Author: NowReadThis

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Secret Warriors volume 2: God of Fear, God of War


By Jonathan Hickman, Alessandro Vitti, Ed McGuiness, Tom Palmer & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851- 3865-5

Marvel’s very own immortal secret agent Nick Fury had in his time fought in every war since WWII, worked for the CIA and run numerous iterations of superspy agency S.H.I.E.L.D., generally finding over and again that nobody could be trusted – not to stay clean and decent – in a world of temptation or, worse yet, to never baulk at doing whatever was necessary to save the planet.

Too many times the spooks “on our side” became as debased as the bad guys in a world where covert agencies were continually exposed as manipulative, out-of-control tools of subversion and oppression.

The taste of betrayal and those seeds of doubt and mistrust never went away and following a succession of global crises – including a superhero Civil War – Fury was replaced as S.H.I.E.L.D. director.

His successor Tony Stark proved to be a huge mistake and after an alien invasion by Skrulls, the organisation was mothballed: replaced by the manically dynamic Norman Osborn and his cultishly loyal H.A.M.M.E.R. outfit. As America’s Director of National Security, the former Green Goblin and recovering psychopath instituted a draconian “Dark Reign” of oppressive, aggressive policies which turned the nation into a paranoid tinderbox and as the nation’s Top Fed he was specifically tasked with curbing the unchecked power and threat of the burgeoning metahuman community.

He was, however, also directing a cabal of the world’s greatest criminals and conquerors intent on divvying up the planet between them. The repercussions of Osborn’s rise (and inevitable fall) were felt throughout and featured in many series and collections throughout the entire fictive universe.

His brief rule also drastically shook up the entrenched secret empires of the planet, and his ultimate defeat destabilised many previously unassailable clandestine Powers and States…

Fury, a man driven by duty, fuelled by suspicion and powered by a serum which kept him vital far beyond his years, didn’t go away. He just went deep undercover and continued doing what he’d always done – saving the world, one battle at a time. From this unassailable unsuspected vantage point Fury picked his battles and slowly gathered assets and resources he’d personally vetted or built…

The indomitable freedom fighter had always known that to do the job properly he needed his own trustworthy forces and no political constraints. To this end he had long endeavoured to clandestinely stockpile his own formidable, unimpeachable army. Decades in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D. had provided him with mountains of data on metahumans from which he compiled “Caterpillar Files” on many unknown, unexploited, untainted potential operatives who might one day metamorphose into powerful assets…

His first move was to assemble a crack squad of super-human operatives. Team White initially comprised Yo Yo Rodriguez AKA Slingshot, Sebastian Druid, Jerry “Stonewall” Sledge, J.T. “Hellfire” James and Daisy Johnson, codenamed Quake, and the terrifyingly volatile Alexander: a 12-year old boy with incredible power.

The child Phobos was destined to become a true god and personification of Fear but until then his daily-growing divine gifts were Fury’s to use… if he dared…

In the aftermath of the wave of crises the old soldier had come across a truly shocking piece of intel: for most of his career, S.H.I.E.L.D. had been no more than a deeply submerged and ring-fenced asset of Hydra. All Fury’s world-saving triumphs had been nothing more than acceptable short-term losses for a secret society which claimed to reach back to ancient Egypt, secretly steering the world for millennia.

However since Osborn and the Skrull invasion had shaken things up so much, the old warhorse now had an honest chance to wipe out the perfidious faceless foe forever…

Hydra too had been badly damaged by the crisis, and as the dust settled Baron Wolfgang von Strucker sought to capitalise on the chaos to regenerate the cult in his own image, seizing all fallow assets, technology and even experienced operatives abandoned by friends and enemies alike…

To this end, Strucker co-opted breakaway factions of Hydra and convened a new hierarchy of deadly lieutenants loyal to him alone. However even with Viper, Madame Hydra, Kraken, Silver Samurai, The Hive and resurrected mutant ninja the Gorgon on board, the prospect of wedding super-science and corporate rapaciousness with ancient magic and millennial covert cabals was a risky ploy…

The rabid rapid expansion also gave Fury an opportunity to place one of his own deep within the organisation…

To further bolster his own relatively meagre forces, Fury reached out to selected old S.H.I.E.L.D. comrades and especially his former second-in-command Dum-Dum Dugan who had gathered up the most trustworthy agents and veterans into a private security agency – the Howling Commandos Private Military Company. Warriors to the last, they were all looking for one last good war and a proper way to die…

Some of them got their wish when the good guys launched a daring raid and stole three of the mothballed colossal flying fortress warships dubbed Heli-Carriers, laying the groundwork for an imminent, unavoidable and very public shooting war…

Written throughout by Jonathan Hickman, this second intriguing and complex espionage epic declassifies material from Dark Reign, The List and Secret Warriors #7-10 from 2009, and opens in stunning style with ‘I Know Who You Work For’ (illustrated by Alessandro Vitti) as Fury secures operating capital for his private war by sending the team to rob a bank – a decent, reliable, reputable financial institution which just happens to be a covertly owned corporate holding of Hydra…

The audacious act prompts Strucker to reach out to Osborn who in turn condescends to deal with Fury as an insulting, double-edged “favour” to the despised former Nazi war-criminal. Osborn’s greatest advantage is his own team of Dark Avengers: ferocious ersatz heroes masquerading as genuine, altruistic champions of justice. One of the most formidable is Grecian war-god Ares. The Olympian is also the father of Fury’s wild-card agent Phobos…

The terrifying celestial child is snooping in Fury’s office with older but no-wiser bad influence J.T. James when they intercept a distress call from ex-Avenger and former S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Black Widow. She needs extraction immediately but when “Fury” rendezvous with her and partner Songbird, the desperate agents are all ambushed by Osborn’s Thunderbolts – a penal battalion of super-villains, purchasing pardons by doing dirty jobs for the Federal government…

In New York, captured and confronted by the Security Czar in ‘I’m the Perfect Means to an End’, Fury is shot in the head and everybody thinks it’s all over – until Phobos climbs out of the undetectable Life Model Decoy (a trusty robot duplicate the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director has utilised for decades to save his life from assorted threats)…

The real Fury is actually in Virginia with another old operative.

John Garrett is 90% mechanical after years of dutiful service to his country but the cyborg is prepared to risk all he’s got left for the right cause…

Back in the Big Apple, Team White agents J.T. and new recruit Eden Fesi attempt a rescue but it’s Phobos who saves them all by confronting Osborn head-on – earning the grudging respect of Ares who lets them all go. It’s not a reprieve, though, just a decent head start…

The rest of the squad are with severely wounded team-mate Yo Yo Rodriguez – whose arms have been replaced with mechanical limbs – when Alexander, J.T. and Eden teleport home with Ares, the Dark Avengers and lots of H.A.M.M.E.R. grunts hard on their heels in ‘The Starting Point is Everything’. With the base automatically initiating a data-purge and self-destruct program, Team White stage a spectacular holding action allowing everyone to relocate to a safe house…

And in Virginia, Garrett begins investigating former S.H.I.E.L.D. op Seth Waters, now a big-wig in the Department of the Treasury and just possibly a life-long dedicated Hydra agent…

Ed McGuiness & Tom Palmer provide the interlude ‘Start the Clock End Game’ wherein Nick breaks into the heart of Osborn’s citadel to put the Security Director on notice even as Waters is exposed as an agent of long-dormant terrorist group and universal threat Leviathan.

With Fury as Osborn’s willing hostage, H.A.M.M.E.R. officers and Dark Avengers lead the savage interrogation but Waters has unsuspected resources and distractingly suicides – just as the immortal superspy intended – allowing Fury to escape from the lion’s den with invaluable intelligence and ‘Leviathan Technical Data’ (all the bases, maps, files and diagrams any conspiracy nut could ever need to untangle the web of intrigue all diligently laid out for our perusal).

‘There Will Always Be War’ wraps up this saga with the full history of Phobos, beginning with an ancient parable of a forgotten war between the gods of Greece and Japan, the crafting of god-killing weapons and rare, telling insights into how Ares and Alexander grew apart.

A secret deal between undying war god and immortal spy is revealed before the fearsome inescapable fate and cost of inheritance is at last made clear to the slowly-maturing future god of Fear…

To Be Continued…

This excellent exercise in tense suspense and Machiavellian manipulation also includes a stunning ‘Cover gallery’ by Jim Cheung as well as variant covers from McGuinness, Adi Granov, Frank Cho & Gerald Parel to supplement the wry, engagingly cynical, blackly comical, staggeringly over-the-top action and dazzling cloak-and-dagger conflicts: employing enough intrigue to bamboozle even the most ardent espionage aficionado, with the added bonus that far less knowledge of Marvel continuity is necessary to fully appreciate this particularly intense and engaging effort to the full.
© 2009, 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Lola – a Ghost Story


By J. Torres & Elbert Or (Oni Press)
ISBN: 978-1-934964-33-0

These days young kids are far more likely to find their formative strip narrative experiences online or between the card-covers of specially tailored graphic novels rather than the comics and periodicals of my long-dead youth.

