despotic rule of a manipulative cult leader—is the embodiment of the worst kind of hypocrisy, the women of Marrisville, Ohio—convicts who receive Yorick with gossipy hubbub but allow him to leave in peace and without trouble—are pleasantly humane.

Pia Guerra's artwork is a fine fit for Vaughan's story.  Her lines are clean and neat, her figures beautiful, and her facial caricatures consistent and easily distinguishable, which in Y's world of diverse female characters is of prime importance for its reader.  The page layouts are confident but risk little, and the panel designs are usually more functional than bold, but ultimately they serve well in telling the story, for which a flashier style would be out of place.


Collects Y: The Last Man #1-10

ISBN:  978-1401219215

American Vampire #5

Chapter Five:  "Curtain Call" and "If Thy Right Hand Offend Thee..."
written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King
art by Rafael Albuquerque


However pervasive, action sequences are difficult to do right in comics.  They always seem stiffer than on film and thinner than the quieter, more verbal moments.  Relatedly, it's very difficult to right action dialogue without sounding like a throw-back to bad puns, cheesy one-liners and empty bravado.  Pearl's revenge on her European vampire attackers and her back-stabbing best friend and roommate Hattie shows just how well they can be done.  Snyder's set-up—a meditation on the natural hierarchy of predators and the delusional overconfidence of the vampire movie moguls—is very fine, but his best move is stepping out of the way to let Rafael Albuquerque's artwork tell the tale.  The details of the scene—including the dismembered and perhaps still living body of a young woman, their cache of bladed weaponry, and their pleasure in boasting of their earlier tortures—showcase the vampires' hubristic sadism.  But it's her more personal revenge on Hattie, the vampires' new starlet and a popular embodiment of the American desire for instant celebrity and validation, that is truly satisfying.  Just as Hattie's meteoric rise is on its surface the realization of the American Dream, the reality of her "break" is a more faithful representation:  self-promotion at the expense of others, spurred by jealousy and competitive friendship, and the willingness to achieve success at any cost.

Pearl's final scenes on the boardwalk with Henry, whom it is exciting to see collaborating in Pearl's earlier revenge, is a fine and gentle moment for a character whose recent actions could threaten to change her nature as well as her form in ways more cruel than I would like.  It, in some ways, validates her earlier actions by reinforcing that she is, in fact, still Pearl.  It's also a fine moment for Skinner Sweet, who once again manages to make honesty both charming and menacing.

Jim Book is the other side of Pearl's coin, the only other person Sweet has been known to turn.  Unlike Pearl, who has reluctantly but successfully embraced Sweet's transformation, Book resists it for over three years, barely surviving on groundhogs and sheep, trying large-scale transfusions and blood treatments to cure his condition.  Finally, he enlists Abilena, his former partner's daughter, to help him kill himself.  She agrees on the condition that he impregnate her, continuing a cycle of inherited revenge, handed down from one generation to the next.  Sweet, it seems, may outlive his enemies, but not his injustices.

[September 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 1 (ISBN 978-1401228309)

The Private Eye #2

written by Brian K. Vaughan
art by Marcos Martin
with Muntsa Vicente

And just like that what started as a simple background check for a formerly wayward rich woman turns into an off-the-books homicide investigation.  The Private Eye has made no effort to disguise its villain:  cult leader, wanna-be apocalyptic savior, murderer, and shadowy conspirator De Guerre.  Taj McGill's poking around into her own past brought him back into her life, and he repays her by stabbing her at the conclusion of the previous issue.  "Patrick Immelman," the P. I. protagonist, stumbles on the police circus at the murder site and promptly decides to drop Taj's case altogether to avoid run-ins with the law and, more importantly, the criminal underground who might actually recognize his password.

However, The Private Eye #2 really picks up when Taj's sister, and "Immelman"'s referral for Taj herself, Raveena McGill surprises the investigator in his own office.  Thinking he is responsible for her sister's death, Raveena attacks him.  Ultimately, her threats seem somewhat half-hearted since it takes very little for "Immelman" to calm her.  Their relationship, teased in the previous issue when he joked that he'd taken her case because she was hot, is considerably more familiar than I would otherwise have anticipated between the P. I. and his clients.  He even removes, temporarily, the dark make-up mask covering his eyes to demonstrate his sincerity, and she responds with a full-body embrace.  They have a surprisingly easy rapport and honesty, refreshing in a world of calculated deception and well-kept secrets.

