Big news this week (well, big for me) - Garan Madeiros of A First Salvo sent me not one but two full issues of his comic Contract. A big thanks for supporting the little guys in the comic review business (can't get much littler than me), and look out for special (spoilerless) preview reviews of those issues... well, right now:
Contract #1 & #2 ~ Okay, bottom line: buy this book. I'm not just saying that because I got to read it for free (hey, I'm still paying for my copies when they ship), but seriously, I have rarely had as much fun per page as I have with Contract. I don't want to suggest that it's 'comedy', because that pigeon-holes books into a played-for-laughs category - rather, it's funny the way The Fifth Element or Indiana Jones is funny (Crystal Skull didn't disappoint in that regard). The plot and characters are real and serious, but they often wind up in amusing places, and the dialogue sparkles with witty banter between Jessie, Tsumi, and Panzer, the latter's heavily-accented lines often being laugh-out-loud entertaining. The art is energetic and action-oriented, but with a playful edge that works well in the lighter moments. As sci-fi the story has a kind of pulp flair to it - it's intelligent and consistent, but it has a larger-than-life quality that makes anything possible around the next corner (Fifth Element comes to mind again, with its novel designs and concepts). It's like The Princess Bride meets Blade Runner - a grim, tough future, seen through the lens of vivacious, entertaining characters with lashings of finely-crafted dialogue. And I bet you never thought you'd see those two movies cited at the same time. I'll be reviewing Contract in more detail, plotwise, when it ships, but for now: if you like exciting action/comedy, head down to your local comic shop and tell them to get this in for you.
Bomb Queen V #1 ~ The Queen is back! It's been an interesting ride through the miniseries since the original Bomb Queen - enemies from her past, revelations about her origins, journeys to hell and back - and this issue has the feeling of having come full circle, back to where it all began: the horribly funny and just plain horrible New Port City. But just as BQ isn't the unknown she was when she made her debut, New Port isn't just the quirky evil city we first met - as the Queen has had her adventures and developed into a more complex, more faceted complete psychopath, so New Port is growing, and this issue has the city facing population pressures as, like other states become tax havens, this one has become an 'evil haven' with people trying to get in for all sorts of reasons. As a result of these pressures, we're introduced to Littleville, the scarily cheerful Main Street America small town whose sole industry is farming, to provide neighbouring New Port City with the food it needs but (being a built-up metropolis, and evil) can't be bothered producing for itself.
Meanwhile dirty deeds are afoot in Littleville itself, drawing in that town's resident superhero White Knight, and a trio of bloggers (who seem to carry around a manga-esque set of artistic devices with them) are sticking their noses into things in the wildly optimistic and possibly suicidal hope of getting an exclusive profile of Bomb Queen, who no other superhero/villain-centric commentators will go near due to her penchant for murdering bystanders and the press. This miniseries will be six issues, the largest yet, and there's no shortage of plot hooks set up in this issue to be developed later on - but as has always been the strength of this title, it's the way you can relate to Bomb Queen, in a warped kind of way, that makes it memorable. She may be utterly evil and abominable, but her problems are our problems - here she's facing the frustration of her beloved city getting more complicated, more demanding. Strip away the evil and it's something everyone goes through in one way or another: the loss of easier, simpler times, the facing up to the fact that there's no magic return to the happy nostalgia of yesterday. Bomb Queen is back home, and doing what it does best: devil-may-care enough to make points no-one else will, but subtle enough to tug at heartstrings few 'edgy' comics can manage.
Justice Society of America #15 ~ A difficult issue to review, this one. It's mostly a fight scene, with a new thing turning up at the end, and if this were your first exposure to JSA, you'd probably be a bit lost. Since the title has been going on for fifteen issues now, and has been remarkably strong, it's no effort to give it the leeway to muck about a bit on the assumption that answers will be coming later on - and to its credit, this issue doesn't waste the time it takes up. We get a lot of heroes fighting Gog, with some cute moments - Liberty Belle using her speed formula again, and Citizen Steel and Lightning both getting amusing moments amid the general chaos - and we get some of the other side of things, with those who got knocked down on Gog's first strike licking their wounds and getting back on their feet at the headquarters. It's nice to see the Society's large cast used in this way, to show elements of superhero fights we don't often get to see - normally in one-on-one or similar smaller fights, there just isn't time for anyone to gather their wits, since there aren't enough people for some to be out of the immediate fight for any length of time while it's still going on.