In times past the commercial comics industry thrived by producing copious amounts of gaudy, flimsy pamphlets subdivided into a range of successfully, self-propagating, seamlessly self-perpetuating age-specific publications. Such eye-catching items generated innumerable tales and delights intended to entertain, inform and educate such well-defined target demographics as Toddler/Kindergarten, Younger and Older Juvenile, General, Girls, Boys and even Young Teens, but today the English-speaking world can only afford to maintain a few paltry out-industry, licensed tie-ins and spin-offs for a dwindling younger readership.

Where once cheap and prolific, strip magazines in the 21st century are extremely cost-intensive and manufactured for a highly specific – and dying– niche market, whilst the beguiling and bombastic genres that originally fed and nurtured comics are more immediately disseminated via TV, movies and assorted interactive games media.

Happily, old-school prose publishers and the newborn graphic novel industry have a different business model and far more sustainable long-term goals, so the magazine makers’ surrender has been turned into a burgeoning victory, as solid and reassuringly sturdy Comic-Books increasingly buck the pamphlet/papers trend.

Some of the old-fashioned publishers even evolved…

Independent comics mainstay Oni deftly made the switch to sturdy stand-alone one-offs at the end of the last century, publishing a succession of superb illustrated tales splendidly pushing the creative envelope whilst providing memorable yarns that irresistibly lure young potential fans of the form into our world…

That looks quite creepy in type-form but that’s okay – this is a beguilingly spooky story and you should be on your guard…

Aimed at readers of seven and above, Lola – a Ghost Story follows young Canadian Jesse as he returns to the rural Philippine farm where his parents grew up. It’s not his first visit, but it is the saddest. They’re going back for the funeral of his grandmother…

In the native Tagalog language Lola means “grandmother” and Jesse’s was pretty scary. She was old and ugly, had a hump on her back and – he thinks – tried to drown him when he was a baby.

She also saw dead things and monsters and the future… just like Jesse does.

Despite all this he loved her very much and really doesn’t want to accept that she’s gone forever. After hours of exhausting travel Jesse and his folks at last arrive at the old farmhouse which has seen so much tragedy. The visitor fulsomely greets his uncle and cousin Maritess, but doesn’t acknowledge her brother JonJon.

The kid’s acting like a jerk as usual, and besides he’s been dead for over a year and no-one else can see him…

Soon the family are gathered together: eating, remembering the departed and telling stories of Lola – like the time she saw the giant devil-pig and saved the entire family from financial ruin – but Jesse is still ill at ease. Even though everyone here believes his grandmother had second sight and blessed gifts, the sensibly modern boy can’t bring himself to believe the things he sees are real…

Maritess believes though and she suspects what Jesse won’t admit even to himself…

After JonJon teases him some more and taunts him with the giant bestial, cigar-smoking Kapre lurking at the window, Jesse finally drops into an exhausted, nervous slumber.

The funeral next day is horrible. Everybody is sad, the church is filled with so many shockingly damaged spirits and Jesse is afflicted with a vision of being trapped and burning which makes him run terrified from the ceremony.

Still traumatised that evening, he finds JonJon’s old toybox on his bed and Maritess guesses what has happened.

She tells her cousin the story of the bloodsucking Manananggal which attacked Lola’s mother causing her unborn daughter’s hump-back and magical sight. Such gifts and curses usually skip a generation and Maritess always assumed she’d be the one to get the sight, but now that it’s clear Jesse is the one to inherit she’s determined to give him all the help he needs.

The box is full of JonJon’s toy cars, and after playing with them Jesse and the dead boy romp over by the farm wall – the one where nobody is allowed to go anymore…

Jesse’s uncle isn’t doing very well: all the tragedies have made him very sad and he’s drinking an awful lot.

There are other problems bothering Jesse. The entire family have stories about his grandmother and it’s clear that she was brave and determined and fought monsters all her life: is that, then, why she tried to drown him when he was a baby?

As Maritess tells her Canadian cousin about the time young Lola saved her school friends from a predatory Tiyanak – a baby-shaped carnivorous monster – and he prepares to ask her if she thinks he might be evil, her father comes in very drunk and shouts at him for leaving JonJon’s cars in the garden.

They are all he has left to remember his son and the boy’s favourite one is already missing. Jesse knows which one it is… the striped one JonJon calls “Zebra” which he wouldn’t share with him last night by the wall…

Uncle Tim hates the wall. It had something to do with his son’s death and Jesse knows he’ll get into trouble if he goes over it. But Uncle is so sad. He misses his boy and really wanted to bury Zebra with JonJon, but it’s gone and the man is so drunk and angry all the time now…

Jesse’s fear that Lola saw something evil in him is assuaged by Maritess who thinks he should use his gift to help people – just like just their grandmother used to -  so when JonJon appears again, Jesse climbs the hated wall and vanishes into the wild unknown beyond…

With Jesse’s first good deed successfully accomplished JonJon can rest and Uncle Tim is at peace. The troubled psychic is even a little less disturbed by his power and his apparent destiny, but that all changes on the trip back to the airport when Jesse sees something utterly horrifying…

Evocative, compelling, gently enthralling and with a genuinely scary shock ending, this superb kid’s chiller is filled with a fascinating new bestiary of monsters and boogey-men to bedazzle Western eyes and imaginations, but mostly relies on captivating art and top-notch storytelling to draw readers in. I loved it and I’m actually praying there’s a sequel in the pipeline…
Lola is ™ & © 2009 J. Torres. All other material © 2009 Oni Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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The Guild


By Felicia Day, Jim Rugg & various (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-549-0

The Guild is a US comedy show which first appeared on the web in 2007, brainchild of actress and author Felicia Day. The quirkily smart, geeky-outsider fantasy revolves around Cyd Sherman, a musician who is more than usually prone to problems in the real world and escapes the dreary horror of it all by joining like misfits in a cyber-spacey online gang (or “Guild”) in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (or MMORPG) called unsurprisingly “The Game”.

The live action episodes revolve around the interactions of Cyd and her associate ‘Knights of Good’ – all of whom find themselves more at home in an artificial universe of magic, myth, monsters and really mean people rather than mundane reality – although of course there are plenty of impossible tasks, unpalatable hardships and actual mean people here too.

You can check out the show – six seasons thus far – on Day’s dedicated YouTube channel Geek and Sundry…

We don’t do shows here, but since the material clearly overlaps with that old fashioned fantastic universe of comics, Dark Horse Comics approached Day in 2009 in search of a canny cross-fertilisation. The result was a 3-issue miniseries and a short story which appeared on the publisher’s own digital dimension in MySpace Dark Horse Presents #27. That pithy 2-page debut/introduction (illustrated by Jim Rugg and painted and coloured by Juan Ferreya & Dan Jackson) is included here at the conclusion of the main storyline.

On screen the seductive soap opera story is ongoing and began with the characters already in place and interacting, but The Guild comicbook gave Day the chance to work with an unlimited visual budget (that’s the advantage of comics: a monologue in a bedroom costs as much and as little to draw as all the hordes of hell unleashed and riding winged monkeys up the Champs–Elysées) and thus inspired her to reveal the secret origins of her outré comrades in a winning, hilarious and deftly moving prequel tale.

Cyd plays far less than second fiddle at the back of a sub-par orchestra and is very fed up with her crappy life. She knows that she’s a failure at everything and a disappointment to everybody.

Although she has a boyfriend and fools herself that it’s love, deep down she knows that Trevor is a manipulative, exploitative, controlling jerk only using her as roadie, housekeeper, bedwarmer, manager, press-officer, writer and arranger of the music he claims as his as he tries hopelessly to break into the rock biz.

