Gideon Falls Volume 5: Wicked Worlds

Sheer chaos. “Please . . . just slow down,” Dr. Xu begs of Danny when he tries to explain. “What does all of this mean? I am . . . I’m so confused.” Join the club, Doc.

Here it is in a nutshell. After the Black Barn got blown up at the end of the previous volume we’re told that it didn’t get destroyed but was instead “set free.” Whatever that means. What it seems to involve is the multiverse collapsing in on its center point, which is Gideon Falls. You see, “for some reason we can never know,” the “heart of it all” (that is, the heart of everything that ever has or ever will exist in space and time) is Gideon Falls. It was all that existed before the fragmentation into an infinite number of timelines, and now after that initial Big Bang reality is experiencing a Big Crunch back to its singular identity. Because of the darkness. Which is where the Laughing Man/Bug God comes in.

If it all sounds fuzzy that’s because it is. In this volume various characters in different parts of the multiverse (a Wild West environment, a dystopic police state) run away from zombie Laughing Men until they can regroup as the “New Ploughmen.” Which is an homage to the original bunch of Black Barn conspiracy nuts. There’s a lot of running around but it feels like running in place since you can’t even say they’re going in circles. We’re just left to understand that someone, somewhere understands what they’re doing and has arranged things to work out the way they’re meant to.

The plot itself doesn’t advance, but lots of things do happen. The main draw here though is again Andrea Sorrentino’s art. He was really off leash with this series and it’s a lot of fun seeing what he comes up with in terms of page design and layout. So enjoy that, because the story in this part is thin gruel and what there is will probably leave you scratching your head.

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Batman/The Shadow: The Murder Geniuses

I’ll grant that crossovers can get messy. And crossovers with two writers may get even messier. That said, the idea of having Batman and the Shadow joining forces must have seemed like a good fit, as they’re both dark, mysterious crime-fighters hailing from the same era (both debuted in the 1930s). Unfortunately, it’s hard to think of anything this comic series does right, at least in terms of its storyline.

I found that story impossible to follow. I don’t know the Shadow character very well, but I think even if I did I would have been lost. As far as I can figure out he’s an immortal figure or spirit from another dimension: the fabled city of Shamba-La. What is Shamba-La? Why it’s a “foothold on your plane of existence, anchored by heavy dimensional ballast.” People there live “on a higher thaumic frequency.” Got it?

Anyway, apparently the Shadow has had his eye on Batman for a while and has selected him to be his heir. But then this manga-masked super-villain from Shamba-La named the Stag (because he wears an antler headdress, you see) shows up and starts killing off all the best people in the world. This makes him the reverse Shadow, as the Shadow’s mission is to take out the worst people in the world. So Batman and the Shadow team up to defeat the Stag, who has allied with the Joker. Batman sort of gets killed but then he’s revived by going to Shamba-La and meeting Cthulhu. The Stag is finally beaten and the Shadow is stuck still being the Shadow and Batman stays on as Batman.

I may be getting something wrong in all that. I’m probably getting a lot wrong. I just didn’t know what was going on. The Stag has a backstory but he only speaks a single enigmatic line (“I am an honest signal”) over and over. The Joker is roped into action just because this is a big Batman title and they figured the Joker had to show up and do something. But this is one of his least impressive incarnations. The Shadow looks dramatic in his magic red scarf unrolling like Spawn’s cape, but honestly I didn’t understand what he was going on about most of the time. Harry Vincent and Margo Lane show up too, but just as props. I guess the art isn’t bad, but Batman’s boyish face doesn’t really go with his scarred tank of a physique and the Joker seems like a puppet figure.

I didn’t like this one. The crossover idea had a lot of potential but they needed to keep the script a lot tighter. With all the background mythology I just had the sense that things were getting away from Scott Snyder and Steve Orlando right from the start. It was fairly well received by fans though, which makes me wonder if coherence or intelligibility is something that people even look for anymore in pop entertainment.

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Marvel Comics: Timeless Tales

Marvel Comics got its start (at least as Marvel Comics) in 1939. This slim volume collects a bunch of all-new genre homages to celebrate their 80^th anniversary (in 2019), and is a real treat for fans of the Marvel brand.

We kick off with a spooky psycho-thriller from Crypt of Shadows. Then War is Hell, Journey into Unknown Worlds, Love Romances, Gunhawks, and Ziggy Pig – Silly Seal. I think the titles speak for themselves as to what you can expect, but if you’re wondering, the genres covered are horror, war, SF, romance, Western, and humour.

