Comic Picks By The Glick

(No, this isn’t the start of a new trend.  This is what happens when I forgot to put the post I banked for Sunday up on Sunday.  Uh, in case anyone was wondering.)

In his afterword, artist Scott Wegener describes this latest “Atomic Robo” miniseries as an answer to the question of “What would it be like if the ‘Jason Bourne’ and ‘Pacific Rim’ franchises did a crossover?”  I think he’s greatly overstating the presence of the “Bourne” franchise in this equation as a better description of this series would simply be “Atomic Robo” does “Pacific Rim.”  Shaking off the middling diversion that was the previous miniseries in short order, “Ring of Fire” finds Task Force Ultra -- the organization that was formed by Majestic 12 after they seized Tesladyne in vol. 8 -- having to deal with a worldwide outbreak of Biomega (read:  Kaiju).  Even with all of the resources at their disposal, they still find themselves behind the proverbial eightball against this threat as they desperately try to get enough Titan mechs and pilots ready to combat this menace.

It’s hard to feel too sorry for Ultra, though, as they’re still painted as the bad guys in this situation despite their intentions.  Ultra is still on the lookout for the members of Tesladyne who escaped their takeover, and it’s this motley group -- Bernard, Lang, Vik, Foley the intern, and more -- that has to find a way to bring Robo back (which is easy) and find a solution to the Biomega crisis (difficult enough to make up for the ease of bringing Robo back).

If you can get past how much this particular story pays homage to “Pacific Rim” then you’ll be in for a good time.  The action and pace are frantic but never exhausting, the science talk only adds to the drama, most of the jokes hit, and the end result is that “Ring of Fire” feels like a welcome return to form after what we got in vol. 9.  While Brian Clevinger’s writing is mostly spot-on, this his really Wegener’s show as he gets to come up with lots of dynamic Biomega and Titan designs and then have them fight each other with the kind of energy I normally expect to see from the likes of Stuart Immonen.  Even if the end of the volume shows that someday we’ll have to stage an intervention regarding the “But it’s not quite over…” endings Clevinger serves up, what we get here makes me excited to read “Atomic Robo” again.

The previous volumes of this series have carried an albatross around their metaphorical necks.  (It’s a reference, not a weird sex thing.  Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was turned into a weird sex thing given how this title rolls.)  An albatross by the name of Myrtle “Kegelface” Spurge.  It’s understandable that series called “Sex Criminals” would have a kind of “Sex Cop” as its main antagonist, but she goes about her business in a way that feels counterproductive, unfair, and more than a little vindictive.  I have an immense dislike for the character, is what I’m saying here.  So I was surprised to see that writer Matt Fraction managed to humanize even a little bit in this volume.

I thought I knew who the antagonists were in this series going into this volume.  You have Silver Mask, now revealed as Hilmes -- son of the murdered King Osores, who was the secret power behind Lusitania’s invasion of Ecbatana and has a serious mad-on for its King Andragoras and (by extension) Arslan.  Yet Andragoras isn’t on the side of the angels either, as he was the murderer of Osores, and his parenting skills are right up there with Gendo Ikari’s.  There’s also Innocentis, the king of Lusitania whose girth is exceeded only by his foolishness.  A recent arrival to the cast is Duke Guiscard of Lusitania whose association should mark him as one of the bad guys, but whose cunning and pragmatism make it hard for me to find any reason to dislike him.

As it turns out, the real antagonists here are outright villains -- the fanatical followers of Yaldabaoth, Lusitania’s religion of choice.  One of them, Bodin the priest, has been kind of a background character in the previous volumes sporting the wide-eyed look of a crazed zealot who enjoys nothing more than throwing infidels on a pyre.  He gets a more prominent role after a fellow high-ranking member of his faith is murdered under mysterious circumstances and then demands that 10,000 infidels be slain as recompense.  While this leads to some marvelous trolling on Guiscard’s part, it stops being a laughing matter when the Yaldabaoth Templars arrive in town.  This group slaughtered 250,000 men, women, and children in their last campaign and they are determined to have the king see the rightness of their ways once again.

