So look, I spent some time off-and-on over the course of the last few weeks wondering if there was anything that I personally have to say about Ernie Bushmiller's
, history's most perfect daily gag comic strip, that hasn't been said better dozens of times before by more insightful critics with more impressive resumes.
Now that my self-imposed deadline for this post about all the new-ish comics I read in June has arrived, I still can't think of anything.
The latest volume in Fanta's Carl Barks Library contains various Uncle Scrooge comics from 1963 and 1964, ranging from the sorts of big adventure stories that we tend to think of when we think of Barks and Scrooge to a couple of face-offs with Scrooge's perennial enemies Magica De Spell and the Beagle Boys (and both at once, in one story!), and from comedic, Duckburg-set stories to one-page, space-filling gag strips
The title story is one of those adventure stories, a 22-pager in which Scrooge's lucky dime is lost at sea...and in danger of falling prey to an unlikely salvage operation by four-armed Martians, a story bookended by Donald's attempts to make it as a newspaper reporter, even if he has to make up outlandish stories on slow news days. (Despite being the length of a standard modern comic book story, this one feels much longer, thanks to how many panels there are per page, and how much Barks packs into each one.)
That's followed by "The Status Seeker," in which Scrooge finds himself in a race to recover a particular jewel that resembles peppermint candy, his opponent being one of those mustachioed anthropomorphic pig villains discussed in a prose piece in the recent "A Little Something Special" and Other Tales of Fiendish Foes (The pig man villain design resurfaces in a second adventure in this very volume, wherein he is named "Foulcrook", is teamed with a dog man named "Slyviper" and tries to steal the discovery of a lost city out from under Scrooge and his nephews in an attempt to make it into an archaeological society).
As for Magica, she uses catastrophic weather events and magical disguises to try to break into the money bin in one story, later hires the Beagle Boys in an attempt to beat Scrooge from acquiring a flock of geese that lay golden eggs and later still comes up with a bizarre—but quite visually interesting—potion that transforms one's face into that of whoever he has last looked at.
In addition to all of the Scrooge stories, this volume contains a couple of shorts starring Gyro Gearloose and his mechanical helper, Helper, none of which did much for me personally; I guess I'm so used to seeing the inventor used as a sort of plot device in Scrooge stories that it's hard to find him too terribly compelling a star in his own right, even if each of his stories here are rather short ones.
Interestingly, among the usual generous amount of backmatter discussing each story and its history, and the original comics covers, there's a double fold-out poster of a Gyro image Barks drew.
This is a technically very well-made comic. Artist Jorge Jimenez is as skilled an artist as any that has ever drawn a Batman monthly, and he's quite adept at every part of comics-making, from distinct character designs to an occasionally Breyfoglian sense of dynamism when it comes to Batman in action (Check out this kick from
that pose is from a Breyfogle-drawn comic, but I'll be damned if I can remember which one.)
Similarly, writer Matt Fraction's plotting is strong, and, with one glaring exception I'll get to in a bit, he has a solid grasp on all of the characters, who all seem to be and sound like themselves, and his presentation of Bruce Wayne on a maybe date with a scientist whose work might be behind some strange goings-on involving Arkham inmates is an inspired blast of flirty dialogue and action sequences.
Despite the considerable, even obvious talents of the creators though, this first volume of the new Batman series still left me kind of cold. I could appreciate most of its component parts, but I couldn't really personally connect with the book, let alone get lost in it.
That likely has to do with the sense that we've seen all of this before, even as the comic takes the pose of giving us something new (Check out that dramatic new Batman costume, for the most obvious example, with Batman back in blue for the first time in over 30 years!).
So, there's a supervillain in a position of governmental authority and using his resources to target our heroes, something I complained about as feeling tired when Jason Aaron introduced villainous New York City District Attorney Hieronymous Hale in his 2025 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1: Return to New York (reviewed in this column).
Batman is on the outs with the Gotham Police Department, as he has been off-and-on from Batman: Year One to James Tynion's IV's 2020-2022 run and, I think, beyond.
Militarized law enforcement specialists are brought in to deal with vigilantes and supervillains, again as in Tynion's run.
Killer Croc is apparently devolving and becoming more bestial, with a newer, scarier design featuring a long, Venom-like tongue, as in the 2002-2003 "Hush" storyline.
