Meanwhile...

I have a review of the handsome new collection of Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix in Las Vegas Weekly this week. It's a really well-designed book, of the sort everyone should have on their bookshelves...not with their graphic novels, but with their fancy-schmancy literary volumes, so as to encourage visitors to pull it out, flip through it and contort their faces in confused horror.

That's it, Surfer! Make him cry!

Also in this week's LVW, I suggested a trio of Avengers comics Marvel Studios might want to borrow their titles from for future Avengers films, should they start running out of ideas when it comes time to start work on a fifth Avengers film (Fingers crossed for Defenders War!)

Because YOU demanded it! Mike Allred draws Bloodwynd!

I have a review of sorts on Multiversity #2, Convergence #4 and its attendant tie-ins and Justice League #40, all of which were released this week and all of which, oddly enough, deal with DC's ever-changing Multiverse, at Robot 6 this week.

EDILW favorite Steve Mannion, drawing the best Olive ever.

I took a look at some of my favorite of the always awesome variant covers IDW commissions for their Popeye Classic Comics series at Comics Alliance, in that goofy, click-bait gallery format that users of the Internet probably all totally love to use.

In which I make a dent in my To Be Reviewed pile

Arty Party When I was in about fifth or sixth grade, my grandmother had a subscription to the New Yorker and, because she knew I was interested in writing and was very encouraging of me, she always passed them on to me when she was finished, telling me there was a lot of great writing in them and I should get a lot out of reading them.

Well I liked the covers, I read all of the ads and the cartoons, and I tried to read the articles as well—I remember at least two instances in which I forced myself to read issues cover to cover—but I was either completely uninterested in the contents, or completely ill-equipped to digest them, or, most likely, some combination of the two, because the articles were almost always completely over my head.

Hell, the cartoons were mostly over my head. I knew they were supposed to be funny, that there was a joke either in the drawing or in the line of writing just below it or in the discrepancy between the two, but as often as not I couldn’t find the gag (I had similar difficulty appreciating the cartoons in Playboy magazines in grade school, on account of the cartoons all being about sex and my knowing nothing about sex beyond the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be looking at Playboys).

Reading Sara Drake and James Payne’s Arty Party was sort of like reading New Yorker cartoons when I was only at a Peanuts/Calvin and Hobbes reading level.

I could take in Drake’s images and appreciate how well drawn they were. Her style is loose but assured, with relatively few but lines, but they’re all strong and purposeful. She has a unique style that doesn’t immediately call to mind the work of any other cartoonist, and her poses and expressions are often amusing in and of themselves.But I hardly got any of these jokes. Some seemed funny to me because, devoid of the proper context to understand the gags as intended, the surreality is kind of amusing. Like, the fact that something like this——looks like a gag cartoon, but I don’t really get the gag, and the fact that I don't makes it funny to me anyway.

The book is a collection of 20 New Yorker-style, image-with-caption, one-panel cartoons, each of which is devoted to a gag about a particular modern (or is it post-modern?) artist. Sometimes the artists appear in the cartoon, sometimes their work is referenced or they are being alluded to or talked about. The table of contents lists each of the artists if it’s not apparent who is being discussed, although if you don’t know the work, then chances are knowing the artist whose work is being poked fun at isn’t going to help much.

It was a somewhat frustrating read for me in that I knew I should know many of these artists well enough to get the cartoons, as the names were familiar—Christo, Marina Abramovic, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Luc Tuymans, etc—but it’s been a dozen years since my last college art history class, and the work of the Batman artists of 1998 has proven much more relevant to me in my adult, post-collegiate life than the names of many of the artists whose work I had to memorize for slide exams.

Arty Party is, essentially, a collection of in jokes, and while those on the inside make up a fairly big group, I’m unfortunately on the outside now. If you’re more steeped in the fine art world, then chances are you’ll get a lot more out of this than I did.

How limited is my knowledge of the fine art world these ?

These are among the ones I got: (That second one is Dale Chihuly, by the way).

Nevertheless, Drake’s art gets a thumbs-up and she and Payne both deserve high fives—gag panels making fun of fine artists are a great idea, even if I find myself too old and divorced from that world to “get” it.

Also included are a write-your-own-caption contest (below a picture of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene), and an “After Words” in which the pair responsible discuss the lack of humor in the “art world”…or, as they put it, “the ‘art world’ is totally humorous in its humorlessness. Laughs abound because art people insist on cultivating serious personas even though there is nothing intrinsically solemn about the function that the art world performs.”

Yeah!

And then Drake draws a picture of Duchamp’s “Fountain” sculpture playing chess.

To learn how to order a copy for yourself—it’s three bucks for an album-sized, 23-page book—check out this post on Drake’s blog, where you can actually read the whole thing online for free if you want. But you should probably buy one anyway, as Drake and Payne are artists, and thus probably need all the money they can get.


Driver for the Dead #1 (Radical Comics) This new three-part miniseries seems to fall squarely into the comic books-serving-as-auditions-for-movies-based-on-them category, to the point that writer John “The Guy Who Wrote Snakes on a Plane” Heffernan and artist Leonardo Manco feature an older, stately, black dude with white hair who looks an awful lot like Morgan Freeman.

