Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I reviewed Breath of Bones: A Tale of the Golem, the collection of a Dark Horse miniseries by Steve Niles, Matt Santoro and Dave Wachter. I haven't read everything Niles has written, but I've read a lot of it, and I think was probably the best thing he's written. And Wachter's art is pretty incredible. Check out his blog—which doesn't look like it's been updated for a couple months now—for all sorts of more art, including conventions sketches of some of your favorite characters.

Crazy Kelley Jones Contraption of the Month:

Batman has developed his own personal Man-Bat Catcher, which shoots out a missile that, when within range of Man-Bat, enters its second stage and fires a net around him.

But wait, wouldn't tossing a net over Man-Bat while he's in mid-air cause him to fall all the way to the ground, badly injuring and possibly killing him, and thus violating Batman's strict modal stance against taking another life?

Yes, it would. If Batman hadn't already thought of that, and included a little parachute, which will gently float the captured Man-Bat safely down to the ground:



Note Batman's usual strong branding efforts on the net, too; it includes a big, bright, yellow Bat-symbol, so anyone who comes across a giant were-bat entangled in a net on the street will know who's responsible for putting it there.

A few words about every single story in MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 2

This second volume collecting the current, free, electronic version of Dark Horse Presents strips features a cover by Eric Canete, which gives me the Conan/Milk and Cheese/B.P.R.D. crossover of my dreams (and it looks like Kraken from Umbrella Academy and a couple of other characters are in there as well).

Dark Horse should really get into the company-wide crossover event comic business sometime; I know I’d buy a Crisis on Dark Horse’s Earths featuring, like, Predator stalking Little Lulu, Tubby and the fellers; Sock Monkey teaming up with Conan; a starving Conan lost in a desert trying to eat Milk and Cheese; Solomon Kane trying to send Hellboy back to hell; Empowered joining forces with The Umbrella Academy; and like that.

Ah, that’s a pleasant thought…

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 2. It also includes an introduction, by one Ann Romano. This excited me a lot, because of my oft-repeated belief that almost all collections should have introductions.

This was an extremely boring introduction though, structured as a gossip column, and I couldn’t force myself to read more than the first paragraph. I have just googled “Ann Romano” and she apparently writes a column for Portland Oregon-based altweekly The Portland Mercury. Dark Horse is based in Oregon, so it’s cool that they hired locally. This sort of thing just isn’t my cup of tea, I guess.

What about the rest of the contents? As I did last time, I will try to say a few words about each story.

“Captain Hammer (Nemesis of Dr. Horrible): Be Like Me!” by Zack Whedon and Eric Canete

As did the previous volume, this one opens with a story written by a Whedon. This is a new Whedon though, or at least a Whedon who is new to me. Is this Joss’ new pen name? His brother? His son? His father? Someone who just coincidentally has the same last name as Joss Whedon and has managed to parlay that into gigs writing comics? I have no idea.

I will go spend 45 seconds looking on the Internet and tell you what I can find out.

Well, he has an IMDb entry, and a Wikipedia entry. Apparently he was a miscellaneous crew member on Deadwood and Angel and was involved in that Dr. Horrible Internet thing that 450 people recommend I look at but which I never did. He is the brother of Joss Whedon, graduated from Wesleyan University in 2002 and is nicknamed “Spacious” and “Stonehenge.”

So that’s who he is.

Eric Canete is an artist whose name sounds familiar and whose work looks very nice, but I can’t recall reading a book of his before. (Oh hey, he did this at Project Rooftop; I liked that picture).

This story is an eight-page one narrated by the rather generic hero Captain Hammer, who wears cargo pants, black gloves, a utility belt and a black t shirt with the outline of a hammer in a yellow field. You probably know that, if you know about this Dr. Horrible thing the kids with their computers know about and like.

Many of the jokes are your standard superhero parody jokes, of the sort you’ve heard 100-600 times before, but a few of them were funny. I liked the third page, for example. Canete’s line work and sense of motion is a lot of fun too. In the action panels, the whole image pitches radically in the direction Captain Hammer is punching a crook or throwing Dr. Horrible.

It’s alright, I suppose. I still don’t want to watch Dr. Horrible though.


