Something is Killing the Children Volume Two

Volume Two of this series, collecting issues #6-10, and . . . things aren’t getting better. In terms of the story that means that all the little baby demons of the mother demon that Erica killed at the end of Volume One are now getting hungry and killing more of the children of Archer’s Peak. But what I really mean is that I’m not liking this comic any better as it goes along.

James, the kid who survived an attack by the mother demon, is laid up in the hospital most of the time here. So instead it’s Erica teaming up (sort of) with another demon hunter named Aaron sent out from the Order of St. George with instructions to clean up Erica’s mess. And that means more than just killing the demons. But Aaron turns out to be pretty useless. As do the police. And Tom Mahoney, the only other adult gifted with the ability to see the demons, isn’t much help either.

So actually very little happens. There are more references to obscure monster lore like the fact that the baby demons are “oscuratypes” who only exist in a shadow form until they start eating. Which is just a bit of mumbo-jumbo that’s introduced to keep the plot moving along (in order to kill them, Erica will need some live bait, you see). Erica and the demon hunters know all this stuff, and they’re impatient with all the normies they have to deal with who just don’t understand. This makes Erica irritating, but she’s not the least likeable character. To be honest, I don’t think I cared for any of these people.

Nor am I a big fan of Werther Dell’Edera’s art (though I love that name). Erica’s cyclopean look is certainly striking, but I found her oversized green eye to be distracting and even repellent. Meanwhile, some of the secondary characters are hard to distinguish, at least to my eye.

Well, maybe I’ll give the series a bit more rope. But so far things aren’t looking good. I’ll be surprised if I make it to the end, if there even is an end yet.

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Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Volume 1

The title as I read it is just Batman. But this book is usually said to be Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Volume 1 because how many thousands of Batman books are there now?

The extended title does signal the importance of the writer (Moench) and artist (Jones) for this particular run of Batman. These are two big names who were at this time (1995-96) at the top of their game. Of the two though I would rate Jones as the more important. He has a remarkable ability to indulge cartoonish caricature and wildly exaggerated forms (Batman’s cape here is a giant life form all its own, while the “ears” on his hood must jut out a couple of feet over his head) without being ridiculous. Some of the faces of secondary characters look like they belong in MAD Magazine, and the Batmobile is sometimes a silly bubble car that I couldn’t even imagine Batman getting into, but none of this is laughable. It’s all part of an insane, dark, and grotesque world.

Collected here are Batman issues #515-535 (excepting #520, 526, and 533-34). Coming right after the epic Knightfall story arc there was a switch to what are mainly double-issue stories, and I think this probably struck most readers as a bit of a relief. The central stories deal with Batman facing off against the usual suspects. Killer Croc escapes from New Arkham so he can retire to the bayou with Swamp Thing. Scarecrow escapes from New Arkham and goes after the jocks who tormented him in highschool. Mr. Freeze is actually released from New Arkham following a “positive psychological review” (ha-ha!). Two-Face escapes from New Arkham and goes on a justice tour. Batman springs Poison Ivy from New Arkham so she can help fight a killer plague.

Don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think New Arkham isn’t any more secure a facility than Old Arkham.

None of these stories struck me as all that impressive. Instead, the two I liked the best were an early one featuring a new villainess named the Sleeper who was the subject of a military intelligence sleep-deprivation experiment and the final story which introduces us to the Ogre and his brother Ape, subjects of a military intelligence bioengineering experiment. Both the Sleeper and the Ogre are on missions of revenge, killing the doctors who tormented them. That these stories stood out as the best may say something about how played-out the veteran supervillains are, or just be an example of Moench enjoying a free hand. But then the long story involving Batman and Deadman heading off to Peru to fight a gang of neo-Conquistadores alongside a mummy cult didn’t work for me at all. Oh well, You have to expect a lot of ups and downs in a series like this.

As a footnote, there’s a reference in the Ogre issue to Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is said to be “the story of a man who increased the intelligence of an ape . . . and who used that ape to commit murder.” Maybe this is how Moench remembers it, or maybe he’d only heard of the story, but this is so far from what happens in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” that it took me by surprise. There are editors too who proofread comics and it’s hard to believe nobody caught such a mistake. Or is it that so few people still know these things?

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Marvel Zombies: Dawn of Decay

For starters, it’s a lousy title. This four-part series isn’t part of the Marvel Zombies universe but instead deals with a bio-plague that turns people into homicidal plant creatures. Pansies and rosettes for eyes, bark and fungal growth breaking out over their skin, that sort of thing. Plus they go around biting people, which is the way thing the virus spreads. Though I don’t think anyone gets eaten.

