HELL by Robert Olen Butler has a damned news anchorman sentenced to conduct newscasts in the underworld (where you definitely do not want to rely on the teleprompter!), carrying out an awkward affair with Anne Boleyn, reporting news stories that invariably turn out bullshit and hunting desperate for a gateway out of Hell and into Heaven. Amusing in bits (like J. Edgar Hoover’s rationalization that he’s in Hell to prevent a Commie takeover)) but ultimately lacking in substance compared to Larry Niven’s Inferno.
100 BULLETS: The Hard Way by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso is an excellent installment in the series as the drifter Wylie recovers the memories of his past as a Minuteman, learns why he was glad to forget and we learn more about the differing agendas of Graves, Shepherd and their plans for Dizzy (I’ve frequently wondered if Graves and Shepherd were really on the same side despite their stances——this answers that). This is noteworthy for giving the history of the mysterious conspiracy the Trust and the Minutemen, though it doesn’t explain their later rift. Well done, as usual.
KILL SHAKESPEARE by Conor McCreery, Anthony Del Col and Andy Belanger has Hamlet’s trip to England take a different turn from the play as Richard III recruits him to take down a mysterious godlike entity named Shakespeare who exercises a strange power over Richard and his people. Accompanied by Falstaff, Juliet, Othello and a seemingly reformed Iago, Hamlet sets off to find Shakespeare, unaware that Richard and Lady Macbeth have their own agendas … Entertaining, but not as clever a reworking of fiction as Fables or Unwritten.
THE ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN by Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard has a successful businessman bitten by a werewolf on vacation, then turning his powers to crimefighting under the direction of the urbane vampire Zechariah. The toll it takes on his life and a few details Zechariah hasn’t mentioned soon become a problem … More than the Werewolf by Night knockoff I anticipated, though it didn’t really win me over either (but as Durham Library has several more TPBs, I’m sure I’ll keep reading); I did like some neat touches, such as Zechariah’s amusement over current vampire fiction (since writers don’t use the classic powers like shapeshifting and turning to mist, people have no idea just what his powers are).
SCALPED: Indian Country by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera is a hardboiled crime comic in which Dashell Bad Horse, son of a former AIM radical (no, not the Marvel crime cartel, the American Indian Movement of the 1970s), returns to his home reservation and becomes a deputy in the corrupt law-enforcement regime of reservation boss Lincoln Red Crow, who’s unaware Dash is working with the FBI to take him down. Very grim and gritty in showing a world where everyone’s either corrupt, has a hidden agenda, or both, but not to my taste as much as the more classic noir of Criminal or the elaborate conspiracies of 100 Bullets.
MODESTY BLAISE: The Black Pearl by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway is the third collection of the newspaper strip, including the unremarkable title story, the much more entertaining “The Magnified Man” (with a very clever adversary) and “The Killing Ground,” the only comic strip adapted into prose (the short story of the same name in Pieces of Modesty). O’Donnell’s interview in the front covers his work as romance novelist Madeline Brent.
THE IRREGULARS by Steven-Elliot Altman, Michael Reaves and Angelo Dazo has Sherlock Holmes call in the Baker Street Irregulars when Watson is identified, by eyewitnesses, as a brutal killer. The solution involves a shapeshifter and a scheme by Moriarty to mathematically reach outside space-time and summon Lovecraft’s Old Ones——can a handful of children save the day? Well, of course, but it’s fun watching them try.
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