THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

Jun arrives at The Ellsmere School, having won a coveted scholarship to the acclaimed private middle/high school. She's given up her family and friends in the clear-eyed recognition that without the sort of boost that Ellsmere can give her, especially academically, the chances of getting into the sort of college she wants later on are slim. Her father died when she was young, and her mother is a struggling hairdresser, so this is going to be her best shot. Her roommate Cassie is a somewhat flighty but very sweet person. However, Jun almost immediately joins battle with Emily, queen of the mean girls. Part of it is pure academic rivalry -- they've both been the best in school until now. Part of it is, frankly, that Emily is in fact very mean, and Jun tends to start things sometimes without thinking them through. Eventually, things escalate to a breaking point.

Hicks draws the situation very realistically. Almost anyone who was in junior high or high school can remember having some sort of situation with others, some sort of competition, some sort of rivalry, people who instinctively disliked each other, sometimes for no good reason. Hicks' artwork makes it easy to distinguish even minor characters, and the expressions easily convey the emotions the characters feel. The school itself almost feels like a character, a heavy gothic presence around the girls. The mystical element introduced at the end is a bit ... odd; frankly, it feels like the sort of thing that might be setting up future stories at the school. It's properly set up by the story -- unlike, say, the Minx story Clubbing, it doesn't come winging in completely without warning -- but it feels a bit out of place. That said, I'm not sure how the situation could have been resolved without it.

Highly recommended, for anyone above the age of 12.

Sylvia seems to be your average teenaged girl, having your average teenaged girl problems. Her adoptive parents don't seem to understand her, she's having problems with the popular girl at school thinking she's poaching her boyfriend, she's having bad dreams about dozens of girls in these big incubation chambers -- you know, the usual. Only it turns out that she's got freaky super strength, so she accidentally flings the popular girl across the hall and then breaks her arm with her bare hands when she attacks Sylvia again. And it turns out that she was one of the girls in the incubation chambers, and was cloned from the tissue of various scientists involved. Because the government -- or someone -- is demanding results of the project, the people who created her suddenly want her back. She was stolen from the project by scientists who disagreed with what the project was for, which was to turn teenaged girls into weapons with superhero/villain-type powers through the use of Mad Science. (They'd already tried with boys, and with a very few exceptions, it doesn't seem to have worked.) Sylvia doesn't want to go back, and lets the bad guys know this with Extreme Violence. She then seeks out the other few girls who were taken out of the project, trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

I call them bad guys, but the fact is, the mad scientists are drawn up as surprisingly complete characters. They have feelings for each other as well as the girls they've created, and that some of them have taken away from the project. You don't really understand why they're doing this -- even a moment's thought should have told them why this would be a terrible idea, adolescent rebellion to the extreme not withstanding, and Sylvia's extra little ability (you'll know it when you see it) is both understandable from a battlefield viewpoint, and terribly terribly misguided -- but that aside, both the girls and the scientists are very well developed. There are also people of various visible ethnic backgrounds who are involved in the project, as well as in trying to rescue some of the girls, which is a nice touch. (And mildly confusing at first; it's not until they explain that Sylvia seems to have been adopted as a teenager that it makes even vague sense that her adoptive parents are black.)

It's a very good, entertaining book, with interesting characters and artwork that's just cartoony enough to keep the violence from being too offputting. And make no mistake: when I say there's Extreme Violence, I mean there's a good bit of barehanded killing, killing through explosions, some interesting dismemberments, a bit of torture that we thankfully don't get to see ... really, it's pretty much all there. Depending on how you define things -- and allowing that every single thing she does, until the very end, is clearly in self defense -- Sylvia might be considered one of the biggest mass murderers in the country's history. All that violence does bring up the question of who, precisely, the audience of this book is. Mind, the question only comes up because of a certain cultural sexism. You've got a book meant primarily for boys in which a teenaged boy kills and maims and dismembers in a slightly cartoony way, no problem. But allegedly, boys don't read books with girls as the principal characters, which means that this would be aimed at girls, and people's biases change in interesting ways regarding girls and violence.

According to an interview I read elsewhere, Gallardo and Demong hope to continue the title, which was originally published through Arcana. I hope they get the chance. Any road, it's a very interesting story. Recommended.

Once upon a time, there was a girl. Her parents wound up selling her to the wicked witch after they stole some lettuce from the witch's garden. The girl was brought up in ignorance of that fact, until she found out about the realities of her world. And then she decided to do something about that.

