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Comics/Manga

Comic Book Review: Constantine 1
The Price We Pay

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constantine issue one, the new 52Zombos Says: Very Good

After a few hundred issues bollocksing about in Hellblazer, DC reboots a New 52 inspired John Constantine, after retiring his demon-tired bones in a lacklustre and poorly drawn finale (Hellblazer No. 300).

Constantine No. 1 brings a more youthful Constantine into the DC Universe and Renato Guedes art, which accentuates camera-angle panels showing Constantine at his best and worst–a normal day for him in the world of magic and shadow he walks in.

But Constantine is now in New York City, with spiffy new occult digs, down the stairs in Dotty's Pet store. His double-breasted trench coat looks less rumpled (more Prince than Columbo), his hair more fashionable, and his demeanor less like a cigarette aftertaste and more like a Jack Daniel's sipped over ice with a Heineken chaser.

Ray Fawkes and Jeff Lemire have a good handle on the bitter and the sweet of it, but make no mistake, this Constantine is more movie-ready, less foul-mouthed, and, so far, less British. You get the impression he went through the New 52 cleaners instead of his trench coat.

What remains the same is how he handles dire situations by relying on friends and close associates. Readers familiar with the death toll around Constantine know what getting close to him means to any long term relationships. That's where his morality comes into question, and it's a question that propels his old, and now, new series of trials and tribulations with black sorcery, Heaven, and Hell, and all those nasty, black squiggy places in-between points North and South.

constantine issue one, the new 52

At 20 pages, the setup brings into play an evil cult (aren't they all?) called The Cold Flame, an old acquaintance best forgot, and Constantine playing the odds, which always seem to fall in his favor–to some degree. This first installment of The Spark and the Flame is tight, neat, and delivered with as much assurance as even John Constantine can deliver.

And he still smokes. Let's hope New York City's Mayor Bloomberg doesn't notice, otherwise Constantine may have to face a real foe even he can't conjure away.

A courtesy copy was provided by DC Comics for this review.

Manga Review: Octopus Girl

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Octopus_GirlAny Otaku worth his or her geeky cognomen knows about Toru Yamazaki's horror manga, Octopus Girl, the cute little girl who's head is bigger than her eight dainty tentacles. Know a horror fan who's a budding Otaku? Then this manga would make a perfect gift to give for any holiday occasion.

Taunted and abused by her classmates, and after having an octopus stuffed into her mouth–with her being allergic to octopi, and probably shell fish, too–Takako wakes up one morning to find she's turned into a little cephalopod. Of course, at first she's horrified and wreaks bloody vengeance on her tormentors, but after a swim in the ocean, she calms down, just a bit, to pursue her new life in a series of wild vignettes that will make you wonder how much drinking Yamazaki does before noon and after midnight. 

Be that as it may, the explicit artwork (for gory illustration of entrails and dislocated eyeballs mostly) is a delightful journey of crass craziness with copious bodily fluids vomited as Octopus Girl alternates between playful and sadistic and homicidal. Pairing up with another unfortunate girl, Sakai, who had turned into an eel, and who, by the way, wants one or maybe two of Tako's  tentacles to nibble on–hey, they grow back, right?–granny vampires, unrequited love with face-eating now and then, wicked sea witches, and other nasties keep these two bottom feeders quite happy, or insane depending on the time of day.

At one point Yamazaki has to put his big foot down and kick some sense into Tako, which he actually does in the comic. Yamazaki's quirky wit abuses the cultural and personal as Tako takes on contestants in Idol and teenage romance and monsters. What's sublimely offending to any sensitive soul is the lack of remorse, regret, or any moral compass whatsoever within Tako's world. Lovecraftian to the tee? Perhaps; most of horror manga is. It doesn't get any weirder than this (well, maybe it does, but I figured I'd end on a positive note because you can't go wrong with Octopus Girl anyway.

But be warned: Yamazaki embraces the brutal and the heartless in his Grand Guignol artwork. Laughing one day and dying horribly the next sums it up quite tidily I'd say.

Comic Book Review: Ghosts One Shot

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GHOSTS_Cv1

Zombos Says: Good

Unfortunately, I can only give you two reasons to pick up Vertigo's one shot, Ghosts: the unfinished story by Joe Kubert, The Boy and the Old Man, and the Geoff Johns and Jeff Lemire story, Ghost-For-Hire. Reasons for not picking up this anthology would include the remaining stories, although Run Ragged would have been a treat if the whole story was here and not just the first part.

