Category: Mature Reading

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Fear Agent volume 2: My War


By Rick Remender & Jerome Opeña (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 987-1-59307-766-2

Fear Agent debuted from Image Comics in 2005 and ran for eleven issues before folding. It was subsequently picked up by Dark Horse in 2007 with the first tale represented in an explosive collection as Re-Ignition. It introduced dissolute, Mark Twain-spouting, alcoholic Texan freelance pest-control operative Heath Huston: the original Man With a Past But No Future…

One of the last humans in existence, he was hunting aliens and eradicating outer-space thingies for a fee, looking for a way to end it all on his own terms, when he got suckered into triggering a nigh-inescapable trap to destroy what remained of Earth by bombarding it with “Feeders”.

The flesh-eating horrors can only be stopped by blowing up any planet they land on and Huston realised the plot was another attempt by the Dressite Empire – Earth’s greatest enemy – to finish the job they started decades ago, when they tried to wipe out mankind and only the legendary Fear Agents were (barely) able to stop them…

Huston – claiming to be the only survivor of that august cadre of warriors – barely escaped the Dressite trap, taking with him feisty, surly warp scientist Mara Esperanza – last survivor of space station Glentbin – and raced to stop the wave of ravenous, unstoppable Feeder larvae hurtling towards Earth aboard a convoy of deadly Trojan Horse ships to eradicate the slowly-rebuilding human race.

Until now his only companion had been Annie, a sentient AI spaceship who hated Mara on sight. Now, thanks to more Dressite treachery, they all fell together into another trap. However, the wicked plotters underestimated the astounding Annie, who contrived to ride their deadly warp-wave and dumped the humans – alive but lost – on a strange alien world where they become embroiled in an apocalyptic war between creatures of flesh and monsters of metal.

As the conflict proceeded and Huston fretted that Feeders were inexorably closing on Earth, he realised that he was lost not just in space but also time. Savouring a chance to preserve his homeworld centuries before any marauding ETs ever attacked, Huston embarked on a crazy raid with his meat-based allies that went horribly, irretrievably wrong. And then he died.

This second volume (representing Image issues #5-10) opens with the time-lost reprobate somehow battling giant brains and getting on really rather extraordinarily well with the sultry and completely unpredictable Mara, only to be given a tantalising glimpse of possible personal futures just as Annie warns them that they are in orbit above Earth.

The scenes below are utterly appalling, but as Huston tools up to go down fighting the now gigantic mature Feeders, the many wars he has fought blur and a new element enters the baffling picture: a previously unknown coalition of races which arrests him for causing a time anomaly…

Thrown into a ghastly Gen-Pop of otherworldly malefactors, Heath devolves into an even more disgusting wreck, slaughtering other inmates and stealing their drugs. Utterly unrepentant, he is a pathetic addict when finally charged and doesn’t even notice when his accusers let slip that this is the thirteenth time a Heath Huston has stood before them…

Left to rot in the worst of all imaginable jails, he sinks into addiction and barely understands when he is rescued by Annie and Mara and arrives (via a telling flashback which recounts the day his family died and the alien invaders first hit his homeworld) on an Earth that couldn’t possibly exist, a Terra where other Fear Agents still fight against ghastly all-consuming monsters. A world where his dead wife Charlotte is president of all that remains of humanity…

Confused? Good, you’re supposed to be, but if you stick with this astoundingly compelling rollicking rollercoaster ride everything will become even more cosmically confounding before eventually slotting neatly into place. Pandering to your juvenile desires to see monsters, space-babes, ray-gun blasts and humongous explosions whilst deftly straining your brain with deviously clever extrapolations of classic science fiction memes, this collection comes with a sketchbook section from illustrator Jerome Opeña: affording readers a powerfully character-driven, fast, furious, frantic, thrilling, manic and exceedingly clever, balls-to-the-wall Sci Fi romp which exults in the best OTT traditions of 2000AD, and has all the adrenalin-fuelled fun any fantasy aficionado could want.

Once upon a time science fiction was hard, fast all-encompassing action wrapped in impossible ideas, but over the years films like Star Wars and TV shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica slowly pacified, ameliorated, crossbred and bastardised the form until it became simple window-dressing for cop stories, westerns and war yarns…

Rick Remender clearly loves the old-fashioned, wide-eyed wonder stuff too, and with artistic collaborator Opeña revels in sublimely impossible, mind-bending adventurous Amazing Stories to remind us all of what we’ve been missing.

Fear Agent was a breath of fresh air when it came out and remains one of very best cosmic comics experiences around. If you’re old enough, Sentient enough and Earthling enough, this is a series you must see before you die, have your brain-engrams recorded and are cloned into a new form unable to enjoy terrific fiction feasts.
© 2006, 2007 Rick Remender & Tony Moore. All rights reserved. All characters and distinctive likenesses are ™ Rick Remender & Tony Moore.

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Canardo, Private Eye: A Shabby Dog Story


By Benoít Sokal (Xpresso Books/Fleetway)
ISBN: 978-1-85386-260-6

Artist, writer and games designer Benoít Sokal (Sanguine, Syberia, Amerzone, Kraa) was born in Brussels in 1954. He studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc De Bruxells, the prestigious art school where legendary creator Claude Renard (Belles Histoires de l’Oncle Paul, Aux Médianes de Cymbiola, Le Rail, Ivan Casablanca) taught and nurtured many students who would become Belgium’s modern masters of comics.

