A few words about every single story in MySpace Dark Horse Presents

“Sugarshock” by Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon

This was by far the best comic book writing in Joss Whedon’s short comic-scripting career, perhaps in large part because of the tossed-off nature of it.

His previous endeavors have involved big-name properties—Buffy “Season Eight”, Astonishing X-Men and, to a much lesser degree, Runaways—and the attendant expectations that come with them (not to mention the attendant expectations that follow any creator to have found success in another medium trying their hand at this one), but the three short parts of this rather random story add up to little more than Whedon goofing around with enough half-ideas to make for a very fun short story.

All-girl (plus one robot) band Sugarshock are on their way home from a battle of the bands when they get invited to another battle of the bands—in outer space!—that turns out to be a battle of the bands sans bands.

Each of the characters has a few super-quirky character traits (for example, lead singer Dandelion believes she works for a top-secret government agency and she also really hates Vikings for some reason), and Whedon’s plot is the wild, anything-goes sort that will flash to a scene featuring the Greek god Pan for all of one panel simply because he’s thought of an amusing Pan joke to get in there somehow.

The one thing I didn’t like is when Dandelion used “the saddest song in the world” as a weapon, mainly because it seemed too similar in concept to an aspect of Guy Maddin’s 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World. It only accounts for about a page worth of jokes, so it doesn’t ruin the whole story or anything, but it was certainly distracting.

If you haven’t seen The Saddest Music in the World, by the way, you totally should; it’s one of my favorite movies.




“In the Deep, Deep Woods” by Tony Millionaire

This is a two-page, six-panel Sock Monkey strip that reads pretty much like your average Maakies strip, the only differences being that the panels are bigger, stacked horizontally instead of laid out vertically, and it’s in color.

Like Maakies, it’s deeply weird, and funny on two levels: The literal level in which the crude thing that happens is kind of amusing, and on the conceptual level that, “Hey, Tony Millionaire thought this weird, crude chain of events was funny, and worthy of him drawing in his meticulous style.”

So, you know, it’s like all of Millionaire’s work: Awesome.


“A Circuit Closed” by Ezra Clayton Daniels

This is a moody little story featuring a sort of YA novel version of magical realism. It’s about a little kid with a fantastic device on an unusual quest of great personal import.

Daniels is able to quite effectively tell a whole story, complete with foreshadowing, climax and a punchy ending, in just ten pages, in large part due to an interesting Q-and-A format narration, although the art is strong enough that if you took the narration away completely, the story would remain the same, although it would naturally be much more vague.

Check out Daniels’ work at his site.


“The Comic Con Murder Case” by Rick Geary

Geary, master of murder comics, presents a two-page, 18-panel story pretty much summed up by the title. There’s not a lot to it, really, nor much of a story there at all, but hey, it’s nice to see Rick Geary included along with some of these other creators, especially if it gets some Buffy or My Chemical Romance fans to check out his comics.


“Safe & Sound: Featuring The Kraken, Formerly of The Umbrella Academy” by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

I’m like 90% sure that this is the same story that was included in Dark Horse’s Free Comic Book Day free comic book. It’s the story in which the superhero-ish colorful character The Kraken rescues a kidnapped little girl from a gypsy supervillain…? That must be where I saw it, as I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu as I read it.

I like how when he punches out the gypsy, the sound effect is “CRACK,” since his name is The Kraken and all…


“Founding Father Funnies” by Peter Bagge

Two one-page gag strips featuring President and Mrs. George Washington, as drawn by Peter Bagge. Yes, it’s just as great as it sounds.


“Gear School” by Adam Gallardo, Nuria Peris and Sergio Sandoval

On it’s own, there isn’t really much of anything to this story, aside from the fact that Peris is a great designer, both of characters and, even more so, of the weird vehicle called a “gear.” It looks a little like a small, personal mech version of a cross between a Japanese motorcycle and a frog.

It wasn’t until I hit the ads at the back of the trade until I realized that Gear School is actually a graphic novel from Dark Horse. I’m not sure that this short sketch which introduces readers in passing to the characters and that neat frogcycle thing actually makes me want to read the trade—reading the solicit for the text excited me more than the contents of this story, as well as cluing me in that this story was meant as a sample of the actual trade—so I don’t know how effective the story was as an ad.