“The Umbrella Academy: Anywhere But Here” by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

This surprisingly complete eight-page story set in the full and mysterious past of Way and Ba’s superhero team focuses on the team’s bad boy and bad girl, Kraken and Vanya, their punk band, how it broke up and how they both kinda sorta ended up doing what they were destined to.

The franchise’s considerable virtues are all on full display here, but what I found most impressive was the economy with which Way and Ba were able to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, a story that features some actual characterization and everything. I know that sort of thing shouldn’t impress me, and that it should just be standard, par for the course stuff that all comics always did, but man, this fucking medium. What are you going to do?


“Retro Rockets Go!” by Ian Edginton and I.N.J. Culbard

Speaking of economy, here’s another completely complete story told in just eight pages, this one not even having the benefit of characters the reader is already familiar with (at least, as far as I know; they were new to me, and sure seemed like one-off characters).

It’s a kind of sci-fi flavored melodramedy, about a space race between extremely colorful racers—sort of like Wacky Races, but in outer space.

You can see more of Culbard’s work here.


“Wonder Twins Activate!” by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

The lack of the word “powers” between the words “twins” and “activate” in that title really bothers me for some reason.

This is, of course, a collaboration between twin brother artists Moon and Ba, who together produced De:Tales for Dark Horse.

The story is the story of the two of them doing a Batman-like superhero comic story in which the caped crimefighter stops a mugger. One of them explains it to the other by beating on him just as the superhero beats on the mugger.

I’m not really doing it much justice. It’s a pretty simple but rather cute story, and the last page gag is especially nice.

Now, how do I tell them apart…?


“Milk and Cheese in ‘The Fur Suit of Crappiness!’” by Evan Dorkin

A two-pager in which Dorkin’s angry, violent dairy products gone bad accidentally show up at furry convention, thinking it was supposed to be a fury convention.

The results?

Insults. Lots and lots of insults. Followed by violence. Lots and lots of violence.


“Ann Romano: Gossip Whore” by Ann Romano and Paul Lee

Here’s the contribution from introduction –writer Romano, which is two pages of stale Britney Spears-is-a-trashy-human-being jokes. Perhaps it was less stale when it originally ran on MySpace, but it’s hard to imagine it was actually “fresh” then.


“Ransom! A Wondermark Tale” by David Malki

Here’s a story from well regarded web comics maker David Malki, which is unusual in its length. Rather than a strip, it’s an eight-page, more comic book-style story, which keeps the style and humor of his usual work remarkably well.


“A Going Concern” by John Arcudi and Steven Young

This may be the weirdest story in here. It’s a short western about a bounty hunter with a neat little twist ending, but, for whatever reason, the characters aren’t humans, but some sort of flea-like insects. And the horses are made out of pipe cleaners. But there are other animals, scaled to the fleas as if they were humans, like donkeys, dogs, vultures and even flies.

I didn’t get it.

But they’re all drawn quite well.


“Hobo Fet” by The Brothers Matkinson and Jon Adams

This has a fairly fantastic title, mixing one of the funniest words in the world, “hobo,” with one of the coolest things in the world, Boba Fett. And yet it’s pretty terrible.

It’s an eight-page story about a guy named Hobart who has a motorcycle helmet, and, after falling off his scooter, encounters a variety of characters that all vaguely suggest Star Wars characters. Then he decides to become a bounty hunter.

After the title, it’s all down hill really.


“Manga” by Gilbert Hernandez

I believe this was linked to pretty heavily when it originally ran, for the obvious reasons. It’s a pretty clever, dryly amusing story about a village punching competition in which the winner gets a basket of coins and a beautiful (looking) girl. It’s always a treat to see Hernandez’ art both in color and in a different context.


“Jared” by Ilias Kyriazis

Human beings as giant space ships piloted by Star Trek-style captains and crews. Jared is one such person, and we see a day or so in his life, from both his perspective and that of the people inside him. There’s not an interesting conceit, and if there’s not a whole lot to do with it, Kyriazis’ story is only eight-pages long, so there’s not enough time for it to get tired.


“How to Heal a Broken Heart: Method #37 by Tara McPherson

This is the first comics work I’ve seen from McPherson, an artist who has provided covers to some Vertigo series and recently had a second collection of her work published by Dark Horse. It falls somewhere into the picture poetry territory, told in images instead of words, although there is some dialogue as well.

