Comic Picks By The Glick

Enter Yu Ishigami! The student council’s elusive treasurer finally makes his appearance in Kaguya-Sama:  Love is War vol. 3 and proves to be a worthy addition to the core cast.  He’s a gloomy otaku with a gift for number crunching and an unfortunate knack for saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.  The fact that we’re introduced to him expressing his fears that Kaguya wants to kill him (after he unwittingly foiled a few of her schemes to get closer to Shirogane) should tell you all you need to know about him.  Ishigami’s appearance, along with the expanded presence of Kaguya’s personal assistant Hayasaca, also heralds a shift in the status quo that takes “Kaguya-sama” from relying on a will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com formula to being a genuine ensemble comedy.  That’s not to say that the rom-com shenanigans haven’t stopped being funny yet as bits like the mind games Kaguya and Shirogane engage in to determine who actually forgot their umbrella on a rainy day and who is using it as a ploy to get closer to the other person that open the volume are comedy gold.

Meanwhile, over in Silver Spoon vol. 3, Hachiken is wrapping up his summer vacation over at Mikage’s farm.  This includes the creation of memories both happy (quality time with Mikage, lots of good food) and not so much (the unexpected arrival of his insufferable brother, a massive milk spill).  Yet with them comes payment for the hard work he did on the farm and the decision of what to do with it. Hachiken wants to use the money for a good purpose, but it’s not clear yet if his decision will bring him any happiness.  Though the volume is rife with wackiness and slapstick, seen most prominently when the Ezo Ag students descend like locusts upon a local festival’s food stalls, it’s balanced out by these quieter moments when Hachiken tries to figure out what to do with his life.  That these sharply contrasting tones can coexist as well as they do in this manga is a testament to mangaka Hiromu Arakawa’s talent, and seeing her pull it off is all the reason I need to keep reading it.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

In the wake of the “Hydra Cap” storyline and “Secret Empire’s” uh… decidedly mixed reception, it’s safe to say that Marvel felt Captain America’s image could use a little rehabilitation.  But what creative team could be trusted with the task of getting Cap back to his old heroic standard? That would turn out to be the team supreme of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee.  While Waid is responsible for what was probably best received run on “Cap” back in the 90’s, it was his work with Samnee on “Daredevil” and the underappreciated “Black Widow” that showed they can do no wrong while working at Marvel.  So it’s no surprise that they were given “Captain America” both to let fans know that they’d be getting a take on the character they could believe in and to mark time while Ta-Nehisi Coates prepared his run with Lenil Yu.

Ok, so it turns out that the trans-dimensional crisis involving the monsters streaming from magical portals in the absence of Wakanda’s gods is genuine.  Klaw showing up with a hard-light hologram machine at the end of the previous volume was just his way of trying to cash in on the current crisis to troll his longtime foe T’Challa.  So now Wakanda finds itself fighting a war on two fronts with magical enemies on one side and supervillains on the other.  And the Dora Milaje are becoming restless after being told that they can’t go rescue one of their own who was captured by Klaw in the previous volume.  The odds might seem particularly dire for the nation of Wakanda at the moment, but that’s only because the Black Panther is waiting for the right time to make his move.

While Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run has lacked the fun of seeing T’Challa as the manipulative mastermind who was three steps ahead of everyone in Christopher Priest’s classic run, this volume comes the closest yet to capturing it.  Seeing how Black Panther deals with the Dora Milaje situation and disclose the real reason he got Storm involved in this conflict are the kind of clever and, in one case, morally ambiguous moves that I like seeing from the character.  This volume is also helped out by some very lively art from Leonard Kirk for most of its run (Chris Sprouse ably chips in for an issue in the middle) and he turns out to be the perfect choice to energize the actual fighting in this three-sided conflict.  His handling of the silent action sequence with Aneka is aces too.

Where the volume falls down is in its use of Klaw.  His history with Wakanda and T’Challa specifically makes him an ideal big bad, but he feels largely peripheral to the conflict.  You almost get the feeling that his presence was something editorially dictated rather than organically implemented. Then you have the fact that the real big bad is someone who comes out of nowhere and is a VERY deep “X-Men” villain cut likely to prompt a response of “Who is this?” in the reader and the climax basically falls apart.  I dunno, I’ve given this series plenty of chances so maybe I should just stop here. Or will excellent new artist Daniel Acuna illustrating the Interdimensional Empire of Wakanda finally (FINALLY) get this series to live up to its potential?

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

I was primed to enjoy the setup of “Portland Homicide Detective Who Is Also a Witch” as it was coming from the creative team of Greg Rucka and Nicole Scott.  What I got with the first volume was something that ultimately felt a bit too conventional even with its supernatural trappings.  It takes a while to get there but vol. 2 is ultimately an improvement on the first. After starting off with a flashback to show witch/detective Rowan Black’s coming-of-age ceremony and how it disrupted her life we jump back to the present day to see how she’s dealing with a new kind of awful.  In addition to the growing friction Rowan has with her partner on their current assignment, she finds out that the witch-hunting organization known as Aira may be behind the craziness she and the members of her coven have been dealing with. Aira has its own agenda, though, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the creepy figures that have been hanging around town with their eyes on Rowan.