Buy THE PRIVATE EYE at PanelSyndicate

Dial H #15

"Crossed Wires"
written by China Miéville
pencils by Alberto Ponticelli
inks by Dan Green

There are two phases to Miéville's over-sized conclusion to his spectacular run of Dial H:  the explanation and the action climax.  While both are satisfying finishes, the explanation—offered in the stilted but poetic prose of the Fixer—is the better of the two.  Miéville's mythology for the Dials is subtle and deep:  a hodgepodge of shadowy characters, mysterious villains, ever-multiplying dials, a distant but cruelly remembered Dial War, and scattered, faulty Dials littering multiple worlds.  And while we may lament that we get no more of it than we do, it's refreshing here that he presents the outlines clearly here.  Miéville's action-packed finale is rewarding but less engaging than his ideas and dialogue.

The real treat of "Crossed Wires" is the unveiling of the Operator, the mysterious "O," who crash-landed on Earth after retroactively bombing the Exchange in the midst of the Dial War siege.  He and his acolyte the Centipede, for whom he has crafted an E-Dial for "evil" (which is poised to feature in Miéville's Justice League #23.3), have been dialing apocalypses on their Doom-Dial to take revenge on those worlds that fought against the exchange in the Dial War.  One of Miéville's finest contrivances was to reverse the image of the phone, which is no longer the inspiration for the Dials but the reflection of them.  The Exchange existed first, and only in the Operator's efforts to reproduce those dials do man's inventions for the telephone derive.

Even in its final episode, Miéville continues to pepper Dial H liberally with esoteric details culled from a wide gamut of fields.  Proper dials are "ectypes".  The previous issue's Metacastle is destroyed by the Operator's Doom-Dial by calling up the favored apocalypse of Urschleimopolis.  The assault on the Exchange and its Operators for the preservation of the worlds' "unique essences," later referred to only as the Dial War, was mounted by the coalition forces of the Material Protection Alterity Army and the Rapid Interreality Assault Alliance, MPAA and RIAA, representatives of motion pictures and recording studios respectively.

All in all, Miéville has crafted a series-long meditation on superheroes, villains, the inevitable consequences of power and the potential for its exchange, and the virtue of uniqueness.  Dial H is a series that not only recalls moments from earlier issues—Bumper Carla, for instance, makes another silent appearance here—but one that effectively foreshadows the story's direction, and it does it so deftly that I'm confident I didn't catch a lot of it.  It's for that reason that I anticipate eagerly returning to re-read the full run in the short future.  It's a difficult read to be sure, complicated and Daedalean, but peerlessly rewarding.

Superheroes:  Secret Faction, Watertower, Blink Centurion, Ponder, Monodon Seer (i.e., Narwhal), Crosshairs, Matryoshka, Galaxy, Captain Baker, Girl Coelacanth, Pie Chart, Kid Red, DeFacer, Still Small Voice, Matterhorn, Jab Cross, Muriatic Man, The Coagulator, LobotoMist, Chimney Lachrymose, Pelican Bluff, Tugboat Resin, Synapsetrix, Ctrl-Alt-Daffodil, Rancid Hoop, Cloud Skeet, Flame Snail

Sidekicks:  Exhaust

[October 2013]

The Black Beetle #4

"No Way Out" (4 of 4)
by Francesco Francavilla

Francavilla concludes his first complete Black Beetle mini-series with a supremely stylish, if not particularly surprising, verve. The two-page title spread, for instance, a delightful birds-eye map-scape (with the humorously identified "ME" car rumbling over the bridge) which bleeds ambiguously into a portrait of the Fierro family estate Camp Creek, sets the tone for the Beetle's final showdown, his final "reveal".  It's a puzzle, quite literally in Francavilla's design, which explains step by step the Black Beetle's logic, a series of proverbial bread crumbs.  Part mystery, part adventure, all pulp candy.