His name? Moses Freeman.


Guys, you have to change the name a little more than that before you “cast” a real person in your comic book! (Also, maybe give him a mustache or an eye patch or something...?)

Morgan/Moses Freeman is a “healer” who seems to be the hoodoo equivalent of an exorcist, and he was called in to save a young boy cursed with black magic so badly he’s got a bunch of snakes and maybe some sort of dragon/demon thing living in him.

Morgan Freeman dies on page 20, which is kind of too bad, because the opening scene was rather strong, and it was long enough that I was getting used to the guy and liking him enough to feel bad when he left…particularly since the actual star (that’s him on the cover) seems a lot less interesting.

That pattern held for the entirety of the first issue, one of Radical’s giant, spine-having $5 format books with the story gathering more mostly Hollywood clichés the longer it rolls along, snowball-style.

After the solid opening, we’re introduced to Alabaster Graves (Don’t laugh! That’s his name!), a New Orleans hearse driver who drives around in a souped-up, turbo-charged Hot Wheels version of a hearse named after the same fictional horse that the Green Hornet and Kato named their car after.

The appealing high concept here is that funeral homes are about more than embalming bodies, putting together calling hours and conducting funerals—they’re involved with all manner of different ways to keep the living from seeing the reality of death, like disposing of vampires and busting supernatural entities and so on.

Graves then is a little like Jason Statham’s Transporter character, but with a cargo of dead bodies and ghosts and ghouls chasing him.

After introductions, Graves gets the big job of transporting Morgan Freeman back into town, only there’s been a complication—Freeman’s great-granddaughter, an attractive young lady, insists on going along. Graves doesn’t like that, because he works alone and it will be dangerous for a lady and so on. She doesn’t trust this scruffy-looking Graves not to screw it up. They bicker bastardized screwball comedy style, and I will give Heffernan $1 if they don’t end up romantically entangled by the third and final issue.

Oh, and there’s a super-goofy demon named Fallow who shows up near the end, wearing a coat and hat taken from The Undertaker’s storage unit (The Undertaker the wrestler? Do you guys get pro wrestling references? This is the first one I made, I think), who appears to have some sort of stealing-supernatural-abilities-from-those-who-have-em schtick going on.

The basic premise is solid, and certainly has potential, and I suppose if Fallow is the last eye-rolling element introduced, then the series might end up meeting some of that potential. If, however, the comic continues to get less inspired the longer it goes on, then imagining Morgan Freeman intone “Back to the pit, you scaly bastards” at a bunch of snakes might end up being the highlight.

Manco’s artwork is photorealistic, a style I generally have little love for, but it’s surprisingly good. The artist seems to have found a way to make many of his panels resemble drawn versions of photographs without losing their expressiveness, so there’s implied motion from panel to panel, and implied emotion within the frozen expressions and body language (I'd show an example, but the "prestige format"-like format makes scanning whole pages super-hard).

As someone with something of a bias against this school of artwork, I was impressed with it, so I imagine those who don’t have negative preconceptions about such work will absolutely love it.

You may want to proceed with caution, but if you’re looking for something new, do proceed—like almost all of Radical’s first issues, it’s well worth a look, and it’s big and nice enough a package that even if you’re somewhat disappointed in it, you won’t feel as ripped off as you might have if you gambled four bucks on 22-pages of Avengers Monthly Number Seven or whatever.


Fearless Dawn #3 (Asylum Press) The third issue of a four-issue miniseries may seem like an odd place to stick an issue-long flashback, as that gives a huge chunk of the second and third acts over to an aside which, in this case, has little to nothing to do with the what’s come before.

But then, the “story” of Fearless Dawn is essentially this: Artist Steve Mannion sure can draw. That is, what plot and characterization has been in the series thus far has been there mainly to give Mannion an excuse to indulge himself in good girl art, hulking muscle guys and monsters, neat-o vehicles and loose, cartoony, just-this-side-of-caricature character design. And, because Mannion can draw so damn well, the dual purpose is, of course, to allow readers to indulge in the results of Mannion’s indulgence.

So if he wants to mostly ignore the Fearless Dawn and company vs. the Nazi super-drug scheme for twenty pages or so, he’ll get no complaints from me.

At the end of the last issue, Dawn and Number Seven were rescued by Betty, Dawn’s old friend and ally who looks just like Bettie Page. On their flight back to safety, the girls tell Number Seven a story about “The Case of The Monster Frog!”

An atomic bomb was tested by their home town...a frog got a nostril full of radioactive Kirby dots and monstered up......it made short work of local police, proved too unstoppable for even “an all-sergeant group of Marines"......so it was up to the gals to take him out with a bit of frog trivia they learned on the first page of the story...

I guess I just spoiled the plot of the entire issue, but then, plot's not the point of Fearless Dawn.