One of Tim Drake's loved ones notices that when Tim spends time with Bruce Wayne, he tends to get injured, and je blames Bruce, as was the case in Chuck Dixon's 1990s Robin run.
James Gordon, Harvey Bullock and Alfred are all around. Jim's a beat cop now, and Alfred is either a ghost or a hallucination of Bruce's. Indeed, Alfred pops up in here about as much as he always has and, at first, I thought he might be some kind of programmed holographic AI Batman had built, but instead he seems to be a figment of Batman's imagination, as he talks to him about his current cases and conflicts, often receiving admonishment or advice in return.
I actually haven't read a regular Batman monthly since Tynion's climactic "Fear State" arc, so I'm not up on what's going on in the DCU's Gotham City at the moment, but Batman seems to be spending most of his time at "Pennyworth Manor," which looks to be a sizable mansion within the city limits. Bruce Wayne still seems to be very rich and to be running his company, so I assume he's recovered his fortune but lost Wayne Manor somehow...?
Fraction's take on the character is very gadget-heavy, with Batman and his Robins employing all sorts of high-tech gear throughout, including toyetic flying and stealth suits, and, charmingly, every time they use one, even something as simple as a grappling line, there's a little box introducing and explaining the gadget in question.
Now I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here. Fraction and Jimenez's Daylight represents good, solid, entertaining Batman comics. I am interested to see where this is all going, if The Minotaur is someone we know (or who I suspect it is) and if Fraction later justifies choices like the use of Savage in this story or why Anarky Lonnie Manchin suddenly seems like an idiot (Again, more on that in a bit).
It's just not great, and, at this point, I want really great comics, not just really good ones.
You probably think I've gone on long enough at this point, but here are a few bullet points regarding particular gripes of mine from these otherwise quite solid comics...
is Vandal Savage the Gotham City police commissioner now...? Is this an original idea of Fraction's, or a holdover from a previous
Now, if you're reading this blog, then you are probably a longtime DC Comics reader, and therefore probably already know all about Vandal Savage, an immortal caveman who has been menacing various DC superheroes since he first appeared in a 1943 issue of
Green Lantern, from back when the only GL was Alan Scott. Though he and Batman have obviously crossed paths repeatedly over the decades, Savage is generally a Justice Society or Justice League villain, with world-ruling ambitions, and to see him show up in
Batman at all, let alone as a government official, seems...weird, to say the least. (I work in a library, and they ran a background check before they hired me; does Gotham City not check to see if their new hires have criminal records, have ever been part of a team of super-villains or tried to conquer the world?)
Making it even more odd, in these first few issues of Fraction's Batman at least, he doesn't do anything that required the character to be an immortal caveman supervillain. He is anti-Batman and, presumably, opposed to all of the other Gotham vigilantes. He frames Batman for a murder. He threatens to kill a subordinate...and then perhaps kills or has him killed off-panel later on. All stuff that, like, any bad actor could do, whether it was an original character, or another supervillain taking at random.
Like, why Savage, and not The Ventriloquist or Captain Cold or Amazo or Starro? I just don't get it. (Also, in the scene of The Minotaur having a sort of staff meeting with various crime heads, Savage seems to very much be that character's lieutenant, which doesn't seem very Vandal Savage-y, does it? )
•The biggest misfire in this book is, I think, Fraction and Jimenez's treatment of Anarky (That is, believe it or not, Lonnie Manchin getting kicked in the face in the panel at the top of this review). Now, I'm a huge fan of writer Alan Grant and artist Norm Breyfogle, one of the best Batman teams to ever do it, and I similarly love their character Anarky, one of a handful of original characters they added to the mythos during their time managing it.
Anarky started as a one-off vigilante in the mold of What-if-Batman-was-more-hardcore-and-worked-to-change-the-world-rather-than-just-fought-to-uphold-the-status-quo?, tackling pollution and corporate greed in addition to the prevalence of illicit street drugs, which Grant's Batman seemed to spend most of his time dealing with. As Anarky became a recurring character, he quickly developed into a sort of anti-Robin and, by the time he earned a miniseries and a short-lived ongoing, (in 1997 and 1999), he was a full-fledged superhero, with a secret base of his own in Washington, D.C., and coming into conflicts with characters as various as Etrigan, Darkseid and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner.