If you like McPherson’s art, and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t, it’s a nice enough two pages.


“Rex Mundi: Frailty” by Arvid Nelson

At just eleven panels spread over just two pages, there’s not much to go on here. There is a woman, named Genevieve, and there’s a man named Julien, and the former gets the latter to sneak out of a boring class. And then they kiss. It seems to function best as a sort of commercial for Nelson’s Rex Mundi comics, by pointing out how great the art is, and, if you want to know what it’s in service of, perhaps you should check out a trade.


“The Nothinist” by Jason Graham

Like the McPherson story, this is an art-first, picture-poem sort of strip, a two-page tale of Death—a cute little grim reaper with black and white-striped tentacles that can turn into snakes, and a little girl with bear claws who he falls in love with. There are several cute corpses in this story. You don’t see cute corpses all that often, really.


“Criminal Macabre: The Creepy Tree” by Steve Niles and Kyle Hotz

I think I’ve mentioned my dislike of Niles’ Criminal Macabre before. I read a trade of it from the library because it was illustrated by Kelley Jones, and I found it extremely amateurish and pretty generic. The lead character, Cal McDonald, was a drinking, drugging, smoking P.I. that specialized in the supernatural and seemed conceived as the sort of character a junior high boy would think is totally cool.

This story doesn’t have the benefit of Jones’ art, but Hotz isn’t exactly a slouch either. As for the story, McDonald is called in to kill an evil tree, he does, and that’s all there is to it.

The swearing is kind of funny in that I-want-to-use-a-swear-word-and-have-everyone-know-exactly-which-specific-word-without-actually-putting-all-the-letters-down kind of way. So Cal says he has “the worst f****** luck in the world” and that he’s seen “some weird s***” in his life.


“B.P.R.D.: Revival”
by John Arcudi and Guy Davis

Ah, now this is more like it. The BPRD versus one of those creatures they call frogs, which is posing as a little girl capable of performing miracles at a sort of revival meeting, by regular B.P.R.D. creators.


“A+” by Nate Piekos and Jeff Wamester

A horror story with a twist involving nerdy high schoolers and a killer science fair project. A bit predictable, but nicely executed, one of Wamester’s monsters is exceptionally well-designed (the snake-based one), and they all have funny, easy to read expressions.


“Legion of Blood: The Messenger” by Francisco Ruiz Velasco

Here’s another short story which ends on a gag punchline, although it’s set up is perhaps too long for the pay off. The sense design sense and artwork are both rather incredible though.


“Criminal Macabre: ‘The Trouble With Brains’” by Steve Niles and Kyle Hotz

No better than the first one.


“The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob: True Stories rom the Life of Robert E. Howard” by Jim and Ruth Keegan

A two-page version of the autobiographical strips that used to run (and perhaps still do?) in the back of Dark Horse’s Conan comics. I’ve always liked these a lot, and I like this one as well.

This kicks of the Robert E. Howard section of the book that carries us through the end.


“Sailor Steve Costigan” by Joe Casey and Pop Mhan

This was actually my first exposure to Howard’s modern day (to him, anyway) creation, a merchant sailor and ex-boxing champ, and it actually made me want to see more stories featuring him, be they comics adaptations like this, or maybe some of Howard’s original stories.

The title character has a new gig—writing sports stories covering the boxing world he used to know from the inside of the ring—but the last two boxers didn’t like what he had to say about him, so he finds himself having to use his fists anyway.

It’s a lighthearted, humorous story that also happens to involve a whole lot of punching. It’s also really nice looking, and I was surprised to see that Mhan supplied the art, something I didn’t notice while reading it.

I haven’t seen new work from Mhan since 2006’s Blank, so maybe he’s changed his style quite a bit, or maybe he was just working in a style that better suited the character and time period, or maybe colorist Jose Villarrubia completely transformed it (or maybe a little of all three), but this doesn’t look much like Mhan. Even rereading it now, I have a hard time seeing Mhan in it, aside from the way a limb flails here or there.


“Solomon Kane: The Nightcomers” by Scott Allie and Mario Guevara

I’ve been fascinated with Solomon Kane since I found a copy of the old Marvel Comic at my barbershop when I was a little boy, and rather eagerly awaiting the trade collection of Dark Horse’s new series featuring him. This was a welcome taste.

