Comics for Feb 15, First Looks Feb 22

[dvandom]

                    Dave's Unspoilt Capsules and Awards
         The Week's Picks and Pans, plus Awards of Dubious Merit

Standard Disclaimers: Please set appropriate followups.  Recommendation does
not factor in price.  Not all books will have arrived in your area this week.
Astoundingly, Devo 2.0 is fairly good.  Rants, Capsules can be found on my 
             homepage, http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/Rants 

First Looks:
     Every so often, I'll have the time (either while waiting for comics to
be sorted on Wednesday, or over the weekend) to pull out my PDA and type up
reviews of the stuff I read out of the First Looks pile.  Books I end up
buying will be moved down to the Capsules section on Wednesdays.  If I don't
give it a recommendation, I'm probably not buying it.
     If I read the First Looks on Wednesday, I won't include them in the next
week's review.  But if I don't get around to them until the weekend, I'll
include them in the next regular post.

February 22, 2006:

     (Note: the Marvel pack didn't show up, so it's not that there's nothing
of interest in it for me...there's just nothing period.)

     The American Way #1: DC/Wildstorm - Deconstructions of the Silver Age
have been done before, as have reconstructions.  John Ridley seems to be
trying to pull off both at once...show the man behind the curtain, then prove
he's a real wizard after all.  And it's off to a good start.  One could call
it Busiekian, sure, but as long as it keeps up this level of quality, I don't
mind at all.  Recommended.  $2.99/$4.00Cn
     Warlord #1: DC - Hard to say if this is a restart set in the here and
now, or a reworking of Warlord's origin story many years in the past, but
Jones and Sears do a fairly good job of it.  $2.99/$4.00Cn
     LSH v5 #15: DC - As a sort of breather before the big shake-up, we get
something like the Legends of the Dark Knight episode of the Batman cartoon:
kids telling stories about the core team that evoke various historical
periods of the old LSH comics.  Stuart Moore writes, Pat Oliffe draws, doing
a good job of homaging various art styles.  The lettercol is really a backup
that runs through all the Core Team to explain powers and origins and stuff.
Recommended.  $2.99/$4.00Cn


Capsules:
     Short, relatively spoiler-free reviews of books I actually bring home
(as opposed to reading in preview form in the shop or online).  If I get a
book late due to distributor foulups or whatever, I'll put it in the Missing
section.

     Roy Thomas's Anthem #1: Heroic Publishing - This is a project that,
according to the essay in the back, has been shopped around in one form or
another for over twenty years.  The product that finally hit shelves
straddles the line between the "What If?"/Elseworlds sort of story initially
pitched to both DC and Marvel and the subgenre known as a "counterfactual".
A counterfactual takes some change in history (usually a single core event)
and follows the new timeline from there.  A What If does the same thing with
an established fictional timeline...one might call it a counterfictional.
But since Anthem leads off with the change, it's neither fish nor fowl (one
could argue that it's a counterfactual that posits a LOT of changes,
including adding superhumans to the mix, but even Nomura's Luftwaffe 1946
doesn't play quite so loose with the 'rules' of counterfactuals).  Anyway,
all that aside, it's not yet clear how many pivots this tale turns on, there
could be a single core event that links the German flying saucers and Gojira
and superheroes and stuff, it's just not going to come out right away.  The
writing is, well, pure Roy Thomas.  He hasn't changed a whole lot since the
60s, which has its good points and its bad points.  The art by Daniel Acun~a,
on the other hand, is pretty bad.  This seems in part to be due to initially
being done for a B&W comic in Spain (that lasted one issue), and the cover by
new series artist Jorge Santamaria Garcia shows a lot more promise for future
issues.  Provisionally recommended.  $3.25/$3.99Cn (odd exchange rate, that).
     Flare #32: Heroic Publishing - The lead story is okay, mainly being
about how Flare doesn't really have the typical ethical structure of most
superheroes.  Very "ends justify the means" oriented.  The Sparkplug backup
is less annoying than most in its series, and the Dolf story isn't quite as
stupid as usual.  Mildly recommended.  $3.25/$3.99Cn
     Flare Adventures #16: Heroic Publishing - The first chapter is, by
dialogue, a tutorial on how magic works and doesn't work in the setting.  But
by art, it's an HLA tease-fest.  And while switches over to hetero in the
second chapter, the sexing up continues.  Sometimes I think Heroic's slogan
should be "Superheroes Like You Remember, But Horny!"  Mildly recommended.
$3.25/$3.99Cn 
     Conan #25: Dark Horse - Not much to say here.  Good Conan adventure
stuff, swords and sorcery and betrayal and all that fun stuff.  And in case
you're wondering, no nipplege this issue, if you're worried about reading it
in public.  Or disappointed.  :)  Recommended.  $2.99
     Transformers Beast Wars: The Gathering #1: IDW - It was kinda odd
reading this, because almost every single page has been shown in previews
already, either online or offline.  I got cover A, with Don Figueroa's lovely
rendition of a pre-Beast reformatting Magmatron.  I like his robots a bit
better than his beasts, oddly because his beasts are a little too realistic.
They kinda break the mood, given that I'm used to either the somewhat
plasticky look of the Beast Wars cartoon, or the anime abstractions of Beast
Wars II.  The subtitle "The Gathering" is apt, since rather than introducing
new characters in dribs and drabs as in the BW cartoon, the stasis pods are
being gangfired.  Not counting characters back on Cybertron who will only
show in flashback, over two dozen characters are at least seen...which brings
with it the unfortunate tang of the BotCon comics, which read more like
rosters than stories.  Hopefully the story will get down to being about the
story (of a secret war fought behind the scenes of late Beast Wars, featuring
more characters than in all of Beast Wars) instead of about the rosters.
Mildly recommended unless you just like seeing lots of non-show characters,
then recommended.  $2.99
     Rod Espinosa's New Alice in Wonderland #1: Antarctic Press - A fairly
straight adaptation of Lewis Carroll's story, in terms of dialogue and
pacing.  Espinosa brings in a number of manga/anime standards with the
visuals (especially the "scratchy blank circles for eyes to denote shock"
thing).  As usual for Espinosa, there's some lovely backgrounds that make
good use of computer graphics.  So far, however, nothing really justifies the
"New" in the title, unless Espinosa did a previous Alice in Wonderland
comic.  Recommended.  $3.50/$4.75Cn
     She-Hulk v2 #5: Marvel - Given the nature of this title, I'm not
surprised in general to see a new love triangle develop.  However, this
particular one was a bit of a surprise.  :)  Recommended.  $2.99/$4.25Cn