Sokal joined that select band of professionals in 1978, selling humorous strips and characters to À Suivre and striking gold early. He had been producing short, blackly comedic tales featuring anthropomorphic animals living in a world of contemporary humanity. Amongst the vast cast was a tawdry, unscrupulous, hard-drinking private detective named Inspector Canardo. Although never a true protagonist in those days, the dour duck was always around when events inevitably spiralled out of control…

The occasional series struck a chord with European audiences and soon Canardo was headlining his own series of albums. The first, in 1979, gathered those early shorts into an “Album #0” entitled Premières enquêtes and was followed by 22 more to date: the latest, Le vieux canard et la mer was released in 2013.

Dividing his time between his mallard megastar and more realistic dramas such as police thriller Silence, on Tue! (with François Rivière) and Le Vieil homme qui n’écrivait plus, by the close of the 1990s Sokal made the sideways jump from comics to the burgeoning videogames market, bringing in artist Pascal Regnauld to handle much of the illustration for his foul-feathered fowl.

Although a huge hit on the continent, Canardo struggled to find a place amongst English-speaking audiences. Sporadically released in translation between 1989 and 1991 by Rijperman and NBM for the American continent and through Fleetway’s Xpresso books in the UK, Sokal’s patently adults-only, philosophically nihilistic and bleakly moody homage to film noir came and went largely unnoticed, and I think it’s time some savvy publisher took another shot…

Volume #1 – Le Chien debout (1981 and more accurately translated as The Standing Dog) became initial British release A Shabby Dog Story as Xpresso – the experimental division of publishing monolith Fleetway – when the home of Judge Dredd, Buster and Roy of the Rovers sought to catch a pan-Atlantic wave of interest in comics for grown-ups.

The series readily toys with the internal consistency of storytelling: Canardo and other cast regulars have died several times, timescales are largely irrelevant, early tales have humans, anthropomorphic animals and regular critters cautiously coexisting side by side, science and magic happily co-mingle with the seedily traditional elements of sex, violence, depression and existential isolation and some of the players occasionally refer to themselves inhabiting a comics story.

As previously mentioned, in the earliest escapades the dowdy duck dick is little more than a disinterested spectator; an Éminence grise perfectly capable of shaping events and preventing tragedies but always unwilling to get involved unless there’s a direct benefit for him.

Here the focus is on shady nomad Ferdinand, a hooch-loving hobo pooch whose addiction to garbage brought him low and whose years of aimless peregrination have now brought him back to his hometown. Once an infamous bigwig and ruler of the roost amongst the skeevy bestial characters on the wrong side of the tracks, he’s now unrecognisable to the surviving patrons of Freddo’s Bar, but that’s okay.

All the down-and-out really cares about is seeing his adored Gilberte once more, but after he makes himself known in his traditional manner and hears she’s dead, Ferdinand regains some of his old fire and resolves to find out who killed her…

His anxious successor is Kartler, a blustering hound with a big bark but little bite, although he does have dangerous friends…

When thugs corner him our traumatised shabby dog is soon overwhelmed and left to die horribly, with Kartler’s accusation that Ferdinand was Gilberte’s killer ringing in his floppy, flea-bitten ears. Only as the dog is dying does former cop Inspector Canardo intervene, and only then because of the promise of scoring a stash of drugs…

The duck does offer a little info for nothing, revealing Gilberte had latterly lived with a human doctor named Calhoun after she stopped being Kartler’s main squeeze. Calhoun has a unique and unenviable reputation: a sadistic maniac operating on animals – especially dogs – turning them into mindless zombies for Kartler’s ever expanding army…

When desperate Ferdinand breaks into the surgeon’s compound he quickly discovers that’s the very least of the doctor’s many atrocities…

And back at the bar, against his better judgement a duck with an unslakable thirst breaks all his own rules and decides to get involved. After all, Canardo has known from the very start exactly how Gilberte died…

Stark, wry, bleak, outrageously amusing and almost Brechtian in its tone and execution of a demi-monde society, the saga of Carnardo is a powerful antidote to traditional adventure paladins and a supreme example of the antihero taken to its ultimate extreme. It’s also beguilingly lovely to look upon in a grim traffic accident, bunny-in-the-headlights manner.

Let’s hope some publisher with a little vision agrees…
Le Chien debout © 1981 Casterman. Translation © 1989 Cha Cha Comics. UK edition © 1991 Xpresso Books. All rights reserved.

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The Evil of Oz


By Ryan Fuller & Sanjana Baijnath (CreateSpace)
ISBN: 978-1-49351-704-6

Depending on your outlook, you’re either going to adore or despise this one…

We all know the story of The Wizard of Oz – or at least the bare bones of it harvested to make the admittedly stunning 1939 film – but the truth is there’s a vast amount from that legendary 1900 novel by jobbing journalist and prolific author Lyman Frank Baum that remained unfilmed and unaddressed.

In recent years a number of books, comics, films and stage productions have taken another look – and many liberties – with the modern myth, but this is one of the most forthright, unrepentant and engaging – especially if you’re a lover of gory horror stories.

It begins at the scene of bloody multiple homicides in ‘Kansas’. A maniac has brutally ended the lives of an old farmer and his wife and their niece Dorothy Gale isn’t making a bit of sense over the crime.

