Archive for Power Girl

Bulletin Bored

I gotta say — last week was one of the best single weeks for comics I’ve enjoyed in quite a while. I felt like every comic I picked up was grand fun and worth reading and re-reading.

This week was the exact opposite. Lots of stuff seemed competently written — but nearly all of it just simply bored me. There were some bright spots here and there — I’ll review them next week — but on the whole, just depressingly boring stuff.

So let’s get after it.

Power Girl #26

Dark Confession: Even though I still hate Judd Winick, I finally went and read the trade paperback of the “Power Girl” comics he worked on. Hey, I was depressed that there’d be no Power Girl in the DC Reboot, so I decided I’d give it a shot. And it was pretty good, so I figured I’d give the last couple issues a shot.

In this issue, PeeGee attends the first ever Power Girl fan convention, filled with tons of girls cosplaying as her. She looks on it as an opportunity to encourage young women to have positive self-images, to confront low-level evil where they can, and to uphold general feminist principles. The whole convention gets highjacked into outer space by a space alien disguised as a convention-goer — her planet is under siege by invaders, and she wants to duplicate Power Girl’s powers for herself. Of course, there’s a chance that the other fans can help Power Girl stop the villain.

Verdict: Thumbs down. It was entirely competent work, but — dangit, it was just boring.

Rocketeer Adventures #3

More pulp-action tales starring the Rocketeer and his girlfriend Betty, with stories by Ryan Sook, Jonathan Ross, and Tommy Lee Edwards, pinups by Stephanie Buscema and Joe Chiodo, and a prose story by Joe R. Lansdale, illustrated by Bruce Timm.

Verdict: Some outstanding art here, but ultimately thumbs down. It was boring.

Tiny Titans #42

Bizarro Supergirl makes her first appearance. She gets romanced by Match, while Beast Boy dodges rocks thrown by Terra all issue. We also get a brief glimpse of the Bizarro Tiny Titans.

Verdict: Thumbs down. What, even my beloved Tiny Titans? Yes, thumbs down. It was boring.

Criminal Macabre/The Goon: When Freaks Collide

Well, “Criminal Macabre” is about a guy named Cal McDonald who hangs out with a ghoul named Mo’Lock, and they hunt monsters. Both of them get kidnapped to some kind of otherworld at the same time as the Goon and Franky, famed for their drinking and face-punching, get kidnapped to the same place. While the Goon and Cal beat up on each other, Franky and Mo’Lock go exploring. Will beating up hordes of monsters give all our heroes their chance to go home?

Verdict: Thumbs down. There was a nice “Little Rascals” gag and a nice final-page reveal — but on the whole, it was boring.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #3

Well, there’s a lot of historical stuff about Gotham, and some guy trying to blow up the city because his ancestors got a rough deal, and the various members of the Bat-family squabbling and working together, and I’m not sure there’s much else I can say about it.

Verdict: Thumbs down. I mean, it’s all perfectly well done, and just about any other time, I’d probably be enjoying this. But I just plain thought it was boring.

Avengers Academy #16

I missed an issue of this one somewhere down the line. The Academy members have been dragged into the Fear Itself crossover. The Absorbing Man and Titania have acquired magical hammers that give them godlike powers and mostly over-write their personalities with the minds of ancient gods. But the Absorbing Man has somehow shaken that off, and he’s giving some serious whupass to Hank Pym. Elsewhere, Veil is trying to save a little girl’s mother, but how will she react when victory is stolen from her at the last moment?

Verdict: Thumbs down. It was boring.

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The Hero Sandwich List of Favorite Comics for 2010

I don’t think I’ve ever tried to do a year-end retrospective list — it’s always too difficult for me to pick out a list of things I enjoyed the most out of 12 whole months. But what the heck, I’m gonna try it today.

This list is strictly listed in alphabetical order. I can’t claim it’s a list of the best comics — I haven’t read all the comics, after all — but it’s the list of the 15 comics that I enjoyed the most.

American Vampire

Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque, and Stephen King came together to re-invent the vampire for the rough-and-tumble American West. Outstanding characters, close attention to setting, and rip-snorting horror make this a must-read for anyone who loves non-sparkly bloodsuckers.

Batgirl

The adventures of Stephanie Brown as the newest Batgirl are full of great humor, great action, great dialogue, and great characterizations. This is one of the best superhero comics around.