Comic anthologies usually are a mixed bag of trick or treat. Either you get a unified series of stories around a theme, or you get a bunch of stories searching for one; Ghosts lies somewhere in the middle. The stories that fall flat and fail to "terrorize" (or fit uncomfortably) within these nine tales  are: Wallflower (beautiful artwork, worn-out storyline);  A Bowl of Red (half-baked horror concering a bowl of hellfire hot Chili); The Night After I Took the Data Entry Job I Was Visited by My Own Ghost (artwork matches story mood perfectly, but the "message" story itself has been done to death ); Bride (will someone, anyone tell me what the hell this story's about?); and Treasure Lost, which is lost in this anthology themed around ghosts, although I get the tenuous allusion.

The poignant The Dark Lady fits in with the anthology's theme well, but it is incomplete, a mere slice of a larger storyline. The same problem occurs with Run Ragged, part one of a Dead Boy Detectives tale. Part two will appear in the next anthology. Running a continued story in separate anthologies seems awfully gauche to me. 

As for the two reasons to stick around, Kubert's The Boy and the Old Man is more a curiousity piece, and one that doesn't fit well within the ghosts theme. But for fans (like myself) who appreciate seeing his last work, this is worth a look, not so much for the story as for the art. Here you can see Kubert's first draw-through, laying out the action and positioning, which he would later embellish. Ghost-for-Hire is a predictably scripted plot, but the characters keep it humorous while adding depth. This would make for a solid series on its own.

Reading  various comic anthologies these days, you may get the haunting sense they were loosely put together with stories that had no clear publishing intentions. Ghosts suffers from this and I expect more sweetness-kick from my Halloween treats than this saccharin anthology provides.

Here's a key take-away: name talent isn't enough to make an anthology; you need to do something consistently worthwhile with it.

A courtesy reviewer copy of Ghosts was provided to me for this review.

Graphic Book Review: Driver for the Dead

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Driver-for-the-dead-021
Zombos Says: Very Good

Driving a muscle car hearse called Black Betty, always dressed appropriately for a funeral, and keeping the glove compartment well stocked with potent charms to ward off evil, Alabaster Graves deals with death's life-problems in Driver for the Dead.

A recurring dream may hint at his true nature (dead people keep reaching out to him in expectation) but his day job keeps the pace moving in this graphic novel by writer John Heffernan, and penciller and inker Leonardo Manco. Paints are applied by Kinsun Loh and Jerry Choo. I'm not a fan of the painted comic format, but here the panels are lively and the scenes are toned well for the grave situations Alabaster always seems to find himself in. Except for an occasional panel where the characters appear "photographically posed," Manco executes the storyline with a wide-screen, cinematic approach that runs the action in 6 or so slabs each page. The most exciting and vivid scenes come when people lose body parts and the bayou's foggy swamp churns up its decomposing and loup garou residents for one hectic night.

In Shreveport, Lousiana, Mose Freeman, extractor of nasty supernatural problems, makes his final house-call. His dying words are to have Alabaster Graves pick up his body before something else does. Hitching along for the ride is Freeman's granddaughter, who, like Alabaster, doesn't realize her true nature, either. The get-to-know-you chit-chat is supplanted by encounters with that something else, driving hard with a few biker deadbeats looking the worse for death. Freeman's body has potential since its sopped up a lot of magical energy over the years, and one long undead necromancer wants it for his own purpose. How the stiff finds out about Freeman's body (a vision) is a bit B-movie script convenient, but since it leads to butting heads with Alabaster, I'm okay with it.

Alabaster takes a licking and keeps on kicking vampire, werewolf, and witch's butt with heavy firepower and lucky charms that go beyond a little graveyard dirt and High John the Conqueror's root. The backstories for him and the necromancer, well placed in the action so they don't break it up and slow it down, mix Styx and Marie Laveauprovenance, giving Heffernan's hoodoo framework a rich pedigree to work from.

Graphic Book Review: Young Lovecraft
and His Odd Friends

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Young lovecraft

Zombos Says: Good

What's a cultured and persnickety boy to do? Summon the gods to deal with all that growing-up-nerdy angst? and bullies bullying? and annoying aunts not in tune with those outre wavelengths his brain puts out? Why, yes!

Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres let young Howard Lovecraft do just that. Even if he does bother Santa Claus every Christmas with requests for a copy of the Necronomicon in his stocking, and although he has little experience with his heady conjurations so they don't always work the way he'd like, and, well yes, those aunts are trying at times, but all in all, little Lovecraft gets by with a little help from his odd friends (and assorted demi-gods); and sometimes, even in spite of their help.

With Young Lovecraft's childhood encounters captured in 3-panel comic strips, the humorous zing has to be measured precisely in three beats, and for the most part, it is, aided by the minimalist, manga-styled and off-kilter artwork. With charmining aunties taking him to origami fairs and picking up evil guitar-playing hitchhikers, and with him over-dressing for Halloween as Harun Al-Rachid, the Caliph of Baghdad, the opportunities for his awkward weirdness complicating things geometrically propagates.

Add to this his penchant for rewriting the classics with the same dreadful theme, picking up dog-like ghouls in cemeteries, and sepulchre-partying with people like Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud (though those panels don't exactly raise the dead in their zest), Young Lovecraft does manage to keep things infectiously cheeky for fans of the mythic mythos meister.

Young Lovecraft
While this first volume is not quite as squirrely written and wittily acerbic as Roman Dirges's Lenore, the same lightly dark tone and zany mischief can be found in Oliver's characters and situations, and in Torres's wild-eyed, noseless, facial expressions. Of course, being translated from the original Spanish, the words may lose some of their nuances in the translation.

But if you can imagine Charlie Brown partying among the tombstones and summoning ancient gods to handle life's daily challenges facing a not-your-average kid, with his usual bungling innocence not helping, than you will enjoy Young Lovecraft as much as I did.

Comics Book Review: Ragemoor 1

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20120326124257_001Zombos Says: Very Good

While I now only read graphic novels and trade paperback compilations of comic books–usually, anyway –this first issue of Ragemoor drew my attention because of Richard Corben's involvement.

Any Eerie, Creepy, and Heavy Metal magazine reader knows the name well. That this issue is also printed in brooding black and white only heightened it's appeal for me. And with writer Jan Strnad (who also wrote for Warren Publishing), the mood is assuredly sinister, the tone Gothically charged, and the foreboding future hinting at ancient monstrosities biding their arcane time until the moment's ripe for terror.

This first issue introduces the blood-drenched history of the rambling edifice as Herbert futilely warns his Uncle and companion to not spend the night at Castle Ragemoor, whose walls are alive with malevolent purpose and mystery. Herbert blames his brother's madness–he wanders the halls naked, peeing on the walls–on the castle's evil influence. His uncle thinks it all poppycock, mostly because he's looking to inherit the place after having Herbert committed.

After being shown to their rooms by Herbert's lone servant, Bodrick, his uncle and companion learn how dangerous the castle can be as parts of it come alive with a vengeance.

Corben's art is vibrant and propels the story's menace. Strnad's words explain only a little, leaving much more to be revealed, and allow Corben to show the dread. With Ragemoor's grinding movement of stones in the dead of night producing new rooms and longer hallways, what else may happen to Herbert and his future guests  is uncertain, but certainly will be deliciously deadly.

Graphic Book Review: The Black Forest

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Tbfmonsters

Zombos Says: Very Good

Hankering for an old-styled, light-hearted, comic book classic monster fest? Livingston, Tinnell, and Vokes may have one for you in The Black Forest graphic novel.

The story takes place in 1916 during the Great War, and the German army, through an especially evil scientist, is trying to find a way to revive dead soldiers (yes, zombies!). Holed up in the Black Forest in Graf Orlock’s castle no less, the especially evil mad scientist feverishly toils away using Dr. Frankenstein’s crib notes of life and death for his experiments, and the Monster to aid him.

Enter our valiant but foolhardy American hero, Jack (not sure why every valiant but foolhardy American hero is always named Jack or has a monosyllabic name), and Archibald Caldwell, magician and occultist, who, like real-life magician Jasper Maskelyne during World War Two, uses his special skills to assist British Intelligence in the war effort.