The story, in which the hero arrives in a mysterious village plagued by raiders who strike each night, is somewhat confusingly told, on account of the need to hide the twist ending, and could probably have been done a little more smoothly. Guevara’s art is quite lush though, and it certainly hits the Conan-as-pilgrim note I expected it to.


“Conan” by Tim Truman, Ben Truman and Marian Churchland

This story kind of irritated me. See, it’s lettered by EDILW favorite Brandon Graham. Which is nice. I like his letters just fine. But that put into my head the thought of a Brandon Graham-written and illustrated Conan story, and now I really, really, really want to see one of those.

Not that this isn’t a great little Conan comic or anything.

The Trumans write while Churchland draws. Conan walks out of the desert with a ton of loot and journeys to a bar that he quickly realizes is full of people who would like to kill and/or rob him. He defeats them all, but this time not through violence—rather, the stories he tells and the amounts of wine he buys for the house is enough to defeat them all.

The stories within the story are all really neat. Here, for example, is perhaps the most badass thing I’ve ever seen Conan do:

He killed a dude with his loincloth. Damn.

If you’d like to see more of Churchland’s art, you can do so here. She’s pretty great.

And if you’d like to see a Brandon Graham Conan story, well, that makes two of us. (I guess there’s this, for a taste).


The collection finishes up with a discussion about superhero comics between Evan Dorkin, Zack Whedon and Gerard Way. What I found most interesting about it was Way talking about his approach to continuity in Umbrella Academy. He says he intentionally implies a long continuity for the characters as if they previously existed and had many adventures, but he doesn’t actually know what all that backstory is, and doesn’t really care about it. It’s a strange thought, that complicated continuity is a negative in superhero comics, but to imply its presence where there isn’t any. It works for Way though.

And that’s a few words about every single story in MySpace Dark Horse Presents Vol. 2.

Your monthly Kelley Jones' Batman update

Well, this week Batman: Gotham After Midnight #9 by Steve Niles and Kelley Jones came out, which means it's time once again for a monthly-ish check-in with how insanely awesome and/or awesomely insane Jones' Batman work is.

This "Nefarious 9th Issue" was full of the things Jones does so well.

The over-the-top, visual-operatic melodrama was in full effect for much of the issue, in which Batman discovers the burned corpse of his new lover, resulting in many panels of his forehead burning with red rage, and a few panels of him smashing his red glowing arm fist into a mirror or through a window to vent his frustration. Even Commissioner Gordon gets some neat dramatic imagery, like a panel featuring his glasses reflecting Batman's silhouette and he raging apartment building fire behind the Batman, or a two panels later, one of Gordon standing before the burning building, his hands thrust into his trench coat pockets, while torn pieces of police tape and wanted posters featuring the villain Midnight swirl in the wind around him, foreshadowing the fact that he's going to be a target of Midnight's.

There are also lots of cool bat-gadgets and Batcave scenes this time around, but this page is probably the best of them:

Yes, that's Bruce Wayne driving a nondescript, rich man's civilian car through the countryside while speaking to an R2-D2/CNN-style holographic projection of Alfred, then entering a tunnel, apparently pushing some kind of crazy button that activates all these hidden mechanical arms (panel four), and then emerging from the other side of the tunnel now dressed like Batman, his car completely transformed into some kind of strange two-wheeled, missile-with-a-cockpit style Batmobile.

I always call attention to how wild Jones' art and designs are, and there's certainly a lot of that in this issue as well (the very first panel, for example, has Batman charging into a burning building, his left thigh all of a sudden longer than his entire torso, and most of his entire right leg), but Jones can really, really draw.

Just check out the detail on this page, which you may want to click on to make bigger:

One could certainly say that the Batmobile looks ridiculous to them, or that they don't like the Batman design, but, wow, just look at the city Jones drew here!

Look at the details...all those little lines, all those little windows, the skylights breaking up the black planes of roofs near the bottom. It's a splash page, but rather than looking at that as an opportunity to rest, to slack off for 1/22nd of the book, Jones draws a page that looks as detailed and difficult as any multi-panel page in the book. H

ow often in super-comics do you come across a page like this where you just kind of want to linger for a while and admire the architecture, a page that lets you imagine what it must be like to actually be in Gotham, which isn't just New York City with the Wayne tower, more gargoyles and a couple of blimps, but a distinct, videogame/playground kind of place with multiple levels of bridges and rooftops for vigilantes to swing from, jump around on and pilot their super-rocket cars over?