Batman and Robin

Grant Morrison’s triumphant run of Batman comics had its most epic stretch in these stories of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne, as well as Alfred, Dr. Hurt, and the Joker. The scale of Morrison’s storytelling here was breathtaking.

Blackest Night

Possibly the most successful crossover storyarc in years, this grabbed readers’ imaginations and didn’t let go for months. Even better than its commercial successes were the overall excellence of the plotline. At its height, there was nothing as good as this story about zombies, power rings, and emotions.

Crossed

I’m not a fan of the new series, but Garth Ennis’ original Crossed miniseries was the most harrowing, brutal, relentless, depressing, and terrifying horror comic to hit the stands in a long, long time.

Daytripper

This was, without a single doubt, the best comic series of the entire year. Nothing else came close. Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon deserve to win so many awards for this one. If you missed this series in the original run, you should definitely keep your eyes open in the next few months for the trade paperback.

Detective Comics starring Batwoman

Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III didn’t create the character, but they crafted her best stories. While Rucka brilliantly fleshed out her backstory, personality, and supporting cast, Williams took the stories and created some of the year’s most beautiful artwork and design.

Hellboy in Mexico

This story of, well, Hellboy in Mexico was my favorite, but I also loved all of the other collaborations between Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and fantasy artist Richard Corben. These two meshed together creatively in ways that very few creators are able to do, and all of us readers were the beneficiaries.

Joe the Barbarian

Grant Morrison’s fantasy story is both epic and mundane in scale, which is really quite a trick — Joe is in diabetic shock, and he’s hallucinating that his home and toys have turned into a fantasy kingdom. But what if he’s not really hallucinating?

Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit

The second chapter of Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Donald Westlake’s crime fiction is a beautiful tribute to Cooke’s retro-cool art sensibilities and the pure fun of good pulp crime novels.

Power Girl

Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Amanda Conner created the best version of Power Girl ever for a year’s worth of funny, smart, sexy, exciting superhero stories. These creators loved this character, and you can tell that in every story they published about her. I still hope they’ll be able to come back to this title eventually.

Secret Six

Far and away DC’s best team book, Gail Simone has hooked us a bunch of people who are extremely likeable and also completely crazy and prone to trying to kill each other from moment to moment. This shouldn’t work as well as it does, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s colossal fun to read every single month.

Strange Science Fantasy

Scott Morse’s retro-pulp series packed a heck of a lot of audacious fun into six short issues. This was a treat visually, emotionally, intellectually — even on a tactile level, what with the heavy, rough paper it was printed on.

Thor and the Warriors Four

The Power Pack go to Asgard. I didn’t really expect much of it, to be honest, but readers were treated to godlike quantities of humor, excitement, whimsey, and awesomeness, thanks to writer Alex Zalben and artists Gurihiru, and to Colleen Coover’s excellent backup stories.

Tiny Titans

Probably the best all-ages comic out there right now. These comics are smart and funny and cute and just plain fun to read.

Aaaaand that’s what I got. There were plenty of other comics that just barely missed the cut, but these were nevertheless the ones that gave me the most joy when I was reading them.

So farewell, 2010. And hello, rapidly onrushing 2011. Hope you’re a better year for all of us, and I hope we can all look forward to plenty more great comics to come.

Now y’all be safe and have a good time tonight, but call a cab if you need it — I want to make sure all of y’all are here to read me in 2011.

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Friday Night Non-Fights: Big Bang!

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.

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Power and Wonder

Power Girl #12

Power Girl is visiting Terra’s underground home in Strata. They visit the local spa, which has the side effect of completely dropping all emotional barriers — something Kara isn’t sure she’s all that wild about, since she’s used to keeping her emotions more under control. After meeting Terra’s family and eating dinner with them, she heads back home. Back on the surface, Satanna does the nasty with Dr. Sivanna (Um, yuck?) in an attempt to get him to help her kill Power Girl, but Sivanna don’t care — he got his jollies, and he has her thrown out. Power Girl gets back to her apartment, gives her horrible, horrible cat a proper name, settles her debt with Fisher, beats up an offended alien, throws ’70s-style sleazeball Vartox off the planet, and gets some good news about her company.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Just tons of awesomeness going on here. This is pretty much Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Amanda Conner saying farewell to all these characters, so the good guys get good endings, and the bad guys get bad ones. We get cheesecake, we get action, we get humor — all of this title’s strongest points. We get lots of Amanda Conner’s brilliantly expressive artwork and all those really cool details that you might miss on first glance — the stuff Kara almost eats in Strata, the laser pointer she uses to play with her cat — and all those wonderful facial expressions and body language. Only thing I had my doubts about was the sequence with that Strata spa — looked like they’re trying to set up some future lesbian subplot for the benefit of Judd Winick.

