zc

Comics/Manga

Comic Book Review: Constantine 2
Dead In the Streets

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

0004212013Zombos Says: Good

The foldout cover is not the only good thing about the continuing saga of John Constantine in issue 2 of Constantine; the Spectre pops in to pass judgement on all those nasty happenstances that follow Constantine around, like the escalating body count of his too-close associates who tag along with him. Briefly.

It’s a close shave, sure, but Constantine gets into more of a lather with bad people itching to piece together Corydon’s compass. More sinister mayhem ensues, but the issue’s 20 pages come a wee short of a pint, so you’ll easily wet your whistle, but keep thirsting for more story. Still, the art is consistently appealing and Constantine’s consistently unyielding in his steadfast refusal to ignore the sh*t rolling downhill along with him. Man’s got nerve: must be the trenchcoat. How can you not act self-assured and hard as nails when dressed in a trenchcoat?

Or carrying it along to Myanmar, anyway, since it’s too hot to wear it. Of course he manages to get knocked unconscious. Good timing, though, since he was about to light up another cancer stick. He also must fend off a certain blind sorcerer who doesn’t want to hear his jokes, and then deal with the cold, accusatory glare of the Spectre, ready to smack Constantine’s soul down hard.

The story moves fast, a tad too fast, and although the principal players are moving into their squares for the middle game to begin, more pages would have made this issue better than just good. What can I say, I’m an old comic book fan. I think 20 pages an issue is too little to tell a great story; but I’ll settle for a good one anytime.

Funny thing is I’m hooked on Constantine since his rebirth. I still think he needs more British in him, and his trenchcoat needs to look more rumpled. But Fawkes and Lemire are hitting the right tempo, and Guedes panels are an eyeful. So far this New 52 incarnation of John Constantine is keeping his Hellblazer ghost around for old time’s sake, and that’s a good thing.

Comic Book Review: Constantine 2
Dead In the Streets Read More »

Graphic Book Review: I, Vampire Vol. 2
Rise of the Vampires

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

I vampire comic bookZombos Says: Good

I'm not a big fan of artists who draw people with the same facial features, slightly altered, for every non-masked character, and who fill panels with heavy dark lines and even darker spaces. Remember the big-head makeup artist on Face-Off? He bored the judges because his makeups kept reverting to big-headed sculpts, so they looked the same. I was bored with Admira Wijaya and Daniel Sampere's art in the same way: too dark, obscuring detail without lending depth to the scene, and everybody looks like a cousin to everyone else. Except for Batman and Batgirl; they have masks.

What they also have is the same tired fists-and- wisecracks response in the face of supernatural catastrophe. Even John Constantine seemed bored by it all. Peter Milligan's dialog and story flow was like every DC Comic issue where "real" superheroes hook up with the occult fringe: predictable encounters filled with quips from caped crusaders who are out of their element, and the eventual reliance on some astral zones-worth of cosmic assistance, given with a brief show of reluctance, leading to ambiguous results (you know, the cop-out ending).

Did I mention I'm pretty bored by all this nonsense by now? At this point I'm thinking What's all this "next comic to sink your teeth into" BS from IGN quoted on the cover? When I turned to Fialkov's and Andrea Sorrentino's issues contained in this second volume, I got it. My recommendation is to breeze through the  Justice League Dard issues, 7 and 8, and focus on the real deal, I, Vampire issues 7 through 12.

I reviewed the first issue of I, Vampire favorably because of Fialkov and Sorrentino's efforts, and these later issues headed by them show more maturity in the execution of characters, the panel-world around them, and the sticky situations they antagonize. After Cain works up all those vampires into a feeding, bleeding frenzy, shifting gears on them by moving them from Gotham City to Utah to go cold-turkey does provide enough tension to spill over into bedlam soon enough. The Van Helsings show up for a fight and they've got a nifty new tactic: resurrection. Andrew Bennett's shell-shocked sidekicks get in on the action, with the usual "more than they bargained for" portion of hurt. And even Mary, Queen of Blood, faces a new challenge.

This New 52 version of the House of Mystery's I…Vampire shifts the storyline to vampires who can stand in the sunlight, but are weaker for it, and have the ferocity of those blood-suckers in 30 Days of Night. Andrew Bennett is also much older, though youthful in appearance (as is everyone in the New 52 Universe). This series is ending in April with I, Vampire issue 19, so look for volume 3 soon thereafter.

A courtesy copy was provided for this review from the publisher.

Graphic Book Review: I, Vampire Vol. 2
Rise of the Vampires Read More »

Comic Book Review: Constantine 1
The Price We Pay

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment


constantine issue one, the new 52Zombos Says: Very Good

After a few hundred issues bollocksing about in Hellblazer, DC reboots a New 52 inspired John Constantine, after retiring his demon-tired bones in a lacklustre and poorly drawn finale (Hellblazer No. 300).