For much of the volume’s first half, “Black Magick” carries on as the first volume did.  Rucka’s professionalism and Scott’s lovely inkwashed art made the experience a pleasant read, but not a particularly memorable one.  Then at the halfway point Rowan shoots a running suspect in the middle of the street and Aira’s people make their move in a surprisingly subtle way and things start to get interesting.  The fact that this coincides with the introduction of Rowan’s foul-mouthed black cat familiar is probably coincidence. My interest only increased once Aira’s pointman made his intentions clear and we find out just what the creepy people hanging around town are after.  I was honestly invested enough in the goings-on that when I got to the last-page reveal of issue ten that I was relieved to find out that this volume collected the eleventh issue as well. (Yeah, I know that sounds silly but for some reason I thought that this volume only collected issues 6-10.)  So while this series isn’t on par with its creators’ best work, I can at least see how it might find its way there after this volume.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

When I heard that this new series, co-written and co-illustrated by Pablo Raimondi and Klaus Janson, was going to feature oversized issues I regarded it as a good thing.  With most comics clocking in at 20-22 pages an issue, having one that ranges from 45-66 pages with the bigger ones only costing a dollar more sounds like a great value for your money particularly as it was coming from a talented creative team.  Yup. Great value. Talented creators. Nothing can go wrong here. You can see where this is going as these oversized issues turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. Raimondi and Janson haven’t given us more of a good thing they’ve given us an indulgent mess that was honestly a chore to read through.

For all its flaws, “Gantz” never bothered with filler arcs.  Sure, there were some storylines that probably would’ve benefitted from judicious editing, but every arc served to push the main story forward in some way.  There were never any arcs that took the focus away from the main characters and showed us how another group went about killing the alien of the week. Why am I bringing this up?  With mangaka Hiroya Oku’s return to his signature series, just as a writer with Keita Iizuka providing the art, he has seen to rectify this grave oversight and give us the “Gantz” filler arc that we’ve been deprived of for so long!

With a title like that you’d figure that you’re in for a real bummer of a read, right?  Well, in order to actually be depressed about the “Fall of the Batmen” depicted here you’d have to have some kind of emotional investment in the characters’ struggle up to this point.  As James Tynion’s run so far has been the very definition of by-the-book, I found this volume’s efforts to showcase a real Bat-tragedy decidedly lacking. In fact, only one of the “Batmen” experiences a real fall here and it’s not really even his fault.  That’s because when the Victim Syndicate (ugh) make their move, their first act is to remove the bracelet that’s been allowing Clayface to transform back into Basil Karlo and to control his emotional state as well. Without the bracelet, Clayface is back to full-on villain mode and becomes a city-wide threat once he gets his hands on the extra mud that Batman has been keeping for him.

I’ll admit that the efforts to reform Clayface and the character’s relationship with Cassandra Cain have been the most interesting things about this run so far.  To see them come to an end here in a way that renders it all a zero-sum game is, to say the least, disappointing. To say more would be to mention that Clayface’s fall really feels like a cut-rate version of Kid Miracleman’s iconic rampage through London right down to the finale.  (If you haven’t read any of “Miracleman” yet then please go out and read it now and stop wasting your time with this title.) Everything else about this volume, from the happy reunion to resigned parting between Red Robin and Spoiler, to Batwoman’s means-y/ends-y way of handling the situation plays out exactly as you’d expect.  I did like how the villainous alliance between Anarky and the First Victim didn’t play to my expectations, but that wasn’t nearly enough to outweigh the overriding predictability of this volume. Toss in art from several different artists that’s competent but not very distinctive and you have a penultimate volume that makes me consider selling the previous volumes and picking up the final in digital form (when it’s on sale) because I really don’t think this run is worthy of a place on my shelf anymore.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

This series came off of a high point with “Ring of Fire” only to head into the merely okay “Temple of OD” flashback/sidestory.  Where does “The Specter of Tomorrow” fit in? Right between those two, closer to the upper end than the lower. After saving the world, Robo and the rest of the scientists at Tesladyne are busy setting up their new research facility in New Mexico, right between the ones owned by Richard Branson and Elon Musk.  That might sound like good company to be in, until the former gets tired of the noise and orchestrates a work shutdown through the local homeowner’s association. While this is a big enough issue to get Robo to come out from his basement experimentations regarding machine intelligence, a much bigger threat rears its head when ordinary humans across the globe are suddenly revealed to be high-tech cyborgs after they go berserk.  If you think that this is a great setup to work of one of Robo’s former antagonists back into the story, then you’d be wrong. This setup involves two of them.

Writer Brian Clevinger notes in his afterword that this is the first volume of what he, artist Scott Wegener -- who delivers art that expertly serves the series comedic and action sides as always -- and the rest of the “Robo” team are calling “The Weird Future” era of the series.  So expect things to only get stranger from here as they try to keep up with how the real world is changing along the lines of the documentary “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” It’s a solid enough lead-in to this era as it’s got the title’s winning mixture of hard science, human eccentricity, and breakneck action down pat.  In other words, it’s just as fun to see Robo mix it up with berserk robots as it is to see the rest of his team find a way around Branson’s work stoppage.

The only thing about this volume that feels off is its use of those old antagonists here.  When you’re bringing back characters like these it’s usually meant to signify that the stakes have officially been raised in a story.  It doesn’t have that effect here, particularly since I’d be fine if we never heard from one of them again. The other does manage to set up a potentially fascinating story thread for the series to follow, so it evens out in the end.  “The Specter of Tomorrow” ultimately winds up being a good start to this new era of “Atomic Robo” overall. Now let’s have Clevinger and Wegener follow it up directly, without another sidestory or flashback.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com