Still, pretty great art.


“Samurai” by Ron Marz and Luke Ross

This is a perfectly fine, straightforward genre piece about a samurai who kills some guys. Like the previous story, it is something of a sample of a comic, Samurai: Heaven and Earth.


“Who da Uber-mensch?” by Adam Warren

Adam Warren’s series of original graphic novels, Empowered is, honest-to-God, probably the best superhero comic around at the moment. It’s fun, funny, sharply written, sharply drawn, bursting with new ideas and starring deceptively realistic characters.

This is a full-color story in which Empowered helps her teammates in the Superhomeys take on The Crimera, which is a sort of half robot, bipedal chimera that commits crimes. And that alone is genius, but it’s just one of many little bits of ingenious super-writing that punctuate this story (like all of Warren’s Empowered stories).

It’s a nice intro to the characters and the concept of the Empowered trades, as well as answering a question about super-fights. Specifically, throwing a car at an opponent is pretty bad-ass, but isn’t there a more effective way to strike them with a car?

It looks like this story is also included in Empowered Vol. 4, which was just released, so Empowered completists need not buy MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 1 just for this story. (They can buy it for all the other good stories, though).


“Chickenhare” by Chris Grine

I didn’t get it.

In fact, I never really got past the title character, who is apparently some kind of human/chicken/hare hybrid…? He and some other Wuzzles play a prank on another Wuzzle.

Perhaps if I had prior experience with the character and his/its comics, I would have appreciated this two-page story more.


“The Nocturnal Adventures of Scratch and Suck” by Steve Niles and Brian Churilla

Niles turns in a neat little eight-page story about a vampire and werewolf that fight crime together as a sort of superhero buddy cop team, with a little old school EC horror type twist at the end.

I’m completely perplexed as to why Niles called his super-werewolf Scratch though; DC Comics, a company Niles is currently writing two titles for, has a werewolf superhero-type character named Scratch that Niles surely must have heard of before.

Check out Churilla’s art here.


“Tricks of the Trade” by Brodie H. Brockie and Katie Cook

Like the Niles story that precedes it, this is a short horror story with a twist ending. It’s also a much, much more effective one, with the horror and violence implied—involving the reader in putting two and two together to enjoy the four—and Cook’s super-cute art subverting the nature of the story.

For more Cook art, click here. And if you only read one thing on her site, make it The Smashy Adventures of The Hulk, a strip so cute I can barely stand it. Marvel should pay her $1 million dollars to run those at the end of every Hulk comic.

No seriously; check out Cook’s site, it’s awesome.

How awesome?

This awesome:



“The Axeman” by Haden Blackman and Cary Nord

A short history of American serial killers, as told to an almost-victim by a serial killer who can see the future, the better to tell the almost-victim—and thus the reader—all about these serial killers who weren’t around just yet.

Since the story is essentially just an ineffective framing device for a few anecdotes of lesser known killers, it makes the whole endeavor seem kind of pointless, especially give the fact that the whole thing is only sixteen pages long.


“The Christmas Spirit” by Mike Mignola and Guy Davis

This was probably my favorite story in the book. Mignola scripts and Davis draws, a division of duties that the Hellboyiverse collaborators are clearly quite comfortable with at this point.

It’s Christmas Eve in what looks like either Victorian England or America, and a priest labors fruitlessly to exorcise a demon from a little boy’s body. He must break to handle Christmas mass.

Meanwhile, Santa Claus/Saint Nicholas/the titular spirit, intervenes, plucking the devil out of the boy, wandering gigantic through the urban city at night, and decorating a huge tree with the demon.

The imagery is beautiful, both as subject matter and as rendered on the page by Davis and colorist Dave Stewart.


“Eat The Walls” by Matt Bernier

Another short, scary story with a neat twist at the end, this one involving a man trapped in the belly of a whale. A dead whale. It’s a pretty neat story.

Now who is this Bernier character, exactly? A pretty damn good artist, that’s who. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to click here.


