Month: September 2015

Wild’s End: The Enemy Within #1
Written by Dan Abnett
Illustrated and Lettered by I.N.J. Culbard
BOOM! Studios

I heard about Wild’s End when iFanboy.com made the first issue their pick of the week, but I’ve been waiting for the trade (Out next week, according to Amazon). From what I understand, it was a charming story about a world of anthropomorphic animals in the early parts of the 20th Century. Aliens invade a small British village, and a group of brave cats, dogs, and the like banded together to defeat one of the invaders.

Though I came to the sequel with no more knowledge than that, this book was easily accessible. As the book begins, five animals are under house arrest as the British government interrogates them about the alien invasion they fought, and the animals realize that they are suspected of being aliens in disguise. The fox (named Fawkes) loses his crap about the accusations, while the piglet just kind of accepts it and hopes his mum is okay. To aid in the paranoid investigation, the military summons two science fiction writers as consultants. One cannot contain his disdain for the commercial success of the other’s dumbed-down “scientific romance” novels, and the witty repartee is only elevated by the fact that this is a cat hating a histrionic Irish Setter.

The plot in this book is pretty slow, spending most of the time gathering the major players on either side of the house arrest, but the intelligent humor of the dialogue and the whimsy of the art make this a thoroughly enjoyable read. Dan Abnett brings a lot of trust from science fiction successes like Guardians Of The Galaxy and Hypernaturals, and though I have been unfamiliar with Culbard’s work, the team works together smoothly. I recommend folks head down to Ultimate Comics in Raleigh or Durham to get in at the beginning of this blend of cute talking doggies and grim paranoid sci-fi, and maybe ask Al to save you a copy of the first trade.

-Matt Conner

Tokyo Ghost #1
Writer: Rick Remender
Artist: Sean Murphy
Image Comics

I cringed when Alan gave me today’s assignment. My exposure to Rick Remender has generally been with his Marvel work on titles like Uncanny X-Force, Uncanny Avengers, Axis, and the Secret Wars miniseries Hail Hydra. His ideas have been good, but his understanding of the characters he writes… Well, it hasn’t always shown any previous reading he has done about them. I’m looking at you, suddenly-racist-suddenly-all-enraged Rogue. But I just finished Sean Murphy’s gorgeous Chrononauts series, and I remembered Rick Remender wrote that amazing Night Mary series I loved a few years ago, so I swallowed my pride and approached this new Image series with open eyes.

And I have converted.

Tokyo Ghost is a fantastic science fiction dystopia book about the very real-world nature of addiction as it occurs in family systems and social units. If that sounds boring, I will also say there are many pictures of bare breasts and blood, so hey, multiple levels. The setup is that in the future, everyone except Debbie Decay has been implanted with technology that lets them stay in the Internet forever, downloading modifications to simulate actual emotion so they can just sift through their newsfeeds and run pornography in the side of their screens. Debbie and her partner, Led Dent, are enforcers for one of the crimelords, pulling one last job so they can leave the ruins of Los Angeles for the potential paradise of Tokyo. That last job involves racing motorcycles through an amazingly detailed cityscape on the run from the henchmen of gangster Davey Trauma, a lunatic pulling A Clockwork Orange into the Facebook generation.

This book was incredible. The story was engaging, with tons of creative swearing but never to the point of making it unpleasant to read. The curse words were there to provoke but also to set the gritty tone, and I applaud Remender’s restraint. Sean Murphy’s Los Angeles is futuristic and dark, and the team pairs brilliantly when it comes to jokes like a pop-up ad for “Roofies that also make her lose weight instantly” or Tweets like “Remender sucks at riting comix!” The character names pull a sense of noir gang movies without coming across as affected.

The main reason I loved this, though, was the shockingly sensitive way Remender wants to explore addiction. In the back of the book, he writes a letter showing that he is intentionally telling this story as a caution about our addiction to social media and technology, but that’s been done before (See Vaughan’s Public Eye, see Luna’s Alex + Ada). What makes this better is that Remender wants to look at the role of Debbie Decay, working her butt off to support her boyfriend Led. She remembers the great man he was, and she appreciates his role in her partnership, even if he only interacts with her through the foggy lens of his data screen. It would be easy to write her off as codependent, but Remender is looking deeper than that. She loves him. She hates his addiction. She respects herself. She doesn’t see a lot of options. I have no idea how this story is going to end for Debbie, but I trust Remender to help us to understand the complexity of loving an addict.

For fans of science fiction, for people who care about someone in trouble, for people tired of going to dinner and having everyone staring at their phones, for readers who want something honest and new, head on down to Ultimate Comics and pick up this hot new series.

-Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics & NCCOMICON

Faster Than Light
Story and Illustration by Brian Haberlin
Image Comics presenting a Shadowline Production

Comics readers tend to have a variety of interests, which is part of what I love about this medium. Walking into Ultimate Comics gives you access to as many genres as Barnes And Noble might. Fans of action can hit the superhero section, fans of crime drama can check out Brubaker and Phillips, and the horror fans can check out the works of Niles or Valiant’s Shadowman book. There are plenty of cerebral science fiction books on the stand, but full disclosure, I generally don’t enjoy them. As a kid, I wasn’t especially taken with space. I didn’t enjoy Star Trek, I stopped reading Heinlein after a couple of books, and at Dragon*Con this year, I steered clear of the Dr. Who cosplayers. Leave it to Ultimate Al to start changing my mind with this week’s selection, Faster Than Light.

The story is pretty cool. A group of astronauts is about to go exploring the universe now that someone has cracked the formula for faster than light travel, and they have heard that a race of alien monsters is headed for Earth, so they need to fly around preparing for that. Before they can get going, they see a new planet in our solar system. They tentatively name it Ouroborous and fly out to check it out, and spoiler alert, there are big scary monster tentacles all over the place. I may not have understood all of the scientific words, but the book was only using those to frame a story about a man taking over control of a team, balancing the fear of the unknown with the desire to see something absolutely novel. He’s navigating the relationship with the former captain of the ship he’s taken over, he’s having tense conversations with the tech people about the safety of the ship itself, he’s running meetings with the international council running these missions. With the exception of the scary tentacles, there’s very little plot movement, but the emotional soup of the issue, everyone scared and excited and distrustful, has me excited to see the next chapter. And man, those tentacles are great.

The best part of the book, though, is that readers can download a free Android of iOS app at experienceanomaly.com/ftl and use the camera to scan certain pages for interactive holograms. When you scan the establishing shot of the space station, for instance, the tablet will show a loading bay hovering between the page and the camera, and if you tap it, it will open and let an image of a spaceship fly out. When you scan the page with the tentacles, tentacles appear in your screen and lash out at you, and you can tap an icon to see a paragraph summarizing what the astronauts know so far. Marvel’s attempts at this augmented reality have been so hard to use that I haven’t even tried since the Avengers Vs. X-Men crossover, but this app was easy to use and made for a fun reading experience. And how cool is it for a book about man and technology to pioneer a new interaction between reader and tech?

I highly recommend you take your Smartphone down to Ultimate Comics in Chapel Hill or Raleigh and give this sci-fi tech experience a spin. Just watch out for monsters.

Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics & the NCComicon

Toil And Trouble (originally solicited as The Third Witch)
Writer: Mairghread Scott
Artists: Kelly and Nichole Matthews
Archaia (Boom Entertainment)

Macbeth was one of my favorite plays in high school. I remember loving the darkness and intrigue, the murder and remorse. But twenty years later, the only parts I recall well are Lady Macbeth washing imaginary bloodspots out, Macbeth’s “Out, brief candle” soliloquy…

… and the witches. I can’t even remember what they did in the story. But I remember absolutely loving that this play, a story of a man who murders his king and suffers for it, opens up with three sisters and “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” agreeing to meet “when the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.” The mystery, the supernatural, it was catnip for a teenage geek, and I still love it.

This week, Archaia begins a six-issue limited series telling the story of Macbeth from the point of view of one of the three witch sisters, blending in more of the savage history of the British Isles and the pagan traditions of these warriors. Smertae is a pretty redheaded witch with spikes sticking out of her shoulders and hips, aligned with Cait (an earthy blonde whose image often blends with trees and nearby animals) to carry out subtle manipulations of the Scottish warriors according to the dark plans of grim sister Riata to raise King Duncan’s son up at the expense of Macbeth. Smertae has second thoughts about cursing her own people, and she hints at a grave history with Macbeth himself, so in the last moment, she possesses the Scottish Thane and saves his life, breaking the plan and probably triggering all the tragedy we read in high school.

This was a gorgeous book, the kind readers have come to expect from the Archaia publications. The dialogue floats along a dreamy path through Shakespeare’s original language and a broader, older element from the pagan histories, all to a lilting cadence that’s not quite iambic pentameter but suggests it. I couldn’t follow all of what the witches said to each other, but much like in Shakespeare plays, the thrust of the story is more about tone and character than recognizing every vocabulary word. The art is ethereal and compelling even when representing the brutality of the battle scenes, keeping the focus steadily on Smertae’s inner conflict.

If you haven’t read any Archaia titles yet, this issue is a great introduction to an intelligent, cultured example of the line. Come on down to Ultimate Comics in Chapel Hill or Raleigh to pick a copy up before they’re gone, or risk having to wait for reprints When The Hurly-Burly’s Done.

Matt Conner for Ultimate Comics & NC Comicon