Yuki is just one of too many Japanese schoolgirls who get groped on their commute to and from school by total scumbags on the trains. As if that weren’t bad enough, some weird male student is “secretly” filming her on his phone and some psycho calling themselves Spirit is murdering cats.
What does it all mean? Good question! A mystery should keep the reader in the dark but Goodbye Geist does this too well unintentionally by being poorly drawn and written. Besides Yuki, a lot of character designs are generic making it difficult to tell who’s who. Also, certain crucial panels are utterly puzzling because you can’t tell what they’re supposed to be.
It’s tricky to talk about Stray Bullets without acknowledging Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which came out the year before Stray Bullets debuted in 1995. The clever dialogue, likeable criminal characters, and violent, interlocking stories must’ve felt derivative like the million Tarantino copycats that popped up in his wake. And yet Stray Bullets is its own thing. It shares only superficial similarities to Tarantino’s masterpiece and possesses notable differences to make it stand out separately.
Innocence of Nihilism collects the first seven stories in the series. It opens in 1997 where a couple of lowlifes are looking for a spot to bury a body before things go to hell and they shoot up a diner. From that explosive beginning, we’re thrown back to 1977 where we meet Ginny, a young girl who witnesses a brutal murder in an alleyway. The stories then jump ahead to different years, 1980, 81, and 82, featuring new characters like Spanish Scott, a charismatic killer, and Orson, a high school kid whose entrance into adulthood is something of a shock.
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big… yawn!
Scott Snyder’s Wytches continues to have a surprisingly leaden story in this second issue. The series follows Sailor, a troubled young girl living in a house surrounded by wytch-infested trees. Her father writes and draws a popular children’s book while her mother is a former healthcare professional who was put in a wheelchair after a car accident.
Spoilers abound so beware!
Well, he kept his word - Scott Snyder got DC to drop the price point from the ridiculous $4.99 to the just slightly overpriced $3.99 with Batman #36 aka Endgame Part 2. It means we get the 22 page Snyder/Greg Capullo story plus the 8 page backup by James Tynion IV and Graham Nolan. 30 pages of prime Batman for 4 bucks? Not bad in this day and age!
I’m sure that following the bells and whistles of the last issue, some readers were a bit disappointed that the female Thor only got the briefest of cameos right at the end. Well, Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman make up the deficit in the second issue as the Goddess of Thunder takes centre stage!
Her identity still remains a mystery thanks to the mask but we get to know her voice now and she seems like a very down-to-earth human gal. She also seems pretty surprised to find herself dressed in Thor’s outfit and hefting Mjolnir on the moon so who knows what her backstory is. It seems though that anyone who can lift the hammer ends up talking like an Asgardian (all thou’s and thee’s) and intuitively knows all of Thor’s tricks!
Following what happened during the latest Marvel event (THEY WILL NEVER END!!), Axis, Tony Stark’s personality has been altered to become a bit… darker. Now, Tony Stark is the Starlight Express Tron Superior Iron Man!
Who do you get to write the evil version of a good character? The ultimate writer who writes bad versions of good characters: Tom “Injustice: Gods Among Us” Taylor! Thankfully, Superior Iron Man is better than that dismal DC series but it’s not without its flaws.
Henni is a cat-like young girl living in a theocratic society. As she starts to mature, she questions the religion that instructs her every action and so begins her journey of growing up and finding her own individual identity, whether the world accepts her or not.
Miss Lasko-Gross’s surreal coming-of-age fairy tale is a continuation of her theme of liberation from societal norms like her book, Escape from Special. But while Henni looks at outdated tradition and corrupt religion and its effects on the subjugation of women, as well as the importance of free thought and the role of art, it’s a fairly simplistic examination that puts me in mind that Henni is aimed at younger readers.
Before The Sixth Gun there was an earlier collaboration between Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt: The Damned. Instead of the wild west, it’s prohibition-era America with gangs of demons trafficking in the souls of humans, in particular two crime families who have been warring for years. Except when peace is finally brokered, the emissary for the two is kidnapped along with a ledger containing deadly secrets that’ll bring down both houses. It’s up to Eddie, a cursed small time fixer, to come back to life and find the missing demon and his book of souls.
(I jump in and out of spoilers throughout – it’s the only way to review this trash - so rather than constantly having to stop myself to write “spoilers”, I’m writing it at the top of the review. Fair warning.)
Christine has a very specific type of amnesia: every day she wakes up not knowing who the man sleeping next to her is. She also forgets that she’s 47 and not in her early twenties as she believes. She forgets that she was in an accident that caused her memory loss, she forgets that she had a son who died in Afghanistan, she forgets that she was once a successful novelist. She has to relearn everything about her past, every single day – before she goes to sleep and does it all over again tomorrow.
I suppose it had to happen - with the success of Saga, imitators have begun popping up, with Joe Keatinge and Leila del Duca’s Shutter being one such example.
A magical world where giant eagles and dragons, minotaurs and kids with horns, flying cars and saucer police, Scotch lions and gorilla doctors, dinosaurs and a talking platypus, are all de rigeur; a strong female character and a child, together with a talking cat sidekick, on the run from forces who want them caught, including a male and female bounty hunter. All of this sound familiar to Saga readers? This is Shutter.
Highschooler Kitaro is approached by his frantic classmate Aya with some startling news - the prettiest girl in school, Sana, is an alien!! Once Aya, the only one who can see the aliens, witnesses the beginning of an alien invasion, the three go on the run - but the greys know about Aya’s ability and the chase is on!
Vs Aliens is a farce, as in the dramatic genre use of the word, though you only realise this once it gets to the end. Up until then, Yu Suzuki keeps you guessing, throwing curveball after curveball at you. Are the aliens real? Is Sana an alien - is Aya, or Kitaro? Is it all made up - if so, why? Etc.
There’s a lot of Spider-Man I haven’t read so I’m not sure if this is actually the first time, but the way Dan Slott presents it, it feels like it is: Peter Parker gets a paying gig as a scientist for the first time ever. It took Marvel nearly 50 years to allow this change but it finally happened - ol’ Pete no longer has to sling hammy photos of his alter-ego Spidey anymore! Annnnnd that’s the whole book basically.
There’s an obligatory big superhero action scene that kicks things off with Doc Ock sending in giant Octobots to smash up the city while Spidey leads the Avengers against them. But there’s no payoff to that scene (at least not in this book) and you’re left wondering what the point of it was at all. Doc Ock is forgotten almost instantly once his ‘bots have been taken out. There ya go, schmucks, superheroes fighting robots - happy? Filling the quota for bland superhero fighting!
Reading Ben Templesmith’s The Squidder is a game of “spot the reference”. I don’t think there’s a single original element to it that hasn’t already been used two or three times already in much more famous books or movies.
In some post-apocalyptic world (like Mad Max, The Road, The Walking Dead, I Am Legend), humans have become like crops to be harvested by flying squid monsters - THE MATRIX anyone? Our hero is Jack aka a Squidder, a genetically enhanced soldier (like 2000AD’s Rogue Trooper) whose nanites cause any harm to him becomes magically healed (like Valiant’s Bloodshot) who lost his wife and kids to the squids because losing your family counts as instant audience empathy, right?
Ruben Rath has fallen in with some bad people who’ve hired a dangerous man called Ira to kill him. Except Ira is Ruben’s dad. And while Ruben’s outrunning the cops, Ira’s in Ruben’s house with his pregnant lady… One of these days I’m gonna have to visit the American South. I have to see if its as intense as the stories - and not just Jason Aaron’s - make it out to be; a place where humans and animals, life and death, nature and instinct swirl together in a heady melange.