This is the point of Fearless Dawn:


Spandex #2 The second issue of Martin Eden’s deceptively, subversively substantial super-comic about an all-gay British super-team has all the virtues of the first issue, with the added benefit of Eden’s stripped down, super-simplified artwork getting slightly sharper and more precise, and the inclusion of another wonderfully designed character being added to the mix.

Not Neon, the yellow-wearing ninja who is introduced as a replacement for the fallen Mr. Muscles, who died last issue, but Spandex’s antagonists in this issue:

Coloring, like lettering, is one of those elements that one rarely notices in a comic unless it’s done very poorly or, even more rarely, if it’s done exceptionally, and it’s an element that is generally missing entirely from self-published books like Eden’s (black and white is sooooo much cheaper, after all).

I have a hard time imagining Spandex without color though, and I’m having a hard time thinking of a superhero comic in which color has been more integral. Even Geoff Johns’ recent Green Lantern mega arcs with the emotional spectrum and color-coded Lantern corps focused on color more as a plot element in the story than as something integral to the story-telling through the art.

But Eden has given each of his hero’s a color of the rainbow (appropriate for gay heroes, yes, but, with this issue, it becomes clear there’s a literal reason for it in addition to the metaphorical reason), which transforms the simple costume designs into eye-popping, sluttier versions of Golden Age superhero gear.

He also uses colors to define scenes, so that Liberty dreams in shades of purple and lives in an apartment that is seemingly all purple. When characters are highlighted in a particular panel, the background will burst with their color. And when they are all together, or in a crowded street, well, look how bright and, uh, colorful (as in, like, full of colors) these pages are:In this issue, a mysterious ninja has robbed the Queen of England of her jewels and a corgi, and the team must follow the trail back to Japan, where they meet Neon, who has lured him there to help him fight the Pink Ninjas which are, of course, ninjas dressed in pink.

And they’re awesome.

But perhaps they’re too awesome...? Last issue, Eden had the team fight a 50-Foot Lesbian, and this issue opened with a Liberty dreaming of fighting a giant in tighty whities named Big Boy and a kaiju named Gayzilla before preceding to the pink ninjas.

Where do you go from there?Oh. Okay, that will probably do nicely.

To learn more about Spandex and how to order it, check out spandexcomic.com, and check out the “Japandex” design and art project while you’re there.


Walt Disney’s Comics #707-#708 (Boom Kids) There are two covers on issues #707, neither of which feature dinosaurs, but instead feature Mickey Mouse and some pals on a desert island (“Cover A”) and being lost on a stormy sea (“Cover B”). In fact, the entire issue passes without a single image of a dinosaur.

This is only unfortunate in that the story arc beginning in #707, “Mickey Mouse on Quandomai Island” by writer/pencil artist Casty and inker Michele Mazzon, is about Mickey and his castmates getting marooned on a seemingly deserted island actually populated by dinosaurs.

I can’t speak for the core Disney comics audience, for which I’m not really a part of, but dinosaurs are always a strong selling point for me, providing extra incentive to check something out (as they’ve been ever since I was a little kid). In fact, I only picked up #707 because one of #708’s two covers did have dinosaurs on it, and “Mickey Mouse and friends on an island with dinosaurs” is a much more appealing premise than “Mickey Mouse and friends on an island with no dinosaurs" to me.

I suppose it’s a matter of the way the comics are packaged stateside after translation, but the structure was a bit strange. Part one of “Quandomai Island” is 18 pages long, and ends rather suddenly, with the mildest of cliffhangers. (The rest of the issue is filled out by five-pages of a multi-part Minnie story by Francois Crteggiani and Roberto Ronchi). It’s the third page of the second issue of the arc, #708, in which there’s a big splash page revealing the fact that Oh my God there are dinosaurs on the island!.

The unusual stops and starts of the storylines—perhaps just strange by the standards of the other Western serial comic books I read in comic book-comic book format—accompanied the other past issues of the title I’ve sampled as well. They won’t matter in a trade, of course, and ultimately don’t impact the quality of the story, they’re just sort of awkward to experience.

As for the story, Mickey is treating his friends Minnie and Goofy and his dog Pluto (Aaagh! Goofy and Pluto sharing panel-space! Can’t reconcile…Mickey…befriending an anthropomorphic dog…while owning a non-anthropomorphic dog…!!) to a very expensive cruise, where Minnie meets and becomes smitten with a tall, womanizing braggart—Duke Hight of Konseet. When the ship goes down like the Titanic, Mickey’s crews, the Duke and his manservant, and Mickey antagonists Peg-Leg Pete and Trudy Van Tubb all end up on the titular island.

They eventually discover an abandoned research facility, a bunch of dinosaurs and a mysterious professor who stayed behind. The bad guys hatch a plot to profit off of the dinosaurs, but some other weirdness is going on regarding the nature of the research and the shifty professor as well. The plot therefore seems to be shaping up to be more of a “Mickey on the island from Lost” than “Mickey on the island from Jurassic Park.”

These are fine kids comics—simple and straightforward without talking down to young readers—and if you're buying comics for that age group, you could certainly do a lot worse than these. Older readers may get something out of them as well, they’re probably better off waiting for a collection.

