Something is Killing the Children Volume Three

This third volume of the Something is Killing the Children series collects issues #11-15 and even though it kept on after this (and may still be going, for all I know) things are brought to a conclusion here with the adventures of rogue agent Erica Slaughter in the Wisconsin town of Archer’s Peak. All the “big-toothed scary things” are killed and while the Order of St. George (not a team of heroes, it turns out) has suffered some uncomfortable exposure, they at least manage to find a fall-guy and hush things up.

Given how this volume ends I think I’ll take a break from the series. A break that may be permanent. I haven’t liked this comic much, and all the mumbo-jumbo mythology about the monsters and the familiars that the monster-killers carry with them didn’t interest me. I’m not into the story, or the characters, or the art.

Graphicalex

Batman: Off-World

Usually it’s a bad sign when familiar characters go off into space. In terms of horror franchises it didn’t work for Jason, Pinhead, or the Leprechaun, with each of those movies being clear indications that a shark had been jumped. So Batman in space wasn’t an idea I was keen on. “I have no business battling alien empires,” he reflects at one point. I could not agree more.

Given all that, I thought Jason Aaron did a decent job with this this six-part series. The set-up is, admittedly, crazy. Batman gets his butt kicked by some muscle that a Gotham gangster has brought in from way out of town. Specifically, he’s a goon from the Slag Galaxy. How he got to Earth I’m not sure, but I may have missed that part. Anyway, Batman figures that the only way he can beat the goon is to actually go to the Slag Galaxy himself and train against this new competition. So he gets on board an experimental rocket ship and off he goes.

The Slag Galaxy is a brutal place that’s run by the Blakksun Mining Company. The BMC have a mercenary force of War Stormers that go around enslaving the populations of various planets, resulting in mass orphanization. This of course gets Batman’s back up since he has a soft spot for orphans, not to mention injustice generally. So he decides to take on the BMC as part of his training, which proceeds with the assistance of the requisite sexy alien (a Stormchaser named Ione with lots of tattoos), a giant war wolf, and a Punch Bot that likes to get into fights (and lose them).

It’s pretty brutal stuff, as Batman works up the corporate ladder until finally taking on the co-CEOs of the BMC, a pair of baddies called the Blakksun Twins who rule the galaxy with “lawful omnipotence.” Wrath Blakksun is a tall dominatrix warrior woman while her brother Whisper is a nerdy-looking runt who makes people’s heads explode when he says something to them. They’re actually quite a creepy couple and I was only let down by how easily Batman manages to withstand Whisper’s dirty talk. It seems all you have to be is tough enough and you can take it. And we all know Batman is the toughest guy there is. Even if, as always, his code doesn’t allow him to kill any aliens. Which makes his taking out whole armies of mercenaries a bit hard to swallow, but at this point we just have to roll with it.

Then . . . back to Earth and a rematch with the goon he fought at the start. Who this time doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a tidy ending, and things are even set up for Ione to launch as she adopts the Batman mantle back in her galaxy (her sidekick, the Punch Bot. is now Bat-Bot for good measure). I think I can live without those adventures though, at least for a while.

Graphicalex

Batman: Europa

We begin with Batman going toe-to-toe with Killer Croc in some Gotham alley and the Dark Knight is really feeling it, but not in a good way. “Getting’ too old for this, Batman?” KC chides. And even though Batman finally puts the big guy down for the count, he has to admit that “it was harder than usual.” Is he getting old? In need of some testosterone replacement therapy? I mean, over the course of nearly a hundred years of crime-fighting he has taken quite a beating.

Alas, things are worse than that. It seems a secret canonical villain has infected Batman with a virus that will kill him in a week. This sends Batman hopping about Europe trying to find out who’s responsible. He’s first off to Berlin, then to Prague, Paris, and finally Rome (being sure to hit all the must-see tourist monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Notre Dame, and the Coliseum). The twist is that he finds out early on that the Joker has been infected with the same virus, so they actually have to go on this little road trip together. It’s a team-up of unlikely partners, which turns out to be as much fun as you’d expect.

I didn’t care much for the story. The whole premise seemed like the flimsiest sort of excuse for throwing Batman and the Joker together. The problem I had with it is that I just couldn’t see how it made any sense, even on the level of the way the plots of most criminal masterminds in comic books are needlessly complicated and don’t add up. And then Batman’s trick at the end to take down the bad guy struck me as ridiculous.

But the plot isn’t the point anyway. What we’re really getting here is a gallery of striking artwork from different artists for each of the travel destinations. Now if all you want is art in the standard DC or Marvel comic book style then you may be put off by it. I found the Paris section by Diego Latorre to be particularly dark and sketchy, making a lot of the action hard to figure out. It reminded me a bit of Reptilian in that regard, for better and for worse. But most of the time I was really impressed.

Despite the interesting idea of pairing Batman and the Joker as buddies I really didn’t care for the script. What sells Europa is the art though, which is well worth a look.

Graphicalex

Simpsons Comics Jam-Packed Jamboree

The Simpsons have been with us for so long that a list of minor recurring characters from the show would likely be as long as the tax rolls in some small towns. And yet, even though it’s been years if not decades since I watched the show, I can identify all of them, or nearly all of them, as soon as they’re introduced. Examples showing up several times in this collection include Dr. Nick (catchphrase: “Hi everybody!”), Gil the worn-down salesman, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Hell, I even remember the Cletus song.

But I said I recognized nearly all of these guys because I had no recollection of Dr. Colossus. This sent me to the Internet to see if maybe he was introduced sometime after I stopped watching, but actually he’s been around since 1994.