Officially, this title is going to continue, but I’m considering this the last issue. Palmiotti, Gray, and Conner are moving on to other projects, but colossally hacky writer Judd Winick is taking over the comic with the next issue. It’s depressing that DC considers him someone they want futzing around with their intellectual properties. Aside from his deficiencies as a writer, the biggest problem with Winick may be his shallow grasp of drama — the only items in his bag o’ tricks are killing characters, throwing in new subplots about homosexuality, and afflicting them with HIV. Ain’t nothing wrong with those in moderation, but Winick’s got no grasp of moderation — just ham-handed, clumsy overkill on his obsessions.

The “Power Girl” comic is probably going to go through a severe personality change and a steep drop in quality — and I’m not going to be there to watch the disaster. Let’s let this last issue be the character’s coda — at least until Palmiotti, Gray, and Conner make it back.

Wonder Woman #44

Astarte, the sister of Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, is now the captain of an alien ship that survives by raiding planets, killing their entire populations, and mulching them down into a biological gruel for everyone to eat. And she’s raised Theana, her daughter — Wonder Woman’s cousin — to be a cruel and merciless killing machine. Back on Earth, Achilles, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy, and everyone else try to fight off the invaders, but it may all be for nothing if Wondy can’t figure out a way to beat her cousin and defang her aunt’s treachery.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Excellent action and characterization, lots of subplots getting wrapped up, and lots of old favorite characters making one more appearance. Nicola Scott’s artwork is, as always, fantastic. Writer Gail Simone has occasionally stumbled on this comic, but she knocks this one completely out of the park. And next issue is going to be her last one here, which is a big disappointment. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the upcoming writer’s abilities, but for now, it’s great to see Simone working near the top of her game.

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Raw Power

Power Girl #11

It’s the next-to-the-last issue of this great series (Oh, sure, the series name will continue, but without Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, or Amanda Conner — and with one of the worst comics writers in history taking over the title), and it just keeps getting better and better.

The Ultra-Humanite has transplanted his brain into Terra’s body. Big deal, right? Power Girl is a lot stronger than Terra is. But wait, no, Terra could crack New York City apart with ease, and when it comes to beating PeeGee up with boulders or lava, Ultra’s up for that, too. Can Power Girl find Terra’s brain? Can she find someone to put the brains back where they belong?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Pages and pages and pages of knock-down-drag-out fightin’, all of it awesome, mixed in with actual smart dialogue and strategy and characterization. Ultra-Humanite/Terra makes for a great global-level threat, and Power Girl breaks out some serious brutality and badassery. And as always, brilliant and beautiful artwork by Amanda Conner. Why she’s not on the A-list of every comics company on the planet, I have no idea…

Tiny Titans #27

Our entire focus of this issue is on Raven, her dad Trigon, and Kid Devil. Raven gets stuck babysitting Kid Devil and brings him home with her to hang out at her house for a bit. And her dad, a red-skinned, horned demon, is completely won over by the pint-sized, red-skinned, horned demon. Trigon keeps assuming Kid Devil is a harmless little tyke, which leads to several amusing incidents of minor injuries and property damage.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Just three main characters this time, and it’s all funny, and it’s all cute. I didn’t expect it to work so well, but it turned out just fine.

Marvel Adventures: Super Heroes #1

Not sure why they’ve started re-numbering this series, but here we are anyway. The Avengers have gone to talk to everyone from the UN to the FBI to S.H.I.E.L.D. to the White House, making their case for everyone to let them serve as an independent, unaffiliated team. Meanwhile, an unknown party has begun creatively vandalizing famous statues around the world — adding extra arms to Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue and a set of giant wings for the Statue of Liberty. Who’s behind it? Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants, who are now threatening to start blowing up buildings, too. Can the team take out the insanely powerful Master of Magnetism when some of their most powerful members have to be off pleading the team’s case to the authorities?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A very nice story with a wonderfully clever ending and great character work. There are lots of great moments for characterization here — Black Widow’s strong disagreements with the team’s decisions, Sue Storm’s homesick phone call back to the Fantastic Four, the struggle between Nova and Thor for the last donut. It’s outstanding stuff, and not the sort of thing you expect to see in an all-ages comic.

