Category Archives: Comics

Following DC’s Future Quest series mashing up most of the Hanna-Barbera 1960s cartoons, DC published 12 issues of Future Quest Presents showcasing various characters in solo adventures in the aftermath of the big crossover. Space Ghost gets a multi-part arc, followed by the Galaxy Trio (who were more interesting than I found them on TV), Birdman, Mightor, the Herculoids (the weakest arc) and Frankenstein Junior.

Without a running plot and with a variety of different creative teams, this doesn’t work as well as the original. Still, fun enough I’d have liked to see more (and some stories hint at the possibility) but apparently that’s it for this universe.

THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM is a comic book series by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward of which I recently read the first two collections, Walking the Path and Edge of Everything. It’s set within a small solar system dominated by a powerful church and an all-powerful Lux corporation (think Amazon for an equivalent). Protagonist Jess is a novice nun who discovers the church is in cahoots with Lux; Grix, a space captain who works freelance deliveries for Lux winds up allied with Jess against the sinister cabal.

This is a mixed bag. I honestly don’t care about the evil forces arrayed against our heroes, but the characters are strong enough to keep me reading — though the second book introduces too many supporting characters for me to care about any of them. I’ll be back for V3 though.

METAL MEN: Full Metal Jacket by Len Wein and Yildiray Cinar was DC’s attempt to revive “the robots who think they’re human” during the New 52 reboot (from the same Legends of Tomorrow anthology book as Metamorpho: Two Worlds, One Master). Surprisingly this was a lot of fun, Wein clearly knowing and liking the team.

As in the original series, the Metal Men are a group of self-aware robots who can shapeshift and use the natural abilities of their metal forms — Mercury can turn liquid, Lead is radiation proof, Tina (Platinum) can spin super-thin wire, etc. A sinister hacker, Nameless, is unleashing assorted robots built for the DOD to force Doc Magnus to turn his creations over to him: Nameless can access anything through the Internet but the responsometers that power the Metal Men enable them to operate independently off-line. He wants them under his control, by any means necessary.

The resulting arc is fun, though it suffers from the setting: the villain behind Nameless, Mother Machine, was apparently a big threat who’d already appeared in other New 52 books; as I never read them, the reveal did nothing for me. That ain’t Wein’s fault, though.

Art top to bottom by Evan Shaner, Riccardo Federici, Ross Andru and Francis J. Manapul. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Film critic Roger Ebert once observed that love stories are always a cliche; what makes them interesting is that the cast keeps changing. Case in point, the fake-dating rom-com RENT A BOYFRIEND by Gloria Chao. It’s obvious as soon as Chinese-American protagonist Chloe hires a fake boyfriend from Rent For Your ‘Rents (whatever your parents want for you, your fake boyfriend can fake it to a T) that she and Andrew will end up together. It’s still fascinating watching them navigate cultural issues, dysfunctional parents and their own personal issues to get to the HEA.

This was a fun romance and I give Chao points for not resolving the family dysfunction easily. I hate the “Oh, they really love their kid after all, let’s forget what awful parents they were” resolution (I’ve seen it a few times in movies and TV) and no, the story doesn’t hand-wave any of the problems. I’m not sure if Rent for Your ‘Rents makes sense (is one visit really going to satisfy your parents everything’s fine with your love life?) but thumbs up for this one.

Not so much SINGLE PLAYER by Tara Tai. The protagonist of this lesbian rom-com is a computer-game writer a gaming company hires to provide their soon-to-be-legendary next release with some romantic plotlines. That doesn’t sit well with the nonbinary game designer, who wants to avoid any such elements, and boy do these two find each other Obnoxious and Irritating … Sounded promising, but the first few chapters were so heavy into gaming talk and nerdy references that as a non-gamer I couldn’t get into it. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad concept — a lot of people do care passionately about gaming — but it’s not one that works for me.

As the climax of Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a blatant riff on King Kong — Bernie Casey as a now berserk Dr. Pride climbs the Watts Towers for a standoff with the cops before falling to his death — I decided to dig deeper and bought TRACKING KING KONG: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture by Cynthia Erb. The author looks at King Kong, it’s 1976 remake (Erb mentions that Peter Jackson is thinking about a remake of his own) and spinoffs such as King Kong vs. Godzilla and Jack Kirby’s Kamandi #7 (cover by Kirby). That makes me surprised by the stuff she doesn’t mention, such as the 1960s King Kong cartoon or the film Konga — though she’s not making an encyclopedic survey so I don’t think that’s a flaw in the book.