Reviews: Blink, Cownt Tales, Fearless Dawn and Spandex

Blink: Breathe in the Beat (Onward Studios) This 2009 mini-comic from writer/artist Max Ink contains two short, previously published pieces—the first a 2007 piece from Oh, Comics! #16, the second from a smaller 2006 minicomic.

Both are short vignettes featuring Ink’s characters Blink and Sam more or less just hanging out and talking, and sandwiched between a prose “creatorial” and a longer, four-page “Sketchbookery” section in which Ink walks reader’s through some of this process and, finally a neat little page featuring some local history on the settings his characters pass through.

Sam and Blink, like Ink and I, live in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the many appealing aspects of Ink’s work for Columbusites is recognizing places in our hometown and seeing how well Ink captures and renders them.

In the first story, “Beatnik Picknik,” the ladies walk around the main branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library (where I get all those trashy super-comics trades from!) on their way to a poetry reading, while chatting.

Ink is a hell of a draftsman. The story opens with a drawing of the front of the library. Check this out:
His characters aren’t quite as representational, but they’re certainly well put together, and Ink’s pages generally remind me of ‘80s independent cartooning. This one, for example, I think has a pretty strong Dave Sim vibe: At the end of the story, there’s an equally gorgeous pin-up of the girls reading in the topiary garden next to the downtown library.

The second story, “Space to Breathe,” lacks the same strong sense of place, but is perhaps a slightly more focused narrative. The ladies are outside at night, looking up at the sky, and talking.

This particular comic may be out-of-print at the moment, but you can find out for sure—as well as learn more about Ink and his work—by checking out his website here.


Cownt Tales (Cahoots Studios) Chances are you’re already familiar with the writing of Michael May, who blogs at Michael May’s Adventureblog and contributes reviews to Comic Book Resources’s Robot 6 blog, but did you know he also dabbles in bovine-based horror comedy comics?

It’s true, as Cownt Tales readily attests. The title character is a cow who is a vampire cow, and if you’re wondering why a female cow (udder and all) is going by a male title (instead of, oh, The Cowntess), well that’s actually addressed in the three short stories collected in this 18-page black-and-white comic.

May works with three different artists, each given their own story, and each of those stories is introduced by a different barnyard EC-style horror host (Billy Z. Bub, Farmer McBones and, um, Frankenkitty).

The first is by Gavin Spence, and tells the origin of The Cownt, which involves Count Dracula himself getting his ass killed by a bull, and bleeding his potent vampire blood all over the grass where a cow was grazing.

Spence’s art looks like this:
That’s followed by “Udder Nonsense,” a story drawn by Paul Taylor (who I think may draw the best cows of the three) in which The Cownt visits a plastic surgeon in the middle of the night to discuss an udder-removal surgery (it’s just not that scary, in addition to being too female for the now male-identifying vampire cow).

The final piece, “Lactose Intolerance,” is illustrated by Jessica Hickman and tells the tale of a scantily clad vampire slayer attempting to destroy The Cownt, who finds a pretty good (if gross) use for his/her udder after all.

Rounding out the book are pin-ups by Patrick Gleason, Kate Cook and Spence, and an explanation by May of the character’s extremely nerdy real-world origins.

I can say without reservation or qualification that Cownt Tales is certainly the best comic anthology about a gender-confused vampire cow I’ve ever read.


Fearless Dawn #2 (Asylum Press) As with the first issue of Steve Mannion’s rock ‘em, sock ‘em, tongue-in-cheek adventure series, the story is so straightforward as to be uninteresting, but is saved by Mannion’s artwork. If someone else were drawing this, it might be so uninteresting as to be boring, but Mannion’s so skilled at drawing curvy ladies, muscley men, goofy faces and silly action scenes that it hardly matters—the script is mostly just something to hang his panels on.

When we last left Dawn and her would-be rescuer Number 7, they had injected themselves with a “combat drug” that turns people into monsters in order to break out of the prison where they were being held by sexy Nazi Helga and her small army of straight-from-WWII Nazis (including one big hulking monster guy). They do a lot of fighting, and, just when it looks like they’re about to be re-captured, a new character enters the fray—Mannion’s Betty, who looks like Betty Page and here is given a purple version of Lady Blackhawk’s duds, with a cartoon chicken where the Blackhawk symbol would be.

There’s not really much too it other than great drawing chops, so I suppose you’ll now whether or not this is a comic for you based on how highly you value an artist’s ability to just draw things really, really well.

If you need a reminder, here’s what Mannion’s art looks like:



Spandex #1 Martin Eden’s Spandex, his self-published comic about an all-gay super-team that operates out of an abandoned night club in England, received a ton of press a few months back, either because Eden is really good at placing stories in the press, or the press is really excited about the idea of gay superheroes.

While I remember seeing a lot of articles popping up in my Google News feeds about the book’s existence, I don’t recall seeing a whole lot of reviews, so this is my very late attempt to rectify that.