The Hales recast Rapunzel as a fairy tale of the old west. Evil witch Gothel has some sort of magic that makes things grow very fast, but it also sucks the life out of other areas, which means that much of the kingdom she reigns over is dead and sere. Rapunzel is raised inside the castle, and knows nothing of this. One day she gets very curious about what's outside the castle, and eventually gets around her mother's proscriptions, and takes a look, only to discover an enslaved, blighted world beyond the walls. She also accidentally finds the mother who gave birth to her, a slave in Gothel's mines. Needless to say, her view of things is changed dramatically. Furious that Rapunzel has disobeyed her, Gothel takes her to the forest and shuts her up, not in a tower, but in a very tall tree, with a hollow space near the top. Gothel uses the forest as defense of sorts, and causes things in it to grow very fast, including as it turns out, Rapunzel's hair and nails. Rapunzel refuses to give in to Gothel's demands to apologize and go back, so eventually Gothel abandons her, and causes the tree-prison to start growing closed. Rapunzel uses her now-lengthy hair and the rope tricks taught to her by one of the guards when she was a child, and escapes from the tree, and then has a raft of adventures in her attempt to free her real mother. Along the way, she runs into the prince who has come to rescue the maiden from her high prison -- only not so much, really. And then she meets Jack, of beanstalk and giantkiller and other fame; he's clearly meant as a sort of Jack portmanteau-trickster archetype, much as Jack of Fables.

Characterization in this story works in really pretty typical fairytale ways, setting aside. Rapunzel is a spunky young woman who rescues herself through most of the story, and rescues Jack a few times. The villains of the story are very very villainous, including Gothel, who seems to regard Rapunzel more as a possession to be subdued, rather than a daughter to be cared for. Nathan Hale's art is very expressive and fun to look at.

Very technically, Rapunzel's Revenge is sort of an all-ages book. More practically, it's the sort of thing you give to kids who are just old enough to read comfortably on their own. I don't think teenaged girls would like it -- or would admit to liking it -- which is a bit of a pity, since it really does show a teenaged girl being both very thoughtrul and very competent physically in ways that aren't often depicted. Recommended.

We meet Blythe, a flight attendant for a Dutch airline, as she and some guy are falling through the air out of a plane crashing into the ocean. We then jump back in time to when Blythe first meets this guy, having what appears to be a charmingly racist moment of terrorist neurosis about him -- he's from somewhere Mediterranean or Middle Eastern or somewhere (it's very very confusing) -- and then running into a charmingly racist/nationalist group that wants to take advantage of her feelings. Then, in a wildly improbable way, she gets talked into taking a travel bag for one of those guys. She gets talked into looking into the bag by That Guy -- he's now apparently a Spaniard, so he says -- and discovers some Very Bad Things inside. Then lots and lots of very bad things happen.

I really don't know about this one. I think I need to give it another issue -- although, that said, it's probably going to get dropped to trade, just because this is the sort of story that's probably going to read better in chunks. Judgement reserved, for now.

Danni and her mother have moved in with her mother's alcoholic and borderline abusive boyfriend after the disappearance of Danni's father -- apparently, he just deserted them. Danni winds up falling in love with Haskell, her sort-of stepbrother, and getting involved in his brand of radical ecological activism. Becoming involved with Haskell means that Danni winds up having to make a lot of tough decisions about her actions and bearing the consequences of them.

Honestly, I think this is the first Minx title where I can say that the issue is that I'm absolutely not the target audience, even though I've liked other Minx books, sometimes quite a lot. Donner's writing isn't at all bad, and Miranda's artwork works well with the story. But it took me three times to get through it, despite its brevity. Part of the issue is that because of the different things she's been going through, and the terribly awkward living situation, Danni's personality comes across as very muted, despite being the first-person narrator. For that matter, for all that he's a radical ecoterrorist of sorts, Haskell comes across as surly and quiet, and not actually there all that much. Danni's mother, aside from making one bad decision after another, is barely there. To be sure, much of this is the result of Hank's verbal and near-physical abuse of Danni's mother and of Haskell; one of the things you learn about being around an abusive person is to be as quiet and withdrawn as possible, because you never know what will set them off. But that means that everyone in the story, aside from Danni's best friend, feels terribly buttoned-down a lot of the time.

I don't know ... I think overall, this story just wasn't to my taste, so I can't really rate it.