She even goes all over town pinning up the flyers she designed for his third-rate band’s gigs…

Cyd first learned about the manic world of consensual alternate realities when she was pinning up a poster in a comicbook and gaming store and, on the insistence of the therapist her dad is paying for, one day tried to break out of her dis-comfort zone by making new friends – if only by becoming a completely different person in a role-playing alternate universe…

After yet another ungrateful disappointment from Trevor the Rock God, she sat at her keyboard and became Codex, a mystic healer in the captivating fairyland of The Game…

Soon she was exulting in graphic slaughter, thievery and high adventure, meeting loads of wild people all revelling in being someone or something other than they were…

And as she learns and evolves in fantasyland, Cyd makes true friends and proper foes, forming her own guild of like-minded questors. They’re all real even if they aren’t actually there, and their effect on Cyd even leads to a satisfactory showdown with the increasingly unbearable Trevor…

Sharp, clever, moving and painfully funny, this an engaging introduction to the milieu and characters of the show and if I’ve skimped on detail you’ll thank me when you marvel at the captivating interactions of the beguiling cast of adorable misfits and wonder at the astonishing facility of illustrator Rugg as he makes both grim reality and miraculous meta-world come to life – each in its own unforgettable manner…

With covers and supplemental artwork by Georges, Jeanty, Dexter Vines & Tariq Hassan, Matthew Stawicki, Kristian Donaldson, Cary Nord & Dave Stewart, Rugg & Dan Jackson, Juan Ferreyra, Paul Lee, Jason Gonzalez and Jon Adams, working designs and a sketchbook collection from illustrator Rugg, complete with commentary by editor Scott Allie, plus a Bonus Section of tryout pages by a crazed band of artists including Zack Finfrock, Indigo Kelleigh, Kevin McGovern and Ron Chan, this slim, fanciful and thoughtfully funny fantasy offers a wry counterpoint to both gaming bombast and comicbook blood and thunder whilst defending your right to another life, liberty of imagination and the pursuit of fairy gold…

If you need the odd, gentle laugh in your hectic, horrible life The Guild might be just the tonic…
The Guild © 2010 The Guild. All rights reserved.

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Batman: Life After Death


By Tony S. Daniel, Guillem March, Sandu Florea, Norm Rapmund & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-0-85767-123-2

At the climax of a harrowing and sustained campaign of terror by insidious cabal The Black Hand, Batman was apparently killed (by evil New God Darkseid during the “Final Crisis”). Although the news was kept from the general public, the superhero community secretly mourned whilst a small dedicated army of assistants, protégés and allies trained over the years by the Dark Knight formed a “Network” of champions to police GothamCity in the catastrophic days and weeks which followed: marking time until a successor could be found…

Most of the Batman-trained task force refuse to believe their inspirational mentor is dead and thus, believing him only lost, have accepted Dick Grayson – first Robin and latterly Nightwing – as the stand-in Gotham Guardian until Bruce Wayne can find his way back to them.

The transition has been bloody and brutal. Grayson had to stop an outcast contender who sought to usurp the legacy of Batman and turn the role of Dark Knight into debased red-handed avenger rather than benign shadowy protector. For now former Robin and erstwhile Red Hood Jason Todd has been defeated, abandoning his quest to become the new Gotham Guardian even as a new iteration of deceased crimelord Black Mask runs rampant in the city.

Crushed and cast aside in the savage gang-war with the triumphant mobster’s mind-controlled False Face Society, mercurial maniac Two-Face has simply vanished, whilst third force The Penguin has been apparently conquered and cowed: remaining only as a meek and compliant vassal of the triumphant newcomer.

Whoever he is, the current Black Mask is as sadistic, psychotic, meticulously methodical and strategically brilliant as his predecessor. His first move had been to free many of Batman’s most maniacal menaces – temporarily stored at Blackgate Prison after the infamous Arkham Asylum was destroyed. Despite the Network’s utmost efforts and the completion of a new high-tech institution, many of the worst inmates remain at large…

This terse and occasionally histrionic volume collects the contents of Batman #692-699 (December 2009 – July 2010) revealing the identity of the mastermind behind the mask and recounting the final fate of the pretender as well as heralding the return of a much misunderstood and fearfully underestimated foe…

Written and primarily pencilled by Tony S. Daniel, the eponymous saga ‘Life After Death’ begins with ‘The Awakening’ (inked by Sandu Florea) as Grayson – grudgingly assisted by Bruce Wayne’s assassin-trained son Damian as the latest Boy Wonder – continues to hunt the escapees and their Machiavellian manipulator…

So great was the crisis that the National Guard had been deployed to enforce Martial Law, driving back the False Face legions and more or less cordoning them into the Devil’s Square area of the city.

With the successor Batman and Police Commissioner Jim Gordon forced to play a waiting game, Black Mask and his inner circle – malignant “Ministry of Science” boffins Fright, Professor Hugo Strange and Dr. Death – go on the offensive by resurrecting a deadly nemesis even as the new director of Arkham seeks a way of undoing the brainwashing techniques used on the False Faces. Hard pressed on all fronts, Grayson seeks the unique assistance of his mentor’s greatest, most secret asset Selina Kyle, and together they discover a new player in the drama. Marco Falcone has returned to Gotham…

Years ago the original Batman had destroyed the power of the Mafia in the city, driving the last of the “Made Men” into exile and breaking the all-pervasive organisation of Carmine “The Roman” Falcone. Now his last surviving son seems intent on using the current chaos to reclaim his inheritance and re-establish the family business…

However the gangster has his own setbacks to deal with: his safe has just been broken into and the contents swiped by Catwoman. As well as cash and jewels the vault contained the most valuable and potentially dangerous document in Gotham…

Luckily for all concerned, Mario doesn’t realise the role his beloved “niece” Kitrina – a very capable and dangerous teenaged cat-burglar in her own right – played in that theft…

The Ministry of Science now has a ferociously hands-on new member. Concentration Camp survivor Dr. Grant Gruener once haunted Gotham as the scythe-wielding vigilante The Reaper, until his apparent demise at the gauntleted hands of the Dark Knight. After years of genetic tampering and behaviour modification by Strange, the killer is back and ready to resume his crusade…

Moreover new information has revealed that the mesmerised False Faces aren’t just enslaved career criminals but also have members recruited from ordinary law-abiding citizens, all equally mind-controlled by the hideous masks they wear – and now someone is killing them, guilty and innocent alike…

The campaign of terror continues as the headstrong and potentially lethal latest Robin joins his barely tolerated commanding officer in winnowing the hordes of False Faces before the pair are distracted by different enemy in ‘Charades’.

Bruce Wayne’s (if not Batman’s) ultimate adversary is Dr. Tommy Elliot, a beloved boyhood friend as warped by his own mother’s malign influence as Bruce was reshaped by the murder of his beloved parents.

Eminent surgeon Elliot became the twisted, sadistic and obsessive Hush to punish his only friend and childhood companion: one who had been perpetually held up to the troubled, never-good-enough kid as a perfect example of a son by Elliot’s deranged parent. Tommy even divined the billionaire’s greatest secret – the true identity of the Dark Knight…

After many deeply personal, psychotic attacks on Wayne’s legacy and Batman’s friends, Hush took the ultimate step in his psychological war against his oldest confidante by surgically transforming himself into Wayne’s mirror image and attempting to entirely usurp his life (see Batman – Streets of Gotham: Hush Money).

The Batman Family had never accepted that their mentor was dead, and all their actions were predicated upon the premise that he would eventually return to reclaim his mantle, so once Catwoman tracked down and emptied all Elliot’s hidden bank accounts Hush began trading on his stolen looks to rebuild his fortune and take another stab at revenge by bankrupting the Wayne financial empire, simultaneously removing the Bat-Network’s crucial operating capital at the same time…

Only recently reformed criminal-turned-High Society Private Eye Edward Nigma – still known as The Riddler – seemed to suspect the imposture, with Grayson and his comrades ironically compelled to publicly cover for the faux Bruce to keep their own secrets…

At a grand benefit to mark the re-opening of Arkham Asylum, Grayson and the undercover Huntress verbally spar with Elliot, Riddler and the Falcones, but when Kitrina perpetrates another robbery Nigma chases her and sustains a life-altering head injury…

Meanwhile in the bloody streets The Reaper is taking a brutal toll on Black Mask’s enemies and the general public too…

Batman begins his fight back by targeting the suspiciously quiescent Penguin in ‘Fractured Pieces’ even as the newly open Arkham begins to suffer mysterious attacks and its builders and administrators begin succumbing to tragic accidents. But even as the Dark Knight’s strategy prompts a murderous attack on the Bird Bandit by Black Mask forces, Mario has discovered Kitrina’s role in his misfortunes and takes steps to end her interference.

Tragically he has completely underestimated her abilities as he hunts for missing maps of Devil’s Square – and Black Mask’s secret sanctum – which she originally created and has now reclaimed…

Norm Rapmund joins Florea on inking with ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ as Kitrina begins her brutal retaliation against the Falcones and Batman discovers who she really is. As Mario flees the aftermath, the mob boss is ambushed by the Reaper and only the last minute intervention of Batman and Huntress save him from a grisly end.