Then again there’s not much sense to be had when the perp steals hearts after crudely removing them with an axe…

Once the cops have gone, however, the survivor undertakes a strange course of action. Activating her silver slippers, she summons a raging storm and, gripping the gory murder weapon, heads back to ‘Munchkinland’ in search of answers and justice…

Her return to the beautiful happy place she once liberated is a nightmare of shattered dreams. The wonderful kingdom is dark and blighted, reeking of decadence, decay and death. Dorothy isn’t surprised when she is mobbed by disgusting diminutive aberrations. She just wields the axe with terrifying dexterity in a deadly dance of destruction…

Grimly retracing her steps on a once-golden path she makes her way to ‘The Emerald Stockade’, encountering en route an old friend brought low and made example of.

He relates the reason for Oz’s decline but does not accompany her as she moves on to ‘The Stumps’ and a shocking confrontation with another beloved former comrade fallen on hard and mercilessly uncompromising times…

Having dealt justice to her guardians’ murderer means nothing after Dorothy learns who has overseen the tainting of the magical land and she struggles onward, enduring a similar heartrending reunion in ‘The Petrified Forest’ before reaching ‘The Bright City’ and a final battle with the avaricious traitor who instigated the corruption…

However, even after winning her last smidgen of scarlet retribution, Dorothy still has one last happy memory to ruin and betrayal to avenge when she meets ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’…

Bleak, nihilistic and superficially feeling like Titus Andronicus meets I Spit on Your Grave, Ryan Fuller’s sparse, spartan and extremely evocative violent chiller is realised with lush and lavish painted artwork by Sanjana Baijnath and carries a subtle but venerable message: be careful what you wish for…

The acquisition of all those so-long-desired and hard-won gifts did nothing but sour and poison the once-noble champions who strived so mightily to attain them and now the heroes are monsters who need to be put down…

Visceral, unflinching, possibly exploitative but with a moral subtext that cannot be denied, this is a terror tale to tantalise fans with adult tastes and post modern sensibilities.

No copyright notice that I could find so I’m assuming Text © 2015 Ryan Fuller and Illustrations © 2015 Sanjana Baijnath.
The Evil of Oz is also available as a Kindle edition.

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Mercy: Shake the World


By J.M. DeMatteis & Paul Johnson (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels)
ISBN: 978-0-486-79905-6

Dover’s superb line of lost and rescued comics classics continues with a still-fresh and immensely innovative spiritual odyssey first seen in 1993, now resurrected in a softcover collection packed with fascinating extras and bonus material.

Originally conceived as one of a tranche of titles developed by Editor Art Young for the Disney Company’s ambitious but ultimately stillborn Touchmark adult comics imprint (the others being Sebastian O, Enigma and Shadows Fall) in the early 1990s, Mercy was first released as a 64-page one-shot comicbook in the initial wave of DC’s Vertigo line in 1993.

Thematically at odds with the dark, uncompromising and nihilistic fare of titles such as Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol and even the groundbreaking, bleakly lyrical Sandman, the astounding near-life experiences of Joshua Rose came and went relatively unremarked then, but at last gets a fair chance to shine here.

Preceded by an absorbing reunion between creators as transcribed in ‘About Mercy: Shake the World – a Conversation Between Writer J.M. DeMatteis and Artist Paul Johnson’, the phantasmagorical journey of revelation unfolds through a cascade of stunning painted visuals that begin in a coldly antiseptic hospital room…

Middle-aged and long-bled of all inner joy, Joshua Rose was almost glad when the stroke put him into a coma.

Jaded, world-weary, bitterly disappointed to his core, he has no illusions about life’s wonders or humanity’s merits. He lies inert in his exorbitantly expensive private clinical cell, impaled on and afflicted with dozens of tubes and needles and machines.

Seemingly dead to the world, he is in fact acutely aware of not just his own physical surroundings but also every inconceivable nook and cranny of universal time and space.

Spurning his wife and his world, Rose’s morose and twisted psyche roams infinity despising everything he sees in it, especially the miraculous mute woman glowing blue, constantly flashing across his consciousness and dragging him to uncountable encounters with people in all their pathetic, pitiful privation, sordid weakness, tawdry injustice and innate inescapable misery.

He derisively calls her “Mercy” but as she silently lures him ever onwards to scenes of family discord in London, an agonising personal trial in a primeval South American rainforest and a death-haunted, woe-infested apartment in Brooklyn, Joshua observes her tireless confrontations with monsters and worse and, somewhere deep inside, begins at last to change…

Crafted in true collaborative fashion by DeMatteis and Johnson, the deeply evocative and astonishingly expressionistic voyage of discovery is deconstructed in a number of extra features beginning with intriguing ‘Excerpts from the Outline’ exploring the writer’s initial plot concepts before being expanded with forensic intensity through illustrator Johnson’s beguiling monochrome ‘Page Layouts’.

Then, augmented by page after page of lavish and lovely full colour ‘Production Art’, character sketches and design roughs; accompanied by the artist’s thoughts on his process in ‘About the Art’, the entire delicious and eccentric delight is finally summed up in original editor Art Young’s laudatory ‘Afterword’, putting to bed one of the most intoxicating and passionate paeans to humble humanity ever crafted in comics form.

Mercy was different then and it’s still different now: an ideal confection for comics connoisseurs who remain forever bright at heart…

© 2015 Dover Publications, Inc. Introduction © 2015 J.M. DeMatteis and Paul Johnson. Art & text © 2015 J.M. DeMatteis and Paul Johnson. Afterword © 2015 Art Young. All rights reserved.

Mercy: Shake the World will be in stores from June 17th 2015 and is available for pre-order now. Check out www.doverpublications.com, your internet retailer or comic shop of choice.