Wow.

Here's one more splash page, this one a lot less detailed, and featuring Jones interpretation of the current Catwoman costume (and not doing so hot with it, honestly):

I like her hands though, and the weird, cat-like posture. Artists usually interpret her feline grace as a series of either athletic or seductive poses and stretches. Here she's just kinda collapsed like a cat, and, you know, despite the rep the jungle varieties have, cats aren't always the most graceful of animals.

That's not why I scanned this page though. Look at how her dialogue was written and/or lettered.

Um, shouldn't that be "Perrrrrfect," to indicate she's purring like a cat, and thus allowing Niles to make the hoary old perfect/purr Catwoman pun, rather than "Peeeeerfect," to indicate that she's...well, I don't know what drawing out the e into a super-long e sound indicates. That Catwoman thinks she and Midnight are perfect peers...? A pun about how he was just peering at Batman through a telescope?

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.

Crazy Kelley Jones Contraption of the Month:

My apparently now monthly post about Gotham After Midnight

Wednesday's new issue of Steve Niles and Kelley Jones' Batman: Gotham After Midnight wasn't merely numbered with the standard "3," but said instead that it was the "thrilling 3rd issue." I'm sure DC meant that bit of hyperbole as humorous irony, but, to be honest, I did find it rather thrilling. Or, at least, I found the art half of the equation thrilling.

Here, let me share my thrillcitement with you. Here are the three most thrilling scenes in the comic.

1.) I can think of no better exaample of Kelley Jones tendency to exaggerate the hell out of everything than this panel right here:

It's merely of Commissioner Gordon and Batman having a typical Commisioner Gordon and Batman conversation about a murder case, but regardless of the situation (and what the story would logicaly dictate), Jones still draws Batman as a scary gargoyle monster.

It doesn't look like he's comparing notes with Gordon so much as trying to hypnotize him. Or maybe cast a spell on him. Or getting ready to lean over and bite him.

2.) Later, Batman has returned to the Batcave and is preparing to take a batnap when the batsignal goes up, letting him know that Gotham needs him. How does the Kelley Jones Batman have thngs set up to alert him of danger? Is his cellphone set to vibrate? Is there a blinking red hotline phone under a glass dessert case? Perhaps a siren or alarm of some sort? No, nothing so subtle as that.

Apparently a batsignal is shone into some kind of disco ball, which then covers the entire surface of the batcave in dozens of little batsignals.

3.) As I mentioned in my review last Wednesday, the plot of this particular issue involves recurring Bat-villain Clayface growing to enormous, King Kong size and threatening the city.

When Batman sees what's up, he tells Alfred to forget the batmobile, as he's "going to need something bigger."

We then cut to a couple of pages of giant Clayface wreaking havoc, when, on the last panel of one page, he hears someone calling his name. Clayface turns and, on the very last page, sees this:

That's the first the reader sees of Batman's anti-giant Clayface weapon system too. You just turn the page and, on the next spread, theres' an ad on the left-hand page and a splash on the right-hand page featuring Batman in his giant robot punching machine.

Why does Batman have one of these? How did he build it? What's it look like from the wasit down...does it have legs? Wheels? Does it transform? How did he get it into the city and manage to sneak up on Clayface with it? These intriguing questions are left unanswered, Niles and Jones just leaving us with the impact of seeing Batman appear in his giant robot punching machine.

And as cool as that little surprise is, what really makes this page is the expressions on the two characters.

You've got Batman looking all serious and determined while lookng out through his little bat-decorated porthole, completely oblivious to how silly he looks while manning the shockingly simple-looking controls


and then you've got Clayface making the same blank face of confusion mixed with curiosity that I had when I first saw that thing


And that all adds up to a thrilling 3rd issue. I can't wait to see these guys duke it out in what I'm assuming will be the "fo' real fourth issue."

Batman, The World's Greatest Detective

(From DC's Batman: Gotham After Midnight #2 by Steve Niles and Kelley Jones)

Don't Look Now, Brad Meltzer!

From Batman: Gotham County Line by Steve Niles, Scott Hampton and Jose Villarrubia (DC Comics; 2005)