He was also brilliant, constantly quoting philosophers and lecturing his dog and/or readers about political and economic theory. Breyfogle originally costumed him in a wide-brimmed hat, cloak and face mask patterned after the lead character in Alan Moore and David Lloy's V for Vendetta.
He is completely unrecognizable here.
Jimenez's radical redesign has him wearing what are essentially street clothes, a big, puffy red jacket with a tilted A-for-Anarchy symbol (spraypainted) on the front of it and wearing a gold mask that looks nothing like his usual one, with bright red eyes and a jagged, zigzag along the lower half as if to suggest pointed teeth.
When we first meet him, he and two henchmen, both wearing gold masks, are trying to hijack or rob a semitruck for some reason. Why does Anarky have henchmen? The scene provides a reason why he shouldn't; one of them shoots the driver dead, and Anarky berates him: "You moron-- --This wasn't the job!"
I was just sort of assuming this was a new, second (or third, I guess) Anarky, until Batman later tracks him to his hideout, throwing two more random guys through the window—apparently more of Anarky's men—and addresses him as Lonnie. Batman catches him easily (the best fight Anarky can put up is spraying Batman in the face with something, which slows him down for a panel).
Tell me, does this sound like Anarky Lonnie Manchin?
Just before Batman arrives, he's talking to himself:
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Okay. Be cool. Come on.
Be cool, grab your gear and get--
AAAHH!
And then, after Batman has caught him and tied him upside down, we get this dialogue:
I don't know man, I swear.
Guy paid me a grand to boost the truck and dump i into the river. That's it. That's all.
But everything went bad.
...
I-- I wanna turn-- Whatchallit-- --State's evidence.
Take me to the cops. The D.A. The Feds, I don't care. Just take me in.
"Whatchallit"...? Does that sound anything at all like Lonnie Manchin...?
Now, both Croc and The Riddler were notably having trouble thinking, and were acting much, much dumber than usual, so I suppose it might later be revealed that Anarky has also had his mind messed with by The Crown of Storms, but, given that he has never been an inmate of Arkham, that seems extremely unlikely...and his relative lack of brains here isn't presented as an anomaly the way that Croc and Riddler's were (Other than Batman commenting on Lonnie's "friends" seeming "pretty stupid" and then later asking "What was the plan here, Lonnie? Because this one seems pretty weak", Batman doesn't acknowledge how out of character his old enemy is).
Remember, Lonnie wasn't just an ordinary genius like Batman, Tim Drake or Barbara Gordon, but he later used a "biofeedback learning enhancer" to make himself ten times smarter than he already was, as well as fuse the two hemispheres of his brain, giving him a uniquely brilliant mind. Lonnie Manchin should seem at least as smart as Batman or Lex Luthor or Mr. Terrific. He should use big words. He shouldn't say "Whatacallit". He knows the term "state's evidence".
•In general, I'm not a fan of killing off characters, as it just seems intuitively counter-productive for a storytelling "universe" like DC Comics to voluntarily reduce their cast and options for their creators...and, of course, as we know now, no one stays dead anymore. Not Bucky, not Jason Todd, not Bary Allen. Hell, even Uncle Ben has come back to life temporarily, hasn't he? So, killing off super-comics characters at this point in time just sets up some dumb resurrection story in the future...I mean,
someone is going to have write a story where Alfred has been put in a Lazarus pit and then went into secret butler training for years before he shows up alive at Wayne Manor again in a year or three or ten.
So, killing off Alfred, something that actually happened during Tom King's run, sometime after I tired of it and dropped Batman...? Not a fan! I think Fraction's run helps demonstrate why. Clearly Fraction wanted to write Alfred into his Batman story, and he wanted it badly enough that he went ahead and did so despite the fact that Alfred was, you know, dead. Which means we get scenes of him as Batman's imaginary friend in this book, like that above.
The scenes aren't poorly done or anything, but they do serve as a constant reminder that maybe King and DC shouldn't have killed him in the first place...?
Birds of Prey Vol. 4: On the Run (DC) This book collects the final nine issues of writer Kelly Thompson's
Birds of Prey run, and I'm sorry to see it go; this is the longest I've stuck with an iteration of the title since Gail Simone's first run, circa 2003-2007 and thus, obviously, the one I think is the best since.
