Comic Picks By The Glick

While much of “Batman #50” have largely remained unspoiled for me, two details have emerged regarding it.  The most relevant one to this volume being that Batman and Catwoman did not wind up getting married. Which is too bad for a couple of reasons.  The first being that I was already looking forward to writer Tom King giving us the Bat-divorce in issue #100 if his hundred-issue-run plan is fulfilled.  The other is that Batman and Catwoman actually do make for a very likeable couple and this volume represents our last chance to observe this before it disappears amidst all the wedding drama.

“Sherlock Frankenstein” is a great name.  It’s an unlikely mash-up of two of the most famous characters in fiction that grabs your attention right away with its promise of weirdness and horror tempered by rationality.  He’s also a character who fits perfectly within the superhero pastiche of the “Black Hammer” world, of which this is a spin-off miniseries to. While adding “and the Legion of Evil” to his name only makes this miniseries sound that much more promising, it’s ultimately a misnomer.  As was the case with another Dark Horse miniseries I reviewed a couple weeks ago the real star here is someone who isn’t even mentioned in the title.

That would be Lucy Hammer, the daughter of the superhero known as Black Hammer.  She was very young when her father disappeared with the rest of the “Black Hammer” cast in the fight against the Anti-God.  Yet Lucy never gave up hope that her father was still out there somewhere and she still wants to solve that mystery as an adult.  After a former superhero gives Lucy her first major lead, the rookie journalist then works on getting her second by tracking down her father’s rogues gallery.  First on the list: Sherlock Frankenstein himself.

Working in this miniseries’ favor is how it fleshes out Lucy’s character as readers of the regular “Black Hammer” series know that she’s become a very important part of it.  We also get more fun riffs on established superhero conventions, as is the series stock-in-trade, with Cthu-Lou -- a plumber possessed by a Lovecraftian entity -- being the most memorable of the bunch.  Yet while the miniseries expands the world of the series, Sherlock Frankenstein is only a bit player in this story with his name at the top of it. Though writer Jeff Lemire is clearly having fun with all this, and the art from David Rubin is as amazing as you’d expect, I was left wishing I’d got an actual “Sherlock Frankenstein” miniseries.  One that details his longtime criminal history with its major shifts and dug into his romance with Golden Gail. These are the kind of things I was expecting to read about in a “Sherlock Frankenstein” miniseries, let alone one that also name-checks his “Legion of Evil,” and it’s immensely disappointing to realize that we’ll likely never find out more about them now.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

The slow-y burn-y approach of “Outcast” continues unabated in this volume as a major new character makes his debut.  Rowland Tusk has just moved to the town of Rome and is dealing with the usual headaches that such a thing entails.  A wife who has to deal with the unpacking, kids who are uneasy about going to a new school, and getting acquainted with the rhythms of small-town life.  Why has Tusk come to Rome? He’s the replacement for the late and unmourned Sidney, sent to make sure all of the possessed citizens are taken care of and that nothing gets in the way of the upcoming merge.  Top of his to-do list is finding the Outcast, Kyle Barnes who has gone to ground with his friends and family in the rural countryside. They’ve also been attracting a rather large congregation of refugees from the goings-on in Rome who they may wind up having to turn into an army sooner rather than later now that Tusk is coming for them.

Tusk makes a pretty great first impression as he’s shown to be a great dad who genuinely cares about his wife and kids.  Later in the day, after confronting one of his minions who has let an individual in the early stages of possession escape, he rips out the man’s tongue as punishment.  Charming and ruthless in equal measure and the parts of this volume that focus on him are the most engaging ones. It’s too bad that the end of this volume implies he’s about to be one-upped by someone even more sinister, but Kirkman clearly sees the finale of vol. 6 as a major raising of the stakes for the story.  In the nick of time too, if I’m being honest. The parts of the story focusing on Kyle and company really feel like they’re marking time waiting for the finale to set up a tense new status quo and some potential allies. So I’m left hoping that everything that this volume sets up results in vol. 7 finally (FINALLY) turns “Outcast” into a must-read series for me instead of one that’s only good enough to keep me reading.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

My thoughts on Matt Kindt's so-so follow up to "Mind MGMT."