On the deadly, near-deserted streets, Riddler’s confusion slowly abates as he begins making connections to a life he’d forgotten and re-experiences a compulsion long controlled…

The war takes an ugly turn in ‘Mind Games’ when the Penguin at last makes his move: enslaving Batman with Black Mask’s mind-binding gimmicks and dispatching the befuddled crimebuster to even the score – and perhaps even assassinate the murderous mastermind behind everyone’s woes…

By the time Robin has rescued his brainwashed senior partner, Kitrina has found an ally and mentor of her own – one with no love for the Falcones, Penguin or Black Mask and an agenda all her own – and the Boy Wonder’s unsavoury task is to reconstruct just what horrors Batman has committed since he fell under the spell of the mind-controlling mask.

Armed with inevitable conclusions, hard-won knowledge and unpalatable truths regarding presumed friends and foes, the new Dark Knight at last implacably ends the plague of unrest afflicting Gotham but, even after taking out the Ministry of Science, overcoming the rampaging Reaper and exposing Black Mask, the ‘Liberator’ and his Network allies are acutely aware that the job never ends and the battle is barely begun…

This collection then concludes with the 2-part ‘Riddle Me This’ (illustrated by Guillem March & colourist Tomeu Morey) as the Prince of Puzzlers encounters a murderous old associate in criminal conjuror Blackspell whose ‘Magic Tricks’ concealed a cunning, years-long revenge scheme.

However as the bloodshed and mystery escalated in ‘A Means to an End’ the increasingly overworked Batman was forced to accept that the obvious suspect might not be the guilty one… nor that all his allies were working with him…

Torturous, tumultuous, convoluted and challenging, this action-packed, high-octane Fights ‘n’ Tights drama will deliver all the thrills, spills and chill fans could hope for with impressive punch and panache aplenty. Moreover it’s all very, very pretty to look at and even the freshest neophyte is well aware that it’s all just a prelude to the return of the real Dark Knight…
© 2009, 2010 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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The Runaways: Rock Zombies


By Terry Moore, Chris Yost, James Asmus, Takeshi Miyazawa, Sara Pichelli, Emma Rios, Norman Lee, Craig Yeung & Roland Paris (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-4074-0

The Runaways are a bunch of super-powered kids whose parents lied to them.

Whilst conveying an aura of affluent respectability, the adults were in actuality a secret cabal of super-criminals: “The Pride”. These extremely circumspect and clandestine villains played it smart for years and ran Los Angeles without the populace knowing they even existed – and were so ruthlessly dominant that most of the baddies and monsters in the Marvel Universe gave the city a wide berth.

When the appalled, betrayed offspring discovered the truth they rebelled and ran away (Duh!) and after many trials and tribulations – including the death of some of the pesky kids – the young absconders confronted, overthrew and eradicated their progenitors, with the unwelcome result that LA became a newly open city and soft target for ambitious costumed ne’er-do-wells and malevolent masterminds.

The orphans were briefly placed with well-meaning, clueless social services, but before long the renegades – who had inherited assorted powers, talents and devices, if not the amoral proclivities of their progenitors – were compelled to bolt: preferring to stick together on the streets rather than be separated again.

They also felt responsible for and were driven to protect the city they had unwittingly endangered. It was a dangerous wild life and the kids lost friends and recruited new members of the dysfunctional family with alarming frequency

…But not all of them were trustworthy either…

The underlying premise of this series is that adults can’t be trusted – only your friends – and this volume (collecting volume 3, issues #7-10 of the monthly comic-book) sees the kids, after adventures in New York and another century, resettled back in LA and endeavouring to taking their self-imposed role of city defenders seriously.

The current roster comprises Nico Minoru, last in a long line of hereditary sorcerers, whilst Karolina Dean was once the compliant daughter of two domineering aliens intent on global conquest. The extraterrestrial Valley Girl has just lost her lover (rebellious shape-shifting, gender-fluid apprentice Super-Skrull Prince Xavin) who sacrificed him/her/itself to save Karolina from vengeful alien invaders.

Little Molly Hayes is much younger than the others, a super-strong, invulnerable child of evil mutant parents, whilst oafish teen Chase Stein was the son of genuine mad scientists. He might not have inherited their intellects but he has got lots of toys from their arsenal. He also sort of inherited the genetically-augmented 87th century empathic dinosaur Old Lace when her adored previous owner Gertrude Yorkes was killed by the Pride.

Gert’s folks were time-travelling bandits and would-be world conquerors…

The latest editions to the group are Victor Mancha, who can control electricity and manipulate metals; gifts his “father” – genocidal robotic despot Ultron – considered quite useful in the secret weapon he was building and growing, and little Klara Prast, a 12-year Swiss girl rescued from her abusive husband in 1907. She can accelerate the growth and control the motion of plants, and thinks the 21st century is a joyous paradisiacal wonderland…

As this book opens with the 3-part tale ‘Rock Zombies’ by Terry Moore and artists Takeshi Miyazawa, Norman Lee, Craig Yeung & Roland Paris, the voluntary outcasts are back in LA LA land just taking it easy and bonding.

Over at radio station KZIT however, ambitious, greedy power-mad DJ Val Rhymin is chatting to an old friend. Wicked wizard and accountant Monk “Mother” Theppie has come far since the demise of the Minorus who kept the city’s magical denizens tightly bound, and Val’s talk of making zombies has produced a dark inspiration in the cagy mage/treasurer.

He can’t just magic up an army of enslaved undead, but he could use a transformation spell on something that many people have communally experienced. Something like plastic surgery, for example…

It’s Los Angeles: who knows how many people that sort of spell might affect…?

As Nico, Karolina and the younger girls tackle a hostage stand-off, Val is layering the spell into his latest dub mix and whilst the team are blithely vacationing in the desert the demented DJ plays it repeatedly on his show.

By the time the gang hit the city again, thousands of monster-zombies are rampaging through the sunny streets gathering booty for their avaricious master, and when Nico uses her mystic weapon the Staff of One to stop the ghastly rioters the spell is warped and hundreds of individual victims merge into a colossal composite horror…

Whilst she was in the past, the Last of the Minorus was captured and tortured by her own ancestor, a witch determined to make Nico attain her full potential. That scheme has clearly worked as her spells are fantastically stronger and drastically misfire every time she tries one…

After a further disastrous attempt to save the ensorcelled zombies, the kids withdraw and instead go after Rhymin at the Hollywood Bowl where he waits for his slaves to bring all the money and jewels they’ve been ordered to steal.

Also there is Mother, who attempts to steal Nico’s Staff – and regrets it for the last three seconds of his life…

With the wizard gone it doesn’t take the kids long to reverse the spell and save the day but Nico is now terrified by how lethally uncontrollable her power has become…

Issue #10 offered two tales, beginning with the hilarious ‘Mollifest Destiny’ by Chris Yost & Sara Pichelli. Molly is a super-strong and tough mutant going through those difficult bossy-boots years but she’s faithful, loyal and extremely protective of her friends.

Elsewhere in the world, the world’s mutant population was reduced to a couple of hundred desperate souls, following the temporary madness of the Avenger Scarlet Witch (as seen in the various House of M story-arcs).

Most of the empowered survivors banded together in self-imposed exile on Utopia Island in San Francisco Bay: a defensive enclave led and defended by the X-Men. Although generally welcomed by most of the easygoing residents of the city, tensions were high and leader Cyclops ran the colony in an increasingly draconian and military manner whilst telepath Emma Frost sent out a psychic summons offering all remaining mutants sanctuary.

Heeding the call, little Mollie reluctantly obeyed but she would rather have stayed with her friends…

…And after a very short while trying to deal with the hyper-active, super-curious, annoyingly perky, indestructible and incredibly destructive little girl, Colossus, the Beast, Frost, Cyclops and especially Wolverine were more than happy to return her to them – especially after Wolverine saw how Mollie dealt with a gang of super-villains who wanted to take revenge on the turbulent tyke for the unexpiated sins of her parents…

The stories end with a warmly informative character piece by James Asmus & Emma Rios, which finds the reunited runaways playing ‘Truth or Dare’ in the Malibu beach house they have appropriated.

As well as learning more about each other, the kids discover just how unruly Nico’s Staff has become after it grotesquely interacts with another mystic talisman recently confiscated from racist cult The Sons of the Serpent. There’s kissing and violence and giant snakes and icky grossness, dudes…

With covers and variants by Humberto Ramos, David LaFuente & Christina Strain, cover production art by LaFuente and design sketches from Rios, this marvellously upbeat and deliciously funny thriller is a superbly entertaining, thought-provoking Fights ‘n’ Tights treasure bursting with wit, action, horror, humour, charm and poignant passion, once more proving that superhero comics can surmount their escapist, gratuitous power-fantasy roots and deliver stories of depth and even joy.