Constantine No. 1 brings a more youthful Constantine into the DC Universe and Renato Guedes art, which accentuates camera-angle panels showing Constantine at his best and worst–a normal day for him in the world of magic and shadow he walks in.

But Constantine is now in New York City, with spiffy new occult digs, down the stairs in Dotty's Pet store. His double-breasted trench coat looks less rumpled (more Prince than Columbo), his hair more fashionable, and his demeanor less like a cigarette aftertaste and more like a Jack Daniel's sipped over ice with a Heineken chaser.

Ray Fawkes and Jeff Lemire have a good handle on the bitter and the sweet of it, but make no mistake, this Constantine is more movie-ready, less foul-mouthed, and, so far, less British. You get the impression he went through the New 52 cleaners instead of his trench coat.

What remains the same is how he handles dire situations by relying on friends and close associates. Readers familiar with the death toll around Constantine know what getting close to him means to any long term relationships. That's where his morality comes into question, and it's a question that propels his old, and now, new series of trials and tribulations with black sorcery, Heaven, and Hell, and all those nasty, black squiggy places in-between points North and South.

constantine issue one, the new 52

At 20 pages, the setup brings into play an evil cult (aren't they all?) called The Cold Flame, an old acquaintance best forgot, and Constantine playing the odds, which always seem to fall in his favor–to some degree. This first installment of The Spark and the Flame is tight, neat, and delivered with as much assurance as even John Constantine can deliver.

And he still smokes. Let's hope New York City's Mayor Bloomberg doesn't notice, otherwise Constantine may have to face a real foe even he can't conjure away.

A courtesy copy was provided by DC Comics for this review.

Comic Book Review: Constantine 1
The Price We Pay Read More »

Manga Review: Octopus Girl

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

Octopus_GirlAny Otaku worth his or her geeky cognomen knows about Toru Yamazaki's horror manga, Octopus Girl, the cute little girl who's head is bigger than her eight dainty tentacles. Know a horror fan who's a budding Otaku? Then this manga would make a perfect gift to give for any holiday occasion.

Taunted and abused by her classmates, and after having an octopus stuffed into her mouth–with her being allergic to octopi, and probably shell fish, too–Takako wakes up one morning to find she's turned into a little cephalopod. Of course, at first she's horrified and wreaks bloody vengeance on her tormentors, but after a swim in the ocean, she calms down, just a bit, to pursue her new life in a series of wild vignettes that will make you wonder how much drinking Yamazaki does before noon and after midnight. 

Be that as it may, the explicit artwork (for gory illustration of entrails and dislocated eyeballs mostly) is a delightful journey of crass craziness with copious bodily fluids vomited as Octopus Girl alternates between playful and sadistic and homicidal. Pairing up with another unfortunate girl, Sakai, who had turned into an eel, and who, by the way, wants one or maybe two of Tako's  tentacles to nibble on–hey, they grow back, right?–granny vampires, unrequited love with face-eating now and then, wicked sea witches, and other nasties keep these two bottom feeders quite happy, or insane depending on the time of day.

At one point Yamazaki has to put his big foot down and kick some sense into Tako, which he actually does in the comic. Yamazaki's quirky wit abuses the cultural and personal as Tako takes on contestants in Idol and teenage romance and monsters. What's sublimely offending to any sensitive soul is the lack of remorse, regret, or any moral compass whatsoever within Tako's world. Lovecraftian to the tee? Perhaps; most of horror manga is. It doesn't get any weirder than this (well, maybe it does, but I figured I'd end on a positive note because you can't go wrong with Octopus Girl anyway.

But be warned: Yamazaki embraces the brutal and the heartless in his Grand Guignol artwork. Laughing one day and dying horribly the next sums it up quite tidily I'd say.

Manga Review: Octopus Girl Read More »

Comic Book Review: Ghosts One Shot

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

GHOSTS_Cv1

Zombos Says: Good

Unfortunately, I can only give you two reasons to pick up Vertigo's one shot, Ghosts: the unfinished story by Joe Kubert, The Boy and the Old Man, and the Geoff Johns and Jeff Lemire story, Ghost-For-Hire. Reasons for not picking up this anthology would include the remaining stories, although Run Ragged would have been a treat if the whole story was here and not just the first part.