What fresh hell awaits us in this volume?  Not much, all things considered. Compared to previous volumes where I was expecting “Murcielago” to stop trying to shock me, only to be proven wrong in unsettling and/or skin-crawling ways, this volume is relatively sedate.  A kid gets stabbed in the head, a woman gets part of her head chopped off -- these things are pretty much business as usual for this title. The most disturbing thing in this volume is seeing the abusive state of the lesbian high school couple from the previous volume and even that’s only for a couple pages.

If the paragraph above seems like I’m complaining about the lack of shocking content in this latest volume of “Murcielago” then you’re not wrong.  I’ve been waiting for the point when this series would settle down and start delivering some storytelling with more substance than it has shown up to this point.  Has vol. 7 finally delivered on this expectation? Not quite. After an opening chapter which features possibly the worst thing to happen to Kuroko so far in this series, the latest arc kicks into gear after a member of an extreme right-wing organization from decades ago escapes from prison.  He’s been planning this for a while and has managed to not only ring in a few killers to help him, but a chemical agent that can turn ordinary people into crazed psycho killers.

All of this is pretty standard-issue as far as storytelling goes for “Murcielago.”   Though the mastermind and his henchmen don’t really stand out compared to the other psychos that have graced its pages, the story itself moves along at a decent clip and without too much dumb to drag it down.  In particular, I liked how the chief of police was more on the ball than I expected him to be here and burly AF bartender/brawler Ran Sabiura looks like she’ll make a nice addition to the regular cast. Not a bad volume overall, even if the series still has yet to demonstrate that it has anything truly memorable to offer beyond its most envelope-pressing moments.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Wizord’s story takes a backseat in this volume so that writer Charles Soule and artist Ryan Browne can focus on two key members of the supporting cast:  Marsupial-loving Margaret and living, breathing French joke Jacques Zaques. The latter becomes less of a joke in this volume (well, insomuch as a Frenchman named Jacques Zaques can be) as he makes the best of his current situation in the Hole World.  That includes working with its magical overlord Sizzajee to find out what happened to his sons who were transported over there back in the first volume. To my surprise, Jacques’ quest wasn’t really played for laughs and the few that we got were mainly of the dark variety.  That’s actually a plus in my book since I wound up being able to take the Frenchman seriously as a character for the first time in this series. Jacques genuinely struggles to find out what has happened to his sons and the results were not what I was expecting. Granted, the character does get an extreme makeover at the end of the volume that wouldn’t be out of place in an Image comic from the 90’s, but after this volume I’m actually interested in seeing how his rematch with Wizord goes now that he’s got the juice to extract his vengeance.

Margaret, on the other hand, remains in our world for the entirety of this volume kept under lock and key by a couple of government agents.  Their goal is to extract all the information about Wizord they can from Margaret, who only tells them that they’ve signed their death warrants by kidnapping her.  Margaret’s story doesn’t carry the same emotional heft as Jacques’ (yes, really), but it at least makes some notable contributions to the overall story. We find out that this world also has its own magical people, though none of them can compete with a powered-up Wizord or Ruby Stitch, and one of them, a Tarot card reader named Candace, winds up becoming Margaret’s friend.  That relationship leads to some interesting developments by the end of the volume, including one that’s likely to cause some repercussions that will have to be dealt with in the next volume. Which is definitely still on my reading list after another satisfying volume like this one.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

It’s time for the culmination of long-running subplots once again.  Over in X-Men:  Blue it’s that title’s first go at it as we finally find out the full scope of the Mothervine business that Miss Sinister has been planning ever since the first volume.  X-Men:  Gold has already had one go at paying off on its subplots, which resulted in an awful fourth volume.  That one in turn set up the events of this one as Kitty and Colossus finally prepare to tie the knot, but not without some villainous complications first.  Which volume wins this round? The result surprised me. Mainly because I wound up changing my mind about the better volume on a re-read.

For those whose “X-Men” fandom can be traced back to following the comics in the 90’s (or watching the animated series from the same era) Rogue and Gambit’s relationship was arguably the defining romance of the time.  She was the strong-willed southern belle whose powers prevented anyone from touching her skin and he was the charming cajun rogue with a dark and mysterious past who was determined to win her over. That star-crossed relationship provided a lot of entertaining drama for a good many years before it started feeling played out and the two characters wound up interacting less and less in recent years.  I expected that Marvel’s latest effort to reignite their iconic pairing at this point would come off like another nostalgic cash-grab, but it’s honestly shocking to see how well writer Kelly Thompson and artist Ramon Perez manage to pull it off here.