Bodin’s zealotry may come off as some over-the-top villainy, but it’s not hard to see how his kind of thinking would mellow out over a thousand years to the kind of religious partisanship we see in this country today.  But that’s just my opinion.  It does make me eager to see how the title character and his group will deal with these characters when they face off against them, even if it seems likely that they’ll be dispatched swiftly and decisively.  You see, even if these fanatics of Yaldabaoth make for good bad guys, their one-sided villainy is out of place in a work from Hiromu Arakawa.  It’s all just shades of gray as she showed us in “Fullmetal Alchemist,” though humanizing these crazies is probably too much to ask even from a mangaka of her skill.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Garth Ennis won’t be able to write comics about all of the stories to be told in WWII.  He continues to give it his best try in the two arcs in this volume that detail some drastically different experiences in the European and Pacific Theaters.  “Our Wild Geese Go” has the writer showing us what it was like for Irishmen who technically deserted their army to go fight in the war.  While the Nazis are still the bad guys here, the scars left by Ireland’s bloody history of nationalism threaten to undo the unity of one particular squad.  “The Tokyo Club” is an exclusive one with some very specific requirements:  First, you have to fly escort to bombers headed to Tokyo from Iwo Jima.  Next, you have to make it back to base alive.  Then, you do it all over again in another day or two.  Neither story is particularly exceptional by Ennis’ accomplished work in the war story genre.  However, they do benefit from his standard attention to detail in recounting these specific experiences and characterization that helps put faces on them.

Where they’re let down, in part, is in the art from Tomas Aira.  I didn’t say much about his work in the previous volume because he handled the tank combat action well and was dealing with a relatively small cast in both of the stories he illustrated.  Aira is still good with the action and the scenes that have the Irish infantrymen under fire and the pilots braving the skies to Tokyo are the most striking in the book.  The problem is that his characters tend to have a generic look about them and it becomes difficult to tell the supporting cast apart after a while.  It’s kind of a problem in the first story, and a bigger one in the second with its expanded cast.  Maybe the monthly grind was getting to Aira at this point, but I found myself wishing for someone like Steve Dillon to come over and show us how to distinguish a roster like this.  The first two volumes of Ennis’ “War Stories” at Vertigo boasted an impressive roster of artists in their pages.  I’d say it’s time to take a cue from that format and bring in a new artist with each arc.  It couldn’t hurt to give Aira some time off so he can show us what he can do when he’s not delivering a book a month.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

I’m taking a break from talking about manga on this Monday since it’s July 4th and I’ve had this in my “to review” pile for well over a month now.  Brian Wood’s first creator-owned series for Dark Horse had its problems, but still managed to run for thirty issues.  “Rebels” is his ground-level look at the people who fought in the Revolutionary War and it lasted for all of ten issues.  I would’ve liked to have seen it last longer because it’s main story, about the exploits of taciturn rebel Seth Abbott, is pretty entertaining.  After a brief look at his childhood growing up with a hardassed father, we see Seth jumping into the thick of the revolutionary spirit fighting against land-stealing Redcoats, sinking a British granite transport, and overseeing the hauling of cannon several hundred miles overland during the winter.  It’s good high adventure, but Wood also infuses every step of Seth’s journey with the politics and upbringing that inform his present-day decisions.  Which don’t always turn out to be the right ones, as his wife will attest to.  Seth emerges as a character worth following through the war, and Andrea Mutti’s detailed, gritty pencils represent the period and the character’s journey well.

It would’ve been nice if the ten issues in this collection had been given over entirely to Seth’s journey.  There’s some awkwardness as the story jumps forward seven years between the first and last issues to show us the beginning of his adjustment to the post-war era.  I was involved enough in Seth’s journey that I wish Wood had focused entirely on it in in these ten issues.  Instead, we also get other stories of uneven quality about other people contributing to the revolution in their own ways.  The story about Sarah Hull, who fought on the field at the Battle of Bemis Heights, is quite good with its focus on the role of women in the military still feeling relevant today.  As for the others, stories of a rebellious poster-printer, Seth’s encounter with a former slave, a Native American who has loyalties to his people and the local militia, and a British citizen who chose to sign up for the regiments rather than go to prison, they really needed more space to reach their full potential.  Especially the last one.

Better to have given the space to fleshing out Seth’s story in greater detail is how I felt about them in the end.  As it is, “Rebels” is an interesting look into an era that doesn’t often get any significant focus in comics.  It’s also one whose potential was not, and will likely not ever be, fully realized.