© 2009 Marvel Characters Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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DNA Failure – British Weapon Comics


By Jon Chandler, Leon Sadler & Stefan Sadler (Picturebox)
ISBN: 978-0-9851595-4-2

In comics we’re most accustomed to seeing representationalism and an artistic aspiration towards commercial slickness, but at its most basic the art form is about getting ideas – and far too infrequently emotions – across in sequential form: building ideas and forms to an intended climax. In its purest form, however, talking pictures is all about the act of creation.

You all know people who paint or play music for fun, but how many of you are familiar with the kind of folk who make comics for anything other than commercial or career reasons: experimental craftsmen, raconteurs and artisans with no other honest intention than to see their stories told?

Jon Chandler, Leon and Stefan Sadler are members of prolific art collective Famicon Express and are all just such rare ducks, responsible for a host of decidedly different illustrated fictions such as The Blue Family, Mega Macerator, Ride into Chaos, Blood Bike, Police Worx,  I’m Gonna Kick You in the Nuts and many more.

Drawing much inspiration from manga maestro Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s geki-ga model – comics dark, adult and frequently uncaring of the necessity to entertain – the three innovators have collaborated here to deliver a succession of events set in a feudal wonderland of sharp gritty intensity and compelling free-ranging complexity.

It’s not about the story here but if you must know, Sting and Peter are wild lads in a bad time: getting into trouble stealing, fighting and running about being rowdy, even as the soldiers and villagers stumble from fight to fight and crisis to crisis. To further complicate matters Zeta and Gewgaw want to smuggle themselves aboard a departing galleon because the greedy donkey-beating Major stole their house. Moreover, the land is absolutely rife with annoyingly pushy magic fairy-men, giant burning rats, ghostly doppelgangers and time-travelling monks.

There’s even a moment of old-fashioned illustrated prose courtesy of the enigmatic GHXYK2 & LMS before Sting and Peter burrow under the castle to enter the knife-throwing competition…

Rude, rampant, offbeat and explosively outrageous, this fast-paced, ferocious stream of consciousness saga is unpolished, uproariously free and casually brutal in a raw intellectually anti-art style reminiscent of Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit.

Here three cartoonists take turns turning many mediums on their heads, resulting in a composite scenario with echoes of classic fantasy and modern shared-universe role-playing wherein these bold British cartoon radicals co-opt the freewheeling nature of a strategic, life simulation video game and make it uniquely their own.

If you’re picky about grammar and syntax or wedded to polished art and story this exuberantly pell-mell rollercoaster probably won’t appeal, but if you love experimental bravado, tongue-in-cheek violent affray or spectacularly single-minded comedy carnage, this medieval mash-up might well be worth a few furious moments of your time.
© 2012 The Authors. All rights reserved.

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Thrill Murray – a Colouring-In Book


By Mike Coley & various (Belly Kids)
ISBN: 978-0-9574909-0-1

Belly Kids are a quirky multimedia arts company with a fun-fuelled, anything goes attitude, producing art-based books, records, DVDs, t-shirts, merchandise, live shows and comics just because they can.

This decidedly peculiar collective tribute to a true Hollywood original features twenty three memorable coloured images of the masterful William James “Bill” Murray in many of his most iconic roles, crafted by a bevy of uniquely individualistic artists.

Moreover there are adjacent monochrome iterations of each image just so you and your young ‘uns can have a go at improving upon each…

Ranging from passionately illustrative to baldly comic, these cartoon contributions from Hattie Stewart, Murray Somerville, Logan Fitzpatrick, Anneka Lange, Jonny Packham, James Burgess, Alice Devine, Bridget Meyne, Brooke Olsen, Tobias Hall, Mike Kilkelly, Nicholas Stevenson, Thomas Key, Chris Arrowsmith, Richard Fairhead, Marie-Louise Plum, Catherine Askew, Mya Munnelly, Rosie Roberts, Beth Harris, Donald Ely, Mary Cheung and Nathan Dirienzo recapture the magic of the great man’s celluloid hits from Caddyshack to Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and much more.

It’s never too soon or too late to get in touch with your visually expressive side, and the only way this wonderfully wry and imaginative activity book could be improved is with a box of crayons or some paints and pens…

Irreverent, subversive and appallingly addictive, the combination of great characters, compelling pictures and mirthful attention-seizing is a welcome weapon to get kids reading and creating rather than sluggishly absorbing whatever’s on the TV or computer screen.

Forget video-games – buy that child or your partner this book. If you’re worried about exercise, make ’em do the colouring-in standing up and if they make a mess you can boost their cardio rate by getting them to clean up.

Boy, you have a lot of problems having a bit of fun…
© 2012 Belly Kids. All Rights Reserved.

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The Silver-Metal Lover


By Tanith Lee, adapted by Trina Robbins (Harmony/Crown Books)
ISBN: 0-517-55853-X

During the 1980s, comics finally began to filter through to the mainstream of American popular culture, helped in no small part by a few impressive adaptations of works of literary fantasy such as Michael Moorcock’s Elric or DC’s Science Fiction Graphic Novel line.

Cartoonist, author and comics historian Trina Robbins joined the throng with this deceptively powerful and effectively bittersweet romance adapted from Tanith Lee’s short tale about an earnest young girl in a spoiled, indolent world who discovered abiding love in the most unexpected of places.

In the far-flung, ferociously formal and civilised future everything is perfect – if you can afford it – but human nature has not evolved to match Mankind’s technological and sociological advancements.

Jane has everything a 16-year old could want but is still unhappy. Her mother Demeta provides all she needs – except human warmth – whilst her six registered friends do their best to provide for her growing associative and societal needs. Of her carefully selected peer circle, Jane only actually likes flighty, melodramatic needily narcissistic Egyptia – whom Jane’s mother approves of but considers certifiably insane.

In this world people can live in the clouds if they want, and robots perform most manual toil and tedious services, but it’s far from paradise. Humans still get suspicious and bored with their chatty labour-saving devices and the monumental Electronic Metals, Ltd strive constantly to improve their ubiquitous inventions…

One day Jane agrees to accompany Egyptia to an audition and the fully made-up thespian is accosted by a rude man who mistakes her for a new android. He wants to buy her.

Ruffled by the rude man’s manner, Jane’s attention is then distracted by a beautiful metal minstrel busking in the plaza. The robot’s performance and his lovely song move and frighten Jane in way she cannot understand, and when S.I.L.V.E.R. (Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot) affably introduces himself the flustered girl bolts, running for the relative security of the nearby home of sardonic friend Clovis, where the beautiful tart is in the process of dumping another lover. He proves unsurprisingly unsympathetic to Jane’s confusion and distress, telling her to go home where, still inexplicably upset, she tries to talk the experience out with her mother. Impatient as always, the matron simply enquires if Jane is masturbating enough before telling her to record whatever’s bothering her for mummy to deal with later…

Sulking in a bath Jane is awoken from a sleep by the ecstatic Egyptia who has passed her audition. Bubbling with glee the neophyte actress demands Jane join her at a big party. Avoiding a persistent old letch who is creepily fixated on the fresh young thing, Jane stumbles again upon S.I.L.V.E.R. and once more reacts histrionically to his singing.

As he profusely apologizes for the inexplicable distress he’s somehow caused her, Jane realizes the disturbing mechanical minstrel has been rented by Egyptia for quite another kind of performance later… a private one…

With a gasp of surprise Jane at last understands what she’s feeling and kisses the alluring automaton before fleeing.

Her mother is as useless as ever. Whilst futilely attempting to explain her problem but failing even to catch Demeta’s full attention, Jane gives up and claims she’s in love with Clovis just to cause a shock…

The next day the heartsick waif visits the offices of Electronic Metals, Ltd ostensibly to rent the droid of her dreams – as a minor she has to lie about her age – but is sickened when she finds him partially dissembled whilst the techs try to track down an anomalous response in his systems…

Despondent, she is astonished when Machiavellian Clovis intervenes, renting S.I.L.V.E.R. for Egyptia and convincing the too, too-busy starlet to let Jane look after it for her…

Alone with the object of her affection, insecure Jane’s imagined affair quickly becomes earthily, libidinously real but the honeymoon ends far too soon when Clovis informs her the rental period is over. Crippled by her burning love for the artificial Adonis, Jane begs her mother to buy him for her. When the cold guardian refuses the obsessed child at last rebels…

When Demeta disappears on another of her interminable business trips Jane sells her apartment’s contents, moves into the slums and desperately claims her dream lover with the ill-gotten gains…

Following a tragically brief transformative period of sheer uncompromised joy with her adored mechanical man, reality suddenly hits the happy couple hard as Demeta tracks Jane down and smugly applies financial pressure to force her wayward child to return. Undaunted, the pair become unlicensed street performers and grow ever closer but even as Jane grows in confidence and ability, becoming fiercely independent, public opinion has turned against the latest generation of far-too human mechanical servants. When Electronic Metals recalls all its now hated products, the improper couple flee the city. However the heartless auditors track them down and reclaim Jane’s Silver Metal Lover…

Lyrical and poetic, this is a grand old-fashioned tale of doomed love which still has a lot to say about transformation, growing up and walking your own path, with Trina Robbins’ idyllic and idealised cartooning deceptively disguising the heartbreaking savagery and brutal cruelty of the story to superb effect, making the tragedy even more potent.