Second, it isn’t clear that this is “decay.” The infected haven’t died and in fact they can even be cured and turned back to normal at the end.

So not zombies. Just zombie-adjacent. Sort of like the Contagion storyline in that respect.

Groot and Rocket of the Guardians of the Galaxy are in superhero prison before being let out by the Avengers. It seems Rocket was up to his usual Rocket stuff but everything is OK aside from the fact that Groot now has a case of the sniffles. On the jet back home though Groot sneezes on Captain America, which instantly has the effect of turning him into one of the aforementioned plant zombies. And Cap then infects Black Widow, Ant-Man, Thor, and Iron Man before Groot bails from the jet with Bruce Banner. Practically by the time they hit the ground all of NYC has been turned into plant zombies and Banner figures the only way to stop the plague is to get to the Avengers HQ where he can find a cure in the lab. The only problem is that in order to cross the city and get there he will have to turn into the Hulk (who, along with Groot, is immune to the virus). And the Hulk doesn’t want to find a cure, he just wants to smash.

That’s all there is to it, and even though there’s a lot of fighting between Groot and the Hulk on one side and the zombified Avengers on the other, the real conflict is between Groot and the Hulk. As noted, the Hulk doesn’t care about the mission and he gets really sick of listening to the stick man keep saying “I am Groot.” Something I can certainly relate to.

If you like the primitive comic banter that goes on between two characters so limited in their speech then you might have a good time. But even at only four issues I wouldn’t have wanted any more of it. And I say that despite how rushed the ending felt to me. There’s a twist I won’t get into, but the main thing is that they need to find a cure and then they just get one by accident. I actually had to go back and read it again to understand what happened.

I would say this might pass muster for zombie fans, but actually they may be the least impressed by it. There’s less gore and horror, for one thing, because they were targeting a younger audience. But more than that, I found the story too simple and the characters too flat and uninteresting to care very much about it.

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American Vampire Book One

This is a comic that really impressed me. Writer Scott Snyder (with some help from Stephen King) and artist Rafael Albuquerque actually took the tired vampire trope and made something that felt fresh and interesting out of it. This is a challenge that comic writers and artists are always being tasked with – how can you tell a “new” Batman or Spider-Man story? – and it’s something they probably don’t get enough credit for.

So the idea here is that vampires are a species of predator that has arrived in the New World (that would be America), not just to feed on people (“Americans are only food, like the great slabs of cow they shovel down their throats!”) but to get rich. These vampires are nasty, rich, decadent types hailing from Britain, France, Russia, and other parts of the continent. Because they live forever they can invest for the long term and basically they form a cabal of hypercapitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

A run in with a deadly gunslinger named Skinner Sweet sends the vampire bloodline off on a tangent though. Sweet is infected by one of the European vampires just as he’s being killed, which means he comes back from the dead as a vampire himself. But not just any vampire but a new-and-improved American vampire. Which means, among other things, that he has a greater tolerance for sunlight. Then Sweet brings Pearl Jones, a young woman hoping to make her way in Hollywood, back as a vampire after she’s killed by the same crew of Eurotrash in the 1920s. After she “rises” Sweet explains what’s happened to her as a kind of evolution: European vampires are, “in automotive terms . . . like old, broken-down European clunkers” while Skinner and Pearl are “like shiny new 1926 Fords. Top of the line, just rolled out onto the showroom floor. See sometimes, when the blood hits someone new, from somewhere new . . . it makes something new. With a whole new bag of tricks.”

These bloodlines keep branching off (it’s surprisingly easy to get infected by vampire blood and so turn into one), but Skinner Sweet, Pearl Jones, and Jones’s (former) BFF Hattie Hargrove are the main recurring American vampires. Only they don’t work together unless they’re forced to since they all hate each other. And there are other people/vampires involved as well, and they in turn have descendants as the story proceeds to work its way through several decades of American history.

To be honest, at times I did feel a little lost keeping up with who was who and when we were. Part of the problem might have been that I was reading a collection of issues #1-11 in one of DC’s “compact comics” editions. These are at least more reasonably priced (comics and graphic novels have become very expensive) but you do lose something in the smaller format. But I also think the story jerked around a bit too much and was hard to follow in places. Not enough to stop me having a great time with it though.

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Something is Killing the Children Volume One

An adult fairy tale? In the town of Archer’s Peak children are disappearing or being murdered in horrible ways. As the coroner puts it, “there’s some scary shit at work.” It seems the woods are full of monsters. These monsters are only visible to kids though, who are also the monsters’ only target or food of choice.

