Comic Picks By The Glick

Above-the-Board Recommendation:

Sex vol. 6:  World Hunger:  Hey everyone, more “Sex!”  There’s been a lack of new “Sex” in the marketplace for a while so getting some new “Sex” is great news!  Best of all is that “Sex’s” return is going to be bigger and thicker than before! Better catch up on all the old “Sex” that’s out there because you’ll want to be ready for this new “Sex” that’s coming your way in April.

Did I recommend this latest volume of “Sex” just to write that paragraph?  Yes. Yes I did. Joe Casey and Piotr Kowalski’s series about a retired superhero (who was totally not Batman) who tries to find fulfillment in living a normal life has always been one that I’ve appreciated more in what it’s trying to be than what it actually is.  Whatever appreciation I had for it diminished after it looked like we were going to be left hanging after vol. 5, but it’s good to see Casey and Kowalski making an effort here to finish things off. I don’t think this is going to be the last volume of the series, but I’ll be picking it up anyway to complete the “Sex” in my life.

Above-the-Board Recommendation:

Cover vol. 1 & Pearl vol. 1:  The former is about a comic book creator who is recruited to be an undercover operative by the CIA.  The latter is about a tattoo artist who is also a Yakuza assassin. Linking the both together is the fact that they’re both written by Brian Michael Bendis.  The writer has shown, much to my surprise, that he’s actually committed to putting out his creator-owned work on a regular basis with his move to DC. While it’s nice to have continuations of long-dormant series like “Scarlet” and “The United States of Murder Inc.,” “Cover” and “Pearl” are notable for being all-new titles making their debut through DC.  They’ve also got a strong artistic pedigree with David Mack illustrating “Cover” and Bendis’ “Jessica Jones” collaborator Michael Gaydos handling “Pearl.” I’ve gone on about the writer’s uneven output during his latter years at Marvel, but the move to DC appears to have reinvigorated him and I want to see if that carries over to the quality of his creator-owned work in addition to its quantity.

Featuring criminals, lovers, madmen, graphic violence, clever plans, and laugh-out-loud moments throughout the list, and all together in the year's best read.

When we left off with the main characters of this series, things had become really weird even by its standards.  Having Hideo partially swallowed by a mutant ZDQ creature and not be digested was strange.  Finding out that his current situation not only allowed him to exert some mental control over the creature, but to link with the other Kurusu-type characters we’ve seen so far sounds just plain crazy.  It’s not, because the series has long hinted at the fact that all of the ZDQs are connected in some way and Hideo’s interactions with the other Kurusus is just one way of visualizing it. We see this done another way late in the volume as a little girl in Italy winds up finding shelter with a group of people who have managed to avoid becoming infected in the midst of an outbreak.  One of the group even has some very interesting ideas about how this situation came about as there might actually be more direction to it than it seems. Oh, and that the Kurusu-types may not be part of the plan but their own special kind of chaos.

All of this is good since it shows that there’s a method to the madness that mangaka Kengo Hanazawa has been serving up to this point.  There might even be some satisfying payoff to it by the end of the series, meaning that “I Am A Hero” won’t have to just get by on our investment in the plight of Hideo, Hiromi, and Oda.  It’s an investment which is severely tested here as things take a bad turn in the middle portion of the volume. After Hiromi and Oda go out on a scavenging run and reveal certain issues they have with each other, the former nurse gets some bad news that threatens to split her off from the group.  What news could be so bad that it would cause Oda to strike out on her own in the middle of the apocalypse? Something pretty understandable, to be honest, and the rest of the volume deals with Hideo and Hiromi coming to grips with the fallout of her actions. It’s something which is realized pretty convincingly and balances nicely against the insanity bookending this volume.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Brian Wood has turned out some good work on licensed titles, including “Star Wars,” “Conan,” and “Aliens,” over at Dark Horse, so checking out his take on “Robocop” from BOOM! was a no-brainer for me.  “Citizen’s Arrest” takes place thirty years after the events of the first movie with a resurgent Omni Consumer Products that has taken over all public services in Detroit.  Chief among these is the new R/Cop app which allows citizens to report crimes and get rewarded for it. The app is enforced by OCP’s automated police force one which the original Robocop, Alex Murphy, is not a part of.  They overwrote his programming to send him into forced retirement leaving him to haunt the run-down suburb where he lives like a mechanical ghost. That changes when former cop Leo Reza tries to look him up and enlist his help against the ruthless gentrification efforts of OCP.