I thought the first story, written by Al Ewing was the best. I had to go back and read it again to understand what was going on. It’s a complicated narrative involving hypnotic states, but I think in the end it all made sense, which is something I appreciated. Also good were the two stories in Journey into Unknown Worlds. There was nothing fancy about them, but they delivered.

The other genres sampled are ones that haven’t maintained the popularity they once had. War comics and Westerns aren’t so big today, and I think romance titles have mostly disappeared. And I wonder why. Romance novels are still popular, aren’t they? Could romance comics not survive the attention of Roy Lichtenstein?

That’s a point worth dwelling on. Some genres, like SF and horror, can hold up under an ironic gaze. But for war, Westerns, and romance I think it’s harder. Which is why those stories here get cross-genre, ironic treatments. There are twist endings and supernatural elements that I doubt were that common in the originals. One of the romance stories takes place in a steampunk future, and another has a robot falling in love with an alien. The war stories are both strange tales and the Western takes a weird turn at the end as well. Then there’s Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal . . .

I have to admit I don’t know anything about these characters. As I understand it they were the basic comic odd couple, with Ziggy being the smarter one and Silly being the unbeatable goofball. I doubt they were as grown-up as they are here, however, as Silly has become a celebrity while Ziggy is stuck renting prostitutes and throwing up all over his flophouse apartment. Finding out that Silly has put him in his will, Ziggy travels with him to Latveria, home of Doctor Doom, in the hope that the Doctor will kill Silly for being a friend of the Fantastic Four. But that’s not how things work out.

Deadpool has a cameo here and that feels right because the humour is pretty adult and meta. Very Howard the Duck, if you remember that. Again it seems as though this material can’t be done straight today so there have to be layers of irony. At one point the co-writer, Frank Tieri, even puts in an appearance at a back-alley comic-con.

All of this goes down easy, but it’s still worth noting what sort of an homage this is. The genres really aren’t timeless, and these tales are very much of our time.

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Daredevil: Supersonic

This volume is the sequel to Chinatown. Chinatown was so called because it was set in Chinatown. I’m not sure why this one is called Supersonic. It consists of three stories and the third one has Ulysses Klaw as a giant “kinetic living audio wave” so maybe that was it.

Charles Soule is the writer in charge again, though each of the three stories has a different artist. The last is illustrated by Vanessa R. Del Rey, who I last encountered in The Empty Man, where I said her drawing style was not my thing. I didn’t think it worked any better here. Her art just puts me off.

I didn’t care for the stories much either. The first has Daredevil battling Elektra, because she’s been brainwashed into thinking she had a child that Daredevil abducted. Weird. And it doesn’t go anywhere because her brainwashing is fixed and she just leaves at the end to find out who did it to her, and why.

The second story starts off well, with Matt Murdock crashing a high-stakes poker tournament in Macau. He’s able to beat a telepath because the telepath’s ability to “see” the other players’ hands doesn’t work with Murdock because he’s blind. That said, Murdock’s strategy of just going off of other players’ cues while not knowing any of the cards he’s holding himself doesn’t strike me as a likely winner. In any event, it turns out what he’s really after is a briefcase full of valuable information that he teams up with Spider-Man to steal. Again though I felt like things ended abruptly, leaving me wondering what the point was. Daredevil mentions how everyone has lost their memory of his secret identity but doesn’t say how it happened (you’ll have to wait for an explanation of that). Then Spidey warns him about going through a “black-costume phase” (like Spider-Man did), but even though Daredevil’s uniform has changed I haven’t got the sense that Soule was changing the character much. This isn’t dark Daredevil, or even dark-er.

Finally, the third story has Klaw turning New York into a city of sonic zombies. Daredevil and Echo (who is deaf) team up to stop him. And finally there’s a coda with long-time adversary the Gladiator descending deeper into criminal psychopathy.

I didn’t like any of this as much as I liked the Chinatown storyline. Blindspot shows up briefly in the fight with Elektra before being disabled. I like how Daredevil tries to protect him, recognizing when a challenge is out of his league. As happened when fighting the Hand in Chinatown. Overall I thought there were some good ideas here that just needed more development. The emphasis on action over plot is something I’m usually OK with in a superhero comic, but in this case I thought Soule was just coming up with hooks or concepts and not turning them into stories with any legs.

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Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice

This is the first volume in the award-winning Chew series, written by John Layman and illustrated by Rob Guillory. And you could tell right away it was going to be great.

