Kill Shakespeare #4

Hamlet and Falstaff have just made a narrow escape from Richard III’s men and are now stuck riding through the forest wearing dresses — thanks to a failed scheme of Falstaff’s to disguise themselves as women. Falstaff takes Hamlet to an inn that’s a secret organizing base for the resistance, and they meet two of the resistance’s superstars — Juliet and Othello. They don’t have very much confidence in a supposed Shadow King who wears a dress, but they don’t have long to debate, as Richard’s men soon attack the inn. Othello is one heck of a fighter, but will his warrior instincts hold up when he learns that his old enemy Iago is on the scene?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m still surprised I’m enjoying this as much as I am — I did suspect that it was a one-joke concept that wouldn’t last beyond one or two issues, but I’m still very pleased with how it’s developing. I’ve heard it described as “The League of Extraordinary Shakespeare Gentlemen,” which isn’t far off the mark.

Hellboy: The Storm #2

Nimue, destroyer of Merlin, murderer of Queen Mab, corruptor of the fae, is on the march — her goal is the death of mankind and the entire planet. Her champion is a gigantic monster transformed from a lowly hedgehog, and he has enough oomph to impale Hellboy on a spear. Of course, Hellboy can’t really die anymore, and there isn’t much he can’t kill when he’s armed with Excalibur, so he and his human friend Alice continue on their way, finding a pub to rest in, while Hellboy reminisces about his boyhood in New Mexico with Professor Bruttenholm.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This story mixes ancient mythology with a giant slugfest with more personal storytelling, and it all seems to work fine. I’m loving Duncan Fegredo’s art here — it’s fun and kinetic and personable.

Baltimore: The Plague Ships #1

Well, there’s this nobleman named Lord Henry Baltimore who’s hunting vampires in a town plagued by an epidemic of, well, the plague. The vampires try to escape in an airship, but a local witch hexes it so it gets struck by lightning and explodes. Baltimore meets the witch and her beautiful daughter, who is desperate to escape from the town. Baltimore is imprisoned on suspicion of being in league with the devil, and the witch’s daughter helps him escape, in exchange for letter her travel with him.

Verdict: Thumbs down. Maybe you need to have read Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden’s “Baltimore” novel first… but that really shouldn’t be a requirement. There should be something to explain the backstory of the main character and the setting, because if you don’t have that, none of this makes much sense at all.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Erik Larsen, creator of the Savage Dragon, has been taking woman-hating lessons from Dave Sim…
• Noel Murray compares and contrasts “Astro City” and “Planetary.”
• One of those things they don’t seem to teach about in schools any more…

We’ve got another short break before our regular Friday Night Fights make their triumphant return, but there are other kinds of violence in the world, including the violence done to the fragile male ego when cruelly shot down by incognito but freakin’ awesome superheroines!

From October 2009’s Power Girl #4 by Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Amanda Conner: Power Girl goes to a movie, gets macked on by (gasp!) the guys from “The Big Bang Theory” (!!!), and reacts by terrifying them with dating advice (and being alarmingly tall and gorgeous):

Wow, gotta give Howard credit for being able to maintain proper eye contact.

Quite seriously, that right there is probably my single favorite moment from the entire “Power Girl” series — and that was a comic jam-packed with awesomeness. If you haven’t read it, go hunt down the trade paperbacks, fer cryin’ out loud.

Secret Six #24

Here’s a switch — all of the main characters of the series, including several of their villains, transplanted into the Wild West. Deadshot is a bounty hunter, Scandal Savage a sheriff, Bane is her deputy, Ragdoll runs a puppet theater, Jeannette is the local saloon’s most expensive entertainment, and Catman is a savage trapper. And Ragdoll’s vile sister Junior is the wealthiest woman in the territory, dedicated to killing everyone in town with her hired army of thugs, led by a mercenary gunfighter called Slade Wilson.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A very, very cool change of pace story. It’s great the way all of the Six’s characters fit into the Western’s archetypes. I wouldn’t mind seeing this kind of story more often, even if it’s not in the Wild West — surely these guys would fit well into lots of other genres.

Jonah Hex #58

Jonah gets in the middle of the aftermath of a whole series of crimes — the murder of a homesteader’s wife, leading to the homesteader killing the man he holds responsible, and the accidental maiming of a bystander. Jonah has been hired by the wealthy widow to bring in the homesteader, but she unexpectedly decides she won’t pay. Something fishy is going on here, and it’ll probably end with Jonah shooting more people.