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Criminal Macabre: The Third Child


By Steve Niles, Christopher Mitten & various (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-631-0

As illustrated by Jim Whiting, Steve Niles’ Cal McDonald first appeared in 1990 as part of the line-up in controversial comics anthology Fly in My Eye: Daughters of Fly in My Eye.

The hardboiled detective/horror-hunter then enjoyed his own serial in Dark Horse Presents #102-105 (1996), starred in two prose novels (Savage Membrane and Guns, Drugs and Monsters) before returning to comics with Niles’ 30 Days of Night collaborator Ben Templesmith limning the eponymous Criminal Macabre miniseries.

That was followed by loads more comics by many other artists and even another novel…

What I’m saying is that this guy’s been around, but you can pick up any book and get on with the business of being spooked whilst vicariously crushing evil with no appreciable head-strain. Then, when you realise you like what you see, you can track down the graphic novels, the Casebooks and the Omnibus Editions to prolong and expand the eerily electric experience…

In this latest compilation – collecting 2014’s 4-issue miniseries Criminal Macabre: The Third Child – the world’s most uncompromising monster-killer is coming to terms with the most unpleasant of occurrences and not coping well.

Despite years fighting against and alongside all aspects of the uncanny and supernatural, Cal has been in a bit of a dark place ever since he lost a battle and returned as a full-blown example of the undead. Now, as he haunts the darkest corners of Los Angeles, more bad news comes his way…

Whilst McDonald’s mind goes back to 1975 and his first fateful encounter with a destroyer of innocence, elsewhere it begins, as it always does, with people dying…

When two grotesque and infernal infants hit the mean streets they casually sow blood and death in their wake, inspiring everyone they meet – even unrepentant and merciless members of the city’s vast supernatural fraternity – to go on uncontrolled killing sprees. The wee kiddies are searching for the last of their kind. When they locate “The Third Child” they will all unite to end the world in a storm of rabid, infectious, hate-filled aggression…

When McDonald’s associates – Mo’lock the ghoul, Brobdingnagian Adam and a cop named Wheatley – finally locate the self-pitying avenger they quickly realise that he’s succumbing to the darkest urges of his new condition, but have important news.

The devil-babies have stirred things up so much the entire community has united. Even the vampires and werewolves are honouring a truce until the Earth is rid of the infant invaders… but they need a leader…

Meanwhile the terror-toddlers’ search for the missing waif has uncovered a potential candidate. Cal’s greatest enemy Jason Hemlock has clawed his way out of Hell and proclaims himself the third part of the Armageddon triumvirate.

He’s lying, but as the bodies mount up anyway and LA burns, the increasingly out-of-control Cal is running out of options to stave off the end of everything. And then, just as the assembled legion of monsters decide it’s every freak for itself, a reunion with his long dead dad affords McDonald the clue he’s been desperately searching for.

Armed with the knowledge of who and what the missing third is, Cal is ready to save the world again but is quite unprepared for the incredible consequences and his next uncanny evolution at war’s end…

Lightning-paced, dryly funny and spectacularly violent, Niles’ sparse and Spartan tale races along, beautifully and forcefully realised by illustrator Christopher Mitten, who also supplies an extensive and enthralling Sketchbook section.

No-nonsense monster-mashing mayhem at its best.

Text and illustrations ™ and © 2014 Steve Niles. All rights reserved.

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The Light and Darkness War


By Tom Veitch & Cam Kennedy (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-180-8

During the 1980s the American comics scene enjoyed an astounding proliferation of new titles and companies in the wake of the creation of the Direct Sales Market. With publishers able to firm-sale straight to retail outlets rather than overprint and accept returned copies from non-specialised vendors, the industry was able to support less generic titles and creators could experiment without losing their shirts.

In response Marvel Comics developed a line of creator-owned properties at the height of the subsequent publishing explosion, launching a number of idiosyncratic, impressive series in a variety of formats under the watchful, canny eye of Editor Archie Goodwin. The delightfully disparate line was dubbed Epic Comics and the results reshaped the industry.

One of the most evocative releases was a darkly compelling war/fantasy/science fiction serial with a beautifully simple core concept: Valhalla is real and forever…

Conceived and created by author, poet and comics scribe Tom Veitch (Legion of Charlies, Antlers in the Treetops, Animal Man, Star Wars: Dark Empire) and Cam Kennedy (Fighting Mann, Judge Dredd, Batman, Star Wars: Dark Empire) The Light and Darkness War originally ran from October 1988 to September 1989, just as that period of exuberant creative freedom was giving way to a marketplace dominated by reductive exploitation led by speculators.

Because of that downturn, this fantastic saga of martial pride and redemption through valiant service in the Great Beyond never really got the popular acclaim it deserved, hopefully something this glorious hardback retrospective compilation from Titan Comics will belatedly address…

Following heartfelt reminiscences and an appreciation in the ‘Foreword by Commander Mike Beidler, USN, Retired’ the astounding fable introduces paraplegic Vietnam war veteran Lazarus Jones, a broken, troubled warrior for whom the fighting never ended.

Home when he should have died with his inseparable friends, plagued with red-hot memories of beloved comrades lost when their Huey went down, by 1978 the wheelchair-bound wreck of a man is in a most parlous state.

Shattered by what will one day be designated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Laz cannot help making life hell for his devoted wife Chris. His miserable existence takes an even darker turn when Jones begins seeing visions of long-gone Huff, Slaw and Engle all calling him to join them.