“Fear Agent” by Rick Remender, Kieron Dwyer and Hilary Barta

While I’m aware of the existence of a comic called Fear Agent that I know is written by Rick Remender, I’ve never read any of it, so this was my first exposure. It’s not a bad introduction—better than the Chickenhare and Gear School stories at introducing their comics, although it’s longer too.

From what I can gather, it seems to be a sort of sci-fi tale that reads like it was published by 2000 AD, which I mean as a rather high compliment.

The story? A manly-man space guy runs around from action scene to action scene, with cool drawings of cool monsters, sets and characters everywhere he goes, but all is not as it seems.

Oh, and by the way? I love Hilary Barta.


“The Goon” by Various

The collection ends on a high note with this four-chapter story featuring Eric Powell’s Goon and his supporting cast, although Powell himself doesn’t seem to be present, beyond the Maltese Falcon-like set-up, in which the Goon and Franky must find a friend’s missing pecker.

Four different creative teams handle the different chapters, making for a story told a bit like a chain letter. A chain letter involving baboon’s with razor-sharp boomerangs, chimps with sai, dismemberment, corn chowder, a giant spider on a bombing run, punching, kicking, more punching and a whole lot of dick jokes. That all comes courtesy of the all-star team of Bob Fingerman, Herb Trimpe, Al Milgrom, John Arcudi, The Fillbach Brothers, Rebecca Sugar, and Frans Boukas.


While I didn’t like every single story between the covers, I liked most of them, some of them so much that they more than made up for any of the weaker contributions and/or ones that just weren’t to my personal tastes.

If I had one criticism of the book, it was that it lacked contributor’s notes in the back. I realize with the Internet, that may seem superfluous—every contributor whose work I was curious about I ended up being able to find with a simple Google search—but since so many of the creators involved aren’t “name” creators like Whedon, Mignola, Niles, Bagge and Warren (at least, not yet), it would have been nice to be able to simply flip to the back of the book to see what, say, the Fillbach Brothers have done before, or why Cook’s art looks so familiar.

That is all.

Otherwise, I eagerly await Volume 2, which I will read when it’s printed on paper, and pay for the privilege, rather than read the stories for free online. Because I am old-fashioned.

If you’re less set in your ways than I, and aren’t yet sure if you should borrow this from the library or, if you’ve got $19.95 to spare on a pretty awesome anthology, buy a copy for yourself, you can read most if not all of these stories at myspace.com/darkhorsepresents.

You Know Who Should Write Wonder Woman? Adam Warren

I am not, nor have I ever been, a DC Comics editor. But I do have a lot of opinions about DC Comics, and I do have a blog, two things that, in combination, inevitably leads to a lot of armchair editing of DC Comics, which is practically the same thing, only I don’t get paid and my opinions and decisions are never reflected in the actual comics.

But other than that? Pretty much the same thing.

With my credentials thus established, please, take it from me—one of the hardest decisions DC editors have to make is which creators to hire to work on their characters, and these decisions become all the more difficult when it comes to a character like Wonder Woman, which is one of the company’s (and comics’) most recognizable and important characters, but lacks the resiliency of, say, Batman or Superman, characters who can support a dozen simultaneous titles.

For example, say you’ve just done away with your multiverse in a year-long series, and you’re going to completely reboot Wonder Woman’s fictional history, divorcing her from her World War II roots in an attempt to make her character as timeless as that of Batman, Superman or Spider-Man. Who do you trust with this monumental task? Whoever it was that said, “Why not let George Perez handle it?” seems to have chosen wisely; Perez lost a bit of the good stuff—Steve Trevor as love interest and Etta Candy as sidekick—but otherwise did a pretty perfect job.

Or say you’re relaunching your entire line of universe comic books with a reader-friendly event (Like “One Year Later”) flowing out of a soft(er) continuity reboot (The Infinite Crisis multiverse re-creation), who do you trust to make sense out of these various shuffles between what’s canon and what’s not, while simultaneously redefining the character for a new generation of readers? Maybe that guy who writes for TV, and did a 12 issue delay-plagued Marvel maxiseries once?