A kid named James survives one monster attack, though he’s traumatized after seeing three of his friends being sliced and diced. Help, however, is on the way in the form of Erica Slaughter, a monster-hunting ninja chick with a stylish ‘do and a backpack full of weapons. Erica is sent by a mystical council (the dragon-slaying Order of St. George) to Archer’s Peak so that she can put an end to this latest monster outbreak. To do so she’ll need some help from James and the strange spirit/familiar in her stuffed octopus.

As I say, it plays out much like a fairy tale. The monsters might as well be hiding under the bed as being in the woods. And I suppose it’s all an allegory about growing up, feeling vulnerable and not being taken seriously. It got a good reception, perhaps because of the gay angle thrown in. James is gay so he’s even more vulnerable and isolated. I didn’t see this as being enough to keep things fresh though. A punk riot grrrl heroine teaming up with a gay boy didn’t strike me as anything new, or interesting, especially in 2019 (when the series started). That writer James Tynion IV was drawing on personal experience didn’t add anything either. Everything about the story seemed stale. I’ll probably stick with it for a while though in the hope that things turn around.

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Marvel Knights: Make the World Go Away

The Marvel Knights are a superhero team with a complicated publishing backstory and, on Earth-616 (if you care about these things), a fluid line-up. I think they were always headed by Daredevil though.

What I like about them is that most of the members are meat-and-potatoes type grinders rather than mutants or aliens or deities with otherworldly powers. In this limited series written primarily by Donny Cates the Knights are Daredevil, Punisher, Elektra, and Black Panther, with the Hulk sort of tagging along to open doors. (Note: Before I get asked in the comments, I believe the figure on the cover appearing on the far right is Karnak, one of the Inhumans. I don’t know why his picture is on the cover. He’s not with the Marvel Knights here.) Aside from the Hulk they’re all just really athletic fighting machines, good with guns and martial arts but that’s about it. And that’s all I want most of the time.

The story here I found really intriguing. Matt Murdock (Daredevil) wakes up in a graveyard not knowing why he’s there or who he is. He’s met by Frank Castle (Punisher) who is a cop in this timeline, and who has also forgotten his secret identity but is being led around by a weird-acting Bruce Banner, contacting the members of the Knights. All of whom are stuck in the same state of amnesia.

But it’s not just the Knights. The whole world’s memory has been wiped by some unspecified “machine,” basically rebooting this corner of the Marvel universe. So reassembling the Knights is a difficult enterprise since none of the members knows or trusts any of the others. Poor Frank in particular gets the crap beaten out of him by pretty much everybody.

I thought this was an interesting premise and it worked well. Like I say, these heroes are grinders and that part of their identities is emphasized as they often make do with substitute, makeshift costumes. The Punisher just has a t-shirt with his logo. Black Panther has a face mask with some fangs on it.

Unfortunately, I thought it was an idea that needed more room to run. A lot more room. There are things going on that aren’t explained — though they may be elsewhere, in some other timestream. We’re not told what the machine is or its purpose. Doctor Doom and Kingpin are both involved, with Doctor Doom apparently knowing more about what’s going on, but neither of them tell us anything. (As an aside, I was also impressed at how powerful Kingpin has been getting. He’s almost another Hulk at this point, and just smashes Doctor Doom, which surprised me.) The status of Karen Page was mystifying. Angel? Ghost in the machine? And finally the ending was quite abrupt and anticlimactic. The Hulk does his thing and the machine has a reset button so that everyone can just get switched back to normal.

Disappointing then, but disappointing because there wasn’t more of it. I felt like they could have let it run for some more issues and given it a better ending. But comics are all about the churn and keeping the pipeline flowing. Finish one story arc and then on to the next.

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Ka-Zar: Lord of the Savage Land

Not my thing.

Ka-Zar was basically Marvel’s answer to Tarzan, the son of an English lord who was raised by a saber-tooth cat named Zabu in the Savage Land after his father’s untimely death. He didn’t have much in the way of super powers, but was a muscular guy in a loincloth who could usually hold his own against most superheroes and villains. At some point he married a jungle babe named Shanna the She-Devil and had a son named Matthew. Also at some other point he got killed but he was brought back to life. Which is where this series kicks off as a hero reboot.