A little later when Chris’ car crashes, Laz is severely hurt and left in a coma he might never awake from…

Elsewhere on the other side of Eternity, a shadowy shape speaks to Lazarus offering a choice: he can go back or he can join his long-departed brothers …

And thus begins a fantastic adventure as the half-man is restored to perfect health and reunited with those who know him best. The catch is that this afterlife is like nothing any holy book ever promised. It’s a vast cosmos of painful, unrelenting physicality where strange alien species commingle and Earth’s dead continue much as they had before.

Pilots steer gunships – albeit flying ones made of stone and levitated by little blue aliens called “menteps” – Leonardo da Vinci carries on inventing weapons for powerful lords and soldiers from every era have one more chance to serve and die…

Miraculously and joyously restored, Laz eagerly rejoins Engle, Slaw and Huff in the only thing he was ever good at. Manning a flying boat armed with light-powered weapons he becomes part of a vast force perpetually defying an unimaginable wave of invading evil from the Outer Darkness.

It’s a war with no overall plan or envisaged endgame, just eternal conflict, but recently a dark lord named Na has risen to the foremost rank of the “Deadsiders” and the legions of night seem to be gaining an advantage in the never-ending conflict fought on a million planets and a billion fronts…

For five hundred years however the genius da Vinci has created weapons that have checked the rapid advance and held the invaders to a tenuous stalemate, but Deadsiders are tirelessly patient and resort to inexorably taking worlds one at a time.

But now a novel event has taken place. Although Lazarus has happily enlisted in the army of Light comprised of those who died in battle on Earth, on the other side of the sky his body is still alive…

Stationed on besieged world Black Gate, Laz and the “Light Gang” are unable to prevent libidinous Lord Na from infiltrating and overcoming the planetary defences, but at least they save Governor Nethon‘s daughter Lasha from becoming the conqueror’s latest power-supplying plaything.

Although gradually winning the war for the dark, Na is impatient for a faster outcome. To achieve that end he had his necromancers rediscover an ancient, long-forgotten way to contact the Earth realm and dupes millionaire arms-dealer and devout Satanist Niles Odom into creating a device to physically bridge the dimensions.

Na’s wishes are simple; he wants earthly particle weapons, rail guns, atom bombs…

The unwitting dupe building Odom’s bridge is Nicky Tesla, a brilliant physicist whose intellect rivals that of his dead uncle Nikola, the wizard of electricity who once astounded the world.

With his clairvoyant girlfriend Delpha little Nicky has used his uncle’s old researches to complete an inter-realm gate for crazy-rich Odom, but when an army of zombies come through it and abduct him and Delpha nobody is prepared for what follows.

As the scientists are dragged across into an impossible world where Uncle Nikola is alive again, Laz and the Light Gang – following in Na’s wake – explosively head the other way…

They soon find themselves trapped on their birth-world, just as whole and hale as the day they died… and where Jones still languishes somewhere in a hospital bed.

With all the Afterworlds at stake they have no choice but to fight their way back to the War again…

Also included in this gloriously fulsome chronicle is a sketch-&-developmental art ‘Background Briefing’ by Veitch & Kennedy, discussing the Underground Comic origins and antecedents of the story as well as the history, physics and metaphysics of the Light and Darkness War and a potent overview and personal recollection from Stephen R. Bissette, ‘Endless War: The Life, Loss and Afterlife of Lazarus Jones’.

Fast paced, suspenseful, astonishingly imaginative and utterly beautiful to behold, the complex tale of Laz’s team and their struggle, how two generations of Tesla reshape a war that has been waged forever, and how in the end only love and devotion can battle overwhelming evil is a masterpiece of graphic endeavour and one no lover of fantasy fiction should miss.
The Light and Darkness War is ™ and © 2015 Tom Veitch & Cam Kennedy. All rights reserved.

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Empowered Unchained volume 1


By Adam Warren with Emily Warren, Ryan Kinnaird, John Staton, Takeshi Miyazawa, Brandon Graham & various (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-580-1

The trappings and minutiae of superheroes have finally become part of the contemporary conceptual consciousness, just as science fiction did in the 1960s and 1970s. As such the genre has finally laid itself open to the kind of loving ridicule and jocund spoofery which resulted in movies such as Galaxy Quest, Evolution, Mars Attacks, Woody Allen’s Sleeper or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Whilst superhero films haven’t quite reached those raucous heights (although Mystery Men and British TV’s Misfits come damn close) the social democratisation of the once niche – or perhaps ghetto – genre’s core concepts have at least resulted in a few tellingly effective and fondly outrageous comicbook series in recent years.

Indubitably one of the best and most engaging is Empowered, which details in excruciating detail the misadventures of haplessly charming hero-nerd Elissa Megan Powers, who, through events I’ll save for a later review, came into possession of an alien super-suit and quite naturally opted to join the ranks of the world’s already overcrowded super-champion community…

Although incredibly powerful, the hypermembrane outfit is shockingly skin-tight – which does nothing for her punishing body-image issues – and, despite being (eventually) self-repairing, tears at the slightest shock before taking its own sweet time to fix the gaping and revealing holes costumed combat regularly result in.

Moreover, since the dratted rag constantly malfunctions, “Emp” all too often ends up beaten, bound and saucily posted in humiliatingly revealing positions on social media by smirking villains.