Why? I’d start with the terrific world-building. We’re in a world sort of like our own but with a slightly off-kilter history. Sometime previous to the action described, the world has suffered through an outbreak of what authorities determine was an avian flu, though some suspect that calling it bird flu was part of a cover-up for something more nefarious. In any event, tens of millions of people died and one of the results is that chicken is now a black-market menu item while the rest of us have to make do with synthetic substitutes like Poult-free and Chickyn. In the U.S. one of the most powerful government organizations now is the F.D.A., which still stands for the Food and Drug Administration. One of their top agents, Mason Savoy, is what’s known as a cibopath: someone who can, just from tasting food, be given a vision of its entire prehistory. Example: take a bite of an apple and know what tree it came from, what pesticides were used on it, and when it was picked.

And with a bite out of a corpse, a cibopath can tell how said corpse met its end.

There aren’t many cibopaths. One day Tony Chu, also a cibopath, is enlisted by Savoy into the F.D.A. and together they go on various adventures fighting secret gangs and investigating other mysteries. Tony also falls in love with Amelia Mintz, who is a food columnist and also a saboscrivner, which means she can describe food so accurately that her readers have the actual sensation of tasting the meals she writes about. As with Tony’s cibopathic abilities, this is a kind of superpower in the Chewiverse.

It’s nutty, very gross, and lots of fun. The best thing about it though is Guillory’s art, which is a buffet of caricature figures (Savoy’s tank-like torso and spindle legs being the prime example) and bone-crushing action. I actually slowed down to enjoy the different elements in the many fight scenes, they were so good. Guillory’s art is the perfect complement to the weird world Layman conjured, and had me feeling both full at the end and looking forward to more.

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Marvel Zombies 3

Fresh meat. Meaning a new writer (Fred Van Lente) and artist (Kev Walker). And I was looking forward to a change in the storyline, since (as I’ve previously noted) I wasn’t that thrilled by Robert Kirkman’s first two volumes. I found Walker’s art nearly indistinguishable from that of Sean Phillips so didn’t register any change on that account.

And . . . Van Lente really came through. The story here is tight, not at all like Kirkman’s sprawling and confused cosmic zombie epic. If you want you could see some continuity with the previous books, but basically this is a standalone. There’s a zombie universe in play, meaning one that has been taken over by zombies. Unfortunately, since the zombies have finished eating everything they’re now looking for new worlds to colonize/devour, or whole new universes where they can spread what they’ve taken to calling the “Hunger Gospel.” Which would be the zombie virus. Same thing.

Zombie Kingpin is top dog in this zombie dimension, but he has lots of flunkies. Among them is zombie Doctor Strange, who can cast a portal to other locations in the multiverse. This, in turn, lets zombie Morbius and zombie Deadpool infiltrate a secret inter-dimensional facility that exists in our world.

To what end? Well, the zombies have a wicked plan cooked up whereby they will pretend to inoculate all of our superheroes against the zombie virus while really infecting them with the same, which will then make us easier to take over. Man, that’s what I call dirty pool. Not to mention a storyline that feeds into every anti-vaxxer’s favourite conspiracy theory.

Trying to stop them are Machine Man and Jocasta, who have to visit the zombie universe and then make it back. To be honest, if Jocasta did anything on this mission I’m not sure what it was. But Machine Man really kicks ass. He’s a one-man zombie Armageddon. But will that be enough?

As things got started I was wondering if I was going to be able to get into it. Once again, things are very dark. Dark in a way that deadens the wisecracking and attempts at humour. I get the gore, and the fact that zombies do eat people. But Van Lente continues with Kirkman’s thing for heroes being tied up and then cannibalized, which reminds me of the people kept in the basement of the house in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Here they even have a clone farm in the zombie universe to keep the hungry dead fed on vat-grown meat. And even heroes who aren’t as good to eat are also kept vaguely alive, if you can call Morbius or Vision alive, just so that they can be tortured. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why else Morbius and Vision were being kept around, except to add to the whole theatre-of-cruelty effect that’s going on.

If you can handle all that, the story itself is pretty compelling and I read the whole book in a rush. It really helps that things are more streamlined than in Kirkman’s comics, as the action is a lot easier to follow. Given how fast things move, this was a big plus. Throw in some fun stuff like zombie Captain Mexica (a Mexican Captain America preserved from an alternate timeline where the Aztec empire never fell), a bonus section of the usual parody covers (not just of famous comics but of movie posters too), and a relatively happy ending, and I ended up having a good time. In my opinion it was the best Marvel Zombies book yet, and had me finally looking forward to what’s next on the menu.

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Titans: The Lazarus Contract

If you’ve been following along you’ll remember that I’ve taken note of the presence of Deathstroke lurking in the shadows of the previous two Titans books I’ve reviewed (The Return of Wally West and Made in Manhattan). I’d started in on Titans Volume 3 when I found a reference to the team’s battle with Deathstroke in the past tense. Had I missed something?

