Foreign Relations

 

Urban Myths #1

Part of Top Cow’s “Pilot Season” promotion, this one is set in a world where the culture and magic of Ancient Greece survived to the present day. All the buildings look like Greek temples, the cops are centaurs, fauns throw frisbees in the park, minotaurs drive beat-up junker pickups. Our protagonist is a private eye named Jack Kaklamanis, but everyone calls him Jack Medusa, because his mom was, um, the Medusa. That means Jack has snakes for hair, and he has to wear a metal mask to keep from turning everyone around him to stone. One of his few allies is his blind, widowed dad, who helps maintain his mask.

So Jack has been hired to track down a missing girl. He petrifies a couple of redneck cyclopes, but is making no real progress in the case — until he realizes that the girl’s father died recently, so she may have decided to make an unauthorized trip to Hades to visit him. So Jack has to travel to the Underworld to retrieve her, and he has to hurry, or they’ll both be trapped there forever…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Jack Medusa is a really entertaining and appealing character, and the Greek setting is simultaneously familiar and alien, so it looks like the kind of place where you’ll always find something interesting.

 

Captain Britain and MI-13 #3

The Skrulls have invaded England and taken control of Avalon, the source of Earth’s magic. Things look hopeless — the normal humans and superheroes in England can’t stand long against the Skrulls, the few heroes and mystical creatures left in Avalon can’t hold out long, no one’s left who’s noble enough to draw Excalibre from the stone, and Pete Wisdom is going to have to turn to the forces of evil to fight the alien hordes. But it turns out that unleashing the evils in Avalon, he’s also empowered Merlin himself to work his magic, which he uses to resurrect a certain recently-deceased superhero.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The whole thing was pretty good (John the Skrull and Faiza Hussain are great fun), but this really earns its marks for the scene with all the British flags being whipped off their flagpoles to form the new body of Cap Britain…

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