The primary mysteries of "No Way Out"—i.e., the circumstances of the fire at Spencer's and the identity of the masked Labyrinto—are wrapped up tidily, perhaps too tidily.  They fit tonally with the Shadow-esque pulp storytelling, which Francavilla cultivated throughout, but they don't do much to complicate it.  Consequently, its plot is strong, but not all that innovative.  If anything, its one small surprise is that it doesn't grant its villain Labyrinto his parting words from the fire.  He may say them, or something, but neither our hero nor we ourselves will hear them.  That is, assuming he's actually dead, a condition The Black Beetle has been very liberal about undoing.  In true pulp tradition, the Beetle may not have yet heard the last of Jimmy Galazzo...again.

It may lack a little in plot creativity, but "No Way Out" does, however, situate the immediate story in a vintage-flavored context that makes it seem more like the opening chapter of a larger story than the main event.  The series' frequent interludes and it's earlier Dark Horse Presents story sprinkle plenty of potential conflict for the Black Beetle to solve in the future.

Saga, Volume One

written by Brian K. Vaughan
art by Fiona Staples

From its first page, Saga juxtaposes the disembodied, philosophical—yet extremely personal—narration of its youngest character with the much more bodily and mundane circumstances of her birth and preservation.  What makes it so mesmerizing is that it brings out the beauty of both.  It capitalizes on the grandeur of its cosmic setting and its epic science-fantasy predecessors even as it undermines them for more familiar, commonplace conflict.  In a genre littered with destined saviors and heroes and the most unlikely deliverances from certain destruction, Saga is the story of a family stuck in the political, militaristic, and cultural center of a generations-long shitstorm.

On its large scale, as much as anything, Saga is about war, colonization, economic and cultural exploitation, and unbridled nationalism, corruption and privilege, told from the perspective of a family that gets caught in the crosshairs.  It's also a compelling love story.  Marko and Alana are as fiery, flawed and as well-suited for one another as any couple in recent memory.

Saga arrives almost fully formed.  Its opening chapters catch fleeting glimpses of a world and a cast of secondary characters as round and detailed as any.  The credibility of Marko and Alana as a couple anchors the story, but the menagerie of soldiers, hit-men, high-end sex workers, child phantoms, and family back home is the real strength of Vaughan's world-building.  Each character could easily be the protagonist of his or her own series, and most are given moments that capitalize on that potential.  The Will's brief and memorable stay on Sextillion, for instance, betrays his promise as an anti-hero of the Saga universe, a killer (and a cold-hearted one, at that) who nevertheless has a soft spot for children, a disinclination for exploitation, and unexpected broken heart from his break-up from The Stalk.  Prince Robot IV—blueblood, television-head, and commander of one of Landfall's many mercenary armies—could easily be the protagonist of his own tragedy.  A man troubled by his war experience, unable to conceive an heir with his wife under extraordinary pressure to do so, and coerced into pursuing the runaway couple to some of the less desirable ends of the universe.

Despite its sweeping, epic tone, Saga's not above some casual humor and stealthy jokes, e.g., the "grease monkey" Marko paid off for use of the garage actually being a monkey.  Several characters too, Alana and Izabel in particular, are quick-witted and clever and provide fine tonal foils for the series' more sincere voices, like Marko, quick to point out absurdities and ironies.  And, of course, Alana’s insistence that they go to Quietus to meet the “smartest person in the universe” is quite funny, since that man would be D. Oswald Heist, author of pulp romance novel A Night Time Smoke. But, I suspect, in the world of Saga, she might also be right.

Fiona Staples' contribution to the series as its artist cannot be overstated.  She has crafted some of comics' most beautiful heroes.  Marko and Alana both have the fineness of features and sculped physiques of Greek statues.  Her mellifluent style is made all the more beautiful for her unwillingness to shy away from the unsavory and grotesque.  It is, for example, a testament to her skill and suitability to Saga that she makes the arachnoid contract killer The Stalk a believable lover for scruffy, handsome fellow killer The Will.  She also excels in Saga's expansive spacescapes, complementing the scope of vision and tone that Vaughan has cultivated.  