Imagine a balkanized and divided Los Angeles, in which the people don't really trust the police, and vice versa. (Or don't; that's pretty much the situation in the city today.) Imagine that gang warfare suddenly seems to be becoming ... oddly organized. Against the police. That's the setup for Genius, from the writers of last year's Monster Attack Network and Highwaymen. Destiny, a young black woman, has organized the gangs in and around her Compton neighborhood into a very good, appallingly strong paramilitary force. Something specific -- we don't quite know what just yet -- happened to make her decide that their neighborhood would be better with them maintaining control than with the apparently corrupt police. So she and her people kill off a few police and send one back to give headquarters the message.

In the meantime, inside HQ, Detective Reginald Grey has been putting together the clues and realizing that there's a "Suspect Zero", someone controlling all the action, someone setting up the LAPD to take a fall. Of course, nobody at HQ quite believes him -- after all, nothing like that's happened before now, so why should they believe that things have changed so drastically? Except then the cop that Destiny didn't kill gets back to HQ and lets them know that, in fact, the map has changed dramatically.

Bernardin and Freeman convey the situation and characers very well in the limited space they've got. Richardson's art at first seemed a bit stylized for the story but ... it really does work. All the characters are easy to distinguish, and it keeps the story from looking quite like the grim trip that it's likely to be. Tonally, the closest things to it I can think of are Walking Dead and Rex; the former because of the way it deals with people driven to doing difficult things that they otherwise would never consider, the latter because of the gritty and dark way it deals with the police and official corruption and people taking the law into their hands after they've been pushed Just That One Step too far.

I really hope this title is one that survives Pilot Season to become a continuing title. I'd really like to see more of this one. The one thing that I think might give it problems in the voting is that it is in no way, shape, or form, a superhero story, and I wonder if maybe that's all that people are expecting from Pilot Season. I hope they're expecting more than just that. Highly Recommended.

...OK, I will admit that the end to issue 10 took me completely by surprise; I would not for even a second have expected them to go there. Issue 11, I'm sort of "meh" on. Partly, I just wish this goddamn zombie plot would be DONE. I hate zombies. I am one with the hate of zombiekind. But I can deal with the plague of zombies in this title, because I love it with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. On the other hand, not entirely loving Thomasina's characterization in issue 11; it really does seem like her reaction to discovering what became of her grandfather was ... off, a bit. Granted, I understand her feeling that the information was sort of irrelevant, and that she just wants to know what she needs to defeat the zombie plague. Still, given that the information about what happened to him wasn't coming directly from him, but from someone else she trusts, it really does seem like she should have given it at least a little more credence.

Something of a sidenote --I ran across the following at Occasional Superheroine's weblog:
Anti-Semitic Comment In "Countdown" #32?...right off that bat, if you want to make comparisons between different characters in your comic and you put the Old & New Testaments in there, you're already sort of in the danger zone in terms of offending someone. If the symbolism was indeed there in this "Countdown" story that evil Eclipso = Old Testament and Good Spectre = New Testament, then you've got some problems. [...] It's verrrrry complicated. We tended not to use overt religious stuff in our books at DC. This is why.

Tranquility has now gotten rather explicitly religious, probably as part of the lead in to Armageddon/Revelations.

DC's Countdown is headed to Final Crisis by way of a miniseries called "Salvation Run".

The entire Wildstorm superhero universe is headed to its own final crisis via the paired, title-abolishing miniseres "Armageddon" and "Revelations".

I think DC may have decided that they really don't care about offending people's religious principles any more. I'm not saying that's bad, necessarily; it's certainly unexpected.

As far as can be told from solicitation copy, Welcome to Tranquility may have been stealth-cancelled, without official notice in Previews; on the other hand, they may be delaying it to figure out what to do with it once Simone takes over Wonder Woman. One can hope anyway. I do think the title has been rather spectacularly mishandled ... but more about that elsewhere, elsewhen, belike.

I had what turned out to be an odd advantage coming to this title. I'd never heard of Gerard Way, never really paid attention to My Chemical Romance, so I didn't come to it with any particular preconceptions about whether or not he could write, as others seem to. And that turned out to be a good thing, because this is definitely a fun read.