Now, there are basically two ways to conclude a series like this once the publisher decides to cancel it for whatever reason...and by "like this" I mean one featuring a team that has starred in various one-shots, miniseries and ongoings for 30 years now, and is thus all but guaranteed to return in a new book before too long.
The first would be to simply end the series, wrapping up whatever plotlines were ongoing and maybe giving the characters a bit of a sendoff, while implying that the team will be staying together and continuing to have adventures, just off panel, rather than ones that are chronicled every month in a new issue of a comic book. The other would be to temporarily break up the team, scattering the cast so that they can be used elsewhere, and leaving it up to some future writer to reassemble some version of them.
Here, Thompson does the latter, and I assume this has something to do with the fact that most of the cast she has been using have other comics in which they are appearing. I know Batgirl Cassandra Cain is currently in a so-so ongoing series, for example, and I have heard that Black Canary is appearing in
Tom Taylor's current Detective Comics run (along with Green Arrow; I wonder if Sin will be as well...?), and Barbara Gordon will be starring
in a new book in which she goes to jail (the events of which might prove a little challenging to reconcile with those of a
Birds ongoing).
The in-comic reasons given for the team's dissolution seem somewhat abrupt. Babs and Canary decide to break up the team simultaneously, which allows for a sharing of the blame and a demonstration of their co-leadership.
Babs has realized that the team has essentially made themselves a target to bad actors who want to get their hands on all of the data Oracle has acquired over the years (and, in this case at least, powerhouses Big Barda and Sin/Megaera are targets for different types of possession by those same bad actors), something that Thompson has space and time to foreshadow.
And Canary wants to spend some time with Sin that doesn't involve the constant pressure of a superhero team, something that feels more tacked-on (There's a sense that this particular ending wasn't necessarily originally planned for, and that Thompson might have had to wrap the series up a little more quickly than might have been ideal; there are other elements of these issues that would support that).
These nine issues are technically two different story arcs—"On the Run" and "Unreality"—but as both feature the team in conflict with the same team of evil opposites, and the bad guys' plot carries from one arc to another, it's essentially one big, novel-length adventure...although it seems to climax somewhere closer to the middle, at the end of "On the Run".
The Birds follow a series of over-obvious clues into a series of also obvious traps (
the review at Collected Editions mentions that the connective tissue here isn't as strong as it could be, among other problems with the comics collected herein), the most spectacular of which involves shooting Barda into orbit, blowing her up, letting her fall back to Earth and, the New God thus weakened, allowing one of the bad guys to take over her body, resulting in a cool, menacing visual: A "blacked-out" Barda with a big, white, circular "eye" in the middle of her distinct silhouette.
While under attack, the Birds must try to figure out who their attackers are and where they are, eventually taking the fight to them. These attackers call themselves The Shadow Army, and consist of Copperhead (who primary artist Sam Basri gives little skin "wings" under his arms, and draws as overall quite menacing looking), Velvet Tiger,
Batman Beyond's Inque and new characters Golden Lion and Daemon Prime, the latter of whom seems to be a sort of anti-Oracle, and to have an intriguingly weird design, which looks kinda like...comfy Doctor Doom...?
(He also talks in a font that suggests an electronic voice and, at one point, Barda crushes his windpipe but he recovers panels later; I would have liked to learn a bit more about his nature, as, by the end, I wasn't clear if he was a regular human guy, or a robot, or some kind of cyborg or metahuman. Maybe we would have learned moer about him had the series not been canceled when it was...).
When the Birds realize that they are in danger, this gives Babs the excuse to call and warn all of the past members of this particular team, all of whom get at least a one-panel cameo here (the only characters to have appeared previously in the series that are missing seem to be Xanthe Zhou, who briefly appeared at the end of one arc in an unofficial capacity, and Meridian, the Mia Mizoguichi from the future...although she will appear briefly in a flashback later in the trade, as it is apparently her tech that allowed Inque to time travel back from Batman Beyond time to the present of 2026).
And then, when it comes time for a Birds vs. Shadow Army showdown, the good guys call in the reserves, so we see most of these characters join them for a battle...and then a post-victory dinner, during which we learn that John Constantine cannot use his magic to create noodles.