Possibly sensing that this issue, while fun, was a bit story-progression-light, Johns gives us another of those teaser pages he's so fond of. I'd love to think the appearance of Isis means she'll be back, but that's certain to be a flashback, and Power Girl's trip to Earth Two is something we've heard about in Previews for a while now, but the other two teasers are vague enough to be curious rather than just telling us stuff we know already. Overall, a good issue as part of a larger story, just not really one to stand on its own.
Madame Mirage #6 ~ So that's it - Madame Mirage is over, all wrapped up, and I confess to feeling disappointment, mainly. It's not that it was bad - in fact, it was quite good - but this title had so much going for it that never seemed to come to fruition. Mirage's mystery and style, in the end, amounted to a fairly standard revenge story, Harper and Mirage's relationship - Mirage's whole nature, in fact, as more than just a machine - got touched on but never elaborated upon, and the bad guys never really stopped being interchangeable, with the exception of the amusing Dude. Rocafort's art was lavish and lovely as always - whatever he does next will be worth a look - but at the end of the day, although the story was interesting and well-told, I find myself looking at the cover, at Madame Mirage, and thinking "...was that all she was?" Perhaps the delays were part of the problem - with long stretches between each issue I often found myself struggling to remember what had just happened (probably part of the reason I never felt any importance in the who's-who of the villains), but I think maybe it's just that Mirage committed the cardinal sin of a magician: we learned how the trick was done.
Avengers: The Initiative #13 ~ Christos Gage writes this issue solo, and it's a solid effort. We get a done-in-one story featuring a new batch of recruits at Camp Hammond - pretty much Z-list, as Taskmaster puts it - focusing specifically on Emery Schaub, whose power is that he can't be affected by anything: he can't be damaged, hurt, exhausted, you name it, he's immune to it. It's a good illustration of both this title's strength and its current weakness - Emery isn't the kind of character any other book would feature, and he, his powers, and their effects on him (physical and psychological) are explored in interesting ways, with the story jumping ahead days and weeks at a time to show him progressing, or not, through the training programme. On the other hand, everything in this issue is interesting and intriguing - but how much of it are we ever going to see again? Not a lot, I'd wager, and - as I was saying last issue, about Cloud 9 and her cohorts - there's a sense of disappointment that what we get here probably won't be elaborated on in future issues, except - maybe - in passing, in minor cameos. It's like getting a whole season of pilot episodes - no matter how good they continue to be, after a while you find yourself wanting to slow down and follow some of the characters, instead of continually moving on to new stuff.
Mighty Avengers #14 ~ This won't be a long review, since this issue is basically "What's happening with the Sentry," and he's not really my field of expertise. It's well-told for a novice like myself who only knows the basics of his character - we get to see him from various points of view, in his original setting pre-memory-wipe, with other heroes like the Fantastic Four, and from the point of view of the Skrulls debating how to deal with him. Their eventual strategy it something we've already seen in Secret Invasion, but this issue goes on to reveal what that does to him, and ends with an interesting new development. I'm still not sure what's going on with Lindy, and I suspect that's something Bendis is keeping in reserve for another issue. What I'm mainly wondering is, will this have ongoing consequences - since the next Mighty Avengers issue focuses on Hank Pym, will Secret Invasion itself pick up this storyline and show us what it means long-term?
American Dream #2 ~ If you recall last issue, I said it was straight-forward and entertaining, though nothing revolutionary. This issue is about the same, but like a good second issue, builds on what was laid down in the first, so here - now that we've already got a basic grasp on Dream's character - we get more background on how she became who she is, more interaction with other characters, and more complications introduced in the plotline. I'm not that versed in the MC2 continuity as a whole, but here it seems more like an alternate present day than 'the near future', with the world behaving very much like it does now, in terms of society and social issues - which is nice, since it lets the story touch on illegal immigration as an aspect of the storyline, adding some depth to proceedings. Not that I imagine immigration is suddenly going to stop being an issue in the near future, of course... Still, that, along with the appearance of Maria Hill, looking much the same age she does in regular continuity, makes this feel more contemporary, and since it's not aiming to be sci-fi enough to really make use of a 'future' setting, I find that a good move. The art continues to be engaging and colourful - though a bit vague in its proportions here and there, the crucial action scenes are full of motion and excitement, and Dream's facial expressions in her introspective scenes - largely silent, with thought captions - are useful in helping the text tell her story.