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White Knight to the Rescue

Green Lantern #52

It’s the next-to-the-last chapter of the “Blackest Night” event. Sinestro, almost entirely to my surprise, is now the White Lantern, the embodiment of all life in the universe. This leads all the Black Lantern zombies to fly top-speed at Earth, hoping to kill him, pursued by all of the other Lantern Corps. Looks like they didn’t need to bother, though, ’cause while Sinestro is exulting in all his power, Nekron goes and cuts him in half — length-wise — with his scythe. Doesn’t seem to have killed him, though. And a group of Lanterns manage to blow up the zombie planet of Xanshi, drastically reducing Nekron’s power and demolishing most of the zombies. Can they all shield Earth from the wreckage? And can a reborn Sinestro still lead the forces of life to victory?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Not the best of these issues, though, but it still does a good job of getting the story points across. After all, the big moments will come with the very end of the “Blackest Night” saga. Doug Mahnke’s artwork is just entirely and unbelievably awesome — the big double-sized splash page of the giant Lantern-powered framework protecting Coast City from meteor fragments is fantastically beautiful. Definitely looking forward to seeing how this is all going to shake out.

Power Girl #10

Satanna has stuck a device on Power Girl that is about to use a gravity field to compress her into a small, dead ball. Luckily, Terra has shown up, knocks Satanna around a bit, and uses a particularly nasty threat to get her to release PeeGee. While Satanna makes her escape, Power Girl and Terra return to Kara’s apartment, where they meet up with Fisher, the kid who’s blackmailing Power Girl with photos of her real identity. He has a bunch of serious demands — he wants her to go with him to pick up his comics this week, he wants her to take care of some bullies, and he wants her to help him get a date with a girl from school. Okay, that coulda been a lot worse. Power Girl and Terra head off to Kara’s company for a few hours, then go off to see Fisher’s friends at the comic shop. After that, there’s another attack from some of Satanna’s monsters, and Terra starts acting quite a bit more bloodthirsty than normal. What’s going on?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Holy cow, I just love this comic to pieces, and there are only a couple of issues left before Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Amanda Conner leave it. We get all the great stuff we’ve come to expect from this book — lots of funny stuff, outstanding artwork, great action, awesome dialogue, the best facial expressions and body language and background details in the comic world. If you’re not reading this, I’m gonna chase you down and beat you with an aardvark, I swear.

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Fun, Fun, Fun

Everyone pay attention — these were the two comics that gave me the most joy last week.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #14

After a short intro where Batman and Plastic Man defeat the Scarecrow with the power of terror and good acting, we get to our main story — the Huntress calls Batman to help her corral a lunatic crook named Mr. Camera. His gimmick: he has a camera on his head. Batman thinks Huntress wants him around because it’s Valentine’s Day and she’s got the hots for him. She eventually heads home while he tracks Mr. Camera to his hideout — and discovers that Huntress is in more danger than he suspected!

Verdict: Thumbs up. Very nice story, but I must admit, it was the little details in here that really made it fun for me, particularly the revelation that Bruce Wayne participated in theater in high school and college, and the amusingly long list of all the things his “theme villains” have been obsessed with. I really wish we could see a story featuring the wheatcakey villainy of the Griddler…

Power Girl #9

After chasing down the person she thinks is trying to blackmail her (not only is it apparently not him, but she also ends up dropping her bathtowel in front of one of her neighbors), Power Girl heads to work and the bank. Unfortunately, Satanna, the Ultra-Humanite’s ex-girlfriend, is attacking PeeGee’s bank with her highly-destructive genetically-engineered animal army. The animals aren’t too much trouble, but Satanna shows up with a couple of specialized weapons — an oversized sonic hammer that’s actually able to knock the stuffing out of Karen, and a nasty chunk of nanotech that can do a heck of a lot worse…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Things get pretty serious towards the end, but still, this is the best mainstream-superhero humor comic that DC is producing. And again, the fun is in the little details, whether that includes the usual shenanigans of Power Girl’s horrible, horrible cat, Dr. Mid-Nite’s pet owl watching a TV show about mice, PeeGee throwing a subway pervert off the train, or all the outstanding facial expressions and body language. As always, the writing by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti is great, and Amanda Conner’s artwork is amazingly fun and appealing and charismatic.