Erb argues that while King Kong was seen as a horror film at the time and a monster movie in the 1950s (after its rerelease inspired both American and Japanese kaiju films) it also has a romance element, a jungle-movie element and some similarities with director Merriam C. Cooper’s earlier documentaries. She also looks at the racial subtext, with a bunch of white adventurers invading the jungle and carrying a dark-skinned jungle dweller home in chains; his rampage through New York can be seen as embodying the dangerous black savage or a righteous pushback against the white oppressor

That material is fascinating but it bogs down in the heavy academese Erb writes in. A fair amount of space goes to discussing different academic interpretive schemes and the pros and cons of each; possibly this would have worked if I was in the same field as Erb … but I’m not. So a favorable review, but not an enthusiastic one.

Cover by Kirby. All rights to images remain with current holders.

PHOEBE AND HER UNICORN: Unicorn Theater makes me think Dana Simpson’s gotten better at the graphic-novel pacing since her earlier The Magic Storm. Phoebe and her unicorn BFF Marigold are heading to summer camp but to Phoebe’s surprise, Marigold’s traveling with her sister Florence; much as Phoebe reminds herself it’s only fair to share her buddy, she finds herself getting jealous. Light but engaging.

As a fan of the L. Sprague deCamp/Fletcher Pratt Harold Shea books, I had high hopes for deCamp’s THE UNDESIRED PRINCESS, which has another modern-day American sucked into a portal fantasy. In this case he ends up the designated monster-slayer in a world run by binary logic — not in the computer sense but in having everything divided with no middle ground. There’s blue and yellow but no green; people are either virtuous or villainous, with no moral ambiguity; the landscape switches from mountains to plains without any intermediate zone such as foothills

What sunk this was that the protagonist is mopey and grouchy: he doesn’t like having to have adventures, grumbles constantly about the strangeness of the world and doesn’t at all like the beautiful and perfectly charming princess he’s supposed to wed (until the end when he suddenly discovers she’s wonderful). He’s not at all interesting. David Drake’s The Enchanted Bunny, which was added in to fill out the volume, is a great deal funnier in its story of a modern man turned portal-fantasy monster slayer.

The seventh collection of LAZARUS by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark is less than overwhelming. We get two chapters dealing with Jonah Carlyle’s redemption, largely lost on me as I didn’t remember who he was, then a big conference between the Carlyles — including our protagonist, the “lazarus” Forever — and the head of House Hock. Which leads to the reveal everything that was going on is rooted in a second-rate melodrama from years ago. Perversely this makes me want to go back to the early volumes and figure out why they worked for me.

All rights to image remain with current holder.

LAZARUS: Cull and LAZARUS: Fracture 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (the Owen Freeman cover is from an earlier issue) continue the story I stopped following during the pandemic (I read Cull back in 2019 but forgot). With the head of House Carlyle severely injured, eldest daughter Johanna takes charge while Forever — the “Lazarus” with healing factor and deadly fighting skills — handles threats in the field. Can Johanna steer through the changing political landscape? Can Forever take down deadly adversaries such as the Dragon, another family’s psycho Lazarus? What about Forever’s clone Eve? Solidly readable but I can’t say I regret my decision to get these books from the library rather than buy.

While I liked Nicole Givens Kurtz’s Kill Three Birds, I think the sequel, A THEFT MOST FOWL: A Kingdom of Aves Mystery improves on it. The setting, a kingdom where society divides into avian sects (doves for spiritual guidance, nightjars for graveyard shift, hawks to investigate crimes), is as interesting as the first book but I think the mystery (dealing with the theft of a sacred relic) holds together better.

I get disappointed by a lot of self-published urban fantasy but as I live in North Carolina I couldn’t turn down WITCHWOOD: The Carolina Files Book 1 by Willa Blackmore. While I didn’t find it as Southern as Windmaster’s Bane (cover by Tim White) or Alex Bledsoe’s Tufa books, I did like it — I’ll probably try book two at some point (I don’t say that about all Southern fantasy).

Tula is one of the Whitlow witches who handle problems in their section of the Carolinas. They’ve never had to deal with the kind of threats Harry Dresden does and by and large the family’s a mess — mom’s never taught her girls half what they need to know and Tula’s sisters are respectively a fashionista and a drunk. Still, when an FBI agent asks Tula to help him investigate a supernatural force that’s put his sister in the ICU, how can she say no? Tula learns a local winery hides an evil Druidic cult that’s attempting to incarnate a Green Man and the sister is collateral damage; the Whitlow witches, however, are directly in the cult’s magical gunsights.