Written a little differently, it wouldn't be hard to see how this might have been a climax of a decent final story, as it allowed for the whole cast, going back to the very first mission in the very first story arc, to reappear and then work and hang out together one more time.
But then it's time for "Unreality." See, The Shadow Army gets away at the end of "On the Run," and they have yet to use some of the stuff we saw them steal earlier in the arc. This plot involves the Birds going undercover in new "skins" to infiltrate "The Game," an apparently annual event in Gotham City where a super-smart influencer young woman hosts a hybrid game that seems partly online and partly IRL, with some technology involving a blending of the two. It is all a cover for her real goal, which is also a callback to earlier in Thompson's series.
Here, I concur with some of the points in the Collected Editions review, and it seems as if the arc might have needed a little more room to breathe...and/or that maybe Thompson and company found themselves having to rush or squeeze a bigger story into a smaller space. There's a point near the beginning where I felt like I skipped a page or a scene, as we jump into talk of The Game so soon, and then what seems like the set-up for a cliffhanger (All of the Birds subjected to a gas that seems to make them evil and threaten Barbara in the last panels of one issue/chapter), doesn't actually get picked up on in the next issue, but instead simply jumped over...I guess implying that the gas just wears off...?
I confess that I didn't quite understand everything that happens here, like the precise mechanics of Barda's "big" idea.
That said, Thompson manages to sell this temporary "ending" of Birds of Prey, and, when Barbara and Canary discuss needing to rethink the team, Thompson seems to be commenting directly on the IP and a challenge for the next writer to launch a BOP series.
Here's Barbara explaining her rationale for dissolving the team:
The Oracle data. It makes us too big a target. For the Shadow Army, for a corrupt GCPD, for Maia, still out there looking for revenge. And so many more enemies.
I think the world needs the Birds, but I have to think about how else we can protect ourselves...If every other mission is the Birds of Prey protecting ourselves, our data, then we're not really heroes.
At least not ones that are making much of a difference. I mean, how many times has our headquarters blown up? We have to find another angle.
"Is that possible?" Canary asks, and Barbra answers, "There must be a way."
If so, it's up to the next writer—or maybe Thompson herself, on a later
BOP revival—to think of that way.
As always, the best part of the book is Thompson's strong grasp on the characters, the nuances she's found within them and expanded into her own particular takes on them, and the relationships between those characters, particularly those that don't seem to belong in the same panels, like Barda and Batgirl (Indeed, as the team shares a drink, and Barda attempts to name this era of the team, everyone rejects her first suggestion of "The Barda Era," but they are more accepting of her second attempt, "Big Barda and Small Bat Era".)
(I also liked a short exchange between Barda and Megaera near the end, as the two talk goddess to goddess.)
Like too many modern comics, I'm afraid that Thompson's run, even though it lasted just a little over two years, didn't have a single artist involved, but a whole series of different artists often working in quite different styles, and thus the book didn't have a consistent look and feel to it. Here, Basri draws the majority of the book—Vicente Cifuentes and Cliff Richards draw the rest—and there's really only a single section (the Richards one) where the style changes so dramatically as to kick me out of the narrative.
I honestly can't say enough good things about Basri's art, though, and I hope to see more of it somewhere soon; it was good enough that I didn't even miss original series artist Leonardo Romero when Basri was drawing.
That said, there is one page that I found completely baffling, and I'm going to share it here with you guys, not to shame the creators, but because I honestly need help understanding what I'm seeing.
Here's the page in question:
This is the beginning of a new scene, so there isn't really any additional context. Batgirl approaches Copperhead as he's moving some nondescript barrels around a warehouse and muttering to himself, he notices her and calls her out, she jumps towards him while he grips some object in his hand that seems to spurt flame, and then he says he's going to kick her ass in the next panel, the mysterious object no longer in his hand or anywhere to be seen.
So, um, what happened in panel four there...?
At first, I thought maybe he had some kind of taser weapon, but again, it's not there in the next panel. Did Batgirl throw some sort of flame or energy spurting projectile at him and he caught it? (The drawing of Cassandra doesn't really suggest that.) Did the colorist mis-color his drool as fire...? (But if that's the case, there's still the issue of the object itself.)