I didn’t even notice Dr. C the first time he shows up in this collection, when he briefly appears with his mother before Judge Marge. But then it’s easy to miss things in these comics as they often have so many gags appearing even within a single cell that you have to squint and read the fine print to catch them. As usual, the stories are pure zaniness, giving you no idea where they’re heading aside from the fact that at the end normalcy (or what passes for normalcy in Springfield) will be re-established, with the Simpson family as indestructible as ever. Which makes you wonder at their evolution from what were, at the time, subversive roots, into something so conservative you could even think of them as an institution. Though after nearly fifty years that may be a natural progression.

Graphicalex

Batman: Under the Red Hood

Batman has always had a Robin problem. He’s never been that popular a character, doesn’t fit well with the Dark Knight’s grim persona, and the relationship between Bruce Wayne and his young ward probably seemed creepy at the time and ever since has become the stuff of comedy sketches. Even Robin’s costume looks campy and ridiculous, with elven slippers and shiny green speedo briefs under a shirt that might be a minidress. Fans even voted to have the Joker kill him off in the 1988 storyline “A Death in the Family.”

That particular iteration of Robin was Jason Todd, who was the second lad to step into the role after the departure of Dick Grayson (who went on to become Nightwing). In this story, however, Jason is back as a new crime-fighting crusader who goes by the name of Red Hood. Even though it’s more of a helmet than a hood. But whatever.

How Jason was resurrected is a tale too complicated for me to relate or, if I’m being honest, understand. Suffice to say that Jason as Red Hood is now taking out Gotham’s crime syndicates, which are being run by Black Mask. This should mean he’s one of the good guys, but his methods are quite brutal, which doesn’t sit well with Batman. It seems that when Jason came back from the dead he brought with him a taste for vengeance and rough justice, whether because of how he died or due to some infection from taking a dip in R’as al Ghul’s Lazarus Pool isn’t clear. So there’s a lot of blood in these comics, and bodies are soon piling up all over the place.

I thought it was a strong story, with good character development and conflict between the two leads. Jason/Red Hood has a grudge to settle with Batman, not for letting the Joker kill him but for not killing the Joker in revenge. And he has a case.

Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why . . . why on God’s earth – ??! Is he still alive!!?? . . . Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled. The thousands who have suffered . . . the friends he’s crippled . . . I thought . . . I thought killing me – that I’d be the last person you’d ever let him hurt. If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mass. If it had been you that he left in agony. If he had taken you from this world . . . I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, death-worshipping garbage . . . and sent him off to hell.

I think this is a question that a lot of Batman readers have probably asked over the years. But we just have to accept that the man has a code and that’s all there is to it.

The conflict between Bruce and Jason is the main one being explored throughout the series, and it culminates with lots of bone-crunching fisticuffs and blood splatter. There’s also some dark comedy, especially coming from Black Mask and his exasperation with his incompetent underlings. And I got a chuckle out of things like how the Batman symbol is printed on the soles of the Dark Knight’s combat boots.

Most of all, however, I think they finally made something out of Robin. I count myself as a die-hard Robin hater, and I’m not a fan of Nightwing either. Red Hood as the back-from-the-dead vigilante, however, is a character with some edge. There were a lot of improbabilities along the way and parts that I felt didn’t add up, but this was a solid comic all around.

Graphicalex

Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface

This is one of eight single-issue comics in the Batman: One Bad Day series, each by different writers and artists and each focusing on the tortured psyche of a famous Batman villain. Now in the case of One Bad Day: Clayface what we get isn’t an origin story so much as a reboot, since there have been a whole lot of Clayfaces over the years, which is what you might expect from such a Protean figure. What’s happened in this one is that Clayface, an actor named Basil Karlo, has left Gotham and is now working as a waiter in Hollywood, where he’s trying to break into the movie business. Things don’t go well, however, and soon “Clay” (his adopted name) is demonstrating that even if he’s not quite willing to die for his art he’s absolutely on board with killing for it. Which means literally working his way up the Hollywood food chain from fellow struggling actors to agents to directors to producers. They all get the mud bath treatment when they don’t share Clay’s creative vision.

I loved pretty much all of this. The story by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing (the Hivemind) is solidly constructed, even though initially a bit disorienting as we get introduced to all of Clay’s co-workers. Things keep escalating as Clayface works his way through the usual gang of movie-business jerks. And the punchline ending is both grim and funny. I don’t know if I’m a big fan of the art of Xermánico normally, but he really does a great job with Clayface here, giving pathos to his sad, pupil-less eyes. And finally I’ll call out the lettering by Tom Napolitano. Usually I rail against the speech of characters being presented in stylized ways where it’s distracting and not required. But here I thought it very effective. I liked how when Clay reverts to his Clayface form the speech bubbles become swirling, puddly forms and the lettering liquefies. I also thought the business of providing emphasis through the use of what looks like yellow highlighter was a gamble that paid off. It works with the way they present the text for the scene settings in screenplay format throughout (“Int./Ext. Sunset Chateau. Day.”)

Batman does show up at the end to put an end to Clayface’s theater of blood, or mud, which is done in a perfunctory way with a Ghostbusters-style trap and a quick moral lesson about truth and lies in the dream factory. But Clayface not only gets the last word, he’s also a far more complicated and compelling character. Sure he’s deluded about Hollywood, but he has the conviction of the true psycho, while also being sympathetic. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to throw mud at movie stars at some point? It’s just that Clayface is mud with teeth.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex

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?

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex

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.

Graphicalex