Verdict: Thumbs up. An excellent and moderately complex mystery story, with an interesting framing device in which the bullets fired help narrate the action. Gotta give credit to artist Giancarlo Caracuzzo — he draws the most disgustingly disfigured Jonah Hex I think I’ve ever seen.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Here’s a Japanese manga strip explaining the strategic alliance between Japan and the U.S., in which America is depicted as a kid wearing a hoodie with bunny ears. My only regret is that it doesn’t appear to have been translated into English yet.
• And here are some absolutely gorgeous color photographs of Depression-era America. Definitely recommended for anyone interested in old photos or just old stuff in general.
• It’s depressing that we’ve let people like this and this wage war on Texas schools and schoolchildren for so many years. Depressing that they’ve done so much damage over the years and that their disciples will keep the war going forever.

iZombie #4

Gwen the gravedigging detective zombie and Ellie the ’60s ghost have discovered the killer, Amon, a man who claims to have died and risen from the dead in ancient Egypt. He says he only kills because he has to from time to time, and he only takes those whose deaths would benefit society. Gwen isn’t sure whether to believe him, so he takes her on a psychic journey through his life and explains the esoteric origins of various different monsters and supernatural powers. Elsewhere, Horatio and his fellow monster-hunter try to capture Claire the vampire before she can kill Spot’s friend Ashok. Spot, meanwhile, has been outed as a wereterrier to another of his friends — and he takes it in stride so they can play video games.

Verdict: Thumbs up. I especially enjoyed Amon’s descriptions of the undersoul and the oversoul, and how their presence or absence creates everything from zombies and werewolves to poltergeists and possessions. I’ve been praising Mike Allred’s artwork and Laura Allred’s colors, but Chris Roberson’s writing is also a ton of fun. This series has been a lot of fun so far — make sure you pick it up.

Crossed: Family Values #3

Adaline has discovered that her family’s completely rotten to the core — her survivalist father has raped and impregnated his daughter Kayleen, who’s chained up in the barn because she’s become one of the psychotically murderous Crossed. And dad has decided he’s God’s prophet so he can do whatever he wants, which includes beating Adaline down and locking her up. Her mother has gone at least as crazy as her dad, and she’s willing to excuse anything he does — you don’t go against God’s prophet, right? And a horde of the Crossed have just discovered the family compound, which sets Dad off even more. He declares Adaline to be of the Devil, beats her, rapes her, and prepares to expose her to Crossed blood, which would turn her into a monster, too. This is finally too much for Mom, so she locks herself in a cell with her husband, pours a jar of the Crossed blood on herself and kills Dad. Adaline makes it through the compound, now mostly overrun by the Crossed, kills her sister Kayleen (who’d just cut herself open so she could eat her unborn baby), and escapes with the few survivors of the compound. Oh, hey, did I just spoil the entire issue for you? Yes, I do believe I did!

Verdict: Thumbs down. I can deal with a lot of death, depravity, nudity, gore, and perversion — but only when there’s a good story to go along with it. And while the story here has actually managed to go farther on the gore/depravity/nudity/perversion scale than Garth Ennis ever dreamed in the first “Crossed” series, it’s also gotten nowhere near Ennis’ storytelling prowess. While I still recommend the first “Crossed” series for any adult fan of bleeding-edge horror, I can’t recommend this series for anyone, and I’m dropping it as of now.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Here’s an impossibly awesome Eisner-award-winning comic by Mike Mignola and his seven-year-old daughter.
• I don’t normally think much of cosplay weddings, but this one seemed cuter than normal.
• You’re actually hearing foolish people talking now about repealing the 14th Amendment. Aside from being nothing more than a dim political stunt (the Republicans couldn’t even pass a flag-burning amendment when they had the presidency and both houses of Congress — so this is just some red meat to throw to the Know-Nothings), this is about a heck of a lot more than “anchor babies.” The 14th was passed because some states were passing laws keeping blacks from their rights as full citizens, and it prevents any government from arbitrarily taking away your citizenship. That’s what political dimwits are talking about when they say they want to repeal it — they’re talking about getting rid of a lot of the stuff that really keeps you free.

Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain #2

Abe and another B.P.R.D. operative are aboard a small salvage ship that has just recovered a magical helmet called Melchiorre’s Burgonet from a long sunken Soviet submarine. And they soon get an unexpected visitor — the walking corpse of a decades-drowned Russian sailor. Abe soon recognizes him as the sailor he’d found in the submarine chamber holding the helmet — but after decades deep undersea, surface gravity is making him sag and fall apart a lot. And Abe realizes that the zombie isn’t attacking anyone, despite getting shot — he’s only there to guard the helmet. Wrapped around the main story are a couple of smaller stories — a modern-day Soviet sailor who plans to man the underwater salvage suit to recover the helmet for Mother Russia, and in the past, how the Russian sailor aboard the sub was originally assigned to guard the helmet.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Just an excellent story from beginning to end. Amazing (and sometimes very, very gory) artwork by Peter Snejbjerg and great storytelling by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi. Loved the characterization on everyone, particularly the Russian soldiers, who have great motivations and personalities. And we get to see Varvara, the extremely cute/creepy little girl who runs the USSR’s paranormal research and acquisition division. Can we have a whole series focusing on Varvara? She’s awesome.

Buzzard #2

The Buzzard, a friend of the Goon’s who is immortal and subsists on eating dead people, is traveling the rough and scary country in the company of a small boy who has a case of hero worship. He asks Buzzard to teach him how to be an assassin, and Buzzard reacts by forcing the kid to shoot him in the face — it won’t hurt him, and he hopes to dissuade the kid from violence. But it’s a rough, terrifying land, so he agrees to show him how to work a gun. Eventually, they run into a cult preparing to sacrifice a girl, and after they run off the cultists, they’ve got a new traveling companion. In the backup story, “Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities and the Pit of Horrors,” Billy and his friends are attacked by a monster-witch who splits in two — the top half can fly, and the bottom half has a mouth where her stomach ought to be. She kidnaps the little boy who was traveling with them, and now Billy is going to have to travel into the witch’s lair to get him out.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The Buzzard story is full of moody, eerie fantasy/horror with some nice character work for both the Buzzard and his young friend, and the Billy the Kid story reads like the world’s most insane Western-horror shoot-em-up ever. In both cases, I approve, and I want more.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Snell says comics are overdosing on captions. And he’s got supporting evidence from a recent Justice League comic to back him up.
• This is both funny and sad. Kevin Smith, man, you gotta stop trying to turn Batman into Jay and Silent Bob.
• You can make yourself pretty angry by reading about awful stuff in history.

American Vampire #5

New vampire Pearl Jones and her non-vampire friend Henry bring the fight to the Euro-vamps who’ve taken over Hollywood and take ’em down without too much trouble. But Pearl has one last score to settle — Hattie Hargrove, her former friend who sold her out to become a movie star. But Pearl gets a rude surprise — Hattie used Pearl’s blood to turn herself into a vampire! Who wins out when American-born vampire fights American-born vampire? And in our Old West story, written, as always, by Stephen King, former Pinkerton agent James Book has been turned into a vampire by Skinner Sweet, and he’s trying to control his ever-growing bloodlust by sticking to eating sheep and prairie dogs. He finally convinces Abilena Camillo, daughter of his oldest friend, to kill him, but Abi’s fallen in love with him, and she wants something from him first.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Excellent horror storytelling all around. Loved the reveal about Hattie, loved the hints about one of Pearl’s still-unrevealed weaknesses, loved every single appearance of Skinner Sweet, loved the reluctant and still a little creepy love story between James Book and Abi. Good stories, nice endings for the first storyarcs, and I’m definitely looking forward to more.

Madame Xanadu #25

I think Matt Wagner has been watching a lot of “Mad Men” lately. This latest issue is set in ’63 and focuses on a fast-talking Madison Avenue advertising salesman, pitching new ad campaigns to big companies in New York City. But he’s starting to hear voices. Specifically, he’s starting to hear people telling him terrible things, trying to goad him into attacking and killing them. He soon meets up with Madame Xanadu, who tells him that he’s being haunted by an evil spirit that exists to make people go mad and commit murders and other atrocities. She offers a magical rattle he can use to fend off the spirit, but he balks at the idea of waving a rattle around his office. Is there any way to help him if he won’t accept mystical aid?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Laurenn McCubbin‘s art works very well for the early ’60s setting. It doesn’t have the more upbeat ending that we often see in this series, but it has a realistic feel to it — in the modern, rational world, how many people would choose to be driven mad by a demon if the alternative was for their coworkers to think they were nuts for waving a rattle around the office…?