The black and white panels are reminiscent of Harvey Kurtzman's comical characters combined with a dash of Gene Colon's fluid and dynamic panels. This is another graphic novel that cries out for a magazine-sized format to fully appreciate the artwork. It needs a few more pages, too, especially the monster battle royale toward the end between the Frankenstein monster, the werewolves, and the vampire Graf Orlock.

There are Alan Moorish bits throughout, like Caldwell’s ability to regurgitate lock picks he has swallowed, a skill Houdini put to good use, and Caldwell’s dead wife is pickled upright under glass, in a panel very similar to the scene in The Black Cat, where Vitas Werdegast’s wife is preserved by his arch nemesis, Hjalmar Poelzig, the evil cult leader. Boy, these evil guys all think alike, don't they?

The adventure is written in a pulp-style and is fast and furious. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes a ripping good yarn with classic monsters, evil scientists, and heroines in need of rescue.

Graphic Book Review: Billy the Kid’s Old Timey Oddities

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Old_timey_oddities

Zombos Says: Very Good

Kyle Hotz shows the freak in Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities while Eric Powell puts in the odd with a pyschotic Dr. Frankenstein–who looks a little like Peter Cushing–and a Billy whose kid-side abuse leaves him one claustrophobic and ornery character you wouldn't want to tangle with.

Billy joins the Tattooed Woman, the Wolf-Boy, the Alligator Man, Watta the Wild Man, and the diminutive Jeffrey Tinsle (who's as tall as his name is long) in Fineas Sproule's Biological Curiousities and Wild West Extravaganza Show. His quick draw and deadly aim will be needed as Sproule journeys to find the Golem's Heart Jewel, now in the possession of one flesh-tinkering mad scientist protected by his surgical monstrosities.

The four-issues collected here never dull the tone or sashay around. With this fictional Billy's sweaty flashbacks of being locked in tight places, his lecherous proclivities stymied by a chaste Tattooed Woman, and both Sproule's and Frankenstein's oddities amply envisioned,  each page provides enough reading and oggling to  keep the momentum going, maybe a little too quickly, but never too slowly. Their arrival in the mysterious mountain town, overshadowed by Frankenstein's foreboding castle, is met with rot and foul smells, trepidation, Billy's creative wall piss-signing, and monstrous, wall-clinging, inhabitants. The "dinner" party with Frankenstein and his malformed minions provides the anticipated clash of egos, heightens the mania, and springs the action to suitably potboiler intensity.

Hotz's use of coloration is odd in itself, with yellow, buttery hues butting up against the Western browns and reds in the beginning, but settling down to more shadowy, darker hues as they journey further into trouble. His gamboling art provides character depth and nuance, allowing Powell's dialog and situations to reach their full breath. Humor, pathos, and weirdness mix it up dime novel strong, making this matchup, between artist and writer, Billy the Kid and monsters, and Wild West and horror, one that I'd certainly like to see again.

Graphic Book Review: Criminal Macabre, Two Red Eyes
A Cal McDonald Mystery

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Zombos Says: Good

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That walking pill box, Band-Aid strip, and Phillip Morris cigarette pack rolled into one, Cal McDonald, once again gets beat up bad, smokes more than a few, and tangles with impossible odds that scare the dead enough to steer way clear of him. Only this time, after all this doom and gloom build-up, the odds even up pretty quick, and surprisingly easily, in the last few pages of this four issue graphic novel. 

You'd think Nosferatu, after demolishing the Santa Monica Pier upon his arrival, would do more than gloat as he and McDonald duke it out. No way. Instead, Steve Niles let's the vampire manhandle McDonald, and his loyal ghoulfriend MoLock, only just enough to stretch their necks to the breaking point, then pulls out the too simple gimmick of third-party intervention to save their smoked butts. Perhaps Nosferatu was too badass even for Niles to figure out a more McDonald-involved solution?

At least it's quite a build-up to that takedown letdown. Kyle Hotz makes Nosferatu glow with menace and us hurt just looking at McDonald's bruises. The police are out to get McDonald, we know why, and Nosferatu is out to get him, not quite sure why since McDonald's small fry in comparison, and the lycanthropes make a play to get him while he's busy puking past his withdrawal and nicotine starvation in the hospital. A text message from McDonald's girlfriend's phone sparks his recovery. Who'd have thought old Nosferatu could type with those claws on such a small phone?