You see how simply choosing the wrong writer can lead to a real mess, like the one the Wonder Woman monthly is currently in (Relaunching with a new number one in June of last year, only three issues shipped in 2006, and an accelerated publishing schedule is just now catching the title up to where it should be—#12—although sales have fallen from over 130,000 with #1 to about 59,000 with #8).

Fortunately, there’s an easier way for DC editors to make these decisions. They could just ask me who should write their titles, and I’ll tell them.

For example, who should write Wonder Woman?

Adam Warren, that’s who.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Gail Simone has already been announced as the next regular writer of the series, a state of affairs I’m eagerly looking forward to, and doing these Wonder Woman Wednesdays posts as a means of counting down to.

But I still say Adam Warren for Wonder Woman. If not the monthly, then certainly on a one-shot. Or miniseries. Or original graphic novel. Or as the next writer of Wonder Woman, after Simone leaves.

What would make Warren such an ideal Wonder Woman writer? Wait, did I say writer? I did, didn’t I? Well, I didn’t mean he should just write it, he should also pencil the title.

Let’s take Warren’s art first. I’ve always enjoyed Warren’s art style, which is obviously quite heavily influenced by anime and manga (and was decades ago, back when most of America’s biggest digest-devouring Naruto-ites hadn’t yet learned to read). I think it’s safe to say that American readers are now quite ready to embrace such an artistic style en masse, and that Warren’s manga-esque look is a style that is probably even more likely to appeal to more people than even the work of such popular past Wonder Woman artists as Perez, Phil Jimenez and John Byrne.

And it’s worth noting that, with Warren, it’s not just an affectation, a cynically adopted surface gloss to his work—the man understands the speed line, the big eye, the dewy eye and the reversion to super-deformity, but he also understands how to build a page, how to progress a story from panel to panel and how to lead a reader's eyes through his pages. He can draw the way manga artists draw, not just draw images that resemble those drawn by manga artists (If that makes sense).

What would a Adam Warren Wonder Woman look like?

I have no idea; I couldn’t find any images of a Warren Wonder Woman on the world wide web, but I did find these, all from his deviantART gallery, and they at least give us a good idea of how cool a Warren drawn Wonder Woman comic would likely be:



(There you have a drawing of a super-strong, flying DC superheroine who likes wearing red, white and blue.)




(Here’s Marvel’s Valkyrie, who wears a bathing suit and bracelets, not unlike Wondy.)




(And there’s a convention sketch of Medusa, a mythological character who has come to blows with Wonder Woman on more than one occasion.)


But let’s focus on writing for a second.

Warren’s latest non-Iron Man work has been Empowered, which stars a superheroine with an unfortunate habit of getting tied up and gagged during almost every adventure. In other words, her adventures tend to involve an awful lot of bondage, as do Wonder Woman’s. Or, at least, as Wonder Woman’s adventures used to—the innocent bondage of the Golden Age Wonder Woman was one of the elements Perez ditched in his relaunch, and which never seemed to return to the post-Crisis Wonder Woman’s adventures to the same extent that it was present in the Marston/Peters stories.

As anyone who’s read Empowered—and if you haven’t, you should; how many times do I have to recommend the damn book before you read it?—can attest, Warren has a fairly unique ability to be both sexually exploitive and respectful at the exact same time. His characters are in on the joke, and he lets us in on the joke, and his bondage and other sexual imagery is thus almost always of the sort that works on several levels simultaneously.

For example, there's this cover, from a Warren-written, Warren-illustrated Gen 13 story:

(Better drawn than Turner's Power Girl, less icky than that "Heroes For Hentai" cover)

Look, it's a sexy drawing of sexy ladies, naked, and tied up in what appears to be Hot Wheel tracks. That's hawt. And totally ridiculous. And isn't it ridiculous that people—inculding us—find it hot? And it's all a fantasy of that dunderhead in the foreground's anyway, inspired by exploitation films. And he's being punched in the face, and thus being punished for the sordid Hollywood-fueled fantasty. And look, there's Lucky Charms swimmng around his head, so this is like a cartoon, and thus not to be taken too seriously anyway.