Regrettably out of print for years, this is a comics experience long overdue for revival – perhaps in conjunction with new interpretations of the author’s later sequels to the saga of love against the odds…
Illustrations © 1985 Trina Robbins. Text © 1985 Tanith Lee. All rights reserved.

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Black Hole


By Charles Burns (JonathanCape)
ISBN: 978-0-22407-778-1

One of the most impressive and justifiably lauded graphic novels ever, Black Hole is a powerfully evocative allegorical horror story about sex, youth and transformation, but don’t let that deter you from reading it. It’s also a clever, moving, chilling and even uplifting tale that displays the bravura mastery of one of the greatest exponents of sequential narrative the English language has ever produced.

Originally released as a 12-issue limited series under the aegis of Kitchen Sink Press, the tale was rescued and completed through Fantagraphics when the pioneering Underground publisher folded in 1999. On completion Black Hole was promptly released in book form by Pantheon Press in 2005, although many fans and critics despaired at the abridged version which left out many of Burns’ most potent full-page character studies of the deeply troubled cast – an error of economy corrected in subsequent editions.

It has won eleven of the comic world’s most prestigious awards.

It’s the 1970s in Seattle, and there’s something very peculiar happening amongst the local teenagers out in the safe secure suburbs. In ‘Biology 101’, Keith Pearson can’t concentrate on properly dissecting his frog because his lab partner is Chris Rhodes, the veritable girl of his dreams.

Trying to keep cool only makes things worse and when he suddenly slips into a fantastic psychedelic daydream the swirling images resolve into a horrific miasma of sex, torn flesh and a sucking void.

Suddenly he’s regaining consciousness on the floor with the entire class standing over him. They’re all laughing at him… all except Chris…

‘Planet Xeno’ is a quiet patch of woodland adults don’t know about, where the kids can kick back, drink, smoke, get stoned and talk. The big topic among the guys is “the bug”, a sexually transmitted disease that causes bizarre, unpredictable mutations: uncontrolled growths, extra digits, pigmentation changes, new orifices that don’t bleed…

As Keith and best buds Dee and Todd shoot the breeze and goof off they discover an odd encampment, strewn with old toys and bottles and junk. Some of the sufferers of the “Teen Plague” have relocated here to the forest, founding a makeshift camp away from prying eyes and wagging tongues…

When Keith finds a girl’s shed skin hanging from a bush he fears the creepy mutants are closing in and suffers a crazy disorienting premonition…

Chris is dreaming in ‘SSSSSSSSSS’, a ghastly phantasmagoria that involves naked swimming in pollution, a load of strange guys, monsters and that fainting kid Keith turning into a serpent. It all ends with her examining the new holes in her body before ripping off her old skin and leaving it hanging on a bush…

She’s drinking illicit beer by the lake in ‘Racing Towards Something’, remembering that wild party a week ago and what she did with the cool guy Rob Facincanni. As she came on to him he kept trying to tell her something but she was in no mood to listen. She just didn’t want to be the good girl anymore…

She then recalls the moment of explosive climax and horror when she discovered the hideous second mouth in his neck and the noises. It seemed to be speaking…

In the sordid guilty aftermath she felt awful but had no idea what that furtive, disappointing assignation had done to her…

Rob is still sleeping with Lisa. She’s accepted the cost of the curse and the ghastly changes in her body but what she won’t take is him screwing around. She has heard Rob’s second mouth talking as they lay together and needs to know ‘Who’s Chris?’

Keith and his friends are getting stoned again when he hears that some guys have just watched the so-virginal Chris skinny-dipping and seen her sex-caused mutation. The virgin queen isn’t any more…

In ‘Cut’ their teasing proves too much and he storms off into the scrub and accidentally spots the object of his desire getting dressed again. Guiltily voyeuristic, he’s prompted to action when she steps on broken glass and cries out.

Dashing to her rescue he bandages her foot, too ashamed to admit just how much of her he’s really seen. All Keith knows is that someday he will be with her. Fate was obviously on his side…

‘Bag Action’ finds him and Dee trying to buy weed from a bunch of skeevy college guys, but the frustrated romantic is utterly unable to get lascivious, furtive, distracting naked images of Chris out of his mind.

However, after sampling some of the dope in the Frat boys’ dilapidated house, he meets their housemate Eliza, an eccentric artist extremely high, nearly naked and very hungry…

Just as baked, achingly horny and fascinated by her cute tail (not a euphemism), Keith almost has sex with her but is interrupted by his idiot pal at just the wrong moment…

Many of those infected by The Bug have camped out in the woods now and ‘Cook Out’ finds them having a desperate party around a roaring fire. Rob is there, bemoaning the fact that Lisa has kicked him out but he’s also acutely aware that the sex-warped kids are getting oddly wild, manic, even dangerous…

‘Seeing Double’ finds the devastated Chris talking things over with Rob at the outcast’s encampment. The naive fool has just discovered what’s she got and what it means. Lost and disgusted, convinced that she’s a dirty monster with a biological Scarlet Letter that is part of her flesh she drinks and talks and, eventually, finds comfort in her bad boy’s arms…

In ‘Windowpane’ Pearson, Dee and Todd drop their first tabs of acid and head for a party at Jill‘s house. The increasingly morose and troubled Keith is feeling ever more isolated and alienated and the LSD coursing through his system isn’t helping, When Dee and Jill start to make out, he leaves and finds her big sister crying outside. After she shouts at him he turns and, still tripping off his nut, heads into the woods.

Lost and confused, he sees horrific and bizarre things in the trees and bushes before stumbling into some of the infected kids around their fire. In a wave of expiation he begins to talk and keeps on going, slowly coming down amongst temporary friends. Keith has no suspicion that some of the things he saw were not imaginary at all…

‘Under Open Skies’ finds Chris and Rob playing hooky. Fully committed to each other now, they head to the coast and a perfect solitary day of love at the beach. They think it’s all going to be okay but the voice from Rob’s other mouth tells them otherwise…

Back home again, Chris’ recent good times are ruined by her parents’ reaction. Grounded, the former good girl makes up her mind and, gathering a few possessions, elopes with her lover to a new life in ‘The Woods’ where the grotesquely bestial but kindly Dave Barnes takes them under his wing.

Although they have bonded, Rob cannot stay with Chris but returns to his home and High School. Although he spends as much time as he can at the encampment, Chris is too often alone and on one of her excursions into the wilds finds a bizarre and frightening shrine.

Little does she know it’s one of the things the tripping Keith thought he had hallucinated…

Summer moves on and Pearson plucks up the nerve to go back to the college guys’ house. ‘Lizard Queen’ Eliza is on the porch, drawing but obviously upset by something. Confused, scared and without knowing what they’re doing they end up in bed, consummating that long-postponed act of drug-fuelled passion…

Chris’ days of innocent passion end suddenly when Rob is horrifically attacked by a lurking intruder in ‘I’m Sorry’ and she descends into a stupor for days until she spots nice safe Keith at one of the camp’s evening bonfire parties. Soon he’s arranged for her to move into an empty property he’s housesitting for ‘Summer Vacation’ but even though he’s attentive, kind, solicitous and so clearly wants to be with her, he’s just not Rob.