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Putting the Cheese in Cheesecake

Power Girl #8

PeeGee and Vartox, sleazy superpowered ’70s swingah from another world, are fighting a seemingly hopeless battle against an indestructible and self-replicating monster called the Ix Negaspike — well, the operative phrase is “seemingly hopeless” ’cause they do, in fact, defeat it. Power Girl then lets herself be persuaded to let Vartox take her on a date. Plentiful shenanigans follow, including Vartox dressing very inappropriately, Power Girl wearing the gown from Adam Hughes’ celebrated “Women of the DC Universe” poster, Vartox burning dinner, and PeeGee picking up takeout pizza from a NYC pizzeria. And we get the real story of how Vartox hopes that Power Girl can help him repopulate his home planet. Will she actually agree to this mad scheme? (Hint: She will!)

Verdict: Thumbs up. Good gravy, this was wildly, wildly funny. This is probably the funniest mainstream comic DC is producing right now, other than some of their all-ages comics. I do hope you’re picking this one up, ’cause it’s very good.

Wonder Woman #40

After beating up a giant Aztec winged serpent, Wonder Woman starts noticing a lot of strange stuff going on. The winged serpent admits he doesn’t know why he attacked the city or ate a subway car — he normally hates the taste of people and can’t imagine why he’d want to eat anyone. There are a bunch of ominous little schoolboys hanging around who manage to turn the people Wondy just rescued from total fans to utterly disillusioned non-fans. There’s a rash of race- and religion-based hate crimes. And Power Girl shows up with a mad-on to beat Wonder Woman to death.

Verdict: Ehh, not all that awesome. I dug the winged serpent, I dug the backstory for the new modernized version of Etta Candy, but the rest of it was less than fully awesome. Hopefully it’ll get better as the story advances.

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The Princess and the Frogs

PowerGirl7

Power Girl #7

We start out on the planet Valeron, where Vartox, a Superman-like hero who made his original debut in the 1970s (and who dresses like Sean Connery in the utterly mad sci-fi flick “Zardoz“) fights off a bunch of alien yeti space pirates. But the battle was just a distraction for the pirates’ real attack — the detonation of a contraceptive bomb! A contraceptive bomb?! Yep, and everyone on Valeron except for Vartox has been sterilized — their race is doomed to die out… unless Vartox can find himself a suitable mate. And of course, he chooses a certain busty, superpowered blonde living on Earth.

And speaking of Power Girl, she and Doctor Mid-Nite are chasing a supervillain named the Blue Snowman, who is some crazy person in a powered armor suit who shoots ice from her cyber-hat and cyber-pipe. Unsurprisingly, the Blue Snowman is no great challenge. That’s when Vartox shows up in a giant floating robot head (Just like “Zardoz”! You think they’re going with a theme here?) and shoots Kara with something called “Seduction Musk,” which, luckily, doesn’t work on her. And then Vartox unveils a big fang-faced monster called an Ix Negaspike, which he intends to defeat to win Kara’s love. This doesn’t work out at all — it’s entirely indestructible and ravenously hungry. Can PeeGee beat the Ix Negaspike and fend off Vartox’s unwanted advances?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is awesomely funny from beginning to end, with lots of silly touches, like the ridiculously 1960s-70s culture of Vartox’s homeworld (His chancellor is named Groovicus Mellow and the leader of the military is named General Peacemonger) and the ineptness of Blue Snowman. The dialogue between Power Girl and Doctor Mid-Nite is also fun. And as good as Gray and Palmiotti’s writing is, Amanda Conner’s artwork really sells this — great, funny, beautiful art here, everything from facial expressions and body language down to the details of the buildings Vartox gets punched through.