Collects Saga #1-6

ISBN: 978-1607066019

Dream Thief #3

written by Jai Nitz
art by Greg Smallwood

John Lincoln is becoming a dangerous and perhaps different man in his mask.  After two episodes of fulfilling the vendettas of dead men in his sleep, keeping their memories but himself unaware of his actions while he commits them, Lincoln is starting to take matters into his own hands, becoming increasingly comfortable with other people's revenge.

It begins differently, not remembering anything.  Though it slowly comes back, piece by piece, an accident of the relevant ghost as much anything, it certainly is a sign the rules of his new life are changing.  The hanging of a Mississippi Ku Klux Klan leader may have followed the pattern thus far, but his actions against the rest of his Klan chapter's pick-ups and his investigation into the life and death of his new ghost are all Lincoln's own.  And he's using the expertise he's accumulating from the other ghosts to help him out.  He's spending more and more time in each issue in the mask and even more time out of the mask serving the mask's purposes.  And, as John Lincoln himself says, "No problem.  I'm getting good at this" (Dream Thief #3, p. 22).

Dream Thief seems to be moving toward a fever-pitch of a finale.  Lincoln's relationships are suffering.  His friends are disappearing from his life, he's becoming increasingly suspicious of his sister who may have known about his now-dead girlfriend's murder of his first ghost Cordero, and his estranged and incarcerated father looms near in the future.  Dream Thief may at first seem episodic, with its vendetta-of-the-issue format, but more than that it's one man's struggle not to lose himself to forces outside of himself.  Issues #2 and #3 aren't as tightly packed or as individually satisfying as the series' exceptional opening chapter, but Nitz and Smallwood have crafted an excellent story.

Día De Los Muertos #1

Uno
"Dead, But Dreaming"
written by Alex Link
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Nick Johnson

"Reflections"
written by Christopher E. Long
art by Jean-Paul Csuka
colors by Riley Rossmo

"Te Vas Ángel Mîo"
written by Dirk Manning
art by Riley Rossmo
colors by Megan Wilson

In the first of three issues, artist Riley Rossmo has assembled a collection of shorts thematically tied to the Mexican Day of the Dead.  Each of the stories is a fine meditation on death, in particular the toll it can take on the living.  In "Dead, But Dreaming" a grown woman Katrina—a sly nod to La Calavera Catrina, the lady skeleton in fine clothes ubiquitous around the holiday—visits the Deadlands to find her mother who died giving birth to her.  It is a vision of death that is as vibrant and dangerous as it might be, and its heroine Katrina—beautiful, liberally tattooed, with long, wild hair and a fondness for her skeleton-helmed motorcycle—is fierce but vulnerable, still guilty for her mother's death and so eager to meet her.  This longing, never realized within the story, since Katrina never does meet her mother, is nevertheless content, feeling through her unexpected salvation in the Deadlands that her mother does love her and does not blame her daughter for her early death.

If "Dead, But Dreaming" tantalizes the reader but leaves the story unfulfilled yet hopeful, "Reflections" is refreshingly complete.  It is a ghost story, a mystery.  Hired to resolve a conflict with ghosts which lands a father Walt in the hospital, ghost-liaison Zan returns to the home they haunt.  It is swift paean to justice and as Zan calls it "laying bare the truth".  Using a mirror, a not so subtle instrument to reveal the truth, he recognizes the dead as ancestors protecting Walt's two young daughters.  Though his specific sins are never enumerated and Zan himself doesn't take any action against the abusive father, his ancestors—in a rush of supernatural verve reminiscent of Poltergeist—take care of Walt with the very mirror in which they are revealed.

In the final of the first three stories "Te Vas Ángel Mîo," a mariachi singer still mourning the death of his lover, spends the night with a strange but beautiful young woman.  Unlike Día De Los Muertos' other offerings, this one is written partially in Spanish with an English echo, a celebration of the beauty of the language as well as an appreciation of the culture.  It also mimics the nature of the lady, who herself seems an echo, an echo of both Juan's words and his former lover Aislara.  Whoever...or whatever...she is, "Te Vas Ángel Mîo" is a bittersweet lyric of lost love and hard comfort.