Chris has been going slowly crazy since her beloved boy vanished: reliving memories good and bad, feeling scared and abandoned, playing dangerously with the gun he left her “for protection”…

Keith is still plagued by nightmares and X-rated thoughts of Eliza in ‘A Dream Girl’ but hopeful that he has a chance with Chris, now. That swiftly changes when he checks on her and discovers that the house he’s supposed to be guarding has been trashed. There’s garbage everywhere, a bunch of her fellow outcasts have moved in and she’s clearly avoiding him, locked in a room, constantly “sleeping”…

Despondent and confused, Pearson doesn’t know what to do. Chris is having some kind of breakdown and the house – his responsibility – is a wreck. The lovesick fool is trapped and crumbling when Eliza breezes back into his life. If only his own bug mutation wasn’t so hideous…

Heading back to the home once more he finds that Chris has gone and the pigsty has become a charnel house…

Throughout the summer there has been a frightening, oppressive presence in the woods and with the Fall coming the mood is beginning to darken. When Dave is barracked and abused whilst trying to buy takeout food he snaps and pulls out Chris’ gun. Calmly taking his fried chicken from the crime-scene he walks back to the woods and the troubled soul known as ‘Rick the Dick’. It’s going to be their last meal…

Keith meanwhile has found his own happy ending ‘Driving South’ with the gloriously free and undemanding Eliza, but is still focussed on what he found at the house. At least he and Eliza helped the survivors get away, but now happily content with his idyllic artist girl and after all the horrible secrets they’ve shared, he can’t help wondering what happened to Chris…

That mystery and how Dave got the gun are only revealed in the compulsively low key and wildly visual climax of ‘The End’…

Complex, convoluted and utterly compelling, expressive, evocative and deeply, disturbingly phantasmagorical, Black Hole is a genuine comics masterpiece which applies graphic genius and astoundingly utilises allegory, metaphor, the dissatisfaction and alienation of youth, evolution and cultural ostracization as well as the eternal verities of love, aspiration, jealousy and death to concoct a tale no other medium could (although perhaps Luis Buñuel, David Lynch or David Cronenberg might have made a good go of it in film).

If you are over 16 and haven’t read it, do – and soon.
© 2005 Charles Burns. All rights reserved.

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Showcase Presents Young Love


By Robert Kanigher, John Romita Senior, Bernard Sachs, John Rosenberger, Werner Roth & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78116-060-2

As the flamboyant escapist popularity of superheroes waned after World War II, newer genres such as Romance and Horror came to the fore and older forms regained their audiences. Some, like Westerns and Funny Animal comics, hardly changed at all but crime and detective tales were utterly radicalised by the temperament of the times.

Stark, uncompromising, cynically ironic novels and socially aware, mature-themed B-movies that would become categorised as Film Noir offered post-war society a bleakly antiheroic worldview that often hit too close to home and set fearful, repressive, middleclass parent groups and political ideologues howling for blood.

Naturally the new forms and sensibilities seeped into comics, transforming two-fisted gumshoe and Thud-&-Blunder cop strips of yore into darkly beguiling, even frightening tales of seductive dames, big pay-offs and glamorous thugs. Sensing imminent Armageddon, the moral junkyard dogs bayed even louder as they saw their precious children’s minds under seditious attack…

Concurrent to the demise of masked mystery-men, industry giants Joe Simon and Jack Kirby famously invented the comic love genre with mature, beguiling explosively contemporary social dramas that equally focussed on the changing cultural scene and adult themed relationships beginning with the semi-comedic prototype My Date in early 1947 before plunging into the real deal with Young Romance #1 in September of that year. Not since the invention of Superman had a single comicbook generated such a frantic rush of imitation and flagrant cashing-in. It was a monumental hit and the team quickly expanded: releasing spin-offs such as Young Love (February 1949), Young Brides and In Love.

Simon & Kirby presaged and ushered in the first American age of mature comics – not only with their creation of the Romance genre, but with challenging modern tales of real people in extraordinary situations – before seeing it all disappear again in less than eight years. Their small stable of magazines produced for the loose association of companies known as Prize/Crestwood/Pines blossomed and wilted as the industry contracted throughout the 1950s.

All through that turbulent period comicbooks suffered impossibly biased oversight and hostile scrutiny from hidebound and panicked old guard institutions such as church groups, media outlets and ambitious politicians. A number of tales and titles garnered especial notoriety from those social doom-smiths, and hopeful celebration and anticipation amongst tragic, forward-thinking if psychologically scarred comics-collecting victims was quashed when the industry introduced a ferocious Comics Code that castrated the creative form just when it most needed boldness and imagination. We lost and comics endured more than a decade and a half of savagely doctrinaire self-imposed censorship.

Those tales from a simpler time, exposing a society in meltdown and suffering cultural PTSD, are mild by modern standards of behaviour but the quality of art and writing make those pivotal years a creative highpoint long overdue for a thorough reassessment.

The first Young Love ran for 73 issues (1949-1956) before folding and re-launching in a far more anodyne, Comics-Code-approved form as All For Love in Spring 1957.

Unable to find an iota of its previous and hoped-for audience it disappeared after 17 issues in March 1959 before resurrecting as Young Love again a year later with #18.

It then ran steadily but unremarkably until June 1963 when the experiment and the company died with #38. Crestwood sold up its few remaining landmark, groundbreaking titles and properties – Young Romance, Young Love and Black Magic being the most notable – to National/DC and faded from the business…

The new bosses released their first edition in the autumn of 1963 as part of their own small, shy and unassuming romance ring and carried on with it and a coterie of similar titles targeting teenaged girls (for which read aspirational and imaginative 8-12 year olds) for the next fifteen years.

The savage decline in overall comicbook sales during the 1970s finally killed the genre off. Young Love was one of the last; dying with #126, cover-dated July 1977.

This quirky mammoth monochrome compilation gathers the first 18 DC issues (#39-56 spanning September/October 1963 to July August 1966) but, although beautiful to look upon, is sadly plagued with twin tragedies. The first is that the stories quickly become fearfully formulaic – although flashes of narrative brilliance of do crop up with comforting regularity – whilst the second is an appallingly inaccurate listing of creator credits.

Many fans have commented and suggested corrections online, and I’m adding my own surmises and deductions about artists whenever I’m reasonably sure, but other than the unmistakable, declamatorily florid flavour of Robert Kanigher none of us in fandom are that certain just who was responsible for the scripting of these amatory sagas.

Likely contenders include Barbara Friedlander, Dorothy Woolfolk, George Kashdan, Jack Miller, Phyllis Reed, E. Nelson Bridwell and Morris Waldinger but I’m afraid we’ll never really know.

C’est l’amour…

The heartbreak and tears begin with the introduction of a soap-opera serial undoubtedly inspired by the romantic antics of television physicians such as Dr. Kildare (1961-1966) and Ben Casey (1962-1966), written in an uncomfortably macho “me Doctor Tarzan… you Nurse Jane” style by Kanigher and illustrated with staggering beauty by John Romita Senior.

‘The Private Diary of Mary Robin R.N.’ followed the painful journey and regular heartache of a nurse dedicated to her patients but fighting her inbuilt need to “settle down” with the man of her dreams – usually a big-headed, know-it-all medic who had no time to waste on “settling down”…

The serial opened with ‘No Cure for Love’, a two-part novelette in which the newly qualified Registered Nurse started her career at County General Hospital in the OR; instantly arousing the ire of surly surgeon Will Ames whose apparent nastiness was only a mask for his moody man-concern over his poor patients.

However even as he romanced her and she dared to dream, the good doctor soon proved that medicine would always be his first and only Love…

I’m not sure of the inker but the pencils on ‘You’ve Always Been Nice!’ look like Werner Roth in a novel yarn of modern Texans in love that pretty much set the tone for the title: Modern Miss gets enamoured of the wrong guy or flashy newcomer until the quiet one who waited for her finally gets motivated…

‘The Eve of His Wedding’ by Bernard Sachs went with the other favourite option: the smug flashy girl who loses out to the quiet heroine waiting patiently for true love to lead her man back to her…

In #40 Kanigher & Romita asked ‘Which Way, My Heart?’ of Mary Robin and she answered by letting Dr. Ames walk all over her before transferring to Pediatrics, but still found time to fall in love with an adult patient – but only until he got better…

Filling out the issue were ‘Someone to Remember’ by Bill Draut which saw sensible Judy utterly transform herself into a sophisticated floozy for a boy who actually preferred the old her, and ‘The Power of Love’ (incorrectly attributed to Don Heck but perhaps Morris Waldinger or John Rosenberger heavily inked by Sachs?) in which Linda competed with her own sister over new boy Bill…

Although retaining the cover spot, the medical drama was relegated to the end of the comic from #41 on and complete stories led, starting on ‘End With A Kiss’ by Mike Sekowsky & Sachs, wherein calculating Ann almost married wrong guy Steve until good old Neil put his foot down, whilst for a girl who dated two men at the same time ‘Heartbreak Came Twice!’ in a tale that was almost a tragedy…

Mary Robin then cried – she cried a lot – ‘No Tomorrow for My Heart!’ as Will Ames continued to call when he felt like it and she somehow found herself competing with best friend Tess for both him and a hunky patient in their care. She even briefly quit her job for the man of her dreams…

The superb John Rosenberger inking himself – mistakenly credited throughout as Jay Scott Pike – opened #42 with ‘Boys are Fools!’ as young Phyllis was temporarily eclipsed by her cynical and worldly older sister Jayne until a decent man showed them the error of their ways. Vile Marty then used unwitting Linda as a pawn in a battle of romantic rivals for ‘A Deal with Love!’ (Rosenberger or Win Mortimer & Sachs?).