Comic anthologies usually are a mixed bag of trick or treat. Either you get a unified series of stories around a theme, or you get a bunch of stories searching for one; Ghosts lies somewhere in the middle. The stories that fall flat and fail to "terrorize" (or fit uncomfortably) within these nine tales  are: Wallflower (beautiful artwork, worn-out storyline);  A Bowl of Red (half-baked horror concering a bowl of hellfire hot Chili); The Night After I Took the Data Entry Job I Was Visited by My Own Ghost (artwork matches story mood perfectly, but the "message" story itself has been done to death ); Bride (will someone, anyone tell me what the hell this story's about?); and Treasure Lost, which is lost in this anthology themed around ghosts, although I get the tenuous allusion.

The poignant The Dark Lady fits in with the anthology's theme well, but it is incomplete, a mere slice of a larger storyline. The same problem occurs with Run Ragged, part one of a Dead Boy Detectives tale. Part two will appear in the next anthology. Running a continued story in separate anthologies seems awfully gauche to me. 

As for the two reasons to stick around, Kubert's The Boy and the Old Man is more a curiousity piece, and one that doesn't fit well within the ghosts theme. But for fans (like myself) who appreciate seeing his last work, this is worth a look, not so much for the story as for the art. Here you can see Kubert's first draw-through, laying out the action and positioning, which he would later embellish. Ghost-for-Hire is a predictably scripted plot, but the characters keep it humorous while adding depth. This would make for a solid series on its own.

Reading  various comic anthologies these days, you may get the haunting sense they were loosely put together with stories that had no clear publishing intentions. Ghosts suffers from this and I expect more sweetness-kick from my Halloween treats than this saccharin anthology provides.

Here's a key take-away: name talent isn't enough to make an anthology; you need to do something consistently worthwhile with it.

A courtesy reviewer copy of Ghosts was provided to me for this review.

Comic Book Review: Ghosts One Shot Read More »

Graphic Book Review: Driver for the Dead

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

Driver-for-the-dead-021
Zombos Says: Very Good

Driving a muscle car hearse called Black Betty, always dressed appropriately for a funeral, and keeping the glove compartment well stocked with potent charms to ward off evil, Alabaster Graves deals with death's life-problems in Driver for the Dead.

A recurring dream may hint at his true nature (dead people keep reaching out to him in expectation) but his day job keeps the pace moving in this graphic novel by writer John Heffernan, and penciller and inker Leonardo Manco. Paints are applied by Kinsun Loh and Jerry Choo. I'm not a fan of the painted comic format, but here the panels are lively and the scenes are toned well for the grave situations Alabaster always seems to find himself in. Except for an occasional panel where the characters appear "photographically posed," Manco executes the storyline with a wide-screen, cinematic approach that runs the action in 6 or so slabs each page. The most exciting and vivid scenes come when people lose body parts and the bayou's foggy swamp churns up its decomposing and loup garou residents for one hectic night.

In Shreveport, Lousiana, Mose Freeman, extractor of nasty supernatural problems, makes his final house-call. His dying words are to have Alabaster Graves pick up his body before something else does. Hitching along for the ride is Freeman's granddaughter, who, like Alabaster, doesn't realize her true nature, either. The get-to-know-you chit-chat is supplanted by encounters with that something else, driving hard with a few biker deadbeats looking the worse for death. Freeman's body has potential since its sopped up a lot of magical energy over the years, and one long undead necromancer wants it for his own purpose. How the stiff finds out about Freeman's body (a vision) is a bit B-movie script convenient, but since it leads to butting heads with Alabaster, I'm okay with it.

Alabaster takes a licking and keeps on kicking vampire, werewolf, and witch's butt with heavy firepower and lucky charms that go beyond a little graveyard dirt and High John the Conqueror's root. The backstories for him and the necromancer, well placed in the action so they don't break it up and slow it down, mix Styx and Marie Laveauprovenance, giving Heffernan's hoodoo framework a rich pedigree to work from.

Graphic Book Review: Driver for the Dead Read More »

Graphic Book Review: Young Lovecraft
and His Odd Friends

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

Young lovecraft

Zombos Says: Good

What's a cultured and persnickety boy to do? Summon the gods to deal with all that growing-up-nerdy angst? and bullies bullying? and annoying aunts not in tune with those outre wavelengths his brain puts out? Why, yes!

Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres let young Howard Lovecraft do just that. Even if he does bother Santa Claus every Christmas with requests for a copy of the Necronomicon in his stocking, and although he has little experience with his heady conjurations so they don't always work the way he'd like, and, well yes, those aunts are trying at times, but all in all, little Lovecraft gets by with a little help from his odd friends (and assorted demi-gods); and sometimes, even in spite of their help.