On the same day, dozens of mutant children are born in an instant to women around the world, many of whom hadn't actually been pregnant until that moment. Professor Hargreaves adopts as many of these infants as he can find, eventually winding up with seven children to raise. It becomes fairly clear that Hargreaves is a rather dreadful father; mostly he wants to use them to demostrate his scientific principles regarding their superpowers. Then we jump 10 years into the future, where the kids are fighting the renegade Eiffel Tower. (No, really. Renegade Eiffel Tower, rampaging through Paris.) Then we jump forward another 20 years, where the group is gathering to find out if it's true that their father is dead. Issue 2 takes up from where issue 1 leaves off, with everyone gathering for the funeral. It's clear that there was some sort of dramatic break between the children and with their father; they can scarcely stand the sight of one another. Their mother, or rather, Professor Hargreaves' wife -- she at least seems to have been married to him -- she's very ... well. She's quite unusual, let's put it that way. And, of course, it turns out that she'd been estranged from the professor as well. And the seventh child, Vanya, whom the professor thought untalented turns out to have a very subtle power; she was so profoundly alienated, however, that she didn't even return for the funeral.

Ba's art is absolutely perfect for this series. I honestly can't imagine that anyone else would do better or be more appropriate for a story that's simultaneously this loopy and this serious. It wouldn't work with a more realistic style -- the characters would look utterly absurd drawn in a more realistic way. His art brings out the humor in the characters without making them ridiculous.

It's really a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I would like to make a suggestion to the big companies. Whenever you have one of those mondo-crossover events, and you decide to compile an individual title's issues, if the character has been off doing something in another title, please insert two or three pages summarizing what they were doing, maybe with a frame or two from the other titles. "Manhunter: Origins" is sharply discontinuous in one section; they don't even put in a note saying, "To see what Kate was doing, you need to read 52 or Crise du Jour" or whatever title it was she was doing ... whatever she was doing. In any event, apart from that, it's an interesting read.

This volume takes its title from its bookend stories. The first concerns the origins of the Manhunter uniform and weapons; the last the origins of Kate herself. The latter story is, understandably, much more interesting.

It's very strange to have one of the DC universe's heroes who really has very few qualms about killing off the villains. Moreover, the other DC universe superheroes she comes in contact with don't necessarily seem to mind all that much. You do wonder, though, why it is that she seems to be able to do this almost without personal consequence. Most people would find it more difficult to kill than she seems to, even knowing what those people have done. Another oddness; almost everyone on the planet seems to know that Kate Spencer is Manhunter,including the odd villain, yet nobody seems to be telling. And even so, her loved ones wind up in harms way with surprising frequency.

Her supporting cast is great. Chase and Dylan have their ... whatever it is they're doing, in which Dylan is mostly amused and grateful, and Chase is terribly confused. Damon and Todd continue their relationship, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody's dead or creatively mangled as yet. And it's fun to watch Kate squirm when she gets forced to defend one of those villains in court. All in all, highly recommended. Someday, volume 4 will come out. And, in theory, someday there will be more issues of Mahnunter, which DC says is being stockpiled so that it can have a more continuous printing schedule. (One wonders why they don't do that with their other titles.)

Ah, well. We can dream, can't we?

Scalped contains a very dark view of life on the Prairie Rose reservation of the Lakota Sioux. Dashiell Red Horse was a hellion who ran away when he was very young, somehow got himself in order, became an FBI agent, who was then sent back to Prairie Rose to do an undercover investigation of ... something he's not sure of, because his control agent hasn't really told him what he's doing there. The story wends its way through all sorts of corruption, official and otherwise, prostitution, drunkenness, drug use and so on and so on and so on...

The story is problematic at any number of levels. At a purely emotional level ... well, they're all very unpleasant people. Even Dashiell Red Horse, our nominal viewpoint character, isn't that great, and honestly, for the (very nominally) viewpoint character, we don't really know much about him. And then there's the Prairie Rose reservation itself. However bad life on a reservation can be -- and I'm sure it can be bad -- it just can't be this relentlessly grim, and everyone on a reservation can't be this hopeless or evil. I'm certainly not saying that everyone living on a reservation is wondrous and virtuous; that said, I have a hard time believing that corruption is quite that endemic. I get that it's a crime story, but at the same time, most crime stories do a bit better at giving you someone to care about. Compare the first arc of Scalped with the first arc of Brubaker's Criminal; in the first issue, we get not only an introduction to the main character, but also reasons to care what happens to him and his. In the first issue of Scalped, we get introduced to almost everyone, but not enough to feel any sort of connection to or strong interest in any of them.