Turns out I had. But I picked up a big pile of these comics for a dollar each from the library’s overstock sale so I had the missing piece, which is this book. It didn’t have a number because it was part of what’s known as a “crossover event” involving a bunch of different titles, in this case Titans, Teen Titans, and Deathstroke.

This led me to the next question: Was all the build-up worth it?

No.

Basically what you need to know here is that one of Deathstroke’s kids, Grant Wilson, was recruited by H.I.V.E. (ahem: the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination), who gave him a serum that turned him into the supervillain Ravager but that ultimately brought caused him to have a heart attack while fighting the Teen Titans. Deathstroke sort of blames Grant’s death on the Titans, and decides he’ll use the Flashes’ (Flash and Kid Flash’s) ability to enter into the time force to go back into the past and save his son’s life. Since everyone knows disruptions in the space-time continuum always go wrong, the Titans and Teen Titans team up to stop Deathstroke. This they manage to do and Deathstroke, more disappointed than angry, decides to “retire” by setting up a new team of hero/villains composed of his other kids.

I don’t like most time-travel stories. This one doesn’t work for all the usual reasons. I particularly didn’t care for the blather trying to explain the mechanics of time travel. You see, Deathstroke modified an extractor made by someone for Flash to keep his speed power under control. Deathstroke uses this device to store that energy in battery cells connected to his fancy new “Ikon suit” (complete with lightning bolts!) that has a “gravity sheath” that allows him to move at near-light speed and enter the “time stream.” Then, when the Titans and Teen Titans want to follow Deathstroke they mimic his combination of Kid Flash’s super-speed and the gravitational properties of his costume by joining Jericho’s gravity sheath with Flash’s speed to create a “time vortex” stabilized by Raven’s “chrono-kinesis” and Starfire’s energy, all while being tethered by Raven’s mind-meld to the rest of the team as Flash goes running into the speed force, at least until Raven’s “vast mystical powers” begin to fray and her soul-self is in danger of being trapped in the “speed force,” which is where Deathstroke has looked into the face of God and achieved a higher consciousness.

Enough already. I lost interest in all of this long before the end. It all just seemed like a bunch of sparks and noise, with too many characters involved and not much for most of them to do but stand around barking at each other. Not that I knew who a lot of these people were anyway, or cared. I do know Deathstroke and have found him an interesting character in the past, but he’s a lot less so here, especially when he starts spouting scripture (a lot of scripture) in the epilogue. I think maybe there are fans who like this kind of story but it wasn’t my thing and by the time I finished I was glad that I was done with it, and nearly done with my Titans book haul.

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The MAD Book of Mysteries

Since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction, a book like this couldn’t really miss. I also like that it’s full of original stories and not a grab-bag of previously published material, and that all the stories have the same author and artist (Lou Silverstone and Jack Rickard, respectively).

So the line-up of crime-solving all-stars here sounds like the cast of Murder by Death. There’s Hercules Pirouette, Archer Spillane Spayed, Shtick Tracer, Allergy Queen, Charlie China, Perry Maceface, and Shamus Holmes. And there’s also a spoof on G-Men movies now and then, a quick trip to Peanuts-land with Chuck Frown, Private Eye, and a bunch of gags about what cops say vs. what they really mean. Alas, there’s no Nero Wolfe or Miss Marple, though they’re on the back cover. I would have loved seeing them.

The gags aren’t terribly funny but Silverstone knows his stuff and the way he pokes fun at the material will make you smile. He takes digs at Poirot’s long, drawn-out and confusing explanations of the crime, and has Number One Son getting back at his dad for all the mean cracks made at his expense. But the style of humour is mainly geared around running a gag-a-page of snappy comebacks. When Shamus Holmes declares that a murder victim lived near a canal Dr. Whatso says “A canal? That’s eerie, Homes.” To which Holmes replies: “No, alimentary, my dear Whatso!” Because the deceased worked at a candy company you see.

Rickard often gives the supporting characters familiar movie-star faces. James Cagney and Robert Redford, for example, as their era’s representative G-Men. I loved the look of all the stories, though MAD‘s house style of square speech bubbles and sans serif lettering seemed out of place. I don’t know why they couldn’t have played around with that more. Lettering matters.