You'd think four issues wouldn't be enough to hold all this menace and you'd be right. The easy-breezy showdown takes place at the Hollywood sign, no idea why. Maybe Niles is trying to tell us something with those big white letters. 

Keep trying.

Graphic Book Review: Action! Mystery! Thrills!
Comic Book Covers of the Golden Age

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PP02092012_0000

Zombos Says: Very Good

There's an irresponsible, commercially driven abandon, tawdriness, and pandering to prurience seen in many of the comic book covers of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. How wonderful!

From the crowded magazine racks of the time, these covers must have screamed "Buy Me!" to those young boys holding onto their slippery dimes as they rummaged among the pulp pages to find the baddest issues to spend them on, and share with their friends. (I'm sure girls spent their dimes, too, but I doubt it would have been for any of these testosterone-building wonders.)

Action! Mystery! Thrills! Comic Book Covers aof the Golden Age 1933-1945 boasts, in lurid colors and terrifying situations, long-haired dames in distress and undress, fiendish scientists armed with sharp instruments and drooling ghouls, dashing and brawny heroes rushing to the rescue, and evil villains with guns and hooded figures with sharp knives, and enough sensationalism to fill a book, which in this case would be the whole comic.

The best artists condensed all this action, thrill, and mystery into a one-page visual story that told you everything you needed to know about that issue from it's cover, give or take a little accuracy or so. Looking at these covers you'll see the beginnings of the horror tropes we see to this day.

Greg Sadowski provides capsule comments on each of the covers shown in this collection, citing their artists, but unless you're a diehard golden age comic book fan, the information isn't very satisfying because it assumes you know who he's talking about.

But these covers are completey satisfying. In this less golden age of false propriety and parroting of values without substance, it's refreshing to just go with the flow of all this innocent naughtiness.

Now, if I can just get them in poster size… please?

 

daredevil the hangman golden age comic book

 

golden age science comics

 

golden age science comics

Graphic Book Review: At the Mountains of Madness

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at the mountains of madness graphic novel

Zombos Says: Fair (art mutes story too much)

On and around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. (H. P. Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness)

In a clear mismatch of artist with storyline, At the Mountains of Madness, the graphic novel adaptation illustrated and written by  I. N. J. Culbard and published by Sterling Publishing for the U.S., fails to convey H. P. Lovecraft's tone and mood entirely. Culbard's cartoony style is good for a newspaper comic strip, but it supplants the cosmic undertones of finding an ancient alien race by its minimalist panels and inadequate coloration. Culbard's coverage of the novella's highlights is good, but also conveys as much dread and suspenseful buildup as a Boy's Life magazine article, especially when it's most needed during the encounter with a Shoggoth in the subterranean passages beneath the ancient city in Antarctica: the bubbling mass of chaos is drawn in an uninspiring way that holds as much otherworldly creepiness as a Scooby Doo monster. The revelatory and bizarre dissection scene, which should have been on a scale similar to a sublimely messy melange as seen in John Carpenter's The Thing, becomes a perfunctory half-page panel that loses all shock value. 

As an introduction to the underpinnings of Lovecraft's pantheon of Elder Things and their biologically-induced mistakes, Culbard manages to cover the first person narrative of Professor Dyer effectively for new readers of Lovecraft. However, the unfolding of Miskatonic University's tragic expedition to find deep-level rock and soil samples from various areas of the antarctic continent is done in a digest-sized format more suited to an adaptation of the slicker 1951 The Thing From Another World, where the implications of finding proof of an alien creature from space is not so philosophically or religiously troubling. The nuances of Lovecraft's total disdain for the spiritual are not adequately reflected here: the cosmic joke has no punchline and there is no unraveling of faith beyond all reason. 

More reliance on Lovecraft's prose in key panels, with a sprinking of style like Bernie Wrightson's grim swirls or Neil Adam's electrifying, kinetic angles would have pleased the eye-nerves more. Along with a larger page format to expand the panels into the heinous acts of visual insanity that Lovecraft alludes to, a more experimental color palette to fluctuate the mood would have been a better choice than the standard one used here. 

For readers newly exploring Lovecraft's dark universe, Culbard's graphic novel may, hopefully, wet their appetite for delving more deeply into this ancient Cyclopean city and the nature of  its past and present inhabitants by reading Lovecraft's work directly.