And it’s quite a power-up, right down to his now high-tech breeches. Ka-Zar has gone from being a Tarzan figure to becoming something more like DC’s Animal Man, channeling the strengths and abilities of whatever animal he wants (including dinosaurs, which still live in the Savage Land). In fact, he’s even more than this now, and the comparison I made most readily was to Swamp Thing as the Knight of the Green. But then Animal Man was more recently revealed to be the defender of the Red or animal world, so these books are all talking the same language. Suffice to say that Ka-Zar is not just the Lord of the Savage Land but a god. Indeed, he even proclaims himself the God of Balance, which I thought being a bit full of himself, even if it’s true.

To be honest I never found Ka-Zar that interesting, but somehow with this new mythological overlay I found him even less so. And his domestic set-up with Shanna and Matthew (now a teenager) was dull too. The only bright spot here is the bad guy he’s up against, a figure known as Domovoy the Flesh Weaver. Now I didn’t really know what Domovoy was, or what his issues were, but he looks like a sort of walking octopus and he’s the half-machine creator (or perhaps just the leader) of an army of “Polyscions” who are also biotech monstrosities. As far as I could Domovoy the Flesh Weaver and the Polyscions (a great band name) constituted some sort of Savage Land death cult. They sort of have an environmentalist point of view, but it’s tainted by all their machine parts. In any event, Ka-Zar has become one with all of nature and so has evolved to a point where he knows that “death is just the beginning of a new phase.” Like Swamp Thing, he is now an eternally dying and reviving god, here to preach a green gospel: “Domovoy’s technology won’t save us. It’s callous to think so. The only thing that can save us now is being mindful. We must focus on today and reintegrate ourselves with nature. It’s sincerely that simple.”

As with so many of today’s comics I found myself thinking that less would have been more. Shanna doesn’t have much to do here aside from nursing Ka-Zar back to health, while freckle-faced Matthew is the most annoying character I’ve come across in a long time. This would have been a better comic if those two had been left out of things and Ka-Zar had fought Domovoy one-on-one with only his hands and some stone-flaked knives. But the mythic impulse seems irresistible, and it’s become a fatal attraction.

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Parasyte Full Color Collection 1

Another popular manga series, this time in a deluxe colored version. Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte was originally serialized from 1989 to 1994, when it appeared in black-and-white. Having success (over 25 million copies in circulation by 2022), it would later go on to spawn some spin-offs and be made into a TV series and some films.

As you probably know, I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, and Parasyte shares some of the main faults that characterize the form, at least for me. The two I’d highlight are (1) the lazy artwork, with indecipherable fight scenes, generic figure, and characters who somehow fail to register any emotion at all on their faces even when supposedly experiencing incredible shocks, and (2) the odd blend of violence and gore with leering, juvenile sexual elements.

But even with those strikes against it I enjoyed Parasyte. It’s has a good basic story, with alien spores falling to Earth, where they immediately crawl inside the brains of other, host life forms. One of them tries to get into the brain of highschool student Shinichi Izumi but he stops it and it can only inhabit his right hand. He calls it “Migi” (Japanese for “right”), and they share a consciousness and talk to each other so that Migi is able to explain to Shinichi what is going on. Migi also has special alien powers that allow him to fight with other aliens. This is important as the aliens can sense each other and they’re not happy that Migi and Shinichi form a human-alien hybrid. And these aliens are very dangerous, as they have the ability to split open and unwind in fantastic ways that allows them to tear humans apart and eat them. This leads the newspapers to be full of reports of the “mincemeat murders,” because that’s all that’s left of people once the aliens are done with them.

What I liked about Parasyte is that it avoids the usual manga trap of just repeating the same situations over and over, with the hero taking on progressively more powerful bad guys. The story is more complicated than that, with a number of interesting pieces that introduce some real drama, like Shinichi’s relationship with his parents, a would-be girlfriend, and a sexy teacher who is an alien. There are also allegorical and political messages in play, from the way Shinichi’s battle with Migi’s impulses stands in for anxiety over masturbation to the environmental angle that, in this first volume at least, is only hinted at.

The upshot being that this is a manga that I actually want to continue reading. High praise!

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Sinister War

One for the big-time Marvel fanboys.

Basically we have Spider-Man here taking on nearly every enemy he’s ever had. Or, as he puts it, it’s “a battle royal with every single baddie who’s ever looked at me sideways.” Some of these I had never heard of. Who was this Morlun guy? He seemed important. What’s with the yellow lizard? I had to do a search to find out he’s called the Dragon King. I never did figure out what his super powers were. There are so many villains on parade that sometimes they just have to be introduced as the teams they’re a part of: the Sinister Six, the Savage Six, the Sinister Syndicate, the Superior Foes, etc. They come flying off of splash pages so filled with figures they don’t even register as individuals. But at the end of the day, as with most battle royals, they end of spending most of their time just milling around in the background.