After turning the page, I returned to this one and pondered it for a while before eventually giving up; whatever is supposed to have happened in panel four, it doesn't seem important to what precedes or follows it.
...
You know, it wasn't until just now, a week or so after reading this book for the first time and trying to puzzle that panel out, and after having spent a while writing all these paragraphs, that I have another guess.
I noticed that the font and look of the Copperhead's dialogue balloon changes from normal in the first two panels, to more jagged and rough in the second panels.
Flipping ahead about a dozen pages to when previously mentioned sorta cliffhanger, in which the Birds expose themselves to a drug The Shadow Army was after to see what it does (after Oracle and Batman thoroughly tested it to make sure it wasn't toxic, of course), the affected Barda's dialogue appears to have the same font and balloon shape.
So perhaps Copperhead had some sort of handheld gas-dispensing device and then purposely dosed himself with the drug in order to fight Batgirl while under its effects?
Readers wouldn't know it at that point in the story, but we will later learn that what the drug does is make people more aggressive. (Of course, if that were the case, then Batgirl should have an idea of what it does, shouldn't she? Because she doesn't mention Copperhead using it as Babs is about to expose them all to test it...).
The other problem with this theory, which I'm becoming more and more convinced is what really
was meant to be conveyed in that sequence above, is that Richards draws it to resemble flame or energy more than gas in that panel, while it looks more gaseous when Basri draws it in the later scene and, for whatever reason, colorist Adriano Lucas gave it a degree of luminosity in the Copperhead scene, while it's a duller, flatter color later on. You can see the same drug being administered to the Birds in this later scene, by Basri. (Again, note the style of Barda's dialogue.)
Am I dumb, or is that page Richards drew featuring Batgirl and Cassandra not very clear...? Did
no one have trouble making sense of it before it was published, or after? (Remember, I'm reading the trade, so presumably a few thousand people have already read this scene in the single issues before).
Anyway, back on topic: This was a really fun Birds of Prey series overall, and I'm sorry to see it go.
I hope Thompson gets to play with some of these characters, and in the DC Universe, as much as she likes in the future, same as Basri. (I do kinda regret that we never got an appearance by Mister Miracle, who Canary namedrops at one point here; the great fun of Barda in this BOP is, of course, that we get to see her without her husband and the other New Gods, which has so rarely been the case in her history, of course, but wouldn't mind seeing how Thompson's Barda interacts with her husband...)
Brume Vol. 2: The Forest of Lost Souls (Hippo Park) I reviewed the first volume of this series for Good Comics for Kids, and I was intrigued enough by the cliffhanger that I wanted to find out what happened next, even if I wasn't writing about it for the site. It stars a little girl with mysterious origins who plays at being a witch...and then turns out to maybe actually be a witch after all (At the very least, she performs some powerful magic and defeats a dragon in the first volume).
In this volume, she and her friends—a bespectacled little boy with a crush on her and a very smart piglet—go looking for the village's lost witch, which involves exploring the very dangerous sounding location of the subtitle.
They do not end up finding her here, but they find some important clues, and the series continues.
I wanted to share what spread from the book, as an illustration of just how good the storytelling is. At one point, Brume and her friends are set upon by a pack of huge black wolves. Just look at this scene! (I tried to scan it a few different times at different settings but it kept coming out looking poorly.)
The growling, roaring wolves fall at them like an avalanche, a roughly triangular mass, with their snouts pointed at their intended prey like arrows. The other panels in the layout are also sharp, pointed triangles, resembling the shape of dangerous blades, as the reader is shown important details—the shocked and panicked wide eyes of the children, the empty eyes of a wolf, and its fanged, drooling mouth.
Wow, what a spread...!
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Vol. 19 (Viz Media) While it hasn't come up in quite a while, it was established way back in volume 2 that the zombie virus could also turn animals, as we saw when Akira and Kenichiro faced off against a huge zombie shark in an aquarium, made bizarrely mobile by the legs of human zombies it had apparently gobbled up sticking out of the bottom of its body.
In this volume, the gang head to a zoo, so the fact that animals can be zombified is particularly relevant. They are there looking for ostrich eggs, which are needed in the creation of the vaccine their scientist ally has been working on...but, since "ride an ostrich" is on Akira's bucket list of things he wants to do before becoming a zombie himself, well, why not kill two birds with one stone...?