Warren did the having-your-cheesecake-and-eating-it-too trick that he pulls off on almost every page of Empowered throughout his too-brief, 18-issue run on Gen 13. Which includes, for the completists out there, not only Gen 13 #60-#77, but also a two-issue fill-in (#43 and #44), Gen 13 Bootleg #8-#10 (the must-red “Grunge: The Movie” arc, available in trade, and the source of the above cover) and miniseries Gen 13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy. (All of which would add up to a swell omnibus, wouldn't it?).

He also repeatedly examined stereotypical tropes of various genres, particularly the superhero genre, but also manga, anime, and kung fu movies, as well as comic books in general, pop music and technology. It was a rib-tickling, navel-gazing comic book narrative about comic book narrative. All the while featuring sexy women, always scantily clad, and often in states of undress (That was kind of Fairchild's whole deal, wasn't it?). Warren may pack his stories with fan service, but it's the thinking man's fan service, and that makes all the difference.

I for one would love to see what Warren could do with the weird sexual politics—both overt and naïve—within the Wonder Woman mythos, as well as wacky Amazon technology and the DC Universe in general. (Is that single Titans Elseworlds special really Warren’s only DC work to date?)

And I'm willing to bet so would a lot of other readers, beyond the 20-30,000 people who will read Wonder Woman every month no matter who's writing and drawing it.

Finally, on a more superficial (and thus easier to communicate) level, there’s the fact that Empowered is by far the single best superheroine bondage narrative going, and doesn’t Wonder Woman deserve to have the creator of the best superheroine bondage narrative telling her story?

Similarly, Gen 13 featured an Amazonian bombshell with super-strength and super-smarts in Fairchild. And isn’t Fairchild but an off-brand version of Wonder Woman?

And, finally, if Warren could write so many well-realized female leads—Empowered, Fairchild and the other Gen 13 girls, the Dirty Pair—throughout his career, then certainly he could handle comics’ number one female lead, right?

April 19th's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

Hey, loyal EDILW readers, how's it going?

Everything okay in your life?

I'm okay. I'm a little bummed because I just realized I made a huge tactical error in my schedule arrangement tonight. A friend of mine has a film festival here in Columbus, and tonight was its opening night. So I went to take in the prosaically titled but actually quite good Waitress.

Two hours later, it hit me that today is Thursday, April 19th and at the exact same time that Waitress was playing, two miles down the street, the still-in-production Eisner documentary Will Eisner: The Spirit of an Artistic Pioneer was unspooling at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

I probably shoulda been watching that instead, and then posting about it here.

Man, I am the worst comics blogger.

In happier news, Las Vegas Weekly ended up using my lame W. Somerset Maugham joke headline on this week's comics column. To pull the curtain back a bit, each weekend when I submit my column for the following Thursday's issue, I usually include a headline suggestion, which the editors will either choose to use or, if it's too stupid, will choose not to use and instead make up their own, superior headline.

I had a hell of a time thinking of one that would be appropriate for a column that covers both Adam Warren's sublime superhero bondage comic strip-com Empowered and K. Thor Jensen's autobiographical book about his Greyhound journey across America, Red Eye, Black Eye. At least until I realized that not only did W. Somerset Maugham write Of Human Bondage, but also something called The Vagrant Mood, and what is "vagrant" but another word for "drifter" or "hobo," terms Jensen kept applying to himself in his book?

So "Of superhuman bondage and the vagrant cartoonist's mood" it was. And they used it. Woo hoo!

Anyway, click on the words "comics column" above to read reviews of Empowered and Red Eye, Black Eye, which are both pretty excellent books (We'll be taking a closer, scantastic look at the Columbus chapter of Red Eye, Black Eye later this week). While you're at lasvegasweekly.com, you may want to check out the cover story, "The Most Beautiful People in Las Vegas" (Or at least look at the pictures).

And while I'm linking, The Absorbacon has the only piece of DC fan fiction you ever need to read, in which Aquaman busts in on Brad Meltzer's JLoA and sets "Clark," "Bruce" and "Diana" straight, and The Invinicible Super Blog reviews the greatest story entitled "World War III" DC ever published (and it didn't come out yesterday).

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go kick myself for missing that Eisner flick...