The guy behind all of this is Kindred, and if you don’t know who he is then I don’t have time to fill you in because it’s complicated. Really complicated. Basically he’s a supernatural figure with demonic powers, including the ability to send centipedes into people’s ears and control their minds, sort of like the slugs in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kindred has assembled this all-star team of supervillains (even raising some of them from the dead) to make Spider-Man pay for his sins. Or something. They all go along with it because they think Kindred has the power to send them to hell. I don’t know if Kindred can actually do this. I also don’t know what sort of hell it is we’re talking about. There’s talk of souls and punishment and the like, but there’s no theological content to any of it. It’s just another part of the multiverse I think.

The four-part series collected here was the culmination of a longer story arc by Nick Spencer. At the end they collect some of the teasers from previous issues that helped set things up (but shouldn’t these have been part of a prologue?), and the story went on from here as well, so it’s really all quite confusing unless you’ve been following along pretty closely. Which I hadn’t.

There was too much going on. Which is too bad because I liked the main story arc, which has Doctor Octopus again cast in the anti-hero mold. He’s the one who takes down Kindred at the end, using science. Spider-Man is mainly just a punching bag throughout, only being spared when the bad guys start fighting each other. (Why Kindred didn’t see that was going to happen when he set things up as a competition to kill Spider-Man, I’m not sure.) I didn’t like Mephisto being involved because that only increased the confusion as to what was actually happening. That confusion also had the effect of watering down all the psychodrama involving the Osborn family, which I didn’t understand anyway.

I think this is a problem with the current era of Marvel comics (and the MCU) generally: an inflation in the roster rolls and an increase in complexity that caters to a readership expected to be up on more and more information regarding backstories and different timelines. So if you’re just coming in here, good luck!

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Aliens: What If . . . ?

I continue to be impressed at how good the Aliens comics are, coming up with interesting original storylines that put the film franchise to shame. Aliens: What If . . . ? is another great example, taking as its starting point the end of the film Aliens and positing that the character of Carter Burke (played by Paul Reiser) actually survived the destruction of Hadley’s Hope.

This is the sort of thing that might have most fans saying “Oh no!” Carter Burke, after all, was one of the great heels of moviedom, the sort of villain you love to hate. And that’s the reputation he’s carried with him here, as he’s stuck managing an office at a mining outpost in the back of beyond. “He’s the most hated person in the universe. Literally.” And “Humankind’s most reviled Judas. Next to Judas.” A judgment that comes from his daughter!

But it turns out Burke wasn’t all bad. He was a corporate stooge for Weyland-Yutani, nothing more. And the thing is, he is a dedicated family man. He wants to find a Xenomorph egg so that he can hatch a new Xenomorph and use its blood as a cure for his terminally ill wife, who he is keeping in a cryochamber. It’s a totally crazy idea, but he thinks he can make it work. And he’s also lied to his daughter Brie about how she can’t leave the mining planet because her lungs won’t be able to adjust to a different gravity, just so she’ll have to stay with him. That’s not very nice either, but . . . like I say, he’s a family man. That counts for something.

You won’t be surprised when Burke’s plans go awry, and before long the mining colony is hopping with Xenomorphs. And the action that follows is kept simple and easy to follow, which isn’t always the case. But what sets Aliens: What If . . . ? apart from the other books in the series is the jokey flavour throughout. It’s full of the sort of snappy dialogue that may put off die-hard horror fans but that I found to be a fun change-up. Despite the gore, there are whole scenes that play out as comedy, like when Burke interviews the cubicle monkeys in his office to try to find a suitable host for the facehugger to impregnate. Despite his bad reputation, Burke is a soft touch, you see, and he just can’t bring himself to select a guinea pig.

One of the hooks here is that the concept is co-credited to Paul Reiser himself, along with his son Leon and three other writers. Five writers for a concept? Well, that’s what they say. Anyway, I don’t know how much of a hand Paul Reiser had in this – somewhat less, I imagine, than Keanu Reeves with BRZRKR – but the rest of the writers, including Leon, all come through with a solid story populated with an interesting group of characters, including a replicant who provides a lot of comic interplay with Burke and a Yutani offspring who romances Brie before revealing his true family colours. I enjoyed all of it, and as this volume collects issues #1-5 and ends with Burke, Brie, and the cast of The Office (that’s obviously the reference) on their way to bring down Weyland-Yutani (and save Burke’s wife), I’m looking forward to more.

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