BPRDFrogs4

B.P.R.D.: War on Frogs #4

It’s the conclusion of this extended miniseries (just four issues, but spread out over many, many months) as disembodied medium Johann Kraus leads a team of agents from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense against a cult of the amphibious froggy monsters called the Frogs. While they manage to wipe them out easily, Johann discovers that he is able to see the spirits of the recently deceased Frogs, and they want his help in finding out where their afterlife is. He doesn’t think he can help them — who knows what on earth Heaven is like to murderous unnatural frog monsters? — but once they start making other BPRD members deathly sick, he agrees to try to help them. Can Johann lead them to their monster paradise successfully? And even if he can, will he be able to escape the other hungry monsters that dwell there?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This was one of my favorite issues of the BPRD series in a while — most of the stories focusing on Johann are interesting, but this one was especially fun, with the focus on trying to find the spiritual realm of things that shouldn’t have souls at all.

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First Rule of Pet Club: Do Not Talk about Pet Club!

TinyTitans21

Tiny Titans #21

It’s an all Pet Club issue! Everyone is bringing their pets to the Tiny Titans Pet Club — but what about students who don’t have pets? Well, Cyborg has some cute robots, and Starfire and her sister Blackfire send a letter to their home planet asking for their pets. Let’s meet their pets, shall we?

TT-AlienPoopu

Heh. Poopu.

Other pets include the Atom Family’s dog Spot, Terra’s pet rock, Blue Beetle’s bug collection, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, and the Bat-Cow! But with all these pets, the tree house is now too small for everyone? Can the Titans find a new Pet Club meeting place that they won’t wreck?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Fun artwork and story — and very funny material, too, with Poopu and the return of the Bat-Cow being the real standouts. This is excellent reading for kids, or for grownups who enjoy good, funny comics.

Sugarshock1

Sugarshock #1

I absolutely love this story, but the problem is it’s already available online for free. And it’s also in the first volume of the MySpace Dark Horse Presents trade paperback collection. This comic has the exact same story, with a nice cover by Fabio Moon and a few sketch pages in the back.

Verdict: I can’t bring myself to give this a thumbs down, because this story is absolutely one of my favorites — Fabio Moon’s artwork is awesome, Joss Whedon’s story and script are hilarious. If you haven’t read the story, you really, really should, and you can definitely read it in this comic book. But dangit, I was hoping for a new Sugarshock story, and I’m a bit grinched that Dark Horse didn’t get one cooked up here.

Power Girl #6

Power Girl is trying to corral a bunch of superpowered aliens — three fashionmongering partygirls and Carl, a guy who’s trying to bring them back to their home planet. Kara sticks the guy in the ferris wheel on Coney Island to keep him occupied, but loses the girls after they get picked up by a chubby guy in a limousine. And while she’s looking for the girls, Carl manages to escape, too. Without any other leads, she picks up her horrible, horrible cat from her office and takes him to her new apartment, meeting up with Terra and discovering that some stalker has been taking pictures of her and has discovered her secret identity! Not much time to worry about that — Carl tracks Kara down and reveals that the girls’ tracker chips have stopped in Atlantic City — and their chubby limousine pal is in big trouble with the mob. Can Power Girl rescue everyone in time and with a minimum of bloodshed?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A pretty lighthearted issue, so the deaths here and there seem a bit out of place, but it’s fun, nicely humorous, and packed full of excellent characterization. Kudos to Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti. And as always, Amanda Conner’s artwork is an absolute dream. Is there anyone else out there who can do such outstanding facial expressions and body language? Just check out the scenes on the subway and in the emergency room — there is so much to see and enjoy in both of those settings.

BraveandBold28

The Brave and the Bold #28

Barry Allen agrees to help test some scientific equipment and ends up getting shot back in time to the Battle of the Bulge — and he’s got a broken leg, too, so he’s not going to be able to get up enough speed to get back home. Luckily, the Blackhawk air squadron is on hand to help — unfortunately, they’re down here without their planes, so their ability to help is a bit limited, too. The Blackhawks want Flash to help them fight, but he’s unwilling to take lives. Can Flash find a way to help win the war?

Verdict: Ehh, not that bad, but not that great either. The story wasn’t that bad, but why give us the Blackhawks without their planes? Sgt. Rock and Easy Company would’ve been much better fits here than the ‘Hawks. I’m also not buying the Blackhawks’ insistence that Barry has to kill the Germans, nor the ease with which he gives up his principles.

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