There are parts of this story that work just fine.  The opening issue does a good job establishing the current state of affairs, with the application of the R/Cop app coming off more believable than it should, and makes Leo a sympathetic co-protagonist.  Then things slowly start to spiral off the rails. OCP’s logic for leaving Robocop active comes off as laughably foolish even by standards of corporate arrogance. The late-game effort to give the title character a partner of sorts and it comes off as far too rushed for it to have the emotional impact it should.  Most annoying are the constant in-story cutaways to the media’s talking heads who offer blithely ignorant commentary on the events of the plot. This is a direct callback to the biting satire of the first film, but it only distracts from the story here due to the frequency of said cutaways. Not helping any of this is the fairly bland art from Jorge Coelho.  “Citizen’s Arrest” had promise at the start and some bits that occasionally work, yet it just winds up being kind of a mess in the end.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

While this series hasn’t been on the level of writer Brian K. Vaughan’s best work, this penultimate volume actually puts it in a good place ahead of its finale.  The girls, along with along with the Future Tiffany they picked up in the previous volume, have landed in the far future of 2171 and are on the hunt for some answers as to how to get home.  So naturally they head to the local library to get some, and maybe find out if this future has a cure for the cancer that’s going to kill Mackenzie.  The problem is that, as a result of the events of the previous volume, they’ve landed on the radar of one Jahpo Thapa who runs the organization which polices the streets and the timestream known as the Watch.  He’s been waiting a long time to get these girls to answer for what they’ve done. It just so happens that if he doesn’t it might mean the end of the world for everyone involved.

“Paper Girls” has always felt like Vaughan’s attempt to engineer his own kind of “puzzle box” story.  Where all sorts of questions are set up from the start and you’ve just got to have some kind of faith in the writer that all this is going to make sense in the end.  The good news is that it looks like that might actually happen after what we learn in this volume. Through the magic and convolutions of time-travel we actually learn what Jahpo was up to in the first volume, and the stakes are clearly identified going forward from here.  Sustaining patience in Vaughan’s vision would’ve been easier if the four main leads had been more distinctive characters. I mention this because what should’ve been a revelatory moment between MacKenzie and KJ doesn’t come off that way. It feels more like they’re just succumbing to fate.  Still, the fact that everything looks to be coming together, and Cliff Chiang’s appealingly gonzo vision of the future, make this volume of the series the strongest one since its first.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

The solicitations for this latest “Black Hammer” spinoff miniseries made it seem like it was borrowing a lot from James Robinson et. al.’s  classic series “Starman.” Not only was this set to feature a character with “Star” in his name, but it was also set up to revolve around the kind of fractured father/son relationship which drove that series as well.  “Black Hammer’s” take on the history of comics can tread towards self-congratulatory navel-gazing at times and “Doctor Star” looked like it was going to cross right over that line. At least until I found out that the title character’s real name was James Robinson in the “Sherlock Frankenstein” series and I was hoping that creator/writer Jeff Lemire was aiming to inject some kind of metafictional take here.

That’s not the case as Lemire notes in the backmatter that Doctor Star’s real name is really just a nod to real “Starman” writer Robinson.  Paradoxically, this miniseries winds up being more disappointing for not being a riff on the relationship which drove “Starman.” No, “Lost Tomorrows” is a bog-standard story about a scientist who discovers a new source of power, uses it to become a superhero, and neglects his family life in the process.  Don’t expect any twists or surprises here, the story of Doctor Star’s life plays out with the same familiar beats of sadness and regret all these stories have.

Even if the miniseries is effectively hobbled by its strict adherence to storytelling convention, it’s at least supported by some noteworthy craft.  Lemire does manage to give the story an appropriately melancholy tone with a finale whose uplift feels appropriate and earned. I was also impressed by artist Max Fiumara’s work, as he’s come a long way from his work on “B.P.R.D.” and “Abe Sapien.”  He channels the superhero weirdness of the “Black Hammer” universe quite well and gets it to mix seamlessly with the more grounded human concerns at the heart of the story. Dave Stewart’s colors help here as well, giving the flashbacks a brighter look compared to the grays of the present day.  All the creators involved with this story are doing good work here, it’s just too bad that they’re not doing it in the service of a more interesting story.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

As the penultimate volume in this series, vol. 8 certainly reads like one that’s getting everything set up for the big finale.  It begins some time after the cataclysmic events of vol. 7 with Grant and his (ex)wife Sara having jumped to a dimension that has dedicated itself to looking after people like them.  By that I mean other Grants and other Saras. It turns out that the Grants and Saras like them, who have lost their Nates and Pias to something they term the Neververse, are causing irreparable harm to the Eververse in their quests to get their kids back.  The solution: Multiversal therapy to help the former couple come to peace with who they are and their current lot in life.

There’s a surprising amount of uplift in the first two issues of this volume as we get to see the form the therapy takes and its effect on Grant and Sara.  It’s actually kind of nice when compared against the rest of the series, which has usually been about when things will go wrong and how bad they’ll get. Naturally this doesn’t last as the worst-case scenario of the series -- it involves an anti-matter dimension -- comes to pass, which leads Grant and Sara to make a last-ditch dive to the center of the Eververse to try and find out what has happened to their kids.

The answers they find there aren’t particularly satisfying for themselves or the reader.  Lots of comparisons are made between the center layer and “Heaven” which feels like a cheap shot at religion rather than something resembling insight.  It isn’t until the bait-and-switch moments of the last couple pages that “Black Science’s” greatest failing comes sharply into focus. It’ll always be a series that teases big changes and developments, but not one that actually has the balls to follow through on them.  It’s a realization which inspires little confidence that Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera will deliver a finale that will be anything resembling worthwhile.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

(I’d like to be wrong about that last sentence, but…)