Of course, perhaps the ostriches have all been turned into zombies at this point. Akira is adamant that they have not, though, given their great speed, their ability to perceive potential predators and their all-around awesomeness.
Another thing to keep in mind? Porcupines absolutely cannot shoot their quills, but creators Haro Aso and Kotaro Takata come up with such an awesome scene involving a porcupine doing so here that it is well worth the perpetuation of that fallacy. (This book is not available digitally on Hoopla, or else I would totally take a screenshot of the spread on pages 70 and 71 and share it here, even if it did spoil one of the best parts of this volume, as it is so awesome that one cannot help but want to show it to others. Here's a hint, though: It alludes to a scene from Terminator 2, and Takataeven draws an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the background to make sure readers make that connection.)
Amusingly, the gang enter at the petting zoo, where they face a variety of what should be relatively small, harmless animals, although the plague has made them pretty menacing. If you've ever wondered what a zombified sloth or capybara might be like, this volume provides answers.
They also meet a zombified honey badger, which they are all apparently unfamiliar with (Perhaps they are all too young to have seen
that honey badger video on YouTube from years ago...?), and would have totally ended them all...were it not for the timely intervention of a new, totally badass character who makes her entrance riding a tiger.
Despite her warnings, they proceed to the safari park part of the zoo, where all the really big, really dangerous animals are, in search of ostriches. Not to spoil things, but it turns out Akira was right: Not only have the ostriches managed to avoid getting bitten by any zombies up until this point, they are also pretty awesome, and end up saving the day...not unlike the pod of dolphins that saved Akira and Shizuka earlier in the saga.
I obviously love this series, as I am still reading 19 volumes in, but I thought this volume was particularly strong, thanks in large part to the concept of a zoo full of zombie animals, something I've thought about off and on since the
Hitman two-parter "Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium".
REVIEWED:
Iron Man: Super Smash! (Abrams Fanfare) After Mike Maihack's trilogy of "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" OGNs starring Spider-Man, Abrams started a new series by Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate focused on Iron Man (Maihack doesn't seem to be done with Spidey though, as
a fourth one, guest-starring "Thor?! (And Friends)" is due out this month). Hale and Holgate's first one,
Something Strange!, guest-starring Doctor Strange, was pretty good, of course, but this new one, in which The Hulk takes Tony under his wing and attempts to teach him how to smash properly? It's brilliant, and head and shoulders above the first. It's a great portrait of Iron Man, it's a great portrait of The Hulk (if a rather particular, somewhat idiosyncratic version of the big guy) and it features a veritable parade of various Marvel monsters from different creators and differing vintages (Although you can see Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fin Fang Foom, who appears sans shorts, on the cover above). I still think it's weird that I now read more comics featuring Marvel heroes from publishers like Abrams, Viz and Scholastic than I do from, you know, Marvel, but with results like this, it becomes more understandable why the comics publisher farms so much of their popular comics-making out to others these days. Anyway, more on
Super Smash! here.
Although this all-ages original graphic novel was almost certainly commissioned to have another book with "Supergirl" in the title on the stands when
the Supergirl movie came out, it could hardly be more different. In it, writer Brian T. Snider and artist Sarah Leuver send the Super-Family of Superman, Supergirl, Lois, Jonathan and Nat Irons on an outer-space road trip in a reconfigured Supermobile, only to have our heroes become embroiled in a plot to liberate a planet that looks a little
too perfect from some bad guys, who come in the form of some surprise Justice League villains. It's great stuff.
I reviewed it for Good Comics for Kids, and then wrote some more about my favorite parts in
this blog post.
Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Versus The Mouseton Society of Evil (Fantagraphics) I wouldn't be surprised if there are comics readers or critics who think differently but, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to Disney, ducks > mice.
That said, there's no denying the old-school superhero comics appeal of this imported European adventure album, in which Mickey and friends (including Donald Duck, so at least there's some duck content here!) are faced with an evil alliance of many of Mickey villains of varying degrees of notoriety (You probably recognize a few on the cover, which includes a version of some of Scrooge's foes, The Beagle Boys).