When it comes to raising the stakes in superhero comics, Jonathan Hickman took things about as far as you can go with his runs on “Avengers” and “New Avengers.”  The fate of the world wasn’t at stake in those titles, it was the fate of the entire multiverse.  Whoever was going to follow in his footsteps on those titles was going to have to make a choice:  go bigger, go smaller, or go different.  Mark Waid and Al Ewing are writers smart enough to know that going bigger was not the smart option here (if that would even be possible).  Waid, with his history in character-driven superheroics on “The Flash” and “Daredevil,” went with the “go smaller” option on “All-New All-Different Avengers vol. 1:  The Magnificent Seven,” as most of the drama comes from how his eclectic team tries to get along with each other.  Meanwhile over in “New Avengers:  A.I.M. vol. 1 -- Everything is New,” Ewing is picking up on one of the threads from Hickman’s run after Roberto “Sunspot” DaCosta bought out the terrorist group Advanced Idea Mechanics and re-branded it Avengers Idea Mechanics.  He’s “going different” as this team is facing off against transformed crystal-headed citizens of Paris that are acting as a phone to the afterlife and a cthonic wizard of the fifth cosmos.

“The Wicked + The Divine” is pulling a fast one this month and is publishing a one-shot, “1831,” that won’t be included in vol. 4.  Which is also featured in these solicitations.  In the past, I’d have to see about picking up this issue at a convention or a trip to a comic shop.  Now that I’ve gone and embraced digital, I can just download this from comiXology for $4 when it comes out.  Or wait for it to be featured in another Image or Gillen/McKelvie sale on the site.  Or wait and see if it’s collected in vol. 5.  Or wait and see if they do more of these and collect them all in a separate volume.  A real set of first-world conundrums if there ever was one.

As for the issue itself, it takes place in the late 19th century where a group of Romantic poets gathered in a mansion one night on Lake Geneva.  Because I’ve read “The Unwritten,” I can guess with a fair amount of certainty that this was the night when Mary Shelley came up with the idea for “Frankenstein.”  How this connects to the recurrence of the Godhead -- if this story even takes place during one of their times on Earth -- I cannot fathom.  Given that it’s coming from Gillen, with art from Stephanie Hans, I’d certainly bet on it being good and clever.

Okay, I guess?  There’s nothing to get me excited like I was for their announcement of “I Am A Hero” last year, but I’ll be buying two of the three titles they announced at their Anime Expo panel earlier today.  The full list is:  Hatsune Miku:  Rin-chan Now!, Neon Genesis Evangelion:  Legend of the Piko-Piko Middle School Students, and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories.  If you’ve been following my writing here long enough, you’ve probably already guessed that I’ll be passing on the “Rin-chan Now!” manga as I just can’t bring myself to get interested in anything Vocaloid-related.  I also don’t think we need any more “Evangelion” manga, but I will be picking up this one as it’s by the same writer/artist team that gave us the “Neon Genesis Revolutionary Legend Evangelion” strips from the “Comic Tribute.”  Like Tony Takezaki’s contributions to that anthology, I was left wanting to see more from the creators who served up some very funny parodies.  “Piko-Piko” is a multi-volume series, however, so let’s hope that its creators can hit the same madcap heights as their short manga.

“The Hound and Other Stories” is a bit more interesting to consider.  Prose-to-comic adaptations have been the kind of mixed bag you’d expect from them:  Some have been terrible, most have been unexception, and a few have been really great.  One of these is I.N.J. Culbard’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.”  I enjoyed it even though I haven’t read the original story, and a friend of mine who has was also impressed by this take on it.  I’m not familiar with the mangaka, Gou Tanabe, adapting these stories.  A quick search for him on Google does reveal him to have an impressively gothic style that should work well here.

This doesn’t sound bad.  Like the other two, it comes off as something of a “safe” pick.  As if someone at Dark Horse went, “Hey, someone’s doing a manga adaptation of a few Lovecraft stories.  Not only do we have a long history of publishing horror comics at this company, but there’s a decent cross-section of anime/manga/Lovecraft fans out there so this might actually be profitable.”  That’s actually a good reason to pick this up from a publishing standpoint.  But dammit!  I wanted to hear that they’d picked up another wholly original manga title this year!  All these announcements say is that in addition to media tie-ins of dubious quality, you can also expect Dark Horse to publish manga that reside in the cross-sections of certain groups of fandom.  Even if I will be picking up the new “Evangelion” and Lovecraft mangas, these announcements don’t really fill me with excitement or hope for the future of manga at this company.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com