With a ‘Fearful Heart!’, Mary Robin closed up the issue by accidentally stealing the love of a blinded patient nursed by her plain associate. When the hunk’s sight returned, he just naturally assumed the pretty one was his devoted carer…

Young Love #43 opened with the excellent ‘Remember Yesterday’ (looking like Gil Kane layouts over Sachs) in which Gloria relives her jilting by fiancé Grant before embarking on a journey of self-discovery and finding her way back to love, after which the Sekowsky/Sachs influenced ‘A Day Like Any Other’ and ‘Before it’s Too Late’ display the difficulty of being a working woman and the temptations of being left at home all alone…

After that Kanigher & Romita ended the affairs by showing the childhood days of Mary Robin and just why she turned to nursing when her childhood sweetheart became her latest patient in ‘Shadow of Love!’

Issue #44 declared ‘It’s You I Love!’ (Kane or Frank Giacoia & Sachs perhaps?) as wilful Chris foolishly set her cap for the college’s biggest hunk, whilst in ‘Unattainable’ Lorna learned that she just wasn’t that special to playboy Gary even as Mary Robin endured ‘Double Heartbreak!’ when her own sister Naomi swept in and swooped off with the on-again-off-again Dr. Ames…

Sekowsky & Sachs opened #45 with ‘As Long as a Lifetime!’ wherein poor April found herself torn between and tearing apart best friends Tommy and Jamie, whilst ‘Laugh Today, Weep Tomorrow!’ (which looks like Jay Scott Pike & Jack Abel or maybe Win Mortimer) saw tragic Janet see her best friend Margot‘s seductive allure steal away another man she might have loved, before ‘One Kiss for Always’ found Mary Robin the patient after a bus crash cost her the use of her legs.

During her battle back to health, and loss of the only man she might have been happy with, the melodrama finally achieved the heights it always aspired to in a tale of genuine depth and passion.

The captivating Rosenberger’s led in #46 as Maria and Mark conspired together to win back their respective intendeds and discovered ‘Where Love Belongs’, after which Mortimer revealed ‘It’s All Over Now’ for Merrill who only got Cliff because Addie went away to finishing school. But then she came back… This surprisingly mature and sophisticated fable was followed by ‘Veil of Silence!’ in which Nurse Robin took her duties to extraordinary lengths by allowing a patient to take her latest boyfriend in order to aid her full recovery…

In #47 ‘Merry Christmas’, by Rosenberger, showed astonishing seasonal spirit as Thea cautiously welcomed back her sister Laurie and gave her a second chance to steal her husband, after which secretary Vicky eavesdropped on her boss and boyfriend and almost finished her marriage before it began in ‘Every Beat of his Heart!’(Mortimer).

Mary Robin’s ‘Cry for Love’ started in another pointless fling with the gadabout Ames and ended with her almost stealing another nurse’s man in a disappointingly shallow but action-packed effort, whilst in #48 ‘Call it a Day’ (Mortimer) found an entire clan of women unite to secure a man for little Alice, after which Rosenberger limned ‘Trust Him!’ wherein bitter sister Marta‘s harsh advice to her love-sick sibling Jill was happily ignored, and Kanigher & Romita explored Mary Robin’s ‘Two-Sided Heart!’ after “Bill” Ames again refused to consider moving beyond their casually intimate relationship.

Of course that couldn’t excuse what she then did with the gorgeous amnesia patient with the grieving girlfriend…

Young Love #49 opened with Rosenberger’s ‘Give Me Something To Remember You By!’ as Marge prays that her latest summer romance turns into a something more. Waiting is a torment but ‘Your Man is Mine!’ (Roth) showed what’s worse when sisters clashed and Clea again tried to take what Pat had – a fiancé…

‘Someone… Hear my Heart!’ then unselfconsciously dipped into the world of TV as Mary Robin dumped Dr. Ames for an actor and a new career on a medical show. It didn’t end well and she was soon back where she belonged with the man who couldn’t or wouldn’t appreciate her…

Roth opened #50 with ‘Second Hand Love’ as Debbie dreaded that the return of vivacious Vicky would lead to her taking back the man she left behind, whilst ‘Come into My Arms!’ (Ogden Whitney or Ric Estrada perhaps?) saw Mary Grant visit Paris in search of one man only to fall for another, after which Mary Robin found herself pulled in many directions as she fell for another doctor and one more hunky patient before rededicating herself to professional care over ‘The Love I Never Held!’

She jumped back to the front in #51 and discovered ‘All Men are Children!’ (Kanigher & Romita) when an unruly shut-in vindictively used her to make another nurse jealous, after which Rosenberger delivered a stunning turn with ‘Afraid of Love!’ wherein, after years of obsessive yearning, Lois finally goes for it with the man of her dreams.

Romita then took a turn at an anthology solo story with ‘No Easy Lessons in Love’ as Gwen and Peter travelled the world and made many mistakes before finally finding each other again.

The nurse finally got her man – and her marching orders – in #52’s ‘Don’t Let it Stop!’, but dashing interne Dan Swift only made his move on Mary after being hypnotised! Hopefully she lived happily ever after because, despite being advertised for the next issue, she didn’t appear again.

This abrupt departure was followed by the reprint ‘Wonder Women of History: Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’ (by Julius Schwartz & John Giunta from Wonder Woman #55, September/October 1952), detailing the life of a crusading social campaigner before Roth – possibly inked by Sheldon Moldoff – detailed how a flighty girl stopped chasing husky lifeguards and found a faithful adoring ‘Young Man for Me!’, and ‘The Day I Looked Like This!’ (by Dick Giordano and not Gene Colan) celebrated the day tomboy Judi finally started gussying up like a girl and unhappily discovered she was the spitting image of a hot starlet…

Issue #53 began with ‘A Heart Full of Pride!’ (Sachs) as naive Mib proved to herself that, just like in school, determination and perseverance paid off in romance, before Mortimer detailed how standoffish Cynthia realised how she needed to play the field to win her man in ‘I Wanted My Share of Love’, after which Romita described the designs of Kathy who discovered the pitfalls of her frivolous lifestyle in ‘Everybody Likes Me… but Nobody Loves Me!’

Bill Draut illustrated the lead feature in #54 as ‘False Love!’ detailed a case of painfully mistaken intentions as gang of kids all went out with the wrong partners until bold Nan finally spoke her mind, whilst ‘Love Against Time’ by Tony Abruzzo & Sachs showed schoolteacher Lisa that patience wasn’t everything, after which ‘Too Much in Love!’ (Romita) seemed to hint at a truly abusive relationship until Mandy‘s rival told her just why beloved Van acted that way…

‘An Empty Heart!’ (Arthur Peddy & Sachs or possibly Mortimer again) opened on #55, revealing how insecure Mindy needed to date other boys just to be sure she could wait for beloved Sam to come back from the army, whilst Sachs’ ‘Heart-Shy’ Della took her own sweet time before realising self-effacing Lon was the boy for her, after which the original and genuine Jay Scott Pike limned the tale of Janie who at last defied her snobbish, controlling mother and picked ‘Someone of My Own to Love’.

The romance dance concludes here with #56 and ‘A Visit to a Lost Love’ (Gene Colan) – a bittersweet winter’s tale of paradise lost and regained, after which perpetually fighting Richy and Cindy realised ‘Believe it or Not… It’s Love’ (Abruzzo & Sachs), and ‘I’ll Make Him Love Me!’ (Sachs) showed how the scary Liz stalked Perry until she fell for her destined soul-mate Bud…

As I’ve described, the listed credits are full of errors and whilst I’ve corrected those I know to be wrong I’ve also made a few guesses which might be just as wild and egregious (I’m still not unconvinced that many tales were simply rendered by a committee of artists working in desperate jam-sessions), so I can only apologise to all those it concerns as well as fans who thrive on these details for the less-than-satisfactory job of celebrating the dedicated creators who worked on these all-but forgotten items.

As for the tales themselves: they’re dated, outlandish and frequently borderline offensive in their treatment of women.

So were the times in which they were created, but that’s not an excuse.

However there are a few moments of true narrative brilliance to equal the astonishing quality of the artwork on show here, and by the end of this titanic torrid tome the tone of the turbulent times was definitely beginning to change as the Swinging part of the Sixties began and hippies, free love, flower power and female emancipation began scaring the pants off the old guard and reactionary traditionalists…

Not for wimps or sissies but certainly an unmissable temptation for all lovers of great comic art…
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