Today’s Cool Links:

• Markets of Britain
• Ants in a scanner
• You can make yourself pretty angry by reading about awful stuff in history.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #19

Hal Jordan hates to wait for Batman’s intricate plans, so he ends up getting captured by the Cyborg Superman, who wants access to the technology of the Green Lantern power ring. When the power ring detects the cyborg’s tampering, it immediately leaves Hal to find someone else who can help — and it ends up settling on Batman’s finger, making him the newest member of the Green Lantern Corps. But Batman isn’t a fan of power rings — he’d rather rely on himself and his less-flashy weapons. He and the other Corps members fly to the planet Ranx to rescue Hal, but the Cyborg activates the Manhunters, robots that specialize in draining power rings. For Hal and Batman to stand a chance against the Cyborg Superman, Hal is going to have to learn to plan, and Batman is going to have to learn to use a power ring.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It was kinda cool seeing the old-school Cyborg Superman again, and it’s always fun to see Batman wearing a modified Green Lantern costume.

The Flash #4

Captain Boomerang is out of prison again, and he’s now able to throw black-energy boomerangs like he did when he was a Black Lantern zombie. After Boomerang tries to blow up a police helicopter, Flash uses some super-fast footwork to rescue everyone aboard. Flash also saves the Rogue-inspired future-cops from Boomerang’s assault, inspiring the Top to risk his own life by telling Flash about the future — Mirror Master is going to open a gateway into the Mirror Worlds in an effort to beat the Flash, and one of the villains inside is going to take over Flash’s wife and turn her into a supervillain. The only way to free her will be to kill the person who opened the gateway, which will lead to Flash accidentally killing the future cop analogue of Mirror Master. Where does that leave the Flash?

Verdict: Thumbs up, mostly for that great speed stunt where Flash rescues the cops in the helicopter. The rest of it, I’m not so fond of. There are some serious time travel logic problems in this story — if the future cops arrest Barry Allen prior to the point where he kills the Mirror Monarch, then no one actually kills Mirror Monarch, so there’s no reason to arrest Flash, and they’re doing more damage to the space-time continuum than they are by revealing the truth to him. And I don’t much like the way the mirror gateway part of the story is developing either. It’s either going to be needlessly cruel or a complete anticlimax…

Today’s Cool Links:

• Jack Kirby’s depictions of God.
• The article is about the latest round in the legal battles between Neil Gaiman and Todd MacFarlane, but the judge’s ruling leads me to believe we’ve just found the best nerd judge ever.
• So apparently, when you’re faced with an epidemic of people videotaping crooked/violent/racist cops, the solution isn’t to train cops not to be crooked, violent, or racist, it’s to arrest the people who expose the crooked/violent/racist cops. I’ll, as they say, retire to Bedlam.

Our FNF host, SpaceBooger, has decreed thusly: Anyone who won any of the previous 12 rounds of Friday Night Fights has to post one more battle today, to compete to be the final winner. So here’s my entry: from November 1963’s The Amazing Spider-Man #6 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko:

If you want to vote for your favorite of today’s fights, just click on the button below — the entries won’t be listed ’til around 11 tonight, so make sure you check tonight or this weekend.

Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam! #18

Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel discover a new intruder inside the Rock of Eternity — a magical Egyptian mummy who claims he was cursed by the wizard Shazam and Black Adam centuries ago and released during Black Adam’s recent rampage. How tough could a dried-up old mummy be? Captain Marvel knocks his jaw off… but he can regenerate himself easily. And he’s got a mystical device called the Horn of Horrors that can summon hordes of demons. Cap can beat up demons all day, but all Mary has on her side is her speed. And the mummy is creating even more demons back on Earth, too. Can the Marvels defeat the mummy and his monsters?

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a simple, straightforward story, with a few clever twists. And Mary gets a rare chance to show off her superhero bonafides, too. All that, plus a not-so-subtle setup for some future stories, too.

Detective Comics #867

There’s a new gang in town — the Jokerz, a bunch of private citizens, mostly law-abiding, who have gotten addicted to a low-dose variant of Joker venom. They get called together flash-mob style to run amok, trash places, and cause chaos. Their ringleader is a man dressed up as the Joker, who engineers a regular Jokerz riot into something more deadly when he shoots and wounds a cop, who then shoots one of the Jokerz. When the gang later marches on the Gotham Police Department, Commissioner Gordon orders his cops to use rubber bullets, convinced that the Jokerz aren’t a violent gang. Turns out he was wrong. Now in addition to angering his own cops, a new player is impersonating the Batman and telling Gotham’s citizens to emulate Batman’s vigilante tactics.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nice to see the Jokerz outside of the old “Batman Beyond” cartoon, and the Joker impersonator looks like he could be an interesting villain. Only quibble — Batman sure didn’t do very much in this issue… Hopefully, that’ll change later…