Consequently she’s been saddled with a “D-list” rating and a tawdry reputation as a bondage icon with a pathetic “damsel-in-distress” problem. In fact even though she generally triumphs in the end, Empowered is considered to be the lamest “Cape” in the Masks-&-Tights game…

Created and crafted by US manga pioneer Adam Warren (Dirty Pair, Bubblegum Crisis, Gen 13, Livewires) and rendered in his signature “Amerimanga” style, the series – which launched in 2007 – soon spawned a number of even more outrageous guest-artist specials, now happily collected in this splendid monochrome and full-colour softcover compilation

Gathering the Empowered Specials: The Wench with a Million Sighs (December 2009), Ten Questions for the Maidman (June 2011), Hell Bent or Heaven Sent (December 2012), Animal Style (June 2013), Nine Beers with Ninjette (September 2013) and Internal Medicine (March 2014), this riotously sly, wickedly wry and extremely sophisticated smutty comedy also offers full biographies of the shameless collaborators, and in ‘Unchained Extras’ pre-colour cover line art plus masses of designs and sketches in pencil, pen, colour and even computer rendering from all the participants.

Of course the true payoff is the stories themselves beginning with ‘The Wench with a Million Sighs’. With a little title-art assistance from Emily Warren (no relation) Adam’s shot-from-pencils black-&-white art reveals how, whilst the pitifully overmatched Empowered is battling – and being ridiculed by – DNA hunting super-villain grave-robbers, safely back home her bodaciously insatiable stud-muffin insignificant-other Thugboy and BFF Kozue Kaburagi – AKA New Jersey hellion Ninjette – are being treated to the low-down on what makes Elissa tick…

The shameless narrator of the tell-all trivia is certainly the one who knows her best: immortal alien super-devil The Caged Demonwolf has been stuck on the indomitable lass’ coffee table ever since Emp stopped it from destroying Earth by trapping its diabolical essence within an extraterrestrial “bondage belt”…

Emily Warren graduated to co-illustrator with fifteen pages of colour craziness supplementing Adam’s monochrome sections in ‘Ten Questions for the Maidman’ wherein the Torn Titan’s odd relationship with the most terrifying crusader of the costumed community is examined via a tawdry celebrity chat show.

Blessed with no miraculous powers, what secret allows a mere man clad in a French maid outfit to overcome the mightiest foes and foil every threat to humanity? And why has the Dark-Knight Domestic chosen to break his customary silence on cheesy talk show Superstrong Words with BlitzCraig?

‘Hell Bent or Heaven Sent’ features guest creator Ryan Kinnaird for the colour section as Empowered joins the cleanup after a monumental battle featuring huge alien monsters and is relegated to dumping assorted wrecked remnants of “villainware” in the legendary off-planet “Joint Superteam After-Action Superdebris Storage Vault” with robotic champions Mechanismo and El Capitan Rivet.

Sadly even Techno-Capes and Cyberbros are just dirty little boys at heart and when a bored metal man’s private “sexyfiles” interact with the forbidden trashed tech, a plague of horny little cyber-angels and sensually pliable devil-girls are exported to the real world where their unquenchable chumminess manifests as a rapidly proliferating electronic STD…

Designer John Staton steps up to craft the lion’s share of manic battles in ‘Animal Style’ when an army of beast-based mecha-malevolents try to rip off the fabulous wonder cars and “…mobiles” from the 20th Annual International/Interchronal Alternate Timeline Superhero Auto Show…

Sadly for Terrorpin, Powerpachyderm, Brass Monkey, Cyberian Tiger, Supercobra and Maul Bunny the convention organisers have hired Empowered as a security guard and the cocky crimebots don’t take her seriously enough…

Transpacific manga star Takeshi Miyazawa (Lost Planet, Bound Raven, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane) comes aboard for a poignant all-monochrome exploration of Emp’s greatest gal-pal Kozue Kaburagi, detailing the appalling life and secret history of the New Jersey nemesis through ‘Nine Beers with Ninjette’ after which things end with a bunch of bangs as the latest invasion of Earth involves Empowered, Ninjette and a coterie of UberNurses from the Purple Paladin Memorial Hospital struggling to save a dying baby bioship before its excitable xenomorphic mother eradicates everything.

The main problem is that the cosmic infant is afflicted with sentient mites and the soppy heroes can see the pregnant parasites’ momma’s point of view too. Can the flighty girls find a solution that will accommodate both sides in this dire dilemma of ‘Internal Medicine’ (co-crafted by Brandon Graham, late of Prophet, King City and Multiple Warheads)?

Fast, smart, filthily funny in the best possible taste and ferociously action-packed, this is a deliciously immature and superbly addictive treat for all lovers of Fights ‘n’ (laddered) Tights fiction no fan with a secret life can afford to miss…
© 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Adam Warren, Empowered, Ninjette, Thugboy and all prominent characters and their distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Adam Warren. All rights reserved.

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Lulu Anew


By Étienne Davodeau, translated by Joe Johnson (NBM/Comics Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-972-4

In 2010 Bande Dessinée artist, writer and designer Étienne Davodeau completed a two-volume tale he’d started in 2008. Already popular, award-winning and extremely well-regarded for his reality-based and reportage style comics work, Lulu femme nue was something that was special even for him. Within a year the story had been made into a much lauded and celebrated film by Solveig Anspach.

Davodeau was born in 1965 and, whilst studying art at the University of Rennes, founded Psurde Studios with fellow comics creators Jean-Luc Simon and Marc “Joub” Le Grand. His first album – L’Homme qui aimait pas les arbres (The Man Who Did Not Like Trees) – was released in 1992.

He followed up with a string of thoughtful, passionate and beautifully rendered books such as The Initiates, Les Amis de Saltiel, Un monde si tranquille, Anticyclone, Les Mauvaises Gens: une histoire de militants.and Le Chien Qui Louches. Consequently he is now regarded as an integral part of the modern graphic auteur movement in French and Belgian comics.