Additionally, enjoying the story requires you not to know a lot (granted, some of it is fairly oddball stuff). For example, Dashiell Red Horse appears far too young to be an FBI agent, since he'd be required to go to college and have some work experience or additional specialized coursework of a type he clearly lacks (people with those degrees don't get sent undercover by themselves into the field); his supervisor the corrupt FBI agent, at one stage, describes changing his testimony to get someone convicted in a way that would cause problems, because at that point, he'd already testified in two other trials on the same matter, and no sentence could be sustained under those circumstances. It's also very unclear -- by design -- when events take place relative to one another. Slightly beyond the frame of this review, but relevant: a murder takes place at the end of "Indian Country", issue 5 of Scalped. However, as of issue 9, nobody seems to know it yet; very little time has passed. It's hard to be patient with a story where something this major continues not only to be undiscovered, but completely unknown when this much time has gone by in our world, if not theirs. It's hard not to think that a large amount of time should have passed in their world, and why haven't they figured this out yet? It's also, I have a feeling, reasonably obvious who the murderer was and why, but of course, I could be entirely wrong about that. It is, however, incredibly difficult to care, both because the event is so drawn out and because everyone but the murder victim is fairly dislikeable. There's also the small matter that as of issue 9, Dashiell Red Horse himself still doesn't quite know why he's there or what he's supposed to be looking for, and we the readers are very little more informed; as far as we can tell, he's only there to be a cat amongst the pigeons, but it's hard for him to do that without knowing what the pigeons are doing and how to stir them up, so to speak.

To be sure, Scalped somehow manages to be interesting and oddly engrossing, and Guerra's art works well with the story. But I really can't quite recommend the story itself.

Elk's Run is a title that's been through the mill, one way and another. Self-published in single issues initially, it got picked up by Speakeasy, and promptly caught up in Speakeasy's spectacular self-destruction. It eventually landed at Villard for the graphic novel edition.

Elk's Run is the story of the town of Elk's Ridge, as seen by John Jr, his father John Sr, and his mother Sarah. It's an apparently idyllic,very small and extremely isolated (by design) town in the middle of nowhere. The town has a secret -- in fact, a few of them. Everything starts going dramatically wrong when the teenagers desire to leave town and see what else there is in the great wide world collides dramatically with their parents' desire to stay in town and keep their secrets. The storytelling is very simple, almost linear, and very dark, but the story is very well told. You understand the characters, and why they do what they do; you understand the intense isolation and the claustrophobia that causes. It's not that there aren't any villains -- but you can see where the villains feel that they're doing what they need to do for the greater good, misguided though they may be about what the greater good actually is. The artwork is simple and dark, well suited to the story. Highly recommended.

In which the gang returns from winter break for new adventures. Consequences from the explosion of the Ax-Cell-erator continue to grow, as we discover that there are more superpowered kids resulting from the accident. We watch the everyone coping with those discoveries, as well as with the normal stresses and strains of the second semester of freshman year. Old friends discover that maybe they have less in common than they once did; people come to grips with uncomfortable information about themselves; others start new romances. And the Intoxicator continues to throw up on everyone in his own inimitable way. Villains abound, and some come from the most unlikely places. I have to admit, I'm impressed that the creators don't worry about sidelining or killing characters; normally, this early in a book's tenure (if that's the right word), that type of carnage is a bit more limited. (That said, they did not entirely manage to avoid a Woman in Refrigerators (WiR) moment, although it was done about as well as those things can be done.) The artwork is striking and impressive, and conveys the characters and situation well. A very enjoyable book, and well worth the read, even with the WiR.

Now, herewith, a brief plea:

Dear Messrs. Green and Sterbakov,

Regarding Green Thumb: please don't kill him.

Granted, given the developments in the story, that may not be the easiest thing to do -- although I can think of one or two ways right off the bat, depending on the extent of his powers. But that's beside the point. The point is, all things being equal, it would be really really really nice if he didn't wind up all, you know, dead and stuff. ("Stuff" including more creative mangling.) It would be even nicer if he could, as Intoxicator says, "rock out with his [BLEEP] out," but honestly, these days ... yeah, I'd settle for the whole "please don't kill him" thing. He's a character that you've just begun to flesh out and make really interesting, and death would probably interfere with that. He is, for the moment, distinctive and nearly unique in comics. So, really, please don't kill him.

Also, you're to be commended for getting through an entire volume without a single "beaver" joke of any sort. Really, I don't think I could have been that restrained.

Yrs most sincerely, etc.