First off, a tip of the Professor’s marking pen to Dan, who did such a wonderful reviewing job over the last few weeks while the Professor and Mrs. Professor were checking out the Mexican Pacific Coast. The long-winded Professor admires Dan’s ability to be funny and dead-on in just a couple of sentences for each review — tell him you liked them, everybody, and we’ll get him back for some tag-team reviewing over the summer. Now, for this week’s offerings:
Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal #1 (of 4) — Writer: J. T. Krul; Pencils: Geraldo Borges; Inks: Marlo Alquiza
Having taken the former Speedy/Arsenal/Red Arrow/Arsenal again and decided to torture him, by slicing off his arm and killing his five-year-old daughter, DC now offers a mini-series where he wallows in his suffering, including flashbacks to his mutilation and panels showing Liam getting hit in the head by rubble, collapsing and crying for her daddy. This is borderline pornography, grief as entertainment, and it’s made all the worse because it’s so corporate and callous, a cynical attempt to boost sales by manipulating readers. Even if it were well-done, it would be scummy, but fortunately it’s badly-written and badly-drawn, by people you’ve never heard of, so it’s easy to tiptoe past it, and leave it to the low sales that it so richly deserves.
Peter Parker #1 (of 5) — Writer: Bob Gale; Art: Pat Olliffe
This mini-series reprints a digitally-available tale Marvel was offering online a few months ago; that makes it about half a year behind regular Spidey continuity, and it’s got a villain named Spectrum whose power is to…change the color of things (yes, Marvel is now ripping off old, lame Flash bad guys like the Rainbow Raider). The Olliffe art is competent enough, although it makes the whole thing feel like a Spider-Girl story, but there’s little meat to it, and absent the digital effects it’s like watching a 3-D movie in 2-D. Also, Marvel’s charging $3.99 for it, even though it’s just 21 pages of a reprint; an additional eight pages of a Fred Hembeck “Little Petey Parker” story where he meets a young pre-FF Johnny and Susan Storm isn’t enough to dampen the feeling that the reader’s paying too much for too little here.
Hellblazer #265 — Writer: Peter Milligan; Art: Simon Bisley
The story involves aging punk rockers trying to reanimate the spirit of Sid Vicious (no, I’m not kidding), which lets Bisley draw some nice panels of pitiful, balding old guys still in full punk regalia, and Milligan to make a clever you-can’t-go-back-again reference to early Vertigo comics. The art’s still being shot directly from Bisley’s pencils, which gives it an interesting texture but also exposes his weaknesses (problems with proportion and perspective, mostly), which aren’t as noticeable in his more flashy, over-the-top other work. I found it all a not-quite-successful, but noble enough, experiment; it’s worth picking up to see if your mileage varies.
The Guild #1 (of 3) — Writer: Felicia Day; Art: Jim Rugg
This is a sort of origin/prequel to the same-named live-action Web series that stars Day (also known to Joss Whedon fans from Dr. Horrible…) about a group of online gamers: it starts out with her character as a 20-something 3rd-chair violinist in an orchestra, plagued by depression and a bad boyfriend, and follows her first tentative steps into a World of Warcraft-type multi-user milieu. It’s… charming, I think, is the best word, and Rugg’s cartoony, slightly-exaggerrated style is able to make both the real-world characters and the online fantasy world fun to see. It’s not just for women readers (I’m trying to stay away from the phrase “chick comic”), but it does offer a women’s perspective on its main character, and it’s refreshing to see an estrogen-fueled alternative to all those testosterone-drenched superhero comics out there (yeah, Arsenal guys, I’m talking to you).
Shuddertown #1 — Writer: Nick Spencer; Art: Adam Geen
A tough-guy cop, flawed but stubborn, tries to solve a series of murders; the twist is that the suspects suggested by the forensic evidence are all long dead. Is this a noir story that’s flirting with time travel, or (please, God, no…) zombies? No clues yet, because this first issue is mostly background, police procedural stuff and chase scenes with shadowy perps. Both story and art are OK, but too murky for my tastes, and there’s not quite enough oomph to the mystery to bring me back for later issues. If you’re a big crime-comic fan, though, this might be worth a look.
Fade to Black #1 (of 5) — Writer: Jeff Mariotte; Art: Daniele Serra
A film cast and crew are doing location work ‘way out in the desert; when the cast comes back to the trailers after a rehearsal, they find the crew slaughtered — and then a cult of cannibals led by a Mansonesque “Brother Juniper” show up…. I think anyone who’s ever watched a B movie knows where they’re going with this, and if you like horror books there’s enough gore and menace to keep you interested. However, this first issue’s introductions of its main characters and their relationships was all a little too by-the-numbers for me, and “Brother Juniper” just made me laugh; it’s a funny-sounding name, and suggests a certain tone-deafness on the creators’ part that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the story.
Phil Mateer