What I took away the most from revisiting this pocketbook today though is how much the cultural landscape has changed. In the late ‘70s-early ‘80s classic detective fiction could be sent up for a mass audience, here or in the aforementioned Murder by Death, because it could be assumed everyone had some familiarity with these characters. Today I think that kind of awareness belongs to a vanishing few older readers. To be sure, golden age detectives still have their cults, but they aren’t household names anymore. And what’s more, nobody has taken their place. Caricature exploits character, and the old guard had plenty of that. But how can you caricature Inspectors Morse, Rebus, or Gamache? They’re more realistic and psychologically grounded but not as memorable, and give satirists a lot less to work with.

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Aliens: Dead Orbit

Dead Orbit is a one-man show, being written, drawn, and lettered by Canadian comic artist James Stokoe. It’s impressive when someone can handle all these roles as a comic auteur, but there are times when you think a division of labour might have helped. That’s the feeling I had here anyway. I love Stokoe’s art, which turns a space station into a giant, crumbling oatmeal cookie and sees Xenomorphs hiding in the wicker nests of wiring and machinery. I also liked the visual concept he had of turning the impregnated survivors who are “rescued” being burned to a crisp in their cryo pods so that it looks like rotting zombies are giving birth to chestbursters. That was a great touch, typical of the inventiveness found throughout this comic franchise.

The story, however, is hard to follow. I wasn’t sure of the time scheme, as most of the story is a flashback, but I don’t know how much because within the flashback there are a couple of flashforwards, though not as far forward as the story’s frame. This lost me completely the first time through because I got confused as to when Wascylewski was cocooned by the Xenomorphs. And what happened to the salvagers anyway? It seemed like that might be important, and then it wasn’t.

Things were just moving too fast. At one point there’s even a joke made about how quickly the creatures are growing, which is a poke at Alien that is often picked up on. The point remains however that everything here seems to happen in a rush and even at the end I was still wondering a bit about what was going on and in what order.

The supplemental materials describe Stukoe’s original pitch, which was a much more conventional Aliens story featuring space marines infiltrating a planet infested with Xenomorphs. But at some point he decided to go in a different direction, and this is definitely more like the first film than the second. The crew don’t even have any firearms and have to improvise with whatever tools they can find on the ship. Good luck with that!

Perhaps a little too scrambled in terms of its narrative for its own good, this is still another solid instalment in the Aliens franchise, and not to be missed by franchise fans.

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Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

A mangaka is a comic artist who writes and/or illustrates manga. Demon Slayer’s mangaka goes by the name of Koyoharu Gotouge, which is a pseudonym. His self-portrait or avatar in the comics is an alligator that wears glasses.

I only mention this because Gotouge is both author and artist for Demon Slayer, which I don’t think is the norm. Even though manga is a more conventionalized artistic style than its form of storytelling. You can even buy books on “how to draw manga.” Meaning how to draw comics that look like every other manga comic. Anyway, what led me to bother pointing this out is that my response to this second volume of Demon Slayer has split into a good-bad dichotomy and Gotouge is responsible for both.

I like the story. Toshiro is still a young man on a mission to save his sister Nezuko from her infection with the demon virus. This leads him to fight a series of demons, beginning with the sad, fat demon he was in the middle of fighting in the previous volume, and a trio of demons who have been terrorizing Tokyo. This is all standard stuff, but there are some interesting twists, like the way the trio of demons keep popping in and out of a transdimensional bog. As he slices and dices his way through these bad guys Toshiro finds out the name of the chief demon, the one he has to locate if he wants to save his sister. This is some dude-ish fellow named Muzan Kibutsuji. When Toshiro finds Kibutsuji he’s disguised as a family man with a hip-cat sense of style. He sort of looks like a 1930s American gangster. Toshiro confronts him at one point, but Kibutsuji has a legion of demon obstacles to throw in his way. None of that is going to stop Toshiro’s commitment though. As he bracingly declares at one point: “I’ll follow you to the depths of hell and your neck will feel the edge of my sword!”

This all seemed good, or at least acceptable to me, and I managed (just) to keep up with all the new rules regarding demons and how to fight them that were being tossed out. I only wondered at why Toshiro had to fight the trio of demons with the box he’s using to transport Nezuko still strapped to his back. That was ridiculous.

But then there’s the art. I don’t like the way this comic is drawn. The action has already become repetitive and is confusing to boot. Unless you already know what the Seventh Form Drop Ripple Thrust-Curve is and can see that movement happening. In quite a few places the drawing seemed almost like rough preliminary sketches and I don’t know what Gotouge was doing with the eyes of some of the characters. I don’t think it was just the demons who had bug eyes, and even if it was I thought it looked bad.

Will I read any more of these? At this point I’m not sure. Looking ahead, I know that the series goes on forever. And while I liked the story well enough it’s not a comic I enjoy looking at. So I think I’ll take a bit of a break anyway before I continue.

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