Gone Missing:
     Stuff that came out some places this week and that I wanted to buy, but
couldn't find for whatever reason, so people don't have to email me asking
"Why didn't you review X?"  (If it's neither here nor in the section above,
though, feel free to ask, I might have forgotten about it!)

     Current list as of 2/15:

     Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards GN, Exalted #1, Keif Llama
V2.1, Captain America and the Falcon: Secret Empire TPB, PS238 #14.

Awards:

Best Book: Rod Espinosa's New Alice in Wonderland by a whisker

"And Then...Godzilla Attacked" Award to Roy Thomas's Anthem (the official
     title just has "Roy Thomas' Anthem" but fixing that sort of thing is
     a pet peeve of mine...I know it's optional in journalistic grammar, but
     I'm not a newspaper.  :) )

"Caged Heat 2006" Award to Flare #32

"The Magic Of (Implied) Hot Girl-On-Girl Action" Award to Flare Adventures
     #16 

"Did I Err?" Award to Conan #25

"Leoblaze Convoy" Award to Transformers Beast Wars: The Gathering #1 (I was
     thinking of making a Fuzor/blowing a fuse joke, but decided against it.)

"Who's The Dodo In Charge Of This Caucus?" Award to Rod Espinosa's New
     Alice In Wonderland #1  (Oh, and it's "Feed Your Head.")

"This Looks Like A Job For Nick Jacobi's Howling Solicitors" Award to 
     She-Hulk v2 #5

   Dave Van Domelen, "You're so big, you'll have to send shoes to your feet by post! 'Right Foot, Esq. 11423 LC Hearthrug, near the fender!'" - The Doorknocker, Alice in Wonderland #1 (and the original too, I presume, too lazy to dig up a copy and check).

Comments

[scavgraphics.livejournal.com]

So, in Beast Wars, Magnatron et al were a few seconds off kilter from normal time, so the tv gang can't see them...but how do they get to the already there robocofins?

Now see, if my store had Flare Adventures instead of Flare (which they're getting for the shlef cuz they screwed up when ordering the TPB for me), I might have picked it up...(interestingly, this week was the big HLA issue of Noble Causes...well more RLA than HLA.)

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at some point they have to have phased back in, probably before splitting up (since maintaining the effect at planetary range would have been problematic). I decided not to comment on it in my review, but I really should go back and check the pages again to see if there's an explicit reference to coming back into phase.