This was good entertainment though I find “witch” freighted with so many meanings (when I wrote a witch into an unpublished novel years ago, I made a point to establish she wasn’t wiccan) I sometimes wish authors would use “wizard” or “magician” instead (though I’ve had friends who think Harry Potter makes anyone else using “wizard” a no-go).

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Nnedi Okorafor’s SHE WHO KNOWS is a short prequel to Who Fears Death? telling the backstory of one of the supporting characters. The protagonist is a woman from a salt-dealing culture, nudged by inexplicable impulses to push against her gender role; the results make her family and their community rich but inevitably brings trouble as well. Coming-of-age stories don’t work for me but Okorafor pulled this one off. I found the ending too abrupt, though; possibly it would have worked better if I’d read Who Fears Death more recently than 2011 (it’s also setting up for a V2).

My friend Ross bought me BOMBSHELLS: The Death of Illusion by Marguerite Bennett and multiple artist as a birthday present, so I’m finally back in Bennett’s alt.WW II where the superheroes are all women. In this collection everyone from Zatanna and Raven to Poison Ivy, Lois Lane and Supergirl is slowly drawn to the brutal siege of Leningrad, but can they help its people? And what about Hugo Strange and his mad plan to breed a super-race to take over from humanity? As always, a fun series with interesting takes on DC characters.

WE ARE WATCHING by Alison Gaylin has a recently widowed bookstore-owner increasingly unnerved by the way people seem to be watching her and her daughter, and chatting about them online. Still, her paranoid pothead father, an aging rocker, has to be imagining it when he claims they’re all the targets of a vast conspiracy that tried to kill him just like they did JFK — right?

He is not, of course, imagining it.

This is a thriller for the age of Qanon and Pizzagate (there’s a reference to characters searching for a secret room in the bookstore where the human sacrifices are carried out), a conspiracy born online and formed by connecting up dots that don’t exist, which is enough to drive people to kill or die for it. I don’t quite buy it could stay this tight and obsessive for two decades but it’s still an excellent book.

Covers by Ant Lucia and Marguerite Sauvage (bottom). All rights to images remain with current holders.

After watching MY NAME IS MODESTY a few weeks back, I decided to dive back in to the world of Peter O’Donnell’s daring heroine, starting with the one volume of the comic strip Durham Library has that I haven’t read, Ripper Jax (by O’Donnell and artist Enric Badia Romero.

The best strip in this 1990s collection is the first one, in which Modesty learns a psychometric friend of hers is being coerced by knife-wielding gangster “Ripper” Jax, who’s holding the psychic’s daughter hostage. Can Modestry and her trusty dioscuri Willie Garvin rescue the girl and fix Jax’s wagon? Yes, of course, but there are some surprises along the way. The remaining strips are good, though not as good:

• The Maori Connection. Trouble in New Zealand where Modesty’s friend Sir Gerald’s niece is in peril from someone looking to eliminate competition for a large inheritance.
• Honeygun. That’s the nickname of a female assassin who did Modesty a favor years ago; now the bill’s coming due.
• Durango. Two of Modesty and Willie’s friends are hostages with the eponymous revolutionary leader in Guatemala. The rescue plan goes sideways when it turns out Durango knows and hates Modesty Blaise.

The introduction to the collection argues that while Modesty is frequently described as the female James Bond, they’re fundamentally different: Bond works on orders from M, Modesty acts according to her own sense of morality. Sounds about right.

I recently finished rereading AVENGERS: Behold the Vision by Roy Thomas and multiple artists (most notably John Buscema, who did the cover, and Barry Windsor-Smith) as part of my Silver Age Reread over at Atomic Junk Shop. While my assessment of this run hasn’t changed from the last time I read the TPB, it does strike me the team is surprisingly underpowered for “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.” With Thor, Iron Man and Captain America out of the book and Wanda and Pietro absent it feels close to the Detroit Justice League second-string level at times. Perhaps that’s why Thomas has Hawkeye ditch his bow and arrow in favor of becoming Goliath but that role never really worked for me. Still, I’m an Avengers fan from the Kookie Quartet days (the era when the team was Cap, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver) so I enjoyed this (as always with decades old comics, YMMV).

All image rights remain with their current holders.