With Young Lovecraft's childhood encounters captured in 3-panel comic strips, the humorous zing has to be measured precisely in three beats, and for the most part, it is, aided by the minimalist, manga-styled and off-kilter artwork. With charmining aunties taking him to origami fairs and picking up evil guitar-playing hitchhikers, and with him over-dressing for Halloween as Harun Al-Rachid, the Caliph of Baghdad, the opportunities for his awkward weirdness complicating things geometrically propagates.

Add to this his penchant for rewriting the classics with the same dreadful theme, picking up dog-like ghouls in cemeteries, and sepulchre-partying with people like Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud (though those panels don't exactly raise the dead in their zest), Young Lovecraft does manage to keep things infectiously cheeky for fans of the mythic mythos meister.

Young Lovecraft
While this first volume is not quite as squirrely written and wittily acerbic as Roman Dirges's Lenore, the same lightly dark tone and zany mischief can be found in Oliver's characters and situations, and in Torres's wild-eyed, noseless, facial expressions. Of course, being translated from the original Spanish, the words may lose some of their nuances in the translation.

But if you can imagine Charlie Brown partying among the tombstones and summoning ancient gods to handle life's daily challenges facing a not-your-average kid, with his usual bungling innocence not helping, than you will enjoy Young Lovecraft as much as I did.

Graphic Book Review: Young Lovecraft
and His Odd Friends Read More »

Comics Book Review: Ragemoor 1

/ Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

20120326124257_001Zombos Says: Very Good

While I now only read graphic novels and trade paperback compilations of comic books–usually, anyway –this first issue of Ragemoor drew my attention because of Richard Corben's involvement.

Any Eerie, Creepy, and Heavy Metal magazine reader knows the name well. That this issue is also printed in brooding black and white only heightened it's appeal for me. And with writer Jan Strnad (who also wrote for Warren Publishing), the mood is assuredly sinister, the tone Gothically charged, and the foreboding future hinting at ancient monstrosities biding their arcane time until the moment's ripe for terror.

This first issue introduces the blood-drenched history of the rambling edifice as Herbert futilely warns his Uncle and companion to not spend the night at Castle Ragemoor, whose walls are alive with malevolent purpose and mystery. Herbert blames his brother's madness–he wanders the halls naked, peeing on the walls–on the castle's evil influence. His uncle thinks it all poppycock, mostly because he's looking to inherit the place after having Herbert committed.

After being shown to their rooms by Herbert's lone servant, Bodrick, his uncle and companion learn how dangerous the castle can be as parts of it come alive with a vengeance.

Corben's art is vibrant and propels the story's menace. Strnad's words explain only a little, leaving much more to be revealed, and allow Corben to show the dread. With Ragemoor's grinding movement of stones in the dead of night producing new rooms and longer hallways, what else may happen to Herbert and his future guests  is uncertain, but certainly will be deliciously deadly.

Comics Book Review: Ragemoor 1 Read More »

Graphic Book Review: The Black Forest

/ Comics/Manga / 2 Comments

Tbfmonsters

Zombos Says: Very Good

Hankering for an old-styled, light-hearted, comic book classic monster fest? Livingston, Tinnell, and Vokes may have one for you in The Black Forest graphic novel.

The story takes place in 1916 during the Great War, and the German army, through an especially evil scientist, is trying to find a way to revive dead soldiers (yes, zombies!). Holed up in the Black Forest in Graf Orlock’s castle no less, the especially evil mad scientist feverishly toils away using Dr. Frankenstein’s crib notes of life and death for his experiments, and the Monster to aid him.

Enter our valiant but foolhardy American hero, Jack (not sure why every valiant but foolhardy American hero is always named Jack or has a monosyllabic name), and Archibald Caldwell, magician and occultist, who, like real-life magician Jasper Maskelyne during World War Two, uses his special skills to assist British Intelligence in the war effort.

The black and white panels are reminiscent of Harvey Kurtzman's comical characters combined with a dash of Gene Colon's fluid and dynamic panels. This is another graphic novel that cries out for a magazine-sized format to fully appreciate the artwork. It needs a few more pages, too, especially the monster battle royale toward the end between the Frankenstein monster, the werewolves, and the vampire Graf Orlock.

There are Alan Moorish bits throughout, like Caldwell’s ability to regurgitate lock picks he has swallowed, a skill Houdini put to good use, and Caldwell’s dead wife is pickled upright under glass, in a panel very similar to the scene in The Black Cat, where Vitas Werdegast’s wife is preserved by his arch nemesis, Hjalmar Poelzig, the evil cult leader. Boy, these evil guys all think alike, don't they?

The adventure is written in a pulp-style and is fast and furious. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes a ripping good yarn with classic monsters, evil scientists, and heroines in need of rescue.

Graphic Book Review: The Black Forest Read More »