Green Lantern #56

Giant-headed super-psychic Hector Hammond gets extraterrestrial help in breaking out of prison, and he goes off looking for Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris. Hal, meanwhile, is in Minnesota, trying to find Larfleeze, who’s busy stealing everything he can, no matter how valueless. Hal eventually finds Larfleeze working on… a letter to Santa? Hey, when you’re the greediest thing in the cosmos, why not try to hit up the Patron Saint of Greed for some more loot? But before long, Hammond shows up and grabs away Larfleeze’s orange lantern, intent on freeing Ophidian, the orange lantern entity trapped inside. Certainly two ring slingers can fight off a floating, paralyzed telepath, right? Well, not unless Hammond eats the orange lantern…

Verdict: Thumbs up. An issue focusing on the awesomely greedy Larfleeze? Oh, yes, I’ll have more of that, please.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Lubbock’s Star Comics has a new website design. Go check it out…
• Full trailer for next year’s “Thor” movie. Doesn’t look bad. A bit longer than I was expecting, but doesn’t look bad.
• Whoa, the triceratops we’ve all been familiar with since kindergarten may have just been a baby version of another dinosaur?
• The “Friends of Lulu” organization advocating for women comics creators is in trouble. Let’s hope it can survive…

Wonder Woman #601

The first full issue of J. Michael Straczynski’s run on this title. History has been rewritten — Themyscira was destroyed decades ago, and Wonder Woman has been on the run ever since. A blind oracle grants her a vision of the final days of Paradise Island, after the gods withdrew their protection of the Amazons. A mysterious force attacked the island with superior magical firepower, and Queen Hippolyta died rather than betray where Diana was being hidden. After she leaves the oracle, Diana tracks the men who’ve been pursuing her, but before she can attack them or their shadowy leader, she learns that some of the surviving Amazons are about to be attacked and destroyed. Can she make it halfway around the world in time to save them?

Verdict: I’ll give it a thumbs up. I was not expecting much from this, because in the past few years, J. Michael Straczynski hasn’t done much to justify the very high opinion that people have of him. His work on “The Brave and the Bold” has mostly spotlighted a lot of stories where JMS mangles characters’ personalities, and his just-begun run on “Action Comics,” where Superman sets out to walk across the country, has been greeted with howls of derision. In contrast, this one is… not bad. It’s not the best comic of the week, but it isn’t bad at all.

So why is this one better than his other DC books? My theory is that JMS does his best writing on his own characters — “Babylon 5,” “Rising Stars,” you name it — but when it comes to characters that he didn’t create himself, whose personalities were crafted and established by other writers, he doesn’t do as well, because he gives them the personalities he wants them to have, rather than the personalities that readers have come to expect. And this Wonder Woman, with her completely altered origin and history, with none of her previous supporting cast, is a completely different character than any previous Wonder Woman. Will he be able to write a decent Wonder Woman when the reality-altering storyline is over? Or is JMS hoping we’ll all forget what Wondy was like before he came along? Only time will tell.

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4

Welcome to the Wild West, where murderous thugs execute homesteader families and no one defends them… except for a time-traveling bat-obsessed masked man wearing a black cowboy hat and duster. Vandal Savage, the immortal caveman, has survived to the 1800s and has hired Jonah Hex, the West’s foremost hired gun, to protect him while the diabolical Dr. Thomas Wayne tries to open a mysterious box with a bat emblazoned on the cover. Can Bruce Wayne save the innocent, punish the guilty, preserve the future of the Wayne family, and avoid getting gutshot by Jonah Hex? Hmm, well, maybe not all of that…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nice Western fun with a little Batman flavor to go with it. I completely approve.

Supergirl #54

We start out with a great moment — with disaster all around and a little kid in grave danger, Jimmy Olsen shows up to save the day. But he runs into trouble soon afterwards after he gets abducted by a Bizarro Supergirl. And where’s the regular Supergirl? Angsting it up at home because she doesn’t want to be a superhero any more after the destruction of New Krypton. When Lana Lang discovers what’s tearing up Metropolis, she calls Kara and convinces her to go take care of the Bizarro. But is Supergirl prepared for the new Bizarro superpower?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Great stuff with Jimmy Olsen at the beginning, and decent superheroics, elsewhere. The Bizarro Supergirl is very nicely creepy, and I’m generally happier with the art style than I’ve been with a lot of previous incarnations of the main character. There are also some nice plot complications going on in the background that will be a lot of fun eventually.