Spandex is actually really, really good super-comics. It’s bright, it’s light-hearted, it’s fun, it’s sexy, it’s dramatic-bordering-on-melodramatic, it’s got a few shocking twists and hooks to get you interested in the next issue—it is, honest to God, everything superhero comics should be.

Oh yeah, and it’s actually a superhero comic that is actually created for adults specifically, not for the same juvenile PG-13 audience that the vast majority of DC and Marvel’s “serious” superhero works are aimed at. Characters use swear words! Human bodies are anatomically correct! People have R-rated sex!

Eden seems to have consulted the rainbow (an appropriate symbol) when creating the roster for the team Spandex (which I have a hard time believing no one ever used as the title of a superhero comic before…it seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it?). Diva, Glitter, Mr. Muscles, Butch, Prowler, Indigo and Liberty (The first transvestite superhero?) each have their own color of the rainbow they work...
...and Eden gives them all nicely simplified costumes and designs (Perhaps the relative lack of clothes many of them wear helps contribute to that simplicity).

There’s a pleasant simplicity to Eden’s artwork in general—it seems stripped down to the basics, but not necessarily amateurish at all. Certain images look stronger than others (I got the sense the pages in this book were created over a long span of time), but the lead feature is quite well drawn, and if its lacking in detail or filigree, it’s apparently an intentional stylistic choice.

That lead story is one in which the team does battle with a fifty foot-tall lesbian, introducing themselves and their powers during the course of the conflict. Meanwhile, similarly colorful and apparently alternative lifestyle-living villains watch from afar.

Eden does an excellent job of integrating the basic elements of old-school superhero comics into this story, lending the entire endeavor an aura of the subversive. It’s because it is so familiar and normal that the differences stand out so.

That 15-page adventure is followed by an eight-page sequence in which the heroes return home and become themselves again, and two-page Mr. Muscles story in which the action is equally split into two parallel threads sharing the same captions; in one, our hero goes to a clinic to get tested, in the other he battles alien invaders.

If you’d like to learn more about Spandex, and/or order the first issue, this is the site you want to visit.

Review: Fearless Dawn #1

Last fall Asylum Press introduced me to the work of Steve Mannion with The Bomb, a trade paperback collecting his work from a self-published anthology series of the same name.

His main main character from that series, a Nazi-fighting, vaguely superhero-esque good girl existing somewhere on a continuum between Bettie Page and Tank Girl named Fearless Dawn, now has her own four-issue miniseries.

The selling point is, as it was in The Bomb, Mannion’s art, which looks heavily influenced by the classic cartoonists of Mad and EC comics, and creates a world where Arthur Adams-esque women exist alongside Eric Powell-ish men.

While the stories in The Bomb seemed more or less made up as they went along, with loose narratives, constant digressions and other features between the Dawn sections, this miniseries is much more focused in story, tone, spirit and style. It’s also in full-color.

Our title character, decked out in black leather pants, bra and lots of accessories—including the goofy rubber cowl with antlers she wears—picks up a personal, one-girl jet plane from an old mechanic and then flies off to Manitoba, exposition-ing that there’s “some new combat drug there” that “turns ‘em all into the Incredible Hulk or some $#!@”

There she attacks “Helga’s heinous hothouse of horrors…and home of the mysterious “agro” drug!”, but it taken down by that giant, Nazi monster guy from The Bomb and thrown in the slammer.

A rescue attempt is made by Old Number Seven, a member of some sort of superhero-ish group called The Syndicate with a square jaw, blond hair and plenty of thick muscles under his red jersey. He gets captured too. The pair decide the only way to escape is to inject themselves with the drug, and break out all hopped up on the monster-making junk. Cliffhanger ending!

Mannion’s plotting is extremely straightforward, in a Point A leads to Point B sort of way, with less of the humor, funny drawings and cheesecake that made The Bomb such a blast. Of course, it’s early in the series yet.

His artwork is still a complete joy to take in. If nothing else, Fearless Dawn #1 is a celebration of drawing chops, and that’s something that can never be celebrated too often.


********************

Apparently, the first issue of Fearless Dawn didn’t meet Diamond’s new-ish, $2,500 sales benchmark, so there’s probably a pretty good chance you won’t find it on your local comic shop rack. Your local comic shop can order it for you directly from Asylum Press, or you can order a copy yourself from them, I think. Click here and poke around for ordering info, and/or to see a preview of the first issue.

Three reveiws of three comics featuring two heroes who conceal two-thirds of their faces with their helmets and visors

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 11 (Rebellion) is the latest of the black and white phonebook-like collection of Judge Dredd adventures. It offers a couple hundred pages of stories from 1987 and 1988, all written by the John Wagner and Alan Grant team, and illustrated by the sort of all-star roster of artists that are pretty much par for the Complete Case Files course: Steve Dillon, Jim Baikie, Brendan McCarthy, John Higgins, Cliff Robinson, Brett Ewins and others contribute.

The most memorable story is both the biggest and the last one in the book, the 26-part “Oz” storyline.