NBM have translated and collected both volumes of the dreamily moody mystery into one stunning hardback edition and Lulu Anew is definitely going to be regarded as one of the very best graphic novels of the year – if not decade…

It all starts with a sort of wake as a number of friends gather to learn the answers to a small, personal but immensely upsetting event which has blighted their lives of late.

Xavier is the first to speak and relates what they all already know. Lulu, a frumpy 40-something with three kids and a very difficult husband, has been missing for weeks. She went off for yet another distressing job interview and never came back.

It wasn’t some ghastly crime or horrible abduction. Something simply happened when she was in the city and she called to say she wasn’t coming home for a while…

The sun goes down. The attendees calmly imbibe wine and eat snacks whilst a number of her friends and family share their independently gleaned snippets of the story of Lulu’s aberration: a moment of madness where she put everything aside – just for a little while – and what happened next…

Bizarre unsettling phone calls to the raucous family home precede a quiet revolution as Lulu, without any means of support, inexplicably goes walkabout along the magnificent French Coast, living hand-to-mouth and meeting the sorts of people she never had time to notice before. Through interactions with strangers she learns about herself and at last becomes a creature of decisions and choices rather than shapeless flotsam moved by the tides of events around her…

Related with seductive grace in captivating line-&-watercolours, the gently bewitching examination of Lulu’s life, her possible futures and the tragic consequences of the mad moment when she rejects them all unfolds with uncanny, compulsive visual magnetic force.

Told through and as seen by the people who think they know her, this isn’t some cosmic epic of grand events, it’s a small story writ large with every bump in the road an inescapable yet fascinating hazard. None of the so-very-human characters are one-sided or non-sympathetic – even alcoholic, often abusive husband Tanguy has his story and is given room to show it – and Lulu’s eventual hard-earned resolution is as natural and emotionally rewarding as the seemingly incomprehensible mid-life deviation which prompted it.

Slow, rapturous and addictively compelling, Lulu Anew is a paragon of subtlety and a glowing example of the forcefully deceptive potent power of comics storytelling.

Every so often a book jumps comics’ self-imposed ghetto walls of adolescent fantasies and rampaging melodrama to make a mark on the wider world, and this elegiac petit-epic will make that sort of splash. Why not dive in now before the rush starts?
© Futuropolis 2008, 2010. © NBM 2015 for the English translation.

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A Town Called Dragon


By Judd Winick & Geoff Shaw, with Jamie Grant (Legendary Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-93727-840-3

Legendary Comics (a print adjunct of Legendary Pictures – responsible for the latest Batman/Dark Knight movies as well as The Hangover, Man of Steel and 300) is an outfit that seems to specialise in graphic narratives tailored for big screen film franchises, and this latest trade paperback release feels like their best potential blockbuster offering yet…

Gathering a 5-issue miniseries (from September 2014 to January 2015) this no-nonsense thriller-romp is written by Judd Winick, illustrated by Geoff Shaw and coloured by Jamie Grant, and opens just before the end with a valiant band of outsiders facing the most terrifying creature in history…

Flashing back to Norway a thousand years ago a bit of backstory reveals that at that time an army of Norse heroes slew the last dragon in the world… but not before an egg was laid.

The vile wyrms were the greatest threat to mankind ever known, fast, deadly and voracious. Only after uncounted deaths over centuries did the Northmen finally devise a way to kill the monsters, and then only when they had matured. Newborn dragons hatch out fast, starving and utterly invulnerable…

The deadly seed also proved to be immune to all efforts at destruction, but the wise men had learned that intense cold kept them from hatching. Thus, wary King Olaf Truggvason, after exhausting every effort to destroy the ominous ovoid, bade intrepid explorer Leif Erickson to take the damned egg to the other side of the world and leave it there in the coldest place he could find…

Discovering a new continent after an epic voyage, Leif and his dedicated followers carried the lethal load halfway across the country, climbed a snow-capped mountain, sealed themselves in a cave and lay down to die…

In 2014 Dragon, Colorado is just another small town in the skiing belt trying to attract the tourist dollar, but not every citizen is on board with the Mayor’s schlocky schemes to capitalise on the name by turning every store and public building into a simulated saurian playground.

Failed football star and Olympic javelin hopeful Cooper Runyon is happy with his diner as is, big city outsider and very bad waitress Kelly is more interested in making sculptures and farmer Pete just wants to sell produce, not gussy-up his cows into some kind of tacky petting zoo…

Sheriff Castro‘s kids Sam and Eric are having too much fun blowing up stuff to even get into drugs and other normal crap let alone dragons, solitary old man Garvey gives off a spooky CIA vibe and wants to be left alone and PhD. Malcolm just wants to study his ancient languages.

…And then there’s poor troubled, bi-polar Mickey who spends all his time scaling mountains like Devil’s Peak looking for a purpose to his life and perhaps a good way to die…

It’s whilst on one of those rash escapades that the climber discovers a bunch of German scientists secretly excavating a cave and, after alerting the disbelieving township, heads straight back up to the summit in time to see the egg hatch and all hell break bloodily loose…

Back home his crazy warnings aren’t disbelieved for long. Soon after he gets to town livestock starts disappearing, a strange lizard-skin is found in a tree and of course there’s the twenty-foot dragon ripping up Main Street and torching citizens just as a blizzard cuts off the rural paradise from all outside contact…

Trapped, terrified, vengeful but far from helpless, an unlikely team of heroes thrown together by a rather heavy-handed Fate are soon following instructions left by a thousand-years-dead Viking and attacking the greatest threat to modern humanity ever seen… but even after their astoundingly improbably triumph there’s a terrifying further threat in store…

Also incorporating a beautiful gallery of covers – in both pencilled and fully coloured final versions – this fast-paced, razor-sharp, witty and astoundingly action-packed monster mash rattles along with vivid characters and smart set-pieces in the manner of Tremors, Critters, Them! or perhaps even Bubba Ho-Tep: a satisfying scary rollercoaster romp tailor-made for transferral to the silver screen.

