Comic Book TPBs (#SFWApro)

Continuing to clean out my backlog of reading reivews …

UNWRITTEN: Orpheus in the Underworld by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (cover by Yuko Shimizu, rights with current holder) has Tommy descend into the Underworld in the hopes of rescuing Lizzie Hexam. However with Leviathan dying, even our stories of the underworld have become corrupted, plus there are a lot of people down there who know Tommy and don’t like him … Good as usual, and I really liked learning the urban legends about the vampire Savoy (“You’ve been conclusively traced back to the 17th century!”).
KILL SHAKESPEARE vol. 2 has Hamlet continue his quest for Shakespeare, the mysterious demiurge shaping the lives of England’s people, with the melancholy Dane accompanied by Juliet, Falstaff and Iago, while Richard III and Lady Macbeth plot to exploit Shakespeare’s power for their own ends. Better than the first volume, actually, so I hope they get Vol. 3 kickstarted.
MARVEL MASTERWORKS: Ant-Man/Giant-Man vol. 2 by Stan Lee and Don Heck shows why Hank Pym’s size-changing super-hero was never A-list (as witness the “Ant-Man’s getting a movie?” eye-rolls across the Internet when that was announced). His battles with Egghead, Porcupine, Madame Macabre and the Human Top (plus Spidey and the Hulk) never click the way Thor and Spider-Man did, and sometimes they’re a complete mess—the final two-parter (before the series was dropped in favor of Sub-Mariner) has Hank lose his size-shrinking powers, only to get them back at the end without explanation. The character core is the relationship between Hank and the Wasp, but Lee messes this up too: Whenever Hank declares his love, the next issue has Jan wondering why he never declares his love.
MARVEL MASTERWORKS: Sgt. Fury Vol. 2 by Stan Lee and Dick Ayers is my first encounter with Fury in his WW II “Howling Commandos” era (other than one issue in childhood) and it doesn’t look like I missed much. Lee and Ayers recycle lots of WW II genre cliches: The multi-ethnic squad (Southerner, New York Jew, handsome Italian-American, etc.—though with the addition of a black man), Nazis who alternate buffoonery (sometimes they’re one step away from “Heil myself!”) with quasi-laughable arrogance (repeated reminders they’re The Master Race) and the Howlers effortlessly defeating all opposition (and being called away from their European base for jobs as far off as Burma or Africa—it frequently seems like they’re all the Commandos the Allies have. Though Commander Benson (whose blog is down so I can’t link to it) says the series improved a lot later, and I trust his judgment, it’s not on display here.
DOMINIC FORTUNE: It Can Happen Here and Now is a graphic novel starring Howard Chaykin’s 1930s soldier-of-fortune, here assigned to bodyguard three drunken over-the-hill stars and keep them from too much trouble. Only it turns out they’re also tangled up in a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR … A lot of Chaykin’s recent work hasn’t grabbed me much, but I really enjoyed this; some good backup reprints too.
THE SIXTH GUN: Cold Dead Fingers by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt is the first collection in the series (I read Vol. 2 a while back) wherein a former Confederate and a preacher’s daughter find themselves pursued by an undead Confederate general seeking a magic weapon the preacher’s daughter now carries, one of six guns the general needs to bring about the apocalypse. Fast-moving, eerie and effective—I look forward to reading more. (Cover by Hurtt, all rights to current holder)