Mega-City One skysurfing champion Chopper is rotting away in a cell, busted for illegal skysurfing (a future sport that’s exactly what it sounds like; surfers pilot flying surfboards), unaware that world championship Skysurf 10 is coming up in Australia, and that the loudmouth, maybe offensive to real-life Aussies Jug “The Wizard of Oz” McKenzie (any EDILW readers from Australia who have read this story who care to comment on …?) seems like a lock to win (and regularly trashes Chopper’s rep).

In the midst of being transferred, he managed to escape custody, and then attempts to skysurf all the way to Australia, which means a seemingly impossible journey over The Cursed Earth and over the ocean.

Meanwhile, the judges are being stalked by some sort of mysterious super-judges calling themselves The Judda, and Dredd journeys to Oz to arrest Chopper on the infinitesimal chance he manages to somehow arrive their alive (Dredd is, by that point, the only human being on earth who actually wants to arrest Chopper and prevent him from competing in Skysurf).

It’s a pretty great story, folding a series of the random-ish, episodic adventures of Dredd stories in general into a big, long, epic story (Highlights include Chopper’s battle with some bizarrely drawn (by McCarthy) giant birdmen who speak in outrageous Mexican accents and an encounter with a killer robot chef, and the extremely ‘80s sports movie formula Supersurf event itself.

There are a few other multi-part storylines in the book, including “The Alabammy Blimps” five-parter drawn by Steve Dillon about a group of very large what-used-to-be-Alabama-based Amazons in the Cursed Earth, but mostly the contents reflect Grant and Wagner picking up on an idea they saw in the modern world of the late ‘80s, turning it around and looking at it from a few different angles, and turning it into a ten-to-twenty-page tongue-in-cheek action adventure story sometimes only tangentially involving the title character.

More recent Judge Dredd adventures are collected in Judge Dredd: The Pit (Rebellion), a slimmer, collection of a series of stories form 1995-96 set in the titular neighborhood. A sort of dumping ground for Judges who are somehow defective and being punished for it, The Pit is a particularly bad part of town policed by a particularly corrupt bunch of judges.

At least until Dredd is sent there to be the new station chief, and turn things around—ferreting out corruption and improving judicial efficiency while fighting the rather rampant crime.

These stories, which all add up to a bigger story that starts with Dredd’s arrival and ends with his departure, are all written by John Wagner, and illustrated by his Dredd co-creator Carlos Ezquerra, plus Colin MacNeil, Lee Sullivan and Alex Ronald.

Wagner plays around with Hollywood movie clichés in his usual fashion, here focusing on a variety of police movies as he introduces a series of corrupt cops and moles, an undercover cop who can’t come back in from the cold and various good cops with bad habits and double lives, culminating in an Assault on Precinct 13 meets The Alamo climax.

Though the writing here seems somewhat stronger than in the above Case Files collection—somewhat more sophisticated, or at least more serious and more focused on character drama than social satire—the art seems a great deal weaker, perhaps in large part due to the fact that it appears in color.

I prefer experience Dredd’s world in black and white, as the garish neon-green of the judges’ uniform doesn’t come through and my eyes are spared its violent clash with the red, gold and blue-black of the rest of it.

The color here looks particularly garish in general. I’m not sure if this was colorized black and white —I’ve only experienced Dredd in trade—or what, but it has a sickly, air-brushed look to it, and over-ambitious application of light and shadow effects that I find personally aesthetically unappealing.

While not quite the feast that the Case Files collection offers, The Pit is still a pretty satisfying genre meal.

Warlash: Dark Noir #2 (Asylum Press) isn’t a Judge Dredd comic, but it’s hero does resemble him. Like Dredd, he always wears a helmet with opaque lenses hiding his eyes, and only his mouth and jaws betraying any humanity (and even those are generally frowning and clenched).

Frank Forte’s sci fi superhero series reminds me a lot of Dredd actually, and not just because of his head ware. The design of the character Warlash echoes Dredd in a few places, and he similarly patrols a generic-ish futuristic city (Pittsburgh in this case), and, in this series at least, his adventures are presented in an episodic, anthology-like format, drawn by different artists.

I wasn’t exactly impressed with the first issue, and despite liking all four the artists who draw the four stories here, this isn’t the sort of book I’d be adding to my pull list any time soon, or probably even reviewing here, if I wasn’t sent a review copy (That’s pretty much the secret to getting reviewed here, publishers! While I can’t promise to review every single comic book that gets mailed to me, I do promise that I will put every single comic book that gets mailed to me in a pile on the floor of my living room, look worriedly at that pile a few times a day, and feel extremely guilty if I don’t review everything in it at some point).

The first story is part two of “Phlegm Fatale,” which began in the last issue. Like all of the stories, it’s written by Frank Forte, and this one is drawn by him as well. Warlash fights a big worm-like, tentacley monster in the sewers. I can’t tell how serious it’s meant to be taken. It ends with Warlash brandishing his weapons and saying, “Now that the playing field is leveled, let’s see how you fare against Warlash…in full fury!” That’s a joke, right? Forte draws this one too, and I do like his art quite a bit.