More please!
© 2015 Legendary Comics LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Angry Youth Comics


By Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-56097-867-1

This book is full of rude and vulgar words, nasty sex and terrible pictures. There’s also lots of disgusting violence but that’s generally acceptable to most people.

So, if such adult-oriented material offends you, don’t read this review or the book.

You will however have to find something else to get angry and complain about…

Graphic narrative and cartooning, despite our regular protestations of comprising a comparatively small pond, cover a vast range of genres, formats, disciplines and tastes. From Tintin or Raymond Brigg’s Snowman through the various escapist mainstreams to the edgy, unpredictable and even the downright shocking.

Johnny Ryan is a comedian who uses comics as his medium of expression. Whether in his Prison Pit series, or his many commissions for such varied clients as Nickelodeon, Hustler, Vice, Arthur, National Geographic Kids and elsewhere, his job and passion is to make laughter. Depending on your point of view he is either a filth-obsessed pervert smut-monger or a social iconoclast using the same tactics as Hogarth, Gillray and Cruikshank or more recently Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks or Frankie Boyle to challenge the worst aspects of our society.

Ryan’s loose cartoon drawing style is deceptively engrossing and engagingly excessive whilst his seeming pictorial Tourette’s Syndrome of strips and gags – involving such signature characters as Boobs Pooter (world’s most disgusting stand-up comedian), Loady McGee & Sinus O’Gynus, Sherlock McRape and the incredible Blecky Yuckeralla (originally seen weekly from 2003 in The Portland Mercury and Vice Magazine before switching to Ryan’s own on-line site) – will, frankly, appal and baffle many readers, but as with most questions of censorship in a Free Society, the naysayers are completely at liberty to neither buy nor read the stuff.

Ryan dubbed his stinging graphic assaults on American Culture and Political Correctness “misanthropic comics” after first coming to public attention through his occasional comicbook series Angry Youth Comix.

Originally produced as self-published minicomics from 1994-1999, the strips were brought then to the attention of Fantagraphics by Peter Bagge and the company promptly commissioned a second volume.

Now this spectacular and colossal (424 pages, 273 x 184mm) monochrome hardback tome gathers all fourteen of those staggering assaults on “taste and decency” (first issued between 2001 to 2008) in one monolithic compendium of raucous, riotous baroque hilarity…

Ryan is a cartoonist with an uncompromising vision and an insatiable desire to shock and revolt whenever he wants to. In his ongoing Prison Pit series he perpetually pushes the graphic narrative envelope and the outer limits of taste with a brutal, primitive cascade of casual violence and there’s plenty of senseless carnage and casual slaughter on show here too, but deftly woven into a never-ending barrage of grossly outrageous confrontations and a barrage of bracing, despicable filth. Or you could just see the funny side of it…

In this non-stop welter of exceedingly excessive force, vile excrescences, constant cultural clashes, scatological salvoes and sheer unadulterated graphic carnage can be seen a never-ending Darwinian struggle of witty license and disgraceful debauchery.

The only truly gratuitous thing however would be a complete listing of strips and gags contained herein, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t especially recommend ‘Loady McGee & Sinus O’Gynus in the Whorehouse of Dr. Moreau’, ‘Marshmallow & Snowflake in It’s the… Ku Klux Kuties’, ‘My Dad Went to a Concentration Camp and it Was Okay’, ‘1976’, ‘Sherlock McRape in Who Hit Nelly in the Belly With Jelly?’ or ‘Boobs Pooter’s Joke-Pocalypse’ …every one an unforgettably disgusting laugh-riot…

Also included in a special full colour section are the 28 brilliantly imaginative front & back covers as well as all the contentious and wonderful letters pages from the magazine’s run to complete your shock-jock flavoured enjoyment…

This is a brutally macabre yet beguiling, loathsomely intriguing miracle of cartoon exuberance; appalling, dismaying, cathartic and horridly, blackly humorous – always forcing the reader to think and challenge their own preconceptions.

Resplendent, triumphant juvenilia and selfish self-interest have been adroitly catapulted beyond all ethical limits into the darkest depths of absurdist comedy. This is a non-stop rollercoaster of brain-blistering profound profanity; pictorial purgatory at its most gorge-rising and compelling.

Not for kids, the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, here is extreme cartooning at its most visceral and pure. Gross, vulgar, shocking strips and panel gags about sex, defecation, bodily functions (particularly the many types of farting), feminine hygiene – and men’s lack of same – comics, toys, knob-gags and even the ultimate modern taboos of religion, politics, race and child abuse are all here and waiting to get you…

And now that we’ve placated the intellectual/moral imperative inside us all, I’ll also affirm that this titanic tome is another, all-out, over the top, indisputably hilarious hoot. Buy it and see if you’re broad-minded, fundamentally honest and purely in need of ultra-adult silliness. If you aren’t any of those things but could stand a good, hearty laugh that might also make you think, then this is also the dirty cartoon joke-book for you.
All contents © 2015 Johnny Ryan (except where it isn’t). This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books Inc.