Next up is a story called—I swear to God—“Enter The Bladeviper.” This one is co-written by Royal McGraw and drawn by J.C. Wong. Wong’s art is also quite strong, but the story may be the visually weakest, if only because there are a few pages where I can’t figure out exactly what’s happening (This has something to do with Bladeviper’s powers, which I don’t understand, but seems to have something to do with making sharp objects move around or appear or something).

In this story, Warlash fights scantily clad Bladeviper, who looks a bit like Marvel’s Medusa character wearing a bikini and mask designed by H.R. Giger, two unfortunately placed rubies on her bikini top. She and Warlash fight each other with their various pointy weapons for a while, she releases a bunch of mutants from glass cases that Warlash must stop to fight, allowing her to steal a blood sample from what looks like Swamp Thing’s head, while using a bunch of stupid sex metaphors for the procedure.

The best part of this story, aside from the employment of “KRAKKADOOMM!!” as a sound effect, is the bit where Warslash narrates about watching a “neurovid” of an old “2D” musical from over a century ago, apparently just so McGraw can allude to the Annie Get Your Gun’s “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” song to describe Bladeviper’s powers in relationship to Warlash’s.

Somehow Warlash just doesn’t seem like the sort who would watch ancient musicals on neurovids to me…

Next up is “The Transformation of Eduard Yan,” drawn Nenad Gucunja, in a cartoonier style with more extreme, energetic angles than the rest of the book. In this story, a couple of drug pushers cut up a junkie, who injects himself with something, and then gets thrown in the sewer, and turns into a big tentacley monster that fights Warlash.

Finally, there’s a black and white story by Steve Mannion, a continuation of the story that began in the first issue, in which Warlash fights a giant monster in the, um, sewer again.

Nice production values, all around great art—everyone in here can out-draw a good half of the folks working on DCU comics and a good quarter of the folks working on Marvel Universe comics at the moment—and a great value (42 story pages for just $2.95) make this at least worth a flip-through, should you encounter it in the wild. (Or you could just do a visual flip-through here; there’s a few pages worth of preview of each of the four stories in the issue).

No, seriously—Steve Mannion rules

Here's his version of Angel and the Ape


Here's his Hulk


Here's his Black Canary


And here's his Harley Quinn and her pet gorilla versus Batgirl.


These were all nicked from here, but you can also see more of his work here and here. And seriously, consider checking out the Asylum Press collection of his series The Bomb—every panel looks like these pin-ups, and features either a pair of supergirls, a pirate girl or a jungle girl versus Nazis, a Nazi Frankenstein's monster-like monster, a Nazi dominatrix, a dinosaur, a giant robot and/or zombies .

Review: Warlash: Dark Noir #1

Warlash: Dark Noir #1 is the first issue of a new ongoing series from Asylum Press, and, having read it, I can’t help but think I’m missing something.

Has the title character appeared elsewhere before? Not according to warlash.com or asylumpress.com, and yet this first issue is formatted more like a book featuring a pre-existing character would be rather than an introduction to a brand-new character.

It’s not just that things begin in mdias res, but that they do so four times in the same book. This is anthology of stories all featuring the character Warlash, all written by Frank Forte and each illustrated by a different artist.

The unfortunately named Warlash looks like some sort of hodgepodge of other superheroes—some Batman here, some Judge Dredd there, maybe a touch of Shadowhawk—but his distinguishing characteristic seems to be his scorpion-like tail, which ends in a sharp, curved blade. He fights crime and monsters and the like in some sort of futuristic version of Pittsburgh, referred to at least once as “The Pitt.”

It’s really not as bad as it might sound.

Warlash’s shoulder pads and opaque visor ensemble weren’t the only things about him that had me thinking of Judge Dredd; there’s also Forte’s writing. The stories—particularly the first and the fourth, which seem relatively lighter hearted—reminded me of the earliest Judge Dredd stories in both the hard-ass, no nonsense sensibility of the narrator/protagonist and the inconsequential, nearly random nature of the proceedings.

In the case of Dredd, of course, these eventually all lead to something massively influential, retroactively instilling a greater meaning to the earliest stories that wasn’t there when they were originally being written and drawn. So perhaps it sounds silly to compare Warlash to those, but if the future of the feature is uncertain, the spirit of it at least recalls that of early Judge Dredd.

The first story, “Phlegm Fatale” (get it?!), is both written and drawn by Forte, and deals with Warlash fighting a man-eating tentacled monster in the sewers to save a prostitute he uses as an agent; it’s a lot of speechifying by the monster (who used to be a mad scientist) and terse, manly-man narration from Warlash, who shoots, stabs and tail-lashes the creature until the “to be continued.”

In “Wormwar,” drawn by Szymon Kudranski, Warlash fights an A.I.M.-like group of scientist criminals who pull a job with a giant techno-organic worm creature thing as their muscle; it’s more straightforward superheroics, and also ends with a “to be continued.” While Forte’s art had more than a touch of the cartoony to it, and lots of squiggly drawn lines still visible under the ink and coloring, Kudranski’s looks more heavily computer-infused, perhaps in part due to the subject matter.

That brings us to “The Demon,” another straightforward—but super gory—story in which Warlash encounters a weird looking demon with three lower jaws that some occultist kids raised and he has to put down. This one ends without a to be continued, but the demon swears vengeance from its hell, essentially promising a rematch. This is by artist Marcin Ponomarew, and is, in some ways, the strongest entry visually. The demon-design is a little self-consciously metal, but the gore is almost splatterstick in it’s over-application, and the hero’s proportions are, like Forte’s version, walking a tightrope between cartoony and serious.

Finally comes “Grubbs,” a black and white story by Steve Mannion, whose work I was just raving about on Friday. The story is as disposable as the others: a guy with some super venereal diseases that have deformed him is now going around touching others, which is enough to transfer hideous deformities to them. Mannion’s hugely proportioned, Warlash is on the case. The chief pleasure to this story is Mannion’s art, which here resembles Eric Powell’s Goon work more than a little bit (That’s a good thing, by the way).

While the art styles are all quite different, they’re all also quite good. It’s less easy to come to any conclusions about the stories, as none of them really finish, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with any of the stories either.

You could certainly do worse for disposable super-comics entertainment.

And the value! There are a full 46 pages of story in here, three-fourths of ‘em in color. The production is slick and accomplished all around, and the book has a spine, like DC’s old “prestige format” books, rather than staples. And the whole thing costs just $3.95; four cents cheaper than 22-page cardstock cover Marvel comics like Secret Invasion or anything from their Max or Marvel Knights line.

This issue is already available; the second issue drops in December. You can see the first four pages of all four of these stories, and get a much better idea of the art than you could probably get from me talking about it above, here.

Review: The Bomb

Steve Mannion’s The Bomb is aptly named. The book is, as the kids used to say, the bomb.

Most of that has to do with Mannion’s interests, influences and incredible illustration style (alliteration!), since his one-man anthology series was short on serious story, but jam-packed with curvy, scantily-clad classic calendar-girl types wearing costumes and fighting Nazis while romping through gag-driven stories.

Asylum Press has collected the four issues of Mannion’s self-published series, and it makes for a heck of a package.

The bulk of the story (and pin-up pages) are devoted to the story of Fearless Dawn. She’s the girl on the cover wearing some sort of black rubber batwing/antler things on her head.

Who is she, and how did she get her start?

Prissy Jones was just your average bobbysoxer growing up in a quiet small town, in love with comics and often bullied by this girl at school named Betty, who looks an awful lot like Bettie Page. Then she orders the Joe Jeeder Miracle Strength Kit from a comic book ad, and, after a little bit of training, a strange dream, and a fortuitous encounter with a suitcase full of fetish gear for costume play, she becomes Fearless Dawn.

Yeah, I don’t get the name, either.

Anyway, in her first adventure she busts up a ring of Nazis operating out of the old Saurkraut factory in town, well underway in their plan to build an army of zombie robots with the help of Betty, who is also a superhero, although her costume is really just a pair of roller skates she wears while fighting.

Mannion breaks up the make-it-up-as-he-goes-along Fearless Dawn storyline with a couple of other features, including the adventures of pirate Sea-Goin’ Lil and her captain/sometimes boyfriend Brownhole Jones, and Jungle Chick, a blank-eyed mute blonde in a leopard skin bikini who is menaced by a dinosaur that always ends up getting badly hurt.

The main feature reminded me a lot of Tank Girl, in spirit if not style—like the original Tank Girl comics, it seemed like a large part of the creative process was the artist just kinda drawing whatever the hell he wanted, telling some jokes along the way, and letting the story go wherever it’s naturally headed, no matter how silly.

Mannion’s drawing style has a lot more to do with Wally Wood than it does with Jamie Hewlett, however.

The Dawn and Lil passages in particular scream of 1950s influences, particularly EC’s Mad and the stable of artists it eventually cultivated. From the pin-up girl poses and proportions of the heroines, to the Will Elder-like level of “chicken fat” detail in the backgrounds, to the lovingly rendered monsters and the occasional horror host characters that appears and disappears, there’s a bit of post-war comics boom on almost every page of the book.

Mannion doesn’t seem to stick to the same style or process for very long either. For example, he Jungle Chick scripts are pantomime gag strips of the Spy vs. Spy tradition—dinosaur tries to eat jungle girl, something happens to prevent it, often involving blunt trauma—and Mannion seems to lean towards a Sergio Aragones look in them (His Jungle Chick character designs is particularly Aragones-like).

Some of the fight scenes in the Dawn stories—like one in which she and the Nazi general named The General trade blows with different meats—take on the loose movements of Harvey Kurtzman drawings and their cartooniest.

The net effect is a trade paperback that looks like a graphic novel, but reads like a sketchbook. Considering the amount of joy in each of Mannion’s pages—no matter what the subject he tackles, the style he’s working in or the influence he’s channeling—that’s not a bad thing at all.



RELATED: You can read the first eight pages in a preview here.